A sale of assets notice posted by Gerbsman Partners, an asset liquidation firm, is offering up Emergent Technologies’ assets to the highest bidder. These assets include full control of the company’s middleware engine, Gamebryo Lightspeed.
The private company secured $40 million in financing, but has posted negative earnings every year since 2005. Audited revenue for fiscal year of 2009 came to $12 million, with $6.9 million in revenue for 2010 so far.
In mid-September, Emergent announced a deal to merge with troubled development house Krome Studios. Unfortunately, Krome completely shut down only a month later, completely halting the deal.
Emergent lists a number of large publishers as its clients, including Electronic Arts, Activision, Ubisoft, Sony, Bethesda, 2K, Atari, Disney, Tencent, Shanda, TheNine, NineYou, NC Soft, Kingsisle, EA Mythic, and Trion. THQ just signed a deal in August to use the Gamebryo Lightspeed engine in an undisclosed number of titles. Junction Point’s Epic Mickey, scheduled for release later this month, also used the engine. The company touts over 100 projects currently in development using Lightspeed.
It's been a strange week for the middleware sector, as now both Gamebryo and Torque are in need of buyers. Perhaps a larger engine company like Epic or Unity will snatch them up?
Update: The blog of programmer Vincent Scheib, a former software architect at Emergent, has a few more details.
