Nordisk Film acquires Avalanche Studios

Danish film studio Nordisk Film has acquired Just Cause and Mad Max game developer Avalanche Studios, the company announced.

Nordisk Film will obtain all shares and full ownership of Avalanche Studios, including its three branches and over 320 developers, in the €89 million acquisition expected to close at the end of June. Avalanche Studios is currently valued at €117 million. Nordisk Film has been a minority shareholder in Avalanche Studios since 2017, when it paid more than $10 million for a stake in the company.

Avalanche Studios will continue to maintain creative freedom under Nordisk Film, as well as avoid any kind of personnel changes, excluding the addition of Nordisk Film managing director Mikkel Weider to the Avalanche Studios board. Existing agreements with outside publishers will continue, such as Avalanche Studios developing Rage 2 for Bethesda Softworks, and the door will be left open for outside publisher partnerships in the future.

“This was simply the right offer, at the right time, from the right company,” Avalanche CEO Pim Holfve told GamesIndustry.biz. “We have worked closely with Nordisk Film as a minority owner for the past year, which has been a great experience. As good as we are at developing explosive open-world games, they have a 111-year history of working with companies within the creative industries, and bring with them a wealth of knowledge and experience.”

Holfve continued, “Nordisk Film are also fully committed to our road map, and feel that Avalanche Studios are headed in the right direction, so they don’t want to mess with that. Being able to maintain our creative independence, while at the same time being acquired by stable, long-term owners is the best possible scenario, and I couldn’t be happier to have them onboard.”

According to Holfve, the company will also accelerate its self-publishing initiative, with games such as theHunter Classic fitting in with Nordisk’s ideas for games as services.

“We have been running theHunter Classic as a service for almost a decade, and that’s also how we think about our upcoming self-published games as well,” Holfve said. “theHunter: Call of the Wild has been supported with new DLC (paid and free), game updates, community events and more since launch. That’s a great blueprint for how we think about our self-published games as active, dynamic services for our fans.”