Do You Remember All The Game Developers Bought Out In 2012?

The division and sale of THQ into smaller, more manageable portions has served as a full stop on the wheeling and dealing of 2012. True, the sale itself occurred in 2013, but it was last year that the industry at large and perhaps more so gamers, became fully aware of the dire straits the company was in.

But it wasn’t just THQ’s subsidiaries that found themselves with new homes — 2012 had its fair share of acquisitions, mergers and takeovers spanning the entire gamut of gaming sectors. So you don’t have to wrestle with your brain for all the names, VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi has compiled a roll call of developers, publishers and everything in-between that were picked up during 2012.

Take a guess at how many there were?

If you spouted 38, you’d be wrong. The actual number? 58.

Dean’s list looks pretty darn comprehensive to me. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the acquisitions involve developers in the casual gaming field, their names holding little meaning to most, but there a quite a few studios and properties on the list that you have most definitely heard of.

Takes breath…

NCsoft picked up a sizable portion of the South Korean Ntreev Soft… and NCsoft was gobbled up by Nexon. Gaikai was scooped into the awaiting arms of Sony, Zynga pulled the trigger on a deal with Draw Something developer OMGPOP and Rovio of Angry Birds fame added Futuremark to its catalogue. Then there’s Epic’s acquisition of People Can Fly (Bulletstorm) and who could forget Disney swooping in for LucasArts? Finally, within our own borders, World of Tanks developer Wargaming took in BigWorld, the Australian company behind the MMO middleware of the same name.

Suffocates.

Who knows what number 2013 will serve up. If you like, you can just say “higher” or “lower”. I’m going to go with “higher” myself.

The DeanBeat: Game acquisitions rise 23 percent to $3.4B in 2012 [VentureBeat]

Image: Hometown Beauty / Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons 2.0


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