Housemarque Teases Unannounced AAA Title, Other Projects on Hold

Resogun and Super Stardust HD developer Housemarque unveiled the Finnish game maker has begun focusing their almost-80 person team on their “biggest and most ambitious title yet.”

In the newsletter, CEO of Housemarque, Ilari Kuittinen, celebrated the upcoming 25th anniversary of the company and reflected in the journey they made back from the Amiga and PC era of video game development. Looking ahead, Kuittinen spoke about how their newest title has entered full-production with a yet to be announced publishing partner after three years of game concepts and ideas and will be revealing more info “in the coming months.”

The letter also acknowledged that as the work becomes more and more demanding, the full team is needed to keep the company high quality they strive for. Meaning “putting every other project on hold, including the development of Stormdivers.”

Stormdivers was a sci-fi battle royale titles that started development back in 2013. Housemarque noted that the title was developed back when the battle royale genre was niche, and the growing completion meant that the game would have to be more unique. What Stormdivers had going was some more emphasis on powerups for shields and invisibility, players vs. environment elements like tornados that suck up players on the map or thunderbolts striking the players and, of course, Housemarque’s trademark high-quality visual effects.

The developer even released a beta for the game that didn’t go too well with the community for being just another battle royale.

Though this wasn’t the only significant change that Housemarque has made. The developer decided to shift genres in 2018 after the “Arcade is dead” comment and shifted into triple-A development. The company even moved away from its proprietary in-house VFX engine it has used for 22 years to the Unreal Engine 4 for 2017’s Matterfall as well as their new game.

Check out the two-minute developer diary for Stormdivers below.