Chilli Connect Acquired By Unity Technologies

Only days after the news that Edinburgh’s Delta DNA has been acquired by the leading games platform, Unity, Dundee’s Chilli Connect has also been snapped up.

If you’re not familiar with Chilli Connect, the company was spun out of Tag Games in 2016. It offers ‘Live Ops’ services, which enable developers and publishers to run and manage their games as ‘live’ services. This means a combination of:

• Backend Services such as running player accounts, multiplayer, virtual goods, cloud save, leaderboards, messaging and gifting
• Live Ops Toolkit which enables managing game economies and run A/B Tests, live events and promotions
• Integrated Analytics allowing segmented KPIs, full raw data access and warehousing

In a post on the company blog, Chilli Connect said:

“We’re delighted to announce that ChilliConnect has been acquired by Unity Technologies!

From day one it has been our mission to become the leading Live Game Management platform, enabling developers to add connected features to their games and run LiveOps successfully.

By joining the Unity Technologies family, we gain access to the experience, resourcing, and skills that only the world’s #1 game development platform can provide. We can now move faster and go deeper in our efforts to provide thousands of developers with cutting edge Live Game Management tools, opening up new opportunities for developers to create commercially successful and creatively innovative games.”

On Facebook, Paul Farley, the head of Chilli Connect said:

“I am extremely thankful for the work of our small, but world class, team who have built a brilliant platform with limited resources, and for the support of our investors and shareholders who backed my vision when it would have been easier not to. We wouldn’t have got this far without each individual taking a big risk on being a part of Chilli – I’m glad they did!”

Chilli Connect has stated that the company will maintain it’s platform agnostic approach and that despite the acquisition it will be ‘business as usual’ moving forward.

Following the acquisition of Delta DNA, which offered an advanced predictive analytics service, it seems clear that Unity is moving to a far more comprehensive offering to developers, with a focus not only on developing games, but running and managing those games after release.

Both deals are very good news for Scotland’s games sector, as they show the country is still innovating and pioneering in the global games industry, with a real commercial focus on the realities of the market and the need to understand, analyse and manage players on an ongoing basis.

A Five Year Overnight Success Story

To some, the company may seem very young for such an exit – it was only established in 2016, remember. However, the technology has been in development for much longer (we ran a story about the launch of ChilliConnect as part of the growing ChiliWorks suite back in 2015 for example…)

Given the company’s success in supporting some VERY successful games, the growing recognition of ‘live ops’ as a vital part of publishing,the opportunity to integrate Chilli’s incredible technology into Unity makes perfect sense.

It also puts it in front of a huge audience of developers.

Congratulations to Paul, Mike, and the whole ChilliConnect team