February 26th, 2008

Electronic Arts To Buy Take-Two?

No matter what happens, it seems we're headed towards monopoly in most areas of the economy. Obviously, I am only thinking about the IT world, and no matter how many companies are competing on a field, there's always a big one that takes a huge advantage of its market share and celebrity so bad products keep being sold just because of their predecessors' fame. For example, Intel and AMD, and I don't have to add anything else about that topic, especially since today it's about Electronic Arts and Take-Two Interactive...

There are a lot of people that see Electronic Arts as a money-making company that simply engulfs smaller companies with good titles in their portofolio, and then releases very bad follow-ups, and they may be right. I am not a big fan of sports games, but the FIFA series stopped from adding really new and interesting things a few years ago, as well as the Need For Speed series, which stops at NFS: Porsche for me. Now, I just heard they want to take over Take-Two Interactive, and I really don't know what to think about it, considering the past and present of these two companies and the titles they released so far.

The story is very simple - EA offered $2.0 billion for Take-Two, and they also claim this is as good as it gets. This being an unsolicited bid, just as it happened with Microsoft vs. Yahoo, it seems the story repeats itself. Now, EA offers $26 per share, after a previous offer of $25 per share was rejected by Take-Two.

All there is left to do is wait and see what happens next, as EA tries to catch up with Activision and grab back the "largest game producer" crown from them. In the recent past, Activision purchased the gaming unit of French giant Vivendi for $18 billion, while EA grabbed Bioware and Pandemic, in a deal with a value of $860 million.