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Singapore's Garena snaps up Dauntless developer Phoenix Labs

Date Type Companies involved Size
January 29th, 2020 acquisition Garena Not disclosed
Singapore's Garena snaps up Dauntless developer Phoenix Labs

Singapore-based games firm Garena has bought the developer behind free-to play title Dauntless, Vancouver's Phoenix Labs.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, studio CEO and co-founder Jesse Houston said that the deal will help the company move into the mobile games space. Garena had already invested in Phoenix Labs, with the two seemingly sharing a decent relationship. No price tag has been put on the acquisition yet.

"We've got a pretty good background in PC and console development," he said.

"But the next frontier for us is mobile, and then there are a number of emerging markets we want to attack. So we were trying to decide if we wanted to develop these competencies internally or work with external groups."

Phoenix Labs' debut title, free-to-play Epic-published Dauntless, launched in beta on PC in May 2018, attracting one million players in the process. The title came to the Epic Games Store, PS4 and Xbox One in May of the following year, bringing in six million users in its first week across all platforms. The game left Early Access on September 26th, 2019.

The firm is still looking to focus on this title for now.

"In terms of other games, we're entirely focused on Dauntless right now," Houston explained.

"There's still a lot of game to be built. Our goal with Dauntless is to make it into the best free-to-play MMO in the history of video games, and we're still on a path there. I think we'll continue to focus on Dauntless for the foreseeable future and grow to support our future ambitions."


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.