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>Tip: Buy Me!
>Seeing the news reports of acquisitions brings to mind some issues that we commonly see during the buying and selling of technology companies. Before a potential purchaser will buy the company, they will most likely do an analysis of the innards of the seller. Does the seller have any contracts? Are the workers signed to employment agreements? Has the seller done anything to protect the intellectual property (e.g., filed copyrights, patents, trademarks?) If not, why not? And, what routinely happens is that the less actions that the seller has taken up to the point of the potential acquisition, the more downward price pressure that the buyer is able to exert.And I know I’m not saying anything earthshattering, but the value of a video game company generally comes down to two things: (i) the intellectual property assets and (ii) the people. So, to all of those fledgling game developers out there,… Continue Reading
>Ninth Circuit Declines to "Boldly Go Where No Court Has Gone Before"
>Proponents of free speech through the arts earned a victory on February 20, 2009, when the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit confirmed a California district judge’s 2007 ruling that a California law that restricts sales of “violent video games” to minors is unconstitutional.Chapter 638 of the Statutes of 2005, otherwise known as “AB 1179,” was passed by the California state legislature in October 2005. AB 1179 imposes restrictions on the sale and rental of violent video games to anyone under the age of 18. The act defines a “violent video game” as, among other things, making available the option of “killing, maiming dismembering or sexually assaulting” a human or substantially human game character if doing so appeals to a “deviant or morbid interest of minors” or is done in an “especially heinous, cruel, or depraved” manner. Such games must also be labeled with two-inch by two-inch… Continue Reading
>More on Games and the Economy
>GameStop game out with its sales information for 2008. The game store had a 24 percent year-over-year increase, with sales of $8.8 billion. GameStop is expecting sales growth of 10% to 12% in 2009 and anticipates opening more than 400 new stores. In my previous post on the economy, we were using the sales numbers for one of the largest publishers of video games. With the release of these numbers, GameStop is also saying that it expects to outperform the retail sector in 2009.What I wonder about these sales numbers is the impact of used game sales. Publishers certainly like to keep the life of the game as prolonged as possible, and used sales can certainly help in that regard. On the flip side, a used game sale puts money into GameStop’s coffers and not into the coffers of the publisher/developer, which can lead to efforts such as what Epic… Continue Reading
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