It won't happen. Why would EA want to be exclusively on one console?? They make most of their money on having games on all platforms, narrowing down to one console would be suicide in the long run. And do they honestly think everyone would buy a 360 for them. I bet there are housewives who bought EA Sports Active for the Wii who don't even know what an Xbox is.
It didn't happen, it won't happen, the rumor is a pile of bunk. However, if you happened to own Microsoft and EA stock when this rumor caught fire the other day, you could have made a bundle in the market. I'm not saying it was a purposely invented rumor for profit, but it could have made some folks quite a bit of cash since both EA & MS stock went up for the while that speculators thought this might be real.
It's not going to happen, but I can't believe (a few) people in the thread are championing the idea. As someone renowned for being a bit of a Sony fan on these boards, I would say exactly the same thing if Sony were rumoured to buy EA: it would be cataclysmic for the video game industry.
You're naive if you think Microsoft would directly fund Playstation 3 development.
Either way, it would never happen. EA must receive over 60% (if not more) of their revenue from PS3, Wii, PSP and DS titles. They'd cut the companies revenue by more than half if they were bought by Microsoft. At around 6 Billion dollars to buy outright, that would not be a financially sound investment.
Secondly, the bulk of EA's value hinges on FIFA and NFL franchises -- and I'm not entirely sure the license-holders would be particularly pleased to see both franchises become exclusives -- particularly skipping on the platforms with the greatest market share (Wii and DS). If EA had those licenses rebuked the, company would practically be worthless. They'd have to oversee the admin of massive job loss (seeing as many studios would no longer be need for 360 development), something the government would be pretty pissed at.
No matter which eventuality you look at it from, if this happened (which it's been outright denied by all sides now) you'd be looking at a changed video game industry; and Microsoft, the new owners of a completely gimped company worth quarter of the value they were before takeover.
I highly doubt this is real, but even if it is, EA would not accept unless they are given the publishing rights. There's no way in hell EA would just stop making games for the PS3 just because the guys upstairs told them to.
It would be smart of MS to do this. This is a rare once in a lifetime move they could make. I would also enjoy this as it would bring it back to the ultra competitive days between the PSX and the N64. I think its pretty sad that the console wars have become more about system price and a couple AAA first party games rather than their game library. If someone pulled something like this it would force both companies to step up their games and in turn we would all get better games across both consoles.
That being said MS has a record of buying successful studios and then kind of running them into the ground and dissolving them so they would have to give EA a lot of autonomy so as to not suffocate them.
" I think MS realized that they cant make games and decided to buyout a company to make games for em....pretty sad "
Like when they stole Rare : ( That pissed me off more then any news, since the Donkey Kong series was one of my favorites. "
The Rare acquisition made it really obvious how much additional polish your game gets with Nintendo's oversight. Cus man, when that went away... yikes.
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