What happens when a company merge or is sold to another ?

**Franzh11** · 04-23-2012

Hello yall, since i dont know much how the industry works, I was wondering what happens to a, exemple, videogame company ( developper ) that is sold to another company and/or merge within a company. For what purpose an '' X'' videogame enterprise would like to buy ''Y'' enterprise ? I know primary its to own the copyright of ''Y'' company, but any else reason ?

do all the assets of ''Y'' videogame enterprise is now owned by the '' X'' one ?

thanks for delighting me on that. I know some of you wonder why I'm wanting to know this....

its a joy to know more about things that we'd wondered.

**Borman** · 04-23-2012

Depends on the company really. Contracts will dictate where things end up. Sometimes the entire company is bought, sometimes some IP, heck, sometimes only a name.

**Shadowlayer** · 04-25-2012

Most the time is just IP, like franchises, names, arts, etc... all the stuff you need to legally make a sequel to a game, and the reason why tons of kickass devs are stuck and can't make a second one...

Only a few are what you could call "talent mergers", and thats because good devs who dont like shitty working conditions (*cough* EA! *cough*) can always GTFO there and get a better job elsewhere, but still sometimes the people you got are complete retards who cant make a decent game, so you go and buy a smaller company with decent people on board and get them to stay by not paying for their stock until an X amount of time, meaning that if they leave they loose the stocks, and thus a shitload of money.

Bottom line, they always keep the IP, unless you offer to buy it back, like Fargo did with Wasteland