Video Games

Netflix shuts down studio working under former Halo lead

Less than two years after establishing it

Marco Wutz

Netflix

Team Blue, a triple-A development studio established by Netflix Games, has been shut down, as per a report from Stephen Totilo. It’s been less than two years since former Overwatch producer Chacko Sonny had been tasked with building up the studio in California, which added big names like former Halo creative lead Joseph Staten to its ranks in the meantime.

Staten joined Team Blue in 2023 as the creative director for its debut title, a triple-A multiplatform game based on an original IP. Job listings from last year indicated that the game was supposed to be a third-person action RPG.

Other veterans impacted by the studio’s closure are Rafael Grassetti, former art director at Sony Santa Monica, director of technology Jerry Edsall, and design director Gavin Irby. It’s unclear how many people are affected by the shutdown in total.

Netflix offered salaries of up to half a million USD for the top positions at Team Blue back in January 2023, shortly after the studio’s foundation.

Totilo stated that the closure was not a sign of Netflix backing off of its ambitious video game strategy, but rather a shake-up connected to new leadership taking over Netflix Games. “Definitely a sign of new leaders pulling back from one big bet, but Netflix still has a bunch more studios and execs seem hyped on growth targets and show tie-in games,” he wrote on social media.

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Marco Wutz
MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg

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