Starbreeze Studios had announced in a blog post that they expect to let go of their 91.82% stake in Dhruva Interactive for about $7.9 million to Rockstar Games. 15% of the purchase price will be held in escrow for 36 months, of which 50% will be released in 18 months. Starbreeze expects to be done with the deal by the end of Q2 2019.
“Dhruva Interactive has been a beacon of Indian game development for decades and we are excited to bring them into the Rockstar family,” said Daniel Smith, Studio Manager of Rockstar India. “The addition of the Dhruva team to the existing talent at Rockstar India will expand the studio’s capabilities and reinforces our belief in and commitment to the local development community.”
“Rockstar Games are the undisputed leaders of innovation and creativity in modern game development, said Dhruva CEO and Founder Rajesh Rao. “Dhruva Interactive was founded with the aim of creating a world-class game development community in India, and so bringing the Dhruva team under the Rockstar Games label is further proof that we have succeeded in creating a talented team that can contribute to the best games in the world while helping to create a thriving local game developer community in India.”
While existing client projects will continue uninterrupted, the team will operate as part of Rockstar India alongside approximately 500 talented team members already working in Bangalore on Rockstar’s ground-breaking games.
Starbreeze had been in a cash crunch ever since the failure of Overkill’s the Walking Dead, which flopped hard. The sellout seems a perfectly reasonable way to recover lost ground.