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EA/BioWare Deal Finalized, Nets EA Ten Franchises
Gamasutra notes that the announced deal, where Electronic Arts was to purchase BioWare/Pandemic, has now been formalized. This arrangement will fold ten new franchises into the EA family, from the just-released Mass Effect all the way back to BioWare's classic titles. "EA Games president Frank Gibeau will oversee both studios within his organization, and BioWare's Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk have each been named as vice presidents of EA and co-general managers of BioWare. Similarly, Pandemic's Andrew Goldman and Josh Resnick have each been named vice presidents of EA and co-general managers of Pandemic, while Greg Borrud has been named vice president of EA and chief production officer of Pandemic Studios. "
Right. I forgot this was Slashdot. I forgot that Microsoft was a total failure of a company. Has cheated to get where it is today, and has been dying for 10 years now, with each new product having fatal flaws that will kill the company.
Face it. So far Microsoft is in a solid second place, and thanks to the high attach rate and traditional style, probably number one as far as most 3rd party game companies are concerned.
Can Sony pull it together and do better? sure, it's possible, maybe even likely. Maybe Nintendo will start getting some serious 3rd party development and not the shovelware it seems to be getting.
Did you play KOTOR? And KOTOR 2? And you can say with a straight face that Obsidian is "the Honda to their GM"?? Jeezus, KOTOR was a terribly fun game, and ran pretty well on the Xbox. KOTOR 2 ran horribly, had major, game ending bugs, apparently used five year olds as the level designers, and left more plot lines dangling than a daytime soap, and made the Sopranos look like a well-thought out, complete ending. To top it all off, they left all the voice acting to a fantastic, unimplemented ending in the final product, rubbing it in for us. Bioware's not the best ever, but if Bioware is GM, I'd suggest Obsidian is Zastava (maker of the famous Yugo).
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
That EA is allowed to buy out all their competition rather than be forced to produce top notch titles in an effort to battle over the market is a farce to me. They did it with Madden as well by scooping up the NFL license just as Visual Concepts' ESPN NFL 2k series was starting to show signs of seriously competing with Madden. They can't be allowed to continue doing this. Why would BioWare want this for themselves? Doesn't anyone inside gaming feel that EA needs less help than anyone? Stay independent! Fight the urge to conglomerate!