Remedy's next AAA game is in pre-production phases of development

Today Remedy confirmed its next game is now in the critical pre-production phases, which comes before principal development.

Remedy, like all independent developers, works on many games at once. Even as Control was being made, a small internal team of Remedy devs was working on a new project that may or may not be set in the Control IP. We knew about this additional game as early as 2018 and then Remedy reinforced the news in 2019.

Now in its recent earnings report, the studio says the unannounced game is currently entering pre-production. This means the project isn't quite in full development, but it's gearing up to that point, and should be developed with Remedy's Northlight games engine.

"A third unannounced project and Vanguard are preparing for pre-production," reads the progress report to investors.

The Vanguard project refers to Remedy's new Vanguard team, which is focused on making live service games.

Read Also: Remedy only gets 45% of Control game sales

What's interesting is that Remedy is now capitalizing certain expenditures related to games development. This means this spending is recorded as an asset that will deliver revenue over time, which shows great confidence in the new games. The company capitalized 15.1 million Euros during 2019.

"The Board of Directors made a decision to capitalize product development expenses partially starting 1 January 2019.

"The decision concerned product development expenses for two projects - the third not yet announced project and project Vanguard - during the period under review. The company capitalized 1 510 thousand euros of product development expenses during the reporting period. Product development expenses for other projects were not capitalized."

The new project will also likely be optimized for next-generation consoles like Sony's PlayStation 5 and Microsoft's Xbox Series X. Remedy has already teased a possible next-gen Control port, and has confirmed it plans to ready its pipeline for PS5 and Xbox SX.

"There is also on-going work so that we are prepared for the next generation consoles arriving in 2020," Remedy CEO Tero Vitrala said in the report.