Tag Archives: Mediatonic

Tonic Games Group will manage game studios

Tonic Games Group has become the new parent company for game development studios Mediatonic and Fortitude and will oversee the publishing label The Irregular Corporation. It is a sign the company has moved up the world of gaming and wants to build a sustainable long-term business.

The London-based Tonic Games Group has about 300 people making games in seven locations around the world. It has five studios and two publishing offices, and it is partnered with third-party studios in 13 countries across its brand family. These groups were scattered as separate companies, though they had the same ownership.

The new parent company was formed by game creators Dave Bailey, the CEO of Tonic Games Group, and Paul Croft, a co-founder and chief games officer. The parent company has a deep belief in having a positive impact with the games it creates as well as the way those games are created, Croft and Bailey said in an interview with GamesBeat.

Their goal is to find new ways to bring original franchises to the two billion people who play games nowadays. In 2005, Bailey and Croft started Mediatonic as a work-for-hire studio. Their first project, which was made while they were still in college, was a Flash game named Snowman Salvage, and they continued to build games for PopCap Games (presently owned by EA), PlayFirst, and Big Fish Games. It developed specialties in live services, heavily in demand now.

They also wanted to work on new games and new intellectual properties which were their own creations. They wanted a more resilient business.

Mediatonic has now grown into four studios with 230 people making titles like Yahtzee with Buddies for Scopely and Gears Pop for Xbox Game Studios. Mediatonic has 27 games in active development.

Tonic Games Group has a new office in London; however, the team can’t move into it yet due to the coronavirus pandemic. The company raised a $30 million round of funding one year ago, and it has diversified beyond the original business.