Where to look to sell businesses?

[StormcloudCreations]

Just wondering: a friend of mine has a fairly well-developed indie game business he wishes to investigate possibly selling. Where would he look to post the business for sale, to people who might have interest in such things?

Thanks!

[papillon]

There's always BusinessesForSale.com :) (I routinely browse the UK section looking for the going rate for a shop+flat.... well, when I can actually SEE that is. Still no glasses. Argh!)

[princec]

(How'd you run a porn site without any glasses??? - no wait, don't answer...)

Cas :)

[Mike Boeh]

And what url is this "friend's" site? :D

[Mithril Studios]

How about here?

I'm sure there must be someone who browses these forums who might take an interest in purchasing an existing business.

Anthony

[Andy]

And what url is this "friend's" site? :D

Retro64.com!
Bva-ha-ha.... :D

[formfarbeminze]

private bankers. business angels. venture capitalists. these people are interested in buying/building companies. how to drive one into buying an indie games shop? i don't know. my assumption is, most of them won't be interested because the total ammounts of investment and ROI are just to low.

[Greg Squire]

I second what formfarbeminze said. I believe the traditional buyers or businesses just wouldn't be interested in an indie shop, unless the business has done EXTREMELY well. Even then I'm not sure they would. The most likely buyer would be another indie that wants to expand his business some more, or a new indie that wanted to get a head start. Even then there would be a lot of factors to consider as no one wants to buy a "sinking ship". (Not saying that your friend has one of these) And of course, most indie's don't have a lot of cash, so that there decreases your chances of a sale. The other potential buyer would be an up and coming publisher, that wants to move some game development "in house", but in this case, they are mostly looking for "people" (to build new games), and not just assets.

[papillon]

I mentioned BFS because I have seen wacky online businesses listed there. Of course, I've also completely ignored them. :)

Cas - I'm not blind, I just can't focus! Fuzzy blurry pictures better than fuzzy blurry text :)

[gekido]

publishers, investors etc do not look for 'companies' to buy. they look for teams to invest in. teams that they know have shipped product in the past and will be able to produce content for them in the future.

what's an indie company without the founder? for most indies, not much. look at how much massive corporations can die when an original founder leaves, let alone an indie.

for the site to be interesting to a publisher as a site itself, you'd need to be getting millions ofhits to attract that kind of attention.