As Codemasters is a UK company, are there any legal/government complications, e.g. anti monopoly issues?
What’s the problem with EA taking over Codemasters?
I am not sure how to answer that question. Are you at all familiar with EA and its treatment of studios it takes over?
Basically they suck the life out of the studio while running the brands of said studio into the ground and then dissolve the studio while absorbing its remnants into the EA collective.
When was this? And, if true, how do you know it will happen again? They took over Respawn a few of years ago and they made 2 of my favourite recent games, Apex and Fallen Order.
ZeTh1 has a point. Look at Origin, still going so strong they even named their EGS knockoff after it.
I highly doubt it. I can’t remember there ever being a CMA intervention for a games company, and I doubt Codies have enough market share for them to care. Even enterprise software is pretty rare. It’s a bit more possible the Bundeskartellamt would intervene, but again I doubt it.
Take-Two is considering its position in relation to Codemasters and a further announcement will be made when appropriate.
This thread just got slightly more interesting, it’s rare to catch a sighting of an EA defender.
He’s just uninformed. We can’t all be grizzled singularities of gamer PTSD & cynicism.
EA funded the creation of Respawn, which had no IPs at the time. When EA buys an existing developer with IPs they want to have, the developer generally has 5-10 years left to exist as an organization. If the studio is lucky, the trademark and logo will survive.
Origin Systems, acquired 1992, dissolved 2004
Bullfrog Productions, acquired 1995, absorbed 2001
Maxis, acquired 1997, primary office closed 2015
Westwood, acquired 1998, assimilated 2003
Criterion, acquired 2004, merged with another studio 2007
Mythic, acquired 2006, restructured out of existence 2009
PopCap, acquired 2011, downsized dramatically 2012
What is the average lifespan of a non-EA developer? It’s my understanding that standalone developers often don’t always last long, even after having one or more big hits. People often “cash out”.
I’m not sure that EA acquisition is the proximate cause of death in all cases—-it’s just an industry that sees a lot of turnover and change.
You are absolutely correct that shit happens in the game-making business, even if EA is not involved. But I was focused on the EA track record for high-profile acquisitions. Granted, they do the same thing to their own internal teams, like Visceral. Part of that seems to be the classic pattern of publicly-traded entertainment companies, one CEO comes in and wants to make a mark, the next one has no incentive to make the last guy’s projects work out because there’s no credit to be taken.
So there’s a broader point to be made beyond the one I was making. I was just pointing out that your favorite studio being acquired by EA is basically a death sentence by homogenization and absorption into the EA glob.
I’m not sure I knew about this one. It’s a shame we never got a good Sim City game out of them after 2003’s Sim City 4.
UK game development studios seem pretty resilient to me. Bizarre Studios was bought and absorbed by Activision, but the key people left and formed Playground Games, who started making the Forza Horizon series, which is pretty much like the spiritual successor series to the Project Gotham games from Bizarre Studios.
I’m sure if Codemasters got dissolved by EA or Take 2, some of the more passionate developers on those teams would form another studio to make fantastic racing games.
I’m not sure how decisions going back 10-30 years ago are relevant today and I don’t understand how your examples prove your claim regarding EA’s intentions for Codemasters. Other than Criterion and Mythic, the studios you mentioned seem to have normal “life expectancy”, when comparing them with the industry average.
As for the IPs I don’t see how they are worse off after going from being controlled by the board of a $1b company to the board of a $5-10b company. Do you think $1b companies are run by passionate developers or corporate suits not too different from the ones running EA? In fact, a quick google tells me Codemasters is owned by some Indian Bollywood company that has nothing to do with gaming. If I were to guess, I’d say it’s good for them to be owned by a bigger corporation which has plenty of experience in the field.
And even if the current facts are ignored, EA is not the same company that preached the death of single player gaming 10 years ago, which seems to be the main source of scorn from gamers, along with microtransactions(which do not exist in any shape or form in Fallen Order, in example).
Isn’t EA the reason Anthem got kicked in the balls by a shitty game engine?
EA figured they own a pretty powerful engine, so why are they paying licenses to Epic and others to use their own engines. Which is a reasonable decision to make.
It’s just, their engine tools are shit and it’s caused their devs no end of pain. Maybe that situation is slowly changing as they all file complaints at the engine devs over at DICE.
More specifically, isn’t it that Frostbite and it’s tooling are shit and absolutely not designed for making anything not called Battlefield: ($subtitle)?
I remember that the issues with Dragon Age: Inquisition were that the engine was entirely built around what DICE and first-person shooters needed. So of course, when Bioware adopted Frostbite for DA:I the studio had to come to grips with the fact that they had to scratch build almost everything they needed for an RPG, right down to the inventory systems.
Which obviously set Bioware back a bunch in terms of the developmental resources and time they required to be able to put together a functional product.
Intentions don’t matter. It’s EA’s corporate culture that leads to the inevitable result. It’s not just the projected lifespan, it’s that the character and expertise of these studios, which is what EA was purportedly buying, always dissolved into the EA blob. Ultima VII versus Ultima IX. SimCity 2000 versus SimCity (2013). The original Plants vs. Zombies versus the mobile-only sequel filled with microtransactions. Mass Effect versus Mass Effect Andromeda. From Burnout 3 to nothing but assisting with parts of Battlefield and Battlefront games after 2013. From singular visions to acquisition to chasing the most recent gaming trends and squeezing dollars out of the customers. The blob always wins.
If you want to think the best of EA, knock yourself out. I do not.
EA made that game quick and on the cheap, basically against their will, to keep the Star Wars license after they pissed off Disney by letting the IP languish in a pool of mobile games, cancellations, and finally a Battlefront game that made both the license and EA look very bad. This is not a new trend for EA, it’s a loss leader to save face that ended up actually making a few bucks. I strongly suspect EA would rather Respawn make another Apex Legends than another single-player SW game.