Instead of Strauss Zelnick’s company, a different publisher will be the new owners of Codemasters, known for the F1 and DIRT games.

We previously discussed how Take-Two has placed a bid on taking Codemasters over – their board of directors have approved of the deal, but now, a new publisher came, saw, and conquered the UK-based company, and fairly quickly (yesterday, Sky News did not write about it as a 100% done deal). In other words, Electronic Arts has taken Codemasters away from Take-Two. Andrew Wilson’s company will pay 7.98 USD per share for Codemasters, which totals to 1.2 billion dollars. The amount is significantly higher than what Take-Two’s bid was.

„Electronic Arts and Codemasters have a shared ambition to lead the video game racing category. The Board of Codemasters firmly believes the company would benefit from EA’s knowledge, resources and extensive global scale – both overall and specifically within the racing sector. We feel this union would provide an exciting and prosperous future for Codemasters, allowing our teams to create, launch and service bigger and better games to an extremely passionate audience,” Gerhard Florin, the Chairman of Codemasters, stated.

„We believe there is a deeply compelling opportunity in bringing together Codemasters and Electronic Arts to create amazing and innovative new racing games for fans. Our industry is growing, the racing category is growing, and together we will be positioned to lead in a new era of racing entertainment. We have admired Codemasters’ creative talent and high-quality games for many years. With the full leverage of EA’s technology, platform expertise, and global reach, this combination will allow us to grow our existing franchises and deliver more industry-defining racing experiences to a global fan base. We are pleased that both our Boards of Directors are recommending this transaction, and we look forward to welcoming such an exciting and talented team to the Electronic Arts family,” Andrew Wilson, CEO of Electronic Arts, added.

By pulling Codemasters in, Electronic Arts now has the licenses of F1, DIRT, GRID, or even Project CARS (as Slightly Mad Studios was acquired by Codemasters earlier this year). Codemasters’ CEO (Frank Sagnier) and CFO (Rashid Varachia) will remain in the same roles when the acquisition has completed in the first quarter of 2021, along with Codemasters’ entire senior executive management team.

Previously, Electronic Arts has killed many studios (Bullfrog. Pandemic. Visceral. Westwood. Black Box. Mythic. Origin Systems. Should we keep listing them?), so we are somewhat afraid of the new owners of Codemasters…

Source: WCCFTech, GI