Unicorn Training Acquires Top Games Company
Bournemouth (UK), July 2016 - Unicorn Training has underlined its commitment to developing world-class learning games by taking a majority stake in BAFTA-nominated games studio, Amuzo. Unicorn Training first invested in Bournemouth-based Amuzo last December, and the partnership’s potential has proved so positive in its first six months that Amuzo has now officially become part of the Unicorn Training Group.
Together Unicorn and Amuzo are developing and publishing learning games that engage and immerse "players" along with apps to meet employer and employee demand for just-in-time and reinforcement-spaced learning outside of the more traditional desktop environment.
Peter Phillips, Unicorn CEO, said, "This partnership is about allying the creativity of a great casual-games company with the instructional design expertise of Unicorn to hit the sweet spot where the power of games can make learning more meaningful, practical and effective, and fun, too.
"Equally important, Amuzo have in-depth expertise in publishing apps to mobile platforms for global audiences, a skillset not yet embedded in the desktop-oriented world of corporate eLearning. Amuzo’s LEGO® games, for example, are played on a range of different devices and in different languages in over 100 countries worldwide.
"That knowhow and level of experience would take years to build from scratch in the eLearning world, and yet flexible, mobile learning solutions that can be made available to many thousands of people at the same time are what employers and learners want now."
Mike Hawkyard, Amuzo MD, said, "We are delighted to strengthen our partnership with Unicorn through this new investment. Unicorn brings scale and financial strength and opens up a new revenue stream for Amuzo, while enabling us to continue to grow our core business of creating great games.
"With games and gamification the fastest growth areas in learning and development, adding proven world-class games development to its core business helps Unicorn meet this demand with uniquely creative and effective solutions."
The past twelve months have been record breakers for Unicorn, with sales topping £6m for the first time, while Unicorn’s learning and performance platform, SkillsServe, was ranked the world’s top LMS for financial services for the second year running. Unicorn has been creating learning-and-development and compliance solutions for the UK’s ever-changing financial services for 28 years. This experience, industry expertise, and award-winning creativity are unmatched in the financial-services sector.
Award-winning Amuzo games have been played well over a billion times in the last two years alone and have reached #1 on app stores in over 150 countries.
