Microsoft could reportedly be teaming up with People Can Fly again to bring a new installment to one of the Xbox 360’s leading franchises.

History repeats itself. Ten years ago, Epic Games teamed up with this Polish studio to create Gears of War: Judgment for Xbox 360 (and before that, they made the PC port of the first installment in 2007), so People Can Fly has experience with one of Redmond’s previous big IPs. Now here‘s a Polish-language press release saying that the studio has signed an agreement with Microsoft to publish the game, codenamed Project Maverick, and it’s not stupid to think of the IP nowadays just called Gears…

Outriders was released in 2021 (when will Square Enix’s live service game die…?). People Can Fly used several Gears elements, including the cover system, except that the Poles still don’t get royalties from the game, so Microsoft will provide Project Maverick’s budget: “The production of the Game will be carried out by the Company in the work-for-hire model, based on the intellectual property rights of the Publisher, and will be fully financed by the Publisher as the Company completes the key stages of the Game production contracted as part of the production process (milestones). The Publisher’s total budget for the game production amounts to $30-50 million,” the release said.

The document doesn’t mention Gears of War. Still, given the history of the Polish company, that would be the most logical thing to do, as Gears was last represented three and a half years ago, but then, only with an XCOM-like tactical spinoff, Gears Tactics (developed by Splash Damage), while the last main title, Gears 5, was released in October 2019 by The Coalition, who was rumored to have canceled all of their side projects to refocus on Gears 6, which uses Unreal Engine 5.

Oh, and since People Can Fly was briefly called Epic Games Poland, they’re a team well-versed in the Unreal Engine so that they could use UE5.

Source: WCCFTech