Electronic Arts now looking for a buyer. Apple interested?

[Lightwreather]

8 minutes ago, tim0901 said:

That's the size without instrument samples - they're stored separately. https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/logicpro/lgcp4598b412/mac

Huh, I didn't know. Lemme check that.

 

EditL Turns out it's around 6 gigs. Now that I think about it, that's far more reasonable for sample sizes.

[WereCat]

4 hours ago, leadeater said:

Here me out, maybe they want to make a FIFA TV series then if that is popular they could then do like a FIFA but it real life with real players... 

listen.. listen...

 

FIFA series thats still played by an AI and you as a viewer can spend money for skins for each different player and it will exclusively be linked and shown on your device while watching the match. Or you can spend more money to show it as default to other people who don't spend for skins.

[soldier_ph]

If Apple buys them then either EAs Games will get extremely worse or they kill all failing franchises EA has and exclusively make mobile Apple approved games which they then can put behind their Apple Arcade subscription Service. Though this seems very unlikely to me because Apple never as far as I can tell positioned Gaming as a Core offering on their Products and Services and they seem to be very anti "Hardcore" Shooter Games like the Battlefield and Battlefront series. No matter who buys up EA though has some cleaning up and a lot of fixing to do. I do personally enjoy Battlefield 5 and Battlefront 2 a lot when they work...

[WhitetailAni]

4 hours ago, BionicSeaSerpent said:

i haven't. because i'm far from an apple user. had an iPhone once. it sucked to use. Macs are not any better. the way it is, if you are at the point where you like MacOS and apple Devices. you have Explicitly stated that you are fine with being Technically Illiterate. apple has made it clear that their goal is to trap people in a Fisher Price Ecosystem by dumbing them down where they think to upgrade every time it breaks a little bit with a Mediocre Knockoff Linux OS that connects to their phone like literally anything else will.

Bias much?

4 hours ago, BionicSeaSerpent said:

i haven't. because i'm far from an apple user. had an iPhone once. it sucked to use. Macs are not any better.

That's your opinion. Macs aren't for everyone. I personally like iOS/macOS, I also am fine with Android and Windows. Will I choose iOS over Android? Yes. Is Android hot trash? No.

4 hours ago, BionicSeaSerpent said:

if you are at the point where you like MacOS and apple Devices. you have Explicitly stated that you are fine with being Technically Illiterate.

- macOS has a zsh shell that's accessible with Command+Space, type in Terminal, hit enter

- install brew with a simple copy+paste command from https://brew.sh/, boom package manager

- most iOS jailbreaking tools are developed for macOS

4 hours ago, BionicSeaSerpent said:

Mediocre Knockoff Linux OS that connects to their phone like literally anything else will.

Ok a few things here.

1. macOS isn't based off of Linux. It's based off of Darwin. Both Linux and Darwin are Unix-based though.

Darwin is a set of Unix core components that Apple made from parts of NeXTSTEP, BSD, and some of their own code, and literally every Apple operating system has been based off of it since Mac OS X 10.0. Mac OS X, Mac OS, OS X, macOS, iOS, tvOS, iPadOS, recoveryOS, bridgeOS, watchOS, audioOS, you name it. It's based on Darwin.

2. I have used an iPhone on Windows, and an Android phone on macOS.

It does not connect to the phone like literally anything else will. There's a reason one of Apple's things is "it just works", because it freaking does. Sure, you have iTunes on Windows, but that program is a "it works usually" type of thing. Meanwhile iTunes on macOS? Rock solid.

Tell me, how do you add music to your Android phone on macOS?

[darknessblade]

Apple buying EA.

 

So we're gonna get Iphones with DLC. 1gb of extra storage for 10$. even though the actual hardware is still there

[Kronoton]

So many people going of the deepend over this...

 

IF Apple does this they will bend EA to their way of doing things.

 

Apple will only do it IF they are serious bout gaming.

 

Apple going hard into gaming sound as far off as Apple going hard into Movie/TV streaming sounded 5 years ago.

 

 

[DANK_AS_gay]

10 hours ago, BionicSeaSerpent said:

we really don't need Mac exclusive games that are just as Awful and Overpriced as the Apple Ecosystem is itself

Yeah, but what about the games that already exist? And the game development using Metal and Tile Based Rasterization would be huge for M1 gaming. Think Rocket League. Free, but it would attract some buyers to MacOS, because they don't have to give up gaming to have a Mac. This could be good for Apple, if they fundamentally change EA. Apple isn't the DLC type. They charge a hefty price up front, and after that, usually you are fine. No hidden fees or whatever else. 

[hishnash]

11 hours ago, Kisai said:

If you don't pay for it, it doesn't use the hardware acceleration (h.264, h.265 encoders and so forth)

Funny little fact on macOS device Resolve does use hardware encoders for any codec supported by the OS (this includes h264 and h265...) the api apple provide them does not let them opt out of hardware acceration and they are not going to put extra dev work into building their own CPU encdoer/decoder for the free version so they just use the VideoToolBox apis and you get full hardware support even on the free version.

 

[hishnash]

4 hours ago, DANK_AS_gay said:

Yeah, but what about the games that already exist? And the game development using Metal and Tile Based Rasterization would be huge for M1 gaming. Think Rocket League. Free, but it would attract some buyers to MacOS, because they don't have to give up gaming to have a Mac. This could be good for Apple, if they fundamentally change EA. Apple isn't the DLC type. They charge a hefty price up front, and after that, usually you are fine. No hidden fees or whatever else. 

Apple would basicly put as many games as possible into the Apple Arcade bundle and use this to get Mac users who might not be supper hard core gaming but intrested in a little gaming on the side. But the main reason would be for the talent and IP for future VR/AR headsets. Think football games in VR/AR were your directing the match from above the field etc.  As you say apple uses software to make there hardware attractive, and if they did this it would be no different. 

 

[hishnash]

5 hours ago, darknessblade said:

So we're gonna get Iphones with DLC. 1gb of extra storage for 10$. even though the actual hardware is still there

No this is apple buying EA not EA buying apple... apples corporate cultra is just as strong as Nvidia's... eg they will bend and resolve EA just keeping the talent and the IP. 

[Kisai]

3 minutes ago, hishnash said:

Funny little fact on macOS device Resolve does use hardware encoders for any codec supported by the OS (this includes h264 and h265...) the api apple provide them does not let them opt out of hardware acceration and they are not going to put extra dev work into building their own CPU encdoer/decoder for the free version so they just use the VideoToolBox apis and you get full hardware support even on the free version.

 

Even more of a reason to use Davinci Resolve on a M1 mac. Honestly the amount of bugs I've run into in Resolve tend to resolve around captions/subtitles and when the video assets are on a mechanical drive it will spontaneously abort renders because the mechanical drive went to sleep.

[hishnash]

6 hours ago, soldier_ph said:

If Apple buys them then either EAs Games will get extremely worse or they kill all failing franchises EA has and exclusively make mobile Apple approved games which they then can put behind their Apple Arcade subscription Service. Though this seems very unlikely to me because Apple never as far as I can tell positioned Gaming as a Core offering on their Products and Services and they seem to be very anti "Hardcore" Shooter Games like the Battlefield and Battlefront series. No matter who buys up EA though has some cleaning up and a lot of fixing to do. I do personally enjoy Battlefield 5 and Battlefront 2 a lot when they work...

When apple started Apple TV+ everyone said it would be family friendly content only... and then the first major show they pushed hard had on screen masterbation, sex slavary, heads being chooped off etc... (talking about the show `SEE`). In general in fact if you look at the TV shows apple have been paying big bucks to produce they don't seem at any point to be censoring the content at all. 

[hishnash]

8 hours ago, Paul Thexton said:

1) Can't see it happening unless EA are wanting to turn themselves in to a mobile-only (or at least mobile-first) games studio.

 

You really think the Board of EA cares about this? out of all the gaming companies out there the board of EA is least likly to care about the future of EA as long as they get paid out. 

And I don't think apple would be turning them into a mobile only or even mobile first Apple would be turning them into a AR/VR first studio. (the exact thing many gaming studio managers expect is going to happen to them anyway as that is were they all see the market in 5+ years time when the current games they are starting today will ship). 

[hishnash]

11 hours ago, Kisai said:

 

1. IP for existing games, particularly "The Sims" series gets proper ports to Mac OS

2. IP for existing Xbox/Nintendo console games goes nowhere, PC games that are popular get MacOS ports, everything else remains sidelined. (Apple is known to just abandon software rather than support it.)

3. IP is farmed out to movie/television, Apple produces no games other than a select few IP's that are popular on mobile.

I think you are not considering the VR/AR platform apple is spending billions to build. I think that is the place apple would be looking to use EA's IP and talents.

 

And given apple would require ports to be of a high quality it might well be more likly the console versions would be ported, I don't see Craig Federighi greenlighing a x86 proton/wine wrapped port for macOS.  

If there would be ports these would be from source compiled and targeted at macOS and it might well be simpler to start with the Playstation code base given this is unix based already and thus does not depend on any windows system libs and likly easier to alter to call directly to Darwin apis.  The work needed to take this can change the gpu api to metal would not be that large either... but I could also see them not really both with any of that and just let these existing games sit and rot (just the same as EA would have done for existing releases). 

 

I agree apple would produce new games for alternative platforms, well maybe they would do nothing for Sony and Nintendo but I would not expect any Windows, Xbox or Steam Deck games. 
 

[DrMacintosh]

14 hours ago, hishnash said:

apple does not charge much for software they do a very bad job of valuing software, both their own and developers who sell on their platforms. 

This. Final Cut Pro and Logic are ridiculously cheap compared to the competition. Their office suite is also free and built in. 

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, hishnash said:

I think you are not considering the VR/AR platform apple is spending billions to build. I think that is the place apple would be looking to use EA's IP and talents.

VR is not yet a mature platform, and until someone actually comes out with a VR HMD that won't make people sick because the hardware vendors couldn't be arsed to over-engineer it to prevent motion sickness rather than repurpose mobile phone screens that were not designed for it.

 

AR on the other hand is seeing some rather explosive growth, driven by motion-capture. The entire vtuber craze, 100% relies on ARKit. People using other stuff end up with a mediocre experience unless they're willing to buy expensive mocap suits with expensive licensing attached to them. People are quick to call Apple stuff expensive, but when you compare it to what "professional" equipment is, it's a bargain. One iphone as a AR camera has no competition. Not a single VR HMD's can do this level of eye/lip tracking, and HMD's are heavy.

 

Like, the metaverse is a joke compared to what's actually happening and been happening just to accommodate Vtubers.

1 hour ago, hishnash said:

And given apple would require ports to be of a high quality it might well be more likly the console versions would be ported, I don't see Craig Federighi greenlighing a x86 proton/wine wrapped port for macOS.  

Yeah that's what I mean by "proper MacOS ports", though if a Sims 5 comes down the pipe, I'd expect it to be Mac Exclusive before getting ports to other platforms. Sims AR would be something fantastic, but I we're not there yet.

 

1 hour ago, hishnash said:

If there would be ports these would be from source compiled and targeted at macOS and it might well be simpler to start with the Playstation code base given this is unix based already and thus does not depend on any windows system libs and likly easier to alter to call directly to Darwin apis.  The work needed to take this can change the gpu api to metal would not be that large either... but I could also see them not really both with any of that and just let these existing games sit and rot (just the same as EA would have done for existing releases). 

 

I agree apple would produce new games for alternative platforms, well maybe they would do nothing for Sony and Nintendo but I would not expect any Windows, Xbox or Steam Deck games. 
 

 

Apple doesn't shun Windows, it just builds software for it's own hardware first, and the few things that do get ported out/back to Windows are things that originally started as platform agnostic. Like Shazam. But that's not a guarantee. Apple doesn't produce any games of it's own, so we're just guessing what it would do.  

 

My opinion is that Apple would rather purchase an existing IP library, dump the existing PC games on GOG so it doesn't have to port the ones it doesn't see any value in porting (which is what Activision did with most of the IP it sat on (eg Sierra) that wasn't licensed from someone else.) Activision did absolutely nothing with any of it's IP it acquired from Sierra, and pretty much all of it wound up on GOG. This is why "IP farming" is a bad thing.

 

A company like Disney also sits on IP without producing anything. It's only with like recent cross-licensed games (eg Disney Infinity, Kingdom Hearts, Lego) has anything been done with Disney IP, and even then it's sometimes poorly managed. Like Disney Infinity should have been something that wasn't DLC-hell (having to buy the toys to get the characters in the game) and it would have seen a lot better success if it had borrowed the Fortnite model (which they ironically, are doing with Disney Mirroverse it seems) where you could either get the characters for free if you play few a hours during the character release, or can just buy it later if you want it.

 

Even more interesting here, this is really a great example of what a "NFT" could have been. Buying X character in one game that you could then use in Y game, which is what those NFC toys like Disney Infinity and Nintendo Amiibo actually were. A physical token that theoretically could be used in all games. In practice it doesn't work that way, and the game companies would rather you rebuy the game on every platform, and rebuy the DLC on every platform, and every version of the game thereafter.

 

At any rate, Apple doesn't have any game IP to do this with, and maybe they might accomplish that as another AR use case.

 

[hishnash]

43 minutes ago, Kisai said:

My opinion is that Apple would rather purchase an existing IP library, dump the existing PC games on GOG so it doesn't have to port the ones it doesn't see any value in porting (which is what Activision did with most of the IP it sat on (eg Sierra) that wasn't licensed from someone else.) Activision did absolutely nothing with any of it's IP it acquired from Sierra, and pretty much all of it wound up on GOG. This is why "IP farming" is a bad thing.

 

I agree apple will not pull existing games from sale, and GOG might well be the place they put.

 

45 minutes ago, Kisai said:

before getting ports to other platforms.

Not sure they would put the effort in to port to other platforms, there were leakers a few years ago with respect to apple building a game streaming branch of Apple Arcade, apple already have edge hardware in most ISP racks at the end of your street, might be quite easy for them to ship out something using up M* A* dies that have binning issues for consumers but perfect for server use cases.  This would get apple arcade onto other platforms in a way that is hardware agnostic (like how AppleTv+ can be streamed from non apple devices including smart TVs). This would defiantly make a nice sweet entertainment bundle with AppleTV+ pay a little more and get AppleArcade to play the latest Sims, Apex Legends, Mass Effect etc EA.  Unlike MS apple has a much better ability to inject servers on the network edge as every network needs to provide good iPhone support and having apple edge network nodes is critical for this.
 

[Kisai]

4 hours ago, hishnash said:

I agree apple will not pull existing games from sale, and GOG might well be the place they put.

Yep. Considering how "EA Origin" is such a crapfest of an online store (pretty much only Apple and Steam have ever figured out how to do an online store properly) I would likely see either a "origin emulator" or patches to update games with netcode to work on Apple's servers. Now if it's Disney... uh... no, just no. Disney has a reputation of abandoning games quickly and permanently. One of the reasons I would never sink money into a Disney MMO or Mobile game. EA is already bad for it, but at least EA did something with Ultima Online, unlike Sony with Everquest (which basically just had SOE cancel everything they were operating and sell it off.)

 

4 hours ago, hishnash said:

Not sure they would put the effort in to port to other platforms, there were leakers a few years ago with respect to apple building a game streaming branch of Apple Arcade,

You're not going to build a "streaming platform" for action games. It just simply does not work in North America. Regardless if it's dead by daylight or dance dance revolution, many games have precise-timing that makes "Stadia" like services difficult.

 

4 hours ago, hishnash said:

 

apple already have edge hardware in most ISP racks at the end of your street, might be quite easy for them to ship out something using up M* A* dies that have binning issues for consumers but perfect for server use cases.  This would get apple arcade onto other platforms in a way that is hardware agnostic (like how AppleTv+ can be streamed from non apple devices including smart TVs). This would defiantly make a nice sweet entertainment bundle with AppleTV+ pay a little more and get AppleArcade to play the latest Sims, Apex Legends, Mass Effect etc EA.  Unlike MS apple has a much better ability to inject servers on the network edge as every network needs to provide good iPhone support and having apple edge network nodes is critical for this.
 

Edge only works if the game being streamed has no netcode itself. Like if you wanted to play, oh the Multiplayer part of Mass Effect 3, you pretty much can't. It's a shooter, and it requires other people playing. 

 

I'll just say it bluntly. No FPS game "works" on Stadia. It's a terrible experience. Stream interruptions not withstanding, Stadia is probably better for playing turn-based things like Monopoly and Civilization.

 

 

[hishnash]

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

pretty much only Apple and Steam have ever figured out how to do an online store properly

as a dev dealing with apples stores im not sure I would say they have figured it out.. it still feels like they shoe-horned apps into the iTunes backend. 
 

 

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

Regardless if it's dead by daylight or dance dance revolution, many games have precise-timing that makes "Stadia" like services difficult.

If they can run these on the edge (we are really talking in the server rack were your fibber is terminated) this is were apple currently have servers located. Then the latency will be a LOT better than stadia.  

 

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

Edge only works if the game being streamed has no netcode itself.

No edge has no issue with other NetCode, the edge client effecivly runs what was on your machine and then communicate back to the main server just as if you ran the game on your machines. It all depends on how much compute you put on the edge,

 

FPS is a LOT harder than turn based for sure, but in the end it depends on your latency to the rendering node. If that is sub 5ms then there should be no issue many players play FPS games locally on there machine with over 50ms input to screen update so assuming the server side implementations is done well its possible to have better input latency from the edge to the user than on the users local machine. (even the best ultra high refresh rate gaming setups will have 30ms or so input to screen update).  5ms to the edge is very possible, also by putting this stuff in the edge it costs apple a lot less in bandwidth (same reason Netflix and every other large streaming service have edge nodes). 

[Paul Thexton]

18 minutes ago, hishnash said:

as a dev dealing with apples stores im not sure I would say they have figured it out.. it still feels like they shoe-horned apps into the iTunes backend.

I've never had to publish an app to the App Store, but I will say from the visibility I do have of it, App Store Connect doesn't look particularly friendly.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, hishnash said:

 5ms to the edge is very possible, also by putting this stuff in the edge it costs apple a lot less in bandwidth (same reason Netflix and every other large streaming service have edge nodes). 

You're overlooking why I said netcode here.

 

A game like DBD or Fortnite, which are latency-sensitive plays with other players. So you might have 5ms (if you're lucky) to the edge node, but only if you're in a major city. Those ISP's are too cheap to put data centers in every city. A more reasonable guesstimate is that Edge makes things worse for multiplayer, but better for single player.

 

In multiplayer, a game like DBD only has 5 players, and was originally designed in a P2P manner. It uses servers now, but those servers are certainly not in the edge. So if you want to play DBD with your friend in Seattle who has the game on a PS4, and you're using Stadia, you're going to be the one at a disadvantage, because you have the additional latency. Now if you're say in Morton Washington and somehow even have high speed DSL, chances are your packets are going to be routed to Seattle first, adding 20ms more latency.

 

A game like Fortnite has an even worse problem in this case, because if you don't live in the same city with the data center with a locally run game, you're already at a disadvantage, and because the servers can have 100 people per instance, it's entirely possible to match people far away from the edge.

 

The answer to having a better online gaming experience ultimately requires making decisions that are not cost effective for the players. Just like how ISP's only roll out their best connections to big cities first, and small cities may still end up using what was installed 20 years ago. I'm not expecting people in podunk nowhere USA to have the same experience as someone in San Francisco where there's actually competition in the data center market. I am expecting everyone to be playing with the same expectation, and not have players having an advantage for having fiber in SF over someone having cable or DSL in Spokane.

 

My assumption here is that Apple "knows what they are doing" in the software department far more than EA ever has. That doesn't mean they are doing things in the best interests of the consumer. EA makes games, but it forces it's developers to use it's own in-house engine that everyone hates. That's the same mistake Square-Enix did with Crystal Tools. You make your game engines for the type of game you want, not the other way around. There is no single game engine that is well suited to "everything", with hardly any game engines being suited for open world designs. 

 

And a MMO is something that is not well suited to "edge" solutions. 

 

[ToboRobot]

Consolidation of the gaming industry like this absolutely SUCKS.

Seems like this is a feedback cycle destroying the gaming industry as we loved it.

[Kisai]

6 hours ago, ToboRobot said:

Consolidation of the gaming industry like this absolutely SUCKS.

Seems like this is a feedback cycle destroying the gaming industry as we loved it.

That's exactly what happened with consolidation of film and tv content industries. It results in a few more indie productions, but they still ultimately get locked out because the big media conglomerates also own the broadcast studios and movie theaters. Netflix changed that, but also Netflix seems to presently be operated by complete idiots.

 

[Mark Kaine]

 

I will pay three-fiddy...

 

Spoiler

and then shut the hellhole down

 

 

 

8 hours ago, ToboRobot said:

Consolidation of the gaming industry like this absolutely SUCKS.

Seems like this is a feedback cycle destroying the gaming industry as we loved it.

The last good game EA made was over 20 years ago...

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medal_of_Honor_(1999_video_game)

 

[ToboRobot]

8 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

 

 

The last good game EA made was over 20 years ago...

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medal_of_Honor_(1999_video_game)

 

I am old enough to remember EA and Activision growing to become evil empires.  

But I still feel like they occasionally managed to not F*** up good games, like Titanfall.  

I agree they generally pump out repetitive titles and lots of crap, but there are a few gems.