Hello yall, since i dont know much how the industry works, I was wondering what happens to a, exemple, videogame company ( developper ) that is sold to another company and/or merge within a company. For what purpose an '' X'' videogame enterprise would like to buy ''Y'' enterprise ? I know primary its to own the copyright of ''Y'' company, but any else reason ? do all the assets of ''Y'' videogame enterprise is now owned by the '' X'' one ? thanks for delighting me on that. I know some of you wonder why I'm wanting to know this.... :biggrin-new: its a joy to know more about things that we'd wondered.
Depends on the company really. Contracts will dictate where things end up. Sometimes the entire company is bought, sometimes some IP, heck, sometimes only a name.
Most the time is just IP, like franchises, names, arts, etc... all the stuff you need to legally make a sequel to a game, and the reason why tons of kickass devs are stuck and can't make a second one... Only a few are what you could call "talent mergers", and thats because good devs who dont like shitty working conditions (*cough* EA! *cough*) can always GTFO there and get a better job elsewhere, but still sometimes the people you got are complete retards who cant make a decent game, so you go and buy a smaller company with decent people on board and get them to stay by not paying for their stock until an X amount of time, meaning that if they leave they loose the stocks, and thus a shitload of money. Bottom line, they always keep the IP, unless you offer to buy it back, like Fargo did with Wasteland
