Firemint gets bought up by EA?

Egad, I’m just starting to see articles surface saying that Electronic Arts has moved in to buy Firemint. Firemint just recently did their own acquisition of Infinite Interactive and now looks to be part of the big EA machine.

I have mixed feelings about this I’m afraid. I love seeing independent game companies make it to the big leagues, but honestly EA has been a mixed bag when it comes to their games. The Need for Speed series is actually quite good on iOS but they seem to rely far too heavily on titles like Monopoly, Yahtzee and Boggle. These decent but rather uninspired ports of the classics are good, but are far too expensive for what you get. Plus EA is painfully slow when it comes to updates. I have Yahtzee and I like it, but how long did it take them to fix that stupid bug that caused the game to always appear upside down when you rotated the iPad?

Hopefully this doesn’t stifle innovation and creativity. Smaller games dev are willing to try bold new concept where companies like EA aren’t willing to take those kinds of risks anymore. Hopefully Firemint will keep control of their own projects and EA will stay out of the way and just be a publisher.