Virtuos acquires three studios to 'significantly augment' development support capabilitiesVirtuos acquires three studios to 'significantly augment' development support capabilities

Virtuos Studios has gone and acquired three North American and European studios for an undisclosed fee, in what it calls a "new era of collaborative game development."

The acquired developers are Umanaïa, Pipeworks, and Abstraction, each respectively based out of Canada, the United States, and the Netherlands. All three will provide a "flexible development model for our clients. [...] The expansion integrates the specializations of all three new studios into Virtuos, enabling it to provide clients with comprehensive game production offerings from art to engineering, full game development, and live services as a cohesive unit."

With these new teams, Virtuos now has "over 1,200 triple-A caliber" workers spread across its 16 studios. Before this, its most recent acquisition was Third Kind, a co-development studio that worked on Sea of Thieves. It's also opened studios in Tokyo and Prague, and closed down its Calypte subsidiary, which existed for only a year.

Meet the new Virtuos studios

Virtuos' announcement gives a brief rundown of the new studios under its umbrella, and their individual (and sizable) recent works. All three will continue to be led by their respective management teams, and CEO Gilles Langourieux said the acquisitions help "significantly augment our creative development capabilities...around the world."

Founded in 1999, the 25-year-old Pipeworks has helped with live-service and online titles such as Concord, Ara: History Untold, and several Call of Duty and football-related EA titles. The team will lead Virtuos' development operations in the United States, which also stretch northward to its subsidiaries, Beyond-FX, CounterPunch, and Virtuos Montreal.

Abstraction, which opened in 2007, has worked on "over 200 games," including Baldur's Gate 3, Halo: Master Chief Collection, and Dune: Awakening. Virtuos will use it to accelerate its internal engineering network Virtuos Labs, which "provides our clients with advanced engineering solutions in commercial and proprietary engines."

Finally, the three-year-old Umanaïa, which has helped with Ubisoft's For Honor and Assassin's Creed games, has been chosen to "drive innovation" with its own Virtuos Originals game. The initiative started in 2023, and sees internal teams create their own original projects that will enter full production if Virtuos can secure a publishing deal for them.