EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners

https://ir.ea.com/press-releases/press-release-details/2025/EA-Announces-Agreement-to-be-Acquired-by-PIF-Silver-Lake-and-Affinity-Partners-for-55-Billion/default.aspx

by rf15 • 10 months ago

294 415 10 months ago

ir.ea.com

input_sh• 10 months ago

Translation: Saudi Arabia (PIF), a private equity firm, and Jared Kushner (Affinity Partners).

Mistletoe• 10 months ago

I didn’t think EA could get more evil but here we are.

I remember when they were the good guys. I’d see that EA logo on my Commodore 64 load up and I knew I was in for something amazing like Archon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon:_The_Light_and_the_Dark

throaway19883• 10 months ago

the dark legacy of cashing out

nicce2• 10 months ago

Company is worth of 50 billion, while everyone hates it these days?

kotaKat• 10 months ago

“E! A! Sports! It’s inhumane!”

piva00• 10 months ago

And Jared Kushner's firm is mainly funded by the Saudis as well. So it's even more the Saudis (+ Kushner), and a private equity.

actionfromafar• 10 months ago

"Remember, sports is not about politics"

Jared Ibn Kushner: "hold my شاي"

Havoc• 10 months ago

Was it paid for in DLCs?

Rooster612• 10 months ago

Although I'm not optimistic, there's a small chance this might shake up the sorry state of EA Sports. The incessant focus on microtransactions and features that are essentially just sports themed slot machines over actual solid gameplay has kept me far away from those games for a long time.

EDIT: I think I might have worded that poorly. I do NOT think a change is going to happen, at least not one for the better, especially considering the actors involved in the buyout. I think it's optimistic to think that it will.

msie• 10 months ago

You're kidding, right?

saghm• 10 months ago

I don't think they are. Quite a lot of EA franchises seem to be struggling to appeal even to their core base lately. The Sims has gone through similar issues with trying to push paid content over quality, with a recent update to allow selectively disabling packs with new content apparently just corrupting the installation and making it impossible to actually run a lot of the time. From what I've read about the most recent Dragon Age game, meddling from EA also caused a lot of late changes in the game's development that ended up influencing the lackluster reception, which in turn was used as rationale for shuttering future development of Dragon Age games.

Things really do seem bad enough that clearly something drastic is needed if anything is going to change, For an unhappy fan of one of the many EA franchises, I don't have any trouble imagining that even a major change that's unlikely to produce good still offers more hope than the status quo. If there's a 1% chance that taking EA private will improve things, it still probably is more likely than things improving with the current management.

Analemma_• 10 months ago

I think the odds of an acquisition by private equity resulting in fewer microtransactions and slot machine mechanics are indistinguishable from zero. You should probably instead be preparing for them to be amped up five- or ten-fold.

Daedren• 10 months ago

It's a leveraged buyout. They're going to need to pay those billions in debt, so predatory practices should not be stopping.

JumpCrisscross2• 10 months ago

It's a leveraged buyout

Correct: “the transaction will be funded by a combination of cash from each of PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners as well as roll-over of PIF’s existing stake in EA, constituting an equity investment of approximately $36 billion, and $20 billion of debt financing.”

EA currently carries about $2.6bn in non-current liabilities of which $1.5bn is long-term debt. So an order of magnitude more debt.

jamesnorden• 10 months ago

That's pretty optimistic, actually. If anything, they will double down.

Rooster612• 10 months ago

Correct. I don't think a good outcome will come of this. Hence why I started off saying that I'm not optimistic about the prospects.

sidrag22• 10 months ago

As someone who grew up loving sports games and has been turned away from any modern sports games because of the desire to flood them with all the stuff i see as just legalized gambling for children...

i like this potential optimism. Even if its not likely, its fun to imagine this being a turning point where EA is suddenly just doing things to make games better, rather than chase numbers, and because of that, the competition is forced to match that better gameplay.

I just would love to see where sports games could ACTUALLY be at if a high percentage of the team wasn't focused on horrible predatory in game purchases/questionable card games that just skirt by the legal system for underage gambling.

throaway19883• 10 months ago

Lol. Well someone at EA saw the writing on the wall. This is going to be a bad acquisition by these vultures.

mapcars3• 10 months ago

What other businesses did they buy? What happened to them?

throaway19883• 10 months ago

i mean the new owners are going to jettison everything that doesn’t make money sand hyper optimize the rest even more. It’s basically the end of EA, even such as it was.

AlexandrB3• 10 months ago

AAA gaming feels so tired (and tiresome) that this news barely registers for me. The last EA game I played was the excellent C&C remaster - and EA's main contribution was getting out of the way of the project. They still own the rights to a ton of legendary IP - SimCity, Command & Conquer, Battlefield, but I don't have illusions that new iterations of that IP will be any good.

I know this is probably part of the Saudi strategy of "sportswashing"[1], but I don't really care about EA or their legacy anymore.

[1] https://www.eurogamer.net/ea-sports-fc-24-boss-on-sportswash...

teeray• 10 months ago

The last EA game I played was the excellent C&C remaster - and EA's main contribution was getting out of the way

I still remember the “Westwood Studios Proudly Presents…” on the RA2 intro cutscene and that pride really shined through. Even the installer for the game was a blast (full-screen, dropped you into a faux game-UX and gave you a military briefing with their kickass soundtrack while the progress bar ran). Modern AAA games lack the soul that games of this time had.

porridgeraisin• 10 months ago

soundtrack

The tracks in FIFA 14-15 was also so much better than the tracks in today's FIFAs. In every way. They handpicked not-mainstream songs too

poszlem• 10 months ago

Which is ironic given the origin of the name, Electronic *Arts* once positioned themselves as a haven for “software artists,” treating games as creative works on par with music and film. Now they feel more like a licensing machine, recycling IP until it’s dry and chasing live-service revenue. The contrast between what the name promised and what the company became is kind of bleak.

CaptainOfCoit8• 10 months ago

The irony really kicks in when you start to remember all the arguments for how capitalism leads to the best products. Seems we forgot to clarify "best for who?", but it's clear at least shareholders won something.

itsoktocry• 10 months ago

but I don't really care about EA or their legacy anymore.

They own the entire sports gaming genre, and it's a massive money maker.

AlexandrB3• 10 months ago

Yeah, admittedly my perspective is that of someone who thinks sports games peaked with NBA Jam (1993). The only other sports games I play are racing sims - which are also in a bad place, but I digress.

dminvs• 10 months ago

well, for football and handegg anyway

NBA Live hasn't caught up to 2K for a long time and Sony still has MLB

sofixa5• 10 months ago

Not entire - football has Football Manager (def a niche compared to FIFA/EAFC, but still pretty major), and FIFA will one day publish their FIFA game (there was a licensing disagreement, so EA rebranded their game to EAFC, and FIFA kept the name and will presumably launch a game with it some day).

nemomarx2• 10 months ago

They still have some exclusives or older titles locked up - I think American McGee's stuff?

I wonder if the new owners would care to port it or sell it again.

bob1029• 10 months ago

I mostly agree about AAA, but to be fair Battlefield 1 was/is a really good game. You'll never find an experience like that in an indie studio.

DanielHB2• 10 months ago

Thinking about EA (or any big publisher) as a monolith is quite counterproductive to generate a mental model. In practice it is several studios with an overlord. Some studios might still be independent enough that the overlord just stays out of the way.

Spartan-S63• 10 months ago

I believe that Battlefield 4 was the last good Battlefield game. Biggest asset was fully self-hostable servers that provided progression, community control, and allowed gaming clans/organizations to actually community-build. Nowadays, forced matchmaking and limited party sizes really eliminate the ability to build large communities.

The consolidation of publishers/developers in controlling all of the online experience has started limiting online gaming's ability to be a reasonable third place.

wing-_-nuts5• 10 months ago

As much as I love bf4, I will say bf1 really hit it out of the park. It was a fantastic game that ran well at launch and basically only got better with the dlcs. It's servers also seem to be immune to a ddos that regularly kill bf4 servers.

tnolet• 10 months ago

next up Ubisoft. Last Assassin's Creed was also a snore fest.

JKCalhoun• 10 months ago

AAA gaming feels so tired

When first person games became a destination for gaming (and not just another genre that we move on from — like "fighting games") is when I checked out of gaming. I know, I know, there are no doubt plenty of cool indie games out there (and other genres) but I guess in the meantime I found other ways to spend my time and haven't really looked back into games.

(I think too "AAA" as a moniker is kind of a huge red flag for me anyway. Like how "Now a Major Motion Picture" means it will be artless and instead appeal to a broad demographic in the most banal of ways.)

onli• 10 months ago

A new civilisation game just got released, the most well known mainstream gaming series are either third person (GTA) or sport games (Fifa), there is the witcher - in no way has gaming be reduced to first person games, not even AAA.

zamadatix• 10 months ago

EA is a big publisher, so things like Split Fiction/It Takes Two get sprinkled in with their yearly shovelware of new paint jobs for Madden, NHL, FIFA, The Sims 4, etc too. I'll also give them credit that not every remaster is crap (Mass Effect Legendary Edition was great).

deaddodo5• 10 months ago

The last EA game I played was the excellent C&C remaster - and EA's main contribution was getting out of the way of the project.

Not only did they get out of the way, but they actively hired the studio that sprung up from the corpse of the original developers (Westwood): Petroglyph. Not only letting the original designers/developers do their thing, but giving them a chance to work on their own baby again.

It’s rare for larger companies to be willing to humble themselves for something like that, so they gained an iota of respect from me.

tapoxi2• 10 months ago

To their credit, the new Battlefield had an extremely well recieved beta and feedback from ongoing private tests is overwhelmingly positive.

They're even shipping Godot based modding tools.

CaptainOfCoit8• 10 months ago

To their credit

How much of the new Battlefield actually been coming from EA though? I feels like the relatively new "Battlefield Lab" (which EA seems to have a really hands-off approach with so far) seems to be the main credit for that.

Has there been any interviews or anything that clarifies how much EA been involved? Otherwise I'd continue give credit to the developers rather than the publisher.

wing-_-nuts5• 10 months ago

I'm sure the game will be well received, but the beta was enough to put me off from buying it, and you're talking to someone who bought bf5 and 2042 despite misgivings, so I have a pretty low bar.

The maps I've played are pretty much all close quarters maps with the exception of liberation peak. It's pretty clear they're courting the COD playerbase. The maps that do have vehicles are so small it makes no sense to have anything but humvees. They've once again given assault pretty much everything it needs to be a god class. No thanks. Not my battlefield, and I say this as someone who's got like 4k hours in bf3/4.

drnick1• 10 months ago

Except that it enforces kernel-level anticheat, and hence is incompatible with Linux.

pjmlp2• 10 months ago

Being a 1970's child that grew up with games alongside the industry, nowadays I mostly play retrogaming, retrogaming inspired, or digital versions of board games.

The quest for realism without gameplay of many AAA games, with exorbitant prices, and GB sized textures, is not something I care about.

I may spend more time playing something with Atari 2600 graphics, and enticing gameplay than caring about latest COD.

I would be busy for hours playing Laser Squad, Quazatron, ATF,....

bunderbunder3• 10 months ago

I recently watched a youtube video by a gamer about 20 years younger than me who had discovered older games and was reflecting on how deeply different they feel compared to modern games.

The big difference she observed is that older games don't hold your hand the way modern games do. They expect you to think hard, work hard, use trial and error, and generally, in her words, "use your brain." She spent a while talking about how old games have a manual where new games have a lengthy tutorial, automap, quest log, helpful companion constantly telling you what to do next, etc. etc. etc.

She didn't quite get there herself, but the juxtaposition really brought it home for me: the reason modern AAA games hold your hand is because they have to. Because they're just too big: too many game mechanics, too many locations, too much story, etc. etc. etc. If they tried to just sit back and let the player play the game for themself, nobody would would even scratch the surface of the game before they get bored and leave.

It was a little liberating because I finally realized I really can just stop paying attention to AAA games in general, and I don't have to feel weird about it. I'm not going to say they're bad. Plenty of people enjoy them enough to support a company the size of EA. But I'm now prepared to recognize that the kind of gameplay experience that I grew up on and continue to find most compelling is fundamentally incompatible with a AAA-sized budget.

jader2012• 10 months ago

I may spend more time playing something with Atari 2600 graphics, and enticing gameplay than caring about latest COD.

The first good console for me was the NES. I enjoyed the Atari 2600, but only because it was the best at that time. But I can still enjoy a good NES game.

There aren’t many games on the Atari 2600 that I would still consider fun today. Maybe not necessarily because of graphics, but the graphics were pretty bad too.

It’s interesting that most modern retro-style games seem to keep a higher color and resolution than even the last great 2D generation (SNES/Genesis).

There are some games that hold try to that generation’s specs, though, but I don’t see many go as far back as the NES (and especially not the 2600).

There’s a small niche of people that make/have made modern NES games (actual cartridges for the actual console or remakes of the console), and those that play them, but I’m not aware of any super popular ones. If anybody’s aware of any, let me know!

surgical_fire2• 10 months ago

Fellow retro gamer here, though I typically find my fill in 8/16 bit era games. I too seldom get enjoyment from contemporary AAA games, and have stopped paying attention to those many years ago.

When I to find joy in recent titles, it is typically indie games, or titles from small studios.

Part of it may be that photorealism as a graphical style does not appeal to my senses, but that is not all. I think that in many ways contemporary games have the need of keeping me busy and engaged. When I hear that a game is 200+ hours of content, instead of being intrigued I feel just overwhelmed.

no_wizard• 10 months ago

RIP Mass Effect and by extension BioWare.

One of the most groundbreaking trilogies in gaming with tons of potential and it’ll get relegated to the dustbin of history no doubt.

If I was absurdly rich I’d buy up lots of underused and/or abused IP and start a game studio around it. I feel like that would be a good business if you have the capital to handle game dev costs

khuey2• 10 months ago

I assume the acquisition is mostly about the sports games and Battlefield but EA really is sitting on some fantastic IP: Bioware, Westwood, and Maxis were all great studios.

b3lvedere• 10 months ago

For those who want to play it. Mass Effect Legendary Edition plays great on a Steam Deck or medium pc, but also has 4k reolution. It’s €6 at the moment.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1328670/Mass_Effect_Legen...

Part of the EA autumn sale. More discounts here:

https://store.steampowered.com/developer/EA/sale/ea-autumn-s...

ethbr12• 10 months ago

RIP Mass Effect and by extension BioWare. One of the most groundbreaking trilogies in gaming with tons of potential and it’ll get relegated to the dustbin of history no doubt.

Maybe I started with BioWare too early, but everything after NWN felt incredibly empty... in that 'world breaks if you look left or right of the main plot' Call of Duty way.

Which is fine, but always gave me an itch that I was really strapped into a plot-on-rails amusement park ride rather than a world.

jerf2• 10 months ago

Between the fact that I'm on the "no time" part of the "time to play but no money, money to buy but no time, pick one" saying, indies, some still-functioning Japanese studios, and the burgeoning "AA" segment of the market, where people in the 2020s use 2020s technology with a team of maybe a dozen or two to put out what would have been AAA games produced by hundreds of people in the 2010s, I've had no use for the AAA space for a while. Or the gacha space; you don't need to create an open wound in your wallet just to play some decent games.

I've noticed this attitude is not yet "mainstream" but the first and the second derivative of its prevalence ought to worry the AAA industry. If their moat essentially collapses to "we can afford to spend a bazillion dollars on marketing" their death won't be too many years behind.

brailsafe• 10 months ago

I'm on the "no time" part of the "time to play but no money, money to buy but no time, pick one" saying

You should try Factorio, it'll find the time for you.

mhh__• 10 months ago

The new battlefield actually looks pretty good

ivape• 10 months ago

EA has an interesting strategy on offering a good value for their paid EA Play and EA Play pro plan. For example, if you find yourself in these specific genres:

Sports:

- Madden

- FC Soccer

- F1

This area should grow to cover other major sports. Others have mentioned how strong the sports offering is, and it’s also worth noting how strong Wii Sports was for the monumental success of the Wii.

FPS:

- Battlefield more or less

The Battlefield universe can cover anything you can dream of when it comes to FPS, so that’s another platform that is still a growth sector imho.

I think this is a very lucrative approach.

TwoFerMaggie• 10 months ago

RIP Bioware. This will probably be the final stage of its long, painful death.

devjab2• 10 months ago

Bioware died back in 2007. As I see it this can only be an improvement.

Thaxll• 10 months ago

Mass effect 2, one of the best Bioware game was developed under EA.

paxys2• 10 months ago

For the FIFA series basically.

tibbydudeza2• 10 months ago

Good riddance.

tibbydudeza2• 10 months ago

Final stage to AI slop games.

nerdjon3• 10 months ago

I am finding myself having some conflicted feelings on this.

First, I absolutely hate who is buying them. Especially as a huge Bioware fan with a Mass Effect tattoo.

That being said, putting aside who is buying them for a moment. I would actually be happy to see more gaming companies going fully private. I feel like the need for constant growth (instead of just sustainability) is what has caused much of the issues in the current gaming market.

So not exactly super excited about how exactly this is happening, but I do hope that we can see other gaming companies do it with better sources.

nemomarx2• 10 months ago

A company taking themselves private could be pretty good, but leveraged PE stuff will demand profit to pay down the loan and pretty much always have the same motivation for growth as investors.

Etheryte• 10 months ago

If you think private equity will be milder, you're in for a bad surprise. Most of the enshittification you see around you stems from private equity.

WorldMaker6• 10 months ago

Yup, many private equity deals ultimately are to break a company up into spare parts (to sell individual IPs/sub-brands to the highest bidder.) The extra debt the buyout saddles the company with is in part to build a bankruptcy case to kick off that spare parts auction.

fzeroracer• 10 months ago

A company going private is, in general, a good thing because they're less shackled by investors and capital.

However this is the rare exception because this is more about oligarchs making a play for total control over the media sphere rather than any sort of financial independence. That said, cornering the entertainment side of things is going to be much harder especially since the people that do this kind of thing have zero clue what a video game even is or how to make a profitable one.

herpdyderp2• 10 months ago

BioWare is long dead anyway.

nerdjon3• 10 months ago

Honestly I disagree and I feel like this is largely parroted without playing the games.

SWTOR was maintained pretty well for a while and was fun.

The issues with ME3's ending were blown way out of proportion and was still a fantastic trilogy.

Andromeda had its issues no doubt about it but I am still mad at a certain website deciding that they were going to just go hard on attacking it. It was a fun game, it had some development issues and some nasty bugs at launch. But was still fun.

Anthem... man that game had potential but just was not ready to ship. Was a ton of fun to play and I loved the bits of story we got but it really was just a tease of a story sadly.

DA Veilguard... definitely not up to the standard that Bioware set but there is still something uniquely Bioware about the characters that I fell in love with. That games potential was not helped by a vocal minority being mad about one specific character and not caring about anything else in the game.

Has Bioware gone down since their peak? Yeah. But I think claims that they are dead are overblown and people parroting it on youtube for clicks sure isnt helping that sentiment. Play the games and make your own decision.

AdmiralAsshat• 10 months ago

BioWare doesn't have to be active for PE to crap on their legacy.

BioWare games notably moved the needle forward on allowing same-sex relationships in their games. [0] Should we expect that such things might be removed from the existing titles under Saudi ownership?

[0] https://medium.com/brinkbit/a-brief-history-of-biowares-lgbt...

swiftcoder3• 10 months ago

I feel like the need for constant growth (instead of just sustainability) is what has caused much of the issues in the current gaming market.

I'm not sure the investment group attempting to diversify Saudi oil income is going to be less profit oriented than the stock market in general

JumpCrisscross2• 10 months ago

not sure the investment group attempting to diversify Saudi oil income is going to be less profit oriented than the stock market in general

For what it’s worth, MBS is reportedly an avid gamer.

Nexxxeh2• 10 months ago

Muhammad Bonesaw grew up on Age of Empires, and enjoys(/enjoyed) CoD. They also want to use it to shape global perspective. I think signs are good, or at least less-bad.

dansmith1919• 10 months ago

To be fair, if they're actually buying it for the whole sportswashing thing and not for the short-term cash profits, could it maybe be a good thing for the games? Better games == more effective sportswashing?

Either way, human rights journalists lose.

raincole2• 10 months ago

Idk. Are private equity firms not asking for constant growth? Seems unlikely to me.

I think most companies satisfied for being sustainable are probably owned by their original founders or their families, not private equity.

deaddodo5• 10 months ago

Not necessarily. Private ownership can give you the benefit of operating at a stagnate revenue since it still represents a positive income stream for the owners.

This is an impossible status for public ownership as people don’t want a stock that stays at 10usd for multiple subsequent quarters. They see it as an investment. So you either have to offer significant dividends or find a way to show growth. If not, investors lose interest and your value drops, despite being perfectly profitable.

That’s not to say this private owner set will be happy with that, but that’s the benefit private ownership offers over public capital.

this_user2• 10 months ago

The classic PE business model is buying underperforming businesses, cutting costs, optimising their operations, and then selling the company for a profit after a couple of years (or taking it public). PE are usually less focussed on growth and more focussed on squeezing the most out of what is already there.

vel0city• 10 months ago

This $56B company just took on an additional $20B in debt for this to go private. Now not only do they need to make profits, they need to squeeze even more juice to pay the interest on that $20B.

This will probably result in more money extracting schemes and less editorial freedom, even without thinking about MBS having a massive amount of influence in the company now.

spixy2• 10 months ago

Cannot public company just pay dividents? Then there can be no pressure to constant growth.

rchaud3• 10 months ago

Microsoft paid dividends every year in the 2000s and their share price barely ever broke $40. Most shares in large companies are owned by pension funds, mutual funds and hedge funds. Without share appreciation, the value of these funds don't grow. They make far more money through share price growth than they do in dividends, so they advocate for the company to operate in a way that makes that happen.

viburnum• 10 months ago

Sportswashing is coming to video games.

thiago_fm3• 10 months ago

They basically bought FIFA (now called FC).

It's a very simple money-printing machine, with plenty of people addicted to it with its gambling/gache style game.

All the other IP barely make any revenue and will likely get even less attention. RIP Bioware.

DanielHB2• 10 months ago

I had who spent 1500 USD in one year on ultimate team. In Brazil, around 2015.

That was _quite a lot_ of money in Brazil at the time.

raincole2• 10 months ago

Wait until you see how much people spend on mobile gacha!

Well we don't need to wait long. I think the history book will say this EA acquisition is the point PC gaming market becomes as predatory as mobile.

thiago_fm3• 10 months ago

I have many friends that spent $10K+. Some see it as an investment as you can flip things.

It's a digital market, NFT-esque, sold as a game.

mohsen1• 10 months ago

I'm just wondering how much more predatory FC (formerly FIFA) can get? I already feels like it's owned by a private equity!

Maybe they will limit how many minutes you can play before having to pay more?!

chuckadams• 10 months ago

For a moment, I thought you were saying they bought FIFA itself. Which doesn't seem out of the question, FSM knows they're for sale in every other way.

thiago_fm3• 10 months ago

FIFA the game, I guess this comes with the context of it being EA.

Maybe this will be part of a bigger acquisition... or maybe they have already acquired everything they could, except that they don't want make FIFA look like a bad saudi organization?

csomar• 10 months ago

Given that they are getting the 34 cup, then yes? They did buy fifa?

ksec• 10 months ago

I know a lot of people think FIFA is everything, but in my era it was Pro Evolution Soccer or Winning Eleven.

Modern Games also lack the Game and Fun part. They either make something super complex I no longer have the time to dive in, or pay to win.

red_rech• 10 months ago

They either make something super complex I no longer have the time to dive in

Oh man, it’s often worse than you think. So many games now have a lot of “complexity” the complexity is all really surface level leaving you desiring.

fred_is_fred2• 10 months ago

[flagged]

beepbopboopp• 10 months ago

I want to start by saying I have no skin in the game here. While not perfect, Saudi has very clearly moved "Westernly" on many ideas, most notably social and economic ones. It can even be argued that their recent moves in that direction have made it near impossible for the other large economy companies to move too far the other way. Th

At what point does the narrative about their investments on the larger stage become less pejorative?

sofixa5• 10 months ago

[flagged]

iaw• 10 months ago

They have a well documented and known human slave trade for their laborers in the kingdom.

Maybe the narrative changes when their approaches towards human rights does?

burkaman• 10 months ago

They literally just killed another journalist after torturing him for seven years https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turki_bin_Abdulaziz_al-Jasse...

Another murder last month, this one they killed for the crimes of attending protests and funerals: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde23/0239/2025/en/

Two years ago they sentenced this man to death because he tweeted something they didn't like to less than ten followers: https://www.uscirf.gov/religious-prisoners-conscience/forb-v...

NickC253• 10 months ago

While not perfect, Saudi has very clearly moved "Westernly" on many ideas, most notably social and economic ones.

My man, they can kill you for drawing a stick figure.

Let that sink in.

SA is still a single-export economy, and those who are smart enough to get out of SA, do so. From personally having very close relationships with a few folks who worked on the NEOM project, the Saudi locals are not prepared to do any work at all, just spend money and export the work to consultants. It's about posturing, not rolling up their sleeves.

RankingMember• 10 months ago

I want to start by saying I have no skin in the game here

We all have skin in the game when there's an actor on the world stage that kills its critics buying up huge orgs in our society.

newssucker• 10 months ago

Interesting, they purchased pokemon go this year also. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz61yxv6evjo

moduspol• 10 months ago

I may accept it if they can make a SimCity 5 that doesn't suck.

onlyrealcuzzo• 10 months ago

Hopefully they sell Blizzard's IP to a different company.

sailingparrot• 10 months ago

Blizzard is part of Activision (now Microsoft), not EA.

sleepybrett2• 10 months ago

Blizzard has been in the absolute toilet for years and was never associated with EA in any way.

ezconnect• 10 months ago

Back in the 80s there was a Playboy article about how influential the Saudi's in USA because of their overflowing oil money. I guess it never changed they just got a good PR management to fix their image for a few decades and they are in the spotlight again.

doofkoof• 10 months ago

I wondered about a situation similar to this for the King of the Hill reboot. Seemingly almost every episode contains exuberant praise for Saudi Arabia. Hank would mention how it felt more America than Texas, and how much he loved Saudi Arabia over and over. I haven't seen any public information about Saudi funding being involved, so maybe this is all baseless.

tomhow2• 10 months ago

Please don't comment like this on HN. It set off a generic flamewar about the relative merits of nations/regions in the world, which is the last thing we want here. The guidelines ask us to avoid this:

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

pizzathyme• 10 months ago

Like them or not, EA has been a major force in gaming for over 40 years (I used to work there). They invented the term "Game Producer". Their early vision for promoting Game Designers like hollywood Directors was ahead of its time. They have a hallway lined with gold discs of million seller hit games. They basically created the casual gaming industry (The Sims Division, Pogo, Casual Divisions) in a time when games were mostly marketed to boys.

I respect this company a lot, even though they always seem to do things that embitter the gaming community against them.

Unfortunately these types of buyouts usually come with layoffs, after a year of tough layoffs in games. I hope anyone who will be affected can land somewhere safe.

The campus has a labyrinth with a plaque that's always inspired me: "As in life, the walls are only in your mind."

mlindner2• 10 months ago

Except the entire idea that games should be promoted like hollywood movies is _exactly_ what precipitated this whole downfall. Games are not movies nor should they be like movies.

Personally I hope there are tons of layoffs. The entire industry needs to be rinsed clean and refreshed, especially the US gaming industry.

falcor843• 10 months ago

Would you mind saying more about this?

Why does promoting games as if they were movies is an issue? Is this just about the rising development costs of AAA games, or is there something else here that you're alluding to?

lentil_soup• 10 months ago

> Personally I hope there are tons of layoffs

Wow, I guess empathy is not a thing anymore

johnnyanmac9• 10 months ago

I believe the GP's point was not "games need to focus on cinematics and mind breaking graphics over gameplay". It was how you make brands based on people, not teams. Jane's Combat Simulator, American McGee's Alice in Wonderland, Sid Meier's Games (when Fireaxis had closer relations with them), Clive Barker's Undying.

We have indies who embody their games, but EA was doing this well before that. And AAA companies never really tried doing this since (though some directors did market themselves very well despite that. Like Kojima or Romero). It's a shame we have husks walking under a brand when all the personality has long left.

SillyUsername• 10 months ago

Won't happen. They'll buy the next indie game studio that is successful, chew on their profits, then tank that, rinse repeat.

fidotron7• 10 months ago

Yeah, I worked there too and share this sentiment:

I respect this company a lot, even though they always seem to do things that embitter the gaming community against them.

What I saw, more often than not, was most of the company consisted of the biggest genuine fans of their own products, and it was a few well placed ultra cynical bad apples that persisted in causing such enormous antagonism.

johnnyanmac9• 10 months ago

it was a few well placed ultra cynical bad apples that persisted in causing such enormous antagonism.

Too bad those bad apples were the ones all the way at the top. Kotick's "we'll charge for reloads during an online match" statements really were a harbinger on what those in power thought of gaming as.

(I had him as CEO too, I understand).

this_user2• 10 months ago

It seems likely that they will consolidate their studios and streamline the headcoputn. Bioware may be dead for good, at least to the extent that it is still alive at this point. And there are probably other acquired studios like that.

jsbisviewtiful• 10 months ago

If Bioware can squeak out one more good Mass Effect it would make for a great swan song. I don't really know what the last EA game I bought was other than the Mass Effect trilogy on Steam. I started avoiding Ubisoft games after Assassin's Creed 3 and EA followed a few years after that- so maybe 2015ish?

chubot• 10 months ago

I worked there too (2002-2004), but didn't that all happen when the founder Trip Hawkins was there? It looks like he left in 1991

I don't think you can meaningfully call EA the same company -- it's more like a different company with the same name, and doesn't deserve respect for its past achievements

By the time I was there, over 20 years ago now, the management was already shitty. The people were great, but the management took advantage of employees' love for games. (I was part of the "EA Spouse" settlement)

---

In fact I now remember an utterly bizarre experience when I was an intern at EA. The CFO spoke in front of 20 interns, and reminded us that our jobs was to make the stock price go up. Like whenever you do anything, you should think about the stock price as your ultimate goal. So the company isn't really about making games?

I mean I can appreciate his honesty, compared to later big tech "make the world a better place" slogans, while also just trying to make the number go up

But it's a weird thing to say to a bunch of 22 year olds, since they have little influence on the stock price, other than trying to increase their knowledge of the craft

There were a number of other shady characters in EA management. They were often brought in from outside

Even though I criticized "don't be evil", I have to say that by and large Google management was much more competent, and they came off as kinder, even though the company changed eventually too

---

I do think it has to do with whether the founder still leads the company -- there has to be someone mission-driven, not just money-driven

I think Trip Hawkins was mission-driven. Larry Page was to an extent, but I think he got sick of managing the company, so he let the optimizers take over

And private equity are almost universally short-term optimizers, in favor of themselves and against customers, which tends to ruin the company in the long term. So I see this as a continuation of a multi-decade trend with EA.

Though I'd be interested in any counterexamples, i.e. private equity that actually made the company better in the long term

ddtaylor2• 10 months ago

There was a time in the earlier days of EA where the company had value. That time has passed. The company mainly sits on exclusive licenses and makes minimal changes to the franchises in an attempt to milk cash. The cash milking part has gone downhill recently.

I genuinely hope they lose ALL of their exclusive sports licenses. They shouldn't be exclusive to begin with, but enabling these companies to hold the entire place hostage with their inferior and poorly crafted games just drives away competition and makes everyone play something else.

I have zero interest in football, soccer, basketball games, etc. but I did play them as a kid and I know young kids play sports games more. The fact that Madden has been re-publishing that game with the same Groundhogs Day release notes for 20+ years speaks volumes.

mvdtnz• 10 months ago

There was a time in the earlier days of EA where the company had value. That time has passed.

The company that just sold for $55 billion?

jerf2• 10 months ago

I am old enough to remember a time when I had positive associations with being an "EA game".

The games in question were on my Commodore 64. But still, there was such a time.

EA has a reputation for buying companies and draining all of their reputation for money. The first company that the EA of today did that to was EA itself. There was a time it was just a gaming company.

Actually it was about up to the Origin acquisition that I still had at least some positive feelings for them, before the pattern really settled in. After that, though, I got nothin'.

fidotron7• 10 months ago

EA has a reputation for buying companies and draining all of their reputation for money

If you saw this from the other side you'd see just how much the reverse was true. This was one of the great mysteries of the place.

It's one of those situations where in the public perception the blame all flows up to EA, but the credit is always with the studios. The truth is somewhere else.

HankStallone• 10 months ago

Yeah, in the C64 days, when I could afford to buy a game at retail, it would often be an EA game, because they had some of the best. I still remember the logo flashing through the 16-color set, and how you could tell whether the game had a fast-loader by how fast it flashed.

They were pretty universally admired then, as far as I can remember, but not for much longer.

gosub100• 10 months ago

I loved playing NHLPA hockey on SNES in the mid 99s. I guess they couldn't get the rights to use "NHL" so they used the "players association" instead?

Aeolun4• 10 months ago

I think the good associations died somewhere after C&C Generals.

skeeter20202• 10 months ago

you're remembering the start, when Trip Hawkins left Apple and really pushed the industry - both technically and culturally - forward. THose days probably died before the turn of the century.

paxys2• 10 months ago

The company you admire died a long time ago. Their focus today isn't on these historic franchises but releasing the same FIFA every year with new forms of microtransactions to hook a new generation of teenagers. And they have already laid off several thousand employees in the last 2-3 years.

johnnyanmac9• 10 months ago

This move will only lay off thousands more, sadly. Like the gaming industry needed even more veterans kicked out.

It's definitely not good times at all, no matter how you feel about the companies. Three of the largest 3rd party western studios in the last 3 years are being bought out. This doesn't bode well no matter where you are or what you consume in the industry.

spixy2• 10 months ago

Isn't The Sims Division just rebranded Maxis?

EasyMark2• 10 months ago

It seems like these types of buys are often associated with offloading debt to the bought company so that it can be shed to a company that they can then let bankrupt and then pay pennies on the dollar of their debt, if they have to pay anything. EA seems like a prime candidate for that.

eumenides12• 10 months ago

My made up history of EA is that EA was acquired because a Saudi princling's Dad got mad at him for becoming a whale for EA. So in order to cut costs at home, he just told PIF to buy EA so he can defraud his money back.

AndroTux• 10 months ago

"I'm tired of buying FIFA every year. Let's just buy EA once."

moi2388• 10 months ago

Then I will never buy EA again, because there is no way I will ever support Saudi Arabia in any capacity

eumenides12• 10 months ago

Is it just me, but PIF owning EA is the next (and gigantic) step in the middle east's sport washing strategy?

xbar• 10 months ago

The biggest problem I had with EA was that their client (EA, EA Origin, etc) operated like spyware.

What will PIF, Silver Lake and Affinity partners do to monetize such client software, beyond games, that is pre-installed on 1 billion devices?

gruez2• 10 months ago

What will PIF, Silver Lake and Affinity partners do to monetize such client software, beyond games, that is pre-installed on 1 billion devices?

How is this different than something like Broadcom buying VMware? Corporate machines are probably far juicier than a bunch of 18-35 yr olds computers. Not to mention that a wide install base also means if they go rogue it'll be detected even faster.

CaptainOfCoit8• 10 months ago

Corporate machines are probably far juicier than a bunch of 18-35 yr olds computers.

"Jucier" in what context/for what? Say you wanna influence how people feel about social issues, what computer user is "jucier" then? Not saying that that's the plan or whatever, just that the context matters.

a96• 10 months ago

Spyware isn't a problem with a company. It's a symptom of the company.

pnathan• 10 months ago

My chief thought about this deal is that Silver Lake ripped off the Skype employees with a claw back clause.

Good luck to the EA workers.

maximilianburke• 10 months ago

Being acquired by private equity is a surefire way to recreate the EA Spouse era.

OptionOfT• 10 months ago

Maybe they'll sell off the C&C IP?

One can hope.

And maybe that makes that one person realize they still have a backup disk of the source code of Red Alert 2.

CaptainOfCoit8• 10 months ago

Maybe they'll sell off the C&C IP?

Yeah, business-people famously don't like to sit on things that have a 1% chance of being valuable in the future, usually selling them off to smaller entities so the fans of those things can actually enjoy them.

beardedwizard• 10 months ago

More consolidation of media by the billionaire class. Wait till they start partisan gaming.

nabla9• 10 months ago

PIF: Saudi Arabian State fund.

Affinity Partners: Jared Kushner.

imglorp• 10 months ago

Assuming the usual follow the money angle, what's the political play here for Kushner and the White House?

jihadjihad• 10 months ago

Propaganda?

forgotoldacc• 10 months ago

Tariffs on any game that fails to meet some specific condition that EA does. Pump the stock on EA. Drop stock prices on other companies. Buy them up. Repeat.

Plus you can pull a Facebook/YouTube/Tiktok and use it to push impressionable people politically towards you. Media made for viewing is all a state enterprise at this point. Interactive media (games) have been looked over, but it seems that won't be the case anymore.

WorldMaker6• 10 months ago

Most of the money is PIF, and that gets into a lot of accusations of "sportswashing": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sportswashing

The Saudis through the PIF are heavily invested in entertainment brands and sports to distract from the fossil fuels (and worse) that create most of those investment funds.

As to Kushner's-specific role, could just be cynically seen to money itself, as a US-based middleman of the PIF deal trying to take a cut. "Administrators" in these sort of private equity buyouts (leveraged buy outs) can make a lot of fast, stupid cash in a grift that probably should be illegal but still currently is not. (LBOs saddle the company being bought out with a lot of debt to pay the "Administrators" what they think they are worth. That debt often leads to the original company going bankrupt and selling their IP at auction to highest bidder and the "Administrators" also take their cuts of those auctions. It's a corporate ponzi scheme that no matter how many huge companies it takes down like Sears or Little Debbie or MGM or many more we still haven't actually put a law on the books to stop it.)

thiht• 10 months ago

Well that's an easy boycott, EA has been pretty much irrelevant to the video games scene for the past few years anyway.

port11• 10 months ago

It is an undeniably strong influence in the video games scene, with increasing revenue each year apart from minor tumbles. I despise what it stands for, but EA being called irrelevant?

byronic3• 10 months ago

Not referencing the Saudi Arabia portion here specifically but LBOs as documented in the book Barbarians at the Gate (covers Nabisco/RJR tobacco) gives me basically zero hope for the future of EA. EA was already rabid cost-cutters and RIF specialists, and they won the most hated company award for however many consecutive years for a reason. Giving them crushing debt to go along with their propensity to give large executive bonuses and stomp their workforce is not a good recipe long-term

ecshafer2• 10 months ago

EA won the most hated company award because video game players are dramatic. Charging $5 for a launch DLC is a drop in the bucket compared to the ways that some larger more critical companies can affect your life.

vunderba• 10 months ago

EA has been a target of scorn for a while because of a laundry list of issues (including pay-to-win schemes, loot boxes, treatment of employees, etc.) which is long enough to warrant its own dedicated wikipedia page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Electronic_Arts

stackskipton• 10 months ago

Sure, their “crimes” are minor compared to RealPage raising rents on everyone but it wasn’t because gamers were dramatic. It was most hated because it was so in your face.

lupusreal4• 10 months ago

Gamers will forgive anything if the games are good. But EA is nothing but a slop factory.

lofaszvanitt2• 10 months ago

Nah, EA's history is laden with terrible decisions, killing creative teams, neglecting good project's marketing and killing them in the process because they had another internal game in the same genre and the like. It's a fucking cesspit of a company.

And they sit on a lot of good franchises and they literally do nothing with them.

Yizahi• 10 months ago

You had any hope for them?

qn9n• 10 months ago

I was hoping the launch of early access skate. would be received poorly, it was due to the beloved franchise being made into a Fortnite-like money grabbing scheme, would cause them to run backwards and fix it releasing an actual skate series game with some live service features but a solid focus on the original franchise. However that hope is dwindling.

ARandumGuy2• 10 months ago

Are there any examples where a company was purchased via a leveraged buyout and the company went on to be more profitable afterwards? Because the only examples I know of resulted in the purchased company going bankrupt fairly quickly.

deanc• 10 months ago

Many sports teams come to mind. Pretty much any F1 team that exists is now worth a lot more on paper than it was purchased for. A few EPL teams come to mind too.

jonas21• 10 months ago

Heinz, Hilton, Dell.

choilive• 10 months ago

Dell did pretty well after going private

balderdash• 10 months ago

leverage increases the disparity of returns (so some companies are definitely out of business because the of the leverage put on them) but by far the vast majority of LBO’s are at least moderately successful.

This give you some idea of the volume https://www.ropesgray.com/en/insights/alerts/2025/07/us-pe-m...

missedthecue3• 10 months ago

Hilton's LBO essentially have saved the brand.

Twitter is yet an unfolding story but it seems to be working.

nashashmi2• 10 months ago

Gibson Greeting Cards (1982) by Wesray Capital, Bought for $80M (only $1M in equity), sold for $220M within 18 months

Hilton Hotels (2007) by Blackstone Group, Despite the 2008 crisis, refinanced and sold with a $14B profit

Safeway (1986) by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Restructured, sold underperforming stores, returned to profitability

HCA Healthcare (2006) by KKR & Bain Capital, Strong cash flow supported debt; remained stable and profitable

Dell Technologies (2013), Silver Lake Partners, Went private, streamlined operations, and rebounded strongly

RJR Nabisco (1989) by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts Iconic LBO; despite controversy, generated $53M profit

mnky9800n• 10 months ago

Did you see the HBO movie version of Barbarians at the Gate? I thought it was pretty interesting. You can watch it all on youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS4ENJCIYNM

mrcwinn• 10 months ago

This is a fantastic movie that was lost to time!

deepfriedbits• 10 months ago

Loved the movie (and the book). The movie is highly entertaining for a business movie.

vkou2• 10 months ago

Does EA 202X stomp their workforce? I had a vague idea that this was largely a thing of the past.

The wiki article linked cites a lot of abuse, but all of it is nearly 2 decades old. My understanding was that it course corrected, and is one of the better gaming firms to work for ATM.

byronic3• 10 months ago

Jason Schreier (sp?) is probably the journalist with the best track record on covering EA and it’s generally been rotten all the way down. His recent book Play Nice focuses on just Blizzard but I wouldn’t be surprised if he does one on EA someday because they are in a league of their own when it comes to toxic workplace practices

avanderveen• 10 months ago

In my experience at Maxis (2021-2024), EA 202X was quite a nice place to work

Tiktaalik• 10 months ago

I do not have first hand experience, but my impression from being in the industry is that modern EA is not at all like the "EA spouse" era.

estimator7292• 10 months ago

It would be fantastic if EA went away. They've been such a blight on the entire industry, killed off or destroyed so many good franchises, developers, and studios.

pluc2• 10 months ago

Between Ubisoft selling to China and EA selling to Saudis, AAA gaming looks bleak.

slightwinder2• 10 months ago

Why? Both are probably also buying to participate in the media/culture-war. So it's in their interests to also have some good products to sell. The worst that might happen is that all the good games are now leaning more to Arabian/Chinese culture, instead of US/Europe, which is not even a new development, Asian culture has been quite prominent in Western Countries because of Japan and South Korea, and China has been also growing in the last years. And China has some really funded productions, usually playing in the top of their genre.

Though, the cancer of gambling will continue spreading.

pluc2• 10 months ago

I don't know about you but I don't want my entertainment money to finance slave labor, cultural oppression, military invasions or butchering journalists. Could be a Canadian thing.

sph2• 10 months ago

AAA gaming has looked bleak for the past 15 years, I still do not know why is it such a guiding star for the video gaming world. It is the artistic equivalent of Henry Ford’s assembly line where risk is low, marketing budget is high, and the result is mediocre and bland slop.

AAA gaming is blockbuster cinema. It’s for people that don’t really care about the artistic medium. It’s mass entertainment at the industrial level.

screye• 10 months ago

Wonder how PE intends to transform a company that was already trying every slimy PE trick.

[x] - Employees are overworked and underpaid

[x] - IP treated as infinite cash cows loaded with micro-transactions

[x] - Games turned soulless in pursuit of wide 'rated E' appeal

Sports is ~50% of their revenue. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a sports-washing exercise where revenue growths takes a back set to normalizing Saudi Arabia to the new generation.

hackthemack• 10 months ago

Some discussion pre-announcement from yesterday with 60 comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45400478

khalilravanna• 10 months ago

Take a company already known for its cynical “value extraction” approach to games, barely fostering enough life within its doors to squeeze out acceptable versions of games that used to be truly Great from among their vast hoard of IP—take that company and add 20 billion dollars of debt and private equity overlords and I can only assume we get something akin to the blood orgy from Event Horizon but in game company form.

Blackthorn• 10 months ago

EA about to get Toys R Us'd. It should be illegal to be able to put the debt from a leveraged buyout on the company's balance sheet.

dehrmann5• 10 months ago

At some point, the debt buyers will (or should) balk over the track record of this debt, or the company has enough collateral that they're happy either way.

WorldMaker6• 10 months ago

The debt buyers are the same people that created that debt (the people doing the LBO in the first place). They force the company they just bought to pay them loan terms they set for the privilege of buying the company they just bought. That's why LBOs are pretty much a corporate Ponzi scheme. It's just too bad it is a currently legal Ponzi scheme. It might be nice to have legislation to prevent it.

dfxm12• 10 months ago

PIF also has a controlling stake in SNK (who just released a new fatal fury videogame), and has a close relationship with TKO, especially including Saudi Arabia getting a WrestleMania. MBS is known to love "attitude era" WWE wrestling and this move tells me he was probably also a big fan of FIFA growing up.

Of course this is entertainment-washing at the end of the day, but I just find it funny the that MBS is going about it: buying EA the same way I would buy a used copy of NHL 97.

pavlov• 10 months ago

With Saudi and Kushner ownership, expect many more video games where Iran is the villain.

stronglikedan• 10 months ago

art imitates life!

phkamp• 10 months ago

Just think how many people the new owners can spy on, now that they control the backend-servers ?

Bandwidth is the only limit...

LarsDu88• 10 months ago

Videogamers have fickle tastes that can change on a whim, and the entire dev stack for game development is becoming more accessible and commoditized, creating massive amounts of competition. Even more so when it comes to squeezing beloved franchises out. Multiple franchises have died under EA (Sim City anyone?), and one of the top franchises EA owns basically has morphed into a "Middle East combat simulator" (Battlefield).

I'm sure the Saudi investors think this might be one way to get influence over the west, or maybe they just like playing FIFA, but I can see this buyout becoming a big stinking turd investment in the long run.

Sohcahtoa82• 10 months ago

Multiple franchises have died under EA (Sim City anyone?)

Cities: Skylines managed to fill that gap, but then C:S2 was an utter dud on release.

I think part of the problem is that we've reached a point where the players expect each individual citizen to be simulated, with the traffic to match, but doing that creates such a massive demand on CPU power that even a modern monster system will struggle once your city reaches the high 6-digit population. Simulating 100K vehicles in real time isn't easy. Even if you're not rendering them all because of draw distance limitations, you're still running path finding regularly if you want vehicles to be smart and try to bypass traffic jams, not to mention just trying to make them respond to traffic signals and not rear-end each other.

detaro2• 10 months ago

I'd say the bigger problem was games claiming that's what they did when they clearly didn't.

joquarky• 10 months ago

I wonder if someone could figure out how to implement HashLife for this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife

CaptainOfCoit8• 10 months ago

and one of the top franchises EA owns basically has morphed into a "Middle East combat simulator" (Battlefield).

Isn't the latest + previous installation about US VS either China and/or Russia, or some other amalgamation of those?

ncr1002• 10 months ago

Yes, battlefield 2042 is not so much about Middle eastern conflict, but North Korean or Russian and American conflict

bparsons• 10 months ago

EAs customer base has been pretty negative on the state of the product for the last several years. I can't imagine this move will do anything but accelerate the trends driving brand dissatisfaction.

Customers feel like they are being treated like ATM machines, while the tens of billions of revenue are clearly not going into new, exciting creative endeavors. I suppose all of this makes sense when you consider that EA is a 45 year old company.

qwertytyyuu• 10 months ago

Oh nice, hopefully this means they can not chase profits as much

Hamuko• 10 months ago

This means they need to chase profits even harder. Someone's gotta pay that debt.

walls• 10 months ago

Nothing more American than selling their assets to terrorists.

Culonavirus• 10 months ago

Finally the beginning of the end of EA. The greedy bastards ruined so many franchises and chased so many fads that their absence will be a net positive. I do feel bad for the devs working there... but them having to find new jobs is genuinely the only negative aspect in all of this.

I have very little respect for any company that is only interested in the next couple of financial quarters and in making their shareholders as much money as fast as possible (while all else can go f itself). And that's exactly the kind of company EA was for at least a decade. Good riddance.

npodbielski• 10 months ago

Give this men a drink!

guizadillas• 10 months ago

Yeah EA has been like this for 3 decades since the deal with Origin Systems to publish their games

johnnyanmac9• 10 months ago

I do feel bad for the devs working there... but them having to find new jobs is genuinely the only negative aspect in all of this.

In this job market, that's a pretty big negative. And EA was one of the biggest employers in the US. This is this industry's equivalent of Wal Mart leaving the market. The damage will be felt for years.

I think you're also downplaying the last extinguishing of hope for any non-sportsball IP's to be revived. Those wishing for Need for Speed, Mass Effect, Burnout, Dragon Age, and many many more IP's over the last 40 years aren't just going to say "good riddance".

kulahan• 10 months ago

I literally cannot imagine why people think being purchased by an incredibly wealthy regime looking to extend goodwill to manage their global image would… destroy you?

Like yeah this is definitely a money thing, but to assume day one will be greedy and not part of a longer term strategy makes no sense to me.

Edit: honestly I expect the company to significantly improve. It’s almost like assuming a restaurant will fail because Thailand started backing it. Yeah, they’re “foodwashing”, if you will, but the purpose is to spread culture and make their people seem more familiar globally.

jmuguy• 10 months ago

Am I wrong in reading this will add 20b in debt to EA the company, and not the purchasers? Because it seems like just servicing that debt will immediately put the company in a bad position.

mdavidn2• 10 months ago

That is how a leveraged buyout works. See: Toys "R" Us.

hollerith3• 10 months ago

It doesn't matter much whether the purchasers personally hold the debt or the debt is held by EA, which is wholly owned by the purchasers.

burnt-resistor• 10 months ago

Step 1. Take out a giant loan.

Step 2. Buy a company on credit.

Step 3. Stick company with the loan used to buy it.

Step 4. RIF, cut costs, reduce quality, break contracts, and discontinue goods and services.

Step 5. Sell everything of value.

Step 6. Send that company into bankruptcy.

Step 7. Rinse, lather, and repeat.

amelius• 10 months ago

Nobody fixed that exploit in the law yet?

mdavidn2• 10 months ago

I don't understand why the creditors agree to this.

dehrmann5• 10 months ago

Found this:

The investors are betting that AI-based cost cuts will significantly boost EA’s profits in the coming years, people involved in the transaction told the Financial Times.

It halfway makes sense. EA is priced at current game production costs, but if that goes down, it'll be worth more. The other side of that is that someone might be able to vibe code with "make the next iconic video game franchise in the vein of Zelda or Pokemon." If EA's sports license moat is strong enough, this might not be an issue, but otherwise, it feels like that cuts both ways.

CodingJeebus• 10 months ago

It’s also not a given that AI will improve the cadence of their workflow to begin with. I could easily see a churn-heavy org incentivizing devs to throw workslop over the fence and offload the responsibility of verification to other teams.

lofaszvanitt2• 10 months ago

So it is going down the drain then.

johnnyanmac9• 10 months ago

Vibe coding absolutely does not work at the scale of an EA Sports game. Even if it could get to a compileable state, there will be loads of performance and memory issues. The kind of code needed for these codebases aren't exactly going to be scraped on Github.

And then there's console code rooted in NDA's. Throwing that into an LLM is a great way to be blacklisted as a publisher.

Maro• 10 months ago

As someone who works in the Middle East at a large company, I expect that next step will be a small army of current and ex-McKinsey MBAs to arrive at EA to "set strategies", "implement operating models", "run transformation exercises", "track value creation", and so on.

On the upside, maybe they will release a new AAA Dilbert game though!

jaynate• 10 months ago

“The transaction positions EA to accelerate innovation and growth to build the future of entertainment.”

Unless some of that cash is staying on the balance sheet, they will NOT be investing in growth and innovation.

PE is not what I normally think of when I think of innovation and (non-financially engineered) growth.

numpad0• 10 months ago

Was anything of value lost? EA was long dead due to its predictable and constant lack of content creation abilities, and Saudi Arabia isn't known for even involvement in great creative contents. Meanwhile, Nintendo Switch 2 is still sold out in some places. This feels more like EA shareholders got an exit than SA gained anything.

asfs4fsdfadf• 10 months ago

It's an interesting move because the PE playbook is to buy a company and jack up the prices and cut half the workforce while doubling the workload of the other employees.

EA is already widely reviled for this stuff so it will be like getting blood from a stone

ChoGGi• 10 months ago

Good riddance on having a proper headstone for the EA graveyard of shutdown developers.

hermitcrab• 10 months ago

Interesting to see what effect this has on the games. No more strong female characters?

ncr1002• 10 months ago

Embarrassing the Saudi government. That’s reasonably an area that might change.

gaws• 10 months ago

"More guns and football; less gay and woke" seems to be the mantra.

everdrive• 10 months ago

I'm not sure how to feel about this. EA has already been pretty terrible for years; pushing their origin storefront, pushing microtransaction hell in games, lazy [sport franchise] [current year] releases, etc. I think the last good year for EA was probably in the 2000s. Usually these sorts of acquisitions make the product worse, and EA might get "worse" in some strict sense, but there's not much to lose.

wing-_-nuts5• 10 months ago

Welp, EA was already among the worst publishers out there, I can only imagine things will get exponentially worse being owned by private equity.

mielioort• 10 months ago

Tons of antisemitism?

mholm• 10 months ago

Interestingly, this means Saudi Arabia now owns the PGA Tour line of video games.

manifoldgeo• 10 months ago

There's a recent book called "Plunder: Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America", and seeing this news makes me want to revisit it. The author outlines the usual tactics used by private equity firms to turn a functioning business into their own short-term profit factory, often driving the business into bankruptcy in the process. EA already has a reputation as a semi-broken company, but things can probably get a lot worse.

One method they use is the consolidation of a bunch of small, related businesses. For example, PE firms buy out all of the local veterinary offices in a tri-city area, cut costs, lay off the most qualified vets and replace with less-qualified ones, increase prices for services, and operate a local monopoly.

Clearly, that particular tactic is much harder to pull on the massive oligopoly that is the gaming industry, but it was the one that stuck with me from the book. There are more baffling ones like selling off all the company's real estate, making them rent it back at a much higher rate than their current mortgages (which may already have been paid off), and then filter revenues out of the company via "consulting fees" paid to themselves and their friends for this bad advice.

The book is a little bit repetitive, and some of the tactics are beyond my grasp, but I'm excited to make a personal bingo card of them and see which ones get used on EA as they drive it into the ground.

skeeter20202• 10 months ago

I read this book, and it's OK but both repetitive and biased. Surprisingly more "textbook" oriented works on PE are harder to find. Wiley had one but it's about 10 years old. The term "PE" also covers a lot of different models, from the worst 80's-style LBO "greed is good" ones, to honest invest-advise-stay out of the way funds. These modern huge deals almost always seem closer to the former. Having now been very close to two PE buy-outs and a big VC funding event, I think I actually prefer VC. Everyone is very transparent and open about what they are trying to do: pour rocket fuel on a fire and get rich. PE wants it all: big annual cashflow, cut all mid/long term costs (R&D, investment, etc) a juicy multiplier on the sale when they flip it to the next PE fund. Most recently I was at a 15 year old company that was doing 25% YoY ARR growth - amazing right? Well no, we were not covering our debt servicing from the most recent PE purchase, so had to cut everywhere and had a hiring freeze. You couldn't get any support to build for the next decade, because funds don't last that long and you don't want to be selling a company in the middle of a project that isn't generating revenues this year. It all makes me mad, sad and very tired.

jajuuka• 10 months ago

We don't need to guess here though. PIF and Silver Lake have a pretty solid track record of over-investing in companies. Affinity Partners seems to be a shell company for the Trump family so I don't see them being active.

halJordan• 10 months ago

EA is the perfect candidate for private equity to destroy. There are zombie companies that need to be eviscerated, digested, and then excreted back into the world. The megacompanies of the video game industry are the result of a broken market and this is "nature healing itself." The free market will course correct and private equity is a perfectly acceptable vehicle for something like EA

dvh• 10 months ago

That is cost of 300x GTA IV or 100x cyberpunk 2077 games. Wouldn't it be more cost effective to just fund 300 new studios?

purpleflame1257• 10 months ago

That's the difference between the VC and PE models. VC, at least in theory, allocated capital to new ideas. PE squeezes "efficiency" out of what exists.

isk517• 10 months ago

The value is probably all in the licenses that EA has. Why start studios when you only need 3 or 4 to produce yearly updates to Madden, FIFA, NHL, and PGA.

BatteryMountain• 10 months ago

Spidey senses tingling: so they have access to a huge install base (millions of kids/teenagers/adult gamers), often times with rootkits/spyware on kernel level (anti cheat), often games needs admin mode to even work, with most devices having microphones/webcams, often with high speed fibre connections... What could possibly be the reason for buying EA? Direct view into family life of citizens around the world. Nice way to gather kompromat.

EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners

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