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Infogrames to Acquire Hasbro Interactive
The French are eating the gaming world like a stinky piece of cheese!
December 6, 2000
Big news in the gaming industry today folks. It was announced today that Infogrames, one of the giant French entertainment conglomerates, entered a strategic agreement with Hasbro Interactive. This is a rather large deal here with a whole lot of very lucrative properties involved. The deal won't go through until the Infogrames stockholders approve it, but it doesn't seem as though that should be a problem.
In the deal, Inforgrames will purchase 100% of the common stock of Hasbro Interactive and Games.com for $100 million. Of that, $95 million will be in Infogrames Entertainment SA securities and $5 million will be in cash. For this price, Infogrames will receive Hasbro Interactive and all of it's crew including Microprose, developers of the Roller Coaster Tycoon series and the future X-COM titles and the huge Atari name and properties including the likes of Frogger, Centipede, Missile Command, and Pong. They also will get the exclusive rights to develop and publish interactive games based on Hasbro board games such as Monopoly, Risk and Battleship and Hasbro's line of children's games and toys such as Tonka Trucks, Action Man, and Mr. Potato Head. They also receive the licensing rights to an unannounced massively multiplayer Dungeons & Dragons game which is currently in developement. You can be sure that we're trying to dig up some stuff on that little development. Hasbro will also receive a guarantee from Infogrames based on the sales generated from the licensing agreements.
Now if you are wondering the fate of some of the more anticipated titles such as X-COM: Alliance, you're going to have to keep wondering for a while. "The deal doesn't close for a couple of months," commented Tom Richardson, Corporate Communications Manager of Infogrames, "It has been signed but it takes a while for the process to go through. So in terms of any specific about product plans or any personnel issues, we just can't answer that right now because we just honestly don't know. That will be rolled out when we close the deal."
Infogrames is hoping that this deal will significantly increase their hold on the mass market gaming industry. "Basically the reason why we moved forward on this one is that they have a ton of highly recognizable mass market properties and that area is something that we would like to grow stronger in," added Richardson.
Well that's a pretty big deal there, now we can all just hope that the power that Infogrames commands in the gaming world will help to make Hasbro Interactive even stronger than they already are. That and they don't mess with our X-COM.
-- IGN
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