Shiny Entertainment Purchased, Absorbed

LifesBlood writes to mention the news that Foundation 9, one of the largest independent game development firms, has acquired the non-game assets of Shiny Entertainment. You may recall Shiny as the makers of titles like Earthworm Jim, Enter the Matrix, and (though I'm the only one who ever played it) the unusual strategy title Sacrifice. From the article: "Shiny was originally purchased by Atari in 2002 for an estimated $47 million, but financial terms of the sale to F9E were not disclosed. F9E did reveal that the acquisition was funded by Foundation 9's recent investment from Francisco Partners, which gave F9E a capital infusion of $150 million over the next few years. Under the terms of the transaction, F9E will acquire all the non-game assets from Shiny, while Atari will retain its current project planning formerly developed by Shiny, including Earthworm Jim."

Comments

Re:Sacrifice was the BEST

[shawb]

There's a couple reasons indie-style game developers find it difficult to stick to the same budget. The first and foremost is that your programmers/artists/etc won't be willing to work for free once the first game is released. If you don't give them a salary once you start selling games (and a salary that recognizes that they had worked a long time on little or no money) then they go to another develoer who is able and willing to pay their employees. And once your first game is released, the related costs and labor often are not over... upgrades, bug fixes, etc are often needed in many genres of games (Console games generally don't have as much of these costs involved, while in a game like an MMO the later parts could easilly prove to be more work than the initial implementation.)

And then there are still other costs involved: customer support, press conferences, staff to manage the sales of the older product, and one that many people don't think about: software liscensing fees. Much of the production software used by an indie company will be pirated. Once you are selling a product, you had better make sure that every piece of software is legal. When that includes the OS, and software like LightWave, 3D Studio, Photoshop, sound recording software, software development tools, and associated plugins for all the software... With a couple people in an office, all those liscenses can add up to the same amount as an employee's salary.

And then after your first release, media companies generally aren't quite as fond of your infringing on their IP, so you'd better be sure that anything that you put in the game isn't infringing on the IP of anyone who wants to sue. You know, like the infamous "groovy" used in Earthworm Jim (as well as Duke Nukem, and probably many other games) might not be appreciated by Sam Raimi now that he's mister bigshot Hollywood director with Spiderman rather than just Army of Darkness...

So yeah, once a company has a first game released (or any product, really) there are a lot of costs that come into play... many of these were hidden costs that were merely postponed untill after initial release, and sometimes there are things that are given as freebies to an Indie publisher that you just can't keep doing once you've actually made money.