It's official: EA is going private.

Oh, cool, another buyout where the buyer doesn't have to actually pay for it, they just take out a loan and magically make the company pay for it.

This shit needs to be made illegal. All it does is kill off businesses. Sears and JoAnn Fabrics both died to this trash.
- Toys R Us too 🤬
Basically Tesla, oof
It’s the workers who pay the price for the greed of the CEOs, shareholders, and the new owners.

Just when you think EA can't get any shittier, they find another way to lower the bar.

Going private could have been a net positive. But, not from venture capitalists, and certainly not from the Saudis.
Also, taking on this much debt as part of the buyout is just asking to be gutted and carved out, complete with record-breaking layoffs.
- Toys R Us anyone?
- So we won't even get a shitty titanfall 3?
- All we can hope for is that after EA gets absolutely gutted, a bunch of new indy splinter studios spring up to use their development experience minus the corpo cash grabbery.
EA 0.00052 seconds after hearing Nintendo is the worst game company…

Saudi owning FIFA is hilarious seeing most of its profit comes from gambling. Muslims my ass 😂 Not that they ever practiced what they preached anyway—Islam or not, religion has always been nothing but a tool of oppression to rulers.

Instead of lootboxes, you cut open journalists to get your prizes.
- What are the odds of getting the golden jet in your ultimate team?
- Buy now 20 Jamales one gold drops guaranteed 40% discount.
It would be interesting if EA pulled away from lootboxes for their owner's ideological reasons.
- You can bet they'll pull away from LGBTQ+ representation.
Maybe they'll remove the gambling. Probably not but it would be good if they did.
Except ea lost the FIFA licence in 2023.
- Didn't as much lose it as they called FIFA (an organization worse than EA)'s bluff when FIFA wanted like a billion for the naming rights.
It doesn't exactly scream "Shariah Compliant", no.
Why do people always connect saudi to Islam when it's pretty obvious no muslim other than Saudis likes the Saudi family as they are infamous for their practises. While even a slight hint at israel and Judaism or rich jewish assholes with judaism would get you down voted to the ground even when it's an appropriate callout.
Edit: I am not challenging the comment, i am just curious as to why. One reason I could think of is that jews are considered an ethnic group so they may not be religious at all but that could apply to any religion no?
The religious skirting around the doctrines of their faith for personal gain is a feature, not a bug.
The only part of the religion that matters is the part that lets them treat women as sex slaves anyways.

Hopefully it’s a leveraged buyout and this is the death of EA.

Edit: Haha I clicked the link and it really is an LBO.

It is a leveraged buyout.
- Yup I added an edit. LBOs should be illegal man. Just search how many companies have been bought like this and then driven out of business.
@dependencyinjection Let's hope their IPs are bought by companies that actually know what to do with them.

And the worst get worst-er

101 how to make your company’s bad public image even worse.

EA has basically been dead to me for a very long time, even though I know a couple of people who work there.

While the whole Saudi Arabia / Private Equity angle is terrible, part of me thinks/hopes/wishes that this is part of their whole sports-washing angle - and there is a slim but non-0 chance that there will be an improvement in the quality of their studio output over the next few years.

I’ll continue to avoid buying their games, but it would be nice to see those that still do not getting nickel-and-dimed as hard as they currently are.

Who knows, there is also the potential that this buyout backfires and Saudi’s human rights abuses become even more public knowledge as a result?

When times are as bad as they currently are, we have to hope.

I’d love to see the sports leagues pull their licenses

Y'all shouldn't be buying EA games anyway.

At this point, I see pirating The Sims as a moral imperative. There’s no reason the full game should be ~$1500.
- I downloaded every EA game ever made and I don't even want to play any of them. I have the files imprisoned on my computer, forever. Bwahahaha!
- $1500‽ What the fuck‽

I was already not buying their crap.

Now I can do so gleefully.

I set EA to Ignore on Steam two years ago. Ubisoft too.
They don't even make anything anymore. Just sports games, mobile games and Sims expansions.

I couldn't be more excited about what's ahead,” said Jared Kushner, Chief Executive Officer of Affinity Partners.

Because it just wouldn't be a story without a Trump family angle.

It saves so much time for him to be buying a failed company. It cuts out all the leg work he has to do.
If a company bought EA it would make sense if they were buying it for the IP. Someone who actually knows how to run a business could probably turn it around, but why is he buying it does he have another game studio that I'm not aware of?

Rest in piss, EA

If we're lucky, they'll do a Toys-R-Us and make EA fund it's own buyout.
- This is exactly what happened. To the tune of $20 billion.
  The EA studio slaughterhouse is about to go into overdrive.

Sail the high seas.

E A Sports. It’s in the shame!

For a preview of what happens, look at the embracer buyouts. This is essentially a funeral

Yup. Or Toys R Us, or Debenhams (UK), or any other number of LBOs which led to the death of the company.

Surely gamers will find it within themselves once in their lives to actually not buy garbage from a country that doesn’t even want them alive. Surely gamers, even though they’ve never been able to find it with themselves before, will somehow figure out how to do the right thing for once in their lives And not fund this shit country.

Surely this is the line in the sand.

Who the fuck am I kidding?

Haven't bought an EA game ever. I think I'm already ahead of the curve XD
- NHL 95 was awesome...
How many gamers bought Veilguard?
EDIT: I just checked and it looks like the only game EA released since Veilguard that was targeting the general gaming audience (i.e. wasn't a sports game, a Sims expansion or a mobile game) was Split Fiction. Battlefield 6 will be out in a couple of weeks so we'll see how that does.
Let's say gamers do that. The average EA/"Fifa" buyer will see the box art with Messi/Whoever and buy the fucking game.

going private with debt is a sign of upcoming bankruptcy, possibly dissolution. but with Kushner and the Saudis, probably more a sign of money laundering

Nah the Saudis are desperate to diversify. And they have the money to do it. I know it's leveraged but they'll see it through.

Just when you thought EA couldn’t suck worse they find a way!

Huge fucking yikes on the privacy side of things, if you didn’t learn from the other 100 negatives about this company…. Enjoy fucking yourself and the world. Stop feeding evil.

This is a genuine question and not a passive aggressive one: why make the submission a link to a social media post when that post is mostly just a link to a news site anyway? (you could include link to or even quote the commentary either in the submission body or a comment if you think it's a valuable addition)

edit: has since been answered in another comment orz, I opened this and then was talking to people for a while before commenting

The post replies also provide more context as someone that doesnt understand the legal lingo of the official article
To add to this, Jason Schreier is a well known, and well sourced, gaming journalist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Schreier
But you aren't wrong. There's no way to know that via Bluesky unless you've happen to read his stuff from Bloomberg and before. It's almost like Twitter is a terrible format for news or something...
- Hell yeah, Jason Schreier is thé GOAT !

I’m surprised that there isn’t any government organization that controls or oversees this kind of buyout, especially when so many billions are involved.

There is, but do you know who Jared Kushner is?
- His dad is the president of Nintendo!
- Is he a weed baron?

Holy shit, that is a lot of debt... EA is going to be absolutely gutted. I imagine the ones gutting it will be paid generously for the trouble though.

The new FIFA will be crazy. To celebrate a goal, you can now kill and dismember a sideline reporter.

Truly sad times

Not because of EA, but because of the private equity shit. They want to control everything

Guess I am not playing Battlefield 6 then…

Hop on the finals, my man, it's made by ex-DICE employees.
- How's the player count?

they don’t make good games anymore anyway

They've never made good games. They sometimes allowed one of their devs to make a good game when they weren't looking, but no one is perfect.
- FIFA 99, Need for Speed : Underground, The Sims 2, C&C : Red Alert 2, SSX3, Black and White, LOTR 2 & 3, Burnout 3, Battlefield Vietnam, ...
  There was a time when they were good, but they fell out of grace in the second half of the 2000s
- No, they made some bangers before going evil.
- They accidentally made a really good Star wars game several years ago, but when they noticed they abandoned it. All the reviews for it were basically along on the lines of, this is really good, but don't expect any updates.

I haven't bought an EA game since Mass Effect 3. This is just one more reason to never give them my money.

The first EA game I got was M.U.L.E. (circa mid 80's) for the Atari 800, the last was Battlefield 3. I was an avid supporter until they turned all greedy, I would have purchased many of their titles after BF3 if they were not such greedy devils.
When EA started it was focused on making the game developers 'rock stars' to attract and show appreciation for the good game developers. They lost that vision along the way to feeding their own selfishness.

EA has not been able to send the Auth Codes 2-factor to my e-mail with my own domain for ages.

The support (probably AI) sends me a link to a support article about 2-factor authorisation every time. EXACTLY THE ARTICLE WHERE YOU HAVE TO SCROLL ALL THE WAY DOWN TO CONTACT SUPPORT.

Huh.

So who's betting that EA dissolves over the next few years and they start passing their IPs around to other companies? Not sure how I feel about this because on one hand it could end with EA in the gutter and their dead franchises in the hands of companies that still know how to make games

You should be worried if you at all care about video games. Yes, EA sucks. But even a decade or so ago they were pretty much one of the big two and are still one of the biggest "developer" houses.
Because we already saw this play out with Embracer et al and increasingly with Microsoft. Video games are a horrible investment. If you make a "good game"and do all of your PR right and get REALLY lucky? Yeah, you can buy a yacht or twenty. But that comes after 2-8 years of expensive development with many points where you have to just keep throwing money at it in the hopes of success.
And EA was one of those companies that could get away with that because their sports games are so popular that they can fund development of the entire company AND still make a solid profit.
Because
it could end with EA in the gutter and their dead franchises in the hands of companies that still know how to make games
That isn't how this works. You don't say "Wow. Development is really expensive and has no guaranteed ROI. Let's fund external development that we have even less control over".
As Swen et al constantly remind people: Baldurs Gate 3 is not a model that studios can follow. It was a once in a lifetime convergence of circumstances. Larian had been making CRPGs for close to two decades at that point and had used multiple kickstarters to modernize their stack in a genre that had mostly been forgotten. And they STILL needed 3 years of early access and a LOT of marketing money (BG3 was a fricking keypoint of Stadia for crying out loud).
That isn't what Mass Effect or Dragon Age or Mirror's Edge will get. At best they will get cheap remasters by Nightdive (which would actually be nice but...). More likely they will get the kind of "Are you sure this isn't a mobile game? From the 2010s?" that we see plaguing Warhammer 40k and the like.
- It's a problem only for the AAA industry, The market is correcting. It's becoming clearer risky 200+ million dollar investments on one game that takes 8 years to make and flops on release isn't working. This year especially showed the AA/indie scene thriving, so maybe this will just encourage smaller scale projects and investments in smaller companies
I'm not sure that's the likeliest situation, given the Saudis' stake in so many other gaming companies. If memory serves, they've got in the neighborhood of a 10% stake in Nintendo and outright ownership of SNK.
I would be so happy, they own a lot of great IPs that are just rotting on the vine.

I was thinking about this deal and... I guess it makes sense the Saudis want in on the gaming industry. I recall a long while ago an old article about the industry (probably second hand via Polygon) that noted just how much Saudis whale on mobile and loot box games. It was so disproportionate, their nobility was like 2% of a mobile title's revenue... literally just a few big families.

So my thinking is, EA, being the kind of shitty company it is, is actually probably pretty popular among Saudi nobility. That and FIFA, of course --- imagine pay to win when you have infinite money.

I'm more cynical than that, I think it's that Kushner and the Saudis have both identified gamers as a group susceptible to be influenced by auth-right messaging, and they want a piece of that.
Makes me think why Houthis and the Iranians hate them. Not just sectarian but also wanton excesses of kingdom.
They lost the FIFA games...
- "Lost".
  They lost the fifa name, but fc is basically the same, and it still has all the players and club's in it soooo... Its just a name change sadly

Mmmhhh, The FIA president, an Emirati, recently consolidated all power and made himself dictator of the association. Now the Saudis bought EA, the publisher that releases the F1 game. Bet the next thing to happen is a Qatari will buy Formula One, the current owner has already stated that he is willing to sell for the right offer.

Luckily EA hasn't published anything I care about in over a decade. No big loss.

EA has been dead to me since the mid 2000's when they turned Battlefield 2, which I had purchased at full price, into a severely unbalanced Pay-To-Win game.
It only went downhill since then.
- Do I remember right that the special forces add-on was an online only purchase? I'm pretty sure the euro forces one was at least. I remember not having the new weapons for a long time until I could log in to my account on a friends computer with it installed.
As a big Star Wars fan this hurts though. The Jedi: Fallen Order and Survivor games where my favorite Star Wars content after Andor since Disney took over. I was looking forward to the last game in the trilogy. But I don't want these people to get any money and I'm also afraid that the project will be affected anyways :/

The idea of playing a new Mass Effect owned by Jared Kushner.

R.I.P Mass Effect.

It's resting since 2012, not peacefully though :/
They first zombified it in 2017 and now they're poking its corpse every few years on the 7th of november

A link to the article in the skeet. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250929186526/en/EA-Announces-Agreement-to-be-Acquired-by-PIF-Silver-Lake-and-Affinity-Partners-for-%2455-Billion

It was pretty dry, so I opted for the skeet instead.

So how long before the private equity firms strip mine EA for all it's worth, and force it to rent back it's offices, which force it to bankruptcy?

What do you mean "before"? This right now is the start of that.

So THAT'S why they allowed Battlefield 6 to be so good. Had to pump up those player interest numbers.

Had an EA Play so I could play NHL and FIFA, and the occasional ME Trilogy replay. Canceled it the moment the news broke about Kushner and the Saudis. Had paid for the year and was willing to sacrifice the final five months in the name of morality. But luckily they refunded me the difference.

Rest in peace Mass Effect.

Old BioWare did splinter into Archetype and are working on “Exodus.” I am not yet sold, but looks more like a harder sci-fi, since traveling at near FTL is actually one way time travel.

Hard, relativistic STL sci fi can still get super weird, see: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/48545a0f6352a
- Or Gundam.

Could it be that these guys are going to "Where are we going, Papa EA?" them in a few years?

(Can't find a link to the referenced comic on my phone but basically EA is known for buying up smaller studios and then closing them only a few years later after sucking them dry. This led to a comic of them taking little unsuspecting companies into the dark woods to end them.)

Can't find a link to the referenced comic
Got you covered, fam.
There's other versions around as well and I have no idea which is the original. Just replace "Bioware" with any studio that EA has purchased and chances are there is a version of this comic that followed that news.

I won't be purchasing anything EA.

Wait, can I still play Skate or Die! on my Commodore 64?

Meme:

Ea: was I a good game company.

Grim Reaper: No!

Weird how everyone is mad or upset about EA going out of business. I look at this as a positive. EA makes 90% shit games and 10% games that are unique or could be good that I refuse to buy on the grounds that it is still owned by EA.

If the few decent IPs get sold off to a different company I might actually buy it as long as it's not one of the other mega shit companies. At least now there's a chance.

You can bid the chance of having (good) Mass Effect games good bye.

Pretty sure that ship sailed like 10 years ago.
- I liked Andromeda.
This is apparently a game made by some of the old guard at BioWare.
Reminds me a bit of Andromeda mixed with ME1. Less focus on being part of a military organization from what I see.
https://www.exodusgame.com/en-US

Wow did not see this coming. Saudi Arabia is desperate to diversify so from that angle it makes sense. Kushner wants in lol. That's a big buyout though. Well, things are going to get weird.

From the articles linked elsewhere this is between PIF (Saudi Arabia), Silver lake (American), and affinity partners (Jared kushner)

From wiki about affinity partners:

Kushner's firm received commitments of more than $3 billion by the end of 2021 to invest in American and Israeli companies that are expanding in India, Africa, the Middle East and other parts of Asia. The largest investor by some margin is the Saudi government's sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, which has allocated $2bn of its nearly with Kushner stating that he hopes to open an "investment corridor between Saudi Arabia and Israel",[2][3] seen internationally as a "sign of warming ties between two historic rivals".[4] Officials who headed the Public Investment Fund objected to investing in Kushner's firm, but Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman overruled those officials.[5]

So basically EA got tired of watching Ubisoft and Nintendo fight over who is worse and dropped a nuke.

EA, Its not in the game

Why is an anti-Semitic meme the picture for this post? Did a Jewish CEO buy the company?

That's the profile picture for the reporter whose bluesky post this links to.
- Saw that. I thought the article poster was being racist.

Take Two is next.

Damn, it really happened. Crazy.

So romance options...

HAH! the sims is about to get nuked
They will be fine. Y'all need to choose a side. MBS himself had to step in to make sure this deal happened when officials stooped it as it was investing in Israeli companies too. He doesn't give af about shariah.

It'll be interesting seeing how the worst games company manages to find a way to become even worse.

How much couch money do I need to acquire Westwood's NoX out of this?

I wonder if there’s any entities that they do partnerships with that have provisions in their contracts against this, curious if the sports leagues do. They’re notoriously protective of their IPa and rights