Indian outsourcing firm Quattro and investment firm D.E. Shaw Group have bought a majority stake in the video game outsourcing firm Babel. The purchase price wasn’t disclosed.
Founded in 1999, Babel has grown up as a company that game publishers hand off tasks to, from video game testing to changing the language in a game for foreign markets. Babel, based in Brighton, England, now has 500 employees who do work for 19 of the 20 largest video game companies.
Alvy Williams, founder of Babel, saw that the video game industry was becoming a huge business and it needed the kind of outsourcing infrastructure that film companies have relied upon for many years. In Hollywood, a major studio doesn’t do its own movie special effects. It hires a special effects company. The model is called “distributed development.”
In the game industry, Babel wanted to provide everything a game publisher didn’t want to handle internally, Williams said. That includes tasks such as testing, localizing a game, and adapting it to cell phones or other game platforms. Many of those tasks are seasonal and so it doesn’t make sense for a game publisher to have such employees on its payroll throughout the year.
Under the deal, Quattro and D.E. Shaw will provide more capital to expand Babel’s business. That will mean more competition for companies such as Dhruva Interactive, a game art outsourcing company in Bangalore, India. Williams said he will step down as CEO and become a non-executive director.
Overall, game outsourcing services are scattered among 150 or so companies; one 2006 surveyed showed that Babel was one of the largest but had a 2 percent market share.
Meanwhile, Richard Leinfellner, (pictured) most recently the chief of Electronic Arts’ studio in Germany, will become the CEO of Babel. The company will continue to operate under the Babel brand as one of Quattro’s companies. Babel is expected to expand in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe as well as invest in its existing facilities in Europe, India and North America. While it doesn’t do art for games yet, Leinfellner said that is a likely expansion area in the future.
Williams said that his company can translate games into 20 languages and record the voices of actors in many languages. The company can do round-the-clock testing if necessary. Babel previously raised small rounds of funding in 2001 from Classic Fund Management (Now Chrysalis) and Noble Fund Managers in 2005. Babel’s customers include Electronic Arts, Sony, Sega, Nintendo, Microsoft and also every other major game publisher in the industry.