UTV Ignition Games Ltd.

Overview

UTV Ignition Games, headquartered in Waltham Abbey, UK, is a publishing studio. It is a subsidiary of the Indian entertainment conglomerate UTV Software Communications Ltd.

The company was founded in April 2002 as Ignition Entertainment Ltd. Its development operations were initially centered around the development studio Awesome Developments Ltd. Ignition acquired it in June 2002 and made it its internal development studio, first as Awesome Studios (2004) and later as Ignition Banbury (2006). The development studio was eventually closed near the end of 2006. In March 2007 it was acquired by Rebellion Developments Ltd.

In its early days Ignition was especially known for publishing and distributing a range of games in Europe for the PSP, Nintendo DS and PlayStation 2, along with the full line-up of SNK Playmore Corp. for the European territory. In 2006 the company expanded its publishing activities to the USA with the formation of Ignition Entertainment Ltd. USA on 22nd May 2006.

After the closure of Ignition Banbury further development was done at Ignition London (formerly Digi-Guys). The studio worked on WarDevil (later renamed Project Kane). A first demo of the game was shown in 2005, but the studio was closed on 31st October 2010 and the game was never released.

On 20th April 2007 the acquisition of the company by UTV Software Communications was completed and Ignition was renamed UTV Ignition Entertainment Ltd. In December of the same year the opening of two additional studios was announced: Ignition Florida and Ignition Tokyo. Ignition Tokyo, with developers formerly with Capcom and Clover, went on to create the action game El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron (2011).

On 10 September 2008 UTV completed acquiring 80% of the development studio True Games Interactive. Focusing on PC free-to-play titles, it was renamed UTV True Games in May 2010. By March 2011 UTV's stake was raised to 95%. UTV is said to have another PC free-to-play studio in Beijing, most likely Possibility Space Inc.

In January 2011 the company announced to merge all USA publishing and development operations in a single office in Austin, Texas where UTV True Games was located. This included the development team from Ignition Florida that had previously been closed in November 2010 as well as the main publishing office from Glensdale. The location with both publishing and two development operations was informally referred to as Ignition Austin, with UTV Ignition Games as the official name.

A few months later, on 24th June 2011, the company announced to open a new USA headquarters in Marina Del Rey, California. On the same day however multiple sources revealed that the remainder of the former Florida console team had been laid off. The team had been working on the game Reich. In July 2011 a portion of the staff of UTV True Games was laid off. The next month True Games' title Faxion Online was closed. The company also announced to halt all internal development and focus solely on publishing, ending Ignition Tokyo as well.

In February 2012 Disney announced the acquisition of Ignition's parent company UTV Software Communications.

UTV Ignition's last press release was in March 2012 about publishing Magical Drop V. All websites have been down and in April 2012 Atlus announced to take over the publishing of Dragon's Crown from Ignition. Even though no formal statement has been made, most likely all of UTV Ignition has been closed down.

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