With the release of three trailers so far for Red Dead Redemption II, have you noticed that the developer credited is now just “Rockstar Games”?
Beforehand, Rockstar has all their global studios branded exasperatedly. Rockstar North was in charge of Grand Theft Auto, Rockstar San Diego was responsible for the Midnight Club series, Red Dead Revolver and Red Dead Redemption. Rockstar Leeds did the ports which includes the PSP GTA games and Rockstar Vancouver (now merged with Rockstar Toronto) headed Bully and Max Payne 3, to name a few.
Now all of these studios have been consolidated under the Rockstar Games banner to work on Red Dead Redemption II, as revealed in an interview with IGN.
“We’ve done it out of necessity, ” said Rob Nelson, co-studio head of Rockstar North. “It used to be that a 50-person team could make a game, and then it just got bigger and bigger and bigger.”
The world of Red Dead Redemption II is all hand-crafted by the development team, but not just a single studio can have the credit no more. It’s a global effort from all the development studios working as one for eight years.
This goes to show how massive the project is. Other publishers have also used more than one development studio to work on a game- some even use outsourcing- but not to the scale of what Rockstar is doing where all of its previously separated studios now work under one banner.
Red Dead Redemption II will be out for the PS4 and Xbox One on October 26th.
Source: IGN Via Rockstar Intel