[ibimage==31424==Large==none==self==ibimage_align-center]
Machinima, Scopely, Playsino, Riot Games are just a few names that give LA its status as a video gaming empire. From this talent, LA has sprouted its newest mobile gaming company just this week: Nuclear Division.
The studio will be headed by video game veterans Larry Pacey, formerly in the casino business with WMS, and Vince Zampella, current CEO of game studio Respawn Entertainment. They are building up a 20-person game studio in San Fernando Valley to produce mobile games that have “innovative features that don’t exist yet,” Pacey said.
Pacey and Zampella will be hiring back-end developers, live operations/support specialists and creatives among others until mid-summer to fill up their office nearby Zampella’s current 100-person Respawn team. After that, Nuclear Division will head to beta testing in the fall before putting its first product to market in 2015.
The exact product is what Pacey said he cannot yet specify (no surprise there). He did say though that he and Zampella are concentrated on “making the games you and I play,” games that are “new, unique, relatable” and that people can “easily jump into.”
Both Zampella, who co-created Titanfall and Call of Duty franchises, and Pacey have experience bringing these types of products to market: games that walk the line between deeply engrossing and enjoyably simple. For example, while at WMS, Pacey developed “a really complicated concept for a simple slot machine” where users could make universal slot machine accounts, so they could log on to the same account at different slot machines around the country. Over 1 million people did just that.
“You don’t get any shorter time frame than a casino game like a slot machine; you’ve got to reel people in,” Pacey said.
Nuclear Division will catch users’ attention by tapping into the potential of the smartphone: people are always connected to them, Pacey said. Yet so many games right now don’t take advantage of that fact, leaving what Pacey calls huge “missing elements” in mobile games.
As Nuclear Division joins the numerous gaming studios in LA, it doesn’t view any particular one (locally or nationally) as the biggest fish in the pond.
“There’s not one competitor,” Pacey said. “There’s a really high signal to noise ratio. What’s important is that our product is something people love to play, but that they also want to play it for a long period of time. They have to want to come back.”
Photo credit: Shutterstock
