OPINION: Ztorm Chasers

While there’s no official confirmation of Sony’s swoop for Swedish download firm Ztorm, our spies say the deal is as good as done.

It’s another sign of New World meeting Old. But it says a lot about how the Old World often adapts to the New – by eating it wholesale.

Agile, profitable businesses often get acquired by corporate giants. Assimilated into the hive mind. Less survival of the fittest, more survival via the fattest chequebook.

You’ll see more of this, too. It’s inevitable that the smaller digital distribution firms with the smartest ideas will get snapped up by a bigger fish. It’s already happening, in fact – GameStop just two weeks ago bought a streaming game service and a digital distributor.

So even if the times are changing for the games industry, it doesn’t necessarily mean the companies within it are on the way out.