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EA talks acquisition strategy amid reports of firm buying WBIE

EA talks acquisition strategy amid reports of firm buying WBIE

US publishing giant Electronic Arts has discussed its mergers and acquisition strategy following news that it might be interested in buying Warner Bros' games arm.

Speaking to investors – as reported by Seeking Alpha – CFO Blake Jorgeson fielded a question about the company's M&A plans from Sanford C Bernstein's Todd Juenger, with the EA finance boss saying that it's common for people to reach out to discuss selling their company.

EA is reportedly one of many games giants interested in buying Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment, alongside the usual suspects of Activision Blizzard, Take-Two and Microsoft's Xbox division. The last high-profile acquisition EA made was Titanfall maker Respawn Entertainment, which it snapped up for over £200m in November 2017.

"It is very rare that we don't get a chance to look at anything that's up for sale," Jorgensen said.

"You can imagine people call us and say we're thinking about selling a business or we're thinking about selling ourselves. 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 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. Respawn is a classic example where 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 offence to Titanfall, it's an amazing game and we'll maybe see another 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 organisation. 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. And so 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 business."


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.