Ubisoft Buys Tom Clancy Name

Ubisoft has announced a deal with Tom Clancy to buy Tom Clancy.

The arrangement will give Ubisoft all intellectual property rights to the Tom Clancy name, "on a perpetual basis and free of all related future royalty payments, for use in videogames and ancillary products including related books, movies and merchandising products," according to a statement by the company. The cost of the purchase was not revealed, although post-purchase financial projections indicate an up-front payment of roughly €20 million ($31 million), with future payments to be made in fiscal 2008-2009 and 2009-2010.

"After ten years of a highly successful collaboration which has seen the creation of blockbusters that set standards in the videogame industry, such as Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, today, acquiring the perpetual property rights of the Tom Clancy name for videogames and related projects is a major event," said Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot. "The future of our industry lies in our capacity to create and develop brands that captivate consumers and that present a myriad of opportunities for the full spectrum of entertainment, be it video games, books, movies or other media. The Tom Clancy brand is recognized around the world for offering exciting video games, films and books."

Ubisoft added that based on the past performance of Tom Clancy games, the company expects the acquisition to save the company about €5 million ($7.7 million) in royalty payments per year. Neither Ubisoft nor Clancy would comment on rumors that the noted author would now begin referring to himself by his middle names, James Tiberius.

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They're buying his name... I didn't even know you could do that.

I think the obligatory comment is "well, everyone really does have a price!"

Cor, look at all that Business Speak there. Orwell would be very proud (or horrified) indeed.

Does he have any other original works in progress? The only reason I can think of for him to do this would be a planned retirement.

Man, I killed a lot of time and braincells playing Red Storm Rising on my C-64. You know you've played it too much when you can actually identify ships by the "waterfall" acoustic display without looking the pattern up in the manual...

As to selling the rights to make "Tom Clancy" titled games, well, after 25 or so years maybe Clancy is thinking of retiring... but if so, he'd probably have been better off working the royalty angle instead of taking these big lump-payments.

-- Steve

He gave up €5 million a year in royalty payments for a lump sum of €20 million?!? Doesn't seem like such a good deal to me. It's not as if they're likely to stop making the games.

EntropicWit:
Does he have any other original works in progress? The only reason I can think of for him to do this would be a planned retirement.

Except that he's not selling his name, just the right to use it in relation to videogames and products related to those videogames. He can still write whatever book he wants, and put "Tom Clancy" on the front of it.

bonaparte:
He gave up €5 million a year in royalty payments for a lump sum of €20 million?!? Doesn't seem like such a good deal to me. It's not as if they're likely to stop making the games.

He's getting 20 this year, with additional payments next year, and the year after that. Without knowing the size of those payments, its hard to estimate what his gain/loss could be, but as it stands, he just got 4 years payment up front. Investing said 4 years worth of payments actually turns it into more than what he'd get if they just kept paying him the next 4 years. Were we to know the size of the payments next year, and the year after (potentially contractually adjusted based on how much money they make off the properties?) we could estimate just how many years he got in advance to what he would've gotten in royalties. My essential point: We don't know whether it was a good deal or not, without more information, but there's a good chance it was a worthwhile deal, otherwise, why would he take it?

They did indicate future payments to be made in fiscal 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 so maybe there's more to it?

In any event, here's my takeaway. This is confirmation of a growing trend to treat everything as "brands". It started when characters and settings became brands. For instance, Aragorn is no longer a character in LOTR, now he's Aragon(TM), the brand representing masculine vigor and honorable kingship. That was fine insofar as it went in that characters and settings are creations and only valuable to the extent we value them. But now the trend is for the creators themselves to be brands. This is fine when they remain glued together, but now we see the brand and the creator coming unglued. Tom Clancy works are no longer actually by Tom Clancy. How long will it be until a Steven Spielberg production isn't made by Steven Spielberg?

This is doubly disappointing when one realizes that the pseudo-creator's brand obscures the brand of the actual creator of the work. Who is *actually* thinking up the new intellectual property behind the latest works called "Tom Clancy's"? We'll never know. And that's a shame.

But in many cases (some cases?) the input of the "branded creator" is minimal anyway. Did Sid Meier really have much to do with the latest Civilization releases? And how much contribution did Clive Barker really make to Undying? I agree that the conversion of a known creative force into just another generic brand is troubling, but from the perspective of knowing who's actually responsible for a particular game, is anything really changing?

In this case, yeah, no noticeable difference. There's a reason G4 doesn't grab interviews with Tom Clancy about in-game communications design in tactical shooters, while yeah, if Sid Meier has something to say about 4x game design, or Will Wright has something to say about behavior modeling in a sim game, I'm pretty sure we'd something with them on G4. Heck, he didn't even design Harpoon.

As far as the quality of the deal goes, I've never met the man, but I'm pretty sure of two things. One, he's not an idiot. Two, he knows good lawyers and accountants.

The main concern in this deal is what happens when Clancy becomes less than enthused with Ubi's output in his name, but given the all the numbers that are included in the titles of the Clancy games, I don't see that happening anytime soon. I'm sure there are some performance metrics that Ubi has to meet to retain the name/title.

The main thing this does is prevent anybody other than Ubi from using "Tom Clancy" in a game, so if somebody else tries make an online adaptation of a hypothetical Wizkids Rainbow Six CCG, they have to license the names from Ubi instead of Clancy.

Malygris:
"on a perpetual basis and free of all related future royalty payments, for use in videogames and ancillary products including related books, movies and merchandising products,"

So they could now release a sequel to one of his books and put his name on it? 'Tom Clancy's "The Hunt for Red October 2", not by Tom Clancy.' That'll be confusing.

EntropicWit:
Does he have any other original works in progress? The only reason I can think of for him to do this would be a planned retirement.

There is no such thing as a retired writer. There are writers who don't have things published anymore, I suppose. But writers don't stop writing.

Anyway, I've mostly stopped caring about Clancy games. They all seem to be going downhill, or already in a valley of mediocrity. Rainbow Six hit its peak with the third game, as did Splinter Cell from what I've seen of the upcoming one. They had everything right, and then decided to change things around for shits and giggles.

Calobi:
So they could now release a sequel to one of his books and put his name on it? 'Tom Clancy's "The Hunt for Red October 2", not by Tom Clancy.' That'll be confusing.

My understanding is that a number of "Tom Clancy" books are ghost-written. And anyway, unless Ubisoft releases a Red October video game, they likely couldn't release a book in that series.