BioWare and Ubisoft veterans open Yellow Brick Games in Quebec

As they do, a group of developers with past experience at bigtime studios BioWare and Ubisoft have shrugged off the corporate chains and gotten together to create a new game studio. Mike Laidlaw, Jeff Skalski, Frédéric St-Laurent B., and Thomas Giroux have teamed up to create Yellow Brick Games, a new studio in Quebec City.

Laidlaw (Mike, not Marc, mind) is best known as former creative director on the Dragon Age series before leaving BioWare in 2017. He later joined Ubisoft Quebec in 2018 and then left Ubisoft at the beginning of 2020. Ubisoft reportedly cancelled an unannounced Arthurian RPG he was involved with.

Ubisoft seems to be the common denominator among the founders. St-Laurent B. worked as lead game designer on Assassin's Creed Syndicate with Skalski as a producer on the same. Giroux also has experience from a number of years with Ubisoft but was most recently with Activision.

They've now founded Yellow Brick with Giroux as CEO and Skalski as COO and executive producer. Laidlaw will serve as chief creative officer with St-Laurent B. as game director. They say the team of 15 is made up of people working from home in multiple countries.

"The studio was founded by a group of industry veterans who found themselves keen to work with an agile team, on projects that could deliver innovative and emergent gameplay crafted by a small, highly skilled team," Yellow Brick say.

"We have learned a lot from working on world-class, multi-year projects with thousands of colleagues and we want to take a different approach," Skalski tells Games Industry. "Leveraging a smaller talented team where people come first, we will create amazing worlds and experiences for all others to enjoy. The market is moving fast, and we have no desire to play catchup and chase it when we can influence where it goes. These goals drove us to found Yellow Brick Games."

The studio haven't announced their first project yet, so we'll just have to wait a bit for that news.