Asmodee North America has announced it has acquired the English language rights to the super popular Catan series from Mayfair Games.
News of the acquisition may surprise some, but more surprising is that Asmodee North America is now comprised of Catan Studio (newly formed from this acquisition), Fantasy Flight Games, Asmodee and Days of Wonder – all of the big names under one umbrella. If Steve Jackson Games is ever acquired by ANA, then 100% of my current games will be from Asmodee NA.
Anyway… Catan Studio will be run by Pete Fenlon, who was the CEO of Mayfair Games, so worries that new leadership will screw up your ability to get the popular game can be set aside. In fact, go to your FLGS today, and I bet you’ll see 10 copies of the game on the shelves waiting for someone to buy them.
“I am very proud and honored that through this acquisition, we are becoming a major partner to Catan GmbH and the Teuber family, with whom we share common values and vision for Catan and for board games,” Stephane Carville, CEO of Asmodee Group said of the deal. English language versions currently represent over 50% of the worldwide sales of Catan.
While Asmodee North America doesn’t develop Catan, does the change in distributor affect your view on the game? Since we rarely know which trucking company is delivering our caffeinated drink to the Grab-n-Leave, this change will more than likely have little impact on the game – unless marketing and distribution costs rise…
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I… have no idea if/how this would affect me. I don’t really know how do the gaming stores here in Chile get their supplies. Now I’m intrigued.
Admodee is currently the biggest player in hobby board games. In the last few years, they’ve been acquiring well-known companies with huge IPs, such as Days of Wonder (Ticket to Ride, Memoir ’44, Small World) and Fantasy Flight Games (X-Wing, Arkham Horror, Android Netrunner). Meanwhile, Mayfair, the company that had been publishing Settlers of Catan, has been becoming less important in the hobby as a whole.
What this means is that the game that is possibly the biggest license in the hobby industry right now, the game that (to an extent) started the current board game renaissance in the US 20 years ago, the game that has started to break out of the hobby niche and become recognizable to the market as a whole, is now in the hands of the strongest hobby company with the biggest reach in the industry. The combination could be HUGE if Asmodee can leverage Catan into further widening the awareness of hobby board games to the mass market, accelerating the already massive growth the hobby board game industry has been seeing over the past 10+ years.