We live in a world of corporate takeovers and vicious fighting over market shares. Just remember the whole Ubisoft/Vivendi situation for a right and proper example of things getting ugly in this regard. It is with good reason, then, that some of us have grown jaded at these faceless entities melding together into humongous financial kaijus that not even anime protagonists outfitted with combat mechs would have any hope of stopping.
With that in mind, it is quite refreshing to see a friendly acquisition of companies take place in this day and age! One such example is that of Thunderful Publishing having taken over Rising Star Games.
Established in December of 2017, Thunderful boasts about two main strategies driving their financial decisions: to achieve close and effective collaboration between their properties and to set up a right and proper publishing powerhouse! This spring, they've appointed Ed Valiente as the managing director for the company - the man who spent a fair amount of time at Sony, Square, Microsoft, Bandai Namco and - most recently - Nintendo Europe. Dream talent right there.
The next step was to expand the properties that Thunderful has access to, and the latest such expansion includes the publishers of such titles as are SteamWorld Dig 2, La-Mulana EX and Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut. Thunderful have sung praise about the team at Rising Star Games, who hold offices in both the UK and the US under a rather interesting tagline of them being 'the home of Japanese games'. With that, it might be safe to conclude that we will be getting some interesting Asian titles ported over to tantalise our Western sensibilities.
The tone and atmosphere of the announcement is fairly hopeful, and so it's hard not to go along with the flow. Let us see what the future holds for Thunderful Publishing!
