Midway Games sold for $100 000 (not a joke)

    http://www.edge-online.com/news/midway-sold-00012-share

    Midway Sold for $0.0012 per Share

    The 20-year-old Mortal Kombat Publisher Midway has been sold by its owning investor Sumner Redstone for the rock-bottom price of $100,000, a Midway regulatory filing confirms.

    Sumner Redstone, the 85-year-old chairman of National Amusements sold the company at $0.0012 per share on November 28. Midway investors National Amusement Inc. and Sumco also sold a combined 68 million Midway shares. Combined, the three parties sold approximately an 87.2 percent stake in the company.

    Though that selling price seems absurd at face value, in selling Midway Redstone will make an $800 million tax saving for National Amusements. The firm is reported to have an outstanding debt of $1.6 billion.

    A Wall Street Journal reported said that an investor, Mark Thomas, purchased Midway.

    The future of Midway, which recently understood it may be delisted from the NY Stock Exchange, hangs in the balance.

    Update: Added Midway filing information.

    Can't he just cancel out those debts with earnings elsewhere to avoid tax?

    -e- Lol, first I read 1.6 million in debt and thought it was a little little, then I saw the "b"

    Wow, that $800m tax break is pretty sweet. Not exactly great when put up against $1.6b of debt, but still.

    Although as Frie says, they're also inheriting a lot of debt from Midway: $70m.

    afaik midway complained about ue3 being the biggest mistake they bought last year - they equipped every studio with it and it turned out they weren't able to work with it probably as it wasn't as flexible as they thought it'd be. gotta find the link to that interview :S

    http://weblogs.variety.com/the_cut_scen ... t-wen.html

    Quote

    To find out, I spoke to several ex-employees. And while there were lots of little things, one issue popped up again and again: Midway's decision to license Unreal Engine and use it for ALL its games."The mistake we made was, instead of just taking the base Unreal 3 engine that 'Gears of War' was made on and building games off of that, we let our tech and product development guys try to really modify the engine to add all these diff things," one ex-employee told me. "It was a ton of new technology which they just weren’t capable of doing. It put all the games way behind schedule."

    Even though Midway invested millions in building a common tech base for all its studios, apparently they all had to adapt UE3 for each project, which meant they couldn't share resources in a timely manner, so none of the promised benefits materialized. Making the code work for PS3 was particularly hard, sources said, and so games just weren't coming out. Look at the first half of 2007, when all Midway shipped was "Lord of the Rings Online" for Turbine, or the first half of this year, when all it shipped was "Unreal Tournament III" for Epic.

    Combine that with Midway's relatively weak cash position, as former Chief Marketing Officer Steve Allison explained, and it was a recipe for disaster.

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