Today, we were hit with the rather unexpected news that Microsoft had bought up Epic Games’ Gears of War franchise, and everything that ever was or ever would be associated with the brand; while the series has always been Xbox exclusive, Microsoft taking active ownership of the franchise was surprising.
What was also surprising was their announcement that a new Gears game was in the works at Black Tusk Studios, especially since Black Tusk had shown a mysterious demo last E3 that was… well, completely not Gears-like. As it turns out, that was just a concept piece, and not an actual game under development.
“The thing we showed at E3 last year, it was something that was done in Unreal and more of a concept piece,” Microsoft’s Phil Spencer told Polygon, calling it “an asset” created by the team to get their creative juices flowing, not necessarily an in-development game.
“The studio has really been incubating different ideas over the past six to nine months on what they might work on,” he said, “but the discussion with Epic obviously didn’t start yesterday. We’ve been in this discussion for a while. The leadership team there has known for a while.”
While this makes sense, there will perhaps be a lot of people disappointed that the studio won’t get to work on an exciting new IP of their own. On the other hand, it would be interesting to see how they tackle and try to rejuvenate the Gears IP, given that it has been showing signs of fatigue lately.
