ROBOT ENTERTAINMENT

obot Entertainment began as a rescue operation. While some studios start small, taking cautious steps toward their ambitions, this one crammed as many people as it could onto the lifeboats. The sinking ship was Ensemble Studios, the venerable developer of . Microsoft planned to close Ensemble down once work finished on , but in a perfect case of corporate contradiction, had also greenlit a new project to follow under CEO Tony Goodman. In those final months, studio management scrambled not only to finish its swan song but to lay the groundwork for an independent studio, knowing it couldn’t save everyone. “The last nine months of shipping a game is always really hard,” Robot CEO says. “That project was particularly challenging at the end – the amount of work to get done, and knowing that the studio was going away after that.” On Robot’s first day, 44 people showed up to work – a little under half of Ensemble’s workforce. And for those first couple of years it was business as usual, working on , the MMO-RTS spinoff to the series the team had already