Activision Blizzard’s Beenox studio has announced the opening of a new studio in Montreal, Canada. The Quebec City-based company wants its second studio to grow its current 400 game developers, including the more than 150 it has hired since 2021, by more than 20% to support Call of Duty and “other” ambitious projects”.
Beenox has contributed to several games in the Call of Duty franchise, including creating new content for each season of Warzone and is currently collaborating on a new mobile game. Nour Polloni, head of the Beenox studio, said: We hope the city’s diversity of talent will help us build a team that broadens our creative horizons and brings more diversity to our development.
The investment in Montreal is the next critical step in the growth of our studio as we continue to support the creative ambitions of the Call of Duty franchise. We want our studio to attract local and international talent to the dynamic video game industry to contribute.
Last August, Activision announced the formation of an in-house mobile game development studio called SolidState to develop new games in the Call of Duty franchise. The company later confirmed that Beenox, Activision Shanghai and Digital Legends have also been working on new Call of Duty mobile games in 2021.
Activision revealed last August that all of its core studios are now working on Call of Duty. However, the publisher has reportedly decided to delay next year’s Call of Duty game, which will be the first time the series has skipped an annual release in nearly 20 years.
According to a Bloomberg report in February, the company decided to delay the launch of the new game in charge of Treyarch after last year’s Call of Duty: Pioneer failed to live up to expectations, and “some executives felt they were pushing the new version too quickly.