State of Decay became a breakout success as the first offering from Undead Labs last year. After launching on the Xbox 360 Live Arcade last June, State of Decay quickly sold over 500k copies. The survival zombie game hit Steam the following September, pushing sales over the 1 million mark.

With one DLC behind the title, Breakdown, Undead Labs founder Jeff Strain today made another big announcement for the studio with the confirmation that the developer has signed an extended development agreement with publisher Microsoft. While Strain didn’t go deep into detail of what this would include, he did offer up a few delicious nuggets of information for State of Decay fans:

Hola fellow survivors,

I wanted to let you know we’ve signed an agreement to extend our development relationship with Microsoft Studios. We’ll be able to share details later this year, but as with State of Decay, we think it’s best if we just keep our heads down and build some prototypes before we talk too much. For now, suffice it to say there are big things going on with State of Decay.

If this were a press release, we’d have a vaguely computer-generated-sounding quote from Phil Spencer, head of Microsoft Studios, expressing Microsoft’s excitement as well. Pictures speak louder than words, and Phil spoke pretty loudly during the keynote at E3 last year:

Thanks to the hard work of a lot of people, and your ongoing support and encouragement, the dream is alive. We know how far we’d have gotten if it hadn’t been for your spreading the word, and it definitely wouldn’t be here. Thank you for your part in making it happen.

It’s been a long haul from the original vision to this point, and the road ahead of us will take years to travel. We hope you’re up for the trip, because we think it will be well worth it.

While that’s about as vague as it can come, the new agreement will build onto the State of Decay saga. Here’s where the speculation comes in.

If all goes as originally planned for Undead Labs, their next previously planned project was an MMO-like follow-up to State of Decay codenamed Class4. The project was discussed very early in the initial development of State of Decay, which at the time was codenamed Class3. And while no details were revealed about the new agreement with Microsoft, it’s probably safe to assume that this is one of the projects within that agreement, especially as Undead Labs indicated that it was in negotiation as of last June. Whether that’s right or wrong, we’ll have to wait to find out later.

Source: Undead Labs Announcement