The Chinese entertainment giant NetEase, one of the five international companies with the highest turnover in the video game sector, has opened a development studio in Barcelona that will be focused on creating big-budget titles in the action-adventure genre for consoles and pc. Anchor Point Studios has been announced this morning at a press conference.
The new firm will have its headquarters in Barcelona, but will have a support studio in Seattle (United States) and also employees who will work remotely. Although the intention of its managers is to have a team of about 50 people in the long term, right now the goal for this year is to expand the team to 20 workers, half of whom are expected to still work in an office. Brand new in Barcelona.
“We want to create a great action and adventure game from Barcelona,” says the studio’s director, Paul Ehreth, in statements to La Vanguardia. This American video game designer has worked on some of the biggest names in this genre such as Halo 4 and Halo 5 at Microsoft, or more recently the acclaimed Control from Remedy Entertainment, of which he was the lead designer.
“I grew up playing big action-adventure games on consoles and PC and have worked on them for a long time throughout my career, and I ask myself this question, how can we take these types of games further, make them more interesting and deeper? This is the challenge we have set ourselves”.
Although they have barely revealed details of their first production, during the presentation a small teaser has been shown in which a setting can be intuited that could be reminiscent of the much-loved pirate stories. Now, Ehreth has detailed that this adventure will be his own intellectual property, it will use the Unreal Engine 5 graphics engine and it can be played both alone and with other players. Beyond these small details, he has not wanted to offer a possible launch window.
In a city like Barcelona where international companies in the mobile gaming sector proliferate, Anchor Point Studios’ willingness to develop a game for consoles and PC with certain production values is an anomaly, although more and more examples are emerging. this, as attested to by the imminent After Us from the Barcelona team at Piccolo Studio.
In this case, Anchor Point Studios will have the financial support of a giant like NetEase, a Chinese technology and entertainment giant and developer and distributor with more than 140 video games for mobile, consoles and PC, including co-developed games such as MARVEL Super War and Harry Potter: Magic Awakened, as well as games like Minecraft. Until recently they also distributed the popular World of Warcraft in China.
Recently, NetEase has been in the spotlight for its increasing use of AI in the development of blockbuster games like Naraka: Bladepoint, specifically on the art side. In fact, some Chinese artists specialized in video games have denounced how this technology is changing the way of working and diminishing job opportunities in this field.
“NetEase continues to hire artistic profiles, so there are no signs of slowing down yet, because we continue to ship ourselves,” he says. “I think AI is going to change the industry significantly. In the case of our study, we have no plans to use the AI to directly generate content for the game, but I think that the AI can be used as a good tool, although we have to be careful not to use it without a head.”
For Ehreth, the irruption of AI in the video game sector is something completely inevitable: “I see this great wave that is coming; We can run away or stay on our feet and get hit by it, but really, I think now is the time to grab our surfboards and try to ride this wave that can help us get to the next level if we use it well.”
At the moment, Anchor Point Studios only has four Spanish workers among its ranks. One of them is the also industry veteran Pere Torrents, who will act as the studio’s Director of Operations after he passed through the developer by the Barcelona division of the South Korean Smilegate.
“My hope is that at least half of the team is physically in Barcelona, soon we will have a physical studio in the city and I am going to put on the table the requirement to hire people from here, students, because it is important to invest in the next generation”, says Ehreth. “We have hired a number of veteran creators and now is the time to share our experience and knowledge with the new generation and give them the opportunity to build a game with us,” she adds.
During the presentation of the study, its director explained how his great-grandparents, Enrique and Mercedes, lived in Barcelona many years ago. Later they emigrated to Panama to end up settling in Seattle, their hometown. For Ehreth, the fact of settling in Barcelona has something symbolic. One of the battles that she is facing with the Catalan language is its scarce presence in video games.
According to The White Book of the Video Game Industry 2021, only half of the titles developed in Catalonia include Catalan. Asked about this question, Ehreth has stated that it is something that he will try to carry out: “It is always terrible when a language or part of the culture is lost. My grandmother spoke Catalan and she taught me a few words, so I will try to localize the game into Catalan in honor of the culture that has welcomed us here in Barcelona.”