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Has EA’s acquisition strategy shifted from content to distribution?
The acquisition of Chillingo by EA last week set tongues wagging, particularly when Angry Bird’s developer Rovio went on an aggressive PR campaign to emphasise that the rights to Angry Birds were not part of the deal.
Analysts and twitterers expressed their surprise that EA had bought a publisher, rather than the IP. As Thaddeus Frogley tweeted to me:
“Time and time again, IP is proven to deliver value, more so than tech, property, or staff … buying installed userbase is new.”
That set me thinking. Historically, Electronic Arts had a very powerful distribution machine. Its relationships with retailers and its financial and marketing muscle enabled it to maintain a very powerful position as a dominant publisher of boxed games.
if you dominate distribution, what you really want to buy is Intellectual Property. You then take that IP, stuff it through your distribution machine and make twice as much money from that IP as a lesser publisher, with less muscle, could make.
Acquisitions that were all about IP made sense.
But EA’s distribution power began to erode a few years ago. As Mitch Lasky, former CEO of Jamdat (acquired by EA) and now a general partner at Benchmark, said:
“[For Electronic Arts] it was really their distribution muscle that was responsible for their tremendous success… The world changed in 2004. Really, really changed. Obviously, the shiny discs didn’t go away. But the primacy of the shiny discs as the sole method of distribution for the videogame industry started to erode.”
So if EA no longer has such a lock on distribution muscle, then IP acquisitions are no longer the only sensible deals.
Distribution acquisitions now make sense too.
That set me thinking about the acquisitions of Playfish – a leading publisher of games on Facebook – and Chillingo – a leading publisher of games on iPhone.
I think that these deals make more sense if viewed through the prism of distribution, not intellectual property. Playfish did bring IP, but it also brought a huge audience to cross-promote EA’s existing IP too, as well as an understanding of Facebook, virtual goods and social games.
Chillingo didn’t bring IP. But it brought a massive installed base of users (after all, Angry Birds alone has sold 6.5 million units), connected through the company’s Crystal technology.
Both Playfish and Chillingo look like distribution deals to me. Not just any old distribution either, but distribution on platforms that EA did not have access to before.
I’m now trying to look around to see what other businesses offer the kind of distribution that EA – and other publishers – need.
(Although, for the record, I don’t think Steam fits the bill).
What do you think?
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