Sony announced Thursday that it will acquire Firewalk Studios from Bellevue, Wash.-based ProbablyMonsters. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Firewalk is one of three teams built under ProbablyMonsters’ umbrella, and was the first to make its public debut. ProbablyMonsters previously announced in September 2021 that Firewalk would make its debut with an unnamed multiplayer game, with Sony attached as publisher.
“ProbablyMonsters is incredibly proud of the team and the game we incubated and built over the past few years,” ProbablyMonsters CEO Harold Ryan said in a press release. “Firewalk Studios joining PlayStation Studios is a brilliant move for the team, game, and future players.”
In its announcement, Sony revealed plans to make Firewalk one of the teams that will “define a new generation of live service experiences for PlayStation gamers,” alongside other PlayStation-owned collaborators like Seattle-area firm Bungie and Haven. Firewalk is the 20th development studio to join PlayStation.
Firewalk studio head Tony Hsu and its unnamed project’s director, Ryan Ellis, wrote on the official PlayStation blog that they’re “honored” to “become part of a family that has produced many of the most storied games of our age.” Both Ellis and Hsu formerly worked on the Destiny franchise, at Bungie and Activision respectively, before starting Firewalk with ProbablyMonsters.
The Firewalk Studios acquisition follows up on last year’s news that Sony, which acquired Destiny developer Bungie in July, plans to go all in on live service gaming in the next couple of years. Live service video games, also known as “games as a service,” refers to single titles that are continually updated over the course of their lifespan, such as League of Legends, Fortnite, or Bungie’s Destiny 2.
ProbablyMonsters describes itself as a collective that’s engaged in “building a family of sustainable game studios through a people-first culture.” Rather than simply being a traditional publisher, it also takes on active roles in team management and formation. In March, the Fort Worth Report ran a piece about an ongoing negotiation between Fort Worth and ProbablyMonsters that could see the company open an office in Texas.
The other two studios in ProbablyMonsters’s network, Cauldron and Battle Barge, have yet to reveal their initial projects.
Battle Barge is led by Runic Games founders John Dunbar and Marsh Lefler; Patrick Blank, original lead level designer on Borderlands; and Allen Fong. Cauldron’s studio head is Dave Matthews, former art director at Bungie and an advisor at the DigiPen Institute of Technology.
ProbablyMonsters raised a $200 million Series A funding round in 2021 and added another $50 million last year. It is led by Ryan, former CEO of Bungie.
