Ken Burnside on how screwed Asmodee is

[Warpiglet-7]

This may not be related but I was worried when miniature market was sold to asmodee not so long ago.

In relatively short order changes were made to their online business I was NOT a fan of and I started doing more business elsewhere.

Fast forward a year or so and asmodee sold them already and they closed a Physical store front…

I first shopped miniature market when I was in school and it was in little strip mall!

Don’t know if the weird closing and change of ownership is related completely correlation not causation but I am raising an eyebrow.

 

[nevin]

pretty common story these days. This is what happens when too much cheap money is available. companies play games like this it turns into hot potato. Eventually interest rates go up and the Last guy holding the company gets to file the bankruptcy.

Its what's happening to Red Lobster. All the BS about unlimited Shrimp is silly. first investment company that bought them sold all the real estate that they owned and started leasing the restaurants instead of being rent free, that company made a profit selling the real estate and then resold them. Several other bad decisions by investment firms later and Red Lobster is blaming unlimited shrimp on it's way down the tubes because it's overloaded with debt.

Happened to blockbuster too. You never hear they paid 90 percent of their debt off, recession hit and the high interest rates and bridge loans took them almost exactly right back to the billion dollar mark of debt in one year. Not a billion dollars in debt trying to do stuff, a billion dollars in debt taking high interest bridge loans and eventually long term financing. they owed more to the guys that did the bridge loans than the they owed to the banks for long term financing. They were a zombie company after that. Pretty common story but the papers never tell it. It's always amazon killed somoene, or netflix killed someone, not the bad decisions, that buried the company in debt.

 

[MNblockhead]

I know Ravensburger do board games but do they also do RPGs, CCGs...etc?

Don't know. My feeling is the loss of Asmodee would mainly hit the board games market hard. After they bought Fantasy Ground Flight Games, they seemed to quickly de-prioritize the RPG products. But I never played FFG's/Asmodee's TTRPGs, yet I have bought a lot of their board games, so that skews my perceptions.

 

[aramis erak]

I'm trying to get an idea of how big Asmodee is and what games will be affected. I'm scanning through Wikipedia pages and clicking links of their different subsidiaries, and this is what I'm putting together...

This is essentially the biggest of the popular "nerdy" board game companies. It's not stuff like Monopoly, but basically every boardgame that is popular enough to be in Target and also with crossover appeal to actual gamers - Catan, Pandemic, Ticket to Ride, etc.

Without hyperbole, it's basically safe to say that if Asmodee goes under, that's the end of the era of mass appeal boardgames.

Amongst their imprints: FFG, Days of Wonder, Edge Studios, Catan Studios, Z-Man Games, Lookout games...
Those are the half-dozen I recognized of the over a dozen listedc on Asmodee's Website.
Asmodee failing is BIG news for the state of the industry.

 

[TerraDave]

Productive assets (especially IP) can generally survive bankruptcy. It’s the creditors that lose out. If debt was in fact transferred to an unviable company they could sue. But it could get messy.

 

[dbm]

After they bought Fantasy Ground

I presume you meant Fantasy Flight Games? I don’t see anything online that suggests they own Fantasy Grounds?

Edit for typo

 

[dragoner]

I am a certified financial manager (fancy name for an accountant) it was pretty clear what was happening, it happens a lot. They can't unload all the debt without having some value, though with a lot of things today, it is overvalued. Likely titles will be sold, and return.

Overvalued: Definition, Example, Stock Investing Strategies

Overvalued stocks are defined as equities with a current price that experts expect to drop because it is not justified by the earnings outlook or price-earnings ratio.

www.investopedia.com

 

[Thomas Shey]

Productive assets (especially IP) can generally survive bankruptcy. It’s the creditors that lose out. If debt was in fact transferred to an unviable company they could sue. But it could get messy.

Asmodee is probably not nonviable by any relevant standard, they just overleveraged it.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

I can see when it goes bankrupt eventually Hasbro/WotC scooping up choice IP for cheap.

 

[MNblockhead]

I presume you meant Fantasy Flight Games? I don’t see anything online that suggests they of Fantasy Grounds?

Ugh, sorry. Yes. I'll correct my prior post.