Shroud and Sacriel join forces with Splash Damage to create new survival game

Image credit: Splash Damage

Former professional CS:GO player turned content creator Michael ‘Shroud’ Grzesiek and content creator Chris ‘Sacriel’ Ball have joined forces with game developer Splash Damage.

The collaboration will see Shroud and Sacriel advise on a new survival game codenamed Project Astrid.

Shroud and Sacriel will act as Executive Creators to collaborate with the developer to create Project Astrid. Splash Damage, the team behind titles such as Gears Tactics and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, will leverage the creators’ knowledge and experience to develop a game ‘worthy of the genre’.

Prior to becoming a content creator, Shroud competed in CS:GO between 2013 and 2017 for the likes of Complexity and Cloud9. After calling time on his CS:GO career, the content creator accumulated a following of 10m on his Twitch channel. In 2022, Shroud returned to esports, signing with the Sentinels’ VALORANT roster but has since left the organisation.

From an esports perspective, the survival genre rarely features in competitive play. Despite this, streaming platform Twitch often hosts Twitch Rivals tournaments using titles such as Rust and Minecraft.

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This isn’t the first instance of esports players assisting with game development. In March 2022, former Call of Duty player Patrick ‘Aches’ Price joined Ubisoft to collaborate on new arena shooter XDefiant.

Shroud, the newly appointed Executive Creator for Project Astrid, spoke on the news: “This project means everything to me.

“We want to build the best survival game ever, and with Sacriel’s brain and Splash Damage’s team, I know we can do it.”

Jonno Nicholson
Jonno is a Freelance News Writer for Esports Insider and has been part of the ESI team since 2019! His interests include the rapid rise of sim racing and its impact on the wider industry.