Warframe is a free-to-play, co-op shooter about culling aliens in corrugated iron spaceships. It’s quietly become one of the most popular shooters on Steam – and it’s presumably for that reason, not the Star Trek Into Darkness game, that Perfect World are to become co-owners of developers Digital Extremes. Alongside somebody named Sumpo Food.
Perfect World are the MMO specialists who bought Cryptic Studios, and made free-to-play games of City of Heroes, Star Trek Online, Champions Online and, lately, Neverwinter.
Sumpo Food are a chicken meat company. They are KFC’s suppliers in China, and boast of slaughtering and processing up to approximately 18,000,000 broilers chickens per year. Warframe probably manages similar numbers of militarised humanoid clones, so they have that in common.
A document on Sumpo’s site reveals that Perfect World and the chicken company signed a “non-binding” agreement on June 30, to the effect that all of Digital Extremes’ shares would be split between the two of them.
But a segment of the Warframe community are today ending a “strike” in protest of the sale. They haven’t played the game since Saturday, because they believe Perfect World will “brutally murder our beloved game”, in the dining room, with the microtransactions.
It looks like the acquisition will go ahead, however. Have you lot played any Warframe? Digital Extremes have a history co-developing Unreal, BioShock and The Darkness II – but our Tim wasn’t so hot on them in his Warframe review.
Cheers, Eurogamer.