A Tale of Two Company Blockbuster Franchises: Activision Blizzard's C... -11/23/09 at 3:28 PM CSTby Perry Rod

Activision Blizzard’s (NASDAQ: ATVI) Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 recently dethroned Take Two Interactive's (NASDAQ: TTWO) Grand Theft Auto 4 for having the biggest opening week worldwide of any video game in history.  One glaring difference between the business models behind the two franchises is that one comes out with a core sequel each yea...

THQ Inc. Still Looks Overvalued -11/20/09 at 12:46 PM CSTby Perry Rod

Hopes are running high at THQ Inc (NASDAQ:THQI).  That's because hope is all they can count on at this point. MX vs. ATV, a product being released on four consoles is coming next week without significant fanfare, according to Amazon bestseller charts and others.  The racing genre as a whole has been underperforming in the past year, as seen rece...

Outrageous: Electronic Arts Inc CEO Riccitello Buys His Own Company a... -11/17/09 at 3:33 PM CSTby Perry Rod

What is it about greedy video game publisher executives? Just two years ago at Electronic Arts (NASDAQ:ERTS), with only eight months on the job as Chief Executive Officer, John Riccitello announced a buyout of Pandemic and Bioware studios from his former firm Elevation Partners, of which he was one of the founders.  The purchase price looked astrono...

Gamestop Inc Will Die, They Say, But Publisher Actions Speak Louder T... -10/29/09 at 12:54 PM CDTby Perry Rod

Gamestop’s closest U.S. comparable is Best Buy (BBY).  Analysts for Best Buy Inc. are predicting an 8% year over year EPS growth rate.  Based on current trading prices, BBY trades at a P/E ratio of around 13. Meanwhile, analysts project a 14% year over year EPS increase at Gamestop Inc (NYSE:GME).  With higher analyst growth expectati...

NPD Results Delayed for Gamestop Corp, Activision, Take Two Interacti... -10/15/09 at 5:27 PM CDTby Mahyar Hashemi

Video game investors will have to wait a couple more business days to see September's NPD results for video game software and hardware sales.  "We have just released a communication to our clients, explaining that, due to last minute processing requirements, the NPD Video Games Retail Tracking information for September 2009 will now be released on Mo...

Roddy Boyd, Formerly of News Corporation and Time Warner Inc., and th... -10/13/09 at 3:21 PM CDTby Mark Mitchell

“Telling the truth is only possible by accident through a special sort of boastfulness…” - Fyodor Dostoevsky, “The Idiot” Regular readers of Deep Capture are aware that we have sought to expose certain journalists who seem to serve the interests of a network of market miscreants, many of whom are tied to the famous criminal ...

Wedbush Morgan Upgrades Gamestop (GME) -10/08/09 at 10:59 AM CDTby Perry Rod

Calling Gamestop's guidance "conservative" and citing valuation, Wedbush Morgan senior analyst Michael Pachter raised his rating and price target for Gamestop to $34 and "Outperform". "We expect industry sales to return to positive territory in September, and think that GameStop is well positioned to recover as well. " Gamestop is up around 3% this mornin...

Electronic Arts Chairman Larry Probst in a High Profile Failure -10/02/09 at 2:41 PM CDTby Perry Rod

Larry Probst, current chairman of Electronic Arts (ERTS), served for three years as the company's CEO and is its largest individual shareholder.  In that three years, Electronic Arts stock was flat while the S&P 500 rose 30% and Activision, its biggest competitor, rose 170%.  He stepped down as CEO in 2007 but still holds the position of cha...

Another Day, Another Buyout Rumor - This Time Electronic Arts -09/23/09 at 2:35 PM CDTby Mahyar Hashemi

Why so many rumors in the video game space about acquisitions? Because apparently they work.  THQ Inc. (THQI) was up 13% yesterday as a result of a rumor that Viacom and others are interested in buying them.  But as one poster pointed out, why would THQ raise 100 million in a convertible offering one month prior to a proposed buyout?  It sh...

Why THQ Inc. (THQI) is Unlikely To Be A Buyout Target And Why dealRep... -09/22/09 at 11:49 AM CDTby Perry Rod

Take Two (TTWO) Interactive, a company with a major video game sports division, received a buyout offer last year from video game sports giant Electronic Arts (ERTS) before the market storm.  Today, there is a rumor that THQ (THQI), whose list of internal intellectual property is small and comparatively unimpressive in terms of sales volume, is recei...

Another Take Two Scandal, or Just Another Wall Street Scandal? -09/15/09 at 11:14 AM CDTby Perry Rod

An unusual event occurred at 4:01 PM on September 1st, 2009 as video game investors were staring intently at their Dow Jones Newswire streamers.  Take Two Interactive (TTWO) was to announce earnings on that day and news hit the streamer, “Take-Two Swings To 3Q Loss; Co Cautious On FY Outlook.”  Opening up the report revealed an exten...