Little Orbit ditches licensed games, acquiring APB Reloaded

Little Orbit has dealt in kid-friendly licensed games based on popular cartoons like Cartoon Network’s Ben 10 and DreamWorks’ Madagascar, but it’s shifting focus to creating original works. To help make this happen, it’s announcing that it has acquired the massively multiplayer online game APB Reloaded along with GamersFirst, a platform for multiplayer games.

This isn’t a sudden change. The studio has been steering toward this since last year.It has accrued five years of experience with live services, helping developer Hex Entertainment with its ongoing content development for its digital card games like Hex and Shards. And it acquired Unsung Story from developer Playdek, a tactical RPG that ran a successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter but languished without much progress. Now that Little Orbit has acquired it, it has resumed developing the title and plans on releasing it in 2019.