April 21st, 2009 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Companies & M&A | No Comments »
The past couple of weeks we have received numerous complaints from mobile game developers about Twistbox not paying it’s bills. Some accounts are rumored to be 6 months overdue. We contacted the company.
For those that don’t know Twistbox yet, the company made fame in the adult scene where it licensed most big brands under the name of WAAT Media. At a later stage, Twistbox bought Atlas Studios from InfoSpace so strengthen their US position.
Now, years after the company successfully settled itself in the mobile games market, our mailbox is stuffed with complaints about late payments. As we have some contacts within the company, we decided to contact them to find out if these complaints are true.
Posted below is a part of the correspondence between MGB and Twistbox (Executive Vice President & General Counsel, David Mandell). Please note that we cut off the first part of the communication, as our contact didn’t want to be exposed on MGB (There was no interesting information anyway).
[Arjan 10-03] Dear David,
First off, thanks for taking the time to answer my questions. I know my questions will not be of the kind you love to answer, but as nearly 90% of the mobile games industry (including operators and newspapers) read my blog, I hope you understand the importance.
The thing that is bothering me is that since about two weeks, I receive a lot of complaints about the fact that Twistbox is not paying it's bills toward it's content partners. When looking at the last public financials, it also shows that Mandalay remains having problems to become profitable. Not that strange if you consider the time we are in at the moment.
Nevertheless, the fact that bills aren't paid is a bad sign. We have seen several publishers go down or end up acquired (one other big one will announce it's acquisition later this week). As so, we would like to know why Twistbox/Mandalay is not paying it's bills. If it is, I would like to know why you think so many developers complaint (please note that they will probably react when they read about this). If you are not in a financial situation where you can solve these issues fast enough, I would like to know which steps Twistbox/Mandalay will take in order to improve the situation.
Thanks in advance,
Arjan Olsder
[Arjan 19-03] Dear David,
Please let me know your thoughts on the below as I am planning my story for monday.
Kind regards,
Arjan Olsder
[David 19-03] As a public company, we are not legally permitted to respond to your inquiry.
[Arjan 20-03] Dear David,
I am sad to hear this. Most (publicly trading) companies have some sort of feedback when we ask them what's up, but I guess this means our readers have to decide for themselves on this topic.
Kind regards,
Arjan Olsder
Sadly enough we didn’t hear anything past that e-mail on the 19th of March. I have to say that this conversation made me doubt whether I should place it or not. The fact that I got more complaints this week made me publish it. Even TelcoGames was more responsive. We wonder how many companies in total are waiting for their money. An anonymous reply to this post would be welcome.
PS. The 90% reach we claim is a very rough estimate; there is no way for us to be sure about this outside Europe
