Asobo Studio

Asobo Studio was founded in Bordeaux in 2002, when twelve developers bought the rights to Super Farm, a multiplayer PlayStation 2 game, from their former employer, Kalisto Entertainment. Ignition Entertainment published it in 2003 as the studio's first title. The name comes from the Japanese 'asobō', meaning 'let's play'. Most of its games run on its own engine, Zouna, first built in the 1990s by staff who had worked at Kalisto.

After several projects for various platforms, such as Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties (2006), THQ chose it to adapt Pixar's Ratatouille (2007), followed by WALL-E (2008) and Up (2009). The studio grew quickly and split into two production lines. With Codemasters it released the racing game Fuel (2009), and for Microsoft it made Kinect Rush: A Disney-Pixar Adventure (2012), which scanned players to create their own Pixar avatar.

It worked with Ubisoft on Monopoly and on the Xbox 360 version of The Crew (2014), and in 2016 made two HoloLens games for Microsoft, Fragments and Young Conker. That year it won the French Video Game Creator Prize from Syntec Numérique EY and SNJV. In 2019 it released the adventure A Plague Tale: Innocence with Focus Home Interactive, and Microsoft Flight Simulator followed in 2020. Both won the Pégase award for best French game, in 2020 and 2021.

In 2021 the investment fund Sagard NewGen took a stake of just over 30%. A Plague Tale: Requiem (2022) and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 came next. The studio remains in Bordeaux, led by Sébastien Wloch and David Dedeine, and is working on Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, a prequel due in 2026 and published by Focus Entertainment.