The News: EA's bid to merge with Take-Two, the publisher that owns Rockstar (GTA, Bully), 2K Games (Bioshock), and 2K Sports (2K sports series', duh) is that much closer to becoming a reality. Let me take you back to last month when EA made public their proposal to buy Take-Two Entertainment for 1.9 billion dollars. Many analyists believe that this was done in order to pressure Take-Two to take action or to influence their stockholders and by jove did it work.
There was a report released today stating that Take-Two's largest stockholders have slashed a massive amount of their stock that they hold in the company, from 23% to 11.5% in the case of the top stockholder. On Feb. 25th, immediately after the initial the initial rejection, Take-Two's stock hit $26.89, The companies highest price since June 24th 2005 when stock was at $26.26. The price has since dropped to $24.65.
My View: All in all, this merger can hurt no one. EA, while it doesn't necessarily need the money, can gain a lot from this company. Obviously the massive cash cow that the GTA series is will help them monetarily, as well as the fact that the NBA games that 2K Sports makes have consistently been better than EA's LIVE series. Take-Two really has nothing to lose either. They have made poor PR decision after poor PR decision; having a corporate giant behind them with an established damage control team can do nothing but help them.
We are getting closer to having 3 or 4 sole publishers in the video game industry. This can be viewed in one of two ways: The industry will turn into something akin to the oil industry and will start charging 100 bucks a game, or that this will lead to more defined competition within the video game market which is ultimately better for all parties. The latter being my opinion, and the former (in my experience) being expressed by many forum-dwellers who don't understand economics.
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