Apple/EA Rumors.
Posted by nefchast on May 5, 2009
If you’ve looked at Gamasutra or Joystiq today you might have seen the articles on the ‘Apple may acquire EA’ rumor. I love my iMac; if I could play all the games I usually do on my PC on it I would sell my PC off in a heartbeat, but I just can’t see this deal going through or ever happening/existing. Apple really has too many hurdles it needs to cross to catch up and pass the PC in terms of gaming — hardware prices/power and gaining developers/producers. Gaining EA would certainly help the latter, but they still need to improve their hardware prices before most gamers would even think about converting.
My last PC build just a month or so ago costed me roughly 600 bucks. This PC can run any of the games out quite well and should hold up for at least a year or two before needing any upgrades. My iMac was over a thousand (bought roughly a year ago, or close to it) and doesn’t have quite as powerful hardware. It is decent but for the price, not quite there. The other factor is upgrading. Increasing the memory in my iMac was easy — even easier than doing it to my PC — but I won’t even begin to think of replacing much else since the unit is an all-in-one monitor/computer. Gamers would be willing to pay a bit more than average for high quality hardware, and Apple does put out some high quality products — the iMac is quite nice and solidly built, definitely far superior to any PC I’ve bought pre-built — but the lack of easy customization hurts. I can’t see that changing in the future; part of what makes a Mac is the perfect use of hardware with its software, and together they work amazingly well — far faster than you would expect from the raw hardware specs.
Now the iPhone/iPod touch is a different beast. I could see some developer/producer being acquired for game production for it — but not EA. Way too big and expensive. If they wanted to go the route of developing games for the iPhone I’d think they could do better starting up their own studio and hiring new talent to fill it — would likely be cheaper too.
If memory serves, Apple once had a console-type gaming system that failed horribly, or they just gave up on it. Gaming certainly has been in Apple’s past and might see a resurrection in the future, but I doubt it will be with EA. I wouldn’t mind seeing Apple start their own studio and bringing in some new talent, perhaps some indie talent, and trying to take gaming in different or new directions — that just kind of fits their image better, to me. If there’s something to be taken from console wars its platform exclusive titles — Apple needs some Mac exclusive gaming goodness that’ll draw gamer’s attention. I could actually see Apple getting a hold on the typical console gamer as consoles are pretty similar to Macs — both systems come pretty well setup, no need to customize or really change anything, pretty much all software that comes out for them will work on your machine as the software is configured to the hardware specifications, etc. Apple already has the platforms there, all it really needs to do is support them and this could happen in the future.
