Welcome to Lootbox - The Business Side of Video Games

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What’s in this Lootbox?

• 📢 Spliced Comes Out of Stealth

• 🏁 Max 🤝 EA Sports

• 💰️ Quordle Got Acquired

• 📷️ Meme

📢 Spliced Comes Out of Stealth

Last June I was working at Amazon Games Studios and flew out to our studio in Orange County for a covid-delayed launch party. While I was there I found out one of our best backend engineers was leaving and joining a stealth video game studio. 8 months later Spliced Inc comes out of stealth as a new studio partnering with NetEase.

There’s still very little information about the studio except they are “building the future”, but this will be one to watch.

The studio was co-founded by the CTO Brian Neal who previously worked at Amazon and EA.

🏁 Max 🤝 EA Sports

Electronic Arts has signed a partnership with Formula 1 World Champion Max Verstappen to collaborate on content creation across the EA Sports portfolio and will sponsor him for the 2023 season with EA Sports branding on his race helmet.

This follows the surprising success of EA Sports F1 ‘22 which “materially outperformed” EA’s expectations according to CFO Chris Suh.

Netflix’s Drive to Survive series really did a number on the sport and the impact has made it all the way to EA’s balance sheet.

💰️ Quordle Got Acquired

The Wordle copycat Quordle was recently acquired by Merriam-Webster. Tbh we have no clue who/what Merriam-Webster is and this week we’re too lazy to look it up.

The original Worlde was acquired by the NYT early 2022 for a reported $1M. Not bad for a side project.

The purchase price of Quordle was not disclosed but given it was already monetized via ads it is likely acquired fore well north of $1M.

This is a good reminder that word games are still very much in-demand.

📷️ Meme

This is for all the Apex Legends fans reading this.

Thanks for Reading :)

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