Alright in a day and age when Game companies all over are taking huge blows I'm starting to look at how they are dealing with the immense pressure which things are they doing to keep their companies afloat and I realized something!

Numerous companies have begun resorting to selling off internal IP's and liscenses as a means of bringing in profits. Majesco and Atari are the two companies that come to mind who are adnd who were in a selling spree selling off internal IP and liscenses to turn a profit.

Majesco also sold off internal liscenses for  The Darkness and the game Ghost Rider!  Majesco's sale gave them about 8-million USD and they used the money to bring them out of the negative a little bit. Both games are based on liscenses one for the Movie GhostRider the other from the comic series the darkness and Majesco had planned on both being big budget titles.

Atari has begun selling out faster then you can say Uh-oh, not only the liscenses but internal studios too. The largest sale of late was the sale of the Driver series to UbiSoft. Ubisoft also aquired the Driver series internal studio Reflections. Atari then sold off its award winning Shiny Entertainment to Factor5 leaving the upcomming EarthWormJim game in limbo (Is it cancelled, is it not?). Atari still has more internal assets up for grabs.

Since Atari's sale of the Driver series UbiSoft has announced a port of Driverarrellel lines to the Nintendo Wii the port looks amazing and is bound to bring in tons of profits. So the Driver liscense could have brought alot of much needed profit into Atari, they really do need it. As for Majesco The loss of the Ghost Rider liscense doesn't seem to have been a bad thing , the game bombed but the Darkness liscense could end up having been a fairly bad move! Darkness looks amazing and I have no doubt that once released it should enjoy fairly good sales on both platforms PS3/360!


So is selling IP's and liscenses off ever a good thing? , is their a point where an IP is no longer worth keeping where would you draw the line as a publisher!

Well if the IP is not making money it might be a good idea to sell, but hard to find a buyer.

Selling studios is no big deal if the price is right. Nintendo sold Rare and the right time and MS got like 2 games in 5 years for their 500 million or whatever they paid. I think Nintendo got around $350M for thier 49% stake in Rare.

But I think selling off your developed IPs is a bad move. Sure you get some $$ but also hurt your financials for years to come, just for a short term bump.

Sega could have sold Sonic when their were in trouble, but a merger/buyout from Sammy worked out a lot better for both companies I think.

Hard to qualify it as a good or bad move, but if they're bad enough off that they have to do it, I'm not so sure it matters. Another company that springs to mind is Interplay, and perhaps their biggest sale was Shiny (essentially on the basis of The Matrix license, which proved to be huge shortly after the sale). They just sold Fallout as well, which makes me wonder what the hell they have left. Better than bankruptcy I suppose.

Driver looks to have passed its peak, but with the right marketing could do quite well, so I could see where it would be worth both selling and buying.

I still think selling Rare was definitely a mistake. Hard to say whether they actually lost anything in the deal, but giving them up to their sworn enemy, though it has not mattered thus far, just does not make sense.

If you're a publisher with talented developers that you believe in, selling IPs is brilliant. The best example I can think of is Sony/Naughty Dog selling off Crash Bandicoot right around the time of the PS2 launch. At that point in time, Crash still was a popular franchise, but it was definitely losing some momentum. So Sony sold it, made a pretty penny, and Naughty Dog established a brand new more interesting franchise, Jak and Daxter. Jak and Daxter + "Selling" Crash > "Keeping" Crash

The most notable ones that I could remember, is spyro, and crash. Those 2 ip's were sold for high amount of money, and ended up flopping once it sold (which was really remarkable).

when did they sell those IP's?  majesco and atari have been in financial trouble for a while now.

ngg12345 said: The most notable ones that I could remember, is spyro, and crash. Those 2 ip's were sold for high amount of money, and ended up flopping once it sold (which was really remarkable).

 Those weren't sold. There was a contract from the beginning that gave Vivendi the IP rights to them after Insomniac and Naughty Dog stopped working with them. And the 6th gen Crash and Spyro games did sell well, but not at the levels of the past games.

IP only has value to you if you have the resources to produce games which take advantage of the IP ...

 

Sega (if they were smart) should have sold off several of their properties back in the day in order to gain capital in order to improve reduce debt; by sitting on a bunch of IPs that they couldn't develop they were forced to reduce quality which has made their situation worse.

Selling IP:s i good if you want to reduce your debt. That's why they usually sell them. Sony sold its IP:s for the reason of helping 3rd party (it was pretty good deal for Sony, because they didn't really lose IP:s). And Nintendo sold Rare, because M$ had bought 51% of it before, so even if Nintendo wouldn't have sold it, they wouldn't have been making games for Nintendo anyway, since M$ had the full control for Rare. It was pretty good deal for M$.

Microsoft wouldn't have bought 51% of Rare if Nintendo didn't offer the other 49%.