Activision Blizzard’s Beenox has announced the opening of a new studio in Montreal, Canada.

The Quebec City-based company hopes its second office will help grow its current workforce of 400 game developers—including more than 150 hired since 2021—by over 20 percent, to support its work on Call of Duty and “additional ambitious projects”.

Beenox has contributed to various Call of Duty games, including creating new content for each season of Warzone, and is currently co-developing a new mobile game in the franchise.

“We are counting on the city’s great diversity of talent to build a team that will allow us to broaden our creative perspective and bring even more diversity to our development,” said Beenox studio head Nour Polloni.

“This investment in Montréal is the next key step in our studio’s growth as we continue to support the creative ambitions across the Call of Duty franchise. We want our location to attract local and international talent and contribute to the vibrant video game industry in Montréal.”

Last August, Activision announced the formation of an internal mobile game development studio called Solid State, which was established to develop a new entry in the Call of Duty series.

It later confirmed that Beenox, Activision Shanghai and Digital Legends had also been working on the new Call of Duty mobile game throughout 2021.

Activision revealed last August that all of its core studios are now working on Call of Duty.

However, the publisher has reportedly decided to delay next year’s Call of Duty game, which would mark the first time in nearly 20 years that the series has skipped an annual release.

According to a Bloomberg report published in February, the company opted to push back the release of a new Treyarch-led game after last year’s Call of Duty Vanguard failed to meet expectations, “leading some executives to believe that they’re introducing new versions too rapidly”.

Activision will launch its first ever two-week-long free multiplayer trial for a Call of Duty game on March 30.



Posted: Apr 01, 2022 10:01 am
Related Forum: Call of Duty Forum

Source: https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/call-of-duty-developer-beenox-has-opened-a-new-studio-in-montreal/