A Sky News report anticipates the interest of the American giant to interfere in the purchase process of those responsible for GTA in this movement.
Electronic Arts has shown its interest in acquiring Codemasters, a British video game studio expert in driving titles that since last November has been in negotiations to be acquired by Take-Two Interactive. According to the information, advanced by Sky News on the afternoon of this past Sunday, the North American giant has entered the fight with an initial bet that exceeds 960 million dollars from T2.
EA is currently in negotiations with UBS, a well-known Swiss financial services company, to be able to advance this amount and make the offer official sometime this Monday, December 14.
Although the exact value of Electronic Arts’ offer has not been disclosed, the source estimates that the figure must be very high; enough to justify that Codemasters closed its value on the stock market last Friday with a significant increase compared to the previous days. As of the publication of this article, Take-Two has not countered the amount of EAs.
Codemasters has three studios in United Kingdom and more than 700 employees.
Take-Two Interactive expects to acquire Codemasters in early 2021
How this EA proposition will affect Take-Two Interactive’s plans is currently unknown. The company responsible for Rockstar Games (GTA, Red Dead Redemption) or 2K Games established an offer already accepted by the British to transfer 100% of the company’s shares before March 31, 2021, the last day of this fiscal year. Codemasters managers voted in their entirety in favor of this purchase.
With this reinforcement, now possibly interrupted by the action of EA, Take-Two hoped to include a significant reinforcement in its role within the driving genre and, who knows, perhaps convert to licenses like DiRT, Midnight Club or F1 (whose rights in video games are still in the hands of Codemasters) in authentic AAA capable of competing with other big players in the market such as Forza Motorsport and Gran Turismo.
