Not intending to be argumentative or pessimistic, but this deal is actually taking an unusually long time. Entire companies are sold and purchased faster than this.
Entire companies have been sold in less time, and in a lot more time. But I don't think that's a fair comparison for another reason: it can be
easier to buy and sell whole companies.
I keep seeing people think about this deal as a comparable to buying something from ebay. Just bid high enough and you win. But that's not how these things often work. Consider: suppose a company decided they wanted to buy the IP for Frozen from Disney. Ok, how much would they need to spend? Answer: nothing. There is no reasonable amount of money that would convince Disney to sell that property. Frozen has made maybe three billion dollars for Disney. It might make three billion more. And yet not even for twice that amount would Disney sell. They wouldn't even entertain offers, so any smart alec claiming Disney would sell for "a trillion dollars" would first have to figure out how to make that offer in person, and Disney would never even allow themselves to hear the offer. Frozen is a signature Disney property. The reputation cost of selling it makes any monetary profit meaningless. Disney would forever have to deal with the fact that people would wonder why Disney did it. They would have to deal with another company operating that IP in their face. Disney wouldn't sell for the simple reason that you can give Disney enough money to compensate them for the lost value of the property, but you can't compensate them for all the negatives associated with
someone else having it.
When a company like NCSoft sells a property like City of Heroes, its often the latter that is ultimately more important. They want to be compensated for the value of the property itself, like an actual sale of some commodity. But they also more importantly need to deal with a world in which someone else is operating something that used to be theirs, and is associated with them. And that's not a one-dimensional problem that some quantity of money solves.
When such deals happen quickly, its usually because the seller wants to sell, and has already made the decision that they can deal with someone else having it. A seller-driven sale tends to happen more quickly because its easier for find buyers willing to own it and can afford it. But buyer-driven sales tend to be slower, because you have to convince the seller to sell, and to negotiate the right conditions under which they will be comfortable with that sale. So when people say "things have happened faster" that's true, but often under completely different conditions. Companies that are sold are more often seller-driven deals when the owners of the company actively look for buyers. Buyer-driven deals, hostile or otherwise, tend to be far, far slower because unless the seller is comfortable with the deal conditions, no amount of money will likely make the deal go faster.
The reason why seller-driven deals tend to be much faster is pretty straight forward. When a seller wants to sell, they just have to find a buyer willing to buy, and they potentially have a pool of potential buyers from which to find at least one. You have more than one opportunity to find optimum buyers. But when a buyer wants to buy, they normally want to buy a specific something. So there's usually only one seller: they cannot look for better sellers of that thing. When there's lots of sellers the situation is different but many sellers one buyer tends to be the exception not the rule. So sellers can *find* buyers, but buyers often have no choice but to *wait* for the one seller to want to sell. That one parameter fundamentally dictates the pace of any deal to be made.
