Earlier in the month when I asked you who should buy Harmonix, a few of you pointed to Electronic Arts. It doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. According to Bloomberg (not Goldberg), EA CEO John Riccitiello made an unfavorable analogy regarding Harmonix:
I’m sure some smart investor will buy the business feeling that they can catch a falling knife, but more people have been cut trying to catch falling knives than have benefitted from getting the timing exactly right.
A lot of people in the Twitterverse claim that Riccitiello is being a dick, but I disagree. He has a point — buying a developer that specializes in “plastic instrument” music games is a risky gambit at the moment. I also love his poetic analogy. Falling knives are cool…and I hope Riccitiello uses furry walls in his next analogy.
“felling knives?”
I agree. The music game genre is in free-fall. Why hop on without a parachute?