from Great Entertainment deputy director of and The Department Star Wars Desperados , Avatar: Pandora’s Frontier and Snowdrop Key people behind games such as engines, David Polfeldt He is a veteran in the AAA game industry. However, activity in his studio in Malmo became a little too big It was – pun intended – not of his own volition. In March 2022, Polfeldt left the company and its owners Ubisoft at first they had no intention of resuming a similar career.
Fast forward to the latest Málaga from Gamelab nexus A meeting in , where Gamereactor catches up with Polfeldt, is a completely different story. The Swedish developer isn’t just building a new studio in Barcelona – A special pixel founded in February 2024 and led by Polfeldt himself – and they have now been working on their first game for ten weeks, despite the smaller team, the aim is to to be “World class, triple-A”.
“Well, that might be a long story, but the short story is I promised myself I would never run a studio again,” Polfeldt admits in the full video interview above. “There’s a lot of responsibility there’s a lot of pressure and I’m really happy with what I’ve done at Massive, but I also feel like maybe this is the end of me, I don’t know what I want to do again “For two years, I wasn’t running a studio. But then this opportunity appeared on the horizon, and I decided that if I was going to do this, I had to it’s an adventure. More than just a job. So taking risks at Malumo doesn’t mean, because I worked in the video game business at Malumo for 17 years, but it’s no longer an adventure for me. Then we started looking for places with a better climate and ended up analyzing about 10 cities, including Barcelona, but to be honest , Barcelona came out on top in almost every category.
Bespoke Pixel has started AAA production in Barcelona with a small world-class team
The weather, but more importantly the pool of world-class talent available for hire, and the apparent lack of ambitious studios, ended the deal. Polfeldt “consciously placed all the leadership and all the decisions in the studio in Barcelona”, he told us, “so there are no external forces that you are used to, such as publishers or stakeholders or whoever”.
Independence and independence aside, the idea is to remain strict – even a little elitist in hiring – while pursuing high-quality game development. Pixel Bespoke currently has just nine employees, with a cap of 20 and a possible sweet spot of around 16. “We might be 40, you know,” he admitted, “but 1,000 are not interested.” So what are they doing?
“I’m going to put my head on that guillotine of shame,” joked Polfeldt, I’ve done most of it well enough that I’m satisfied, but this is a really great opportunity – create a job and get lots and lots of things from the beginning, and we attract like-minded people. right now, who feels like, “I’m doing this. I think I’m pretty good, but I want to reach the true level of my craft. So it’s a little elitist.”
As the head of the studio explains in the full interview, for Bespoke Pixel to finish AAA and production values with a team of 50 people, it is not a matter of relying on AI “or that clunky behemoth” ; , collaboration and shared vision.
“Having a vague vision takes a lot of time, a lot of waste and a lot of energy. So we’re big on the vision – the team already knows what we’re doing. We know how we are to do”
Play the full video to learn more about Bespoke Pixel’s highly engaging hiring process (only 4% of applicants are hired), as well as Polfeldt’s thoughts on Massive vs. Ubisoft, AAA vs. Double-A development, onsite vs. work remote, and even more about Insights from Star Wars, Avatar, and The Division.
