The authors of Fortnite have taken up acquisitions. Today, October 8, Epic Games announced the purchase of the Finnish company Kamu. The latter is known for the Easy Anti-Cheat service, which blocks hacking and the use of cheats in multiplayer games.
The transaction amount is not specified. But we are most likely talking about at least several million dollars, because the company’s solutions are currently used by dozens of large teams, including Hi-Rez, Ubisoft, Wargaming and Epic Games itself. Only Easy Anti-Cheat processes the data of 100 million players.
At the same time, it is unlikely that the cost was very large. Kamu has not grown into a corporation since its foundation in 2006. At the end of 2017, it employed less than three dozen people.
Despite the fact that Kamu has always focused on gaming security services, today it develops solutions for communicating with users and analyzing their behavior. Perhaps Kamu just needed the power of Epic Games to promote and develop the latter. At least, this is hinted at by the comment of Kamu CEO Simon Allaeys: “Working with cheats in games was just the beginning. Today, our products also help developers stay competitive by helping to identify the needs of players.”
For Epic Games, buying Kamu means the possibility of its further integration with the Unreal Engine, which, unlike Unity, does not have internal analytical solutions “out of the box”. Now, apparently, they will.
Epic Games assures that after the deal Kamu will continue to sell its services to third-party companies. Moreover, it will become Epic Games’ base for recruiting technologies and developers of online services in Finland.
For Epic Games, this is the second acquisition in a year. In January, the company acquired the Scottish Cloudgine, which is trying to introduce cloud technologies into VR.
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