A new studio is looking to bring music-focused games into the world of user-generated content — and it’s partnering with one of the world’s leading soundtracking platforms to do it.
Epic Games’ layoff of over 1,000 employees in March impacted roles across the entire company, but Fortnite’s music team was particularly heavily hit, according to former members of the team. A silver lining of the layoff was that it effectively released a fully-baked music game development team into the job market — and five members of that team have decided to found their own studio, The Drop Circuit, with the goal of publishing high-quality music games using Unreal Editor for Fortnite.
“The experience of this team — it’s like, 21 years of experience, 20 years of experience, 19 years, 10 years, 11 years of experience,” said The Drop Circuit co-founder and chief executive officer Rick Cody, who spent six years as a game designer at Harmonix Music Systems before joining the development team for Fortnite Festival at Epic Games, in an interview with GamesBeat. “There’s numerous people on this team that were around for a decade-plus.”
The full list of co-founders of The Drop Circuit includes Cody; Lee Graham, a former senior program manager at Epic Games who serves as the new studio’s chief publishing officer; chief legal officer Melissa Bortnick, who spent six years running music legal and business affairs for Fortnite; chief creative officer Mitch Fletcher, who spent 18 years working on music titles for Harmonix and Epic; and chief commercial officer Heather Fuller, who built and led Epic’s Unreal Engine partner program.
The Drop Circuit’s first game, Go Viral Tycoon, comes out today, Sept. 17. The game combines tycoon game mechanics with the rise of short-form video, with players competing against each other to build virtual environments based on randomized prompts and film clips of their characters emoting in those environments. Players vote on their favorite clips, with the winners accruing points over the course of multiple rounds. The game’s neon-colored, futuristic setting is inspired by cyberpunk properties like Blade Runner, according to Fuller in an interview with GamesBeat.
“We’re trying to go for this whole ‘80s wave sim theme,” Fuller said.
To fill its games with recognizable music, The Drop Circuit is officially partnering with the royalty-free music and sound effect platform Epidemic Sound to integrate the company’s catalog into The Drop Circuit’s releases. Partnering with Epidemic Sound gives The Drop Circuit access to over 55,000 tracks, which are used by over 70 percent of the top-300 U.S. YouTube channels, according to numbers shared by a company representative.
“What excites us most is what it means for our artists,” said Epidemic Sound vice president and head of commercial legal Emil Henriksson in a written statement. “Fortnite’s creator community gives their music a life within the gaming space, and that’s exactly the kind of growth we want to keep fueling.”
The Drop Circuit’s co-founders cut their teeth building rhythm games, but they said they are not initially focusing on rhythm elements in their music-focused development projects, although Cody noted that there are already features that allow players to synchronize their characters’ dance emotes with the beat of in-game music. Moving forward, the company fully intends to bring rhythm games to the world of UEFN, but did not share a specific timeline or concept for this vision.
“This team knows how to do that, because they built all the Festival stuff from the ground up, season over season,” Graham said in an interview with GamesBeat. “It’s definitely something we could lean into at one point, but we need the social piece first, because we’re building community first.”
User-generated content platforms like Fortnite and Roblox present an enticing path forward for traditional game developers looking for their next move after the wave of layoffs that have impacted the industry over the past year. The co-founders of The Drop Circuit are particularly incentivized to build on Fortnite because they helped create the platform’s music tools and are deeply familiar with their capabilities, although Graham made it clear that his studio is not getting any special treatment from its friends still at Epic.
“We keep in touch with a lot of our friends there, just because it’s a small industry, and we want to be a glowing, shiny example of how developers work,” Graham said. “And this team has so much knowledge; we can share that knowledge back, and we’re also learning.”