Spicy Horse to return to free-to-play development

Alice: Madness Returns is the last traditional AAA outing for designer American McGee for the foreseeable future, as Spicy Horse announces its intention to target the free-to-play market.

"We don't see that the future for us is in triple-A console games," McGee told Joystiq.

"We actually are trying to make games that are online, free-to-play, 3D advanced casual games, so as we finish [Alice: Madness Returns] we're going to transition the company back to where we were intending to be when we finished Grimm."

McGee had nothing negative to say about his studio's collaboration with EA on Alice, or about the development process.

"We restructured for two years, we built the game, we did a great job, we're gonna ship it on time, on schedule, we never had a crunch and it's been really awesome. ... We never had to work on a weekend and, in fact, we were always running ahead of milestones, so we would even give extra days off when the sky was blue, or something like that. So, it was a really pleasant development experience."

Nevertheless, the studio will return to its original focus.

"But now, it's back to what our belief is in terms of where things are going, so it's going to be all about free-to-play, 3D games for Asia."

Alice: Madness Returns releases on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in June. It is the first major console release developed entirely in China.