Financial Times Predicts EA To Be Next In Line For A Major Takeover

I honestly wouldn’t really care if MS does buy EA. But at the same having NFS exclusive to Xbox might cause concern for me as that is the only franchise that I care about from EA

I just hope MS doesn’t buy a Japanese company

EA are currently valued at $38B.
MS paid over 40% more for Activision than what they were valued at.
If the same was applied to EA, it would require around $55-60B and they'd have to be willing to sell.
The other issue with EA is the majority of their games rely on license deals. These license deals probably require multiformat releases, making a buyout less desirable for a company looking to make games exclusive.

The more realistic options for Sony would be;

• Square Enix = $5.6B
• Capcom = $4.9B

It just depends if these companies would be willing to sell and if Sony even had that sort of money considering they've only been buying small studios rather than actual big publishers.

Before any of this Activision/Blizzard deal took us ALL by surprise, I wouldn't of been Surprised if EA was bought out by MS as they have been relatively closely aligned. EA Play is on Game Pass so it seemed like the 'next' step. The only question was budget after a $7.5bn Bethesda deal. Considering MS's as a corporation, they could buy out an EA too and or a few others without pushing the Monopoly commission (as some keep talking about 'Monopolies').

With TenCent, Sony, Nintendo, Sega, Capcom, Bandai Namco, Square Enix, Ubisoft, TakeTwo, Warner Bros etc Microsoft are a LONG way from 'monopolising' the development and publishing of Games so adding EA wouldn't break their bank or likely to be an issue with the Monopoly Commission. Whilst TenCent exists, MS still has a way to go to be the 'biggest' gaming company by revenue and A/B only took them from 4th behind Nintendo to 3rd behind Sony and TenCent. Maybe when things 'settle' and revenue 'lost' on Sony, gained by MS may take them 2nd in a few years, but right now, they are far from a Monopoly

cant see an EA purchase happening as mentioned earlier Fifa and madden are alot of the companies revenue and rely on them having the licences. if they ever lost those the companies value would tank thats when EA could be bought

@BAMozzy Exactly, the monopoly argument is fallacious, and Sony still has higher revenue for the time being. Tencent/CCP is the company we should be worrying about right now.

@trev666 EA decided to drop the FIFA licensing on its own. FIFA was asking too much money. It looks like the next game will be called EA Sports FC or something.

Netflix seems to be making a play into gaming. I would not be shocked to see them try to get EA.

Oh hell. That Command & Conquer box art.

Back when Westwood existed and was putting out amazing games.

I miss those days.

If they did grab EA, MS would then have Inexile, Obsidian, Bethesda, and Bioware. Not a lot of Western RPG devs left.

Surely the courts would block this especially being so close to the Activision purchase as well, that would be 3 of the 5 biggest third party devs bought by microsoft in under 18 months. And people still wouldn't believe Microsoft were just buying the gaming industry. But sony make a a couple timed exclusives and they are bad

Hopefully if this is true its Google, apple or even tencent

@Magabro

they still have all the player and team licencing they just wont call the game Fifa

@electrolite77 don't be silly, how could owning EA, Activision and Bethesda and having over 60 first party studios and all those ip's and still not be the biggest player?

I'd prefer Microsoft to acquire Square Enix, Capcom or Sega if they agree, at least Square Enix love money LOL. Sell timed exclusivity to anyone.

@abe_hikura
Seriously the only other devs that would be available that fit the Western RPG space I can think of would be Ubisoft to an extent and CDPR. Definitely not a lot of options.

Warner Bros Games

@UltimateOtaku91 : Tencent owns significant quantities of shares in more than 600 video game publishers and developers, and about 37% of them are located outside of China. Examples of their portfolio include 100% ownership over Riot Games, 100% ownership over Funcom, an "undisclosed majority ownership" over Fatshark, 85% ownership over Supercell, 40% ownership over Epic Games, and obviously a whole lot more. Tencent is by far the largest entity in the video game industry, and according to rumours they're in the process of acquiring both EA and Take-Two.

@101Force in comparison Microsoft with the Activision Blizzard purchase has 30-40 developers in their pocket.

@UltimateOtaku91 I hate seeing the industry consolidation continue, but, given Google Apple, Tencent and MS, I think things will work out better for consumers if MS had all of it right now. They at least make content accessible without weird strings attached in a traditional sales model. Google would both ruin the companies, and tether it to some horrible cloud service-only. Apple would tie it to iOS and you'd have to buy their expensive luxury-brand phones and tablets or AppleTV to play it on, and Tencent is a whole other level of horrors.

I'm not saying I want MS to consolidate the industry, but if any of those companies are for sale and the choice is between the tech giants, MS is the only one that won't turn it into a guaranteed horror show and a bait mechanism to entrap you in their other services. MS is still a traditional console + PC + services which is better than the alternatives by light years.

My bigger fear is that this sets of the arms race and all of a sudden Google, Facebook, AT&T, and Disney go on a buying spree in the gaming world, not out of interest in making a mark in the games industry (like MS is doing) and instead just as monopoly play money to sit on and grow with "NFTs" It's only a matter of time before we're all streaming Assassin's Creed on an Amazon Kindle Fire, published by Pfeizer.

@UltimateOtaku91 Sony is still has the largest developer portfolio, behind them is Tencent before Microsoft even if you consider the Activision/Blizzard buyout. You are acting like the sky is falling from this.

@101Force EA and Take Two going to Tencent would be very troubling, indeed. It's all lining up for some power play by them somewhere. They've even invested into Nintendo. MS is digging in for it. Sony would be blown away I think.

It's a bleak day when all the evil megacorpos of a decade ago that were buying everyone, now seem puny and easy play things for megacorps 1000x their size. It feels like there's a future not far away when 20 corporations rule all the world including the governments, and the world is mostly divided into fiefdoms.

@UltimateOtaku91 "But sony make a a COUPLE TIMED EXCLUSIVES and they are bad"

I'm still waiting this so-called timed-exclusivity to end so I can play on my Xbox: Spider-Man, Spider Man Miles Morales, God of War 1-4, The Last of Us 1 and 2, Gran Turismo (all of them), Uncharted 1-4, Lost Legacy, Ratchet and Clank, Infamous, Bloodborne, Shadow of the Colossus, The Last Guardian, Ghost of Tsushima, Demon Souls, Returnal, Killzone, Death Stranding, Horizon, Days Gone, Final fantasy XIV and the list goes on...

Well, I don't see Sony as the good Samaritan either.

@InterceptorAlpha This is the Remastered version of the box without any Westwood involvement, save the original idea of course.

@Foxx_64740 they aren't timed exclusives lol they are games from sony's own studio's......

@NEStalgia I totally agree, who could anyone prefer Google, Apple or Tencent to acquire Activision Blizzard or EA before Microsoft? Only the most desperate and hysterical Sony fanboys. Even Sony would be bad news for everyone but those that have a PS5 and would mean £€$70 per game but anything before those merciless giants.

@iplaygamesnstuff "Sony is still has the largest developer portfolio".

Wrong. Xbox (38) has twice as many studios as PS (20).

@NEStalgia : In the long-run I think Sony and Microsoft may very well team-up to take on the likes of Tencent, Amazon, Google, etc.

And I can already hear some people saying "Google? But Stadia is dead!" Yeah, well Google seriously considered working with Tencent to enact a hostile takeover of Epic Games — not for Stadia, but for the Google Play store:
https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/google-tencent-epic-games-stake

Speaking of which, before UbiSoft was acquired by Vivendi they were on the cusp of a hostile takeover by Tencent as well:
https://venturebeat.com/2018/03/20/ubisoft-evades-hostile-takeover-as-it-swaps-vivendi-for-tencent/

@iplaygamesnstuff how? How many studios do you think sony has?

Just EA and Activision combined has more studios than Sony, there's games combined sell more than Sony's games

@OldgamerDave Yep, they celebrate timed exclusivity bs but someone else having the Japanese games, heck, no! They belong to PS even if they don't.

@101Force wow didn't know tencent were that big or rich, I knew that dominated the Chinese Market but I didn't think console gaming was that big in China, heck I don't even think it was allowed in China lol

Honestly, the only thing from EA I'd miss is nhl. But hopefully another company starts making some quality nhl. EA completely drops the puck every year with mediocre game.

These takeovers need to end

@101Force That's one of the good things about Microsoft, they don't do hostile takeovers, Zenimax were happy about it and Activision Blizzard were looking for buyers. Another great thing is the choice of platforms: two consoles, computers, mobile devices, TVs (soon)...

People really dislike EA but they have some great IP. I don’t want anyone to buy them, if someone like Tencent came along and bought EA and Bioware I’d be gutted.

Also I read somewhere the other day MS own around 10% of devs/companies within the gaming space. Tencent 15%. People thinking MS are anywhere near breaking any rules are deluded, but I do agree that the consolidation is bad and wish it would stop, it’s not going to though it’s only gonna get worse.

@Kamalen That's very true. Still invokes a sense of a simpler time though. Especially Covert Ops' dinosaur levels. Agh.

@BrilliantBill
Konami are valued at $6B, but that is heavily down to their Pachinko business, which in itself would put off a potential buyout for any company not interested in that sort of business.

Below is the full list of of big game companies that could be acquired including their market cap. Credit to Geoff Keighley.

• EA: $38B
• Take Two: $18B (including Zynga if/when closed would be $28B)
• Nexon: $15B
• Bandai Namco: $15B
• Embracer: $10.8B
• Netmarble $7B
• Ubisoft: $7B
• Konami: $6B
• Square Enix: $5.6B
• Capcom: $4.9B
• Sega: $3.6B

EA would have been a better choice than Acti (Because they have better IPs), but now that MS own Acti, I think that buying EA now would be redundant.

Medal of Honor?, Battlefield?, Titanfall?, Apex?, MS already have COD and Halo, and Doom, and Wolfenstein, and Rage.

Dragon Age and Mass Effect?. Outer Worlds, Avowed, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Starfield, Wasteland, Pillars, Diablo.

I feel like the biggest get here would be Dead Space.

If I was MS now, I'll look at a Japanese company, or a kid friendly brand in order to expand that way. Hell, buy Sega, and you get both.

The only other company I'd look at would be Embracer because of the sheer amount of B grade content.

@trev666 EA is loosing th FIFA license either as of right now or after 23 i believe.

But the goal is keeping these IP away from the big tech companies just getting into gaming. Because they will just shutter it up if it's no working. A nice tax write off for the loss.

@UltimateOtaku91 I know that, I was being sarcastic.
So now that Microsoft owns a huge amount of studios, they can make "timed-exclusives" like Sony...you know, maybe 200 years of exclusivity and that's okay.

Jokes aside, I don't like any games being exclusives (or timed-exclusives, as Sony likes to play). But the world is what it is, neither company is "good" or "bad", they're all out there looking for money.

I doubt anyone besides Microsoft could afford them, only some foreign companies come up and I doubt a foreign takeover.

@Banjo- I read an article that was stating this earlier. I'm looking for it again. I could very well be wrong. If I find the article I'll re-read it, I could have comprehended it wrong as well. It was just my understanding when writing the comment. All the same I don't see how this will effect Sony, it's really more of a big improvement for the Game Pass library.

EDIT: The article was from CNN Business, an article I clicked on in my Google News feed. This is the quote I was referring to, "The transaction would see Microsoft become the world's third-largest gaming company by revenue, behind Tencent (TCEHY) and Sony, the company said in a statement." so not by development portfolio but by gaming company revenue.

@iplaygamesnstuff I agree, nothing of this means the end of PlayStation but perhaps they should focus more on development and better services and less in third-party deals that backfire. Open their minds a bit about the business and embrace more genres other than the semi-open world game-movies.

Xbox has 38 studios including Activision Blizzard, they had 23 before this acquisition. Sony has 20 studios, they closed 9 including one of my favourites, Studio Liverpool.

@Banjo- Yeah, a lot of this will depend on what Microsoft does with it. They did get Playground Games to make the new Fable.
I'm curious what games they might resurrect. I'm pretty sure they didn't spend 70B without a plan, I hope not anyways. This will be a nice boost to Game Pass subscriptions at a minimum.

@electrolite77 I’m with you on Xbox not being the ones to buy EA. They just spent a ton on Activision/Blizzard. They’re not gonna add 50 billion more in spending. My worry is it would be someone like a Tencent or Google.

The only purchases j still feel would be cool for MS would be like an IO Interactive or Asobo. I think we’re good on publishers lol

@iplaygamesnstuff The possibilities are endless. Even if they wanted the casual Call of Duty and Candy Crush market, Phil Spencer is a gamer and is willing to bring old IPs back and more varied content, which will only benefit Game Pass as well and increase subscribers.

@Rural-Bandit
Yes. Bare in mind the publishers listed would need to be willing to sell in the first place.
PS is in a tough spot right now. They need to show they are willing to fully embrace the service model, but they simply don't have enough studios to create enough content to sustain a day one Game Pass style model.
Then they also have PS VR2, which could be seen as a distraction considering it will take up already limited studio focus.
Obviously PS5 is still smashing it right now, but the way it's looking, things could change drastically within the next 2-3 years.

It would be sad if EA were to go to some dreaded company that butchers them, closes them, sandboxes them, or makes them into some streaming-only product, just as they were recovering and getting into making real games again for the first time in a generation.

@Banjo- More than anything Sony just needs MORE games. They don't have a ton of studios and they have most of their studios acting as reinforcements for their existing studios. Naughty Dog makes one, maybe 2 games a generation, and that's their flagship. Sucker Punch made one PS4 launch game, and then one game that released shortly before PS5 preorders opened. They can't have all their studios forever tied up in $200m projects that take most of a generation to complete. They banked on that third party money to cover the droughts, but they have to think more about first party, even if it's bought from other studios like "Forspoken" (which still looks utterly terrible, but that's another thing.")

@UltimateOtaku91 Oh, Tencent is real bad. They're pretty much the biggest threat to the free market in the tech world at this point, operating at a scale even MS and Apple could only dream of. Like 101 said, they have their hand in a LOT of pots. Controlling, semi-controlling shares in a lot of the western economy. Alike a lot of Chinese "corporations", they buy enough stakes in companies to control them, but not enough to be listed as an owner. Like a lot of Chinese "corporations" that basically gives them fiat control of Western governments, as the "corporations" are in fact extensions of the CCP itself. The mirage fell apart when one of the Party rags accidentally outed Jack Ma of AliBaba as a a most important Party member. He masquerated as "just a businessman" who "doesn't get involved as politics" as the front of new Chinese business. Once he was outed it became clear that the international businesses are run by the Party, same as always. Tencent, however, never even pretended not to be. They've always been a wing of the CCP. And they, along with Ali run the "social credit" (big brother) system, control mobile everything, and have been spreading their tendrils into everything worldwide for quite a while now. They also control a significant chunk in Nintendo (it was pointed out that the Nintendo boxes became a CCP approved shade of red after that), Epic/Unreal, and many other things. Their wallets, technically, are endless, because officially or unofficially, they really have the whole Chinese GDP at their fingertips. If it benefits their country, they can get the money. So outspending them is not possible, and legislating them is an international incident with the sacred goat.

MS dodges the Tencent bullet a little bit, they can't take Chinese investment because they're a GSA & DoD contractor which bans it.

@101Force Yeah, I wouldn't rule that out at all. I've said on Push before that in a lot of ways MS and Sony are allies in preserving the status quo more than enemies. Sony doesn't always play it that way, but it's largely true. I wouldn't rule out them closing ranks on the "insiders" of the industry. Push ran a Phil quote earlier that kind of has that general vibe to it as well.

Google is the company that literally redefined the WWW to exist primarily for phones, breaking the internet and delisting anything with a PC focus from their pseudo-monopoly search engine because THEIR stake in the internet exists mainly in phones. What other company has the power to force the entire internet to adapt to their ecosystem or else be cancelled?

Facebook as a startup was literally funded by the CIA. We don't have to think too hard about their purpose.

Amazon....well, Amazon pretty much turns everything to a poo pile from the lowest Chinese bidder. Imagine what Amazon would do to physical game sales (and console sales) if they had
a stake in digital games like that?

Tencent literally IS half the of actual Chinese surveillance state, and turning into a global monopoly far beyond just video games.

Apple....well, they're Nintendo on a bigger scale. PS fans don't want to have to buy an Xbox. What will they do when they have to buy an Xbox AND an AppleTV with Apple Arcade subscription to play their games? And no, there's not the remotest chance of those cherished physical games that PS fans love and Xbox still offers.....

Microsoft.....they do wield the same amount of power. The best we can say is they have so far chosen a benevolent dictatorship over a malevolent ones the other companies rule. They have so far chosen to generally just do their own thing and not try to control everything at a macro level. Particularly post-Gates. It was a different thing when Gates the megalomaniac was in charge, though, for sure.

It's the other way around for Ubisoft, though. Vivendi was trying to do a hostile take over, but was denied, and the replacement investment came from Tencent and other sources. Much as I hate Tencent, that was a good thing. It was Vivendi that turned Activision into the gutted shell it has been, and it was Kotick, surpisingly that dug them out of that hole. Which is why his misbehavior is overlooked so much....he saved the company from Vivendi's damage, and they didn't want to bite the hand that fed them. Ubisoft remains truly independent/public for now.

@NEStalgia Yes, Sony have 20 PlayStation studios but now that you mention it, most of them are supporting major projects so that's why they end up with few games each generation. I don't know if a PS Pass will work at this rate but they could make a Sony Expansion Pack with retro games.

I highly doubt this. Microsoft is not in the business of making takeovers. The studio/publisher must be interested or willing to sell, and I dont see EA wanting out anytime soon.

If anything, Activision Blizard acquisition, and the eventual exclusivity of Call of Duty, will just result in gained market reach for Battlefield games in years to come.

@Richnj exactly this. For the timeless mascot; and family friendly games, the back catalogue going back to the early days of gaming; plus the Japanese side of Yakuza and Phantasy Star; Sega is the smart buy.

Embracer group is always forgotten about but I just looked up how many studios form the group and it’s…… 110 dev teams. What! I knew it was snowballing but wow.

Consolidation is happening and though it’s not necessarily a good thing; Microsoft are actually ending up being the gatekeepers from gaming taking a far worse turn. Sony isn’t big enough to stop these conglomerates from destroying the industry; but Microsoft can just about take them on and save these publishers before they get eaten by a company outside the gaming world (though at one point, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo were all in different industries and each threw their hat in the gaming ring).

@anoyonmus same only really care about nfs although I suppose the upside of Microsoft getting that franchise would be that we might be able to get some of the older games through backwards compatibility underground 2 , most wanted & pro street are my favourites

@Would_you_kindly perhaps

Whoever buys EA,plz create new command and conquer games I'll b happy with that I'm easily pleased

If M$ buys EA will all the sports license be lost? I think some of them, at least Fifa, must be multiplatform?

Doubt it. EA recently has been making purchases themselves. Activision was EA's biggest competitor and now they are gone. EA is probably in its most comfortable spot its been. This just seems like nonsense guesswork.

Financial times have no idea what they're talking about. lol. AB was bought because they wanted to sell, or saw that as the best move going forward to save the company from scandals. This whole deal plays out like s3 of succession. lol.

Google should buy EA, and then they'll have a bunch of great titles and studios that can be Stadia exclusive so there's a good reason to buy into that ecosystem. Right now there's not much of a good reason to choose Stadia over others unless you're in a very specific gaming situation.

EA has less value than Acti-Blizz? That's surprising. All this consolidation makes you wonder how much it is just trying to keep out big tech.

You mine as well just start burying Sony if Microsoft gets EA to

@Krzzystuff

they are only loosing the right to put fifa in the title everything else they still have licences for players clubs etc

if lootboxes ever got branded as gambling or they couldnt make madden or fifa games. the 40billion company would be worth half or quarter of that. Most of the value of the company is tied to both those things which they dont own and could loose control over.

@Bmartin001 Sony will be Sega and just make games at that point