Sumo Digital comprises of approximately 700 employees across 5 of its teams in the U.K., with the HQ being in Sheffield. Sumo also has 8 subsidiaries; Lab42, Red Kite Games
Sumo India, The Chinese Room, and PixelAnt Games. More recently (2017 onwards) Sumo acquired Atomhawk, Pipework Studios, and Secret Mode as recently as March 2021.
Perhaps best known for their work on Crackdown 3, Sackboy: A big adventure, Sonic All Star Racing and Hitman 2.
A fantastic team but that price is pretty surprising to me. Then again I didn’t realize that there were 700 employees there and, now that I think about it, they do work on many projects at once.
Sumo is a giant support studio which works for everyone in the industry, I find strange nobody is crying, it’s the biggest UK studios, a giant consolidation move.
Is there any IP involved in this deal? Maybe new IP?
I really don’t understand the price of the *multiple studios being bought here. It looks like they are a work for hire outlet so the one thing going for them is the num of devs - which they have alot of granted.
Two points here
Buying (num of devs) - means you are buying the responsibility of paying the salaries, overhead, insurance, equipment cost, etc - this is a significant amount.
People are free to leave the company - you might be able to have them agree to work for you for x amount of time.
The other question - this is unquestionably a support studio. Is Tencent buying them to support there own initiatives (likely but look at bullet two above) - this also makes any predictability in future cashflows with current cashflows very difficult to extrapolate (and thus value). Or in Tencent going to allow the studio to basically operate as is and take the equity off of earnings?
This is also out of character for Tencent to buy - Does sumo operate any live service / long tailed revenue generators? Is Tencent buying them to support there long tailed revenue generators?
Tencent is expanding into Console and PC AAA, they’ve started establishing several in-house studios for exactly that, the coming generation and forward we’ll be seeing a lot of big projects from them, and for that, Sumo as a support studio infrastructure within the company would do them wonders. Just hope it won’t become like an Activision situation where everyone is working on one or two cashcows.
I don’t think Tencent will stop Sumo from doing high profile support work and work-for-hire projects. That’s Sumo’s bread and butter. From Forza Horizon to Sackboy to LittleBigPlanet 3 to Crackdown 3.
