It’s official, EA has given up their talks with Take-Two and, as a result, the stock of both companies is falling like a stone. While gamers may cheer knowing the Grand Theft Auto and 2K Sports product lines will continue to compete with EA products, share holders are doing a WTF?
Take-Two has had its share of financial difficulties, but nothing shakes up a stock more than a break in discussions when the words acquisition have been spoken. It causes uncertainty and lack of understanding on the part of the game industry and share holders. EA’s stock dropped 2.7% upon opening this morning but has begun to stablize as it’s clear EA isn’t in any financial peril from this breakup in discussion.
Take-Two’s stock, however, is in epic free fall with a 25% decline since the discussions ended. One theory is that, “is taking a huge beating as everyone and their mother tries desperately to sell the shares the figured EA was going to to buy.” (kotaku)
As the game industry gets more competitive, builds bigger bank-roll and becomes a staple entertainment icon there is always more business savvy people getting into the game trying to make a fast buck. In this case, the shareholders obviously aren’t pushing for Take-Two’s future decisions or product launches — this is the reaction of business folks trying to make money.
There is huge risk with block buster 100-million dollar titles and all the crazy hype involved with some of the biggest games in history. They break sales records, smoke box-office numbers and bring new gamers into the industry but it’s all at risk when money gets involved. One bad move and a company making a title like GTA can find themselves in financial peril.
With risk comes reward, but failure is always sneaking up around the corner so watch out!
In before Herr_Alien. 🙂
Come on Paul! How many podcasts are you going to miss?
@GOG says customers hate DRM: Of course they do! Just like you said, DRM only hurts the customers and not the pirates. And yes, please bring back games filled with physical content, I would love to have stuff like that.
@QOTW: Sorry, don’t know of any DRM that I could tolerate. I know that pirates shouldn’t be accepted, but unfortunately there’s nothing that can be done about them.
@DynamicJul
😀 Actually it is a nice change. The time zone difference usually works in my favor (Eastern Europe), but it’s not completely impossible for somebody from US to get in first.
@EA forum bans cause game bans:
So apparently they didn’t fix the issue yet … they’re still using one database to handle the authentication for both systems.
If you think of it, you don’t even need two databases with the same user/password data, you only need separate databases to store forum bans from whole-account bans.
Correcting the bug should not be that difficult and it will make a huge impact for the better.
@piracy’s up 20% in past 5 years:
Games for free? Who would think this would ever be a lucrative business? 😛
I for one would pirate the shit out of Assassin’s Creed 2, just to point out that intrusive DRM is not ok. I’m not that much into that kind of game though, so …
@GOG sez customers hate DRM
And for good reason. As long as the code reaches the client, any DRM measures in it will be bypassed. Not might be bypassed, not could be bypassed, WILL be bypassed.
As for physical content, well, you still have those Deluxe editions.
@Steam user database cracked:
Not the best of the possible news. I don’t like to have the credit card info stored on servers, and in my envision of an online store, the credit card info is never stored. Yes, with every purchase you would need to type in the number again, but unless you check out very often (instead of putting more items in the basket then checking out) it should be quite ok.
@QOTW:
Steam, and the regular CD-key.
Jonah, regarding DynamicJul’s comment, I think you mean pseudo-code. And it’s not really about pseudo-code; as long as you know (1) what you want the program to do and (2) how to do it in one language, it will be easy to get the same thing from another language. The main hurdle in all software companies is not about learning a new language, is more about figuring out what the software you’re making is supposed to do.
Actually my time zone is GMT +1 so it’s the same. Also, I forgot to mention that my country doesn’t have things such as ‘Microsoft offices’ or ‘video game shops’ so I have to buy everything off the internet and it isn’t possible to fix an Xbox 360 over the internet.
Wait… taking fallout 3 apart and putting it back together again? This time it’s a brand new engine, so even if they learnt some stuff from the previous games, it’s not like they could reuse that much this time as they have done between previous games.