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EA Takeover Moves and Countermoves
Details have emerged regarding several EA takeover related stories. The long running dispute with Digital Illusions may be coming to an end as EA has waived the requirement to own majority shares in the company. They still plan to purchase as many shares of the company as possible. Ubisoft announced that they have a defense planned against a hostile takeover bid from EA, should it arise. No mention of what this plan is, of course. In reaction to the recent press coverage of their move to purchase Ubi stock, EA has announced that their purchase was not hostile, and that they'd spoken often with Ubi representatives. From the article: "Florin reiterated that Electronic Arts was not asking for a seat on Ubisoft's board. 'We had the opportunity to buy a 20 percent stake in Ubisoft and we haven't asked for anything... That's not hostile. In our industry, one doesn't make hostile moves because our value lies with people,' he added."
In our industry, one doesn't make hostile moves because our value lies with people
Considering how EA treat their employee, I can't believe they have the gall to say this...
If EA is so eager to buy these companies maybe the current shareholders ought to be asking their boards what value EA sees that they haven't been able to realize.
I guess its no surprise EA is going down, after how badly they marketed their new game Armies of Exigo (which is actaully quite cool), but as nobody ever plays online (or non-online for that matter) it pretty much makes it useless. Still quite sad to see them go, especially since they one of the oldest players in the game.
They are the great evil, a company that can't even included the coolest car on earth (SRT-4) in NFSU2 should be smitted by the game gods!!!
No thanks.
"'In our industry, one doesn't make hostile moves because our value lies with people,' he added."
Right. You just channel the hostility into producing violent games and into bullying national associations into signing exclusive deals with you to their own detriment.
"our value lies with people," - Companies exist to make money, not care about people. What kind of BS line is this?
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is the XR4Ti.
Almost any car I think of handles better than the NEON SRT-4, from a VW bug to an old Plymoth neon. Sure SRT-4s have hp; but they're about as fun to drive as a three wheeled golf cart.
www.GrenadeHop.com
Ah, give them a break, it is not like they are trying to sell a $10,000 USD toaster.
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
Shouldn't you be in bed by now (The one in your parent's basement) and have wet dreams about your English teacher* sucking you off?
* Mr Woodrell
Are these the same people who worked OT and never got paid?
That's not hostile. In our industry, one doesn't make hostile moves because our value lies with people,' he added."
yes, but only when they're valuable for 80 hours a week.
note to mods, here's the point of this joke
" In our industry, one doesn't make hostile moves with a gun because our value lies with beating people."
I think EA is just doing this to keep people guessing and to put their competitors on the defensive.
For basically no cost to EA (they have tons of cash in the bank anyway) they managed to make Ubi (a competitor) hold several emergency board meetings and probably tied up all of senior management for several weeks. Instead of concentrating on making their products, they have to respond to press and government inquiries and come up with a defense strategy.
Furthermore, they got Vivendi involved and probably caused at least some distraction in the management of every other medium-sized publisher. _And_ they diverted some attention from the difficulties EA is having acquiring Dice.
I don't think they really care if they acquire Ubi or not. If it looks doable in a couple months, there's some value there and they'll go ahead. If not, then they probably got a nice short-term return on an investment of some of their spare cash.
I guess that game developers don't qualify as people then.http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11
all ea games are repetitive to me...anyone else agree ?
I own Fifa 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005, you insensitive clod!
Cry to the French govt. about the big bad Americans.
Hostile purchasing is sort of bewildering. I think back to a time when men made tools for the sake of selling them to other men so the town could prosper(think free software movement). I can't imagine any type of hostile purchase in a market setting (You know, markets, those things they had a long time ago. Think Wal-mart without the flourescent lighting). How did this perversion of economics take place?
"You must have Administrator rights in order to buy shares in this company."
The board of ubisoft should be open to buyout offers which exceed the board's esitmated value of the company.
/end "corporate ownership 101"
Their duty is to the owners of the company (shareholders).
The board is not bound to look after the best interest of those, such as Ubisoft upper managment, that don't have the best interest of the owners/shareholdders in mind.
... but not making the move would have been stupid.
...
The way the 20% shares have been available indicates that EA can't have planned it. Its previous owner needed cash and decided suddently to sell them all at once.
EA had the cash, so it would have been stupid not to buy them even if it didn't know what to do after
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This is a lot like on North Shore...maybe Ubisoft can buy back the company with drug money???
The similarities between Electonic Arts' recent practices and those of the world's largest retail company Wal-Mart should be ovious to those with rudimentary economics knowledge.
Electronic Arts can use its leverage and sheer breadth of titles to outcompete others through volume. Wal-Mart also cuts their profit margin very thin, but makes up for it in volume.
If I sell 10000 video games at a profit of $1 a game, and you sell 1000 video games at a profit of $5 a game, I win.
The caveat here is that I have to sell 10 times as many games as you do, which leads to increasing the workforce output in order to increase production time and meet quotas.
Wal-Mart, too, has resorted to cutting its labor costs as dramatically as possible in order to maintain its standing as a volume-based retailer.
However, Electronic Arts is unlike Wal-Mart in a very particular way: they rely on a discretionary product to make their money. Whereas everyone presumably needs T-shirts, food, and chairs, and thus will always *need* Wal-Mart (or at least its products), video games are nonessential and are one of the first things to disappear from a household budget when money is tight.
Unless EA begins to make high-quality games that move to the top of the pack, they will implode the next time a major recession hits. And judging by their volume-over-creativity track record, this is unlikely.
{see header}
If production is high and wages are low, then isn't that value? :)
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
But not FIFA 64? That version sucked I guess!
I don't want EA to take over a good game company. EA makes those shitty sports games, and with new workers they could make even MORE shitty sports games. I also don't want Far Cry 2 to fall into the wrong hands and turn into another Need For Speed Underground, that would hurt the soul. Fuck off EA.
Eat sleep die
If I had modpoints I'd mark you as funny.
home
Of course they lie with people. They can't use computers to lie, nobody's come up with software to emulate a P.R. department yet.
You know what bothers me about hearing this these days in regards to EA?
I heard this same thing in the early 90's from coders who used to work for EA back in the 80's but left to start their own companies.
Many of EA's great early works of classic gaming history were coded by people who have long since left. I can't remember WHO said it, but I believe (though I may be wrong) it was either someone from the Bard's Tale (Interplay) or Starflight (Binary Systems) development teams that said something to the effect "EA likes to find stary eyed young programmers with big dreams of success and lure them into slavery with empty promises." (My parahprase since it's been so long.)
I wish I knew who said it and what exactly they said but since it was in a print magazine long ago I haven't been able to find reference to it now days.
Apparently this isn't new for EA. If I remember someone in the 90's saying it about EA from when they worked there in the 80's, I wouldn't have any reason to believe they are any better today.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Corporations are the rightful pinnacle of human development, which is why we let them get away with almost anything. We exist at *their* leisure now, pray that you remain useful.
Freedom: "I won't!"
I cant stress how much I hate this company... I would like to ask every sports game fan who will be missing out on a great offering from Sega ESPN NFL2k6 because of this bullshit licensing buyout to not give in and buy Madden* next year!
:) and so that I can play it and enjoy it in 2006
I haven't seen anything good come from EA's yearly sport releases in so long, with the exception of Fight Night. NHL finally became playable this year, but still sucks compared to ESPN...
Yes this is a rant, its also a plea, please do not buy EA games, rent them if you have to, you know they will sit on your shelf anyways!
Now what developers like EA and Sega should start doing, is release updates to their games via Demo Disc's in a magazine, or selling them at $10 a pop, here we could get updates to the engine, ui, gfx, sound, rosters, etc. While maintaing a strong customer base, and your share of loyal consumers. Even if they did it at $20-$30 for the update, $60-$80 for the full newest version... i dunno if you guys are following me , im hung over. but I think its a great idea! I want Sega to release updated rosters on a disc so that I wont have to do it myself
Please go fuck yourself EA
*Since EA likes to save money, rumor has it their trimming more fat. pun intended
No, we didn't know that. But that's probably because it doesn't make any sense and isn't even slightly funny.
Boy! Arn't those 3 wheel carts fun!!!!
Now, what was your point?
hmmm
are these the same guys who brought us quality pinball action in the earlier half of the 90s?
Yeah, it went downhill since Jesus bit the dust. FIFA 25 A.D. was where it was at!
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
and that they'd spoken often with Ubi representatives
And that's why the Ubi Soft CEO was going to the media and going "this came out of the blue without warning, and this is an industry where such investments are usually communicated about to the company ahead of time, which is why we don't know how to interpret this except as hostile"?
Hmm.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Once the reputation for mediocrity sets in... Slashdot is on the cutting edge of this here, the public hasn't seen it, but they will... they'll go into a death spiral.
Mainstream music has a reputation of mediocrity but that doesn't hurt its sales one bit. People don't care about the mediocrity because their expectations have been adjusted down until they assume mediocrity is the normal state of things; more than that, they assume that mediocrity is unavoidable, and not only is there no reason they should expect more, but they should be grateful that they are able to get this music and grateful that the RIAA has the grace to drop the few breadcrumbs they allow to the few elect artists they can be bothered to allow into the major label umbrella.
All that EA has to do is create that same adjusting of expectations in the video game industry. This isn't hard, and all they have to do is buy enough things. They probably don't even need to try to control the distribution (music stores) and publicization (radio) channels the way the recording industry cartel does. All they have to do is buy up publishers (like ubi soft), so that the capital and publishing rights available by getting a game published from an alternate publisher come down to a small minority of table scraps that cannot possibly sustain any notable number of serious developers making anything except niche and budget titles; and buy up licenses(like the NFL and most major movies of late) so that if a non-EA developer wants to make a game containing characters people have heard of, they better be either Nintendo or Blizzard.
The expectations are already going down. Many video game purchasers already believe mediocrity to simply be the normal state of things. A sizable portion of the video game market buys Madden every year just because it's Madden, without thinking of whether there might be alternatives. Many video game reviewers already ignore the difference between mediocrity and quality and review their games based on what they think the readers want to hear about the game, not on how they think their readers would react to playing the game. Halo 2 was declared by many sources game of the year sight unseen, just because those sources thought that was what they were expected to do.
Quality is, of course, still the best recipe for success, so we haven't reached any point of true danger yet. But once consumers begin to see mediocre products as what to expect, that point where it dawns on them they're paying for mediocrity ceases to have any meaning. They'll realize they're paying for tripe, then shrug, go "eh, but what can you do", and buy more.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
My God, if you don't want your competitor buying up your company, wouldn't it go to common sense logic to NOT SELL SHARES IN YOUR COMPANY?!?!?!?
News Corp, (parent of Fox) is owned by Rupert Murdoc, and he's fighting tooth and nail to keep control of it. The board adopted a "poison pill" strategy to prevent Malone from seizing control. How did he do that? Are there any ways Ubisoft can do the same?
To adopt a poison pill strategy would negate the benefit of owning stock in a company. A poison pill would make your company go to financial shit, and your shares would be worthless. I'd vote out any board that would seek to ruin my investment. They are on the board to serve ME, the owner, not the company.
And maybe I WANT a hostile takeover. I might end up making a tidy profit from my shares. And that's the only reason I bought them in the first place, to make a profit.1
EA is not to blame that sport is hijacked by money loving whores. Im 100% sure NFL wasnt "given an offer they couldnt refuse". What you call sport isnt sport anymore its entertainment and everything goes. Use your voice and money to change the system, but you need to understand how it works first.
For ages they never had a title ported to Linux.
.. but won't allow even Linux users purchase one any more.
.. fucking die the lot of them.
.. These people deserve having their scrotum ripped off - and their bleeding balls up be forced up their nostrils.
When Vivendi bought Sierra they dictated Tribes 2 should be stopped being produced for Linux.
check out Tribes 2 "sold out" ref: Loki Games
The code is there - the binaries are there - the cost is zero -
they allowed Windows users to download a free Tribes 2
I say
I accept economical ones but those were not.
MS-fearing Mega-corps will do anything to stop gaming coming to Linux and Mac.
Because when that happens - the Desktop war is over.
Wrong. They didn'thave soccor back then. Jesus wouldn't allow it. Now, NASCAR....
They need to hire Michael J Fox to work in the mail room real soon now.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. Always boom tomorrow. BOOM!
Heh, must be a Conan O'Brien fan.
"Bring NASCAR Jesus around again!"
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
The parent topic was modded down, therefore it doesn't show in thread view anymore and you couldn't see it, making my comment seem weird on it it's own. (idiot)
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