Mayfair Games Announces They Are Ending Publishing
February 9, 2018 by stvitusdancern
Mayfair Games has just announced in the past few hours that they have come to the difficult decision to end publishing games.
They have reached an agreement with Asmodee North American to buy all of their assets and take over their titles. Here is the official announcement:
As of today, the management team at Mayfair Games, Inc. announces we will wind down game publishing. After 36 years, this was not an easy decision or one we took lightly, but it was necessary. Once we had come to this conclusion, we knew we had to find a good home for our games which is when we reached out to Asmodee.
We are pleased to announce that we have sold our games to Asmodee North America, who have acquired all the assets of Mayfair Games, Inc. This acquisition includes the product line for both Mayfair Games, Inc and Lookout Games, GmbH.
We would like to take a moment to say - Thank You!
Thank you to the many retailers, reviewers, customers, industry partners, and volunteers, who made us a success over the past 36 years! You helped bring our games to game stores and cafes, conventions, libraries, schools, kitchen tables, backyard patios, family vacations, and more... where thousands of fans have been introduced to this great world of board gaming. Thank you!!
This is very surprising news as we had not seen any indication of these changes happening. It does beg the question of what Gen Con will look like this year as Mayfair Games was a major sponsor.
What do you think of this news?
"Mayfair Games has just announced in the past few hours that they have come to the difficult decision to end publishing games..."
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Mayfair made/make what I think is the best card game I’ve played which is Family Business
IMHO, the industry may need to consolidate to continue to grow, but at the same time it worries me because Asmodee is also going to drop a lot of games and with any consolidation, prices will go up. From what I can see, the only one benefiting from the consolidation is Asmodee.
@turbocooler I have to disagree because ultimately, if the company just went straight out of business without selling its IP, then the IP could potentially be lost forever. So for fans of the games having a new lease of life on them is better than nothing at all.
It doesn’t work like that @mage mate 🙂 if they had just went pop an administrator would have been appointed and the assets and IP would have been sold that way.
There is always a reasonable chance strong ips will continue.
I’m being pedantic here, (especially in this case) but I don’t think that’s quite right (or maybe I misunderstand “pop” 🙂 or the differences between the legal system in the US and UK.) If Mayfair just decides to close up shop, they have no requirement to sell their IP as long as they don’t owe anyone any money. The law steps in/administrator gets assigned in cases where the company still owes money as a way of trying to resolve those outstanding debts in the most fair way possible (supposedly; I’ve been on the wrong side of that dispute and never… Read more »
Yeah by pop I mean involuntary insolvency 🙂
Any company could of course decide to close and not sell IP or assets but in that case it would be a pretty unusual and deliberate decision to make 🙂
Interesting, clearly you know more on the matter than myself and I won’t dispute any of the points you make.
I will express surprise that nobody picked up AT-43 (I know Confrontation had a chance of coming back but the right owners went with… was it Wrath of Kings instead?)
Sad for Mayfair …. Back in the late 80s they were heavy hitters and I loved their DC RPG
I’ll bet GenCon, LLC will be watching this VERY closely.
Small industry so you can bet Gencon have known for some time 🙂
Getting sick of hearing that Asmodee have acquired yet another games company. The industry looks ripe for profit at the moment with the board game resurgence. Monopolies are seldom good for consumers. We have seen the reduction on both the publishing and distribution choices, so prices will no doubt rise due to lack of competition. Kickstarter will soon be the only viable platform for an independent publisher to get to consumers.
Realistically Kickstarter has been the only viable platform for startups. Before that you pretty much self published by remortgaging your house or hoped a publisher would pick you up.
There are plenty of laws in place to stop monopolies,price gouging,cartels and mergers and acquisitions all over Europe,US and elsewhere. All buy outs have to go through a legal process and I am sure they all get looked at in regards to competition
No, no they do not. Unless you are talking about very large telecoms like Verizon and AT&T or Comcast and Disney nobody is really looking. Toys and Games are not on the radar unless enough people complain to the FTC or other alphabet soup agency in the government. Unless it is highly publicized or there are many complaints filed the FTC does not default review what is happening.
Sad. Really enjoyed their games, got into rail games because of them. Still enjoy playing them now and again.