UK publisher Playstack, best known for bringing hits like Balatro and Abiotic Factor to market, is under new ownership.
An 84.5 percent stake in the company has been sold to investment group Integrated Media Company (IMC) by previous owner TruFin. The deal valued Playstack at around £125 million ($169 million).
Notably, IMC also owns entertainment brands such as Fandom, Screen Junkies, Fanatical, and GameSpot, the latter of which is a major video game publication that has covered multiple Playstack titles.
Let’s pull the lens back even further. IMC is also subsidiary of Texas Pacific Group (TPG), an American private equity firm that styles itself as a “leader in the alternative asset space.” TPG manages $306 billion in assets according to an explainer on its website, but what does this all mean for a publisher that has cemented itself on the global stage in recent years?
During a recent interview with Game Developer, Playstack CEO and co-founder Harvey Elliott reiterated that it’ll be a case of business as usual under IMC and TPG. He stressed that Playstack’s new owners aren’t looking to upend the company’s existing model, which has enabled it to maintain an 85 percent hit ratio—meaning the vast majority of titles published by Playstack have generated a positive return on development costs.
“I wanted backers who would buy into what we wanted to do,” said Elliott. “We, like a lot of people, get excited about games and excited about opportunities. But we’re also very mindful that were have a really talented, focused team. There’s about 70 of us in Playstack. I’ve said I don’t want that team to grow dramatically. I like the Playstack team at that size. It feels like the right group for us. We do have a little bit of headroom that we’ve already budgeted for in our plans, but if something came along and we thought ‘there’s a game we really love and it’s going to be a three year investment and it needs a significant fund,’ that would sometimes be a little harder to build into our normal working capital plans. With the new backing they’re basically happy to support us.”
Elliott explained that Playstack was perhaps reaching the limits of what it could do under TruFin after growing significantly under the UK investment firm. He suggests TruFin would have looked for an exit sooner rather than later after seeing the publisher transform from a loss-making business into one that reported full-year profits before tax of £12.2 million in 2025.
In short, he feels Playstack is now better placed because it has the runaway needed to implement a new long-term growth plan. Crucially, he said no team members will be departing as a result of the majority takeover. “We’re here with a new backer for the next 10 years,” he added, before noting that expansion could also include a measured pivot into video game development via mergers and acquisitions.
“Yeah, I think [studio acquisitions] are on the table for sure,” continued Elliott. “But it’s for Playstack to decide [what we want to do] and say what feels good to us. My natural instinct isn’t to suddenly build more internal teams and internal studios because there are so many fantastic developers out there we get to work with, so I don’t think we’ll see a dramatic shift in our business. But I do like having internal dev teams because they can help with all the games we’ve got and it keeps our tools a little bit sharper because we understand [production] more.”
“We care very much about our integrity and we think that’s important”
It’s clear Playstack will have more cash to spend under its new owners, but that doesn’t mean it will simply throw money at the wall. The company’s 2025 slate comprises nine releases (a record for the publisher), and Elliott doesn’t expect that to suddenly grow exponentially. If anything, he explained Playstack might be able to publish a few more titles each year, but that it is more interested in having the chance to better scale each project it signs.
Ultimately Elliott said he’d be very happy maintaining Playstack’s current hit rate while continuing to take the big swings he feels have come to define the company. He added that Playstack will continue to be “mindful” of budgets as it moves forward, because he’s wary of overspending on a game and subsequently leaving developers in the lurch.
Right now, he feels the ideal budget is probably under $1 million, but admitted that each year the company signs a game or two that “push those budgets quite significantly.”
“In the end, it will also come down to ‘what do we think the potential is for this game? Where do we think it could really get to?’ Maybe we need to invest more in some titles that we think are great, but with just a little bit more [could be even better],” said Elliott. “There’s not a rule. There’s not a limit, but games that cost under $1 million tend to have the potential to work really well.”
As for the fact Playstack is now owned by the same company as GameSpot (which is part of the Fandom family), Elliott doesn’t feel it’s a situation that will create a conflict of interest.
“We care very much about our integrity and we think that’s important. You as a journalist completely have your own standards of journalistic integrity and I’d expect nothing less from the teams at GameSpot. Fandom is a different kind of business, so they have a huge audience reach and have lots of things they do, but it’s not what we do. We publish great games. Maybe there are some learnings at some point in the future if we run into each other at a mixer, but I don’t expect there to be any conflicts or preferential treatment. They’ve all got to do their own jobs.”