Cartoons, marathons, pop art: to the US (and back) to climb the Italian gaming ladder

The Italian market responds. You just have to touch the right buttons. There are 32 distributors, but a lot of fragmentation. There are, over the years, the international giants - Tencent, Sony-Playstation, Nintendo, Microsoft-Xbox - with direct distribution and sales in the big electronics chains. But it is a selective and variable market, in which over the years, between mergers and acquisitions of manufacturers and branch closures, only three players will remain. One of these is Cidiverte. 'We have been lucky,' Vago quipped, 'or if we want to give ourselves some small merit, as St Augustine said: "God provides the wind, but man must raise the sails"'.

Raising the sails in this sector means zeroing in on the video games that will win over the public and securing exclusive distribution rights. Even with very simple proposals, which perhaps nobody had thought of. Like the breakthrough contract. "In 1995 we secured the distribution of a promising company that later became a colossus, T2 (Take-Two Interactive), simply by proposing to do the Italian translations of the captions. T2 brought us GTA, our best-selling product, but also the NBA and wrestling games. GTA 1 and 2 I translated them myself'. In 1995, the company had 30 employees and a turnover of around 35 billion old lire (about 18 million euros).

In 2000, during the Internet and electronic games boom, T2, in the midst of an expansion campaign, acquired Vago's company to make it its subsidiary in Italy. Pietro remained managing director until 2005 when he left T2 and opened Gamelife, a retail chain of all brands of games. "I started from scratch, I never thought of leaving the industry. I chose to work in video games out of passion and I always pushed to create a company in which all employees were involved'.

Pietro makes Cidiverte a special reality on the Italian scene. He takes employees to climb Kilimanjaro, to complete the Danube river route and the Paris-Mont Saint Michel by bike, to do part of the Camino de Santiago. "I always think that the company should be a place where, first of all, we have a good time together, among the things we enjoy. By the way, the better you feel, the better you work'.

In 2010, Pietro bought back the Italian subsidiary of T2. 'It was the time when multinationals were concentrating their activity on production and passing distribution back to external parties. They would choose the markets on which to focus their efforts and sell off the others. We acquired the Swiss subsidiary, just to get into the business, and then Italy. We had become T2's reference point in Europe. Selling to us was natural,' says Vago.

In 2017, Cidiverte launched the Qubick brand, a company that produces video game accessories, at first with football team licences, then with own-brand products. 'It was a first phase of expansion and diversification,' explains Vago. 'Today we are the fifth brand for sales of accessories in Italy, behind only the global giants and a French company that we would like to overtake as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, in distribution, the wave of disengagement of multinationals is lengthening. In 2020, Pietro reached an agreement with GameStop, the video game retail giant, 6,600 outlets worldwide, 4,000 in the United States, to acquire all the Italian shops. But the devil, as in the best video games, is in the tail. 'We were finalising the details of the deal when, out of the blue, an American influencer, Roaring Kitty, invited us to buy GameStop's stock, which he said was undervalued. Overnight, the stock jumped from $3 to $400. Result: GameStop shareholders, flooded with resources, six billion dollars, stopped selling shops worldwide and relaunched the chain. We ended up with a fist in our hands'.

Pietro, however, is a man of great tenacity. His hobby is running. He has completed 16 marathons. He is one of the few amateur athletes to have run the Six Majors, the six most important marathons in the world: Berlin, Boston, Chicago, London, New York, Tokyo. He has his Six Star finisher's diploma hanging in his office (while his graduation parchment from George Washington University sits, a little dusty, in a corner). Taking over the GameStop outlets in Italy was an endless race, lasting almost five years. In November 2024, after acquiring the Swiss subsidiary in 2022, Cidiverte completed the acquisition for USD 15 million. The physical shops in Italy, now under the Gamelife banner, number 270; turnover is approaching 260 million (about 5% comes from accessories); employees number 1,420. 'We have begun the third phase of development,' explains Pietro, 'perhaps the most exciting. We want to grow online and in accessories, but above all we want to produce our own video games to complete our presence in the entire supply chain. In Italy there are big independent studios with first-class developers, scriptwriters and designers. Today we are able to provide an important showcase for their stories. We are working on it'. Every great march starts with a small step, Mao used to say. Marathons fall into the category. 'I run, I think,' says Pietro. 'The heat doesn't scare me. I go to Greece where there is a nice wind that cools the ideas and helps'. After all, what did St Augustine say?