While Microsoft has been buying up studios left and right over the last year or so, they have also put in the investment to start an all new studio up entirely from scratch. That studio, sent up in Santa Monica, is called The Initiative, and it has a fair bit of talent backing it up already.
But it looks like Microsoft wants more talent—more talent that can help The Initiative to put out some truly great games. The studio has put out a brand new video to drive recruitment, and it’s a video that sort of outlines the development focus, mission, and culture they will have. It seems like they are trying to make quality story-focused games while staying smaller than the average AAA studio—given the present day development environment, I do hope they can pull that off.
Whatever they are working on, I assume we won’t get to see it for a few more years still. You can check out their recruitment video below, however.