Amazon buys Double Helix Games

Late yes­ter­day, Dou­ble Helix, the stu­dio behind the Killer Instinct Revival on the Xbox One, was pur­chased by Ama­zon. The online retail giant has been in the rumor mill as of late, with rumors spec­u­lat­ing a pos­si­ble android based con­sole or becom­ing a pub­lisher. This is not the first games stu­dio that Ama­zon has pur­chased. In 2008, the retailer bought Reflex­ive Enter­tain­ment. Dou­ble Helix has a rather sta­ble, if not unre­mark­able, resume. Dou­ble Helix was formed by the merg­ing of Shiny Enter­tain­ment and The Col­lec­tive. They recently have had suc­cess with the revival of the Rare fight­ing fran­chise, Killer Instinct, and were picked by Cap­com to revive the Strider fran­chise. Pre­vi­ously they had two titles in estab­lished fran­chises that were mildly received, Front Mis­sion Evolved and Silent Hill: Home­com­ing. Out­side of those titles they have had a string of movie tie-in titles that were poorly received. Microsoft has responded to Games Indus­try Inter­na­tional about the trans­ac­tion say­ing ““We want all of our loyal fans to know that the Killer Instinct team at Microsoft is not chang­ing and that the fran­chise will remain with Microsoft Stu­dios. We remain ded­i­cated to deliv­er­ing a great expe­ri­ence and plan to announce our new devel­op­ment part­ner soon. We’re excited about the future of this pop­u­lar franchise.” It will be inter­est­ing to see what comes of this, if any rumors come to light. The Strider reboot that Dou­ble Helix is putting the fin­ish­ing touches on, will be down­load­able, which will be avail­able on Feb­ru­ary 18th and 19th, 2014. The title will be avail­able for the PlaySta­tion 4, PlaySta­tion 3, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and PC. The title will run you $14.99.