Welsh Developer Floating Point Studio Founded

Graduates from Swansea Metropolitan University (SMU) in Wales have formed a new, independent development studio Floating Point Studios (FPS), developing downloadable PC titles. FPS says it's already in talks with a number of online distribution networks, including Steam creators Valve. The studio says it will develop its own IP, and hopes to eventually migrate to console development. The company was founded by Julian Hainsworth, a graduate of the SkillSet accredited SMU. The business has been financed by Hainsworth’s own investments and by a £10,000 business loan from Finance Wales Investments Limited, and a funding application has also been placed into KEF (the Knowledge Exploitation Fund). Hainsworth was supported by the SMU, the G2E (Graduation to Enterprise) network, and Spin out Wales during the planning and start-up of FPS. The developer is currently a team of four, but expects to expand to five or six in the coming weeks. Currently, the studio has two games in production with a title codenamed Flight due at the end of 2008 and The Elder due in spring 2009. The studio plans to use the revenue from these games to create its own development toolset. Each new game will have features that correspond to a new element of the toolset -- as the studio says, new title development will simultaneously feed tool development, a process FPS calls "Beta-Dev."