Published , by Charles Singletary Jr
Published , by Charles Singletary Jr
Unity is enhancing its collection of services with this latest acquisition. Unity Technologies has purchased Vivox, a voice and text-chat specialist that has supplied the positional voice technology for Fortnite, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, and League of Legends.
“Vivox and Unity share a common mission: to empower creators and developers with the most powerful and accessible tools and services,” said John Riccitiello, Unity Technologies Chief Executive Officer, in the press release. “The ability for gamers to speak to each other, in real-time, is a requirement in connected games because players want to enjoy great moments together. With Vivox part of Unity, we’re excited to work with the team to make connected communications a seamless integration for devs and develop a future roadmap that takes in-game communications to exciting new places.”
The press release states that Vivox will become wholly owned by Unity but will operate independently, offering cross-platform communication services to various game development studios. Epic Games, another entity responsible for one of the most widely used game engines in the industry, also made a recent quality grab by purchasing the real-team capture team 3Lateral.
“It has always been our mission to provide game developers the easiest communications services for their games, regardless of platform, scale, or size,” said Vivox Founder & Chief Executive Officer Rob Seaver. “Unity touches more than 3 billion devices worldwide and over half of all mobile games are made on Unity, which means our partnership gives developers across the globe an easy entry point into building the creation of their dreams. We’re thrilled to become part of the Unity team.”
The entire Vivox team, which is based in Framingham, MA, and will remain there, is coming along for the ride. Vivox's technology has been integrated into more than 125 games worldwide and is described as the "only cross-platform, 3D positional audio technology." Stay tuned to Shacknews for additional updates.