News

Animoca Brands snap ups Power Rangers: Legacy Wars developer nWay for $7.69 million

Animoca "immensely excited about the nWayPlay platform"

Date Type Companies involved Size
December 16th, 2019 acquisition Animoca Brands
nWay
$7.7m
Animoca Brands snap ups Power Rangers: Legacy Wars developer nWay for $7.69 million

Animoca Brands has revealed plans to acquire San Francisco-based mobile games developer nWay.

The Hong Kong publisher has secured the deal worth $7.69 million, which will see the firm pay $1.94 million in cash and $5.75 million in shares to complete the acquisition. It's worth noting that approval is still needed from shareholders for the sale to close.

To help complete payment for the studio, Animoca has taken out an unsecured 12-month long agreement for $2.5 million, with options attached to investors.

Founded in 2011 by Taehoon Kim, Dave Jones, and Tony Harman, nWay is best known for their work on mobile fighting title Power Rangers: Legacy Wars. The game has been downloaded 50 million times across iOS and Android since launching in March 2017.

Historic day

"The acquisition of nWay is a historic day for Animoca Brands," said Animoca Brands co-founder and chairman Yat Siu.

"Not only are we acquiring a company with experienced management, strong revenues, and successful branded games, but we are also immensely excited about the nWayPlay platform, which - among other advantages - will allow a new generation of developers to create multiplayer games without the many years of experience normally required for such tasks."

nWay co-founder and CEO Taehoon Kim added: "Animoca Brands is the perfect strategic partner for nWay, as the Company brings a deep history of innovation, talent and IPs which can help further the main goal of nWay – to create amazing games that are enjoyed by fans around the world."

nWay launched a commercial edition of its nWayPlay backend platform back in May, before adding a blockchain solution to the platform in August. This is probably what attracted Animoca in the first place - the publisher has been bullish on blockchain for several years now, as explained in our interview with Siu back in October 2018.


Deputy Editor

Matthew Forde is the deputy editor at PocketGamer.biz and also a member of the Pocket Gamer Podcast. You can find him on Twitter @MattForde64 talking about stats, data and everything pop culture related - particularly superheroes.