Tencent acquires Inflexion from Improbable

gamesindustry.biz:

Brendan Sinclair

Managing Editor

Tuesday 22nd February 2022

Late last month, buried toward the bottom of a blog post about its current metaverse push, Improbable CEO Herman Narula announced the SpatialOS company's withdrawal from first-party game development.

"We are in advanced discussions with potential partners for the games being developed within the Edmonton and Midwinter studios and it is our belief that they will reach their full potential supported by publishers with leading track records of bringing games to market," Narula said.

The fate of Midwinter is still to be determined, but Improbable today announced that it has sold its majority stake in the Edmonton-based Inflexion Games to Tencent.

Inflexion is currently working on its first game, Nightingale

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Inflexion CEO Aaryn Flynn tells GamesIndustry.biz the shift had been in the works since last summer, when Improbable "saw a future for itself in a different direction," but worked with Inflexion to divest itself of the studio in a way that would be amenable to all involved.

While Inflexion wasn't in a position to dictate terms here, Flynn says Narula and Improbable were supportive in the process and took the studio's desires into consideration. Flynn says chief among those was operational independence "to build the game we want to build, and the trust that comes along with that."

"In my experience, good game developers are always willing to have conversations and accept feedback, but there are limits and expectations on that that had to be respected"

Aaryn Flynn

"In my experience, good game developers are always willing to have conversations and accept feedback, but there are limits and expectations on that that had to be