Liquidcool said:
I see a lot of people dislike what EA does to the development studios they acquire. They have had that reputation for years now. So I'm confused about something and that is why do the owners of those studios sell their companies to EA? Either those companies were performing poorly or EA offered their owners a fortune. Or is there something I'm missing?
Welcome to the EA Acquisition Crash Course. This time with 50% less bias (I'll reign it in for this thread.)
What you have to remember is that we are looking back in hindsight at what happened to these companies, but most of them were acquired in the late 90's/very early 2000's when there wasn't this stigma and the mass shut downs really took hold in the early 2000s.
Sometimes the developers had made some really crappy economic decisions and the debt was piling up and they were on the way out (this is the case for Origin Studios, although even then EA had their eyes on the company and deliberately worsened their economic standings by launching several phoney lawsuits against them to tie up their legal expenses and hasten the decline of the company)
Origin Systems: 1992-2004
In the case of Westwood the two owners of the company were offered $122 million between them, and for that money they let their company go.
Westwood: 1998-2003
The company Bullfrog was co-founded by Peter Molyneux, who went on to briefly become vice-president at EA, and EA was at that time the publisher for Bullfrogs games, While Molyneaux was CEO at EA he bought Bullfrog so they were put completely under the control of EA, I suppose you wouldn't be too concerned about being bought by a company if the bloke in power was also someone you personally knew and in fact co-founded the business you were in.
Bullfrog: 1995-2004
Maxis was a straight up standard acquisition as far as I can tell, I only mention it because technically Maxis is still going, but very few of the original staff remain and the actual Maxis building was closed in 2004, also it should be noted that EA slowly phased out the Maxis name until about 2006 it was harder to find in their games than Wally, but Marketing brought it back in 2011 because it was a recognisable brand and considering people would probably react more favourably to a videogame published by The Nazis than one published by EA. It exists more as a brand than an actual studio.
Maxis: 1997-Zombiefied
Finally the big guns, Bioware/Pandemic were acquired in 2007. As I said before, if you look at the dates of the previous studios, most were acquired before EA got the developer devourer stigma, but this was well after. So what happened?
They had both seen huge success and profits, but had a bit of a run-in with publishers, so they decided to merge together as they would be stronger this way. To do this they were bought by a private shareholding company owned by Entrepreneur/Businessman John Riccitiello, and that funded their companies so they could expand.
Then the universe ran out of original ideas for different ways EA could buy companies and settled for it's second Death Star: John Riccitiello became CEO of EA and bought Bioware/Pandemic from himself, although unlike Molyneux who simply had previous connections to the company he was buying, Riccitiello was still technically the owner of Bioware/Pandemic and because of this earned $5 million as a personal handshake from the stakeholders in his company for doing such a good job with the company that year.
Pandemic released one more game (the Saboteur) and was shut within a year, with around 4-6 games at varying stages of development.
Pandemic January 2008 - February 2009
Bioware did really well; for a while, but recently the skin's been peeling away from the tip and it's been oozing this strange yellow discharge but I'm too embarrassed to go to the doct... Umm, anyway. Bioware, like Maxis, have been declared a marketable brand name and thus have survived in name to release a pile of games that had nothing to do with the original developers, while the remaining Bioware employees are trying to resuscitate a failing MMO, put out the Mass Effect 3 fires, and not dick up Dragon Age 3 because it's the only franchise left that hasn't completely assed itself up and we all know how willing EA are to create brand new franchises.
Bioware 2008-being taken round to the back of the cabin with Pa's shotgun
Ok, I write about this subject way to much. I think I have a problem.
