EA wants to sell itself, Apple, Disney and Amazon are in consideration, nearly merged with NBCUniversal

[whatever I feel like]

This is probably complete bullshit but wow. It really says something if EA OF ALL FUCKING COMPANIES is looking for some sort of consolidating buyout.
I guess them losing the licence to football WAS the massive blow I anticipated.

EA wasn't looking for a buyout, its NBCUniversal that was going to be the bride in the shotgun marriage. FWIW, this doesn't really make sense to me. "Content" means streaming content and none of the streaming services have actually managed to do a good job of adding vidya in before now. Enjoy your streaming games, everyone. Because everyone just loves streaming games...

Hell, one of the companies that is out-competing NBC-Uni is WB, which actively wanted to sell its game unit.

 

[ChefKiss]

every western videogame company wants to sell themselves because they're falling apart, they're just leaving idiots holding the bag. But while collapsing giants like Activision Blizzard at least have value in their IP and brands, what do EA have? They dont own FIFA or Madden or NBA or anything they made money off of. The brands they do own have been so badly damaged you'd have an uphill battle to redeem them after terrible entries and mobile shite. All the talent is long gone so they'd just be more things to put in the Disney IP vault never to be seen again

 

[Picnic_Boy]

every western videogame company wants to sell themselves because they're falling apart, they're just leaving idiots holding the bag. But while collapsing giants like Activision Blizzard at least have value in their IP and brands, what do EA have? They dont own FIFA or Madden or NBA or anything they made money off of. The brands they do own have been so badly damaged you'd have an uphill battle to redeem them after terrible entries and mobile shite. All the talent is long gone so they'd just be more things to put in the Disney IP vault never to be seen again

I'd love to see what Disney would do with Dead Space 4. Turning the franchise into The Last Jedi would be hilarious.

 

[Thiletonomics]

every western videogame company wants to sell themselves because they're falling apart, they're just leaving idiots holding the bag. But while collapsing giants like Activision Blizzard at least have value in their IP and brands, what do EA have? They dont own FIFA or Madden or NBA or anything they made money off of. The brands they do own have been so badly damaged you'd have an uphill battle to redeem them after terrible entries and mobile shite. All the talent is long gone so they'd just be more things to put in the Disney IP vault never to be seen again

The Sims comes to mind as one of EA's prized IPs, but given how long The Sims 4 has been milked for, and is still being milked, it's not a good thing. And the fact that it was in a similar situation that Battlefield 2042 was during its development (TS4 was originally going to be an online, multiplayer game, but had to be hastily changed into a single player game, after the SimCity 2013 disaster), but it somehow survived due to EA pretty much having a monopoly on the life simulation genre, makes it even worse.

 

[trent]

Disney will probably buy them just to have their own "mega-studio" that can churn out multiple AAA games of their franchises per year.

The AAA end of the videogame industry is so fucked.

 

[Raiken]

To stupid to read a lot, So what motivaties them to do this?
Is it them loosing the FIFA licence?

 

[ZMOT]

This is probably complete bullshit but wow. It really says something if EA OF ALL FUCKING COMPANIES is looking for some sort of consolidating buyout.
I guess them losing the licence to football WAS the massive blow I anticipated.

except they dropped it voluntarily (apparently because fifa wanted a billion just for the name) and announced it last fucking october already.

Netscape was partially because they were a giant in their decline who decided to go down swinging, if anything that lawsuit hastened their decline as they spent more on that than keeping up with the competition.

also ignores how normies never ever were going to download netscape when there's already "the internet" on their desktop. not to mention the effect in the business-sphere, which lead to shit like ie6 centric websites riddled with silverlight, which is still an issue today (and googly tries to replicate with webkit).

Disney will probably buy them just to have their own "mega-studio" that can churn out multiple AAA games of their franchises per year.

The AAA end of the videogame industry is so fucked.

disney got rid of all their studio's a while back, and I highly doubt with their current issues they want to go fresh into a new industry.

To stupid to read a lot, So what motivaties them to do this?
Is it them loosing the FIFA licence?

future prospects, the way the market is going, global environment etc. consolidation is a normal market reaction, added by the fact that besides their sportsball and sims endeavors there's not much else they have coming up. as woke as a lot of their lowtier devs are, there will be people higher up looking at those studios, their ability to produce something that's not complete dogshit, look at how long it would take (and what it would cost) and go "yeah, nah". as @ChefKiss said they're just want to get out with a big payout and leave someone else holding the bag.

people also overvalue the fifa name. for starters normies and sportsballfags don't care about the label on the box, they care that the clubs and players have their original name, and even if they do - what else they gonna buy, PES?

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

We need the ghost of Teddy Roosevelt to come back and kick some shit in.

You have to settle for Tim Sweeney.

 

[Spicey McHaggis]

I mean it can't make anything worse at this point. Modern games are mostly shit at this point, let a crash happen already so the deadwood gets cleared out somewhat. Looking for new games to play lately has just been scrolling through the store and realizing nothing is actually appealing, then just saying fuck it and going back to playing old games.

 

[TurkishOreo]

I didn't believe that 2022 would be the year where game companies are whoring themselves out for Disney and Fapapple.

Bethesda, Mojang, fromSoft and shiet.

 

[Jonah Hill poster]

If EA goes through with this, I’ll just be reminded how this was at one point a thing at a gaming expo:

 

[Spicey McHaggis]

If EA goes through with this, I’ll just be reminded how this was at one point was a thing at a gaming expo:

View attachment 3308549

It's been years since I first saw that, but it never gets any less disturbing to me.

 

[Jonah Hill poster]

It's been years since I first saw that, but it never gets any less disturbing to me.

It shows that most monopolies are better than others, and the consooming still continues. Meanwhile, I’ll be stuck playing Burnout! like I’m still holding on living in the year 2004.

 

[Übertroon]

EA had a good run 20 to 10 years ago, people might have voted them the worst company in America because of how Mass Effect 3 ended, but that era where EA was releasing Crysis, Dragon Age Origins, Mass Effect 1, Dead Space 1, Command & Conquer 3, and Battlefield Bad Company in a 12 month timespan was peak gaming

EA really collapsed in output around when the PS4 and Xbox One released, the insistence on having every game using the Frostbite might have been what has killed the company. I began noticing something was wrong when EA aquired the Star Wars license in 2012 and proceeded to only develop a single title. 5 years earlier EA
would have had a dozen studios developing numerous Star Wars titles in all kinds of genres.

Honestly modern video game development sucks, and it won't get better until publishers realize that they can't all try to have the biggest e sports title with cutting edge graphics and live service micro transaction bullshit on top of it.

 

[ZMOT]

I mean it can't make anything worse at this point. Modern games are mostly shit at this point, let a crash happen already so the deadwood gets cleared out somewhat. Looking for new games to play lately has just been scrolling through the store and realizing nothing is actually appealing, then just saying fuck it and going back to playing old games.

indies. cheaper and less annoying. only problem is finding them in the sea of games.

time to shill next fest, next one is in june: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/nextfest
almost all games have demos you can try, should be at least a few games that look interesting in there. you can also check out some of the past fests (although imo the last one had weaker entries). without it I'd never have found little witch in the woods, anno mutationem, chinatown detective agency and plenty others.

EA had a good run 20 to 10 years ago, people might have voted them the worst company in America because of how Mass Effect 3 ended, but that era where EA was releasing Crysis, Dragon Age Origins, Mass Effect 1, Dead Space 1, Command & Conquer 3, and Battlefield Bad Company in a 12 month timespan was peak gaming

EA really collapsed in output around when the PS4 and Xbox One released, the insistence on having every game using the Frostbite might have been what has killed the company. I began noticing something was wrong when EA aquired the Star Wars license in 2012 and proceeded to only develop a single title. 5 years earlier EA
would have had a dozen studios developing numerous Star Wars titles in all kinds of genres.

Honestly modern video game development sucks, and it won't get better until publishers realize that they can't all try to have the biggest e sports title with cutting edge graphics and live service micro transaction bullshit on top of it.

lack of SW games probably in part due to disney insisting on their nuwars shit, and EA simply not having a studio to do it. back then SW was still a hot property they wouldn't let everyone touch, the only one they deemed "worthy" enough was dice sweden of all people.

also frostbite wasn't the issue, EA's general mismanagement is. look at all the stories from bioware, or DICE being retarded for years (still a mystery how they managed not to completely shit up BF1). different engine wouldn't have made a difference.

 

[Übertroon]

lack of SW games probably in part due to disney insisting on their nuwars shit, and EA simply not having a studio to do it. back then SW was still a hot property they wouldn't let everyone touch, the only one they deemed "worthy" enough was dice sweden of all people.

also frostbite wasn't the issue, EA's general mismanagement is. look at all the stories from bioware, or DICE being retarded for years (still a mystery how they managed not to completely shit up BF1). different engine wouldn't have made a difference.

I would still argue the frostbite mandate had an effect as it happened just as the output came to a halt.
About 2012-2013 was when something seriously wrong happened internally

 

[Dom Cruise]

EA had a good run 20 to 10 years ago, people might have voted them the worst company in America because of how Mass Effect 3 ended, but that era where EA was releasing Crysis, Dragon Age Origins, Mass Effect 1, Dead Space 1, Command & Conquer 3, and Battlefield Bad Company in a 12 month timespan was peak gaming

EA really collapsed in output around when the PS4 and Xbox One released, the insistence on having every game using the Frostbite might have been what has killed the company. I began noticing something was wrong when EA aquired the Star Wars license in 2012 and proceeded to only develop a single title. 5 years earlier EA
would have had a dozen studios developing numerous Star Wars titles in all kinds of genres.

Honestly modern video game development sucks, and it won't get better until publishers realize that they can't all try to have the biggest e sports title with cutting edge graphics and live service micro transaction bullshit on top of it.

EA was cool in the late 90s and early 2000s when they put out games like the early Medal of Honors, C&C: Red Alert 2, American McGee’s Alice and Clive Barker’s Undying, they then started to suck in the mid 00s when they put out literally almost nothing but sports games, racing games and licensed games, they did get better during the 7th gen, only to suck shit again with the 8th.

Although Battlefield 1 is a pretty great game.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

If EA goes through with this, I’ll just be reminded how this was at one point a thing at a gaming expo:

View attachment 3308549

Martha Stewart and lifestyle branding has been a blight on the human race and she deserves to burn for what she has done.

 

[ellroy]

Back in the day Microsoft got sued over just shipping with Internet Explorer since that's somehow a monopoly even if you could still just download Netscape or whatever other dumb shit. That was completely benign and silly when compared to shit companies like Google or Apple get away with these days and it blows my fucking mind.

Microsoft wouldn’t of attracted the DoJ’s attention if it wasn’t for all the cutthroat business policies where they threatened companies like Netscape and OEM builders. The problem was the DOJ and the media didn’t understand computers; so all the press was just about bundling IE and not about Microsoft threatening Compaq about including Netscape with their machines, threatening Apple about withdrawal Microsoft Office from Mac machines if they didn’t support Internet Explorer (Steve Jobs even praised IE in one of his keynotes), and worse, walked in Netscape’s office and demanded they sell themselves to Microsoft or go out of business.

Microsoft was generally acting like a shitty company and Bill Gates during depositions was either malicious or flat out lying. At one point he testified that Internet Explorer had to be intergrated with the Windows operating system or there would be significant degradation of performance.

I do think the idea of breaking Microsoft up like Standard Oil was a bad idea, Microsoft just should of been fined and prohibited from acquiring companies for a year or two. Microsoft never destroyed computing like everyone feared and the only worrying thing they are doing now is buying game publishers.

Wired Magazine in 2001 had a good article about it. I need to go find the link.

 

[BaconBoobs]

Disney buys EA and they recast John Madden as a gay fat black woman.