Mass Effect and BioWare could end up in Microsoft's lap soon

Never seen that, but I just run everything from shortcuts anyway.

Rumours are abound of Microsoft buying EA. Previous rumours have It at Microsoft buying either EA, Valve or Tencent to strengthen their software position in the video game market but now current rumours point it to being EA.

That means Mass Effect has another chance if Microsoft wants it to be revived. Hope rumor turns out true.

I hope Valve buys EA or at least BioWare.

But, put that on a bucket list of shit that'll never happen.

Companies get complacent, they get eaten. It happens.

The problem is that EA isn't exactly compelling competition for other companies right now as it is. They're the Boogeyman of video game publishers, could they really be much worse? Say MS buys EA and is fundamentally the same, how would that be worse? Maybe ME gets another chance and turns out to be good.

MS eating EA might also give other major publishers a reality check that simply being big and having a lot of money is not invincibility against rival competition, and that you have to try to compete to survive.

I think in the PR sense that might be true, but EA is one of the bigger publishers out there and they are competition for most people.  If anything they are liking the fact that EA is the lightning rod for what they are all doing, but since EA is the "bad publisher" they will get attacked socially, but business wise I am pretty sure they are one of the more stable publishers.  The other problem if they bought Microsoft is EA's big money is from licenses and those could be lost depending on the contracts.  Yes they sold less copies then predicted for Battlefront 2 and Mass Effect: Andromeda wasn't a massive hit, but EA is a fairly diverse company.

I would think a medium sized publisher would be more appealing to Microsoft then buying one of the biggest out there for that would be both a high price and run the risk of not paying off.  Where if they bought a publisher like Bethesda they get the name recognition of some major brands at a lower price and they have had in my opinion a tougher run of things recently sales wise.  Since three major releases didn't seem to sell well with The New Colossus, Prey, and Dishonored 2 for the two sequels didn't match the milestones of the prior games and Prey didn't seem to catch on.

I'm not referring to the wellbeing of the shareholders, I am referring to the massive repertoire of multi-platform games that would subsequently become exclusive to one console.

As consumers, the last thing any of us should want is for the games industry to become an oligopoly.

I honestly doubt that would happen.  I suspect most games would continue to be multi platform and a handful of titles would be exclusive to be system sellers. But they are in the business to make money, cutting your market almost in half is probably not a good idea.

Also for the general topic I doubt we are any more likely to see another ME under MS than under EA.

My two cents worth on this potential buyout of EA: (Kind of an ironic considering EA had a disturbing trend of buying out beloved dev studios)
I REALLY hope that if Microsoft buys out EA, they implement some extremely strict management policies, such as, oh I don't know, NOT INTERFERE WITH GAME DEVELOPMENT.

More like cocaine. It’ll be a cold day in hell when I see a Fable game compete with that. 

Meh. Go read that article about Andromeda's problems. They started with BioWare, they ended with BioWare.

EA gets a ton of shit thrown at them when they don't deserve it.  I'm not stating that EA hasn't done bad shit, they have.  But this ain't one of their fuck ups.

However the game was starting to come together in the last 18 months... that's where I question either BioWare's or EA's decision to set the ultimate deadline and not allow further delays. It's as if someone went "Alright, you've screwed enough around with this project BioWare: RELEASE IT." when the game would've been sooo much better if it had maybe 6 more months of all-hands-on-deck.

But ah well, Montreal, Austin and the DA finaling team probably crunched all throughout the summer. They were waiting for that vacation. I actaully seem to recall some of the prominent devs took a vacation no less than 2 weeks after launch.