Canada is getting another new game studio.
Developer Hothead Games, which is best known for the mobile sniper-simulator Kill Shot, revealed this week that it is opening a new studio in Halifax. This will join with the company’s main division in Vancouver to bring Hothead’s ranks to 130 people.
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Hothead Halifax already has 25 people designing, programming, and creating assets for various projects. And the company has promised to give its newest studio the freedom to capitalize on that talent. Hothead likely feels confident in its Halifax team — which is on the opposite side of Canada from its headquarters — because it has set up a strong model for producing games-as-a-service.
Among the more than two dozen people at the new development house is a lot more than just programmers and artists. Hothead has brought in people to provide analytics, live development operations, quality assurance, marketing, and support. It’s this sort of all-encompassing development that helped Hothead establish itself as a stand-out mobile developer in the first place, and now it is replicating that experience.
“We are proud to be a coast-to-coast Canadian company servicing the world,” Hothead director of development Vlad Ceraldi said. “Setting up Hothead in Halifax was an easy decision, as the growth in tech, the great schools, and the history of the local games sector in that area matched well with our own objectives for growth.”