European Black Hole – THQ Nordic Still Devours IPs

Table of Contents

• European Black Hole – THQ Nordic Still Devours IPs
• The rollercoaster
• But what to make of all this?

The rollercoaster

From a small, "garage" company, the venture turned into a network of seven stores plus wholesale. But bear in mind that the company was ran by a teenager. His age wasn't the problem, though – it was simply the lack of experience.

Nordic Games was already a nationwide company when Lars decided to sell the business for millions.

The company grew too fast, and, as Lars himself says, it had a "sloppy" business model. Look for new partners became a necessity, but instead of joining companies, Wingefors sold the entire business to Gameplay Stockholm, a domestic division of British Gameplay.com, a video game retailer.

Lars sold his company for almost six million pounds' worth of shares of Nordic Games' new parent company. The British, however, failed at bringing the business back on tracks, and when the dot-com bubble burst, Wingefors bought out its own business back for a single Swedish krona... only to declare bankruptcy in 2004.

Existential crisis

Theoretically, Lars was at the time quite affluent, but the financial crisis reduced his fortune significantly, and because of his career, he had not even finished high school. Back then, he even had the idea of going back to school and starting from scratch, which for a 27-year-old wouldn't probably be easy. And thank God he didn't – otherwise, we'd have one subject less to write about.

He didn't – Lars took all his money, persuaded a few investors, and got back into business. His new idea was to buy games that didn't sell on the Swedish market in bulk, and look for places in the world where they could be liquefied. In an interview with Swedish website entreprenor.se in 2011, he said: "A game that's not popular in Scandinavian countries could be popular in Russia or Australia." He also said that he managed to sell five million games this way in 2010.

The deal, which he called one of the best in his career, is perhaps the best evidence of the type of business aptitude he exhibits. When the British Woolworth retail chain went bankrupt, the Swedes bought tons of overdue games at good prices and resold them with profit. "This deal made us millions," the businessman revealed at one point.

Nordic goes shopping

In 2009, Nordic released WeSing for the Nintendo Wii. It was a red-letter day for the company.

For many years, Nordic had remained a local company that wasn't widely recognized. We usually get excited about publishers who set new trends, build virtual worlds, and come up with new technologies that improve graphics and physics in games. Who cares about a company that makes sure pallets of video games get shipped to the right address?

In the late 2000s, Nordic began releasing their own games, and their hit was WeSing, a karaoke game for the Nintendo Wii. It was a calculated move. These games were wildly popular on PlayStation, but few were available for Nintendo. Nordic noticed this opportunity and seized it.

However, the company only attracted major attention when it began acquiring other businesses and licenses of well-known games. We'll now proceed to listing some of their most high-profile acquisitions. Take a deep breath and follow me:

1. June 2011 – Nordic Games Holding buys JoWood Entertainment and its subsidiaries, including The Adventure Company and DreamCatcher Interactive, as well as the rights to the Painkiller franchise.
2. April 2013 – the second auction of THQ's brands; Nordic obtains the rights to Darksiders, Red Faction, Full Spectrum Warrior and Titan Quest series, among others.
3. June 2013 – Nordic acquires the rights to Desperados.
4. June 2014 – Nordic buys the rights to THQ.
5. August 2015 – Nordic takes over the rights for the Jagged Alliance and North & South series from bitCompser.
6. February 2016 – Nordic buys out the gaming portfolio of Hungarian Digital Reality.
7. October 2016 – the company acquires all NovaLogic brands, including Delta Force and Comanche.
8. February 2018 – Nordic acquires Koch Media and Deep Silver along with a number of licenses, including to Saints Row, Homefront, Dead Island, and an exclusive distribution of the Metro series.
9. July 2018 – Nordic buys out Handy Games .
10. August 2018 – Nordic buys the rights to Timesplitters from Crytek.
11. September 2018 – Nordic buys the rights to the Kingdoms of Amalur from 38 Studio, as well as Alone in the Dark and Act of War from Atari.
12. November 2018 – Nordic acquires the entire Coffe Stain group as well as the Bugbear Studio, the authors of Wreckfest.
13. December 2018 – Nordic buys the rights to the Carmageddon series.
14. February 2019 – Nordic buys Warhorse Studio, the creators of Kingdome Come Deliverance.
15. May 2019 – Nordic buys Piranha Bytes along with the rights to the Gothic and Risen series.
16. August 2019 – Nordic buys Milestone Studio, the creators of Moto GP, and Gunfire Games Studio, which created the last two installments of the Darksiders series.

What do you think about this portfolio? I should only add that I omitted a few less interesting deals for the sake of economy.