The Studio Had Been Sold as Part of the Parent Company Based Strategy
This year has been the year of companies acquiring companies. This trend has continued, with the latest move by Tencent.
Tencent, which has created such games as Synced: Off Planet, Ring Of Elysium, as well as many mobile games, has bought Inflexion studio. Inflexion studio is made of many former Bioware employees, including former BioWare general manager Aaryn Flynn. And they had been working on the upcoming game, Nightingale, the steampunk survival game set in the fae realms. The game itself is set to come out sometime during 2022.
Apparently, the sale was by Inflexion’s parent company, Improbable. Improbable sold the Nightingale developers due to wanting to focus on “metaverse activities.”
But it was also done to help Inflexion out, according to Improbable CEO Herman Narula. “While we focus our efforts on accelerating in the metaverse, we want to make sure that the games developed by our internal studios benefit from the support of publishers with leading track records of bringing games to market,” said Narula. “So we couldn’t have hoped to have found a better partner than Tencent for Inflexion Games and for Nightingale.”
What does it mean for Inflexion and for Nightingale? At the moment, not much. Flynn was quick to assure during an announcement that things were still going well when it came to Nightingale. While SpatialOS: will not be in use, this was a technology that had been dropped in summer 2021, making Nightingale a smaller co-op and single-player experience, not relying on Improbable servers or technology to make a bigger server experience. According to Flynn, Tencent has been “very respectful” about the game design, and they are “working together [with Tencent] on Nightingale’s Early Access launch later this year.”
So thankfully, it looks as if there are no delays for Nightingale, and whatever changes we will see with Inflexion may be for future projects. We will have to keep an eye on this, and see!