Games publisher Double Eleven has tripled the size of its team, having welcomed the 300th employee.
It had already doubled its staff throughout the pandemic and opened an additional studio in Kuala Lumpur.
The 300th employee is Katie Atkins, who joins the company as Operations Assistant from the British bank Santander.
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Katie said: "I'm thrilled to be joining Double Eleven. My partner works here as a junior programmer, he's been with the company for two years, and he's often talking about how great it is, so I already knew it was an incredibly special place to work.
"My new role is different to my previous job, but Double Eleven recognised my previous skills and experience were exactly what they were looking for."
Originally from London, Katie moved to Teesside a couple of years ago when the rest of her family relocated.
Double Eleven's recent growth has resulted from recruiting world-class talent locally, nationally, and internationally from America, Japan, Europe, and many other countries. And the company has brought experience from outside the games industry to support its scale of growth.
Lee Hutchinson, founder and CEO of Double Eleven, said, "The scale and complexity of the projects we have been working on have resulted in us tripling the size of our team in the past 18 months, which is phenomenal.
We've achieved this growth because we actively recruit people who have the right capabilities and experience, regardless of their games sector experience.
With 300 employees, Double Eleven is now one of the top three independent games publishers and developers headquartered in the UK. Trusted with some of the world's biggest IPs, it is currently collaborating on Minecraft Dungeons with Mojang Studios, Prison Architect with Paradox Interactive, and Fallout 76 with Bethesda Game Studios, as well as working on other unannounced projects for Switch, Xbox Series S/X and PlayStation 5.
Lee Hutchinson, said: "We’ve recently begun working with Bethesda Game Studios to create new challenges for players of Fallout 76. Since its release in 2018, Fallout 76 has invited players from all over the world to create a unique Dweller, leave The Vault and explore the many wonders and challenges of The Wasteland of Appalachia.
"Bethesda and Double Eleven began speaking in late 2020, and since then we’ve worked together on a host of exciting new content that will be enjoyed by this passionate community of fans later in 2022.
“It’s a privilege to be trusted to work on one of the most iconic franchises in gaming history. The team we’ve assembled to work on Fallout 76 are so passionate about the series, working with Bethesda is a dream come true.”
Talking about the growth of the business, he said: "Once upon a time we used to be a Sony exclusive studio, and wanting to chart our own course in 2012 we decided to become independent again. We were and still are a highly technical studio so we thought rather than just look for work we could instead go out and find PC games from other studios we liked and bring them to console. We began our publishing business this way.
"Once we were in a good position to let our studio do what it wants to, we began looking to see which other developers we could work with to help develop their own ideas and that we could publish (as opposed to us normally licensing an IP for our studio to work on).
Coming off LittleBigPlanet Vita we became known as a “trusted pair of hands” with other studio’s IP. Our first ‘independent’ title was creating Playdead’s Limbo for PS Vita then later PS4, Xbox One. Along the way, we have also worked with Q-Games on remasters of PixelJunk games, Mode7, Coffee Stain and most recently Introversion with our edition of Prison Architect on console.
To find out more, visit www.double11.com/careers
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