People Can Fly, the studio behind everything from cult classic FPS games like Painkiller and Bulletstorm to the modern live service shooter Outriders, has announced that it's working on an undisclosed AAA game to be published by Microsoft.
The game, codenamed Project Maverick, has a budget of $30-50 million USD, and Microsoft will foot the bill for its production. In a message to investors (via Windows Central), People Can Fly says the project will Xbox "based on the intellectual property rights" owned by Microsoft, though whether that means the game is based on an existing IP or is set to be a new franchise owned by Microsoft isn't entirely clear.
People Can Fly already has experience working on Xbox IP, since it handled the PC port of the original Gears of War back in the day, and co-developed Gears of War Judgment with Epic Games. However, the studio's best-loved games are probably its original FPS titles. Painkiller was a delightfully hyperviolent throwback even on its release in 2004, and Bulletstorm's creative approach to first-person combat remains unmatched to this day.
More recently, People Can Fly worked on the Square Enix-published Outriders, a live-service loot shooter set in a grim future. Outriders reviews landed positively enough, but it didn't really have what it took to stand up against established genre titans like Destiny 2.
With the financial details of Project Maverick having only just been revealed to investors, it's likely the game is only just entering early development - which means you shouldn't expect to learn much of what the game's all about for quite some time to come.
With the Xbox Games Showcase behind us, the lineup of upcoming Xbox Series X games is looking bright.
