Keywords acquires Sperasoft in $27m deal

Keywords has announced yet another acquisition, bringing Sperasoft Inc and Sperasoft Studio into the fray for a combined fee of $27m.

It’s just the latest acquisition for Keywords, who have spent the last two years making a number of strategic purchases across the game’s industry. The deal comprises of $22m in cash — although $1m will be deferred until the deal’s first anniversary — and 260,049 new shares in Keywords that will also be awarded on the first anniversary of the deal. Igor Efremov, Alexei Kudriashov and Mark Rizzo, Sparasoft’s founders, will remain at the company.

."The acquisition of Sperasoft provides us with an entry point into co-development, positioning us as a strategic partner to games developers at the early stages of the games development lifecycle," said CEO of Keywords, Andy Day. "As games are becoming bigger and are higher definition, game developers are increasingly relying upon co-development arrangements with companies like Sperasoft to provide them with broader capability to develop both initial games and additional content and features post launch."

Sperasoft, founded in 2004, is a 400 strong company headquartered in California, with studios in Russia and Poland. The company provide services to assist with development and live ops, with one of the company’s Russian studios in St Petersburg helping Ubisoft with Assassin’s Creed: Origins.

For Keywords, this sees them buying space in the competitive co-development sector, a discipline that will sit alongside localisation, QA, engineer, art, audio, engineering and more.