Playco acquires Goodboy for HTML5 game engine PixiJS

Playco raised $100 million last year for instant games, and now it’s putting some of that money to use with the acquisition of Goodboy Digital, a maker of an HTML5 game engine.

United Kingdom-based Goodboy is the creator of PixiJS, a game engine used to create games based on HTML, the lingua franca of the web. Playco hopes to use it to create “near-console quality” games that run on any social platform, including mobile devices, desktops, and the web. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Game engines are turning into strategic assets for game companies. Unity and Epic’s Unreal games engines are the best known, but Lucid Sight recently acquired the Colyseus game engine, and it was a big deal when Amazon announced it would make Lumberyard into an open-source game engine.

Playco specializes in games that are instantly played on any smartphone or PC, and delivered more quickly, at lower cost, to more users — with instant updates to content and game-play features. This acquisition puts Playco in a position to create games for any platform that raise the bar on quality, the company said.

Above: Sway Stories is an instant game on TikTok from Playco.

Image Credit: Playco

Goodboy, including Mat Groves, the technical partner and the creator of PixiJS, and John Denton, creative partner, will join Playco to help create Playco’s instant games.

PixiJS is an open source game creation engine built to empower developers and companies around the world to make 2D HTML5 applications that look and feel as quality as native content. PixiJS’s performance and intuitive application programming interfaces (APIs) have made it popular.

Goodboy Digital is digital play production partner for global clients. PixiJS has over 16 million developer projects.

Goodboy has 12 employees that have now joined Playco. PixiJS will remain open source.