It’s official: EA is going private.
The leveraged buyout will be financed by a staggering $20 billion of debt, which likely means some *aggressive* cost cutting is ahead for EA in the coming months and years.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250929186526/en/EA-Announces-Agreement-to-be-Acquired-by-PIF-Silver-Lake-and-Affinity-Partners-for-%2455-Billion
In a deal involving a company owned by Jared Kushner, a company that is basically just the Saudis, and $20B of debt.
They had a reputation for buying better companies to own the IPs and gutting the teams before the late 2000s. It’s sort of cathartic seeing that happen to them now, but not really because all the shitheels who made those decisions will probably be getting a nice payout while the actually workers will just get kicked to the curb.
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.
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
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…
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.
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.
No idea, I refused to even entertain the idea of purchasing it after EA pressured everyone to buy it by putting them at a disadvantage against those who bought it and even kicking them out of a server if it changed maps to an SF map. EA hasn’t gotten a penny from me since.
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 :/
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
No, they made some bangers before going evil.
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
They had a reputation for buying better companies to own the IPs and gutting the teams before the late 2000s. It’s sort of cathartic seeing that happen to them now, but not really because all the shitheels who made those decisions will probably be getting a nice payout while the actually workers will just get kicked to the curb.
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.
Eh some of their stuff from the 80s was pretty groovy.
Didn’t they make Archon?
Yeah Archon, the Might & Magic series, Road Rash etc.
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
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 !
The post replies also provide more context as someone that doesnt understand the legal lingo of the official article
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.
No idea, I refused to even entertain the idea of purchasing it after EA pressured everyone to buy it by putting them at a disadvantage against those who bought it and even kicking them out of a server if it changed maps to an SF map. EA hasn’t gotten a penny from me since.
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 :/
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.
It’s only about 20% debt.
The word “only” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
Leveraged buy outs are usually at least 50% debt.
I was already not buying their crap.
Now I can do so gleefully.
They don’t even make anything anymore. Just sports games, mobile games and Sims expansions.
I set EA to Ignore on Steam two years ago. Ubisoft too.
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?
And the worst get worst-er
101 how to make your company’s bad public image even worse.
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.
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?
Wasn’t that Qatar?
You are not wrong and I am.
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.
Yeah. There’s domestic pressure for this anyway, unfortunately.
Maybe they’ll remove the gambling. Probably not but it would be good if they did.
It doesn’t exactly scream “Shariah Compliant”, no.
The only part of the religion that matters is the part that lets them treat women as sex slaves anyways.
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.
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.
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.
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…
Fair, EA abandonware is pretty good. Anything currently actively being developed (2010s onward) is not worth playing.
If it doesn’t have the cube, sphere and cone, stay away.
Let’s say gamers do that. The average EA/“Fifa” buyer will see the box art with Messi/Whoever and buy the fucking game.
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.
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.
E A Sports. It’s in the shame!
Just when you thought EA couldn’t suck worse they find a way!
Just when you think EA can’t get any shittier, they find another way to lower the bar.
EA 0.00052 seconds after hearing Nintendo is the worst game company…
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.
So we won’t even get a shitty titanfall 3?
Titanfall is cooked. They’re 100% killing the servers. I guess we’ll have to go back to the northstar client.
And now we wait for the potential “spiritual successor” 🤞 .
You mean Diesel Knights?
All I want is more BT 😢
Why does it even matter? Why would you buy it?
I wouldn’t buy it if it was bad, but any form of titanfall 3 would at least be something
Toys R Us anyone?
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.