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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.
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.
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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
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.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.