Ubisoft acquires Action Pants studio in Vancouver

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Ubisoft has acquired Action Pants, a dev studio in Vancouver. As far as I can tell, Action Pants has never developed a game, yet they have 110 developers in Vancouver. The first title is due to be a new intellectual property, a “sports game developed exclusively for Wii”.

It seems odd to spend to acquire an unproven developer purely for the headcount, but that appears to be what happened here. I wonder if this was a very low value deal that brought a team of developers in-house at Ubi for little capital outlay.

UPDATE: Sources suggest that Ubisoft paid less than €1 million for the acquistion, with the primary purpose being to bring the development of a new IP (a Wii sports game) in-house. In the current development environment in Vancouver, getting bought by Ubisoft, even for very little money, may have been very attractive for the shareholders of Action Pants.

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