Missed It: Platinum Buys Wowio

As expected, Platinum Studios purchased the digital delivery service Wowio in an announcement that came to light last Friday. As rumored, this involved a swapping of stocks rather than an outright cash purchase. As feared, this brought a termination of certain contracts. As insiders were aware, the reports of cartoonists making significant five-figure sums from the service may shock some of those that didn't really follow the company. As hoped for, creators involved with Wowio seem temporarily satisfied they'll be left alone. As mentioned by a few pieces of analysis about the potential for such a sale, a way of publishing their licensed material without the brutal sales figures and sunk costs of paper comic book production makes a lot of sense for Platinum. As I'm not exactly aware of all sources for such news, I can't be certain or not whether anyone has provided cogent analysis as to why the sale was attractive to the Wowio folks or what exactly precipitated tremors in their model that preceded the sale.

Kidding aside, this is perhaps the epitome of a wait-and-see story. While the deal makes a certain amount of sense and there's nothing that specifically screams danger, Platinum's financially precarious position and the past record of at least one of its principals casts some doubt into the whole affair. While initial word back on the amended situation and the resulting contracts has been positive, or at least not negative, I've heard about multiple creators wanting to pull their strips when Platinum's interest was initially announced. (Also working in Platinum's behavior are positive reports about their handling of DrunkDuck creators.) In fact, the option to do so may be an important part of these new contracts. Since they plan to relaunch immediately, by the 10th of August at the far end of things, we should have a better idea of how much of their former business has survived into this iteration.
 
posted 8:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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