Paramount Skydance chief David Ellison — a self-professed gamer — has finally hit the restart button on Paramount’s gaming ambitions: His company unveiled Paramount Games Studio and splashy AAA title “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin” as its first project on June 5 during Summer Game Fest in L.A.
The new division, led by president Tony Driscoll (formerly Paramount’s head of corporate strategy and development), combines Skydance’s two game studios with Paramount intellectual property. According to the company, the move elevates games as a core pillar of its entertainment biz.
“Games are no longer an extension of the business; they’re a core driver of storytelling, community and growth across Paramount,” Driscoll says.
Until now, Paramount’s gaming business has largely consisted of licensing IP to third parties —so the bar for a revamp wasn’t too high to clear. But with Skydance’s reputation for quality game titles and Paramount’s vast library, there’s potential to carve out a space in a market that’s crowded to the point of bursting.
Paramount
Paramount
“It’s that moment and culmination of what Paramount is as a company,” says Dan Prigg, executive VP and head of games at Paramount Games Studio. Prior to the Skydance merger, Paramount never had internal studios, he notes. So for the first time, the company is treating first-party games as a business.
Driscoll, Prigg and Shawn Kittelsen, senior VP and head of creative and production, are overseeing the consolidated gaming unit’s slate. That includes “TMNT: The Last Ronin” in collaboration with Platinum Games; newly revealed “Star Trek” title “Shadow Frontier”; and “Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game,” which was already in development with Nickelodeon and outside partners Gameplay Group International and PM Studios. Additionally, Paramount Games Studio is working on an untitled “dark academia” RPG based on all-new, original IP.
That last project, which Prigg says, may or may not have a tie-in with an MTV brand, “is set in a fantasy high school kind of moment,” as readers can see above, in the first-look image from the untitled game.
“And there’s a mechanic that we’re getting excited about that plays into relationships,” Prigg says. “If everyone remembers high schools and remembers the kind of social structure that we all had to deal with, the cliques and the groups that you were part of or not part of. And then, if there’s a way to figure out how to get people to work together, regardless of those combinations, I think that’s kind of what we’re looking at from the game perspective.”
Paramount Games Studio now also encompasses projects from Skydance Games’ Skydance Interactive and Skydance New Media teams, including the upcoming “Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra” and an untitled Star Wars game made in collaboration with Lucasfilm.
“We’re looking to grow as a games publisher within a global entertainment company,” Kittelsen says. At Paramount previously, games were “somewhere at the bottom of the flywheel. You were trying to tie movie releases to movie-based games, or it was just an afterthought.”
Paramount Games Studio is approaching games more strategically as a platform for new iterations of existing franchises, execs say. Other traditional media companies are also looking to boost the profile of their IP in game extensions, as Disney has done with its $1.5 billion investment in “Fortnite” developer Epic Games.
With the formation of the larger in-house game studio, Kittelsen says, Paramount Skydance is better positioned to control the quality of its output. When it selects partners, the goal is to ensure that high-value IP is “coming to platforms where there’s actually an audience to receive them.”
Paramount’s gaming business could become even bigger once the acquisition of Warner Bros.
Discovery is complete. That would give the combined company more IP to play with — includ-
ing “Harry Potter,” the DC Universe and “Game of Thrones” — plus the existing lineup of titles from Warner Bros. Games.
Prigg isn’t ready to talk about that yet. “Obviously, that’s on everyone’s mind, but we have to treat it internally as business as usual,” he says. “I know we have enough to work on ourselves, and so our focus is obviously all the great Paramount IP that we have. And then when something changes, we’ll tackle that head-on.”