Well, the rumor continues: there have been some rumblings in the industry that EA is looking to buy Jamdat. This follows EA’s rumored interest in UK mobile gaming company Superscape. One thing is definite, from people I’ve spoken to: EA’s desperate to kick start its own mobile gaming efforts (which have been anemic at best), and knows it has to scale for it soon. So multiple acquisitions will probably be the way out for it.
Now Dean Takahashi over at Mercury News picks up the baton and runs with it, in couple of thoughtful posts:
— Post 1: Buying Jamdat would be expensive, with its market capitalization at around $791 million on Thursday. One market-savvy source said that EA would have to pay a premium of about $1 billion to get Jamdat, and that’s a high price for a cell phone games company with sales of about $65 million..Electronic Arts only needs know-how, not content.
— Post 2: The part of the argument: Jamdat recently paid $137 million for the rights to Tetris, perhaps the greatest game of all time, when it struck a deal with Blue Lava Games. “We put all our eggs in the Tetris basket,” says Henk Rogers, the founder of Blue Lava, who is now part of Jamdat Hawaii. EA is drawn to valuable game licenses like a moth to a flame. As far as value of a game brand goes, it doesn’t get much better than Tetris.
What do you think?
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