Unity has announced to have acquired Vivox, the maker of in-game voice-and-text communication technology. This announcement comes as the game engine maker anticipates that voice communications are going to grow to become a critical part of gaming across platforms.
Founded in 2005, Vivox is the company that powers voice and text chat for the world’s most massive gaming titles, from Fortnite to PUBG to League of Legends. The company’s positional voice chat enables gamers to hear other players chatting around them directionally in 3D space.
“We thought, I thought, that voice is just one of those things that we should offer our customers. There are just a lot of places to innovate there and I was excited by the roadmap of Vivox,” Unity CEO John Riccitiello informs TechCrunch.
Vivox has raised more than $22 million in venture funding from firms like Benchmark and Canaan Partners before it struck hard times some time after its last reported funding in 2010. Its name and some of the assets were acquired by a new entity, Mercer Road Corp, as TechCrunch reports.
The company has maintained much of the original leadership during this time. While Vivox will be a wholly owned subsidiary of the engine maker, Unity has said the outfit will continue to operate independently.
The existing Vivox staff including founder and CEO Rob Seaver will continue with the company after its acquisition as the division continues to operate out of Framingham, Massachusetts.
Seaver mentioned,”It has always been our mission to provide game developers the easiest communications services for their games, regardless of platform, scale, or size. Unity touches more than 3 billion devices worldwide and over half of all mobile games are made on Unity, which means our partnership gives developers across the globe an easy entry point into building the creation of their dreams. We’re thrilled to become part of the Unity team.”
Unity has raised more than $600 million and is valued at north of $3 billion.
