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. "

Comments

The Collapse Of Microsoft's First Party Support

[Anonymous Coward]

Bungie - Was so unhappy working with Microsoft they forced them to let the company become independent and work on any platform they want
Bizarre - Ended their exclusive Xbox development when they went off to Activision
Bioware - Ended their exclusive Xbox development when they went off to EA

That pretty much just leaves Lionhead and Rare as Microsoft's first party Xbox developers. Rare has been a disaster for the money Microsoft paid to acquire the developer. Lionhead has been 'meh'. A decent developer that talks too much about grand plans that continually disappoint in their actual product.

With these rumors of Microsoft looking to license the Xbox to third party manufacturers you have to wonder if Microsoft is ready to turn their focus away from console hardware and back to Windows gaming.

Re:The Collapse Of Microsoft's First Party Support

[Anonymous Coward]

It's even worse than just those three. Mistwalker has turned out to be a disaster with the failures of Blue Dragon and Lost Oddessey. And Epic has sounded very, very pissed off at Microsoft and their online service forcing them to spend six months to a year rewriting UT. Rockstar has tried to hide their frustration and anger at being forced to fit their giant city sized game onto the 360's tiny and smaller than last gen's 7.1GB DVD disks and no standard harddrive.

With the sudden and rapid death of HD-DVD this week and the almost complete lack of mention of the 360 at CES by Microsoft and the almost complete silence on their 2008 and beyond plans that their enthusiasm for the console market is running out. After six to seven years in the console market and billions in cash to spend if Microsoft was still serious about being competitive they would have never let Bioware go off to EA.

Re:The Collapse Of Microsoft's First Party Support

[JebusIsLord]

I dunno... having bought all these game companies in order to build up the 360's installed base, and having succeeded, doesn't it make sense now to sell them off and recoup their costs? They'll still make games for the 360... 3rd parties go to where the gamers are. The PS3 is barely a threat at this juncture, and Wii isn't raking it in for 3rd parties either.

MS way very agressive early on in aquiring these companies, and it has paid off. Sony would do well to follow their example.

Re:What a sad day for gaming

[blahplusplus]

"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"

I wish people would stop bashing EA, the fact is many of their games are pretty good, even with some bumpy patches here and there (battlefield), The sims series, simcity, Need for speed (almost every god damn one has been and fairly well made). There's other crap for sure, but the fact is you don't get to be top dog if you totally blow. Fact is, EA knows how to play the capitalist game very well, and make lots of money doing it. They know what games sell and produce them.

Re:What a sad day for gaming

[Endo13]

EA is good at marketing, yes. But then so is McDonalds. And despite their insane popularity, there's very few restaurants out there that don't serve better food than McDonalds.

Out of the dozens of "games" EA has released in the last 5 years, I can count on one hand the ones that were both fun to play and not complete bug-ridden crap. The same cannot be said about the number of stellar franchises they've purchased and subsequently trashed in the same time period. There's reasons people bash EA. Lots of reasons. And they far outnumber the reasons to like them.

Despite all that, I'm still willing to give them another round to prove they can in fact release something other than turds. Guess we'll just have to wait and see how Warhammer Online and the next BioWare releases turn out. Sadly though, I'm afraid we'll be disappointed.

EA ruins another developer.

[syn1kk]

Example 1 - Dungeon Keeper series by Bullfrog:
"Bullfrog had decided not to do any other RTS of any kind. This decision was in effect the end of Bullfrog as a brand; the company had already been owned by EA for several years, and EA laid off some employees and put the remainder onto other projects such as the Harry Potter line."

"2004 met the final end of Bullfrog when Electronic Arts combined their side studios into EA UK."

Lord British - talking about how EA is a ONE TRICK PONY:
"Richard Garriott: The short explanation was, as they say, fundamental creative differences. If you've seen any of the Ultimas, you know they contain very large virtual worlds, deep story lines and they took me each years to develop. But EA's core business is making sports games, and they've got a machine and a process that does that very, very successfully. Frankly, EA wasn't convinced that the MMOG business model was the way of the future and so that ultimately led to my retirement from EA. In fact, when I left in 2000, I fully anticipated that if EA wasn't interested in MMOGs, that Microsoft or some other big company would dive into this bold new world that we'd opened up and then dominate the market segment. After a year of retirement -- and with no one approaching us -- my brother Robert and I decided to put together a company to create MMOGs that we briefly called Destination Games. "