The Chinese boardgame of Go has often been used as a metaphor for strategic business activity.

The rules are simple, with two players taking it in turns to place white and black stones on the intersections of a 19x19 grid. Any stones, or groups of stones, totally surrounded by those of the opponent are captured and removed. The result is a mixture of placing adjacent stones for support and widely dispersed stones in the hope of future influence, with the winner being the player with the most stones on the board by the time neither can place another.

Of course, sometimes there’s no metaphor involved: games of Go were said to be crucial in creating the level  of trust required in the negotiations between Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi and Henk Rogers over the Tetris licence. But when it came to Autodesk’s acquisition of rival Softimage for $35 million, which closed in mid-November, the image of a couple of white pebbles finally falling to a mass  of black is hard to ignore.

Bluntly put, after Autodesk had spent three years and hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring the other rivals to its Media & Entertainment division, there was no other option for Softimage’s corporate owner Avid Technology Inc but to surrender it up to the inevitable and gain whatever cash available.

Or, as the official press release puts it: ‘Autodesk was presented with the opportunity to acquire Softimage’s state-of-the-art 3D animation technology as well as hire members of the highly experienced, world-class product development team’.

Yet the irony of the situation was that by this stage of its game Autodesk didn’t care that much about Softimage. For example, compare the $35 million to the $197 million it paid for Maya company Alias back in early 2006. Sure, there will some money to be made off its XSI package, which is used by high-profile publishers, especially Japanese outfits such as Konami’s Kojima Productions, Capcom and Sega. And Softimage’s CAT animation plug-in will slide seamlessly into Autodesk’s product line-up as, for bizarre legacy reasons, it only supports Autodesk’s 3DS Max package.

The impact on the potentially revolutionary Interactive Creative Environment platform, created by the CAT development team, is another matter entirely. The long-term fate of the facial animation product Face Robot also seems cloudy. Softimage’s final Go stone placed for future influence not short-term gain, the technology looks interesting but to date hasn’t been a commercial success. The only other product marketed under the Softimage banner, the asset management tool Alienbrain, wasn’t part of the deal and remains with Avid. Instead, it was a different acquisition earlier in 2008 that is shaping the future of Autodesk Media & Entertainment.