Asmodee Group Acquires Board Game Arena: An Analysis

Since its creation, BGA has seen continuous growth, thanks to the commitment of gaming communities and has registered a 600% growth in 2020, a sign of the craze for board games, whether with family or remotely. To support its growth and pursue its development, BGA's management team has chosen to join Asmodee. Indeed, the two companies have known each other for a long time, and this natural move will allow Asmodee to speed up the availability of its key titles on the platform.

Grégory Isabelli and Emmanuel Colin, BGA cofounders, comment: "Working with Asmodee allows us to continue our massive growth, with a partner that shares our love and passion for board gaming. Asmodee fulfills a sine qua non criteria for us: that BGA is always run by absolute board game fans whose core business is board game."

"Our growth is based on one crucial commitment: offer the best gaming experience to consumers and bring our brands to the widest audience", said Thomas Koegler, Head of Strategy at Asmodee. "Having a platform that allows players from all over the world to meet, play their favorite games together or discover new games is a natural fit alongside our amazing catalogue of board games. Skull and Splendor will be in the coming weeks the first of a long list of Asmodee releases on the platform: we hope that players will enjoy them!"

As with other Asmodee entities, BGA will remain completely independent, and current management will remain at its helm. Pricing policies and editorial line remain unchanged, with BGA continuing, as always, to rely solely on the quality and popularity of games, offering its services to all publishers and market players.

[T]he most important thing is that we stay the same: same team, same spirit, same model. We don't want to become a "Premium/Best sellers only" service, and at the same time we consider that all board games must have a chance to be on BGA even if "non commercially profitable". To do that, like we did in the past, we will need game developers for freelance missions for some specific games, and we will need volunteers for the vast majority of the other games. We know that some of you prefer to work as volunteers to work on their preferred licence, at their own pace, making their own choices, while some of you are more interested by paid missions even if they have more constraints. We used to propose both at BGA, and again: this won't change.

Now, speaking about games: in the following weeks, we are going to start an important number of missions, both for new Asmodee game licences and for other licences. Those of you who have previously expressed interest in freelance missions have already received some info about this from Jurica [a long-time developer who joined BGA in September 2020]. Please do not hesitate to write to studio(at)boardgamearena.com if you are interested: we have missions for you.