OXMUK
Microsoft has four new free-to-play games in the works at the recently founded Lift London, studio head Lee Schuneman has revealed at this year's Develop Conference in Brighton. The games will release on "connected platforms", and will "re-define what triple-A represents".
According to Schuneman, the increasingly infamous term is now "not about team size or budget or device" - Clash of Clans qualifies as a triple-A title, in his view, and the secret to success is to "build universes that will grow with the audience and follow them onto whatever device they own".
This naturally suggests that the four new games in question will be mobile affairs, principally, but given Microsoft's desire to make Xbox One a hub platform for smartphones and tablets, it's likely there will be crossover with console at the very least.
A key aim for London Lift is to "take characters to the next level in mobile games". Schuneman illustrated this with a 30 second clip depicting a zombie survival scenario with Pixar aesthetics - not, we imagine, attached to any of the developer's current projects.
Lift London also servers as an "incubator" for third parties - it currently houses the DLaLa team, who are able to preserve their own way of doing things while drawing on Microsoft's resources (after the example, it seems, of Copenhagen-based Press Play, developer of Max and the Curse of Brotherhood).
This in-residence programme runs in fixed cycles - the next in-residence team will start work at Lift in February 2014. "Our journey at Lift London is just beginning, and I'm looking forward to revealing more to you very soon," Schuneman concluded.
http://www.oxm.co.uk/57926/microsoft-lift-london-has-four-new-games-in-the-works-will-redefine-triple-a/
