Red 5 doubles dev team in recruitment spree

Firefall developer Red 5 Studios has doubled its team size to more than 100 developers.

As reported by PC Gamer, the studio has hired most of its new staff from the now defunct 38 Studios and from BioWare Austin, which recently laid off a number of staff after it failed to gain sufficient traction with The Old Republic.

“About 80 per cent or 90 per cent of the people we’ve added in the past few months have been from 38 and BioWare,” said lead class designer Dave Williams.

“Two months ago we had a staff of 60, and now we’re at just over 100.”

Williams also said that developers were also forced to crunch “harder than ever” during the last month as it looked to introduce a major new patch to the game, currently in open beta.

“We’re treading the edge of the knife to some extent. But the people we’ve added – we’re pretty careful about,” he said.

“We’ve probably spent a pure month on recruiting, which hurt production. We ended up having to crunch harder than we ever have to get this patch done. We’ve never really crunched at red 5, but this last month has been an absolutely a true crunch.”