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Sony Paid $229 Million To Purchase Insomniac Games In 2019
Last year Sony Interactive Entertainment acquired Insomniac Games, the developers of critically-acclaimed and commercially successful games for both VR and non-VR formats.
Some of their standout non-VR games include Marvel’s Spider-Man on PS4, the Ratchet & Clank series, and the Spyro the Dragon series on PlayStation 1. All of the studio’s VR work was only for Facebook’s Oculus platform, such as Stormland, The Unspoken, and Edge of Nowhere.
We didn’t know how much the price was, but it was recently revealed in an SEC filing that Sony paid $229 million for the acquisition and most of that was entirely paid in cash. According to the filing, as cited on Twitter by ZhugeEX:
“The consideration for this acquisition of 24,895 million yen (229 million U.S. dollars) was mainly paid in cash. The amount may be adjusted by the end of fiscal year ending March 31, 2020, based on the final closing date financial statements of Insomniac Games. As a result of this acquisition, Insomniac Games has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sony.”
The filing goes on to state that Sony has acquired $165 million of goodwill and $62 million of intangible assets.
This is honestly one of the least surprising acquisitions in recent memory given their long history of working with Sony on exclusive titles across various franchises and even more so when considering their more recent VR experience as well. Having a developer like Insomniac is going to be a huge boost for the potential of PSVR going forward.
There’s no news on what Insomniac is working on next, but we’ll report on it as soon as we find out. Let us know what you think of the news down in the comments below!
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Insomniac’s Final Independent Studio Release Is ‘Strangelets’ AR Game For Magic Leap One
Magic Leap and Insomniac Games announced a new game, Strangelets, for the Magic Leap One. The game is a follow-up to Insomniac’s previous AR title Seedling, which released last year.
We tried an early version of Insomniac’s previous AR game, Seedling, at Leap Con in October last year. The full version of the game released later that year in December, and according to Insomniac the new AR game Strangelets follows on from Seedling’s story and sees players continue to deal with “the effects of ‘The Schmelling Incident'” from the story of the first game.
The Magic Leap blog also provides a brief description of the gameplay that Magic Leap owners can expect from Strangelets. “With the help of a mysterious companion known only as “Bulby,” Strangelets invites players to search their homes for dimensional rifts, reach inside to rescue strange alien creatures, then care for their collection by using harvested energy from real-world objects.”
The game also supposedly takes real-world time and weather into account to vary the gameplay, and features a story “worthy of retelling.”
Sony recently acquired Insomniac Games and, as such, the announcement for the game suggests Strangelets will be the their last release as an independent studio. Before Stangelets, their most recent release was Stormland, an Oculus-exclusive VR title, which was announced before the acquisition but released after it. Stormland’s release was unaffected by the acquisition, but the studio’s future in AR and VR remains unclear.
If you haven’t yet tried out Stormland yet, Jamie had some minor gripes but still said it was “as slick a VR shooter as you can find right now” in his review.
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Insomniac Releases ‘Strangelets’ on Magic Leap One, Its Final Indie Project
Insomniac Games, the studio behind VR games Stormland (2019) and The Unspoken (2017), announced its acquisition by Sony Interactive Entertainment back in August, and while we imagined their last independent project was surely the open-world Rift adventure Stormland, it appears the studio had another title sitting ready in the wings for Magic Leap One called Strangelets.
Strangelets is Insomniac’s second ML One title, which follows December the release of Seedling (2018), a game that puts you in the shoes of a space cadet tasked with repairing a dying galactic ecosystem due to the effects of ‘The Schmelling Incident,’ a catastrophic cosmic event.
Playing in the same universe, strangelets (cute alien creatures) find themselves “trapped in pockets between dimensions,” the studio writes in a Magic Leap blog post.
Here’s how Insomniac describes the game:
With the help of a mysterious companion known only as “Bulby,” Strangelets invites players to search their homes for dimensional rifts, reach inside to rescue strange alien creatures, then care for their collection by using harvested energy from real-world objects. It’s a one-of-a-kind experience that encourages physical movement through multiple rooms, transforming players’ familiar spaces into a playground of discovery and surprise.
“After the launch of Seedling, our small team of spatial computing pioneers were more inspired than ever by the potential of this new platform,” said Nathaniel Bell, Creative Director for Strangelets and Seedling. “We were ready to dive headfirst into our next experimental experience and to continue collaborating with our passionate partners at Magic Leap. Our goal moving forward was to build on lessons learned from Seedling and to venture into new territories of spatial computing not yet experienced by players.”
It will be interesting to see where Insomniac goes from here, and whether it continues to focus on VR/AR, or keeps its main focus on traditional ‘second party’ games for PlayStation. However it goes, Insomniac is one of the most experienced studios in immersive gaming, so we’re hoping for something good for PlayStation 5 and the next iteration of PlayStation VR to say the least.
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