UK Codemasters Sold to Take-Two Games
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Take-Two gets massive subsidies to make "british games". Namely the "british cultural game" Grand Theft Auto. How!? Yes, how is GTA a british game? Well you see Take-Two bought Rockstar, which itself was a formerly a fully UK owned company.
Now Take-Two has turned around and is buying out one of the UK's few remaining publishers. No doubt the UK will now pay Take-Two yet more generous subsidies to keep Codemasters running.
The UK government is literally taxing domestic industries to subsidize an over seas corporation to further buy out UK industry. This is not a cohesive plan. The last thing the UK needs is to hollow out yet more industry.
Rockstar was from UK? I thought the first GTA was developed by Rockstar Canada? And its former self BMG Interactive Entertainment was part of the German arm of Bertelsmann AG.
I dont see how UK Government and public money has anything to do with all this, care to explain in more details?
Rockstar is the studio formerly known as DMA Designs. DMA Designs is/was a british studio. DMA later changed their name to Rockstar. At one point yes, a subsidiary of Rockstar created GTA.
Rockstar was later purchased by Take-Two. This was during the era publishers often strong armed their developers into acquisitions so no doubt there was some bullying involved. Take-Two receives a large portion of the major UK games development subsidy pot[1].
Take-Two has now, as per this article, buying yet another UK devloper/publisher. The UK games industry is getting hollowed out. All while the UK public is subsidizing the very companies performing the surgery.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/games/2019/oct/02/revealed-globa...
Notice how the site claims cultural "British-ness" to be a requirement. Yet in reality GTA V passed this apparently low barrier.
More likely the British-ness requirement is nothing more than a fig-leaf to appease the European Commission.
Rockstar North are the main developer of the mainline GTA games, and they get subsidised because of that, because it's made in Britain and is recognised as "culturally British". Which, it sort of is, everyone knows GTA is made in Scotland.
Code masters as thanks for being diligent tax payers has now been bought out by the very entity abusing the UK tax code. You can easily see how such a bad actor could pay more!
I've looked into ownership of old game IP's, for either remake/running on modern systems to asking if they'll make them legally freeware, and finding who owns an old IP after years of buyouts, mergers, selloffs, bankruptcies, etc is difficult if not impossible in some cases.
To be fair to them, this is the company that re-released remastered X-Com games, along with the Mafia games.
I wouldn't expect to see Dizzy happen again, but you never know...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Twins
But yeah I have a lot of good memories of the Dizzy series, on the ZX Spectrum, along with their other cheap & cheerful releases.
- purchased by the learning company, which got bought by softkey
- combined company was sold to mattel
- mattel interactive was sold to gores technology group
- gores sold some to ubisoft and some to riverdeep
- products were published by encore under license from riverdeep
- riverdeep merged with houghton mifflin and later acquired harcourt to become houghton mifflin harcourt
- hmh went through two rounds of restructuring and a recapitalization
- encore went through some buying/selling/bankruptcy themselves
Who owns the IP? Did it survive all the way to hmh and stay through the restructurings?
I've looked up some bankruptcy records for other smaller software companies, and they've had hundreds of debtors, some of which themselves have since went bankrupt.
encore is not relevant, riverdeep would have granted a one off license to create a game, not transferred ownership of the IP.
The OP is only trying to figure out whom to contact first about the IP. The worst that can happen is that a company replies it's not with them.
A merging/acquisition will transfer all IP to the (new) parent company. A contracting company will grant a license to make one game, not reassign all its IP to the game studio.
I don't think OPs guess is in any way educated. The whole point of this thread is that the rights for these games are complicated, and assuming that the most straightforward explanation is true is just wrong.
> A merging/acquisition will transfer all IP to the (new) parent company.
That's a bold statement that is definitely not always true. There are many reasons why it wouldn't happen, either the acquisition wasn't done properly, or maybe the IP might be kept to ensure any liability would fall on the acquired company.
>. A contracting company will grant a license to make one game, not reassign all its IP to the game studio.
Again, that's the most _likely_ explanation, but there are other very possible ones such as - the company who granted the rights to a contractor didn't have the rights to grant them in the first place, or they granted all rights to games of an IP (see EA and star wars), or some sort of right of first refusal.
https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Spelunker
Then you might be interested to know https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2020/06/evercade_retro_sys...
Also, I happen to live in Birmingham and commute to Coventry. In the Birmingham museum and art gallery I was surprised to find an Amiga 500 used by the LSD demoscene group on display.
Think I played the first one on an Amstrad with the ol' green screen. They made a lot of decent games.
Also, very arcade racing games trying to pass as simulations.
Can someone with more business sense explain why the timing of this worked out this way?
According to Wikipedia, Codemasters HQ is in Southam, which is a tiny town halfway attractive UK hotspots like Birmingham and Milton Keynes [0].
Similarly, Epic is in Cary, NC, a suburb of Raleigh. A bit less "middle of nowhere" than Southam maybe, but still, not particularly San Francisco or London either. What's up with that? Have game studios simply been remote longer? Or do gamedevs actually relocate en-masse to places like Southam and Cary for their jobs? How does this work? What's the employer pitch? "Sure, there's like one bar and half a supermarket, but you'll get to work on cool race games!"? (I'm not being dismissive, I'm genuinely curious if this is "a thing" and if so, how this works)
[0] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Southam,+UK/@52.2523264,-2...
Source: worked in Paris for a medium Game Studio on a small wage before calling it quits
Do you mean the opposite of dearth?
Many years ago I once had to visit Rare for work and was surprised by the security. I wonder if part of it is that they aren't going to be visited by a constant stream of fans if they're harder to reach/find. From outside the gates it was totally un-obvious that it was the HQ of one of the most influential game dev studios of the 80s and 90s.
That being said, plenty of companies are still based in reasonably sized towns: Jagex and Frontier are both in a science park on the edge of Cambridge, EA in Guildford certainly used to be and maybe still are in an otherwise normal business park.
And Leamington is quite attractive - not a bad place to live. Coventry is probably ok too. Personally I would much rather be in a town like Leamington Spa than Birmingham or Milton Keynes. In general, small and medium size towns in the UK are far nicer than the big cities.
Infrastructure is as much a factor as proximity I'd say.
Did enjoy the small Chinese place in the city centre though :)
Also I'd imagine game dev is quite insular, it's not B2B other than dealing with publishers, so no need to be in close proximity to any "tech hub"
The value proposition for employees is an interesting one, I guess the allure of working in games is enough
Only in the last... 8? Years (aside from Sony) we've seen big places in london, due to massive mobile profits.
Not sure even manchester has gotten many big places since psygnosis.
I think the London Studio is still there, not sure what they are working on now though.
King who make candy crush are near there too, I went for a job interview with them around 6 years ago, you could tell at that time, judging by the offices, they were not strapped for cash...
The low pay thing I think is a misnomer, I worked in games from 1995-2005, and although yeah the pay wasn't great compared to other industries, it wasn't bad, and I worked full-time for three different London based studios and contracted for another two. It was certainly enough to live in London (at least then before the property market went crazy)
[added minutes later] Well, that’s spooky. Guess who is the ninth card in my Facebook ‘people you may know’ this morning...
The Raleigh/Durham area is very car-centric, and Epic is right next to the interstate highway. It's intended that you'll arrive by car, probably via the highway -- which is relatively easy whether you live in Cary, in downtown Raleigh, or somewhere else.
In my twenties, I remember attending a swing dance workshop in Durham. It was very well attended; the instructors had recently moved from San Francisco and had been pioneers in the swing dance community there.
At the time I didn't understand how one could be riding high in San Francisco and want to leave. But people who relocate to Raleigh/Durham often say that they move for the nice weather, for the low cost of living, for the fact that it offers a lot of culture while being fairly laid back.
Nottingham is home of Dambuster Studios (former Free Radical Design Ltd. (later Crytek UK Limited)).
Runescape was also operated from the house of the founders parents in Nottingham before they got their offices, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2003/dec/11/games.onl...
Sumo Digital as well although not sure if they make games in Notts - looks like they have a few locations around the UK
Guildford is such a place for games in the UK. Yes, it's not too far from London but it's also fairly suburban. That sprung from Bullfrog/Lionhead, I guess. Hello Games, Criterion and Media Molecule are all based there.
The most famous example is the Seattle/Redmond area, where that hotspot sprung from Microsoft.
To get to work I had to get a lift to a bus stop 4 miles away, where I'd catch a coach at about 7am that went cross country to Bristol. It would drop me off in Southam, then I'd walk for about half an hour to get to the Codemasters offices which were in remote converted farm buildings outside town.
On my first day I met a guy in Southam who said he worked there so I followed him. We had gone through several muddy fields before I saw that he was wearing wellington boots for the journey. I got to work covered in mud! Luckily nobody seemed to care or notice.
To get home, I'd get a ride back into Southam from a colleague, and wait in a pub for a couple of hours before catching the same coach I came in on. At that point I'd be in another town four miles from home. Then I'd go to a pub where my friends hung out and get a ride back with them. I'd get home about midnight.
I worked out I was losing money by working there, but I was desperate to get into the games industry and out of working class menial labour, so I carried on until my temp contract ran out. If I was more savvy I would have been able to finagle myself a permanent position, but honestly I was a pretty depressed, naïve kid at the time, and didn't really know what I was doing career wise.
Later I had a week long interview at another studio, Attention To Detail (who made Rollcage for the PS1) who were similarly remote. The other big game developer in the region was Blitz Games which was at least in Leamington Spa. I only had to get 2 buses to get to my interview there.
All the game developers I applied to were incredibly slow in their communications. It would take weeks to arrange an interview and subsequently get a response back from them. I often thought, "Can I afford to take the time to apply to another games company?" Eventually I got into web dev with a couple of friends of mine, and work on games in my own time.
There's a wider issue with UK businesses being a bit unambitious, and staying in locations where availability of employees affects their ability to grow. But there are far worse places than Devon.
So in this case it seems like a literal physical expansion of the classic garage coder idea.
If you look at older companies they're often headquartered in second or third tier areas. Not middle of nowhere but also not the hip city. Seattle wasn't a hot place when Microsoft started there. South Bay (Google, Yahoo, etc, etc.) is pretty desolate compared to San Francisco and an 45 minute drive away. However commercial rent is cheaper and there's room to expand over time.
It's only companies that don't have good ways of pulling in employees that tend to locate in the hip areas as they need every advantage they can get.
edit: Also if your employees are older and with kids then they value more than living in the "hip" places. They want a nice calm suburban location with good schools.