Electronic Arts Buys Headgate Studios, Now EA Salt Lake
For starters, please indulge this self-quote from early October, when EA closed their DICE Canada studio, shortly after fully acquiring Digital Illusions: "Shutting down a measly DICE satellite may not be something unusual for Electronic Arts anymore. But what's really scary is just how fast they're operating nowdays. Good luck to their next victim!". Well, I really hate making the correlation, but the fact is that Electronic Arts has just announced that they bought another studio, which - if history has taught us anything - means that another closure is sure to follow pretty soon...
But before that happens, let's stick to the point. From EA's latest press release, we learn that the team at Utah-based developer Headgate Studios has joined Electronic Arts, and from this day forward the studio shall be konwn EA Salk Lake. According to the agreement, the development team will remain in Bountiful, Utah and will continue to work in partnership with the EA development teams in California and Florida, focusing mainly on development for the Nintendo Wii.
The partnership between the two companies goes back to 2000, when Headgate began developing and porting sports franchises such as Tiger Woods PGA Tour and Madden NFL, and more recently did the PC version of The Godfather. So we can expect the "08" EA Sports iterations to be fully customized for the Wii remote - which just so happens to make a perfect controller for golf games.
Commenting on the Evil Avatar forums, a 3D-Concept Artist from Headgate said this is great news for his studio, and once they're done with their current projects, they will begin porting EA games to the Wii, and do some original titles as well.
"Once we get all our current titles done, we'll start doing all of the Wii games.
That means ports as well as original stuff... but of course, that's on paper, who knows how it will actually happen or how much the studio grows (we're 60 people right now).
I personally think this is great news for Headgate, we were only doing EA franchises lately and this gives us a lot more stability to do whatever the hell we want, plus the management stays the same."
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Not that we care, really.
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never really liked their games.:dry:
Just got an epiphany this merger makes me want to watch reruns of Dilbert:yahoo:
:source: Source: http://www.playfuls.com/news_8451_El...Salt_Lake.html
