Happy Buyout Day! Square Enix Bids for Eidos, Namco Bandai Wants D3
The recession-proof videogame industry continues to contract today, with not one but two major acquisitions looming on the horizon.
Square Enix has announced its intent to acquire Eidos, in a deal that will see Eidos shareholder Warner Bros. lose about $90 million. The original press release (PDF) will make your eyes glaze over, but Ben Fritz at Variety has done some analysis already:
Of course, Warner Bros. has long been considering buying Eidos. The fact that it would rather take that big a loss than spend another $100 million or so to buy the whole thing tells you what it thinks of the publisher's prospects.
Meanwhile, Namco Bandai has announced that it intends to acquire D3 Publisher, maker of Onechanbara and Ben 10. As of this writing, the press release (PDF) is only available in Japanese, so we're lucky to have a translation of the salient points from Anoop Gantayat:
- Cooperation on overseas content expansion using such products as D3's BEN10 series.
- Increasing the value of D3's content by tying it in with Bandai Namco Groups' other "strategic business units" (the release mentions five such units: toys and hobbies, amusement facilities, game content, network, and video/music content).
- Use of Bandai Namco Games content with D3's casual games series
- Use of D3's content with Bandai Namco's "multi-content" development system (this presumably refers to Bandai Namco's ability to produce toys, anime and other products outside of games).
- For North American content development, improvement of development efficiency through shared use of technology (game engines, etc.)
All fascinating -- especially the part about having D3 publish casual games with Bandai Namco content, and especially the part about working together to strengthen North American content.
In general, if I had to write just one sentence of analysis about today's news, it would be this: Japanese publishers want to expand their publishing and content creation power in the West, and they see mergers both domestic and international as the way to do it.
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http://blog.wired.com/games/2009/02/happy-buyout-da.html#previouspost
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