A fresh press release available in Polish at this URL reveals that developer People Can Fly just signed a production and publishing agreement with Microsoft for an upcoming game called Project Maverick, and there’s a solid chance it’s a new Gears title.
People Can Fly has extensive experience with the intellectual property, having ported the first Gears of War to PC in 2007 and having led the development of the spin-off game Gears of War: Judgement in 2013. Their most recent game, the 2021 sci-fi third-person shooter RPG Outriders, also uses many elements popularized by the Gears series, such as the cover system.
Despite launching to decent success, Outriders (published by Square Enix) didn’t generate royalties for People Can Fly for a long time, which may have led the Polish team to seek another partner. The press release also outlined the game’s budget that will be provided by Microsoft.
The production of the Game will be carried out by the Company in the work-for-hire model, based on the intellectual property rights of the Publisher, and will be fully financed by the Publisher as the Company completes the key stages of the Game production contracted as part of the production process (milestones). The Publisher’s total budget for the game production amounts to USD 30 – 50 million.
To clarify, the document does not specifically mention Gears, but it makes the most sense by looking at the developer’s track record. The last game in the franchise was also a spin-off, the XCOM-like Gears Tactics developed by Splash Damage and released in early 2020.
The Coalition’s last release is Gears 5, which launched in October 2019 and was Microsoft’s most successful launch since Halo 4 as well as the best Game Pass launch at that time. The Coalition was rumored to be doing some side projects, but the most recent rumor revealed that they were canceled while the Vancouver-based studio refocused on the sixth mainline installment in the franchise.
The Coalition was the first big triple-A developer to announce it would switch to Unreal Engine 5. Since then, the team, which is considered to be among the foremost experts in Epic’s Unreal Engine, developed the Alpha Point and the Cavern Cinematic tech demos running on Xbox Series X.
It’s fair to assume their next game will be a looker. Also, going back to People Can Fly, they were briefly Epic Games Poland and have only released Unreal Engine games (except for their debut title, Painkiller), so it’s likely Project Maverick will also use UE5.
