Wargaming.net have announced that they have acquired Gas Powered Games, the troubled development studio behind Supreme Commander, Dungeon Siege and Demigod. CEO and founder Chris Taylor will continue to lead the company. This comes after a tumultuous month which saw Gas Powered bank their future on a Kickstarter for the RPG/RTS Wildman and suffer a round of staff lay-offs. The funding drive was recently cancelled , but clearly garnered enough public interest to prompt the World of Tanks developer into making an offer.
When the Wildman cancellation was announced, Taylor wrote, "We are profoundly grateful to those of you who backed this project and Gas Powered Games. Your passion and hard work put us in a position to write this exciting new chapter in the history of GPG." Now we know where that new chapter is being written.
In the release, Wargaming - best known for and phenomenally profitable because of free-to-play game World of Tanks - played up their other recent purchases, saying that Gas Powered "will further bolster Wargaming's push into multiplatform expansion, including the recent acquisition announcement of Chicago-based Day 1 Studios and MMO middleware provider Big World Pty Ltd."
Gas Powered Games' most recent project was the free-to-play Age of Empires Online, while Wargaming were originally known for robot-infused strategy game Massive Assault Network. There's no word yet on what Gas Powered and Wargaming plan to do together, and whether those plans include bringing Wildman to release.
