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- Epic Games acquires the animation specializing company, Cubic Motion for an undisclosed amount.
- The United Kingdom-based company will join the Unreal Engine team, working on various games including Fortnite.
- After helping raise £20M ($24.5M USD) in a private equity funding round, NorthEdge Capital is no longer an investor in the company after the acquisition.
Cubic Motion announced that it has been acquired by Epic Games and will join the Unreal Engine team. Cubic Motion is a United Kingdom-based tech company founded in 2009 which specializes in automated performance-driven facial animation. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.
The acquisition comes after the two companies had already been working together on creating “realistic physical movements and facial expressions that look and feel like real humans.”
“Digital humans are not only the next frontier of content creation, but also the most complex endeavor in computer graphics,” Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games, said in a prepared statement. “With Cubic Motion bringing their computer vision and animation technology and expertise to our digital human efforts, Epic along with our team at 3Lateral are one step closer to democratizing these capabilities for creators everywhere,” said Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games, in a statement.”
Cubic Motion has partnered with Sony Interactive Entertainment to work on both the God of War series and Insomniac Games’ Spider-Man game for PS4. The company has also worked with Activision Blizzard on Call of Duty and with Respawn Entertainment on Apex Legends.
In 2017, Northedge Capital led a private equity funding round that saw £20M ($24.5M) raised as capital for Cubic Motion. However, after the acquisition by Epic Games, NorthEdge Capital is no longer an investor in the company.