Sega is already a big player on the strategy-game scene thanks to The Creative Assembly, the makers of the Total War franchise, and Relic Entertainment with its Warhammer: Dawn of War and Company of Heroes series. Today, it added another award-winning studio to its stable.
The Japanese publisher’s Sega Europe subsidiary has acquired Amplitude Studios, the makers of Endless Space, Endless Legend, and Dungeon of the Endless. The Paris-based PC game developer has garnered a reputation for incorporating player feedback into its development process, which it calls “Games Together.” Sega will also handle publishing duties for Endless Space 2, a 4X (explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate) strategy game that should hit Steam Early Access this year.
This is the fourth studio that Sega has acquired since 2005 (along with Creative Assembly, Relic, and Sports Interactive), when the company started looking beyond making its own games and got into publishing other studios’ works. It’s been a successful strategy, and Total War and Dawn of War are both best-selling PC games.
“Joining the Sega family represents the culmination of five years of hard work from myself and Romain [chief director/chief operating officer, Amplitude] and everyone here at Amplitude Studios” said Mathieu Girard, the cofounder of Amplitude Studios, “For the Endless series to be alongside PC franchises with such heritage as Total War and Dawn of War in the Sega Europe stable puts our games where we feel they deserve to be. We look forward to leveraging Sega Europe’s expertise in the PC market to take the Endless series to the next level.”
Games Together is a key component to Amplitude’s strategy. In an 2015 interview with GamesBeat, CEO Mathieu Girard showed us how fans helped shaped Endless Legend, his company’s best-reviewed strategy game.
“There’s feedback and then there’s the fact that the community, through the Games Together program, can participate in the creation and addition of content for the game. One example is the Cultist faction we added to Endless Legend, which was designed by the community,” Girard said. “One of our fans designed the gameplay and the lore for the faction, and then some artists designed the units, the buildings, the ships, the logos. Based on that, we finalized it and implemented the real gameplay. We made real 3D assets for the units and buildings. We finalized the concept art. But it was very close to what the fans had created on the Games Together forum. It was really impressive, and it was part of the eight factions delivered with the released game last fall.”
Sega will also publish Amplitude’s back catalog as well.