Virtuos today announced that it is opening a new studio located in Lyon, France. This new studio will help “increase its global footprint, as well as its proximity to clients.”
The new studio will have 12 founding programmers, and will be led by Aurélien Kerbeci and Domenico Albani, who have worked in other Lyon-based studios including Agharta Studio and Eden Games respectively. According to Christophe Gandon, the head of Virtuos’ Game Division, the new studio will be giving support to other locations: “Not only is the team culturally aligned with Virtuos, they are also equipped with the deep engineering and domain expertise that will play a critical role in ensuring our continued success.”
Virtuos’s main headquarters moved to Singapore in 2018, but it has 14 offices around the world. Earlier this month the company revealed it’d raised $150 million from the private equity firm Baring Private Equity Asia. The main directive of the studio is to provide core assets for game engines that can be incorporated into AAA games.
Recently Virtuos CEO Gilles Langourieux spoke with GamesBeat, saying why the company invested in studios around the world. According to Langourieux, “We have studios in countries where there’s a deep talent pool. We have studios in cities where games are made, in order to be closer to our clients. We make these studios work all together on the same platform.”
Lyon is home to several game development studios, most notably Arkane. Virtuos also has a studio in Paris, another notable game development hotspot in France, and Virtuos Lyon will be working closely with the Paris location.
Virtuos was recently in the news when VGC published a rumor that it was the studio developing a Metal Gear Solid 3 remake for Konami. One of Virtuos’s programmers mentioned working on an “unannounced remake” on their LinkedIn profile, which would seem to bear out those rumors. It’s not clear whether or not the Lyon studio will be working on anything related to the remake.