Consolidate or Quit?

In many ways the games market now is like the Cold War. No, Electronic Arts have not just bought the entire nuclear arsenal of a small ex-Soviet Block country; it is just the take over or be taken over strategy that the market leaders seem to be following. Not so much you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours, more "Hey, jump into my bed! The more the merrier!". But is this necessarily a good thing? The industry is rapidly polarizing around a number of key players who are handing over large pots of gold in return for an ever-increasing market share. Shades of Microsoft on the horizon? The big players are keen to stress that nothing counter-competitive is going on, but many of the smaller fry who are being crushed underfoot are keen to cry out.....

First, let's have a round up of the recent actions and reactions. The Virgin Group, on the back of a series of bad financial results and disappointing showings from supposedly top games, caved in and sold its actually quite promising future portfolio to Interplay. However, during the transition, a number of games were poached, and some that were scheduled for Virgin releases have popped up in odd places. Perhaps the biggest coup here was Westwood Studios (of C+C and Red Alert fame) defecting to Electronic Arts. The biggest movers seemed to be the French, with previously unknown Titus instantly becoming a major force by pairing with Interplay. Perhaps the biggest victim of the cutthroat market conditions was former big shot Telstar, who ended up pulling the plug on what had turned into a profoundly unsuccessful games division, selling the twitching corpse on to Take 2. Also on the French front, erstwhile Gallic Top Guns Infogrames merged with Gremlin.

It is not all doom and gloom, however, as a number of people have paid big money to gain a foothold in the market. Toys and entertainment giants Hasbro jumped onto the electronic bandwagon in what many saw as a too little, too late move. Their electronic division seemed to be totally strait-jacketed, committed as they were to making seemingly endless conversions of actually quite boring traditional Hasbro games. Not one of the "Bored Game" conversions, as they were dubbed by a trade magazine, has ever done really well. A line up of Risk 2, Monopoly 2 (different houses??) and Subbuteo (turn-based soccer? What the hell?.....). Then something somewhere clicked, and they snapped up top developer Microprose from under the eyes of the recognized industry leaders, and are also widely believed to be eyeing up Europress. All of a sudden, Hasbro have three games in the Top 10, and none of them even vaguely board games-related (at the time of press, Star Trek: Birth of the Federation, Mechwarrior 3 and Rollercoaster Tycoon were all riding high in the ELSPA Chart).

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