Age of Empires developer Forgotten Empires acquired by Keywords Studios

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Originally published at: https://xboxera.com/2022/06/08/age-of-empires-developer-forgotten-empires-acquired-by-keywords-studios/

Today Keywords Studios revealed they’re acquiring Forgotten Empires for $32.5 million. The headquartered studio is best known for their work on Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition. Forgotten Empires has been at the forefront of the regained popularity of Age of Empires in the past couple of years as stewards of the most popular game in the series. No information was shared about the ongoing partnership with Microsoft regarding Age of Empires. Keywords Studios also owns another Age of Empires support studio, Tantalus Media. The press release from Keywords Studios can be found below:

”Keywords Studios, the international technical and creative services provider to the global video games industry, today announced it has acquired Forgotten Empires, a full-service game development studio headquartered in Ohio, USA. The acquisition furthers Keywords’ strategy as the ‘go to’ technical and creative services platform for the global video games industry.

Founded in 2013 by studio head Ryan Shepherd, who will continue to lead the talented team of 53 game developers, Forgotten Empires specialises in the development of real time strategy games (“RTS”) including Microsoft’s classic franchise, Age of Empires. Forgotten Empires has worked on multiple games including all of the Age of Empires Definitive Editions, Age of Mythology: Extended Edition and Age of Empires IV. Forgotten Empires has also worked alongside Keywords’ other game development studios Tantalus, Wicked Witch and Climax Studios on a number of these projects.”

Source: keywords

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Wild i would have placed money on MS getting them at some point

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I posted this elsewhere but since it’s gotten it’s own thread now I’ll repeat it. For anyone who wants more context: Keyword Studios is a fairly large company that primarily does support/outsourced work on games, they’ve been in the news recently because they have a team providing QA work on Dragon Age 4 that has just announced they will be unionising. If you want to know how much of an effect this will have on Microsoft and any potential future RTS projects they might have worked on together - probably not much. As part of Keyword Studios they are very likely just as available for contract work on projects as they were before, and could continue to work with Microsoft if they wanted to.

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