Watch Chris interview Jake Solomon (Firaxis Games/Midsummer Studios) about launching a new games studio in 2025

Hello everyone,

I was invited to be a guest speaker at an indie games festival in Baltimore this weekend and if you'd like to, you can watch the talk right here. I asked Jake Solomon, the ex-Firaxis Creative Director to join me on stage and we discussed his work on the XCOM series, Midnight Suns, the game dev scene in Baltimore and, given he's just launched a brand new studio, what on earth that's like given the current state of the games industry at present.

Oh! And we also end up showing the very first screenshots of the Life Sim(?) game that Jake and his team have been working on. Geoff Keighley will be fuming when he hears we scored this one instead of him.

The festival was held at the Enoch Pratt Free Library (which is drop dead gorgeous btw) and I feel very fortunate to have been invited. I'm also pleased to say that I've turned this trip to the States into something that'll end up being especially useful for my PMG work too.

Given we're currently in the midst of reporting a story that requires me to travel to Blizzard Entertainment in Irvine, California every so often, it's been a useful excuse to check in with the WoWGG union and see where they're up to with their contract negotiations. The library paid for the first leg of this trip and so it made sense for me to then bolt on a few extra days in Irvine having already made it over the Atlantic.

I'm typing this post having just flown over from Baltimore to Los Angeles (shoutout to all the Angelenos taking to the streets right now, you're giving us all a bit of hope) and now I'm on a train racing southeast towards Irvine to see what's been happening since I last visited the union back in January.

We do have another story that's much closer to being published and I'll have some more to say on that front in the next couple of weeks. Cheers!