| Sea Announces Garena’s Acquisition of Phoenix Labs
Sea Limited (“Sea” or the “Company”), a leading global consumer internet company, today announced that its digital entertainment arm, Garena, has acquired Phoenix Labs, an acclaimed independent games development company and the studio behind the popular cross-platform co-op action RPG, Dauntless. The teams intend to work together to continue building Phoenix Labs’ world-class development team, supporting the growth of Dauntless, and exploring new opportunities in global markets and on mobile. The transaction closed in recent days. Jesse Houston, CEO and co-founder of Phoenix Labs, said, “Our partners at Garena have been our most steadfast supporters since the early days of Phoenix Labs, and we are excited to join forces with a global games leader. With this next step, we’re able to ensure that we can provide the best possible experience for Dauntless players around the world. We’re extremely excited about what the future holds for Phoenix Labs, as we continue to support our ever-growing Dauntless community and explore future games.” Forrest Li, Founder and Group Chief Executive Officer of Sea, said, “We couldn’t be happier to welcome Phoenix Labs to the Garena family. Over the last few years, we have watched Phoenix Labs mature into one of the best development teams in the business and launch a hugely exciting title in Dauntless. We also know that they share our mission of making great games, creating the best teams, and putting players first. Our skills sets are highly complementary, and we see many exciting opportunities ahead that our teams can explore together.” Phoenix Labs was founded in Vancouver in 2014 by veteran game executives with a track record of working on some of the world’s best-known game franchises. It now has a team of more than 100 developers with decades of experience in building world-class AAA games across its offices in Vancouver, Canada, San Francisco, and Seattle, Washington. The studio launched its debut title Dauntless, a cross-platform co-op action RPG, in 2019. Headquartered in Singapore, Garena is a global leading games developer and publisher. It had more than 320 million quarterly active users in the third quarter of 2019. Its self-developed title, Free Fire, is one of the world’s most popular mobile games and was the most downloaded mobile game globally in 2019 according to App Annie. Garena was one of Phoenix Labs’ earliest investors and has supported the growth of the company and the development of Dauntless over the last several years. Following the acquisition, the existing management team at Phoenix Labs will continue to run the studio. In addition to bolstering Garena’s in-house content creation capabilities, the partnership allows Phoenix Labs to tap into Garena’s global network and unique strengths in mobile games and community building. The companies will work together to continue adding new features to Dauntless and explore new growth opportunities in markets such as Asia and Latin America, and on mobile. |
