Asobo Studio

​​​​​​​​Asobo Studio is a French independent game developer based in Bordeaux, founded in 2002 by twelve former employees of Kalisto Entertainment who purchased the rights to an unreleased PlayStation 2 game, Super Farm, and launched the studio around it. 

The name is derived from the Japanese word "asobō," meaning "let's play." For its first seventeen years, the studio built its reputation primarily through licensed adaptations of Pixar films including Ratatouille, WALL-E, and Toy Story 3, alongside support work for major publishers including Microsoft, Ubisoft, and Codemasters. Asobo uses a proprietary engine called Zouna, originally developed in the 1990s by former Kalisto staff, which has underpinned the studio's work across both its major original IP lines. The studio has around 300 employees and operates across two parallel development tracks, a distinction that has made it one of the more unusual studios in the industry.

Both tracks broke through simultaneously: A Plague Tale: Innocence, a narrative stealth game set in 14th-century France during the Black Death, launched in May 2019 to widespread critical acclaim, winning the Pégase for Best French Video Game of the Year in 2020; and Microsoft Flight Simulator, which launched in August 2020 using Bing Maps data and Microsoft Azure cloud technology to render the entire surface of the Earth, won the same award in 2021. 

The sequel, A Plague Tale: Requiem, followed in October 2022, and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 launched later that year. The A Plague Tale series has surpassed five million players combined, while the Flight Simulator series has reached over 15 million players across PC, Xbox, and cloud. Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, the third entry in the Plague Tale series, launches 27 August 2026.