Deep Silver was announced in November 2002, with their first release to be Anarchy Online: The Notum Wars.[2] According to Craig McNichol, who ran Koch Media's England branch, the idea behind Deep Silver was to have a business segment that would develop games that would complement the games Koch Media was distributing on behalf of other publishers.[3] McNichol also stated that Deep Silver's name was subject to much internal discussion.[3] Koch Media invested €500,000 in Deep Silver in July 2003, and in November 2003, all of Koch Media's game publishing operations (excluding distribution) were reallocated to Deep Silver.[4][5] The division had been continuously active since, primarily in Europe.[1] In April 2008, Koch Media opened Deep Silver, Inc., a subsidiary branch based in Los Angeles, under Deep Silver's name.[6] In August 2007, Games That Matter, a studio founded by former Rockstar Vienna employees in 2006, was acquired by Koch Media and became part of Deep Silver under the name Deep Silver Vienna.[7] Co-founders Niki Laber and Hannes Seifert had left the studio by January 2010, at which point Deep Silver Vienna was shut down.[8][9] Deep Silver Vienna has only produced one game, Cursed Mountain, which was developed in association with Sproing Interactive and released in August 2009 for the Wii.[10]
Deep Silver first gained widespread attention with their release of Dead Island and their acquisition of Volition.[1]Dead Island had been their first release to reach the top spot on sales charts in September 2011,[11] and they acquired Volition in January 2013, alongside the rights to the Metro series, from the bankruptcy proceedings of THQ.[12] Deep Silver also acquired a minority interest in Berlin-based free-to-play game developer Infernum Productions in December 2012.[13] In February 2013, Deep Silver announced its intentions to expand into the mobile games market.[14]
In December 2013, Fishlabs, which had filed for self-administration the previous October, was acquired by Koch Media and became Deep Silver's dedicated mobile game studio.[15] As the agreement was an asset deal, the legal entity of the studio was dissolved and Fishlabs was reorganised as a division, officially known as Deep Silver Fishlabs.[15][16] In July 2014, Deep Silver acquired the rights to Homefront and its in-development sequel, Homefront: The Revolution, from German developer Crytek.[17] Dambuster Studios (officially, Deep Silver Dambuster Studios) was established to continue the development of The Revolution, succeeding Crytek UK.[17] Later on the same day, Crytek announced that Crytek UK would be closed, and all of its staff transferred to Dambuster Studios.[18] In August 2018, Koch Media acquired the rights to the TimeSplitters games, which would be overseen by Deep Silver.[19]
In May 2021, Deep Silver and Koch Media, part of Embracer Group since 2018, announced that Free Radical Design had been re-founded. Work on a new part of the TimeSplitters series is to begin before the end of 2021.[21] In November 2022, Volition was transferred to Gearbox Entertainment, another company under Embracer Group. In December 2023, Free Radical Design was closed down amidst a widescale company restructuring from Embracer Group.[22]
Controversy
In January 2013, Deep Silver announced a special edition of their then-upcoming game Dead Island: Riptide, titled Zombie Bait Edition, which would include a statuette of a mutilated female torso in Europe and Australia.[23] After strong criticism over the item, Deep Silver initially offered an apology, stating that they were "deeply sorry" and promising consumers that something like that would not happen again.[24] However, when the game was released in April that year, the bust was still included, generating further backlash.[24]
In January 2019, Deep Silver partnered with Epic Games on a one-year exclusivity deal for the PC version of their upcoming game Metro Exodus on Epic's digital distribution storefront, the Epic Games Store.[25] Through this deal, Metro Exodus was removed from Steam, another digital distribution storefront, where Deep Silver had been selling pre-orders for the game since August 2018.[26] Additionally, the deal was made and announced less than three weeks prior to game's release, causing criticism and confusion among critics and fans of the Metro franchise.[25]Valve, the company behind Steam, labelled the move as unfair to consumers, while fans review-bombed previous entries of the series on Steam.[26][27]
