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![](\"https:\/\/www.engadget.com\/img\/gallery\/a-private-equity-company-has-acquired-balatro-publisher-playstack\/l-intro-1780163206.jpg\")
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The new owner, Integrated Media Company, also owns Fandom, Gamespot and metacritic<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
A majority stake of the\u00a0indie game publisher Playstack is being sold to an investment company called Integrated Media Company (IMG). As first reported by\u00a0Game Developer<\/em>, the owner of the publisher\u00a0behind hits like Balatro<\/em>\u00a0and The Case of the Golden Idol<\/em> is selling an 84.5 percent stake to a subsidiary of IMG called VantageCo Limited for \u00a3112.4 million, or around $151 million. Playstack also released a brief and vague statement from its founder and CEO, Harvey Elliott, that said this step represented “a change in ownership, rather than a change in who we are.”<\/p>\n The majority stake sale from TruFin to IMG values Playstack at around \u00a3125 million, or approximately $169 million. IMG’s portfolio didn’t previously include video game publishers but the company also owns the Fandom umbrella of brands, which includes Fandom, GameSpot, metacritic and more.<\/p>\n It’s hard to say what this acquisition means for the deck-building roguelite that won the hearts of the Engadget squad\u00a0after its release in 2024. We’re hoping it doesn’t mean many changes for\u00a0Balatro<\/em> since Playstack is only the publisher and the anonymous developer, localthunk, likely has more influence on the actual gameplay. That being said, private equity firms have a reputation of salting the earth for anything they acquire in the pursuit of maximizing profits.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n The new owner, Integrated Media Company, also owns Fandom, Gamespot and metacritic A majority stake of the\u00a0indie game publisher Playstack is being sold to an…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":56826,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6404,15391,2725,23836,23837,4779,9857],"class_list":["post-56825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tech-gadgets-reviews","tag-acquired","tag-balatro","tag-company","tag-equity","tag-playstack","tag-private","tag-publisher","wpcat-32-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56825\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/56826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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