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Fox Broadcasting Company has announced it’s creating a new gaming division that will oversee VR, AR and video game productions across the studio’s TV and film output.
Dubbed FoxNext, the division will be headed up by Salil Mehta, who will act as president. Mehta was most recently president of content management for Twentieth Century Fox Film and will report to CEO and chairman of Fox Networks Group Peter Rice and chairman and CEO of Twentieth Century Fox Film Stacey Snider.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Foxnext was born out of the Fox Innovation Lab, which was also responsible for the company’s first film VR tie-in title, The Martian VR Experience. Going forward, FoxNext will oversee all production of the studio’s franchise VR experiences, including the previously announced Alien and Planet of the Apes titles. It will also look to commercialise Fox’s overall VR strategy.
Mehta will also be responsible for managing the Fox Innovation Lab, and FoxNext as a whole will also work closely on film studio projects together with the assistance of an advisory board made up of Fox film executives Teg Gagliano, David Greenbaum and Mike Dunn.
More interesting, though, is the announcement that FoxNext will also merge the groups responsible for games such as Alien: Isolation and The Simpsons: Tapped Out mobile title into one interactive unit. It’s not particularly clear what this means for the studios involved in the development of these titles, but MCV has reached out to Creative Assembly for comment and clarification. We’ll update this article with more details when we hear back.
Extending our storytelling to new platforms in new ways is a constant focus for us as we look to build more touch points with consumers every day," Snider said in a statement.
"Building on the momentum we’ve already seen in this area via the Fox Innovation Lab, FoxNext represents a natural next step in defining our long-term vision in this arena. Salil is quite simply the perfect executive to build this group into what we know will be an industry leader.”
