Fox is getting into the mobile game business as its FoxNext division is acquiring Aftershock, which consists of the remaining assets of mobile game publisher Kabam that were not sold to Netmarble.
The deal is an end to Kabam's novel approach to selling itself by breaking itself into different parts. And the acquisition shows that Hollywood has a growing appetite for games as the growth of film and TV slow down. Aftershock has a studio in Los Angeles and a team of game developers in San Francisco. Its one announced title is a game based on James Cameron's Avatar films, under a license from Fox's 20th Century Fox film studio.
South Korea's Netmarble paid an estimated $800 million for Kabam's Vancouver division, which made the hit game Marvel Contest of Champions, as well as some of its employees in San Francisco. What was left of Kabam after that deal was renamed Aftershock while the Vancouver studio assumed the name Kabam Games. All told, the various transactions that completed the sale of all of Kabam's assets added up to nearly $1 billion. The exact price of the Aftershock deal hasn't been announced, but based on that math, it sounds like the deal was around $100 million.
