Goldman writes, “I know, I know: EA being acquired by Apple is an oldie, but it’s still a goodie!”
“With Electronic Arts’ most recent disappointing earnings, and its stock much closer to its 52-week low than high, and a market cap of only $5.7 billion, now would be as good a time as any for Apple to make a move. Apple’s got the cash, EA is a far cheaper alternative than Activision, the tech industry overall seems to be in an acquisitive mood, and even Apple has opened up its checkbook recently for some key, though relatively small, deals,” Goldman writes. “The payoff could be handsome.”
Full article here.
Steve will just let Disney buy them, then control them by proxy. All of the benefits with none of the risk!
I would prefer some big japanese publisher than EA…
What about Konami? Or Capcom? Or Sega? Or…
He should send an email to Steve. He seems to be a little “chatty” lately.
EA already makes some great iPhone games, from which Apple takes 40% before expenses.
Why would Apple want the part of EA that’s struggling?
Most “Apple should buy Xxxx” arguments ignore the fact that one of Apple’s greatest strengths is their ability to focus (ahem, hello GOOG). Why would Apple want to be a game developer when they already gross 40% of the games available for their game platform?
Sorry – meant “30% before expenses”, and “gross 30% of the profit from games available”.
Never post immediately after lunch. Zzzzzz….
@ Deus.
You nailed it dude.
Not gonna happen. Why?
Apple has bought small companies to further its device and services growth. EA doesn’t fit into this. Apple already makes money off of EA products sold via the App Store anyway. Apple doesn’t need to buy EA to get games made for the App Store. Any game developer which is not making games for the iDevices will be out of business soon anyway.
Buying EA would just be buying something because it was there, not because it fits into The Plan.
Disney would be a better bet, but they already have a robust in-house team cranking out games based on their assets. I paid $2.99 for the “Phineas & Ferb” game for my 5-year olds.
Evil geniuses, Disney….
“Apple should buy…” World Tour, 2001-2010
2001–2003: A record label
2004–2008: A film studio
2005–2008: Sony
2001–present: Adobe
2005–2007: A wireless phone company
2008–2008: Sprint
2009–2009: Facebook
2008–2009: Twitter
2008–2010: Palm
I still think that Apple should consider acquiring NVidia and Adobe. Apple may want to reacquire a significant stake in ARM, as well.
No!
just my $0.02
@BizLaw… Yep. Hit Nail on Head.
@Bubbles…
LOL. Are you sure you didn’t miss a few?
I’m sure I did.
@Ray
+1
And do what with them? Develop games for consoles? EA is already making games for the Apple platforms. What possible additional value does acquiring them yield?
Big-time game developers are in a soulless feast-or-famine business. This makes zero sense.
If Apple’s core principle is to make “insanely great products” how would this help them do that?
Won’t happen. They already get the gravy from the sales in the app store. Like it was posted above, why buy the part of the company that doesn’t work?
Yes, that’s the ticket!
Buy a really big gaming firm and cancel all their XBox titles.
Revenge.
How about they buy out Allume Systems instead, maker of Stuffit Expander 2010 (what happened to AladdinSys?).
Can you believe that it’s listed 8th on the OS X downloads list??
After Apple wins the war on Flash and Adobe’s stock tanks, then Apple can buy them for a song! Steve’s a genius!
This does not really help Apple. EA is not an innovator. They know how to scale and leverage across diverse platforms and they know how to handle movie and sports licenses in a most professional way. Those are their core strengths and they are not relevant to Apple. What Apple should do to rival Nintendo and Sony is
1. Curate the $9.99 price point, e.g. by setting up a Premium Games category in the AppStore that showcases only apps $9.99 and up, preferably replacing the unsatisfying Highest Grossing charts they introduced last year, at least on the iPod Touch.
This would give more exposure to games with deep content and excellent audiovisual assets and teach customers that it is sometimes worth to spend more. To developers this would finally offer enough revenue potential to bring full-size games to the platform.
2. Offer an iPod Touch and/or iPhone version with hardware gaming buttons (d-pad plus 6 fire buttons). Despite all the amazing, innovative touch input games Apple is sorely lacking in many genres that have tradionally relied on hardware buttons. A gaming device without buttons is like a cinema that only shows 3D movies.
Apple should flank both with telling a select few developers (like EA, but also Gameloft, Activision) about their plans in advance (as they now did for GameCenter) so these developers can prepare and finally bring their A-game to the iPlatform.
Deus Ex Technica,
The problem that many users are not seeing is that revenues are still too small on the AppStore for console size games. A typical game for Nintendo DS has a budget of $1 million. A typical iPhone game is making revenues of $10.000 or less.
Over the last 12 months, there were probably less iPhone games that crossed $1 million in revenues than there were Nintendo DS games that crossed $100 million in revenues.
Apple could either wait until their platform grows to 1 billion users and make it up with scale, or they could permanently settle one level below Nintendo and Sony, or they could do some specialization to really grab that market.
@Tom Ross
I don’t think the other shoe has fallen on Apple’s game strategy (if indeed there is one). Their mobile devices so far have been designed as general-purpose platforms. I think they’re probably delighted that the iPhone/iPod Touch platform has become the fastest growing mobile game platform, but I don’t see them coming out with a “D-Pad” iPod, or any such thing anytime soon. They’ve invested too much in multitouch technologies to start adding hard-wired buttons now.
However, I think what could happen is that Apple could make the AppleTV into a Movie, TV, and Gaming platform with it’s own SDK. At that point, it would be a cinch to have your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad be used as controllers for any app you wanted to run on it, including games.
This would leverage and extend Apple’s current “App Store” model, offer yet more opportunities for developers (including EA), and build upon their strengths. I think this is a much more sensible prediction for the future of gaming for Apple.
No freaking way! Most EA Games are rubbish that only sell because of past success of their franchise BEFORE being bought up by EA. I’ll say let EA burn, but instead buy BioWare (one of EA’s recent acquisitions) and Activision-Blizzard. That way they’ll get the most part of great game devs (Blizzard and BioWare alone make some of the most awesome games ever. See Mass Effect, KoTOR, TOR, Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, Baldur’s Gate, etc…)
Like anything Apple, it is more expensive, but the results would be top-notch
ea games regularly purchases smaller companies. would be funny to see EA acquisitions department get acquired.
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&client=safari&rls=en&ei=KgbyS6iaKYriswPdqfmIDA&sa=X&oi=spellfullpage&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=2&ved=0CBUQvwUoAQ&q=ea+games+acquires&spell=1
etc… etc…
You don’t get it man. Apple will never invest in this years or last years winner.They will invest in the winner that will emerge in in one or two years.
Duh…