Respawn opens new studio in Vancouver to focus on Apex Legends

Respawn is expanding its reach by opening up a new studio in Vancouver, Canada to focus entirely on Apex Legends. This announcement was confirmed by Respawn COO Dusty Welch to GamesIndustry.biz and coincides with the studio’s 10th anniversary.

The team over at Respawn Vancouver, conveniently located near EA’s Vancouver campus, will be led by Head of Operations Henry Lee and Team Director Steven Ferreira. Lee spoke about how excited he was for the move.

When you look at Vancouver, it’s one of our [EA’s] biggest studio locations. And Vancouver is full of talented people in the games industry, so there was a natural fit with Steven coming on board with his core team and really establishing that foundation. Now we’re just adding the missing pieces to it.

This is a great opportunity, not just for the Vancouver studio to bring some new creative challenges to people already there, but also to the local industry in terms of being part of the Apex Legends roadmap. So we’re very excited about bringing this to Vancouver and hopefully greater Canada as well, because we can tap into much more of a talent base broadly.

Its Vancouver office will be Respawn’s second location in addition to its studio in California, led by Vince Zampella, who also became the head of DICE LA back at the beginning of the year. With another studio to work on Apex Legends on take the pressure off of the California office, it should allow them to dedicate more resources to other projects.

The Vancouver-based studio actually started up in 2019, and Respawn has been hiring for it internally for several months. The company is now looking to hire externally in the hopes of reaching around 80 employees.