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Rockstar Games buys Crackdown 2 developer “Ruffian Games”, rebrands to form Rockstar Dundee


It appears that Crackdown 2 developer, Ruffian Games, has been acquired by Take-Two Interactive, the parent company of Rockstar Games according to TheGamer, and has rebranded the studio as Rockstar Dundee.

The company behind Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption titles has been working with Ruffian games since last year, and has now acquired them. Ruffian games studio has worked on Halo: The Master Chief Collection and Crackdown 2. They’ve also helped with Crackdown 3. Ruffian Games is home to several former Rockstar developers.

As spotted by ‘TheGamer’, the acquisition and actual rebrand was quietly made official earlier this month of October, according to a Companies House listing, noting the name change and shift of control.

From the listing it appears that Ruffian Games became Rockstar Dundee on October 6 after Take-Two Interactive took ownership of the Scottish studio on October 1.

As reported by TheGamer, Rockstar Dundee is listed on the company’s career page and was noticed by a Twitter user @ConorGamingzHD last month itself:

Ruffian Games had already confirmed that it was working with Rockstar Games last year as per this old Tweet, in which the Studio was hiring talented individuals to work on unspecified titles for Rockstar Games.

This acquisition brings the Rockstar Games division of Take-Two Interactive to 10 studios. Right now, Rockstar is working on a next-generation version of Grand Theft Auto V and Grand Theft Auto Online for Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S and PS5, set to release in the second half of 2021.

Several developers who previously worked on the GTA franchise currently work at Ruffian, so this new acquisition makes sense. Rockstar North is also located in Scotland, and as already mentioned before, Ruffian games studio has been hiring developers to work on a project with Rockstar since 2019.

We don’t know for sure what projects Rockstar currently has in development. The last game released was Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018, although it has announced that it is working on a next-gen version of both Grand Theft Auto V and GTA Online. Many have also assumed that Rockstar has been quietly developing Grand Theft Auto 6 for a number of years. However, Take-Two debunked some of the Grand Theft Auto 6 rumors circulating back in May 2020.

Stay tuned for more!