Apple is considering an offensive into the gaming market, according to Guy Adami from CNBC's Fast Money, who claims to have heard "chatter" about the company being interested in acquiring publishing giant Electronic Arts. While not offering much analysis for such a seemingly unlikely prediction, the notion of a deal between the two companies has gained some credence in light of Apple's recent hires, which include several executives with noteworthy backgrounds in videogames.
Richard Teversham, formerly the senior director for insights and strategy at Microsoft's Xbox Business, left the company to join Apple this week and prior to that Apple picked up two former CTOs from AMD's graphics division. One of them, Bob Drebin, is also the man who created the graphics processor in the Nintendo GameCube. Certainly, all this suggest that a major move onto the gaming business through the iPhone and iPod touch is underway, but if rumors are true then Apple's ambitions would appear to go far beyond just the handheld market.
It's obvious from its failed Take-Two merger bids that Electronic Arts is keen to expand as well, though it has recently been forced to cut back its operations following third quarter losses of over $600 million and their fiscal year ending $1.08 billion into the red. Perhaps they could use some of that $29 billion Apple has piled up in the bank. We'll have to wait and see where this goes, but in the meantime you should probably take the rumors with a large grain of salt.