Facebook completes the acquisition of Beat Games

Facebook has announced the acquisition of Beat Games, the studio behind Beat Saber, a popular virtual-reality game that mixes music, lightsabers and dancing into one experience. 

The price for this deal is however not disclosed.

It has been confirmed that Beat Games will join Facebook’s Oculus gaming studio, and will operate independently out of its current base in Prague. The studio will continue to support and build Beat Saber. 

Beat Saber is listed among the top VR games across a number of different industry publications, and has sold more than 1 million copies. It was launched in May 2018 and was one of the top 12 games of the year by gross revenue on the game store run by SteamVR. Beat Saber will still be available on other gaming platforms and won’t be exclusive to Oculus.

Through the acquisition, Oculus gains ownership of one of the industry’s most popular games as it tries to expand VR to mainstream consumers.

Mike Verdu, head of VR and augmented-reality content at Facebook has announced the deal in a blog post. According to it, more music may be coming to the game. That’s an area where Facebook, which has licensing deals with a number of major music publishers, will likely be able to help the small studio. 

Verdu however admits that when independent game studios get swallowed up by bigger companies, the studios sometimes lose their charm and creativity.