Behaviour Interactive, the Canadian developer behind the horror-based asymmetric multiplayer game Dead by Daylight, announced that it’s officially acquired the indie studio Midwinter Entertainment.
Midwinter is a 30-person team based in Seattle, which means it’s almost entirely comprised of developers who used to work on the Halo series. (Seriously, it’s a city bylaw or something. Everybody in the Seattle indie gaming scene with any previous development experience whatsoever either worked on Halo or Destiny.)
Midwinter’s debut title, Scavengers, is currently in Steam Early Access. It’s a third-person shooter where teams of players compete against the mutated environment of post-apocalyptic Earth and each other and take heavy cues from the Warzone mode in Halo 5: Guardians.
No financial details about the acquisition have been released to the public, which will become official on June 2nd. Midwinter’s former owner, the UK-based tech company Improbable, sold off Midwinter as part of a general divestment of properties as it pivots to focus on metaverse content.
“When we first started talking to Behaviour months ago, the alignment across the teams was striking and, in my experience, rare,” wrote Mary Olson, the studio head at Midwinter, in an official press release.
“As we continued to explore, the opportunity goes beyond similar values and development philosophy. We are thrilled to join and learn from a team with proven success across a broad spectrum of IP while leveraging the strong foundation, culture, and team we’ve built at Midwinter to expand Behaviour’s portfolio.”
According to Behaviour’s initial press release, it plans to “channel [Midwinter’s] skills into exciting original IPs.” Hence, the biggest takeaway from this, which probably should’ve been the headline, is “the DbD guys bought an indie action developer to put them to work on something new.”
According to Eurogamer, the sale of Midwinter to Behaviour has resulted in the cancellation of plans to port Scavengers to consoles as a side effect. The team is being put to work almost immediately on Behaviour’s mystery project.
Behaviour Interactive is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. Founded as Megatoon in 1992, it subsequently rebranded to Artificial Mind & Movement in 2000. Under that name, it created quite a few licensed games and Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, Naughty Bear, and the famously profane third-person shooter WET.
The company rebranded again in 2010 because it used the acronym A2M for itself without realizing there was another use for that acronym in English. (I’m not kidding.) As Behaviour Interactive, it forged on with licensed games and worked for hire until striking gold in 2016 with Dead by Daylight.
