Remedy Entertainment, the company behind Control and Alan Wake, has signed a global development, license, and distribution agreement with Tencent for a new co-operative multiplayer game that is currently codenamed Vanguard.Announced by Remedy, Vanguard – which should obviously not be confused for Call of Duty: Vanguard – will be a “free-to-play, co-operative PvE shooter that combines Remedy’s narrative expertise and action gameplay into an immersive multiplayer experience.”The game will be developed with the Unreal Engine for both PC and consoles and, while Remedy will develop and publish the game for most of the world, Tencent will localize Vanguard for “the selected Asian markets” and it will cover any related localization costs.As it stands, Vanguard is “currently in the proof-of-concept phase” and the game’s “development budget up to the first year of live operations will be in the range of a typical Remedy AAA game budget.” Remedy and Tencent will co-finance Vanguard’s development and each company will be responsible for the publishing and game operating costs in their territories. After the development costs have been recouped, both companies will share a portion of revenue with the other.Alongside the PC and consoles version of Vanguard, Remedy has given Tencent the worldwide rights to both develop and publish a mobile version of the game. Tencent will cover the costs of the project, and the companies have “agreed on a separate sharing scheme for the mobile version.”This announcement follows the news from May 2021 that Tencent had acquired a 3.8% stake in Remedy, which amounted to 500,000 shares. There was no game annoucement back then, but that has now changed.“Vanguard marks Remedy’s first entry into Games-as-a-Service business model, executed by our top tier team of free-to-play experts,” Said CEO of Remedy Entertainment Tero Virtala. “We are building something new and exciting for co-operative multiplayer space, on top of Remedy’s strengths. Expanding our capabilities to take on publishing responsibilities is the next step in the development of our company.”We are excited for this long-term partnership with Tencent and with confidence can say that it is an excellent fit in supporting Vanguard’s ambitious plans. Vanguard is a global opportunity, and Tencent can support Remedy internationally, and lead the operations in Asia and the mobile markets.” Remedy had announced that it formed a new team called Vanguard in 2018 that had the goal to “challenge conventions and to prototype and ship new types of ongoing live multiplayer game experiences,” and it would appear that this is the team inside Remedy that is working on this as the names are the same.Vanguard joins the many projects currently in development at Remedy, including Alan Wake 2, the campaign of CrossfireX, multiple games in the Control universe, and a new, early-stage project.Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
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