SquareEnix bought Taito, Konami owns Hudson, Sci acquired Eidos and now SCi/Eidos is in financial trouble, Atari and Midway are both in bad water, Majesco is recovering from big/medium budget games failure ( es : Psychonouts ) using low profile titles like Cooking Mama, Takara and Tomy merged. 

Pretty predictable, but the offer was rejected. This was no way they were going to take that kind of offer so close to one of their biggest product launches.

http://newsticker.welt.de/index.php?channel=fin&module=smarthouse&id=681493

GTA 2009 for PC PS3 360 Wii PSP DS NGage GBA GameGear GB Iphone wrist watches and microwaves.

Thanks FishyJoe.

Thread is now over. This will not happen. Feel free to lock this.

 Do you think the share price of TTWO will jump tomorrow? About half of all the outstanding shares of TTWO are shorted right now and Pachter had a target of $12. If the price goes up significantly some people will cover and that will drive the price up higher. It could be interesting. I'll have to set that up on my ticker to watch.

wow! how 'bout it! the two boards apparently has been negotiating for a while!

interestingly, i find the MSFT for YHOO bid a tad expensive, but this a tad opportunistic, even if both are at ~60% premium.

don't have too much insights on this. but i mean, there are after all other obvious potential suitors for TTWO so ERTS really may need to increase its offer just purely on that basis.

remark: even with GTA4 coming out soon and uncertainty about how well it's gonna sell, the two sides can still agree on a price.

i guess i'll be sad that the 2K sports franchise would probably die if this goes through.

 Mr. Zelnick added, "While the Board believes that entering into discussions with EA at this time is not in the best interests of shareholders, we had offered to enter into a good-faith dialogue with EA to determine if our companies can reach common ground on the appropriate value of Take-Two as a first step to realizing a mutually beneficially transaction. However, given the great importance of the Grand Theft Auto IV launch to the value of Take-Two, the Board has determined that the only prudent and responsible course for our Company and its stockholders is to defer these discussions until immediately after Grand Theft Auto IV is released. Therefore, we offered to initiate discussions with EA on April 30th, 2008 (the day after Grand Theft Auto IV is scheduled to release). We believe this offer demonstrated our commitment to pursuing all avenues to maximize stockholder value, while we believe that EA’s refusal to entertain this path is evidence of their desire to acquire Take-Two at a significant discount, whereas we believe this value rightly belongs to our stockholders.”

yeah, in principle, the two sides should be able to come to an agreement on a price, even BEFORE the release of GTA4, like i said in the previous thread.

i haven't found out why ERTS decided to go public with this. sometimes, apparently, in these kind of negotiations, higher-ups are advised to go public when they have a fear that the news could be leaked, and so in order to prevent those illegal trades from happening you just go ahead and release the news.

more likely it's just to gauge the market's response--are the shareholders willing to sell out at a 62% premium? in the MSFT-YHOO case, apparently it is the case. ERTS probably wants some input from the market.

my guess is that market won't be happy with a 62% premium. i won't be surprised if it goes to 100% if ERTS want to close the deal before GTA4 is released.

EDIT: in the MSFT-YHOO, it was unsolicited by it's a little different.  but anyway, the response from the market is the relevent part here. 

 I believe that means they want more monies.

There's now an interview on gamasutra. I found this quote interesting from EA's Riccitiello:

On whether he's concerned that this announcement will drive up Take Two's share price:

"It's pretty typical that people who were will being to pay 15-16 bucks on Friday might be willing to pay more on Monday... we'll see how the market opens. If they think the transaction's likely the price will go up tomorrow."