Atari Sells Civilization Franchise!

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/11/24/news_6113971.html

noone yet knows who bought .. i am sure in a few days or weeks it will be revealed

Im betting VU (Vivendi Universal) Bought it and really hoping that EA did not buy it, the only thing worse that EA buyng it might be Jowood buyng it

Sword_Of_Geddon said:

I hate Electronic Arts for what they did to Westwood and the Command and Conquer series by extention. If they buy Civilization....say goodbye to it

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Yes, that would be the fate of civ if it fell into the wretched EA hands.

heh who does everyone think would be the worst buyer of the Civilization Series?

i think it would be EA. support can be found in this entire thread against them

No, EA at least keeps franchises on life support for a long time. If EA bought it, there would be a new Civ every year. It might not be the same game that you loved in the past, but there would be a continuous stream of games with that name and a year number after it. Civ 2007, Civ 2008, .... To give them credit, they had their former Westwood crew make Battle for Middle Earth, which looks to be great.

EA does tend to bring its good independent developers into the fold eventually. This is good and bad. Westwood was bought by EA. Some people made a lot of money on the deal. The bad is that they are no longer independent.

I think there are lots of worse publishers. Strategy First, for example, is in trouble for not paying royalties to its developers.

Well whoever bought it is gonna want to generate some Civ games so they can at least get their $20M+ back!!

I haven't read the scuttlebutt on EA, but does it matter that much who the publisher is?

If I had to punt, I would guess Firaxis or another small company bought Civ........You don't have to pay cash do you?....Couldn't the sale have been financed by Atari BUT not be shown in the financials? (warpstorm?)

I think a big company would announce it right away....a small company would be more likely to prepare their "Grand Opening"...which would give them a lot of needed publicity!

I'm in doubt that EA would be interested in civ. i think EA's product palette includes a lot of "action2 genre games, e.g. sports games, and civ isn't really "action-loaded, is it? And - hopefully - it won't be even with a 3d engine.
Another big company that could afford the civ franchise would be Ubisoft, I read in the news around the sale. Ubisoft publishes Paradox's EU2, for example. Civ could fit to the rest of what they are offering.
This is only speculation, but has anyone thought in this direction, yet?

I'm not sure that buyers like to tell everyone they just wrote a check for $125 million. It indicates to competitors that you have a lot less money then a month ago.

warpstorm said:

No, EA at least keeps franchises on life support for a long time. If EA bought it, there would be a new Civ every year. It might not be the same game that you loved in the past, but there would be a continuous stream of games with that name and a year number after it. Civ 2007, Civ 2008, .... To give them credit, they had their former Westwood crew make Battle for Middle Earth, which looks to be great.

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EA publishes Maxis, which does the sims series, including simcity. I think the statements about which "types" of games EA publishes are a little narrow. EA is huge, and publishes many different types of games.

sir_schwick said:

I'm not sure that buyers like to tell everyone they just wrote a check for $125 million. It indicates to competitors that you have a lot less money then a month ago.

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Yes but a whole raft load of new enterprise... Certainly the Civ as a commodity is well worth broadcasting if you gain control of it.... it has more than just potential to make money. I doubt they would be embarassed of buying it!

I'm not saying embarrassing, but its not going to be valuable until Civ 4 comes out. Until then its a weakness in terms of the oppurtunity cost.

warpstorm said:

Sad to say, I'd probably do this if I came into enough money. Why? So that certain features were done my way.

This isn't as unprecendented as it seems. There are certain people out there who have hired game companies to make the game they want in the past. Kind of expensive, but you get the game you want to play.

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I've thought about this myself. I don't think buying a franchise is an effective way to do it, though. If I were to subsidize the development of a game, just so that I could play it, there wouldn't be any point in investing in a well-known brand like Civilization. In order to get a return on your investment, you would have to make the game as widely appealing as possible, which would interfere with your ability to make it the way you like it. You would be better off just making a game from scratch, and using those features from Civilization (and any other games/series) that appeal to you.

As for the sale, everyone here is assuming that the buyer is a game company. From the Infogrames statement, it seems more likely to me that the buyer is purely an investment concern. My guess is that Infogrames will still be the publisher of Civ 4, but they have sold the rights to the franchise to a separate entity, and they will have to pay that entity a licensing fee in order to use the name. The investors are betting that the royalties will give them a good return on their initial investment. Infogrames gets cash up front, which they need to stay solvent.

The buyer could be a special-purpose entity created for this purpose (think Enron), or an investment consortium set up by an investment bank.

sir_schwick said:

I'm not sure that buyers like to tell everyone they just wrote a check for $125 million. It indicates to competitors that you have a lot less money then a month ago.

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that really depends, for example Vivendi Universal income raised by 131 milions euro to 776 milion euro in the 3rd quarter of the year, thoug their shares were negatively effected by the news of the sale of some parts of their VU games divisions, the news of the purchuase of a successfull franchise as the Civilization franchise might positively effect their shares(holders)
and is not like there is anyone that has the means make a hostile takeover of Vivendi Universal or Electronic Arts

i really hope that Vivendi is the Buyer, Blizzard and Sierra have been taken over and are still producing high quality games

take a look at the strategy titles that VU publishes, im positive that if they are the ones that bought the Civilization francise things for us will be only getting better and better (i learned to dislike Infogrames for my experience with them as a game salesman)

sir_schwick said:

I'm not sure that buyers like to tell everyone they just wrote a check for $125 million.

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More than one person, including me (!), have quoted this price..........It should read $22.3 million NOT $125!!

Anecdote: Infogrames made a CAPITAL GAIN of 15.5 million Euros on the sale of the Civ franchise. (This was NOT the Sales Price as reported by TF on the CFC Main Page.)

Under the current conversion rate, that would mean they paid about $1.5 million for it in the first place........a $20.8 million or 1387% profit!!

(Notwithstanding the change in the Exchange Rate between the currencies.)

DaviddesJ said:

I've thought about this myself. I don't think buying a franchise is an effective way to do it, though. If I were to subsidize the development of a game, just so that I could play it, there wouldn't be any point in investing in a well-known brand like Civilization. In order to get a return on your investment, you would have to make the game as widely appealing as possible, which would interfere with your ability to make it the way you like it.

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Those who have done this in the past didn't care about "return on investment".

You are quite correct though, it would be cheaper to just hire the people you want without the franchise.

warpstorm said:

Those who have done this in the past didn't care about "return on investment".

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I WANT to meet those people!!

Nah, they were probably eccentric idiots. The games probably were loaded with cool sounding features that didn't work well together and just made a confusing, annoying and boring game.

The Last Conformist said:

Not really. I do have some sort of mental impairment/cognitive dysfunction/whatever that causes me to make reading mistakes like that, which I subsequently cannot spot unless someone points them out to me. It's part of the reason I had extra tuition in Swedish back in elementary school.

You wouldn't believe how long it took before I realized that there's no 'E' in "SVGA" ...

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It's not your own dysfunction, and actually it's not a dysfunction. It is proven that the human mind only reads/elaborates the beginning and the end of a word and makes up the rest. Therefor if the brain is convinced that a certain word is made up in a certain way (e.g. SVEGA instead of SVGA or Infogames instead of Infogrames), it won't be easy for you to realize it's not like that. Most of the times it's someone else to warn you that is the case

ZXTT said:

Well, if I had to guess, I'd say Microsoft did it to ensure that Civ IV is an Xbox 2 console exclusive (console exclusive, meaning there would still be a PC version), perhaps a launch title.

I know this is idle speculation, but consider: Xbox 2 is now expected at the end of 2005. Pirates! is coming out for Xbox. That was a lot of money to sell the rights to publish a game franchise on the PC. The Civ IV screenshots that just came out look more console-like than Civ III.

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A turn-based strategic game on the console ? Uhm... kinda doubtful. Console is for action-adventure, AFAIK.

Civ2 was available on the PSX, so it's not unheard of.