Autodesk makes offer of $36 million for Scaleform

3D software and engineering application company Autodesk has made an acquisition offer of $36 million for UI and middleware outfit Scaleform.

The deal was announced as being "subject to customary closing conditions" by Autodesk and Scaleform are yet to make an official public confirmation. If it does complete, the deal is expected to close during the quarter ending April 31, 2011.

"The Scaleform acquisition will further Autodesk's ability to provide customers with more complete workflows to more rapidly develop immersive 3D and casual game experiences," said Marc Stevens, Autodesk's vice president of Games.

"The Scaleform team will bring a wealth of expertise in creating highly optimised runtime solutions for PCs, consoles and mobile devices. We expect the integration of Scaleform to allow us to innovate faster and help further improve the game creation process for online, console, and mobile development."

Several Scaleform executives would make the transition to Autodesk's board as part of the acquisition: president and CEO Brendan Iribe, Scaleform's CTO, Michael Antonov, and COO, Marc Bennett.

"Our combined technologies will not only provide game developers with an improved authoring environment and runtime solution, but will also apply to the broader interactive entertainment industry ranging from film to mobile to the web," said Iribe.

"We will finally realise our long standing vision of integrating 2D and 3D authoring technology while continuing our commitment to deliver leading-edge real-time graphics solutions to our customers."