6waves Lolapps acquires mobile developer Escalation Studios

Social game company 6waves Lolapps has acquired mobile developer and recent publishing partner Escalation Studios, giving the company its first fully-owned mobile development branch. This acquisition gives 6waves Lolapps (Ravensky City, Ravenwood Fair) an established foothold in the mobile space, and positions the company to further expand beyond social gaming. "Basically, what we did in social from a publishing and development capacity, we want to do for mobile," said Arjun Sethi, 6waves Lolapps chief product officer, in an interview with Gamasutra. 6waves Lolapps hopes to mirror its social strategy by establishing an internal mobile team that can both develop new products for the company, and provide additional resources to the its other mobile publishing partners. "The way we saw it, if we work together, we'll be able to hit the market faster and make decisions better, since we have a lot more data distribution," said Sethi. "We also want to have a better understanding of the mobile space, and we want to have a better understanding of what other developers will need." Sethi added that while Escalation is based in Dallas, Texas, 6waves Lolapps plans to use the team to create games for international markets, spanning platforms such as iOS, Android, and Tencent's QQ. In the wake of this acquisition, 6waves Lolapps CEO Rex Ng said that the company hopes to double its business in 2012, with mobile games playing "a significant role in our growth on both the publishing and development sides of our business." Prior to working with 6waves Lolapps, Escalation Studios worked on a number of commissioned projects based on existing IP, including mobile games like Doom Resurrection and Where the Wild Things Are, as well as console-based titles like Samba de Amigo for Wii.