I think if he did, he would be doing more than throwing his name around and building up F2P facebook flash games.
EA bought Pogo to specifically deal with some of their financial issues, namely getting into the browser/free market.
Blizzard's parent company is trying to sell its majority share of Blizzard. If Blizzard can't even buy themselves back, I doubt they could buy EA. And if nobody will buy the majority share in Blizzard, I doubt they would in EA.
He tried working something out with EA over Ultima, they wouldn't do it. He just received over $25 million in a settlement, so he's got money, or could get the backing he needed.
He has another Austin house worth quite a bit, but as I said he received a big settlement from NCSoft recently, and even if he doesn't have it yet, he knows enough people to get whatever he needs. You are right though, EA would not sell to him because of the past.
Were you calling from inside the US, or from Canada?
But then they might make more money, and put themselves in a higher tax bracket!
That's not surprising, they treat the Mythic MMORPGs all the same, and we share community people with the other Mythic MMORPGs as well as GMs.
Hard to say since it wasn't just Ultima but every other game that Origin was producing at the time Garriott sold them to EA back in 1992.
Not exactly a book company, they are into music, television, film, publishing, telecommunications, the Internet, along with video games. One of the other companies they own you might have heard of include Universal Music Group. These guys are like the Disney of Europe....
To say UO is in competition with WoW is like saying that a mosquito competes with Water Buffalo at a water hole.
It's also possible a new owner may have a few people check out each game, see that EA's decision makers, while perhaps competent to run a business, have no clue how to make entertaining computer games, and just replace the management personnel in control of the various games with people who can tell the difference between grind play and fun play. Then hire a few programmers in their late twenties and early thirties who know the languages the older games are writen in and can write reasonably bug-free code in those languages. With that, the two major problems with UO, and likely the other EA games, are gone. Blizzard's people show it can be done with competent leadership and staff, so it can be done with EA games as well.
I hope you mean could Richard buy back Ultima from EA and not Electronic Arts. EA's current market cap is $4.2 Billion dollars. It would take probably at least 10% premium or close to $5B to buy the company. ActivisionBlizzard is a $13B company and might be able to stomach the acquisition but it might also run into govt issues in a merger of the two biggest gaming companies.
This is fairly funny. Who is making $5/share?? Do you think the CEO gets all the 'buyback shares'? LOL
That's why they (Activision Blizzard) are for sale too right?
The point was not that UO was anyway competition with WOW, just that a new company might ask why waste resources on a game like UO when those resources could be better suited to make a game that competes with WOW. It all depends on who buys EA and what that company's direction will take. I believe UO's future is not certain.
ActivisionBlizzard is itself up for sale. They aren't going to buy a $4 billion company anytime soon. Plus it would be far more profitable for Activision to take properties they have lying around and put them into development than buying up EA and figuring out what to do with it.
Both of those companies have been burned by huge purchases related to entertainment and online services in recent years. Comcast maybe regretting their NBC purchase, since they are chopping up the most profitable shows. Time Warner...they do own Warner Brothers which owns Warner Brothers Interactive, which has put out a lot of games in recent years, and which owns Turbine, which owns LOTRO/DDO/Asheron's Call. However, they are suffering from the same problems that EA and Activision are suffering.
Exactly. Some people have tossed around Apple (since they have like $80 billion cash), but Apple is still at its heart a hardware company, and they've even tried to get out of some software areas that they are currently in, and they are trying to reduce the amount of Windows software they offer. Apple has tons of developers flocking to Macs anyways - even EA is offering Origin for Mac OS X. They don't need to spend billions on something that's already happening.
UO is probably making millions in profit, so not a waste of resources, especially given how profitable it is versus the amount of resources allocated to it. EA still thinks the franchise can make money, obviously they wouldn't have put millions into Ultima Forever.
UO's future is not certain based on how silent the team is on the future and direction of the game. It's been a year since somebody truly had a vision for UO's future. Jeff Skalski and Mesanna and a few others have tossed out bits and pieces here and there over the past 10 or 12 months but none of it adds up to an actual vision for UO.
I remember back in the 1990s when the "analysts" were claiming that consoles were going to kill off desktop gaming. It happened with the PS2, it happened with the Xbox 360, Wii, and PS3, and now some are claiming that mobile devices will kill it off.
EA's biggest asset is it's IP and it's customer base. If another videogame or entertainment company bought EA, it would be with the intention of retaining that customer base and IP, because that's what a videogame/entertainment company would be after.
Millions in profit might be a stretch, but if you think a company wouldn't shut down a project that makes millions(with very low growth potential), moving it's personnel and resources to a project that will make millions (with medium to high growth potential), you are fooling yourself. EA doesn't believe that UO has a significant future, as noted by their WOW killer Star Wars and they had to limit UO support to make that happen. If EA though killing UO would make Star Wars successful and raise their stck a few points, we would be gone. UO is not the big stick it once was and it will probably never be sold individually because of franchise problems.
I would put money on that Mesanna was given the marching orders of "We are selling the company, get through the 15th year anniversary and then put nothing in development until we know what we are going to go forward with." So what we are seeing is a positive spin on this with the promise of Bug fixes.
I would put money on that she wasn't, because first you have to find a buyer, and there are no reasonable buyers in this economic climate. I'm repeating myself, but if Vivendi can't find a buyer for ActivisionBlizzard, I doubt EA is going to be snapped up by anybody.
My friend, I completely agree.
Well, Have you seen the new 10 inch tablet phone?
