EA are known for eating up good companies and spitting out sub-par games, so you will excuse me when I say I’m happy to report that the partnership between EA and Take-Two is off the cards after EA pulled out of negotiations yesterday. The reason given was lack of value in what was hitting a near $2 billion acquisition mark.

The two companies came together last month follow a series of offers being passed and then rejected by Take-Two’s investors. The CEO of Take-Two Strauss Zelnick gave a simple and precise overview on how he felt about the affair, telling Reuters – “EA has been consistent in their approach regarding value and our shareholders have repeatedly rejected the price they offered. There's very little else more that meets the eye.”

Zelnick does not feel like it’s over yet for the companies acquisition plans, telling the press “"As part of that commitment, we remain actively engaged in discussions with other parties in the context of our formal process to consider strategic alternatives. We're especially proud of the success we've enjoyed over the past eighteen months and we remain confident in our ability to generate value for stockholders,"

It’s  good to see a publisher such as Take-Two go up against EA, at current EA has very little strong competition and I see Take-Two as one of the few companies that can offer the much needed competition, and better the video game market.
 

One thing you have to respect is when a games studio doesn’t just drop supporting a game after the sales drop down. Blizzard is renowned for quality and in itself can be one of the main reasons the PC games market is as alive as ever. Today the studio releases another patch for its highly popular RTS, Starcraft. It’s be 10 years since the original release, so in any measure the studio still releasing patches is amazing and we hope that other studios take note.

The patch fixes a few minor faults. First it addresses a communication bug that stopped certain third party leagues from working. It also has fixed a error in which Alt-F6 would stall the game in Windows, and finally Mac fans will be please to learn it know works as intended on Mac OC X 256-Color mode.

You can download the patch via Battle.net.
 

The majority of game studios will tell you one of the biggest problems facing the PC market at current is piracy. Cascade-Gaming therefore is conducting a survey which will get input from pirates on why they pirate and how well they understand the issue. The survey results will be made public and then we shall give the results to game studios.

One of the mains to take into consideration is you must answer honestly. No details about you will be stored, not even your IP. For this reason no studio will able to track you down and head hunt you. Share the survey with everyone you know. The more non-geeks we get to take it the better it will be able to provide a fair analysis. We will publish the results in a week’s time, till then try your best to be honest and I’m sure we will get some interesting data from this survey.

Take The Piracy Survey Here