Company type | Subsidiary |
---|---|
Industry | Game Developer |
Founder | Oliver Miao, Keith Emnett, Winston She |
Headquarters | Mountain View, CA , United States |
Parent | Nexon |
Website | pixelberrystudios |
Pixelberry Studios is a mobile game development company based in Mountain View, California, United States. [1] Founded in 2013 by Oliver Miao, Keith Emnett, and Winston She, Pixelberry develops episodic narrative mobile games [2] for Android and iOS, aiming to create "games with heart," [2] [3] beginning with Surviving High School and Cause of Death , which deals with themes of bullying, eating disorders and capturing serial killers. [4] [5] Since then, the company has fully released three more mobile games: Hollywood U, High School Story. [1] [6] [7] [8] In November 2017, Pixelberry was acquired by Nexon. [9]
Pixelberry launched Choices: Stories You Play in August 2016. [10] [11] [12] Like their previous games, Choices: Stories You Play is an interactive narrative game. [12] [13] In it, players can pick "choose your own adventure" stories or "books" across multiple literary genre such as romance, adventure, mystery, fantasy, and horror. [13] Each "book" is divided into "chapters", and chapters are released on a weekly basis. The player character is usually highly customizable, from skin tone to gender. [14] Since the shutdown of their other games, Choices is the flagship game and primary focus for the studio. [14] In 2020, a planned plot line in one of Choices' most popular titles was leaked, leading to fan backlash and further criticism of racial insensitivity in Choices stories. Pixelberry's CEO issued a personal apology and pledged $100,000 to Black Girls Code, the Black Writers Collective, and the Latinx Writers Collective. He also committed the company to enact more representative writing and hiring practices. [15] In 2022, Pixelberry launched a sister app to Choices, called StoryLoom which features creator-made, interactive stories.
On July 15, 2022, Pixelberry Studios announced that High School Story will have its servers permanently shut down on August 10, 2022. [16] On January 22, 2024, Pixelberry announced it would shut down StoryLoom on February 29 and lay off 120 employees across multiple departments. [17] [18] [19]
NCSoft Corporation is a South Korean video game developer and publisher headquartered in Pangyo, Seongnam, South Korea, primarily known for the distribution of massively multiplayer online role-playing games such as Lineage and Guild Wars.
Big Huge Games, Inc. is an American video game developer based in Timonium, Maryland since 2000, known first for real-time strategy games such as Rise of Nations, later for the console RPG Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, and more recently for mobile games such as DomiNations and Arcane Showdown. Throughout most of its history the company has been associated with its best-known founder, Brian Reynolds, whose prior career already included work as lead designer of Civilization II and Alpha Centauri, and co-founder of Firaxis Games. The studio's ownership has changed hands several times over the years, and it became briefly defunct in May 2012, but it was revived by Reynolds along with several original alumni and new partners. The company is presently owned by Nexon, and actively runs its mobile titles DomiNations and Arcane Showdown, while continuing to develop new games.
Mistwalker Corporation is an American-Japanese video game development studio. The company was founded in 2004 by Hironobu Sakaguchi, best known for creating the Final Fantasy series. The company has created both game franchises such as Blue Dragon and Terra Battle, and standalone titles including Lost Odyssey (2007) and The Last Story (2011). With the financial problems caused by Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and his growing dissatisfaction with management, Sakaguchi decided that he wanted to make games outside Square. Mistwalker's first two titles were Xbox 360 RPGs; Blue Dragon (2006) and Lost Odyssey. Following The Last Story for Wii, Sakaguchi and Mistwalker changed to focus on in-house mobile titles. The original Terra Battle saw widespread success and acclaim, leading to further mobile projects.
Dungeon Fighter Online, known in South Korea as Dungeon & Fighter, is a multiplayer beat 'em up action role-playing game, developed and published for personal computers by Neople, a South Korean subsidiary of Nexon, and originally published by Hangame in 2005. The game was originally released in South Korea as Dungeon & Fighter, then in Japan as Arad Senki, and then published in China by Tencent. A global version of Dungeon Fighter Online was released in May 2015.
MapleStory DS is a role-playing video game for the Nintendo DS. It is an adaptation of the original MMORPG game for Windows titled MapleStory. The game was released on April 15, 2010 in Korea, and was developed by Nexon and published by Nexon and Nintendo of Korea. Unlike the PC version, MapleStory DS is a solely single-player game.
Nexon Co., Ltd. is a South Korean video game publisher. It publishes titles including MapleStory, Dungeon & Fighter, Sudden Attack, and KartRider. Headquartered in Japan, the company has offices in South Korea, the United States, Taiwan and Thailand.
Zynga Inc. is an American developer running social video game services. It was founded in April 2007, with headquarters in San Mateo, California. The company primarily focuses on mobile and social networking platforms. Zynga states its mission as "connecting the world through games".
5th Cell is an independently owned American video game developer founded in 2003 as 5th Cell Media, LLC. led by Jeremiah Slaczka and Marius Falhbusch. The company is most well known for creating the Drawn to Life and Scribblenauts series.
Surviving High School was a visual novel game developed and published by Electronic Arts. It was originally released for mobile phones in 2005, later being made available for iPhone and iPod Touch in 2009 and for iPad and Android OS in 2011. New episodes were released and available for download on a weekly basis. It shared many similarities in terms of gameplay mechanics and visuals to its sister game, Cause of Death, which is also developed by EA Games. Some of the characters from Surviving High School now feature in the sister game High School Story by Pixelberry Studios. The character Autumn Brooks transferred out of the Surviving High School after being bullied, and now features heavily in High School Story, alongside other characters with minor roles such as Owen, Wes and Kimi. This ties in with a bullying theme carried through High School story and their partnership with The Cybersmile Foundation. Autumn's bullying storyline from Surviving High School enables her to help a student called Hope in High School Story, who is being cyberbullied; this storyline helps to raise awareness of the issue of bullying and cyberbullying in high school age students.
Cause of Death: Can You Catch the Killer? was a video game developed and published by EA Mobile for iOS and macOS devices on December 16, 2010, that was removed from the App Store in September 2014. While being almost identical in gameplay, the game is intended for a more mature audience than its companion game, Surviving High School, as the game revolves around crime and serial killers and their pursuit by law enforcement. The suggested age on the App Store was 12+. Cause of Death is a visual novel that is divided into a series of volumes, each of which is made up of eight chapters. The base game (which was free from the App Store came with the entire first Volume—future content needed to have been downloaded either by "Episodes on Demand" or "Now Airing". The first 6-episode volume was released in December 2010, and the series released its final episode in July 2014, and the game was unlisted from the App Store in September 2014.
Nordcurrent is a video game development and publishing company headquartered in Vilnius, Lithuania. It has three development studios in Vilnius, Odesa, and Dnipro (Ukraine). Nordcurrent develops and publishes casual and freemium games for smartphones, tablets and PC/Mac.
The Cybersmile Foundation is an international nonprofit organization committed to tackling all forms of cyberbullying and digital abuse. They promote kindness, diversity, and inclusion through professional support services, education programs, awareness campaigns and corporate partnerships.
Motion Twin is an independent studio specializing in online video games. Founded in 2001 the company is a worker cooperative enterprise based in Bordeaux, France.
MapleStory 2 is a free-to-play massively multiplayer online role-playing game, developed by NSquare in association with Nexon and NCSoft. MapleStory 2 was released on 7 July 2015 in Korea. The game takes many of the features of the original game, MapleStory, and applies them to a 3D voxel-based environment. Most enemies, NPCs, and locations made a return in this sequel, although with several changes.
Injustice 2 is a 2017 fighting video game. It is the sequel to 2013's Injustice: Gods Among Us and the second installment in the Injustice series which is based on the DC Universe. It is developed by NetherRealm Studios and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. The game was initially released in May 2017 for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One; a Windows version was released later in November 2017. An expanded version of the game, titled Injustice 2: Legendary Edition, was released in March 2018 for the PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One. Similar to the previous installment, a companion mobile app was released for Android and iOS devices. A prequel comic book series of the same name, written by Tom Taylor, was also released beginning in April 2017.
SINoALICE was a role-playing video game developed by Pokelabo for Android and iOS. The game was directed by Yoko Taro, better known for his work in the NieR and Drakengard series. The game was released in Japan by Square Enix in June 2017, and worldwide by Pokelabo in July 2020.
The Wolf Among Us 2 is an upcoming episodic graphic adventure game being developed and published by Telltale Games with the assistance of AdHoc Studio, a studio that consists of former Telltale staff. It is a sequel to the 2013 game The Wolf Among Us, with the title taking place six months following the events of the previous title.
Titanfall is a media franchise that mainly features first-person shooter games. The series was created by Respawn Entertainment and debuted on Xbox and Microsoft Windows; it has expanded to other consoles and platforms.
Beginning in 2023 and continuing into 2024, the video game industry has experienced mass layoffs. Over 10,000 jobs were lost in 2023, and an additional over 8,000 jobs were lost in 2024 between January and February alone. These layoffs had reverberating effects on both established game development studios and emerging companies, impacting employees, projects, and the overall landscape of the gaming industry.
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