Two weeks ago, during the release of its financial earnings report, Atari summarily announced that it was dropping its MMO development house, Cryptic Studios. The Chinese-based Perfect World Company revealed today that it has picked up the studio and all its properties, including Champions Online, Star Trek Online, and the upcoming Neverwinter MMO.
"We are very pleased to sign the agreement to acquire Cryptic Studios," said Perfect World CEO Michael Chi. "This strategic acquisition will add attractive game titles to our portfolio, which will help us further penetrate into the U.S. and global online game markets. More importantly, Cryptic Studios' highly reputable development team and its technology platform will further strengthen our well-established R&D capabilities. We deem this as another noteworthy achievement of our global expansion efforts."
"With the acquisition by Perfect World, Cryptic has found a strong platform for continued expansion into free to play business model and growth in the global marketplace," said Jim Wilson, CEO of Atari. "The divestiture of Cryptic is in line with Atari's continued focus on key owned and third-party strategic franchises and expansion into emerging game platforms."
Cryptic was purchased for a cool $50 million and now joins Torchlight dev Runic Games as one of the few Western studios under the Perfect World banner.
