Q&A: SHARKMOB LONDON
During his recent trip to London for EGX 2022, Vince Pavey had the chance to swing by the grand opening of Sharkmob London’s swanky new offices in Covent Garden (just around the corner from MCV’s old haunt). Here’s what James Dobrowski, managing director, had to say about the move
Credit Fordtography W
hy move the studio’s location now? Sharkmob was originally
founded in Malmo, Sweden, back in 2017, with the dream of building a AAA studio with a people centric focus. A place where we could build ambitious new IP, whilst ensuring our team felt real ownership over their work, and had a great time doing it. The London studio was started a few years
later – September 2020 – with the idea that combining the historic expertise and excellence of British game development with the Swedish flair for developing new IP, would lead to something really special. As a very small group of founders in London, we initially took
some space in a shared office in Soho, but realistically found ourselves spending most of our formative months working from home as the pandemic hit. Overall however, that space could fit around 40 people, very tightly squeezed in. It was a great little start-up home for us, but it wasn’t going to suit longer term. Coming out of the pandemic, we were really keen to build a studio in London that reflected our ambitions. Something large enough to fit our future AAA team, inspiring enough to recruit the best people in the industry, and offering the best facilities in support of our people doing their best creative work.
40 | MCV/DEVELOP October/November 2022
What are some of the biggest features of the new studio, things that you didn’t have at your previous location? The space we have makes a huge difference! Our previous space fit around 40 people into less than 2,000 square feet, whereas we can now house approximately 250 team members very comfortably. This studio is also tailor made for our specific requirements, spanning from the careful design of the general layout to some of the more specialist facilities we’re putting in place. On the layout front, we’ve optimised for cross team collaboration
with desks organised in feature pods, each separated by open collaboration that allow individual teams and groups of teams to come together for brainstorming and problem solving activities. We were also really passionate about designing a space with neuro-diversity in mind, and the layout plays a huge part in that, effectively looking to minimise visual and audio noise from individual desks where possible. In terms of facilities, we have an amazing kitchen overlooking the
Thames that can house every member of the team for all-hands events, a dedicated User Research lab, Dolby Atmos sound studios, a board game room with custom D&D table, and an esports room for both playtesting of builds and after work events. We unfortunately don’t have the space
for a motion capture facility here in London, but we do have a world class motion capture and photogrammetry facility in Malmo, which is only a short- hop away on the plane.
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