Kabam cuts Beijing team

After Kabam agreed to sell its Vancouver studio along with parts of its Austin, San Francisco, and London operations to Netmarble in December, the company said it was looking to sell its Los Angeles, Beijing, and San Francisco studios as well. That's changed slightly, as the Beijing studio is no longer a key asset after the company cancelled its Legacy of Zeus project.

Legacy of Zeus had made it to beta testing, but as Kabam COO Kent Wakeford told GamesIndustry.biz today, "The game didn't meet our internal expectations, and we made the difficult decision to pull it from the App Store and wind down that specific game team. And we don't take that lightly because it does impact people's lives and people worked very diligently to create a very beautiful game."

A small group of employees remains in Beijing, but Wakeford said the company's primary remaining asset is now the Los Angeles studio, which is currently working on an Avatar game as well as an unannounced project based on another popular intellectual property. Beyond that, the company has a development team prototyping a game in San Francisco, a publishing group in San Francisco, and various studio leadership and senior staff that other companies may be interested in trying to bring on board through an acquisition.

Wakeford hopes to handle any such sales after the close of the Netmarble acquisition, which he said is still on track to happen by the end of March. As part of that deal, Netmarble is acquiring Kabam, Inc., while these remaining assets will be spun off into their own company for sale following the close of that transaction.