October 11, 2007 - Electronic Arts Inc. today announced an agreement with Elevation Partners to acquire VG Holding Corp. -- the owner of both BioWare Corp. and Pandemic Studios. This acquisition gives EA a strong competitive position in key genres in interactive entertainment: action, adventure and role-playing games. The two studios have been recognized for creating some of the highest-quality games in the industry.

BioWare Corp. and Pandemic Studios have ten franchises under development, including six wholly owned games. BioWare Corp. is currently developing the highly anticipated Mass Effect, which will be published by Microsoft in November, and is in the early development stages of a massively multiplayer online game. Pandemic Studios is redefining open-world games with its upcoming Mercenaries 2: World in Flames and Saboteur, in addition to several unannounced projects.

Pandemic Studios and BioWare Corp. employ roughly 800 people across four studios located in Edmonton, Canada; Los Angeles; Austin; and Brisbane, Australia.

"These are two of the most respected studios in the industry and I'm glad to be working with them again. They'll make a strong contribution to our strategic growth initiatives on quality, online gaming and developing new intellectual properties," said John Riccitiello, EA's Chief Executive Officer. "We also expect this will drive long-term value for our shareholders."

Pandemic Studios is led by Andrew Goldman, Josh Resnick and Greg Borrud. BioWare Corp. is jointly led by Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka. These teams will join the EA Games Label run by Frank Gibeau, President of EA Games.

"Pandemic Studios remains focused on attracting the best talent and creating blockbuster action games," said Josh Resnick, President and Co-founder of Pandemic Studios. "As a worldwide publishing leader, EA represents the ideal partner to bring our titles to market as global entertainment events."

"We are truly excited by John Riccitiello's new vision for EA," said Ray Muzyka, Co-founder and CEO of BioWare Corp. "This vision is consistent with BioWare's focus on crafting the highest quality story-driven games in the world. It will enable us to further the careers of the passionate, creative and hard working teams at BioWare Edmonton and BioWare Austin."

EA will pay up to $620 million in cash to the stockholders of VG Holding Corp. and will issue up to an additional $155 million in equity to certain employees of VG Holding Corp., which will be subject to time-based or performance-based vesting criteria. EA will also assume outstanding VG Holding Corp. stock options. In addition, EA has agreed to lend VG Holding Corp. up to $35 million through the closing of the acquisition.

Source: IGN

DO NOT WANT! Creative freedom and EA should be antonyms in the dictionary. Surely a company like BioWare will become crippled under the ownership of a monolith like EA. EA took Origin apart, now they can work on Bioware. Guess Western RPG's will now be the exclusive territory of Bethesda. :(

I'd be lying if I said I was happy about this...

This is just about the worst thing to happen to gaming in a loooooooooong time. You know, with all of these devs, EA could probably make it's own console now and just dominate. :nooo:

They're already one of the biggest players in the gaming industry. They're like the blob.

All because they release the SAME sports games EVERY YEAR, and people just eat it up.

News Flash! Madden 08 is really Madden 07! And Madden 07 was really Madden 06!

EA aren't the boogyman they used to be. Probably just wanting them to make all the games they were already working on anyway.

I know this sounds dumb but why do so many people hate EA games? Tell me so I can know if I should buy Mass Effect or not. :unsure:

Mass Effect isn't an EA game, despite the recent purchase.

People tend to 'hate' EA games because the company tends to release rehash after rehash (i.e. Madden), but its simply the nature of being a large corporation, they're going to milk franchises that make money. But I don't really agree with that point of view, hate the games not the company, every company does the same thing, case in point Nintendo and the Mario Party games, now I dont like these annual releases of what is essentially the same thing, doesn't mean everything released by Nintendo is the same sort of 'crap', same deal with EA.

I'm just worried this acquisition might mean Bioware will produce a plethora of redundant downloadable crap, including Mass Effect: Pets in Space and Mass Effect: Human/Asari Crossbread Babies! :P

Yeah it's a legitmate concern, it's something we'll only know about in time I guess.

I don't care about Bioware...I'm more concerned about Pandemic.
Last thing I want is for their Brisbane studio to called "EA Brisbane/Australia".

Don't think it won't happen. Just look at a Irrational; now it's 2K Games Boston/Australia.
2k said the same crap about "studio freedom"(or whatever) that EA is now...tis just a matter of time.

Does anyone else find it unusual that development teams such as Valve and Crytek remain discrete entities, despite having deep working relationships with EA?

It seems that EA would have purchased them by now.

Well they can't just go and say "I buy you now", the shareholders on the company being bought out have to agree.
Also wouldn't say that Valve and Crytek have deep work relationships...Crytek have yet to release a title under EA(Farcry was Ubisoft) and Valve were with Venvidi up untill last year(I think...may have been 2005).

Then there the fact that different countries have different laws about buying people out and whatnot. Crytek are in Germany for example, so that would make things difficult for them I would expect.

With Valve you've got the whole Steam thing, which would make things very complicated since Valve would have alot of relationships with other major publisher through their use of Steam.

I donno, there's more factors, but I'm not really in the right frame of mind to make sense of anything coming outta my head...

Unlike most people I don't see this announcement as a bad thing, yet.

If BioWare and Pandemic are left alone to do their own thing (ala Criterion with the Burnout franchise) then there shouldn't be a problem with the upcoming games and their quality. Mass Effect will be fine, future games under that franchise (or indeed other ones) will be fine too.

That said, even if EA did start controlling things a little it wouldn't be all that bad. EA have improved a fair bit over the last year or so and if you don't believe me, cast your eyes in Skate's general direction...