How Massive is making two blockbusters at the same time | Thomas Andren interview

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Massive has made a name for itself as one of Ubisoft‘s most important game studios. The Malmo, Sweden-based studio has more than 800 people and it’s working on two major games that were unveiled at the Ubisoft Forward event on Monday.

The games are Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, debuting on multiple platforms on December 7; and Star Wars: Outlaws, which is coming in 2024. Both games have separate teams at Massive, and the studio is getting help from the rest of Ubisoft as it goes into final production for the games.

The guy in charge of making this happen is Thomas Andren, managing director at Massive. He said that both Disney and James Cameron chose to work with Massive because of its track record with the open world games of Tom Clancy’s The Division series. While making all those games, Ubisoft’s engineers at Massive were also responsible for the creation of the Snowdrop game engine. That’s a pretty heavy load, and it explains why Massive was quiet for a long time.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: Were you able to show off the game here? What were you anticipating for today?

Thomas Andren: To come here with two games, starting with Avatar and ending with Star Wars, it’s something that we at Massive and with our partners internally, we were very proud of it.

GamesBeat: How big is Massive now?

Andren: At the studio in Malmo, we’re around 800 people now. We’re all in one location there.

GamesBeat: One thing I did wonder is how flexible has it been over time to have the Snowdrop engine? Does that enable certain things?

Andren: Snowdrop is an iteration of the games we’ve made. We always say