Goodnight Mythic

Rumors were correct.

EA is now officially going to acquire Mythic:

REDWOOD CITY, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–June 20, 2006–Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:ERTS – News) today announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Virginia-based Mythic Entertainment®. Upon completion of the acquisition, Mythic Entertainment will become EA Mythic, a wholly-owned studio dedicated to developing Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs).

Upon completion of the acquisition, Mark Jacobs, the President, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Mythic, will become Vice President, General Manager of EA Mythic. Rob Denton, the Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and co-founder of Mythic will assume the role of Vice President, Chief Operating Officer of EA Mythic. Mythic’s 175-person development team will remain in Fairfax, Virginia.

“Mythic has always been a leading independent developer in the online space,” says Mark Jacobs, CEO and co-founder of Mythic Entertainment. “EA’s commitment to the online market as well as its focus on creating games of unsurpassed quality, scope and scale gives us opportunities and resources we could only dream about in the past.”

“The addition of Mythic to the EA family reflects our deep commitment to the online gaming market worldwide. Mythic will bring one of the industry’s most talented MMORPG teams to EA. Together, we will create games that will introduce MMO players to a whole new level of game play and excitement,” said Paul Lee, President, EA Studios.

The only good part of the news is that I underlined. Now I’ll wait before picking some fun on Mark Jacobs. The post where he denied the rumors (sort of) can be found here. This is what he wrote today:

Mark Jacobs: As you can imagine, it’s been a rather interesting few weeks at Mythic. I promise to post a much longer letter here but the rest of the day is filled with interviews and questions and then I fly out for a few days with the folks at EA. I’ll try to find time to post here during that time but if I can’t, I will do so upon my return.

As always, there is nothing wrong with being skeptical, worried or cynical (traits that are near and dear to my heart) but we will prove over the next 15 months why we deserved your trust and faith from the beginning.

WAR is still coming and nothing will change, except for the better and nothing will stop that.

I’ll leave you will one final bit, we didn’t need to do this deal, we chose to do this deal because of what it meant to Mythic today and to our company going forward. It was a grand slam home run.

Expect LOTS of spinning. LOTS. Mark Jacobs will do his very best.

Sanya also commented:

– EA came to us. Not the other way around. And our deal with GOA (to work as partners on CS and simultaneous patches, etc) still stands.

– We have not been absorbed. Mark’s title is the highest/best/most powerful one he can have. In other words, he remains the studio head.

– I don’t blame MMO players for being nervous, but think about it – we KNOW the history of all previous deals. Only a complete monkey wouldn’t have taken that history into account while the contracts were being written.

– Wait and see if a chunk of sky hits you in the head before you say the sky is falling, okay?

NO ONE is being laid off, moved, rearranged, or changed. Mythic is working with Games Workshop and that isn’t changing in any way. I believe, and I will leave it to Mark to confirm, but I believe that keeping the relationship between us and GW exactly the same was kind of key here.

You don’t have to believe it, but I had to try

Yes, we knew all this. Money hat for Mark. The true impact of this will be only visible in the long term. And it won’t be pretty.

SELLOUT!!1! (this beats Brad bringing Vanguard back to SOE)

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