Albion Online Developer Sandbox Interactive Has Been Acquired By Stillfront For €130M
Albion Online developer Sandbox Interactive has just announced on the studio’s official forums that they’ve been acquired by Stillfront Group AB, a Swedish mobile games publisher based in Stockholm.
“For the past eight years, we have been building Albion Online up completely on our own - everything from development, to marketing, translations, customer has been built up by ourselves. Now that Albion is growing at a massive rate, we realize that being on our own is not always an advantage. There are just too many things we’d have to master, and while we believe no one can develop Albion Online better than we can, there are plenty of areas around the game itself where we could benefit from additional expertise. This is why we decided to the Stillfront Family. The partnership with Stillfront allows us to remain fully invested in Albion Online and its development, focusing on making the best Sandbox MMORPG experience in the world, while benefiting from Stillfront’s expertise in marketing and publishing to spread the word of Albion Online around the world.”
According to Stillfront’s press release, the company bought out 100% of Sandbox’ shares from the four co-founders for €130 million with €100 million, or roughtly $122 million, payable in cash and the remaining €30 million payable in shares. The co-founders will also be getting additional earn-out payments for the next four years and will remain on-board to run the studio.
“There are no changes to our game design plans, road map or vision for the game. The actual Sandbox Interactive team is staying exactly as it is before and all the founders of the company will fully stay on board,” said Sandbox. “Stillfront’s structure and approach is very different from that of other large companies in the gaming space. Their core idea is to identify and acquire gaming studios that are strong on their own and then letting them continue doing what they are best at – making their games – while offering a strong structure for things such as marketing.”
Meanwhile, Game Director Robin Henkys talks about all the shiny new things that had been added to the game this past year in a new dev video. You can check that out below.
