RECENT COMMENTS

ADVERTISERS

Advertise via Culture Pundits





Water Cooler Games

a forum for the uses of videogames in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment



ABOUT
About This Site - RSS Feed

Ian Bogost (editor)
Gonzalo Frasca (editor emeritus)


SPONSORS
Visit Persuasive Games
Visit Powerful Robot


COMMUNITY

Viacom/MTV buys Atom Entertainment
August 10, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Viacom's MTV Networks division has bought Atom Entertainment, who run Shockwave.com, AddictingGames.com (which we've linked to recently for a few newsgames), AtomFilms.com, and AddictingClips.com. The acquisition price was a respectable $200 million.

This is an interesting acquisition for a few reasons. The rest of the world will probably note that the broadcast/media conglomerate ownership of a short films portal like Atom Films and the YouTubesque AddictingClips will offer new opportunities for moving niche and grassroots/fandom films up and down the broadcast chain. But most important to note for our audience is this fact: the acquisition of two casual games portals by a true network opens up many interesting possibilities for the future of such games. It will be interesting to see how this develops.



Comment from David Clearwater on August 14, 2006

Hmmm... I just worry that these new assets will simply become a cross-platform marketing tool for other Viacom products rather than anything else (I'm such a pessimist). I have noticed that Fox has been using their recently acquired My Space to do this sort of thing.

Comment from Gameboy on August 16, 2006

does anyone know if atom was profitable? and if so any guess at their revenues?


POST A COMMENT

Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)


Remember me?



TRACKBACKS

SELF PROMOTION

RECENT ARTICLES
My New Column: Disjunctive Play

Gamasutra has published my latest "Persuasive Games" column, Disjunctive Play. The column mostly discusses Jason Rohrer's new game Between, but ...

Missile in the HASTAC

The HASTAC consortium has just announced a forum hosted by their HASTAC Scholars fellows on digital games, entitled Participatory Play: ...

Pekid Oil

Molleindustria has released a new game about the history and hypothetical future of oil, called Oiligarchy. The game feature's M's ...

Announcing the Journalism & Games Research Project

I'm excited to announce the first public materials from a research project on Journalism and Videogames, which I've been pursuing ...

Politics and Games at Harvard

It's been quiet around here! Next week I'll share the cause of it. Until then, I did a talk at ...

Click Archaeology

One More Election Game

My New Column: The Birth and Death of the Election Game

Truth Invaders

Mad Men Jeopardy


FAVORITES

ALSO VISIT
  Copyright © Ian Bogost & Gonzalo Frasca, unless otherwise noted. Re-printing for commercial purposes by permission only (contact us: ). Re-printing for educational purposes is allowed with proper attribution.