TV production giant Endemol has told MCV sister site CasualGaming.biz that it has retained licences for its biggest franchises so that it can use them in the casual space “to full effect”.

The Dutch multi-national has previously farmed out the likes of Deal Or No Deal to third-parties, but says that it can better take advantage of the online PC market by going it alone.

Endemol owns the rights to programmes including Deal Or Not Deal, 1 vs. 100 and Big Brother – and set up its own casual games group in February this year.

However, the firm said its new push to hold onto its IP would not be likely to affect its relationship with boxed publishers such as Mindscape.

Endemol’s director of gaming Eric LaVanchy told CasualGaming.biz:

“We certainly have retained – at least in terms of North America – the casual rights for some of the larger titles we have, and we’ll use those in full effect.

“We’ve already been speaking to a lot of the different distributors and portals for casual games out there, and there certainly is a large appetite for these kind of brands. They recognise that this is a very good fit as well.

And the firm’s senior VP of digital media Jon Vlassopulos added:

“We’ll be opportunistic. Where we have our own titles and it makes sense for our business, we’ll pursue that ourselves. We feel that the knowledge we’re merging into our core business is important regardless.

"We have 1,100 properties and we’ve got new shows coming out all of the time, so it’s important we still have an active licensing side of the business as well [as well as our own titles].”