The Big Ant, Jagex and Klei studios have new owners -apkrig
The new year hasn’t even really started yet and the gaming business is announcing one acquisition after another. The last few days have brought several news from this category. In the morning we wrote that the Vicarious Visions studio is coming under the direct management of Blizzard. Now we have three more examples.
Jagex changes owners again
The global investment group The Carlyle Group announced today that it has bought the Jagex studio. The British team is especially famous for the game RuneScape. Cambridge-based Jagex employs over 450 people and is one of Britain’s most successful and largest studios. The owner has changed owners several times in recent years. From 2012 to 2016, it was owned by the Insight Venture Partners group. In 2016-2020, it was the Chinese investment group Hongtou, and last time in April, Jagex acquired Macarthur Fortune Holding.
Tencent invests in the Klei studio
The new majority owner of the Canadian studio Klei Entertainment is again the Chinese giant Tencent. Founded in 2005, the studio has played games such as Mark of the Ninja, Don’t Starve or Oxygen Not Included and has been cooperating with Tencent for a long time to distribute its titles in China. Klei should maintain full creative autonomy, assured its founder Jamie Cheng, noting that nothing changes in the upcoming projects or staffing of the studio.
Studio Klei has collaborated with various publishers and distributors in recent years, looking at various potential partners. However, none of them allegedly guaranteed the team such a level of control as Tencent. In addition, the Chinese giant is expected to announce further acquisitions in the gaming business in the near future.
Nacon buys Big Ant Studios
The French publisher Nacon also strengthened. He expanded the range of his own studios with the Australian team Big Ant, which specializes in sports games. The company, which has been operating since 2001, released two tennis games from two competing series last year – Tennis World Tour 2 and AO Tennis 2. Otherwise, it regularly does, for example, cricket and rugby. Even Big Ant is supposed to maintain a large degree of autonomy and should become an even more important player (mrk, mrk) in the field of sports video games.
Nacon noted that cricket is considered the second most popular team sport in the world with 120 million players and 1.5 billion fans. Big Ant wants to expand their scope to other sports, but at the same time they promise fans that they will not leave the series they have been doing so far. Nacon already has 9 own first party studios and is proud to release AA games, which is obviously a business that works for him.
