{"id":8026,"date":"2010-11-12T11:20:02","date_gmt":"2010-11-12T19:20:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dfcint.com\/dossier\/?post_type=news&#038;p=8026"},"modified":"2018-08-01T18:04:45","modified_gmt":"2018-08-01T18:04:45","slug":"viacom-to-sell-harmonix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dfcint.com\/dossier\/viacom-to-sell-harmonix\/","title":{"rendered":"Viacom to Sell Harmonix"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_9853\" style=\"width: 400px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-9853\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-9853 size-full\" src=\"http:\/\/www.dfcint.com\/dossier\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/11\/Harmonix_logo-S-e1428644319290.jpg\" alt=\"For sale!\" width=\"390\" height=\"97\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-9853\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">For sale!<\/p><\/div>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">NOV. 12, 2010 \u2022 After reporting that its profit dropped 59% in the most recent quarter, Viacom Inc. said it would sell its Harmonix game division.\u00a0 Harmonix is best known for creating the Rock Band franchise.\u00a0 The music segment became over-saturated with sequels and related hardware by 2010, leading to declining consumer interest in such titles. Viacom&#8217;s game unit lost about $65 million the company disclosed in a conference call. &#8220;The console-games business requires an expertise and scale that we don&#8217;t have,&#8221; Viacom chief executive Philippe Dauman said on the call.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\"><em>Impact: One of the challenges entertainment and media firms outside the gaming industry continually face in this business is how to be nimble in a market at the mercy of relentless changes in technology and the consumer fads they spawn.\u00a0 The high growth the overall retail games industry experienced in 2007 and 2008 was largely due to the Wii and guitar based music games.\u00a0 One of the signs of music category contraction DFC saw in late 2008 was the high portion of guitar game disc-only sales, indicating growth of new music game consumers were likely going to drop, particularly in the face of the financial crisis, the effects of which persisted through 2009 and into this year.\u00a0 Viacom is not the only major outsider firm that found significant challenge in the gaming industry.\u00a0 Turner\u2019s ill-fated Gametap is a prime example, as was Fox\u2019s 1990&#8217;s effort and Universal\u2019s early slates.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NOV. 12, 2010 \u2022 After reporting that its profit dropped 59% in the most recent quarter, Viacom Inc. said it would sell its Harmonix game division.\u00a0 Harmonix is best known for creating the Rock Band franchise.\u00a0 The music segment became over-saturated with sequels and related hardware by 2010, leading to declining consumer interest in such [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[123,78],"tags":[424,451,119],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dfcint.com\/dossier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8026"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dfcint.com\/dossier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dfcint.com\/dossier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dfcint.com\/dossier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dfcint.com\/dossier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8026"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.dfcint.com\/dossier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13836,"href":"https:\/\/www.dfcint.com\/dossier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8026\/revisions\/13836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dfcint.com\/dossier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dfcint.com\/dossier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dfcint.com\/dossier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}