Quite a symbol. At the end of 2021, the main French publisher Asmodee, whose catalog displays games as popular as Jungle Speed or Time’s Up, was bought at a high price, 3 billion euros (including part in shares), by the Swedish group Embracer. In less than ten years, the value of this company has multiplied by more than twenty. Valued at 143 million euros in 2014, when it was purchased by the French investment fund Eurazeo, Asmodee was worth 1.2 billion euros in 2018, when it was sold to the investment fund PAI Partners.
Over the past ten years, the group based in Yvelines has multiplied the takeovers of studios (Days of Wonder, Repos Production, Libellud, Plan B Games, etc.) and all-out developments. In addition to the online gaming platform Board Game Arena, acquired in 2021, Asmodee has also acquired the specialized site Tric Trac as well as Philibert, the main mail-order site in France. Publisher, Asmodee is also a distributor – the company notably obtained, in 2013, the exclusive contract for the very popular Pokémon cards in France.
Hachette makes acquisitions
A meteoric rise for this company launched in 1995, after an initial experience in the publishing of role-playing games, and which is today one of the main global companies in the sector.
Faced with Asmodee, Hachette has also carried out, since 2019, a series of acquisitions, by buying the publishers Gigamic, Funnyfox, The masked Scorpion, but also the distributor Blackrock Games. On Wednesday February 23, the group announced the takeover of the independent publisher La Boite de jeu (It’s a Wonderful World, In the hollow of your hand, etc.)
If the concentration of the sector is accelerating, SMEs remain, despite everything, much more present than in video games. “In addition, many enthusiasts go through crowdfunding platforms to launch their projects independently, which are sometimes then bought by a publisher”, explains Frédérique Tutt, games and toys specialist at NPD Group.