Fireshine buys Necesse studio Fair Games for $4 million upfront, with up to $2 million more for new platforms

EG7's Fireshine Games has bought the eight-person Danish studio behind Necesse, which has sold about 2.5 million copies. Founder Mads Skovgaard stays in charge of the game.

AI-drafted from 3 sources. This story was written with AI from the outside reporting listed under Sources, and checked by automated tools before it went up. The originals have the full detail.

Fireshine Games, the London publisher owned by Swedish group Enad Global 7, has bought Fair Games ApS, the Aarhus studio that makes the survival-crafting game Necesse. EG7 announced the deal on 7 October in a stock exchange release, and Fair Games told players the same day in a post on the game's Steam page.

What Fireshine paid

EG7 is paying $4.0 million upfront. Up to $2 million more depends on content and platform releases, and a further earn-out worth 10 to 20 percent of net revenue, after the cost of services sold, may be paid if unnamed targets are met. The group is paying from its own cash.

The release gives a rare look at the numbers behind a long-running indie hit. Necesse first went on sale on Steam in December 2019, has sold about 2.5 million copies and has made about $14.4 million in gross revenue since launch, according to EG7. It holds a 93 percent user rating on Steam. Fair Games has eight employees and two freelancers and carries no debt.

Fireshine already publishes Core Keeper, Len's Island and Voyagers of Nera, and EG7 says Necesse strengthens its hand in the survival-crafting genre. It plans to take the game to more platforms and more countries, and expects "long-tail revenue" from continued updates. Today Necesse is a PC game on Steam.

The studio's view

Founder and chief executive Mads Skovgaard stays on as managing director, and the studio stays in Aarhus. In the Steam post, signed "Fair", the team calls it "a defining moment" and says it had been looking for a partner for a long time. It answers the obvious worries in a short FAQ: Fair Games will "still be leading the game direction", updates will not slow down, and the developers will keep talking to players on Discord, Reddit and Steam. Fireshine will take on "a lot of the larger time consuming tasks such as publishing and porting", which the studio expects to free up time for bigger updates.

The post also says more than 150,000 new players tried the game during a recent free weekend, and promises news soon on a Christmas update. GamesIndustry.biz notes the team developing the game stays as it is.

Sources

• Enad Global 7 announces that Fireshine Games acquires Fair Games ApS, the studio behind the game Necesse (Inderes (EG7 press release))
• Fireshine Games acquires Necesse dev Fair Games, described as a "defining moment" for Danish indie studio (GamesIndustry.biz)
• Necesse on Steam (Steam)

Image: Fair Games