TiMi Studio Group has announced that its Seattle-area subsidiary is now officially named “Team Kaiju.”
First announced back in June, the new studio is the result of TiMi’s efforts to expand into North America. It’s currently based out of Bellevue, Wash., with a distributed team split between the Seattle area and Los Angeles.
The debut game for Team Kaiju is planned to be an original, multiplayer first-person shooter for PC and consoles, which is specifically intended to be an “AAA” experience. The phrase, borrowed from baseball, is informally used in the video game industry to indicate the size of a project.
“It’s a goofy term,” said Scott Warner, creative director at Team Kaiju, in an interview with GeekWire. “It’s been around for some time. To me, it’s come to represent that you’re making a blockbuster product. You’re making something at scale, you have a high budget, it’s usually a team of quite some size, and you’re making something that’s going to be competitive with the biggest products. Every aspect of what we’re putting in is going to be top-level quality.”
Warner himself was the lead designer on 2012’s Halo 4. Team Kaiju’s senior director Rosi Zagorcheva previously held the same role on Star Wars: Battlefront, Battlefield 4, and Battlefield V. The rest of the current team includes developers with experience working on franchises such as Apex Legends, Destiny, Halo, and Battlefield.
The track record is there to make a blockbuster shooter, though it’s a surprise to see from a TiMi Studio Group subsidiary. TiMi, headquartered in Shenzhen, China and a subsidiary of Tencent, is well-known in its home country for several mega-hits for the mobile market, including Honor of Kings (a.k.a. Arena of Valor), Call of Duty: Mobile, Speed Drifters, and Pokémon UNITE.
“TiMi is looking to grow,” Warner said. “Obviously, not only outside of the Chinese market, but also growing outside of what’s been successful for them. For expanding into the Western market and trying to establish a name for the studio, and a really compelling product, it feels like the easier path is by making a really compelling PC/console game. So that’s what we set out to do from the beginning.”
Further details about exactly what Team Kaiju is making are still up in the air, however, and it’s likely to be a couple of years before there are any more announcements.
“It’s a very cool game,” Warner said. “We don’t want to get into it just yet, other than to say that a primary verb [a term in game design meant to indicate the primary action taken by a player] is shooting a gun. If it’s going to be something that a player is doing second to second, it’s paramount. Getting that to feel right, to feel responsive, to feel like it’s an extension of a player from the controller into the experience, is super important.”
The game being built by Team Kaiju is also planned to have a heavy focus on its player community, in order to mine those players for feedback as they continue to improve their game.
“Community matters massively,” Zagorcheva said in a press release, “and having players who feel like they have the potential to build a community of like minded gamers could be incredibly powerful.”
The new studio will support fully-remote work for its staff, with plans to stay flexible regarding its team construction. Its new website includes listings of available jobs as Team Kaiju continues to expand, with a currently-planned soft cap of 100 employees.
“There’s an insatiable need for new experiences in games,” Warner said. “That’s part of what we were founded on. I believe that game design is the preeminent creative medium of the 21st century. We’re just getting started. I feel super blessed that I got to grow up in this, and now it’s almost like we’re leaving the silent film era. We still have so much left to do. It’s exciting.”
