SEGA buys Crytek Black Sea – expands Creative Assembly

creative assemblySEGA Europe Ltd. and Creative Assembly have released details of the studio’s expansion.

Thanks to SEGA’s acquisition, Crytek Black Sea’s 60-strong Bulgaria-based development team has now joined forces with Creative Assembly (CA).

This facility, now-named Creative Assembly Sofia, places CA as one of Europe’s largest and most prominent games developers. Not only that, a major contributor to the growing UK games industry.

Creative Assembly growth

Over the last year, Creative Assembly’s headcount has risen by 37% and is now over 500-people strong. This follows the opening of the studio’s third UK site at the end of 2016. That increased the company’s development space by 88%, which now totals over 70,000 square feet. This includes in-house development facilities featuring a 45-camera motion-capture studio and dedicated audio suites.

Tim Heaton, Studio Director at Creative Assembly, said;

Now in our 30th year of games development, with an army of multi-million selling titles to our name and a history of world-renowned partnerships, Creative Assembly is proof of the UK games industry’s potential for global success.”

Healthy UK games market

The UK games market is thriving, with games generating £2.96bn in 2016, 1.3 times the size of the video market (£2.25bn) and 2.6 times the size of music (£1.6bn). UK games rank among the most popular in the world, with Creative Assembly’s Total War series seeing a franchise record-breaking monthly average of 1.2m global players in 2017.

halo-wars-bannerCreative Assembly is well known for its development of AAA interactive entertainment and world-class partnerships. Those partnerships include SEGA (the studio’s parent company), Games Workshop (on Total War: WARHAMMER), Twentieth Century Fox (on Alien: Isolation) and, with Microsoft and 343 Industries (on Halo Wars 2).

Most recently, the studio also announced its strategic partnership with market leader in the free-to-play space, Wargaming. This partnership which will see Total War: ARENA published worldwide.

The studio is working on a number of unannounced projects for 2017. Needless to say that there will be further additions to this slate now being developed by the Creative Assembly Sofia team.