Don't get your hopes up for Max Payne 3. That's a Rockstar developed game.

Yeah they have jobs up for like 150 positions now and they had been hiring a lot of  senior position through the earlier parts of this year and their new studio they bought is supposed to be up and running and fully staffed up by December 2018 from what we heard late last year. The rumour of a 3rd team creating a new IP are interesting but would seem a big ask to staff up fully 2 AAA teams at once. I mean I'd love to believe that artwork we saw from them that looked like Berserk is the 3rd project but that's a long shot indeed. :)

It's not only Playground that are recruiting it's pretty much all MS studios new and old.

We have Rare closing in on 100 strong staff for the new IP they have been incubating whilst they also recruited more staff for a 4th Sea of Thieves content team.

Compulsion Games said they are recruiting for a bunch of positions very soon. Not sure what kind of scope these guys will go for or if they will have multiple teams as most of We Happy Few was developed with 15-20 staff and by the end of it they were 40 strong. I could definitely see them with two teams of around 40 to hit that creative AA space.

The Coalition have staffed up an whole lot since Gears 4 launched and Will likely have a full strength 2nd team going into next gen. Infact I wouldn't be surprised if they are the ones on Perfect dark or at least got 100 staff in collaboration with another studio on the project.

Ninja Theory are staffing up a bunch more also and it sounds like they could end up with 3 teams of 40-60 staff each.

The Initiative are still very small in numbers if led to believe they are still in single digits but are likely to end up 200-300 strong through 2019 with the scope they are  building them for.

Undead Labs - Not sure on these but I imagine the next State of Decay will require a lot more staff to hit the AAA mark they always wanted than the 40 that did most of SoD2 which they built up to 60 towards the end of it's development cycle.

Turn 10 Use a lot of contract work but it's possible they grow in numbers to not only do Forza and have a 2nd team but no clue on that and 343 just always seem to be growing at 500+ now but they do more then just game development with all everything Halo ran through them.

Why though? We do have a lot of rockstar BC games, like GTA IV, Red Dead, Table Tennis,Midnight Club LA and more. So it can still happen.

Also, BC announcements are on Tuesday 99% of the time. However, the last time we got games on a Thursday....it was none other than rockstar.  

That is from January and it was supposed to be an print error, I do expect it to be on Xbox once M+K is fully supported though and probably be announced with it at XO18.

Looks like the recruitment for Playground Games has gone up to 177 currently from the Windows Central article.
https://www.windowscentral.com/playground-games-hiring-177-developers-new-aaa-open-world-rpg

Yeah as soon as I saw the tweet I recalled it was the one from earlier in the year that panned out to be an error or just fake.

When they go into Mouse and keyboard support at XO18 I expect they will announce the HD games coming to Xbox as Play Anywhere titles also a bit more on Gears tactics doing the same and saying about how m+k has enabled us to bring games like this to console etc. Maybe a small teaser for AoE4? along with confirming it for console. I think also them announcing games like Civilization VI and launching soon since the Switch edition is due out 16th November and maybe a Total War game is possible.

I'm just saying that Remedy has nothing to do with Max Payne 3 going BC.

I didn't even realise how safe the seas have been for a couple of months. I remember the first months when you had to be watching your back and scanning the horizon all the time for bloodthirsty pirates. But somewhere along the way the seas became calm. Most crews were just minding their own business or looking for an alliance. We got sloppy and careless..

..until today when we sailed our ship to the Devil's Roar :P

We stopped by some shipwrecks, got loot on board and deciced to sell everything at the new Outpost. We were so enthralled with all the volcanos around us it didn't even cross our minds to check if the Outpost is occupied. And, for the first time in months, after docking our ship we were ambushed! Outnumbered 3vs2 we fought bravely and won. Some moments later we were at a shipwreck and another brigantine caught us totally off-guard. Somehow we managed to escape and even do some damage to their ship. But it was clear we have to start paying attention, months ago they'd never got the jump on us like that.

My point is, the Seas are vicious again and I love it!

But those murderous pirates are not the only threat of Forsaken Shores, oh no. Rare wasn't kidding when they said doing Devil's Roar voyages isn't a walk in the park. Those volcano eruptions are deadly and sink your ship faster than two Galleons full of Pirate Legends. Get hit by a flaming rock & you're dead with a ship full of holes. We experienced this first hand...

Can't wait to play more on Saturday!

Man I kinda hope that Playful isn't one of the Studios MS bought, It's heavily hinted that they are actually working on a MS 1st party IP. I just think that there are better studios to buy like Armature.

BTW Jez speculated that MS might announce new studio acquisitions at the XO event, he said up to 3 so he might have info on what studios MS is talking to.

Yeah Matt Booty said about 40-50 AA staff studios that can put out games every 2 years are stuff their are looking for if I recall correctly. Up to 3 is interesting as Obsidian seems most likely from what we have heard but the other 2... maybe the Playful rumour could pan out or at the very least them working on a Rare IP as 2nd party partner is true but for the third I'd have no idea.

Was this an article by Jez or something? I've not seen anything about it and wouldn't mind a read if so.