Four years after selling Killzone developer Guerrilla Games to Sony Computer Entertainment, original co-founders Martin de Ronde (pictured) and Michiel Mol have reunited to form Vanguard Entertainment Group.
The Netherlands-based firm merges de Ronde and Mol’s online games production company Karami with PSN and XBLA developer W! Games, creator of Greed Corp and My Horse & Me.
Vanguard says it will focus on creating a new breed of online games, “taking the fundamental mechanics of the fast growing market of PC online games and applying them to products for consoles and other premium platforms”. It is currently working on several new projects, with the first due to be announced shortly.
“Over the past few years, we have been closely following the rapid rise of social network games, browser based games and new online business models associated with these platforms. We also see that the market for console games forms the heart of our industry still in terms of revenue and state of the art production values,” said chief commercial officer de Ronde, who’s also chairman of non-profit publisher OneBigGame.
“We feel both these market segments will be rapidly converging over the coming years, rather than competing with each other, and with Vanguard we want to be at the forefront of this development. It will be Vanguard’s mission to capitalise on the need for new types of online content on consoles, which it will be doing with games based on original IP.”