Acquiring a video game studio is the hip thing to do right now, and it seems like we’re hearing about a new one every week. The latest acquisition comes from Dead by Daylight publisher Behaviour Interactive, who’s scooping up Midwinter Entertainment, makers of free-to-play survival game Scavengers.
Eurogamer was informed of the acquisition, and it’s the second one in recent memory for Improbable Worlds Limited, Midwinter’s parent company. Improbable sold Nightingale developer Inflexion to gaming giant Tencent just a few months ago in February. That sale didn’t affect the status of Nightingale (a first-person survival game planned for launch later this year), but the same cannot be said for Midwinter and Scavengers. Eurogamer learned that as part of the sale, console versions of the game have been scrapped. They were in closed alpha testing before being canned, but Scavengers’ PC version is still available on Steam and the Epic Game Store.
Scavengers hasn’t seen particularly high success as is. After launching in early access about a year ago, it quickly came under fire for alleged pay-to-win mechanics. It later began experimenting with gameplay spaces for up to 5,000 players, an impressive level of scale for any developer. Midwinter is now working on a new project for Behaviour, according to what Eurogamer was told. A small team will continue maintaining the PC version of Scavengers, since the game is still in early access.
As for Midwinter’s new owner, Behaviour Interactive is best known as the publisher of Dead by Daylight, an asymmetrical multiplayer horror game that’s been receiving a steady stream of new content since launching nearly six years ago. One player takes on the role of the killer, who must the hunt down all the other players, known as the survivors. There are many maps to hunt across, from murky swamps to abandoned farms to multiple movie-based towns.
