Electronic Arts Up For Sale?

John Wagger writes "One of the world's largest gaming publishers and developers Electronic Arts has quietly put itself up for sale. While there have already been talks with private equity companies, the talks have not resulted in anything concrete. One of the sources is saying that EA would do the deal for $20 per share (currently at $14.02). Over the past year, EA's stock price has fallen 37 percent. Like other major game publishers, EA has been struggling against growing trend of social and mobile gaming."

Comments

Don't go it alone...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they should have partnered and kept their products on Steam rather than trying to compete against Gabe. Lord knows I haven't played a PC game from EA since they took all their products off Steam.

the revenge of DRM

[Gravis Zero]

anyone who plays games that use EA's "always connected" DRM are going to be screwed shortly.

Re:What would you be buying?

[starfishsystems]

They have lots of awesome IP, just idiot management who seems unable to execute.

I think I can attest to this.

I'm a computer scientist who's done a lot of development over the years, as well as large-scale system and network administration. A few months ago, I responded to a job posting for a senior technical position there. The fit seemed great. The description could have been summarizing my career. I spent a whole day in job interviews at EA, having already been phone interviewed with a hiring manager and the VP of the group I'd be working in. The VP and I had gotten along great. We talked about architecture and operations and what each of us saw as emerging paradigms. Before the site visit, I'd also spent a hour answering a detailed technical questionnaire and several hours writing a programming test. (I don't regret this effort: there was an interesting problem to solve and I was quite pleased with the elegance and correctness of my solution.)

But not once in the entire day of meetings was the programming test ever mentioned, much less my technical qualifications, much less anything about the position for which I'd applied. Everybody I talked to wanted to talk about management style and politics and who reports to whom and what would I do in various hypothetical management situations. I seriously thought that they'd made a mistake and scheduled the wrong candidate that day. But no, it was a case of management seeing the world exclusively in terms of management.

Apart from that stunning aspect of cognitive disjunction, the day ran very smoothly. I don't know quite how to describe the mood. It was a bit like being at Club Med or on a cruise ship or at a Las Vegas casino. Polished, courteous, competent, friendly, and yet somehow lacking. A bit soulless, a bit careful to not do or say anything even mildly distinctive or controversial. Corporate.

No surprise, they turned me down for the position, saying they were looking for someone with more of a management orientation. Yeah, well, cool. How would like to put that somewhere in your job posting? We could have all saved ourselves a lot of time. But you see, that's exactly where EA is in trouble. There's a disconnect, and it's stratified. People at the top and in the trenches think EA is one thing, but meanwhile all the middle management are having a fine time carving out turf for themselves and sniping at each other and thinking that's reality.