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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."
EA has a long history of pressuring developers to rush out projects before they are ready. If they claim they are struggling to compete with social gaming, it has way more to do with people not having to download 3 additional patches a game to get a finished product than social gaming being more popular.
Yep, it's totally the market and not the universal hatred that EA has garnered from the gaming community.
Meanwhile: http://www.gamesradar.com/valve-reports-seventh-year-100-sales-growth-steam/
Or perhaps they are struggling with the repercussions of how they treat their customers.
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.
I would like to imagine that any financial problems EA is seeing are also a result of their shockingly poor handling of developers, unethical treatment of customers, misguided use of DRM, and famously incompetent management.
It's got to be someone with the same sets of goals, primarily being evil. There are only a few companies I can think of that are evil enough to possibly buy EA.
First off, in the games arena, there's already Zynga. A ZyngEA merger would create the ultimate evil games company.
Next up, in media, would probably be ComcastNBCUniversal. They've got wide coverage in the world of entertainment, and would definitely have some evil synergy with EA. ComcastNBCUniversalEA would also provide 30 Rock with some new material.
Finally, if mobile is where they see themselves lacking, why not AT&T? They're regularly hated by their customers, yet manage to prevent most of them from leaving. EA could definitely benefit from this sort of customer lock-in. EAT&T could really screw with quite a few customers. Dropped calls could become a new game, for example.
anyone who plays games that use EA's "always connected" DRM are going to be screwed shortly.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Dear Gaben, please use some of that money you keep in your money pool to buy EA, and then make it awesome.
by putting out the same shitty content for 60$+DLC over and over and reducing the player base as they escape to social gaming to find what they want.
Is still upset about Mass Effect 3.
Somewhere along the last decade EA (among others) forgot who its customers were, and even what the term customer means. Put the customer at the center of your business strategy and suprise surprise. Treat them like shit, and they will give you the finger.
EA certainly has a lousy reputation; but it strikes me that video game publishers in general would be a very odd thing to purchase whole if they are selling because of hard times...
Presumably there is the back catalog; but most games don't hold their value that well over time(not necessarily a serious issue if the game still runs on current versions of Windows and you can just shove it out as a download at impulse-purchase prices; but if the game is bitrotten or encumbered in some contractual issue, you probably aren't going to be able to charge enough to make it worth fixing...).
There are also likely some developers/artists/etc. but the demographics of game industry workers seem to skew toward young and mobile. Especially if the ship is sinking you can probably hire them piecemeal, and you can't necessarily retain them if you buy the whole thing.
Would you be paying for the various franchises? How much is it worth to legally sell "Command and Conquer: Kane Cashes It In" vs. selling an otherwise equivalent grim-near-future-warfare-and-alien-minerals RTS?
Surely "Origin" can't be worth much more than the precious metals in the servers it runs on, minus the cost of extracting them.
Again, EA seems like a particularly unpalatable purchase; but I'm a bit confused about the idea of buying any down-at-heel publisher. It seems like being down-at-heel suggests that the whole is not greater than the sum of the parts, and that most of the parts are either optional, not very valuable, or available for purchase either by offering them a bigger paycheck, or by bidding on a chunk of the publisher's corpse...
They also forgot that they were selling luxury goods. A company like Oracle or Microsoft can get away with a certain amount of customer irritation because people use their products to make money and need to plan a migration strategy and spend money to switch away. A game publisher is not just competing with other game sellers, it's competing with other sources of entertainment for a finite budget. In a recession, luxury spending is the first thing that most people cut and that pushes down the supply of dollars that EA is competing for. They made it very easy for people to put them at the top of their spending cut list.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This part made me laugh, "EA has been struggling against growing trend of social and mobile gaming." You can only exploit a hit game for a few iterations before you have to get off your ass and come up with something new. But, it's hard to come up with something good when the talented developers get wise to your project [mis]management and either leave or won't work for you. http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html
[Blue] Control. You get $14 dollars a share and YOU WILL LIKE IT!
[Red] Destruction. Go bankrupt.
[Green] Anti-synthesis. Split apart, releasing all the developers you gobbled up back to their formerly creative ways.
"EA has been struggling against growing trend of social and mobile gaming."
wrong, they have been struggling with overpriced shitware