UPDATE: YoYo Games has announced that the company has been acquired by Opera, the Nowegian-based web browser creator, as the basis for a new Opera Gaming division.
Playtech the online gambling company which owns YoYo Games, the Dundee-based creator of Game Maker Studio, has sold the company to an unnamed buyer, for $10 million, six years after it purchased the company for $16.4 million.
The news was revealed in a trading update, in which Playtech explained the sale was part of its strategic focus on simplifying its business and disposing of “non-core assets.”
The update states:
Playtech has previously stated that it is a strategic focus of the Company to simplify its business and dispose of non-core assets.
It is pleased to announce that it has now completed the sale of YoYo Games, part of the discontinued Casual and Social Gaming business, for a consideration of approximately USD 10 million.
With the completion of the sale of YoYo Games, Playtech has now disposed of all its Casual and Social Gaming assets.
PlayTech describes itself as the market leader in the gambling and financial trading industries. While the trading report noted the company’s online business in 2020 had been robust, it had been impacted by the cancellation of numerous sporting events due to the ongoing Covid pandemic.
Game Makers Of The Future
While there’s no information on who has acquired YoYo Games, the company has demonstrated time and again that it’s an incredible resource for new gaming talent.
Game Maker Studio is one of the most popular platforms for new developers, from the age of 12 upwards and used in schools, colleges and universities around the world as a way to engage young people with game development and STEAM subjects.
When the pandemic kicked in in 2020, the company worked with Into Games, to get Game Maker Studio into the hands of school pupils across the whole of the UK, for the Side Quest project, which saw game studios across the country setting design and development challenges to get young people learning how to make games.
A growing number of commercially successful games were developed with Game Maker Studio:
- Undertale (MetaCritic rating of 93%)
- Levelhead (Steam rating 9/10)
- Hyper Light Drifter – (Apple’s iPad Game of the Year, 2019 (92% – Humble Bundle))
- Skelattack (published by Japanese publisher Konami)
- Pong Quest (Steam rating 8/10)
Even for those not releasing full games, GameMaker can provide an additional revenue stream, or even a career. The GameMaker Marketplace enables users to create assets such as tutorials, lighting effects, audio and art assets and make them available to others – free or for a fee.
In August 2020, YoYo Games announced Game Maker Studio version 2.3, which introduced new features to make the platform even more capable and accessible. It also announced that it had exceeeded 10 million downloads of the software.
Suffice to say that YoYo are a national treasure and that whoever now owns this incredible company has a real asset in its portfolio.
Here’s to an even more successful future…
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