Ben Cousins and David Goldfarb Founds New Studio

The two game development veterans Ben Cousins and David Goldfarb have teamed up to found the new Stockholm-based studio The Outsiders to produce a new still unnamed RPG for pc.

 

Two of the most prolific games industry veterans in Sweden joins forces to found a new indie game studio – The Outsiders – in Stockholm. David Goldfarb, who’s been working on the Battlefield series and most recently Payday 2, and Ben Cousins, who’s had positions at Lionhead, DICE and EA are now working together on a new unnamed mid-sized RPG project for pc.

Goldfarb told Eurogamer in an interview that the new project is something that he has been kicking around for some time” I’ve loved RPGs all my life and have been shoehorning elements of them into games I’ve made over the years with lesser or more success.”

 

Ben Cousins

Nordic Game Bits got in touch with the other half of the founding team, Ben Cousins. We wanted to hear what he had to say about leaving his current job as independent consultant to become part of the new project with his old DICE-colleague, Goldfarb.

“I guess it was inevitable that we would work together on something at some point, and summer 2014 was just good timing,” he tells. “I was working as a consultant and initially thought Dave would just be another client, but as we started working together more it became mutually obvious that we should make this a permanent partnership.”

Cousins also explains that the company is set up so that Davis Goldfarb has full ownership of the game and it’s creative vision, while Cousins is then in charge of turning those creative visions into a viable long-term business.

 

Cousin says that him and Goldfarb are still in the planning phase, but that they already have two additional developers on the project. But “we aren’t revealing who they are at the moment,” Cousins says.
We are in the planning phase with a lot of design work and concept images being developed along with detailed staffing, budgetary and milestone planning. We are currently talking to a bunch of potential funding sources, such as publishers and investment.
Cousins explains that they see the project as sitting somewhere between a full scale AAA title and a small indie game. “We are frustrated that core gamers have hardly any choice for anything that sits in the middle of these two types of products, and want to create products and services that address that chunk of the market.”

 

Often seen as an advocate for mobile games, no doubt thanks to his seminal 2012 GDC-talk When the Console dies, what comes next?, Cousins reassures Nordic Game Bits that he is as much a pc-person as a mobile guy. “It’s funny that people see me that way, as I spent many years working one core free-to-play games for PC at EA and before that on console games at Sony,” he says.
I’m very optimistic about the future of the PC for core gamers.
So far, very few details about the game itself is know. It’s a mid sized pc RPG, but Goldfarb has also alluded to the game having some form of dynamic narrative.
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Multi-passionate game developer and journalist. Has been writing about the Danish games industry for more than ten years, and creating audio design for both Danish and International games for almost as long.

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