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Apple Games

Apple In Talks To Buy EA Gaming; Disney and Amazon Also Potential Suitors (9to5mac.com) 78

Posted by BeauHD from the what-to-expect dept.
Video game publisher Electronic Arts (EA) is actively seeking a potential buyer or merger. Apple has reportedly been in talks with the company about buying EA out according to Puck. Disney and Amazon have also been in talks about purchasing the video game company. 9to5Mac reports: The Redwood City-based firm has published hits like Apex Legends, Madden, and The Sims franchise. According to Puck, EA ideally would like a merger so Andrew Wilson can remain CEO of the combined company. [...] EA's roots actually go back to Apple. Back in 1982, Apple's then Director of Strategy and Marketing, Trip Hawkins, left the company to start EA. A buyout wouldn't be Apple's first venture into gaming, however. The Cupertino company unveiled its gaming service Apple Arcade back in 2019. Through Apple Arcade, users can play ad-free games on their iOS, macOS, and tvOS devices.
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Apple In Talks To Buy EA Gaming; Disney and Amazon Also Potential Suitors More

Apple In Talks To Buy EA Gaming; Disney and Amazon Also Potential Suitors

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  • So does this mean that a large number of games are about to become Apple exclusive?

    • Re:Apple Exclusive Games? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by John Allsup ( 987 ) <slashdot@chal i s q u e.net> on Monday May 23, 2022 @08:44PM (#62560220) Homepage Journal

      I'm wondering whether this would actually be a bad thing.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by zlives ( 2009072 )

        can't be worse than origin drm or ea drm or wtfever its called

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Oh no, not EA games. Please. Come back.

    • Oregan Trail '22
      Marathon: Advanced BlackOps Cold-Warfare

      Poetic outcomes for such a great company.

  • None of those sound good (Score:3)

    by aerogems ( 339274 ) on Monday May 23, 2022 @08:55PM (#62560234)

    Disney probably has at least some gaming experience, but Apple is not really in the gaming world. I'd expect Apple's efforts with EA to go about as well as Google's efforts with Stadia. Amazon's core competencies also lie elsewhere. Sony or Microsoft, sure, maybe even Nintendo or Sega... Epic or even Valve, but I don't see EA being a good cultural fit at Apple or Amazon for sure, and Disney would probably just do what Disney does and pump out a bunch of half-assed games to milk the successful franchises for everything they possibly can like they've done with Star Wars and Marvel.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You're missing the bigger picture here.

      EA ideally would like a merger so Andrew Wilson can remain CEO of the combined company.

      This is all about the CEO of EA trying to get more money for himself.

      Plan A - Sell the company to someone with deep pockets and and collect a big payout.
      or
      Plan B - Merge with another company and get paid more money since he is now the CEO of a bigger company.

      If it destroys EA in the long run, who cares? At least he got more money.

      • lol (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward
        None of those companies would let him be CEO of the combined company. He's dreaming. Disney? Amazon? Apple? Get real bud.
      • Now imagine AW as the CEO of Disney, or Apple. It's either saying goodbye to any of your childhood favorite shows, or having to pay extra to unlock the zoom feature on your iPhones' camera. XD

    • When Star Wars first started, it was mostly for the excitement and art. Merchandise was a big part of it too, but now it's mostly about getting people to buy JarJar silly straws.

      "Progress" I guess?

      • I long for the time when JarJar was actually Star Wars' biggest problem.

        And I mean the muppet. Ok, needs clarification. I mean, the one whose last name isn't Abrams.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fazig ( 2909523 )
        Maybe that was true for first two episodes of the original trilogy.
        Return of the Jedi however already did go for that merchandise shtick with the Ewoks.
        And lastly with the prequels Lucas was pretty overtly obsessed with making money.

        RedLetterMedia on youtube contains a lot of sarcasm with the Plinkett personal, but also offers some quite insightful coverage of many of the issues of the prequels:
        The Phantom Menace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
        Attack of the Clones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?.. [youtube.com]

        • I'm not going to deny the merchandising aspects, but the art and creative design in the prequels was still leagues ahead of what any of the ^c ^v Disney stuff has been.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by fazig ( 2909523 )
            All I'm trying to say is that if we use the Disney stuff as a reference point, we're setting the bar really low, approaching a point where it doesn't make much sense to say that it's better any more, because so many things are better by comparison.

            • Disney games (at least the one I've seen) are aimed at young kids. Simple platformer like games with cute cartoon characters and fairy tale storylines with a low difficulty, and other genres tailored to the same.

                I don't see how a company who would have a game like "Cars" created would be a fit to own the Need For Speed franchise (which got increasingly GTA like).

                So this is just a money grab and a way to fatten their already sickingly obese portfolio of properties.

          • RoTJ was a true work of art and mastery as far as the flying through the Death Star to destroy the power core scene is concerned. That was done entirely with practical effects, and though I can figure out how they might have done it, it's very fucking impressive. The absolute height of practical effects technology.

              They earned their Ewoks market for that alone.

            • How I'm sure the tunnel scene was done:

              The "tunnel" was built as a bunch of standalone models (segments). The part where the ships were in were filmed close up, and the upcoming segment filmed at a further distance away both with the camera moving twards them at the same speed. These pieces of footage were merged together. This is repeated for all the segments (1 close 2 far, 2 close 3 far...) giving the impression of an unbroken scene of moving through a continuous tunnel.

    • No Japanese video game company is going to buy out EA. That makes as much sense as the whole "Disney should buy Nintendo!" crap that came out about a month ago. Despite Disney's House of Mouse being #2 to Nintendo's #1 Pokemon in biggest global media franchise. Or the fact that Nintendo's very insular when comes to their staffing decisions, and Disney could never fill the old guard's role in that regard. (Let alone EA.)

      Apple would be a waste of time and money. No serious purchase would be on the table if

      • Dead Space hasn't seen a decent entry in years. (They recently announced a remake?)

        I really, really don't get this decision. The original still looks great after all these years. I wish they would just shitcan the third game and fix that mess.

        Or make a new command and conquer game without a bunch of nonsensical gameplay decisions. Leave it to EA to kill what used to be the the number one selling RTS.

        • Heh forgot about that. Also forgot to mention the dud that was the Dungeon Keeper mobile game.

        • I wish they would just shitcan the third game and fix that mess.

          That's my impression of why they're doing it. Personally, I liked the series progression, and I don't know hard sales numbers, but 3 sold pretty poorly from what I recall. They probably feel that they can reboot, capture the original audience with some updated graphics/story line, and maybe hook a new generation in and restart the series. I'm not sure they'd have the same success by restarting at 3 vs 1.

      • I seem to recall some article saying that EA green lit a game with a development budget that would have required over a billion people to buy the game at the then standard price of $60.00 to break even.

        That's a budget of 60 billion dollars. Seems three orders of magnitude too much.

        • Yeah. I was trying to find the article but I can't seem to find it now. My apologies. If I do find it again, I'll post a link to it in a reply.

    • Disney would probably just do what Disney does and pump out a bunch of half-assed games to milk the successful franchises for everything they possibly can like they've done with Star Wars and Marvel.

      So what you're saying is that it'd be business as usual for EA?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Maybe they plan to be hands-off and just require EA to port their games to ARM for M1 Macs.

      The main issue I see is that the M1 GPU is a mobile design. Desktop GPUs rely on very high memory bandwidth and render the entire frame at once. The M1 is descendent of PowerVR's technology, used on the Dreamcast and many mobile devices. It uses tile rendering, where is has a small amount of very fast on-board memory that lets it render the frame in small chunks, before pushing those chunks out to relatively slow shar

      • Interesting that Apple is considering EA though. EA doesn't exactly have a great reputation.

        EA has a great reputation among its fanboys who can't wait to give them more money for their next game. You couldn't name a better match for Apple.

  • Because none of the companies sound good, especially Disney_Vault.

      I like a little GTA now and then, and I'll play other modern titles on occasion. But I am finding myself drawn more to games like "Scrabble", or some old Dos/Windows stuff from 20+ years ago. The days of hardcore gaming which the likes of EA caters to is pretty much over for me.

    Sucks for the younger people though.

    • Because none of the companies sound good, especially Disney_Vault.

      I like a little GTA now and then, and I'll play other modern titles on occasion. But I am finding myself drawn more to games like "Scrabble", or some old Dos/Windows stuff from 20+ years ago. The days of hardcore gaming which the likes of EA caters to is pretty much over for me.

      Sucks for the younger people though.

      Gaming died a long time ago as soon as the internet was a thing we lost local applications because generaiton mmo and steam allowed garriot at EA and valve to steal software on a massive scale, all the big AAA pc games were rebranded mmo, aka neverwinter nights (2002) was one of the lat rpg's that had multiplayer hosting inside the exe, guild wars 1 had its networking ripped out and rebranded mmo.

      We got steam at the end of 2003, 6 years after ultima online and 4 year after everquest in 1999. UO and EQ put

      • "networking code because the public was so stupid"

          The public will always be stupid, to the point they will allow millions of their own countrymen and women to be slaughtered by their own governments.

        So the only real course of action is to bypass, hack, and crack away. If anyone obeys the DMCA and such, they are already sheep and need to go and baa with the rest of them. The minority in the meantime needs to hack away and add things like local network code to their games.

    • Not really. EA has been dead when it comes to innovative games for years anyway, what's left is pumping out the same game with a new year number at the end and lootboxes. Nothing of value will be lost with them gone.

  • Crips, Aryan Brotherhood, and MS-13.

  • apple needs gameing hardware not 5K workstations at the min to get good hardware.

  • Ew (Score:3)

    by cfalcon ( 779563 ) on Monday May 23, 2022 @11:19PM (#62560502)

    Of those three listed, Amazon is by far the best result- they would supplement their mediocre and meager in house studio with EA's large library of games, ranging from great to terrible. Amazon would likely continue to support older games, such as SWTOR, which I still play.
    It's hard to imagine a world where Apple would want to do this and could do this. Apple normally buys things that work with their core business of selling iDevices and assorted Apple stuff, and a company that targets all hardware and most OSes doesn't seem to be their big thing. If they approached it as an investment with the idea of making games that worked on all hardware, but with Apple branding, that could work, but it's hard to believe this would be the way they would choose to do that. So on the off chance Apple wanted to buy this, there's no way it makes sense.

    Disney would be simply the worst possible one of the three- with full control over all of EAs brands, they would quickly wreck all of them the same way they have ruined everything else that they have touched.

    • Re:Ew (Score:4, Funny)

      by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2022 @03:11AM (#62560808)

      Disney [...] would quickly wreck all of them the same way they have ruined everything else that they have touched.

      So, they pull an EA on EA?

    • Of those three listed, Amazon is by far the best result- they would supplement their mediocre and meager in house studio with EA's large library of games, ranging from great to terrible. Amazon would likely continue to support older games, such as SWTOR, which I still play.

      I would agree that Amazon would probably be least-bad...but it's one of those things that is probably more likely to turn into a train wreck than to be a net positive, though the odds are the best of the three.

      Disney's "Game Experience" can be summed up with Marvel's Avengers. I knew it was going to be a train wreck the instant that SquareEnix rep got on stage and said "10 years of updates"...and sure enough, the "live service" has 393 players at the moment, less than 18 months in. That's less than 1% of th

  • Lol, Who is puck and how much EA stock do they have?

  • For a change, it's you who is about to be hoovered up, milked dry and thrown away when your IP has been destroyed.

  • ... so I guess that would be a good thing.

  • Will Apple change their mind about gaming ? Their Apple Arcade basically sucks. Long time Mac user so wonder what would happen if they did but EA. None of EA latest AAA hits are Mac OS compatible - don't even list Apple as an available platform on their site. They used to, but like Activision Blizzard, all new games are PC ! So don't care.
  • The last EA turd that I had the displeasure of playing was Battlefield 2042. Thank goodness I didn't pay for it. What an unfinished mess that game is. I'm a veteran of the BF franchise and this last iteration is sadly indicative of the direction they're headed. They took the foundations of what make the BF series great fun and removed them or mutated them into oblivion. I still play BF4 damn near every day, and the servers I frequent always have a queue. Compare that to the BF 2042 servers that are filled w

  • Since I don't use any Apple product, I will never get Burnout Paradise Remaster out of EA's own version of Steam.

  • I guess you can just ask your friends and rely on reviews when picking a decent company. For example, you can go to website [dimers.com] and you can find many reliable betting platforms there, and I guarantee that you will not regret choosing this platform. You can also keep up with the current news and just read articles about sports there.

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