It’s that time of year again. Well, it’s more like it’s that time of week again. Hot off the heels of Activision acquiring Bizarre Creations, Electronic Arts has acquired Bioware and Pandemic for a whooping $620 million in cash.

– Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:ERTS) today announced an agreement with Elevation Partners to acquire VG Holding Corp. — the owner of both BioWare Corp. and Pandemic Studios.  This acquisition gives EA a strong competitive position in key genres in interactive entertainment: action, adventure and role-playing games.  The two studios have been recognized for creating some of the highest-quality games in the industry.

BioWare Corp. and Pandemic Studios have ten franchises under development, including six wholly owned games.  BioWare Corp. is currently developing the highly anticipated Mass Effect, which will be published by Microsoft in November, and is in the early development stages of a massively multiplayer online game.  Pandemic Studios is redefining open-world games with its upcoming Mercenaries 2: World in Flames™ and Saboteur™, in addition to several unannounced projects.

Pandemic Studios and BioWare Corp. employ roughly 800 people across four studios located in Edmonton, Canada; Los Angeles; Austin; and Brisbane, Australia.

“These are two of the most respected studios in the industry and I’m glad to be working with them again.  They’ll make a strong contribution to our strategic growth initiatives on quality, online gaming and developing new intellectual properties,” said John Riccitiello, EA’s Chief Executive Officer.  “We also expect this will drive long-term value for our shareholders.”

As most Xbox 360’s owners will surely be thinking. How will this affect Mass Effect? Mass Effect is intended as a trilogy, but now Microsoft who are the publishers for the first game will still be publishing the game as is. After that game is released and the deal is firmly in place in January 2008, EA is to assume all rights to the franchise from then on, along with nine other IP’s. EA’s domination of the gaming industry is one step closer to to being a sure thing. Like it or not, it’ll be hard to avoid Electronic Art’s games. Has the arm’s race with Activision taken a toll for the worse?

[Via Press Release]

-William “thewilleffect” Bell-