Epic Games is acquiring Mediatonic, the developer of the highly popular game Fall Guys
Epic Games is already a force to be reckoned with and now they have announced their plans to buy Mediatonic and its Parent company Tonic Games group.
This acquisition is one of their more high-profile buyouts, with another being the recent acquisition of the Rocket League developer Psyonix.
The announcement was made via joint post on the Epic Games blog. They didn’t mention how much they were acquiring it for but did mention that Fall Guy’s gameplay “isn’t changing. Also, that Epic will continue to invest in making the game a great experience for players across platforms. Your favorite colorful beans will still stumble through the chaos on PC, PlayStation, and soon Nintendo Switch and Xbox.”
Paul Croft, Tonic Games Group’s co-founder and Chief Games Officer stated on the blog :
“Beyond the shared vision among our teams, we see tremendous potential in combining forces with Epic. Whether it’s about making our own games the best they can be or empowering other game developers to take their content from a kernel of an idea to commercial success, we know that together we will be able to reach greater heights.”
Tonic games group is actually an umbrella organization and have 300 people in their employ, they describe themselves as “an inclusive, ambitious, creative group of companies that want to have a positive impact: both in the way that we make games and with the games that we make.”
Among the small companies encompassed in the Tonic, Games Group are The Irregular Corporation, a publisher of indie titles like PC Building Simulator and Touch Type Tale; and Fortitude Games, a U.K studio that has not actually announced its first project.
Fall Guys will reportedly remain available on Steam for now. Epic and Mediatonic have said that they aren’t planning to make the game free-to-play, as Epic did with Rocket League.
This acquisition is a bit “sus” in the way that Fall Guys was actually developed on the Unity engine which rivals Epic’s Unreal Engine and secondly Fall Guys bypassed the Epic Games Store at launch in favour of Steam.
Epic must have a clear plan with Mediatonic and its parent company or this acquisition would never have taken place.
It will be interesting to see where they decide to go with Fall Guys and indeed any other games that come out of these studios.