Earlier this month, it was revealed how Firesprite was a new development team staffed with former Studio Liverpool employees, and they had helped out with The Playroom for PS4.
In an interview with The Average Gamer, Firesprite Managing Director Graeme Ankers (who was a Game Director at Studio Liverpool) talked about how it “was January-time when we really got going on The Playroom.” Once they began, he says the “timeframe of development was quite aggressive,” with Firesprite handling the visual side of the game, “the little layout dudes that were around, and the Asobi character, the menus, all those sequences.”
One highly publicized part of The Playroom is how people were using it to stream on Twitch, ultimately resulting in the game being removed from the directory.
When Ankers was asked about The Playroom and Twitch, he thought stuff like The Spartan Show “was amazing” and “we’d kind of subconsciously thought about Asobi as almost like a co-host or a chaperone in the room with you, but a few of us were quite surprised in the way that they’d used it. It was amazing to see. They were getting some great hits.”
Obviously, things went downhill from there, with Graeme replying to some of the bad stuff people did with The Playroom:
I guess that’s prevalent in a lot of the social media stuff – Facebook, YouTube, etc. The moderation has to be there and people have to be responsible or be aware that that kind of thing is not good.
For the future of Firesprite, they’re “working on something new that we can’t say what it is yet,” while also “putting a lot of effort into building creating a new game engine.”
Do you think Firesprite will ever make a new WipEout game? Let us know in the comments below.
