The Colorado-based Backflip Studios, founded in 2009, will be closed. Hasbro Corporation, which owns it, decided so.
DragonVale
There is no official press release yet.
The closure is reported to Western media by studio employees. In particular, one of them in a conversation with GamesIndustry.biz stated that about 70 people have already been dismissed. While the team members remain in their places DragonVale — it has not yet been decided who to transfer this project to.
The news about the closure of the studio turned out to be a surprise for the employees. Backflip Studios was just preparing a new product for a soft launch, with which she had high hopes. As one of the studio’s programmers noted in his LinkedIn feed: “the company’s games that were in development had great potential.”
The news of the closure came right after the publication of Hasbro‘s results for the third fiscal quarter. It does not say anything about Backflip Studios, but it is noted that the company’s gaming business (which, in general, includes revenue from all the company’s games, including physical products) fell by 17%.
Hasbro acquired a controlling stake (70% of the company) in Backflip Studios in 2013 for $112 million. At that time, the studio was one of the stars in the mobile market. Her farm about DragonVale dragons sat in the top 10 of the highest-grossing games in the USA for the whole of 2012.
However, after the takeover, the studio never released a single hit. Her most striking release over the past 7 years is a clone of Clash of Clans called TRANSFORMERS: Earth Wars.
According to DataMagic, in recent years, the company’s monthly revenue with IAP has rarely reached $2 million. A third of the company’s revenue came from DragonVale, released in 2011.
However, the programmer of Backflip Studios blames the studio’s problems primarily on Hasbro. According to him, the corporation failed to build an economy.
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