A new report claims that Amazon will officially make its biggest move into the gaming space by acquiring Electronic Arts in a to-be-announced deal later today.
This news comes from GLHF, a gaming content agency, which claims that Amazon will make an official, public offer to acquire the Apex Legends and FIFA developer at some point soon.
While there aren’t any concrete details behind the deal, rumors and reports of EA looking to facilitate a merger or acquisition with a larger, entertainment media conglomerate have been circling throughout the year—with the most substantial coming back in May.
At the time, it was reported that EA had talks with a wide field of potential buyers or suitors for a merger, including NBCUniversal, Disney, Apple, and Amazon after being “emboldened” by Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard in January. Those talks only got so far at the time, with the NBC deal reportedly getting the furthest before falling apart, but EA has seemingly kept trucking along with potential deal negotiations behind the scenes.
EA did decline to “comment on the rumors” with that May report but did not actively deny that talks were being held.
If this deal does go through, it will likely be in a somewhat comparable price range to the Microsoft-AB deal, as EA is one of the largest third-party developers in the world and would provide Amazon with immediate access to a wide number of studios and some of the biggest titles across all of gaming, including the soon-to-be rebranded FIFA, Madden, Apex Legends, and more.
That lineup of games and studios would accelerate Amazon to the forefront of the games industry, which has been slowly expanding over the last several years. It would also provide the company access to more games to toss onto its Amazon Luna streaming service and use as tools to promote the Prime Gaming part of its core business through additional bonus content in its games.
Neither Amazon nor EA have publicly commented on a potential deal being announced and the validity of GLHF’s sources remains to be seen. Should the deal happen, however, consolidation within game development will reach a new peak and likely only continue to snowball from here.
Update Aug. 26 11:10am CT: GLHF’s sources have been thrown to the side as CNBC journalist David Faber squashed the rumors of a potential EA acquisition.
Faber noted that he reached out to several sources who would have been directly involved or in the know about a deal of this size between Amazon and EA, reporting that “no, this is not going to happen today,” while joking about the relevancy of GLHF as a reliable source.
USA Today’s For The Win gaming publication has also updated the original article detailing the rumored acquisition to remove any claims about the report, calling out its content partner GLHF for running the story, which “violated our editorial standards regarding the use of unnamed and unvetted sources.”
EA provided another generic statement to Kotaku about the situation, saying that “We don’t comment on rumors and speculation relating to M&A (merger and acquisition).” Amazon also responded to Kotaku, thanking the publication for reaching out but noting that “we don’t comment on speculation.”
