Studio Wildcard


Wildcard Properties, LLC, doing business as Studio Wildcard, is an American video game developer with offices in Kirkland, Washington, and Gainesville, Florida. The company was founded in October 2014 by Doug Kennedy, Jesse Rapczak, Jeremy Stieglitz and Susan Stieglitz, and is best known for its debut game, , which was released in August 2017.

History

Foundation

Studio Wildcard was founded in October 2014. Its founders are Doug Kennedy, Jesse Rapczak, Jeremy Stieglitz and Stieglitz' wife, Susan, of whom Kennedy serves as chief executive officer for the company. While falling under the jurisdiction of Florida, the company's primary offices were set up in Washington. In December 2015, Snail Ark, Inc., a California corporation and subsidiary of SDE, Inc., was merged into Studio Wildcard. Three managers of Snail Ark subsequently became managers of Studio Wildcard. In February 2016, the company had 60 people employed at its studio in Bellevue, Washington.

Legal dispute

In December 2015, Trendy Entertainment, the former employer of Jeremy Stieglitz, filed a lawsuit against Studio Wildcard and Stieglitz, alleging that Stieglitz had violated a non-compete agreement between him and Trendy when he, following his resignation from Trendy, secretly formed Studio Wildcard and started working on Ark while hiring developers from Trendy for his endeavor. Trendy sought in damages, and the two parties settled on April 13, 2016, for.

''Atlas''

At The Game Awards 2018, Studio Wildcard announced Atlas, a massively multiplayer online game featuring pirates. According to them, the game was 1,200 times larger than Ark and could host 40,000 players in the same game world. To develop Atlas, Studio Wildcard had set up a sister studio, Grapeshot Games, and run a one-year-long recruitment phase to ensure that development on it was not coming at the expense of Ark.

Games developed