Mike Laidlaw, former creative director of the Dragon Age franchise at Bioware, has teamed up with Ubisoft veterans Frederic St-Laurent B., Jeff Skalski, and Thomas Giroux to form Yellow Brick Games. This new independent studio at Quebec City (Canada) will focus on making “original, new games of high quality”. According to a report by gamesindustry.biz, the studio currently has a total of 15 employees. In a recent tweet, Mike Laidlaw said that the team is planning to grow more.
https://twitter.com/Mike_Laidlaw/status/1330876057738764293
Mike Laidlaw spent about a year at Ubisoft after leaving BioWare in 2017. Mike had been heading a King Arthur RPG codenamed Avalon, that got cancelled by Serge Hascoët, the Chief Creative Officer. Serge resigned in July 2020 after multiple allegations of sexual misconduct at Ubisoft.
Frederic St-Laurent B. will be the new game director at Yellow Brick Games with Jeff Skalski as the COO and executive producer and Thomas Giroux will take up the mantle of the CEO.
Although nothing is known about their current project, Yellow Brick Games has announced that they believe “Emergent Systems Create Rich, Interactive Worlds“.
We believe very strongly in creating digital playgrounds. The more interactivity and freedom a game can give to a player, the more immersive and compelling it can be, so long as there are clear rules that guide those interactions. We feel that a truly emergent game can engage players through their own creativity and will offer tools that let our players share those experiences.
Their official website contains an interesting snippet – Developing both innovative gameplay and original IPs, our team also puts a strong emphasis on work/life balance as we believe fulfilled team members deliver the best content. Crunch has become a badly kept secret in game development circles – statements like these provide the much-needed hope for the industry’s labor practices. Remember our article on the crunch at CDPR? Hopefully newer companies like this with renowned vets at the helm will be able to remove this stigma.