Warner Bros. seals up Midway acquisition
With no other bidders emerging for Midway Games, Warner
Bros. has bought most of the company’s assets for $33 million, including the
“Mortal Kombat” franchise as well as the company’s legacy arcade games, such as
“Joust” and “Spy Hunter”.
The bankruptcy judge overseeing the sale apparently wasn’t swayed by Threshold Entertainment’s argument that film producer Larry Kasanoff was the driving creative force in the franchise. (The Chicago Tribune quotes the judge as saying the objections, as well as those of Vin Diesel-owned development studio Tigon Games were ‘resolved’.
A pair of development studios that Warner opted not to buy will be shuttered in just under two months if no bidders emerge for them. The Newcastle studio has worked on the “Wheelman” franchise, while the San Diego studio has created the “TNA” games. Warner did purchase rights to the “Wheelman” games, but not the development studio behind it.
Warner picked up some valuable assets at firesale prices in this deal. Expect another “Mortal Kombat”/DC crossover in the years to come and possibly some re-imaginings of classic titles. The company has been beefing up its video game division steadily over the past few years and has managed to assemble some talented teams. It should be interesting to see what they do with some of the licenses they now own.
Chris Morris reports on the business and culture of video games and offers analysis of recent events and industry trends.
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With the appeal and decline in sales of the Midway catalogue that Warners has purchased way too much for it'll be interesting to see how quick Warners drains its $500 ca$h mountain investing untold dev money on tripe like Spyhunter and Joust remakes. The only real solid purchase was the MK franchise but since it only scraped shy of 140,000 units in the UK even Batman and Superman can't shift units in the most important market outside the US.
Warners is clearly showing its inexperience at marketing and playing within the interactive videogame space, (Watchmen) $33 Million is a huge amount of money to waste on Midway, true its been lucky with travellers Tales and Monolith purchases for content but it needs to step up its game and get some serious headcount to manage all this property and titles its sitting on.
Posted by: Daffy Duck | July 03, 2009 at 03:10 AM
so are they going to make the movie finally
Posted by: corey | July 02, 2009 at 09:11 PM