Starbreeze to create CrossFire game for western market

Swedish developer Starbreeze, makers of the shooters Chronicles of Riddick and Syndicate, has entered an agreement with Korean publisher Smilegate, the studio responsible for the colossal hit CrossFire and the highly anticipated MMORPG Lost Ark. The agreement highlight is the $40M investment for Starbreeze to create a new premium first-person co-op CrossFire game aimed at western markets.

The agreement mentions that Starbreeze “receives a 10 year right to develop, publish and distribute” this new CrossFire game, and also gets distribution rights on the Smilegate platform, with Payday 2 and Overkill's upcoming game The Walking Dead (scheduled for 2017) to release on Asian markets via the platform.

CrossFire is still the world’s largest grossing online first-person-shooter (FPS) game with 500 million users, thanks to the Asian market where it still manages to be a massive success despite being quite an old game now. There's also a CrossFire movie coming “in three to five years” with the Fast and the Furious producer Neal Moritz at the helm. This should give a serious push to Starbreeze's new shooter.