Nothing lasts forever in the gaming industry. To paraphrase from another finale, “All good things come to an end”. Disruptor Beam, the studio responsible for creating the free to play online game Star Trek Timelines, has sold the game. This is actually one step in a long term plan to change direction of the studio’s focus. They intend to switch from game studio to a game engine and platform company. Tilting Point, a company that has had involvement with Disruptor Beam since 2017, has become the new owner of the game.
From the Disruptor Beam news page:
“Tilting Point has acquired the popular character collection role playing game (CCRPG) Star Trek Timelines from Disruptor Beam, which will refocus their development efforts on Disruptor Engine, a platform to support the live operations of free-to-play games. Alongside the acquisition of the game, Tilting Point has formed a new studio, Wicked Realm Games, to support the title in Boston and has taken on 18 key Disruptor Beam team members, including former CTO David Cham who will head the new studio. Star Trek Timelines, which has already succeeded in the Tilting Point portfolio, will be fully owned and operated internally. “
Tilting Point initially became involved in 2017 when ST Timelines became a part of their portfolio. Tilting Point has created a new studio called Wicked Realm to support Timelines. Timelines is a unique property in that it was the first to include content from from ten films and seven television shows. They even succeeded in an extended license to include content from Star Trek: Picard. All together that means over 800 characters and 50 starships.
Disruptor Beam is not the first game studio to change directions to game technology or game engines. Another well known studio, Crytek, did the same when they shifted towards marketing their own game engine, CRYENGINE. After a number of challenging years Crytek shutdown five game studios in 2016. They then began to work on licensing their engine to other game studios and academic institutions. This plan seems to have worked with a modicum of success with games such as Kingdom Come: Deliverance and then returning to game development with Hunt: Showdown. Most recently they have shown off their new Ray-Tracing benchmark tool, “Neon Noir“. Sometimes an ending does help bring new beginnings so perhaps Disruptor Beam may find new success in these changes.