Recently, a well respected writer friend of mine has put up a couple of blogs on the topic of EA's proposed takeover of Take Two, the owner of the very popular Grand Theft Auto franchise. Monco's opinion, condensed and summarized, is that EA kills good game developers whenever they gobble them up. In all fairness, he has a host of examples to choose from. Many great studios have gone under, eventually, after being absorbed by EA. In fact, I'm not even certain that I disagree with him that an EA acquisition of a company is the beginning of the end for many developers. Like just about everyone else, I was adamantly against their acquisition of my favorite gaming company, Bioware, late last year. However, upon deeper reflection, my contrarian nature got the better of me as it does at times and I started looking at the situation from a couple of different angles. First, I examined the companies that EA was acquiring. Many of them were in financial distress when they were taken over. In other words, an alternative interpretation of EA acquiring these companies is that it kept them alive when, through financial mismanagement, they might have gone under if they hadn't been purchased. Everyone who is my age or older remembers the ill-fated end of the great game maker Black Isle of Fallout and Fallout 2 fame. Black Isle made some of the greatest games around when I was younger but eventually went bankrupt and last year had to sell the rights to Fallout 3 to Bethesda. I wonder if Fallout 3 would ever have been made at all had Bethesda not tendered the offer to purchase those rights. Do we, as gamers, protest too much when companies are bought out by huge behemoth's like EA? In general, the reason that we protest is that we feel that the games made post-acquisition are not worthy follow-ons to the games made pre-acquisition. Maybe this is true and maybe it isn't, but, continuing my role as devil's advocate, how much of this fault can be laid at the feet of EA? Most great franchises eventually stick around for one or two games too long and this tendency isn't limited to video games. Everyone loved "The Matrix". We cringed a bit with "The Matrix: Reloaded" and by the time "The Matrix: Revolutions" was done we were ready to tear our eyeballs out of our sockets (not to mention our ears with the horrible dialog) to get the series to stop. Why is this relevant? All three movies were made by same pair of brothers. The magic that was there in the first movie just ran out of steam. It was probably the same to a certain extent with the companies that EA acquired. Part of the problem may well have been EA's ownership/management sty.le but part of it may also been that the shelf life of the series in question had just ran out over time. In the U.S., and probably around the entire world, there is a natural tendency to root for "the little guy". We don't like huge, bloated monopolies like EA because we think that they will, inevitably, crush originality, innovation and freshness. We think of them as soulless androids that don't represent the little guy, whereas we idealize the smaller companies and ascribe all sorts of wonderful virtues to them based on rather flimsy evidence such as a couple of good games. But something to keep in mind, while EA has indeed churned out some true stinkers, it has also been behind some really good games in recent years. If we are going to rip on them when they are connected to a game that ends up being mediocre or worse, don't they deserve some credit when they are behind some of the really excellent titles? While I will be the first to decry excessive consolidation of companies in the video game industry and one company gaining too much control and power, I'm also going to point out that such a practice is hardly unique to the video game industry itself. EA isn't some nefarious Dr. Evil style tyrant bent on world domination. They are acting exactly how successful companies act. When they see opportunities to acquire very popular - and therefore very marketable - intellectual property, they try and do so in the best interests of their shareholders. If they didn't do it, another company would. After all, it wasn't so long ago that Microsoft was the evil empire of the corporate world. Now they are celebrated for breaking up the Sony monopoly of the industry that the PS2 enjoyed last generation. If Microsoft ends up eventually being successful enough to attain a dominant market share, will we then automatically hate them again just because they are very large?