Riot Games, the publisher known for League of Legends and Valorant, is expanding its operations to Australia.
The company has acquired Wargaming Sydney, previously part of the Wargaming family and working across online and mobile games like World of Tanks and World of Warships.
The studio will now be known as Riot Sydney and will lend development support to ongoing Riot projects. What attracted Riot to the studio seems to have been the tech it was deploying in its work with Wargaming, the press release citing its “experience creating next-generation game development tools and servers, world-leading games, and some R&D projects — as well as prototypes for new game features, add-ons, and console ports.”
Wargaming Sydney’s BigWorld Technology, a licensed middleware toolkit for developing MMO’s, is cited as one reason Riot was keen to scoop them up. BigWorld, which was also the name of the company before Wargaming acquired it in 2012, is a multi-award winner and held a Guinness World Record for most concurrent users hosted on a single server. Because Wargaming’s library of games is built on BigWorld tech, it will maintain ownership of Bigworld Technology.
The entire staff of Wargaming Sydney will move to Riot Sydney, while the company’s existing publishing team will remain a part of Wargaming. The team will continue working from the studio’s current Ultimo offices in central Sydney.
Leave a Reply