As much as many of you hate EA, they are without a doubt a dominant force in the videogame industry and the quality of their products seems to be on the upswing. Their yearly franchises like Need For Speed, Madden, Live, Tiger Woods, and now probably Skate, consistently sell millions of copies and their casual gaming service Pogo was unrivaled until the Wii started moving into their market space.

We all know about the attempts to buyout Ubisoft and Take-Two. Ubisoft seems to be safe with how well Assains Creed did and the success of every Tom Clancy game, but Take-Two seems to only be worried about bolstering their worth and squeezing as much money out of Ea as possible. Eventually Im sure that EA will own Take-Two and with that they will have a great foundation to build a console for the future generation of likely to hit shortly after 2010.

In 2007 Ea was only second to Nintendo in number of units sold. Although this was across just about every platform, that is a huge number of titles when you realize that Nintendo used its big three (Mario, Metroid, and Zelda) along with all of the casual gamers sucked up by the Wii and DS. After Gta IV is released and Take-Two joins EA, They will indeed be the biggest developer and maybe one of the most talented.

EA as a software company turning into a hardware company could make development for a new console cost effective through their own proprietary middleware and could possibly drop the cost of development for big time titles. The ps3 complicated hardware and Microsoft’s strict policies for online and development of hardware like rock band accessories could both be avoided by having a little bit of input from their code devs. EA’s console could potentially be more dev friendly than Wii without giving up cutting edge technology.

If you add up the sales from EA and Take-Two and assume that They keep the NFL and NBA license to themselves (with the only baseball competition being a PS3 exclusive) You could assume that EA would have at least a built in install base over 10 million customers after the 1st year (and that would be giving them a generous attach rate of 4 games to 1 console, If you change the attach rate to 2-1 that would 20 million) that could rival the sales of the PS2 over its lifespan.

If you look at Microsoft and their first party offerings you can’t really explain how they survived without saying Halo over and over again, and how different would the ps2’s story be if you took out the GTA titles? 4 of the ps2’s top seven titles are from EA/Take-Two, 2 maddens NFSU 2 and gta San Andreas. The poor Dreamcast didn’t receive any EA support and that was the biggest nail in its coffin.

As much as I hate to say it the only reason I brought the Wii was for Nintendo titles and other than a couple third party games I think everything else is trash. When the time comes to choose a new console in 20-10-2011 I would probably go Ea strictly for the 1st party. That will essentially be the only deciding bullet point next gen when you consider that just about every third party is giving up on exclusives.

EA maybe a slimy corporation that pumps out yearly rehashes but I will admit that most times I enjoy those rehashes, and when you throw in 2K basketball, GTA, Bioshock, potentially Bethesda games, and a Madden every couple of years I along with just about everyone I talk to would be a sucker for an ea console.