Nordisk Film Acquires Just Cause Developer Avalanche Studios

Danish entertainment company Nordisk Film announced today it will acquire Just Cause and Mad Max developer Avalanche Studios.

The $103 million acquisition involves obtaining all shares and full ownership of Avalanche Studios, including its three studios with over 320 developers. Avalanche Studios is currently worth $117 million, and Nordisk had been a minority shareholder in the company since 2017 when it paid more than $10 million for a stake. The acquisition is expected to be completed by the end of June.

“This was simply the right offer, at the right time, from the right company,” Avalanche CEO Pim Holfve said to GamesIndustry.biz. “We have worked closely with Nordisk Film as a minority owner for the past year, which has been a great experience. As good as we are at developing explosive open-world games, they have a 111-year history of working with companies within the creative industries, and bring with them a wealth of knowledge and experience.”

The only management change is the addition of Nordisk’s managing director Mikkel Weider to the Avalanche Studios board. The developer will also keep creative freedom under Nordisk with deals open to new publishers. Existing agreements, such as Bethesda’s recently announced Rage 2, will be honored too.

“Nordisk Film are also fully committed to our road map, and feel that Avalanche Studios are headed in the right direction, so they don’t want to mess with that,” said Holfve. “Being able to maintain our creative independence, while at the same time being acquired by stable, long-term owners is the best possible scenario, and I couldn’t be happier to have them onboard.”

Holfve said Avalanche Studios will continue and accelerate its self-publishing efforts with theHunter Classic as an example of upcoming projects being games as services.

“We have been running theHunter Classic as a service for almost a decade, and that’s also how we think about our upcoming self-published games as well,” Holfve said. “theHunter: Call of the Wild has been supported with new DLC (paid and free), game updates, community events and more since launch. That’s a great blueprint for how we think about our self-published games as active, dynamic services for our fans.”