In today’s Southeast Asian gaming news, Anino Games, the Philippines‘ leading game developer was acquired by Thailand-based Pocket PlayLab for an undisclosed sum. Moving forward, both aim to streamline their company cultures and create a workflow that aims to move ideas faster within the company.
According to Pocket PlayLab, co-founder Jakob Lykkegaard, “It’s a big move to almost double the team size, but we feel like our core platform is good enough to support it and our culture and workflow were close enough to make it fit fast.”
Pocket PlayLab is a 2-year old company that creates titles for mobile platforms. The company has had some ups and downs until they got a hit in the game called Juice Cubes, a fruitier version of Candy Crush. Soon after, Angry Birds developer Rovio saw the game in New Zealand and decided to publish Juice Cubes under its banner.
Anino Games, on the other hand, has been around since 2002. Their first game, Anito: Defend a Land Enraged is arogue-style RPG in the veins of Diablo and Diablo II. This game, however good it was, was met with mixed responses from players and critics. This got the game company rethinking its goals. Soon, Anino became a third-party developer creating games for the likes of EA and Gamehouse while still creating original games on the side.
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In short, both video game companies went to some ups and downs. Such is the norm in the industry where they operate, which Anino Games CEO Niel Dagondon describes as very volatile. He further explained in an earlier interview, “Games are always about predicting trends; you can start making a game now, but a year later, at release, the market may have shifted. For example: two years ago, people were saying that Facebook games were the next big thing. Now, they’ve all but died.”
With more than a decade in game development, Anino Games will bring its 60+ games into Pocket PlayLab’s portfolio. Together, both companies are now poised to become Southeast Asia’s most prominent mobile game developer. PlayLab will benefit from Anino’s decade-worth of experience developing games while the latter will gain the resources for them to create original games.
“Being part of Pocket PlayLab means that from developing games for other companies, we will be able to focus instead on creating new original properties which we hope become the hits of the future.” said Dagondon in a press release.
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