Asmodee Acquires Fantasy Flight Games
From time to time, we’ve talked about Fantasy Flight Games, a company at the very forefront of the resurgence of fantasy board games in the United States. Their catalog includes some of the most popular and acclaimed genre board games and RPGs of the last decade, including Deathwatch, Descent: Journeys in the Dark, Dust Tactics, Merchant of Venus, Middle-Earth Quest, Relic, Runebound, StarCraft, Talisman, Tide of Iron, Twilight Imperium, A Game of Thrones, Age of Conan, Arkham Horror, BattleLore, Battlestar Galactica, Star Wars X-Wing Miniatures, and many, many others.
France-based board game publisher Asmodee may not be as familiar to many of you, but we’ve mentioned them a few times — most recently with our coverage of their fantasy exploration game Cyclades and the massive space epic Eclipse.
On Monday, Asmodee announced that it had acquired Fantasy Flight Games. Leaders of both companies are trumpeting the strategic benefits of a merger, as it will give Asmodee access to Fantasy Flight’s North American operations and marketing infrastructure, and in return Flight Games will benefit from Asmodee’s distribution and marketing prowess in Europe. No plans to move Fantasy Flight’s headquarters from St. Paul, Minnesota were announced.
This is the second major acquisition for Asmodee this year. Back in August, they announced the acquisition of Days of Wonder, publishers of Ticket to Ride, Shadows Over Camelot, Small World, Pirate’s Cove, Memoir ’44, and many other board games.
No immediate changes to Fantasy Flight are anticipated, which will be a relief to most fans. Read the complete details, including an FAQ on the merger, here.
[…] jumped over to the Fantasy Flight Games website last night as I was fact-checking my article on their acquisition by Asmodee, when what did I discover but a major holiday sale, running from […]
I could understand Days of Wonder being bought out. There name is synonymous with quality over quantity, but Fantasy Flight! Better yet they bought them both in the same year.
I hope they don’t try to relocated/fire some people at FFG. The games they’ve been producing have been very successful. It would be a mistake to change that format.
I don’t think anything bad will come from this merger but I’ve always felt that more competition was healthy for any industry, even a small niche market like hobby games.
I don’t think that Asmodee publishes Eclipse, I believe they are distributors for Lautapelit.fi instead.
I don’t think this is good for gaming in general, as it will reduce the number of game companies with their own vision.
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> I hope they don’t try to relocated/fire some people at FFG. The games they’ve been
> producing have been very successful. It would be a mistake to change that format.
Glenn,
No argument from me. FF has produced some really terrific games over the past 10 years, and I owe them a big debt of thanks.
With surprise mergers/acquisitions like this, there’s almost always more to the story. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that FF needed cash. Perhaps they overextended themselves, perhaps they simply had one too many quarters when revenues weren’t what they projected.
When you reach a point like that, a merger often seems like the best choice among unattractive options.
> I don’t think anything bad will come from this merger but I’ve always felt that more competition was
> healthy for any industry, even a small niche market like hobby games.
Agree completely. FF has done splendidly well for itself as an independent entity for a long time. That’s why I suspect there’s more to the story of this sudden acquisition.
> I don’t think that Asmodee publishes Eclipse, I believe they are distributors for Lautapelit.fi instead.
JLB,
I believe you are correct. Thanks for the correction.
> I don’t think this is good for gaming in general, as it will reduce the number of game companies with their own vision.
I don’t either. But perhaps it was the best way for FF to survive in a recognizable form for the foreseeable future. We’ll probably never know.