Dundee’s YoYo Games, the creator of the popular Gamer Maker: Studio software has been acquired by PlayTech one of the world’s leading creators of gambling software.
In addition to online gambling, PlayTech also offers a number of development tools and systems for creating online games. GameMaker: Studio will now join the company’s portfolio of tools. The application’s strong cross-platform support may indicate a greater focus on mobile devices for PlayTech moving forward.
According to an article on GamesIndustry.biz, a spokesperson for PlayTech said:
This acquisition will enable the company to further diversify its business, benefiting from a combined B2B/B2C offering focused on a strong and growing segment of the wider gaming market.
A blog post on the YoYo Games website from Sandy, Mike, Russell and the rest of the team, provides more context for the deal:
YoYo was founded by myself and a group of games industry friends and has never had any external investors aside from our own funds. This means we’ve relied heavily on generating revenue, mainly from GameMaker sales. While everything has gone well and we’ve grown to 30 people it means that we have had to sell more products before we could invest in new features, yet it’s the new features that generate more sales.
Most companies in this position seek external investment to break the cycle and create new products to sell. We tried to raise funds several times in order to further develop GameMaker, but the offers we were given meant giving up on a lot of what we wanted to keep doing, i.e. developing a tool that would continue to be accessible to both beginners and professionals. Our vision has always been to maintain GameMaker: Studio as affordable and great value. This is why we made the Standard Edition free last year as well as package the technology together as Master Collection.
We looked for the right company with sufficient funds, knowledge and supporting technology that matches our developer’s needs.
The reason we accepted the offer from Playtech was they were the first investor who didn’t want to alter our vision. They haven’t just bought the company, they’re committed to investing in YoYo Games in a way that we have never been able to previously. With their help we can now push ahead and hire more people and make GameMaker: Studio an even better platform for casual games developers everywhere. If there are any changes they will be additions to our plans. In fact, we’re already working on a number of these and some of you will get a very pleasant surprise this summer.
They’ve also made us commit to launching GameMaker: Studio 2.0 later this year. In our efforts to generate sales we’ve not been getting our resources packed into Studio 2.0 as we would have liked. But now it’s all hands on deck and we’re really excited that Playtech’s investment will help us get this done at twice the speed.
Develop reports that Sandy Duncan, the CEO of YoYo Games has now left the company.
PlayTech has stated that support for existing Game Maker: Studio users and developers will continue for the foreseeable future.
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