Microsoft’s Vancouver-based studio The Coalition has been keeping busy recently – in addition to their usual work on the Gears franchise, they also co-developed The Matrix Awakens Unreal Engine 5 demo, are helping out numerous other Xbox studios with their tech, and were reportedly working on some additional smaller side projects of their own.
Well, according to the latest episode of Jeff Grubb’s latest Game Mess Mornings livestream, The Coalition is consolidating their efforts somewhat. That means at least two different side projects have been canceled so the studio can make Gears 6 its main focus.
“The Coalition has canceled its smaller non-Gears project. I have previously reported, that to get up to speed with Unreal Engine 5, The Coalition was planning to take on a smaller non-Gears project, before moving onto Gears 6. That game was in the works, but they were also doing other stuff alongside that, including most prominently, in addition to their support work, that Matrix demo. That was not the smaller project. It was a separate thing, but it does seem like they feel like, well, we are up to speed, because we worked on [The Matrix] so they have canceled that smaller project as well as another project. So there’s been two games canceled there. This was reflected in the layoffs at Microsoft, that did hit The Coalition a little bit. The studio is going to move on fully to Gears 6.”
Of course, as with all rumors, take this with a grain of salt, but this would make sense. When push comes to shove, The Coalition is still the Gears studio, so at some point, you have to make that your primary focus. It’s just disappointing we’ll likely never see whatever they were experimenting with.
What do you think? Interested in what The Coalition might cook up for Gears 6? Would you prefer they continue committing some resources to experiments and side projects?