Shawn Fanning's Incredible Shrinking Pay Day: EA Bought Game Company for $15M, Not $30M | Hacker News Reader

Shawn Fanning's Incredible Shrinking Pay Day: EA Bought Game Company for $15M, Not $30M

alleyinsider.com

7 pointsnickb5 comments

Trying to figure out if this part (on what $15 mill bought EA) is a joke:

  Current Assets: $1 million
  Long-term assets: $1 million
  Acquired in-process technology: $1 million
  Goodwill: $9 million
  Finite-lived intangibles: $6 million
  Liabilities: ($3 million)

Goodwill? Finite-lived intangibles? And what were the liabilities that somehow led to cashflow into EA from Rupture/ThreeSF?

It's not a joke. From the latest 10-Q linked in the article:

Finite-lived intangibles include developed and core technology, carrier contracts, trade name, and subscribers.

Thanks, I was wondering the same thing myself.

If you're not familiar with Goodwill, it is used to account for amounts paid over and above the book value of what was purchased. So if Coke bought Pepsi for 300 million, and Pepsi had a book value of 100 million in Pepsi's internal accounting, Coke would show 200 million in goodwill on it's books, IIRC.

Pretty amazing to get $15m for a site not even out of beta...

I don't see the point of Rupture. A social network for gamers, linking their real life identities to their game identities and keeping all their friends up to do date on their latest achievements in game? (I'm not sure whether most gamers want to link their RL identities closely to their game identities; imagine applying for a job and having a Rupture profile come up in the top 10 google hits on your name...)

It seems vulnerable to being muscled out by improved networking within games; witness the example of Rupture itself, where its first beta implemented extensive integration with Blizzard's World of Warcraft, including creating profiles of players' equipment. Then Blizzard launched its own Armory, forcing Rupture to reconsider, leading to the design we see today, where Rupture serves as a "gaming aggregator and friend network," collecting Xbox Live feeds and Armory profiles, keeping track of changes, and alerting your friends.

All that said, congratulations to Mr. Fanning on the sale.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com