Embiggen Business
Saturday, March 01, 2008 6:05 PM
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Pac-Man gobbling down all those little pills, the world’s biggest game publisher
Electronic Arts is trying to get even bigger by taking over
Take-Two Interactive.
No wait, let’s try a less-retro analogy. EA wants to car-jack Take-Two before Grand Theft Auto IV hits the streets. Better.
Home to money-printing games like Grand Theft Auto and Bioshock, T2 also boasts 2K Games (which published 2006’s groundbreaking Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Sid Meier's Civilization series) while their 2K Sports lineup is EA Sports’ biggest (and often better) competitor
Consolidation is the gameplan for EA, which last year snapped up acclaimed Edmonton indie Bioware (Mass Effect, Knights of the Old Republic) and partner Pandemic Studios (Destroy All Humans! and Mercenaries).
Though Take-Two has already rejected a pair of $2 billion buy-out offers, their stock shot-up 50% last week as EA considered a hostile takeover bid and Take-Two boasted other companies want to take them to the prom, too.
But what does this mean to all you button-mashers out there? Well, embiggening videogame publishers—which also includes last December’s proposed merger of Activision and Vivendi Universal into Activision-Blizzard—means the power to green-light games is being consolidated into ever-fewer suits.
This is particularly a problem for sports gamers as EA-T2 would have a virtual monopoly. But overall EA will still be battling the Activision Blizzard behemoth so competition should keep these mega-publishers from jacking-up prices too much—especially since bigger companies may be able to use scale to reduce the production costs of triple-A titles.
The greater concerns are a) huge, publicly-owned corporations care more about maximizing profits than making great games; and b) they’ll use their clout to dominate retail to the detriment of small companies which will have no choice but to also join forces to compete.
Already, the third-biggest publisher, France’s Ubisoft, is publicly musing on its own expansion plans while smaller companies may soon find themselves on the auction block.
On the other hand, EA has proven itself mildly interested in innovation—see: Will Wright’s Spore as well as Crysis and skate.—and hopefully the wild success of unconventional games like Bioshock and Mass Effect will be enough to convince these Franken-companies they don’t need to only churn out sequels and licensed shovelware when they can make big piles of cash off creativity. Plus, EA digs multi-platform releases, which is good news for single-console owners.
Besides, the music industry’s consolidation of major labels actually helped stimulate the rise of indie scene.
So keep your thumbs-crossed.