EA buys Bioware and Pandemic

[Demosthenes]

http://www.bioware.com/bioware_info/pre ... ndemic.pdf

Good game guys... Now let's watch as they milk the cows so hard their udders bleed.

[Unklemonkey]

...God damnit

[Correction]

http://i21.tinypic.com/2rpfncy.jpg

[Koyuki]

EA needs to eat their own asses thereby creating an alternate dimension where they never existed

[Minions]

A sad day for all gamers.

[Kiro]

Meh. They're like Microsoft. :<

[Venture]

Meh. They're like Microsoft. :<

Not even Microsoft puts out .001% of the crap EA manages to butcher. They can't even fix the persistent glitches in their franchise sport series. The legendary Battlefield series have been circling the drain since BF2.

[Brandson]

So Bioware joins Origin, Westwood, and Bullfrog. How long before EA decides it's inefficient to have studios in both Vancouver and Edmonton, closes the Bioware offices in Edmonton, milks all the IP until it's worthless and ultimately relegates it to the storage vault along with Ultima, Wing Commander, Kyrandia, Lands of Lore, Syndicate, and everything else. Good stuff.

[Mysterio]

I wouldn't mind playing some KOTOR clones on the PS3, I actually like them. lol

[Melena]

So Bioware joins Origin, Westwood, and Bullfrog. How long before EA decides it's inefficient to have studios in both Vancouver and Edmonton, closes the Bioware offices in Edmonton, milks all the IP until it's worthless and ultimately relegates it to the storage vault along with Ultima, Wing Commander, Kyrandia, Lands of Lore, Syndicate, and everything else. Good stuff.

doubt it would get that far. Hell Maxis is still in there normal building despite only being 60 miles or so away from there corporate headquarters out in Redwood Shores. On that note, I just find the bioware purchase to be extremely ironic cause of half the tech support department playing Neverwinter nights on the day it shipped the second the phones went offline.

[Po]

Someone needs to buy EA and throw them off a cliff. The gaming world would be a better place without that company.

[Kyreth]

Throw Hasbro in after them, for being good enough to buy WoTC and promptly dismantling it's ability to generate new games (other than Hasbro licenses, of course...and Magic. Moooo, milk it more!).

Large companies often do this to new "good" companies...as it's cheaper in the long run to gobble up small hot companies than deal with them eating market share compared to your crap releases.

Sadly enough, I can remember when EA actually made good games. Archon, M.U.L.E., etc. Now they spend money to make money off other companies instead.

[Charla]

Wait, you mean WoTC used to make stuff other than Magic? (/sarcasm)

[BRP]

I don't know... being bought by Hasbro probably was the best thing to happen to DnD . Though, they recently got rid of the monthly prints of Dragon magazine and Dungeon magazine... the two best products in the 3rd edition line.

[Zarath]

How lame... Edmonton just lost something I would have considered good D:. Would be nice to meet up with the Bioware people again though and listen to their thoughts about this, too bad my sis stopped dating one of their devs.

[Kyreth]

Wait, you mean WoTC used to make stuff other than Magic? (/sarcasm)

Yep, and a decent chain of gaming stores to boot. Oh, and D&D. Horrible, weren't they?

To give you an idea of what kind of crap Hasbro was- the first thing they did when they bought the chain?

Yank out the LAN networked gaming computers to refurbish their offices. After wiping the hard drives first, of course.

Then they started selling their own products to their own shops at prices higher than they did to everyone else, meaning a Hasbro shop would be selling Hasbro games for higher prices than the Kay-Bee three shops down.

And stopped selling Games Workshop stuff. And any third party RPG/wargaming company stuff. Only WoTC D&D stuff. No more ordering stuff for gamers, either. You sold your allocation and that was it. Old customers and retail partners were told to fuck off and not come back, essentially.

And of course, the height of any gaming store chain- they decided the best retailing path was to sell such novelties as fake dog poop and rubber vomit.

So yes, I have a wee bit of hate on Hasbro for fucking up the largest gaming store chain in the country (they took down the Game Keeper chain in the process as well, which WoTC had bought). And they yanked the license rights on the two most venerable gaming mags in the business, Dragon and Dungeon. And now they're producing the castrated runt of a cow that is 4th Edition D&D. Hasbro is the EA of traditional gaming- they swallow up companies with potentially valuable IP's and either milk them for easy money or bury them.

[BRP]

2E(and all previous editions really) were complete shit compared to 3E though. It's way too early to talk about 4E being good or bad, and from what I've seen, it's more likely to be in the good area. But yeah, the two magazines being dismissed for their little online-pet project is rather lame.