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Facebook has acquired the maker of Beat Saber

Date Type Companies involved Size
November 27th, 2019 acquisition Meta
Oculus
Not disclosed
Facebook has acquired the maker of Beat Saber

Social media giant and societal pariah Facebook has bought the studio behind VR hit Beat Saber.

In a blog post on VR company Oculus' site, Facebook's recently-hired director of content for AR and VR Mike Verdu (pictured) welcomed Beat Games to the fold, saying that the studio's virtual reality hit is "a perfect example of why VR is so exciting."

No value has been placed on the deal just yet. 

"The shared experiences of games are profoundly memorable ones, and for millions of people, Beat Saber was their first encounter with immersive VR gaming," he wrote.

"Today we’re announcing that Beat Games is joining us in our quest to bring VR to more people around the world. They will join Oculus Studios as an independently operated studio in Prague, continuing to create new ways for people to experience music and VR gaming. Most importantly, what the community has come to love about Beat Saber will remain intact. Beat Games will continue to ship content and updates for Beat Saber across all currently supported platforms, now with even more support from Facebook.

"Beat Games’ accomplishments are already impressive, but Facebook and the Beat Games team know that there is so much more that can be done across VR, games, and music. They have only scratched the surface with Beat Saber in terms of social features, new modes, music, and more. We are thrilled to join forces to see where this talented team takes VR gaming in the future.

"Beat Saber is a perfect example of why VR is so exciting—VR reimagines old genres and invents new ones. The team at Beat Games made a leap forward in innovation and design with the stellar blend of game mechanics and music in Beat Saber, and yet we know that they, along with so many other devs, are just getting started."

Speaking to PCGamesInsider.biz at GDC this year, Oculus said that the recent PR flops that parent company Facebook had gone through had not affected its virtual reality business.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.