EA Set To Pay $1.2 Billion For Codemasters and Its Stable of Racing Games (arstechnica.com) 28
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The board of directors for British developer Codemasters has reached a purchase agreement with Electronic Arts which would sell the company to the mega-publisher for an estimated $1.2 billion (or just under $8 a share) in early 2021. The deal would put Codemasters' popular racing-game franchises -- including DiRT/DiRT Rally, Grid, F1, and Project CARS (which Codemasters acquired in 2019) -- under the same umbrella as EA's Need for Speed, Burnout, and mobile-focused Real Racing. That's not quite a monopoly in the genre -- thanks in large part to console exclusives like Microsoft's Forza Motorsport and Sony's Gran Turismo -- but it's as close as you're likely to find for any major genre in gaming.
More than that, the acquisition reflects a continuing trend toward consolidation among the game industry's biggest publishers. The acquisition would also likely make Codemaster's current and future titles part of the EA Play subscription service and, by extension, part of Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Aside from its modern racing sims, Codemasters boasts a legacy catalog going back to the days of the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, with titles like Micro Machines and the Dizzy platform-adventure series that were especially popular in the UK. "The combination of Codemasters and Electronic Arts will enable the development and delivery of a market-leading portfolio of creative and exciting racing games and content to more platforms and more players around the world," the companies said in a joint statement.
"Electronic Arts and Codemasters have a shared ambition to lead the video game racing category," Codemasters Chairman Gerhard Florin added. "The Board of Codemasters firmly believes the company would benefit from EA's knowledge, resources and extensive global scale -- both overall and specifically within the racing sector. We feel this union would provide an exciting and prosperous future for Codemasters, allowing our teams to create, launch and service bigger and better games to an extremely passionate audience."
More than that, the acquisition reflects a continuing trend toward consolidation among the game industry's biggest publishers. The acquisition would also likely make Codemaster's current and future titles part of the EA Play subscription service and, by extension, part of Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Aside from its modern racing sims, Codemasters boasts a legacy catalog going back to the days of the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, with titles like Micro Machines and the Dizzy platform-adventure series that were especially popular in the UK. "The combination of Codemasters and Electronic Arts will enable the development and delivery of a market-leading portfolio of creative and exciting racing games and content to more platforms and more players around the world," the companies said in a joint statement.
"Electronic Arts and Codemasters have a shared ambition to lead the video game racing category," Codemasters Chairman Gerhard Florin added. "The Board of Codemasters firmly believes the company would benefit from EA's knowledge, resources and extensive global scale -- both overall and specifically within the racing sector. We feel this union would provide an exciting and prosperous future for Codemasters, allowing our teams to create, launch and service bigger and better games to an extremely passionate audience."
Future of MicroMachines (Score:2)
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Let's hope there's a future in EA's populist world for MicroMachines.
That was my all time favorite racing game on NES. It had more character and variety than RC Pro Am, which was also fun. I didn't know they were 1) still around and 2) responsible for those newer games.
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I think I had it on the Amiga; I vaguely remember having fun driving around on a messy breakfast table. That was back when games dared to try new things.
J-Con (Score:2)
Fond memories.
The Sega Megadrive (Genesis) version had two extra gamepad connectors on the cartidge enabling 4 or 8 (two per pad) players.
We used to play it quite a lot at partie: a friend brought her cartridge and her two gamepads, I brought my console and mine, and it ended up with a funny mess on screen with cars constantly bumping each other out of the track, while their respective player elbowed each-other.
This was a very fufn party-game, even before Nintendo started to pretend having invented the conc
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RIP Another one bites the dust (Score:2)
Basically everything worth playing gets bought by EA and made to be no longer be worth playing.
Well, that sucks. (Score:4, Insightful)
One of my favorite aspects of the Grid games is that they aren't published by EA. No Origin. No consumer-hostile nonsense.
I guess this is where that journey ends.
Bad Track Record (Score:2)
This is a bit of a shame. I often find that otherwise good EA games have one major flaw, usually related to monetization, that keeps me from really getting into the game. It doesn't happen everytime, but it's enough that I have to take the time to look for any "gotcha's" before I can actually give them my money.
I'm not excited to have to add the Project Cars and DiRT games to that list.
Dirt, F1 2022 "features" (Score:4, Funny)
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If you're really lucky they'll forget to change the textures and actively advertise the fact you're playing last year's game like they did in FIFA 2019... or was it 2020... one of them had in game textures showing the wrong game.
Antitrust (Score:2)
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EA is huge, but its nowhere near a monopoly.
Antitrust monopoly investigations usually are about a monopoly unfairly leveraging its market position to harm competitors (Ie app stores being used to punish competitors) or unfairly building new monopolies (Ie Microsoft using its windows monopoly on PCs to kill Netscape and build a new browser monopoly [its worth remembering the reason Firefox built up its steam was the europeans forcing microsoft offer firefox/opera/etc a an alternative to IE]
Ijust dont see ho
Now EA own both the big football franchises (Score:2)
FIFA Soccer AND Sensible Soccer.
Pro Evo was unavailable for comment.
RIP 60 FPS (Score:2)
I haven't encountered an EA racing game that wasn't locked at 30 frames per second for a long time now. 60 should be an absolute requirement for ANY modern racing game.
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> 60 should be an absolute requirement for ANY modern racing game.
^^ THIS 100%!!
Polyphony Digital running (or ruining /s) Gran Turismo Sport at 30 FPS on a regular PS4 was a joke -- having 120+ FPS on PC is so nice. Playground Games did a really nice job on Forza Horizons 4.
I blame "console peasants" not knowing any better. Thankfully PS5 / XBox SX have started to target 60 FPS.
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What's sad is that we had 60 fps racing back in literally the PS1 days, with Wipeout XL. OK, so it wasn't a car racing game, but the point stands.
I'm glad I already bought DiRT Rally 2 for cheap (Score:2)
So long Codemasters (Score:2)
Another 2020 Loss (Score:2)
What a savage year.
RIP Codemasters.
impressed (Score:2)
I've always been impressed by the competence of Electronic Arts.
Especially in their consistency and the attention to detail in the little things.
Like having "My Documents/Electrontic Arts" as the save/config directory in several of their games.
That "t" after the "n" in "Electrontic" is perfection...and the way that some parts of the game code look for files in "My Documents/Electronic Arts" while others look in "My Documents/Electrontic Arts" is just the icing on the cake.
Hooray for cmd.exe and mklink.exe!
Another one bites th dust (Score:1)
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Same here. I still have it on tape for the C64.
I liked Micro Machines on the Amiga, too.
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Dirt Ralley (Score:2)
is now in the dirt...
I can see it, every year a new dirt ralley, Micro transactions even for car colors, changes per year... a new driver roaster and every 10 years an upgrade even worthwhile to be called that way.
Too bad that one of my favorite racing sim houses (I discovered dirt ralley because of VR and their excellent support)
now goes down the gutter just like every other company did when it was bought out by EA.
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You lack ambition and business skills.
Car colours? Sure, why not. But the real money will be made on the gearbox.
Want 5th gear? $3. Want reverse? $5. Want a sequential gearbox? $8.
And another one falls into darkness (Score:3)
Goodbye Codemasters. I suppose the money on offer was just too good, that it made sense to management to sell their souls for it. In truth, I don't really care: I've always thought of you as a second-rate publisher that was best known for the Dizzy games, and later, racing games I didn't really enjoy anyway since they were far too technical for my taste. Still, I can't help but wonder at what would cause any independent publishing house to sell itself to EA, seeing as what happened to all the really great companies that took that path before. It's like the human kings accepting their rings from Sauron, really: all that remains of those once-noble beings is a bunch of shitty ring wraiths.
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EA's game plan is always the same, buy a studio, stop producing their IP, move all of the devs they want over to EA teams, fire the rest and close the studio. It's happened so many times now, any time I see another studio let EA buy them, I just assume that the studio wanted to close in the first place, getting EA to buy and dismantle you is an exit strategy for the execs of codemasters.
Codie's new Micro Machines sequel (Score:1)