Nacon acquire AO Tennis, Rugby League developer

Nacon have made another big move in the games publishing space, having just made a deal to acquire Australian developer Big Ant Studios. According to GameIndustry.biz, the deal will cost the French publisher up to €35 million, with a starting price of €15 million.

Big Ant Studios was founded in 2001 and has worked on a number of properties over the past two decades. In the 2010s, we saw the Aussie dev pivot towards their growing stable of sports titles, some of which became annualised series. Some sporting names you may recognise include AO Tennis, Rugby League Live, and Ashes Cricket, as well as Casey Powell Lacrosse.

In the past, Nacon has traditionally been a name associated with video game peripherals (many of which we’ve tested and reviewed over the years). However, in 2020, it was decided that Nacon would merge with publisher BigBen Interactive while using the established Nacon brand.

Following the acquisition of Big Ant Studios, Nacon now have a growing number of development teams under its umbrella. These include Greedfall developer Spiders,  Warhammer: Chaosbane developer EKO Software, and Cyanide who are currently working on Blood Bowl 3 and Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood which is due to launch in a couple of weeks. Another name gamers will be familiar with is Kylotonn who have spent close to a decade developing racing titles in the WRC series as well as the Isle of Man TT video games.

As we kick off 2021, Nacon now has a fairly diversified portfolio of upcoming games in the pipeline from sports titles and racing sims to dense, story-driven RPGs.

For more on Nacon, here are some of our recent Nacon hardware reviews:

Source: GameIndustry.biz

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Senior Editor bursting with lukewarm takes and useless gaming trivia. May as well surgically attach my DualSense at this point.