Zynga bought the authors of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Mark Pincus’ company continues to strengthen in the middle core project market. One of the last steps is the acquisition of a small team of November Software developers.
While original SIM projects and card role-playing games are storming the charts, Zynga is trying to occupy a niche of middle core, which is not particularly popular among mobile users yet. The acquisition of a small studio consisting of four former LucasArts employees is just part of this strategy.
November Software was founded in January 2011 by the developers of the first and second parts of the console Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Their main task at that time was to develop their own three-dimensional cross-platform engine that would show at least 60 frames per second on mobile devices and be able to upload information from the cloud in real time. Having developed it, the studio prepared a couple of concepts, one of which was the Golden Arrow project. Apparently, Zynga was interested in them.
By now, the project has already been renamed Battlestone, a role-playing shareware action game. The guys who joined the Zynga team are already being helped by the authors of Mafia Wars. However, neither the timing of the release, nor how much the studio itself was purchased, is not reported.
Battlestone is not the first “middle-core” project of Zynga. Last August, the company released a three-dimensional adventure game Horn, and in September, for $ 20 million, it acquired a California-based A Bit Lucky, currently working on the mysterious Unity project Solstice Arena.
“Middle-core” is, in fact, hardcore projects adapted to the casual player. This niche, one of the classic representatives of which is Infinity Blade from ChAIR Entertainment and Epic Games, is now empty: the development of such projects is very risky, and requires substantial investments. Nevertheless, Zynga, which cannot now boast of good positions in the world’s mobile tops, apparently hopes that the market for such applications on iOS and Android will soon be in demand.
