Studio of Former BioWare General Manager Bought by Tencent

Inflexion Games has been purchased by Tencent. The studio is currently working on an interestingly promising fairytale survival game Nightingale. It is supervised by Aaryn Flynn, who spent almost two decades in BioWare.

IN A NUTSHELL:

Inflexion Games has been acquired by Tencent;
Upcoming game from the team, called Nightingale, will not use SpatialOS technology;
The head of the studio spoke out about EA's relationship with BioWare.

At last year's The Game Awards event a fairy-tale steampunk survival game titled Nightingale was announced. The studio responsible for it is Inflexion Games led by Aaryn Flynn, former general manager of BioWare (he worked at the company for 17 years, including on Mass Effect and Dragon Age).

Nightingale is the debut title from Inflexion Games, which currently has over 100 people working on it. The studio was founded in 2018. It is the Canadian subsidiary of the UK-based company Improbable, which deals with technology to power the "metaverse"

Nightingale is currently heading exclusively for PC and is expected to debut this year in early access.

Tencent's purchase of Inflexion Games

Yesterday, Improbable announced, that it has sold all of its shares in Inflexion Games to the Chinese giant Tencent. Herman Narula, CEO of Improbable, commented on the matter as follows:

As announced at the end of January, and while we focus our efforts on accelerating in the metaverse, we want to make sure that the games developed by our internal studios benefit from the support of publishers with leading track records of bringing games to market. So we couldn’t have hoped to have found a better partner than Tencent for Inflexion Games and for Nightingale” (...).

Improbable wishes to continue to cooperate with Inflexion Games by, among other things, making its technology available to the studio.
GamesIndustry.biz reports that acquisition talks have been continuing since last summer.
While Inflexion was allegedly not in a position to "dictate the terms," Flynn says CEO Narula and the Improbable team supported the developers of Nightingale in the process and took their wishes into account.

Aaryn Flynn, head of Inflexion Games, also commented on the acquisition:

“It’s a privilege to work with the Tencent family. The depth of knowledge and expertise that Tencent’s global teams provide, and their empowerment of our team’s independence and creative spirit, offer an invaluable opportunity for collaboration."

Pete Smith, Vice President of Partnerships at Tencent Games Global, also made a brief statement:

“The highly talented team at Inflexion Games has a proven track record of developing engaging universes that combine compelling action with great gameplay. The initial reaction to Nightingale has been incredibly positive and we look forward to supporting Inflexion in realising its vision for this and future titles."

Tencent is a multinational technology and holding corporation founded in 1998. It is also a major player in the video game industry. It owns Riot Games (League of Legends, Valorant), Funcom, Splash Damage or Turtle Rock. It also holds large shares in Epic Games, Dontnod Entertainment and Bloober Team.

SpatialOS

According to GamesIndustry.biz, the deal with Tencent has already had some impact on the game as a whole. As it turns out, Nightingale will not benefit from the SpatialOS technology developed by Improbable (that decision was made last summer). The result, according to Flynn, is expected to be "a more intimate experience for a single player or small group of players."

SpatialOS is a cloud platform used to create and host games for many players. It is designed to enable developers to create innovative titles that can use more than one game server in a single instance. This means that a game based on SpatialOS can range in scale from smaller titles based on short sessions to persistent worlds with very large scale, thousands of players and enormous complexity [link].

Midwinter Entertainment

GamesIndustry.biz also reported that Improbable's Midwinter Entertainment is to be sold. At this point we don't know who will take over this team. At the moment they are working on Scavengers, which is available - since last year - for free in early access on Steam. The game uses the SpatialOS technology to give us a world that feels like a living ecosystem.

Aaryn Flynn a BioWare

In an interview for GamesIndustry.biz, Flynn declared that when choosing a parent company he said that creative independence was the most important point to him. The developer confessed that shortly after the acquisition of BioWare by Electronic Arts (in 2007) the two companies shared a common vision.

However, when there was a management reshuffle, a lot changed. The developer believes that in such a situation both the producer and the publisher should try to find a common language again. Unfortunately, according to Flynn, in the case of EA and BioWare this did not happen.

The head of Inflexion Games, having learned his lesson, does not want the situation to repeat itself in his new studio. However, Tencent's positive attitude makes Flynn optimistic about the newly announced collaboration.