Martin Soltys is the CEO of Transmedia Entertainment Partner, an offshore investment fund that he wants to use to invest in Canadian film, gaming, music, television, and digital media projects.
At Game On: Finance, Soltys said he had been approached about a few interesting places he could put his money while at the conference but believes Canadians have a lot to give and he wants to invest back in his own country as he's tired of seeing no return on the money he spends. Soltys was certainly surprised how many companies were already in the Canadian gaming industry but enthusiastically said that maybe Canada could rise from 3rd worldwide to become no. 2 and eventually no. 1 in the worldwide scope of things.
Soltys had advice for entrpreneurs too saying that you can't forget to be creative and that you need to stay close to publishing access and where the money is. You can read all about his experience in the restaurant, entertainment and film business here where he notably works with filmmakers to help them fund projects that have made more than $20 million in their career in Los Angeles.
Marc Jackson, who was on the speaker panel with Soltys, and also the CEO & Founder of Seahorn Capital says that in the rapidly changing gaming space with the invasion of multi-million and billion dollar web, social and mobile gaming companies is a deterrent to becoming publicly traded. In any industry where this is rapid change, you need to be able to counter that quickly and that doesn't happen in the traditional gaming industry with companies like Electronic Arts, Ubisoft and Sony where they must be loyal to the parent founders of games and the contracts they've signed among many other legal stipulations similar to how television works.
It's the major reason why many of the studios have struggled immensly with making the shift into new gaming platforms, and are starting to lose hundreds of millions alongside studio closures like the one in Vancouver.
Further, investors haven't reacted very well to IPOs from the mobile gaming space like Zynga which has never really risen above $11.50 a share. That may be due to the instability associated in being so ingrained with Facebook in the social gaming space but there seems to be a lack of market enthusiasm in this area in general unlike LinkedIn's IPO.
We'll have to see if mobile gaming companies do better than their social gaming counterparts if any do decide to become public.
As a result, we're seeing potential angel investors like Soltys who want to keep companies private and help new companies continue to come out of nowhere from an ever evolving number of platforms for those dual reasons.
io is a not-for-profit industry trade organization committed to the growth of the Ontario interactive digital content industry. To this end "io" is... [more]
Dan Verhaeghe
Dan Verhaeghe generally contributes on the state of media, mobile branding, tech marketing and forms of new media. He was a Toronto Blue Jays blogger who earned his way into Toronto’s CP24 studios and the Blue Jays front office on various occasions. Dan also worked for numerous marketing agencies and corporations as a brand representative and...[more]
