Barely one month after the incredibly successful launch of Fallout 4, Bethesda Game Studios has announced that it will be opening a new game development studio in Montreal, Quebec.

“We’ve worked with some very talented developers in Montreal for a long time, and decided it was time to open a studio there,” Todd Howard, Game Director and Executive Producer at Bethesda Game Studios, said in a statement. “It’s exciting to think about the new games we’ll be building together.”

“Our collaboration with Bethesda Game Studios has been an exhilarating and memorable journey already,” added Yves Lachance, a former Behaviour Interactive exec and the director of Bethesda’s new studio. “We are thrilled to be launching the studio in Montreal and contributing our city’s great game-making talent to the kind of games that Bethesda Game Studios is known for.”

Montreal seems to be an increasingly popular location for video game developers, and there are several major studios already located in the city. One of the best known is Assassin’s Creed creator Ubisoft Montreal (a subsidiary of Ubisoft Entertainment SA), which has become one of the largest game studios in the world, employing over 2,700 people at that location alone.

The city is also home to the Electronic Arts Inc-owned BioWare Montreal, which is currently developing the next Mass Effect game, and there are several dozen other small and mid-sized studios located within Montreal.

New studio to focus on “console and mobile development”

Bethesda said that the new Montreal location will start out with a team of over 40 developers, whose projects will include “both console and mobile development.”

The company’s website lists around half a dozen positions being hired for the Canadian office, including several programming and artistic roles. Requirements given for one of the game programmer positions mention that “Development experience on game consoles (Xbox360/PS3/Xbox One/PS4) [is] a plus.”

Bethesda gave no other details about what types of games we can expect from its new studio, but since they specifically mentioned mobile development as a focus of Bethesda Montreal, it seems likely that we can expect games that are much smaller in scale than Bethesda’s usual releases.

After the unexpected success of Fallout Shelter, it would come as no surprise that Bethesda might want to explore the mobile space further.

Image courtesy of Bethesda Softworks LLC