Today Reuters are reporting that Take-Two Interactive are poised to buy the British developer of the official F1 games and the Dirt franchise for almost a billion Dollars.
Take-Two are the holding company of Rockstar Games, 2K Games and the Private Division label, amongst others. They are the third largest publicly traded European and American games company after Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts.
Should the acquisition go through, the Codemasters stable of titles will join the likes of the Red Dead, Grand Theft Auto, NBA, Borderlands and Bioshock franchises.
I donāt think its a good idea. Companies need to remain individual or otherwise theyāll all just start producing similar games due to corporate demands.
Player 3 (aka Electronic Arts) has entered the arena!
Things on the Codemasters / Take-Two front have dramatically changed, albeit somewhat quietly, and seemingly very quicklyā¦
Just 12 hours ago rumours of an EA counter-offer started circulatingā¦
Then just a short while ago, reports that Codemasters will accept the EA offer started appearingā¦
Codemasters has withdrawn its recommendation for the Ā£759m cash and shares bid from Take-Two, and said it would unanimously recommend the 604p a share cash offer from EA.
I think either would have better servers that Codemasters, thatās for sure.
Also RIP favourable regional pricing for us. EA is a bit better than Take-Two in that regard though but nowhere near as good as we are used to getting.
I donāt know if itās just me being my jaded, cynical, old fart self, but even with the "the departures had always been part of the planā and āour orientation isnāt to come in and turn Codemasters into another Electronic Arts studioā* PR bollocks, the first thing that popped into my head as I read this article was a āand so it beginsā, followed by Jim Morrison singing, āThis is the end, beautiful friendā.
* Immediately scrapping Regional Pricing for Codemasters games on Steam proves this statement is a lie. Turning Codemasters into another EA studio is precisely what they did before theyād even added their EA logo to all the artwork.
I was sadened and then excited when I found out that Codemasters brought over a lot of the Eveolution Studios devs, if they didnāt take the entire studio. Now that Codemasters is being bought by EA, I am now considerably more aprehensive. Not that EA games are bad by any stretch, but some of their practices I do not like nor agree with. But such is the nature of the industry right now unfortunately.
