Gears Of War will remain an Xbox exclusive forever, with Microsoft putting developer Black Tusk Studios to work on a new game.
Epic Games have sold the rights to the Gears Of Wars franchise to Microsoft, including ‘all existing and future games, entertainment experiences and merchandise’.
A new game hasn’t been announced as such but Black Tusk Studios will be taking over development of the series, overseen by ex-Epic Games director Rod Fergusson.
Black Tusk are a new Canadian studio set up specifically to work on Xbox One games and who were previously rumoured to be working on a new rival to the Halo series. Although whether that’s still happening remains to be seen.
[Update: Microsft's Phil Spencer has told Polygon that the Black Tusk game shown at E3, which showed a Splinter Cell-esque tough guy abseiling down a skyscraper, was just a 'concept piece' and 'not necessarily an in-development game'. Which we imagine means that Black Tusk are going to be working solely on Gears Of War for at least the foreseeable future.]
Although Epic will no longer be involved in making the games they will still use the company’s Unreal Engine technology. In fact it sounds like the new one will be one of the first to use Unreal Engine 4.
There are some laughably non-spontaneous sounding PR quotes on the official Xbox website, but the most important news is simply that you won’t hear more about the new game until ‘later this year’ – which is very likely to mean E3 in June.
‘We’re very proud of the franchise we built in close partnership with Microsoft over the past decade and are happy that this agreement enables Microsoft to forge ahead with the ‘Gears’ universe on their industry-leading platforms as Epic concentrates its efforts on new projects,’ said Epic founder Tim Sweeny.
‘Epic remains totally dedicated to supporting Xbox One and is licensing the Unreal Engine 4 technology to Microsoft in support of their future projects.’
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