Report: EA buys Shawn Fanning's Rupture for $30 million

It seems that the founder of Napster--no, not Seth Green--may have finally cashed in big time on one of his creations.

According to TechCrunch, Napster founder Shawn Fanning has sold his gaming social-media start-up, Rupture, to Electronic Arts for $30 million.

TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld reported Thursday afternoon that as part of the deal--which EA has not yet announced, "but is expected to do so soon," Fanning and Rupture co-founder Jon Baudanza will become EA employees.

For Fanning, this represents the big-time payday he's clearly been seeking for years. He never made much off of Napster, and his last start-up, Snocap, was purchased by Imeem for what is assumed to be a negligible sum.

As for why--if the report is true--EA is buying Rupture, which was working on a social-networking system for players of World of Warcraft, Schonfeld writes that EA "bought the company for its technology. Presumably, creating social networks around massively multiplayer video games is a key component of its online strategy."

That certainly makes sense, and especially so given the success of connected systems like Microsoft's Xbox Live.

It is interesting that EA seems to have chosen Fanning's company when another gamers-oriented social-media service, Xfire founder Dennis Fong's Raptr, has also been making waves. Perhaps Fong wanted too much money for his company.

For EA, though, creating its own hit MMO is mostly a dream. Though it published Ultima Online, one of the first important graphical MMOs, through its Origin Systems subsidiary, it hasn't really come out with anything that followed on that success.

And as companies like Sony Online Entertainment, NCSoft, and, most notably, Blizzard Entertainment have become leaders in the MMO industry, EA has for the most part sat idly by. One would have to assume that someday, it will try to get its own version of WoW off the ground. And technology like that of Rupture could be a big component of that.

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[Wasse_]

I'd be quick to point out EA bought Mythic Entertainment a while back. They are the makers of Dark Age of Camelot (an MMO), and are the ones working on Warhammer online.

So in that sense, EA does have its fit in the MMO market already.

[mike.gw]

Congratulations to Shawn! Napster was groundbreaking and influenced the adoption of the rather new MP3 file format. Yes, there was a lot of illegally traded content on Napster, but it opened our eyes to the convenience of searching for and acquiring our digital content online. Napster paved the way for legal downloads via services such as iTunes. And it freed us from the captive and monopolistic pricing practices of the large music publishers, and placed rightful control of how we buy our music back in the hands of consumers. He is truly a hero in this movement, and his riches have been long deserved!

[robertstanke]

Boy, I just don't know... I loved Napster, but Rapture just doesn't impress me. Maybe I just feel that $30M is too much for that system, but hey, if you are Shawn, it's a great gig if you canget it!