EA is one of the big game publishers reportedly in the run to acquire Warner Bros. Games and Entertainment, alongside Microsoft, Activision Blizzard and Take-Two Interactive.
During yesterday's Q1 2021 earnings call, an analyst prompted EA CFO Blake Jorgensen to comment on the rumor. While Jorgensen didn't go into specifics for obvious reasons, he seemed bullish on the company's general prospects for merge and acquisition (M&A).
[...] what I would say there is it is very rare that we don't get a chance to look at anything that's up for sale. I mean you can imagine people call us and say we're thinking about selling a business or we're thinking about selling ourselves. I mean we are a place that a lot of people want to come as a long-term home if they decide to sell the business. So we get to look at almost everything. I can't comment on any specific acquisition other than what I will tell you as we said you've seen in the past where we've done the best is where we have long-term relationships with people. And we're really trying to buy great talent versus games. And I think Respawn is a classic example of that we were able to bring them into the fold, give them incredible support and it was all driven by the fact that they had incredible talent.
It wasn't about Titanfall and that's no offense to Titanfall, it's an amazing game and we'll maybe see a Titanfall at some point sometime down the road, but it was really about the team and it starts at the top with Vince but it goes all the way through the whole organization. So we're always looking at that, we'll always continue to look at that. We would hope we can find more. Our hope was is that some of the challenges in our broad world economy would actually make people think and understand that being sub-scale is difficult, but at the same time as you've seen from our results, I think everybody's going to do well in the next couple of quarters in our industry. It might take some time but trust that we are more interested than ever because we see talent and building great new franchises is critical to the long-term growth for the business.
Transcript credits to Seeking Alpha
EA acquired Respawn Entertainment for up to $455 million back in November 2017. This acquisition would be much more expensive, with WB Games and Entertainment valued around $4 billion.
The post EA on WB Games Bid Rumor: ‘We’re More Interested in M&A Than Ever’ by Alessio Palumbo appeared first on Wccftech.
source https://wccftech.com/ea-on-wb-games-bid-rumor-were-more-interested-in-ma-than-ever/
