A weird rumour has popped up on the internal stock market over night with Reuters of all people posting that Microsoft are looking at purchasing EA Games in full.
The rumour is currently being looked at seriously with shares in EA Games shooting up by 8% but really can really be good for the gaming industry. I would highly doubt that the PS3 software development side of the company would be treated fairly if this takeover happened and seeing as EA are the second largest software (gaming) publisher behind Activision it would pretty much cripple Sony’s chances of winning or even competing fairly in this war.
I think Joystiq’s header image (stolen and pasted above) also depicts perfectly how Activision must be feeling right now.
However if you look at this purely from a business point of view EA would be a great acquisition for Microsoft and seeing as they both operate in all countries they could save a bomb by merging and slashing costs which are duplicated worldwide.
Source: Joystiq
Last Updated: September 24, 2009
40yearsofgaming
September 24, 2009 at 12:32
I sincerely hope that this will not come to pass. Sure, from a short-term business perspective this is pure gold (EA investors must be smiling from cheek to cheek; and MS must be practically salivating at the prospect of controlling EA), but with the gaming industry slowly shedding capital every year (as interest in titles and perhaps buying power of recession starved consumers wanes) can we as consumers really afford the drop of diversity in gaming titles? It would be ironic if EA did get gobbled up by a bigger corporate predator, since it has been a notorious predator in its own right.
By the way, I own an xbox 1 and a 360, however I can be man enough to admit that both products are rather poorly designed (or perhaps that was intended from the start, because I’ve gone through 3 x 360s already). Unfortunately I’m old enough to remember the gaming crash of the early 80s, and I can’t help but see parallels.
Maxiviper
September 24, 2009 at 21:17
Or Microsoft could also make EA produce only games for there consoles….. PC and XBox 360…………..now that would be a bad bad move. Thats only if they do that.
fallen_angel
September 25, 2009 at 10:48
Or make all EA software underperform on the ps3
Allyson Codrington
November 24, 2009 at 09:24
Your blog is a very good blog. Thanx for all your posts. I hope you ll post more soon. Regards.