Today, IO Interactive (HITMAN) announced the opening of a new UK office in Brighton, one of the largest game development hubs in the country.
This is the fifth office for IO Interactive. The company is headquartered in Copenaghen but later opened offices in Malmö, Barcelona, and Istanbul. According to IOI CEO Hakan Abrak (via GamesIndustry), the Brighton office has a headstart in that it already has a small number of employees, whether the other offices had to be more or less started from scratch.
The Brighton team is already working on Project Fantasy, the online fantasy RPG announced in late February, but they will soon join in on the development of Project 007 (the James Bond game announced in late 2020) as well. At IO Interactive, all offices work on the same projects at once.
According to Abrak, IOI has surpassed the 300 headcount and aims to grow to nearly 400 employees, though each office will be limited to 100-150.
We’re growing fast, but we’re hiring people that we believe in, who believe in us and our way of working. So it’s organic growth, but fast organic growth.
For the development phases we are in right now, and with the move we’re making with Brighton, I think we have what we need for the next year or six months. And up to and after that period, we will be hiring a bit slower… before we get into the later phases of production.
What’s the end goal? It’s difficult to say. But I think most of the people needed for Project Fantasy and Project 007 are in place. There will be a bit more growth, and it’s not hard to imagine that IO will be closer to 400 people in another year or 18 months from now.
Abrak’s words could be interpreted to mean that at least one of the two upcoming projects in development at IO Interactive will enter the late stages of production in the next year or year and a half. Of the two, Project 007 seems the most likely to launch first since it was unveiled over two years before Project Fantasy. That said, Project Fantasy could become playable before release due to its very nature of an online RPG via Alpha and Beta testing.
On that note, Project Fantasy is believed to be the new codename of Project Dragon. Rumors of an online fantasy game featuring dragons in development at IO Interactive started swirling over two years ago, and they came with the info that the game would be exclusive to PC and Xbox due to a deal signed with Microsoft. Sure enough, the documents unearthed last week as part of the FTC vs. Microsoft deal confirmed that.
Two years ago, Microsoft was looking into buying IO Interactive. As part of their evaluation, they mentioned the upcoming Project Dragon as an RPG shooter due to be published by Xbox Games Publishing on PC and Xbox Series S|X. However, IO Interactive never mentioned any kind of exclusivity when it publically discussed Project Fantasy. It is possible that the deal fell through in some way, or they might just be waiting for the right time to announce all the details.
Either way, we’ll be watching.
