After original developer Techland sold off the rights to the franchise and developer Yager (who were also responsible for Spec Ops: The Line and have since gone on to file for bankruptcy) fell out with publisher Deep Silver over what Dead Island 2 should be, there was a lot of uncertainty surrounding the sequel to the open-world zombie game that garnered a huge amount of public interest with its trailer, while ultimately falling a bit flat on the gameplay department. However, it seems now that the project has found a new home at a new studio.

This new studio is the British development house Sumo Digital, a studio that have mostly made ports for games like Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing and who helped develop Disney Infinity 3.0 and they are currently working on Microsoft's Crackdown 3 as well as being a potential partner if Harmonix's Rock Band 4 campaign succeeds for porting it to pc. Speaking to MCVUK, Koch Media CEO Klemens Kundrat had this to say about the new partnership:

Sumo showed so much understanding of the brand, had creative ideas and an excellent, vision that was aligned with our own. It just made perfect sense for us to move the project to them. We will reveal more details at a later stage, but for now I’d like to say that we are obviously super excited about the progress that we are making with them.

Sumo Digital COO Paul Porter added that working on the game is an honor to work on the franchise, and are "looking forward to exceeding fan expectation with an ambitious design".

Dead Island 2 got announced at the 2014 Electronic Entertainment Expo and got a nice trailer to go along with the announcement, showcasing a less serious tone than the first game did.

Dead Island 2 hasn't got a release date yet, and we're interested to hear more about the status of the title after this developer change.