Electronic Arts, the biggest games publisher in the world has just made itself a bit bigger: by puchasing BioWare and Pandemic Studios, for $855m (£422m). The purchases could be key ones for EA, adding BioWare's RPG experience (they created Baldur's Gate, Knights of the Old Republic and the upcoming Mass Effect, among others) and Pandemic's (Mercenaries, Full Spectrum Warrior, Star Wars Battlefront) action game experience.

There will be many cries of monopoly and complains that EA buying up studios inevitably waters them down and washes out their vision, but EA has recently put in place policy dictating that it must create original titles and IPs. Their portfolio, while containing quite a bit of drivel, produces many excellent titles, and they are worth an absolute fortune.

One interesting aspect is that it should ensure that any games by the two parties are all 3rd party. EA hardly ever makes platform exclusive titles. What does this mean for BioWare's Mass Effect, soon to be published by Microsoft? Hopefully Microsoft have the deal wrapped up so that they produce the sequels (it's set to be a trilogy), but if not, maybe they can finagle it to remain exclusive.

Either way, these are huge aquisitions by EA and i'll be following what happens closely.