Jack Tretton brings the SPAC to gaming
Brendan Sinclair
Managing Editor
Wednesday 13th April 2022
The games industry has seen an incredible flurry of investment in recent years, but one thing it hasn't seen much of to date is special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs.
These companies raise money by going public before they have any business to speak of. The money from the initial public offering is then used to go out and invest in a sector where the SPAC management professes a particular expertise. To put it simply, the people who buy stock in a SPAC IPO don't know what they're going to wind up with, but they trust the management team to find something worth their money.
While SPACs have been a trendy option in recent years, they've largely stayed out of the gaming space. That may change, as there's at least one SPAC with an eye on the games market: Power Up Acquisition Corp., led by former Sony Computer Entertainment America CEO Jack Tretton.
Jack Tretton, Power Up Acquisition Corp.
Speaking with GamesIndustry.biz, Tretton says SPACs are just another way to solve a problem he's been trying to crack ever since he left Sony in 2014, when he launched his own company to provide consulting for companies big and small, representing outfits looking to acquire and outfits looking to be bought.
"That led me to realize that not everybody wants to do acquisitions, but just about everybody in the indie space needs help raising money and it's very difficult to do from outside the industry," Tretton says.
When he first heard about SPACs, he liked how it gave companies easier access to money raised through public markets while letting the SPAC handle the regulatory and administrative overhead associated with the IPO. He also liked how it could let the target company remain
Read more on gamesindustry.biz
