I think we'll continue to focus on Dauntless for the foreseeable future and grow to support our future ambitions."Īs for why now was the right time to sell Phoenix Labs, Houston says it wasn't due to investor pressure. Our goal with Dauntless is to make it into the best free-to-play MMO in the history of video games, and we're still on a path there. "In terms of other games, we're entirely focused on Dauntless right now. ![]() Garena has seen that, and is super into enabling us to grow in the directions we want. And our growth in terms of hiring folks has been limited entirely by our budget and our capitalization. I love my team, easily the best team I've ever built in my life. "One of the things I've been really lucky is have is great access to talent. "Yes, in so far as the Garena folks are largely going to leave us alone and will bankroll our growth," Houston says. So will this deal change the plan for Phoenix Labs going forward? They're basically going everywhere we have not gone, and being able to leverage that expertise is really interesting." They've got a huge presence in India, and the Middle East is next on deck for them. Garena's obviously huge in Southeast Asia, but they're also right now the largest publisher in South America. "Free Fire has been a hit in regions where we are not yet strong, and where we have aspirations of being strong," Houston notes, adding, "Those regions represent a really interesting and unique publishing challenge beyond the language barriers, just with consumer expectations differences. It's brought in more than $1 billion since its launch two years ago, and was the highest grossing mobile game in Latin America and Southeast Asia for the quarter ended September 30 according to App Annie, in addition to being the highest grossing game in India on the Google Play Store. Even if most of Garena's games lack a global footprint, the one big exception to that - the global survival shooter Free Fire - is a huge one. It had been an original investor in Phoenix Labs so there was a pre-existing relationship, and has proven success in areas where Phoenix Labs lacked experience. If they were going to look at external groups, Garena was a natural choice. So we were trying to decide if we wanted to develop these competencies internally or work with external groups." "But the next frontier for us is mobile, and then there are a number of emerging markets we want to attack. "We've got a pretty good background in PC and console development," Houston says. Speaking with this week, Phoenix Labs co-founder and CEO Jesse Houston says the acquisition will help each company bolster areas they haven't specialized in before. Vancouver-based Phoenix Labs has a strong pedigree in AAA PC and console development, while Singapore's Garena has more of a mobile focus, particularly in Southeast Asia. ![]() It may seem like an unusual pairing at first glance. Phoenix Labs is one-and-done as an independent developer, as Garena today announced that it has acquired the studio behind the free-to-play co-op action hit Dauntless.
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