Vilnius-based Nordcurrent acquires Swedish game studio River End Games

Nordcurrent, the largest game development and publishing company in Lithuania, headquartered in Vilnius, has successfully completed the acquisition of River End Games, a distinguished game studio based in Gothenburg, Sweden. This marks Nordcurrent’s third strategic acquisition within Lithuania, following the incorporation of two Ukrainian companies in 2018 and 2021.

 

River End Games is a 17-strong team of highly experienced game developers who have worked on AAA games like Battlefield and Need for Speed, smaller award-winning titles like Unravel, and have created several original IPs.

 

“River End Games team joining Nordcurrent is a big step in our strategy to expand beyond mobile gaming, where we have had a decade of success with games like Cooking Fever and millions of engaged monthly players. There is a lot of innovation happening in the PC and console ecosystem, and  we‘re looking forward to Nordcurrent and River End taking an active role in this evolving market,” said Viktorija Trofimova, Nordcurrent’s CEO and co-founder.

 

River End Games was created in 2020 with investment and support from Embracer Group’s fully-owned subsidiary, Amplifier Game Invest. For River End Games, essentially nothing will change in the day-to-day business, and the studio will continue as usual; the name will remain the same, and it will operate as a separate entity from Nordcurrent’s existing offices.

 

The studio has been working on an as-yet unannounced single-player game for PC and consoles with a strong focus on narrative and world-building, which will be published by  Nordcurrent Labs, the publishing arm of Nordcurrent.

 

“At River End Games, we’re a small but passionate group of people who love games and live to create them. Our goal is simple: to bring world-class experiences to gamers. In Nordcurrent, we’ve found a kindred spirit and long-term partner that shares our passion. We are very excited about this new partnership and can’t imagine a better ally to help us create worlds and stories that gamers will remember long after they’ve put the controller away.” said Jonas Nordling, River End Games’ CEO.

 

Nordcurrent, a video game development and publishing company, is the largest studio in Lithuania, having started operations in 2002. The studio’s revenue in 2022 was EUR 89.05 million and EBITDA was EUR 9.38 million. It employs more than 280 people in Vilnius, Dnipro, Odessa, and Warsaw. In total, the studio has developed and published more than 50 games for various platforms. Cooking Fever, Murder in the Alps, Pocket Styler, Happy Clinic, and other favourites have been downloaded over 500 million times.

 

Find our more about Vilnius TechFusion GameDev sector: The Lithuanian games industry grows at an impressive pace: its value is expected to reach EUR 1 billion in 2030 (vilniustechfusion.com)