Chinese MMO house Perfect World buying Warframe developer
In collaboration with a chicken meat factory.
Warframe developer Digital Extremes appears to be in the throws of acquisition.
Behind the purchase are two Chinese companies. One you'll have heard of before: Perfect World, the MMO company that bought Cryptic Studios (City of Heroes, Star Trek Online, Champions Online, Neverwinter) and made everything free-to-play.
The other company you probably won't have heard of: Sumpo Food, a chicken meat company.
It's on Sumpo's website that a document announcing the co-acquisition of Digital Extremes can be found.
But the news hasn't gone down well with a portion of the Warframe community, which organised a strike (via PSU) that ends in two days' time. Those people feel Perfect World would "brutally murder our beloved game" - ie. ram more aggressive micro-transactions into it.
It's not clear exactly how much support the strike has had or whether it's had any effect whatsoever on Perfect World or the acquisition deal.
I asked Perfect World but hit a closed door: "Perfect World Entertainment does not have any comment on purchases and acquisitions at this time," a spokesperson told me.
Canadian developer Digital Extremes has been around since 1993, and found success by co-developing the Unreal series of shooters with Epic Games. Digital Extremes finally went it alone with average third-person action game Dark Sector in 2008, before helping on games such as The Darkness 2 and Homefront, and then following it up with a Star Trek Into Darkness movie tie-in - a game Star Trek movie man JJ Abrams had a pop at.
Then came Warframe, a lacklustre four-player co-op third-person shooter for PC and PlayStation 4.