Global publisher Sega announced that it has acquired Amplitude Studios, creator of Endless Space and other high-profile 4X PC strategy games.
The move strengthens Sega’s foothold in the PC marketplace, as Amplitude Studios joins fellow Sega-owned strategy-game makers Creative Assembly and Relic Entertainment.
Citing an “increasingly crowded” and “intense” digital marketplace, company founders Romain de Waubert de Genlis and Mathieu Girard note that the partnership will allow Amplitude Studios to focus on game development, rather than sales, marketing, and other business concerns.
“With the pressure on sales and marketing we found that more and more time was dedicated to everything else — everything that we didn’t have the size and scale to deal with,” Amplitude’s founders revealed in a recent company blog post. “So we decided to look for the best partner we could to protect us from these distractions so that game development did not become a chore, but remained a passion.”
This week’s acquisition follows up on Sega’s 2005 purchase of Creative Assembly, developer of the Total War PC strategy series and the recent Alien: Isolation. In 2013, Sega acquired Canadian studio Relic Entertainment, creator of Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War and Company of Heroes.
“The bigger reason why we wanted to join Sega was how they treat their internal studios,” Amplitude’s de Genlis and Girard explain. “Often, studios are controlled by a central department that dictates what games they should do, and how and when. But Sega is a company that offers its support to the creators, positioning itself as a service provider, helping studios to reach their goals with only one objective in mind: Quality!”
Founded in 2011, Amplitude Studios developed the PC strategy game Endless Space and its follow-ups Endless Legend and Dungeon of the Endless. The next entry in the series, Endless Space 2, is due to hit Windows platforms later this year with Sega’s backing.
