Respawn Entertainment is the mastermind developer behind games like Titanfall, Apex Legends, and the newly-revealed Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. You could argue that 2019 is the year of Respawn, as millions of players are loving Apex, and there’s just as much hype for the new Star Wars game.
Interestingly, its emerged that Respawn co-creator Jason West has been hired by Epic Games, and has been working there for the past month.
The news broke on Twitter, courtesy of Geoff Keighley, who said: “Some game industry scoop: @EpicGames has quietly hired Jason West, @InfinityWard and @Respawn co-founder, to work on its game development efforts. From what I hear West, who lives in North Carolina, has been in the office for about a month.”
Now, before you go wondering whether West is about to leak a tonne of insider info to Epic (Apex Legends being a top competitor to Fortnite) Epic Games didn’t poach West from Respawn.
West actually left Respawn before the launch of its first game, way back in 2013, with Respawn crediting the departure to family issues.
It’s not known what sort of project West might be working on over at Epic, but people are pretty pleased to see his return to the games industry.
I’d be happy to see Epic produce more exclusive games instead of paying to remove games from other stores
— ivanrosadev (@ivanrosadev) April 12, 2019
The news comes at a tough time for Epic Games, as it struggles to keep players onboard with its still-fairly-new Epic Games Store.
The Epic Store was set to be a pretty hefty competitor to Steam, but has since fallen out of favour with gamers after nabbing exclusives that people really wanted on Steam.
Metro Exodus and the recently-revealed Borderlands 3 are just two of the Epic exclusives that have caused controversy amongst gamers.
Featured Image Credit: Epic Games