EA Gobbles Up Pandemic Studios and BioWare
By Chris on Thursday, October 11th, 2007 at 4:01 PM PST In Bioware, Electronic Arts, Game Companies, Game Platforms, Games, Microsoft, Sony, Star Wars
In an $860 million dollar deal struck today, Electronic Arts has acquired VG Holdings Corp., the parent company of big name game developers Pandemic Studios and BioWare. This is the largest deal in EA’s history. “This deal brings incredible talent to EA,” Frank Gibeau, president of EA Games. “It puts us in categories where EA historically has not had a strong competitive position.”
BioWare is the developer best known for Mass Effect, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Neverwinter Nights, while Pandemic was the developer on Mercenaries (and its sequel), both Star Wars: Battlefront games, and Destroy All Humans!
This is a huge acquisition, as Mass Effect is shaping up to be a huge franchise. Likewise, Mercenaries could conceivably turn into a so-called “GTA-killer.” It’ll be interesting to see what happens now with the Battlefront and Knights of the Old republic series, as the Star Wars rights belong to publisher LucasArts.
“This deal brings incredible talent to EA.”
Talent which some gormless fatcat couldn’t procure in a hundred years.
Bioware is one of the greatest game development houses of all time, lets just pray that the suckage that is EA dosent infect them.
It will sadly…it definatly will…
oh dear god.
When will this stop.
EA is single-handedly going to kill the video game market with cheap, mass-produced garbage.
Expect to see things like Mass effect 7 in the stores this time next year.
And mercenaries 13 by 2009.
When are EA going to realise we want original, independant developers to spend years making a top quality game that we can all enjoy, and not some game put together in 6 months then re-hashed with a ’sequel’ every other 6 months.
Leave the independant developers alone!
I hate EA .. Soon there every game we play will be from EA..
Madden Effect 09 anyone?