THIS JOB IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE
We are looking for a Melbourne based Professional Sound Designer who is easy to work with and specialises in designing and creating both SFX and Music. If you only specialise in one or the other, please still send through an email as we may find two separate people more suitable!
We are very privledged to be working with the team at Surprise Attack. We take marketing very seriously at PlaySide so we wanted someone who would share our passion for our studio and game! We believe Chris Wright is the perfect guy for the job!
We are truly blessed by the amount of support we received world wide on our Launch Week. Our PR Team were working overtime and it paid off. We can’t wait to release some truly awesome games and we will keep our Facebook page updated the whole way!
http://www.facebook.com/playsidestudios
Ex-EA Visceral game designer Gerry Sakkas heads new Melbourne-based mobile development studio; new project to start production in January, with follow-up announcement in March.
In September this year, EA shut down the Australian arm of its Visceral Games studio after reports that staff had met with HR representatives to discuss the future of the developer. At the time, EA told GameSpot AU:
“With no active project in development at that location, we’ve decided to close the Visceral Melbourne office. They are talented individuals and may find other roles elsewhere in EA, if they choose. EA continues to maintain its mobile studios in Melbourne, which are both thriving and hiring.”
Several ex-developers of the recently shuttered Visceral Games Melbourne have banded together to form mobile games studio PlaySide. Headed by Gerry Sakkas as CEO, PlaySide will begin production on games from January 16 next year. Read the rest of this entry »
Following the culling of the EA Melbourne studio where he had been a Game Designer, Sakkas was faced with a decision to either relocate to America and continue working for EA or another large player in the games industry, or create a brand new niche Australian studio. Sakkas chose the latter option, contacted some of his former colleagues from Visceral and got to work.
“We are all about making a completely tailored experience for the mobile platform, with the added quality and polish of a console game,” Sakkas told Kotaku AU. “Our biggest goals are to create unique and loveable characters and to make a real impact on the mobile games industry.”
Australia’s development scene has definitely taken a turn for the small and scrappy, following the closure or severe downsizing of the mega studios. Even massive publishers like EA are focusing on quality mobile development with Australian developers.
Remember Cave Johnson’s lemon rant? Seems the former staff of Visceral Games’ Melbourne studio took his advice – except instead of burning someone’s house down, they’ve opened their own studio.
In an uplifting turn of events, a group of developers from the now defunct Visceral Games (EA’s Melbourne Studio) have banded together to create a brand new Aussie studio that makes mobile games.
It’s becoming quite a common occurrence these days to hear of AAA studios closing, and smaller indie developers popping up from the remnants.
The latest is mobile game studio PlaySide, revealed this week and made up of six former staffers from Visceral Melbourne, which EA closed down back in September.
This new studio is being led by Gerry Sakkas, a game designer who had worked at Electronic Arts for over three years. Sakkas told Gamasutra that he was offered a position at one of EA’s U.S. studios, but declined.
