Rockstar Buys Dhruva from Starbreeze for 7.9 Million

As you may have just learned earlier today, Rockstar is doing quite well for itself, having created one of the best-selling game of all time, as well as Red Dead Redemption 2, a game that’s sold nearly 30 million units – in an industry that considers itself lucky if they hit 5 million. Augment all that money with all the extra cash they get from GTA Online and Red Dead Online, well… the company is basically rolling in money and needs to spend it somehow.

Well today, they made a heck of an impulse buy: they bought Dhruva Interactive from the struggling Starbreeze for $7.9 million USD.

Dhurva, an art production studio and one of the biggest game companies in India, was founded in 1997 and employs over 320 people, who have worked on games ranging from Halo 5 to Forza Horizon 3 to Quantum Break to Sea of Thieves. They have a pretty wide portfolio, and now it’s entirely at Rockstar’s employ.

Rajesh Rao, the CEO of Dhruva, had this to say:

"Rockstar Games are the undisputed leaders of innovation and creativity in modern game development. Dhruva Interactive was founded with the aim of creating a world-class game development community in India, and so bringing the Dhruva team under the Rockstar Games label is further proof that we have succeeded in creating a talented team that can contribute to the best games in the world while helping to create a thriving local game developer community in India."

The bad news is that this deal was only made possible thanks to the fact that Starbreeze is really strapped for cash. This deal will help in the short term, but in the long term it represents a loss for the studio, as they originally bought Dhruva in 2016 for $8.5 million. That’s a net loss for them.

Still. If it helps them keep the lights on, and moves a promising team to a more stable studio, this can only be good.