According to a new report, Electronic Arts' (EA) new owners are going to utilize AI in order to cut costs and boost profits.

I’m sure that the new Saudi owners and Jared Kushner will be looking into hacking up human developer cost by any means necessary.

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16114d

Oh man, this is hilarious from the outside because I’ve worked for private equity before. They are the biggest hype bros that exist. They are in their own reality every time. They can see something as small as a random tweet and think that it’s the truth. There’s no way this goes well for them.

2 examples. Long story but if you want to hear how smart “Private equity” is in tech, here are my two anecdotal experiences:

First, I was an engineer on a project that we were wrapping up a major “V2” rewrite of. We were weeks from finishing this now year long project. They came and asked “How long until released” and I said a month until clients can start using the beta. (Padding a week or so just in case). They didn’t just come back and say “You have a 2-3 weeks”, they came back and said “You have 1 week because we have signed contracts saying that it’ll be ready by then”. What. I was the head engineer. On whose authority did they do that? Who told them it would be ready? Of course no one, they just said it should be done, engineers lazy, they super smart. The project isn’t done in time of course, clients pissed, and they fired the dev team. I hear a year later the entire org had shuttered. They pissed away the entire investment.

Second, again working leading up a major project, a whole new idea in the fintech space. Team is jazzed. We push for 9 months and we release - zero bugs, not a cent lost, we test scaling and we should be able to handle millions of users - we’re ready. We release to… zero fanfare. None. We had no idea what was happening, we’re engineers so we’re used to it but no one cared. Turns out we were being acquired! Hooray said the investors! So much money! The other company claims to be doing what we are already… interesting since we had a novel idea. So we merge, and we decide to do a bakeoff (test each product against each others). Ours of course passes. Theirs tips over after 100 users. Ruby on Rails monolith, they’ve never had more than 100 users. Turns out they just slapped some stuff on a postgres database and called it a fintech product. Business investors at the top high five, show off how much money they’re going to make. Same thing, our loyal customers who were excited for our product got pissed and left. They lied to everyone else about the product just like the other place, the lies eventually caught up, and the stock tanked. Now they have two worthless companies. From what I heard they didn’t make a single sale in Q1 or Q2 of this year, and are shuttering the offices and moving engineering to India. Typical big brain business move.

Never work for private equity. If you ever get bought by private equity immediately start planning your exit. This is a card game to them, they’re sitting at the table in Vegas and are doing anything they can to make it look like the company is valuable just long enough to con someone else into buying it. If they make any profit it will go to them, the company will not see a dime of it. Your budgets will be less than shoestring, you will not have bonuses or dinners out, everything goes to them. You immediately are replaceable, with any, and I mean any developer or AI bullshit being able to replace you. Everyone at EA should be looking for new jobs right now.

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14d

Yeah. I’ve been a part of two companies acquired by private equity, and the playbook is to cut all spending on employees through any means. Slow pay all vendors until they won’t work with you. Kill product development. Raise prices in predatory fashion. And… while the books briefly look good and before it all falls apart in a few years… sell to someone.

Both times, it did not work. Well, I guess it worked for whoever sold the company to private equity. And I guess the private equity installed leadership of tall confident sounding idiots made big salaries and bonuses, which is nice. I’m just not sure where the money came from. If I understand capitalism, it probably came from our taxes somehow.

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514d

It’s such a well known play now, I keep wondering who would possibly think buying from private equity is a good thing

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414d

A sucker is born every minute.

Alaknár
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714d

Well, it’s good to the management that sells the company. They get paid.

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2714d

I’m imagining that picture with ea as death visiting Westwood and bioware etc.

But to the left you see ea death is in its own room and opening the door is the figure of private equity. A bloodstained tzeentchian nightmare screeching from the void.

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814d

If Bioware wasn’t already dead from the corporate bullshit that was Dragon Age 4 (and that comes from me who still found enjoyment in DA4), then this is. I doubt that Mass Effect 5 game will ever see the light of day.

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214d

But you think ME4 will?

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814d

ME4 was Andromeda.

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13d

Kinda. But that’s like saying Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel was 3, and 3 was 4, even though 4 just came out, and isn’t 5.

Ostensibly, they’re actually working on ME4 which would be labeled thusly.

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314d

We have no official name, the bloggers and media are calling it Mass Effect 5, it’s the fifth Mass Effect game, this is just pedantics now. Until there’s a title, Mass Effect five is perfectly fine.

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114d

Except I’ve only seen it called Mass Effect Four.

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614d

First story is not exclusive to private equity. Sales and even business owners have no idea how long things take. We once had a project that would take about a year, sales signed the contract to be done in like 1 month. The saving grace was the client delayed their start date, giving us the time we needed. Another one: guy buys an old building with plans to tear it down and build a new one. Tells the news “we’ll break ground next month”. Two years later they break ground.

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714d

This is a card game to them, they’re sitting at the table in Vegas and are doing anything they can to make it look like the company is valuable just long enough to con someone else into buying it.

It’s not even a card game, it’s lotto scratchers.

A card game implies they give thought and treat each situation unique and change strategies

They’re buying billion dollar companies left and right hoping for a quick payday because they’re obsessed with watching their bank account numbers go up.

primrosepathspeedrun
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-114d

Private equity is why y9u should never rely on a paid or profit service.

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