Well we all know that Eidos Montreal has been a huge success, Square announced they plan to hire another 100 staff members for Eidos Montreal. But alongside that announcement came the founding of another new studio in Montreal. Square Enix Montreal will be producing the Hitman series from now on and is believed to be getting a starting staff of 150 staff members.

Lee Singleton the man in charge of the new Square Enix Montreal studio gave the reasons behind the new studio "As a group, we identified the need for more high quality games and there's a limit to how much service our current studios can give our IPs.  The natural solution was to investigate opening a new studio, and as soon as we knew this was the right answer, we needed to find the right IP for the studio in order to attract the right talent."

Singleton wanted to relieve everyone saying that Hitman's creators IO Interactive will not be completely replaced "Square Enix Montreal will work in step with IO Interactive so we can both contribute great games to the Hitman franchise in the future. We will increase the frequency of game releases, but we have no plans to migrate the franchise to Montreal in its entirety,"

Singleton says that Square has bigger plans for the new Montreal studio "We will start with a single team, but we will manage a controlled growth plan so that over time we're able to work on more than one project,"

A major question people are wondering, does this mean the new Square Enix studio will work on some of Square's Japanese franchises. Well it would appear that Square-Enix in Japan will continue to deal exclusively with their franchises while Montreal will handle western IP. "We'll be working on Western projects for the foreseeable future -- although obviously I wouldn't say that we'd never work on one of the traditional Japan-developed franchises. There just aren't any plans for that right now," Adding that "I think franchises like Final Fantasy are so well embedded with the Asian culture that I don't know if we could develop it without hugely changing the essence of it. We don't have any plans to tackle it at the moment, but as with most things I'm not sure I could say it would never happen."

Well it would appear Square is going after yearly or bi-yearly entries in its franchises. Two studios both working on the Hitman series will mean twice as many games. However you have to wonder if maybe IO Interactive will begin work on a new IP and maybe this new studio was meant to free them up for a new IP?

I'm really excited to see what Square Enix Montreal comes up with, Eidos Montreal did such a good job with Deus Ex it'll be interesting to see what SEM does with Hitman.

good keep the rpgs coming. we need more.

I heard that today... we're really getting a lot of lovin from the gaming industry. I wish there was some sort of big event here... that's all we need :)