Following the news that Electronic Art (EA) has acquired Glu Mobile;

Rupantar Guha, Associate Project Manager for Thematic Research at GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company, offers his view:

“EA’s acquisition of Glu Mobile is further proof of the growing importance of mobile gaming to leading game publishers. In fact, mobile gaming is the largest segment of the video games industry and will be worth more than $100bn by 2022, according to GlobalData forecasts.

“EA ranks tenth out of 42 companies in GlobalData’s gaming thematic scorecard, which scores companies on their competitive position in the ten most important themes impacting the gaming sector. To move up the rankings, EA will need to improve on its score of three out of five for the mobile gaming theme, which lags behind the market leaders.

“EA will be looking to use Glu’s assets, intellectual property (IP) and expertise to compete with Tencent, Microsoft and Activision Blizzard. However, it is unclear if Glu Mobile’s casual games will be enough. Tencent, for example, boasts an extensive portfolio of popular battle royale games such as Honor of Kings and PUBG Mobile. EA will need to produce a game on the same level as Fortnite Battle Royale (Epic Games) and Call of Duty Mobile (Activision Blizzard) to really make waves in the mobile gaming market.

“Saying that, though, the addition of Glu-owned studios – such as Blammo Games, Playfirst and CrowdStar – will definitely allow EA to scale up its mobile game development and set it on the right track.”