I'm always wary of a big company swallowing another. I *know* what the Chillingo guy said - however I have seen a lot of tech mergers go sour. EA is clearly in the drivers seat, and honestly their lack of quality in their later releases combine with their lack of game center support make me wonder how this will resolve. I hope EA Mobile becomes more Chillingo-like but I desperatly fear the other result.... <sarcasm> but hey no worries - EA has totally handled Pixelbytes "Reckless Racing" well.... </sarcasm>
How did they not handle it well? There were like 400 people waiting for it extensively. They don't care about 400 people's incessant whining. They care about releasing their product at the right time to generate more sales and popularity. Are you suggesting that they didn't market it enough? How about you suggest a viable way to market iPhone games? It's been well established that marketing iPhone games is incredibly difficult. Ads don't work, contests on Toucharcade only get a few dozen teenagers interested, etc.
Hopefully EA doesn't **** with Chillingo's affinity for publishing indie games, as Chillingo has a reputation for providing resources to indie devs to polish these promising games, rather than outright changing them up for more conventional mainstream games. I suspect EA's goal here is to compete with Gameloft, a developer/ publisher known for successfully peddling both intensive games and casual games in the Appstore. EA Mobile probably figured out that while they can handle the bigger games on their own, Chillingo is the only big name left that truly has a pulse on casual games. Chillingo may have access to EA's resources to reach out to more developers, but EA will be pushing them to publish what looks like top 20 material like Cut the Rope. Smaller devs who got by on $50,000 to 100,000 paydays, might not find their games being picked up as often. So while this isn't as drastic as EA buying an indie dev and chaining them to tables in order to pump out Medal of Honor apps, this is NOT necessarily great news for smaller devs who might very well not have Chillingo's namebrand to bolster sales. At least not until we get more info. Keep an eye on this.
This is coming from Kotaku (who is very hard to believe...) but also the LA Times. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2010/10/ea-buys-iphone-game-publisher-chillingo.html http://kotaku.com/5668910/angry-birds-is-now-from-the-makers-of-madden
I have to congrats for the acquisition, hope the acquisition makes more better games and benefit to each other, and gamers!
