Upstart sold to China

September 1st, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Companies & M&A | No Comments »

Irish based developer Upstart Games has been acquired by China’s second largest privately owned media company Sun TV Shops. Under the terms of the acquisition, Upstart will be fully owned by Sun Media Investment Holdings. Though initial plans where to start a VC between upstart and STVS, Upstart will now be used by STVS as a distribution arm into Europe.

"We’ve been working with Sun TV trying to extend our distribution into the Chinese market," O’Neill told ENN. "When we started working closer with them, we saw the library of media assets which they control and saw that it could be of benefit to form close links with the company.” said Brian O’Neill, "We have developed a number of tools and technologies which are primarily used in games but can actually be very easily applied to other content. What the deal means for us is that we can now extend our content offering. This doesn’t mean that we’re giving up games because that’s obviously our core business but it means that we’re branching out into other areas."

HandyGames also open to acquisition

August 31st, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Companies & M&A | No Comments »

Following the interview with Karl Woods, we started to look around which other mid-size independent publishers might be open to acquisition. After asking several people in the industry, our focus is on HandyGames. In the Mobile Media magazine of the 11th of August, they already said to de talking around.

Christopher Kassulke, CEO of HandyGames didn’t want to go into details, but did tell us when an acquisition makes sense for the company, they might consider it. However they are surely not interested in just the first one that pops up with a bag of money. The future of the company is the prime objective if anything happens in this field.

Karl Woods: Kiloo waiting to be acquired

August 31st, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Companies & M&A | No Comments »

MobileIndustry.biz yesterday posted their long awaited interview with Karl Woods. Ok, it’s only part one of the interview, but it’s getting interesting from the beginning. As Karl explains, they are currently busy polishing up the company to make it ready for acquisition by one of the current big boys who need experience in the mobile gaming market. As example, Karl stated Activision, one of the major pc/console publishers who doesn’t have it’s own mobile department.