The EA Cancer Continues to Spread
It was just announced a short while ago that Electronic Arts is purchasing BioWare and Pandemic, two major game developers in the gaming industry, an industry that will be run into the ground by corporations like Electronic Arts.
The acquisition will cost EA about $775 million, which includes a $650 million cash payment to the stockholders of VG Holding Corp., which directly owns the two developers, and an additional $155 million in equity to select VG employees.
VG Holding is owned by Elevation Partners, which invested $300 million in BioWare and Pandemic in November 2005, creating one of the world’s best-funded and largest independent game development houses.Elevation Partners (which includes U2 front-man Bono) was formerly headed by John Riccitello, who left EA in 2004 to form the company. Riccitello re-joined EA as chief operating officer in April.
What is the deal with all these current and former EA employees jumping around from place to place? Why is one of the former CEOs of EA now running the Xbox division at Microsoft? With all the amazing games coming out this year and next, it’s hard to have a bad view of the industry, but when you see one corporations continually purchase any and all developers, especially those that rival it, the future of the industry begins to look a lot less customer friendly. It is not a good thing when one company buys up all its competition and is the only player in the game, just look at what Comcast has done to cable TV and Internet prices.
Here is just a small cross-section of EA activities in just the past two years.
12/8/05: EA Buys Jamdat for $680 million
12/20/04: EA Buys Big Chunk of Ubisoft
“Pending further information, we consider this operation as hostile,” an Ubisoft spokesman told Reuters agency.
“We think this operation is aimed at securing the studios of Ubisoft that are ready to face the next generation of gaming consoles,” he added.
6/21/06: EA Buys Mythic
10/03/06: EA Buys Digital Illusions, creator of Battlefield
8/24/06: Phenomic Games Purchased by EA
9/6/06: EA licenses Unreal Engine 3 and Buys Criterion (creator of Burnout) for $48 million
12/13/04: EA Buys NFL License Exclusivity
“This is a dark day for gamers, one that firmly shows corporate might has completely stifled any and all creativity in their industry. Football fans, you have only one option. Buy
Madden? No, it’s NOT to buy Madden. Show EA what they have done is wrong. It’s about all
we have left to do.” - Matt Paprocki
1/18/05: EA Signs 15-year Exclusivity Deal with ESPN.
8/8/07: More EA at MS & Ubisoft
8/15/07: More Deception from EA & EA’s Wikipedia Corruption Exposed
There’s even more, which I talked about in my article about Electronic Arts last December, but as you can see, this is not the first time EA has spent nearly a billion dollars on buying up companies or licenses, it’s not even the second or third time. I personally have not purchased an EA game in nearly ten years now due to their actions, but obviously calling for a boycott of this company, which many have done, does not work since the gaming industry is so large now and is mainly aimed at the casual gamer crowd, who has no idea any of this is going on.
EA employees were also caught earlier this year deleting negative things about the company from their Wikipedia entry. BioWare owns the Mass Effect license as well (which means EA now owns it), so the planned exclusive trilogy for the Xbox 360 is most likely down the drain. I don’t really know what to say anymore when it comes to EA, all the facts are right there for you to see…it’s a sad day for gaming.
(Thanks to Bluetane for the heads-up on this story, he was also the first one to alert me back in August in the article above.)
Also, EA announced today that if you want to purchase Rock Band this fall, you will have to buy every single instrument with it (for a bundle price of $170+), as they will be offering no other option. They also hinted that since Rock Band’s songs require a lot more work, due to being optimized for multiple instruments, that downloadable song pricing is going to be very unpleasant. I’d be more upset about this, but really, anybody purchasing an EA game these days deserves to be ripped off.
July 30th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
[...] play their games online, especially their sports line-up. Since two years ago, EA has gone on to buy up more developers and more franchises, like BioWare (Mass Effect trilogy) and Pandemic (Mercenaries [...]