Imperia Online is looking for new game assets to acquire! Their CBDO Mariela Tzvetanova published a Linkedin article on the pros of selling a game asset and how it can be a successful strategy to boost your company’s profits.
Imperia Online is a part of Stillfront Group, a leading free-to-play powerhouse, which has grown significantly during the past year with the acquisitions of game studios Storm8, Candywriter, Nanobit and Everguild.
Since becoming part of Stillfront, a lot of opportunities have opened up for Imperia Online. The company has recently started to focus on live-ops as a service, based on its 15 years of experience with its own successful games. Early this year, Imperia Online successfully overtook operations of the game Siege: World War II from its sister-company Simutronics. Siege: World War II is developing well with maintained daily active users and revenue, without having to depend on constant user acquisition.
Now it seems that Imperia Online is looking to acquire more game assets from other companies.To talk more on that topic we’ve contacted Imperia Online’s CBDO Mariela Tzvetanova.
PocketGamer.biz: Hi Mariela, nice to have you here again. You’ve been with the company for seven years now, tell us what has changed since the last time we spoke and your new projects.
Mariela Tzvetanova: Hi, great to be here. Yes, that is right. Seven and a half years with the Imperia Online team and the past two as part of Stillfront Group. With the success of Siege: World War II, we decided that it is time to expand our portfolio of games even more. We want to take on already published titles from other companies and improve them with our proven mechanics that we’ve been implementing in our own games. We are experts in live-ops and know how to handle big IPs.
Why did you decide to move from working with live-ops on existing titles to acquiring new IPs?
The whole idea is to find a great game that hasn’t been performing to its full potential in recent years, like Siege, and give it the full attention it deserves. It can be a huge relief for game studios to divest underperforming assets to free up resources and time to focus on newer projects.
How do you plan to seal the deal?
We’re looking for an asset acquisition which is a win-win situation for both parties- we only buy the asset, not the whole company.
That sounds like a great solution for both parties. Do you have any specifics or criteria when searching for a game?
Essentially, we specialise in the MMO, RTS, RPG, Action, Strategy genres and we’re looking for games from these categories. We’re mostly looking at games that were published a couple of years back and that have declining revenue trends, as these are most likely to be up for sale.
Why do you think that this would be attractive for the selling game studio?
A game can be a very costly asset, especially when it hasn’t generated enough revenue for the past couple of years. Operating costs can quickly eat up your profit when revenues start to decline.
What is the point of keeping an asset that holds you back?
Selling an asset is not only a quick way to earn extra cash, but it also frees up additional resources for you to invest in your most important titles.
That is very true. Is this a long process?
We’ve been on the lookout for about two months now and we’re already in contact with a couple of studios. We are always present at events and conferences and we receive a lot of requests from there too. Thankfully we are a very consistent and productive team.
Thank you for your time, Mariela. It has been a pleasure and good luck to you in the future.
Thank you for having me!
Should you like to know more about Imperia Online’s new projects or if you have a game asset that you think would be of interest, please contact them on biz.dev@imperiaonline.org to schedule a call.
