Financially troubled video game company Atari announced on Friday that it sold its kids-oriented Humongous game studio assets to parent company Infogrames Entertainment, which is a separately traded French company. The price was approximately $10.3M, paid in newly issued Infogrames shares.
Given the fact that Infogrames owns 52% of Atari, and has the same Chairman, It must strike at least someone as strange that there were no other bidders willing to pay more than 1x revenue for a brand with historically great assets and apparently historic profitability up through 2003. We are currently in a frothy private equity environment where there are multiple bids for video game companies such as Eidos and where classic entertaiment assets can be profitably exploited across multiple distribution platforms, but no one bid $1 more than the parent company? Looks from the outside like Infogrames got a great deal.
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