Netflix briefly floated the idea of buying Electronic Arts before Warner Bros bid

Netflix mulled over the idea of buying Electronic Arts when it became clear the megaton games publisher was up for sale, Bloomberg reports.

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The creative landscape is changing rapidly, and the world's biggest entertainment franchises are facing mass consolidation. Warner Bros. is up for sale, and Netflix has offered $82.7 billion for WB's studios and streaming business. This includes the WB Games video game segment, which is bundled with a plethora of worldwide creative teams and billion-dollar interactive series, alongside tentpoles like HBO Max and the full HBO catalog.

Before Netflix made the offer to buy WB, company management explored the possibility of acquiring other gaming entities, including sports titan Electronic Arts. This was ahead of EA's announcement that it will soon go private thanks to a $55 billion leveraged buyout--which is funded almost entirely by Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund.

EA is a pure play company, though, and is a different kind of business that Netflix is used to. If Netflix does end up buying WB, the position is that it will let Warner Bros' segments operate as normal, indicating a potential hands-off scenario for WB Games. That being said, the gaming unit is already stressed from multiple high-profile failures, including the ill-fated Suicide Squad live game as well as Gotham Knights, the latest game in the Arkham universe. The stellar success of Hogwarts Legacy helped offset losses from these games.

Warner Bros. comes with a wealth of TV shows and movies that can be integrated with Netflix's client, or kept separately as the HBO Max service. WB's business is therefore more immediately accretive to Netflix's core operations, and would offer more accelerated value than something like a video game, which can take multiple years to develop and still has no real guarantee of investment returns.

EA is among the top publishers on the market, and apart from Take-Two Interactive, was one of the last independent billion-dollar titans within gaming.