It's official: EA is going private.

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.

Good riddance. I hope by "private" they mean we won't hear from them again--they're a very private company, they keep to themselves, and never say anything. That sort of private.

(I know that's not what it means)

Couldn't happen to a nicer company

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.

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.

And the worst get worst-er

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

Is this better or worse than being a public company?

This specific instance? Worse.
It's being bought by blood money (Kushner's $2billion investment/bribe to hush up the US government about the brutal murder of a US resident journalist at the hands of the Saudis). Plus a country that somehow is even more squeamish about content than the US is in charge - look forward to way more censorship.
Depends. This is a leveraged buyout and there are countless examples of other companies bought like this and they don’t last long.
They take on massive debt to buy it. Then they shift that debt to the company they bought and away from the individuals. Then that company is crippled paying down interest so they can’t innovate (not that EA did), then they’ll have to cut costs and the product will diminish. Likely pay out billions in dividends to the buyers can make profit and in 5-10 years EA will go bust or get sold again.
The banks will be left holding the bag, but probably covered their loses by that time so can write off the rest of the debt.
Reddit, and by extension Lemmy, have this infatuated vision of how private companies are actually great for customers because whenever somebody asks about Steam the explanation given is that if this were a publicly traded company it would be horrendous but because it's private everything is perfect and there are rainbows inside their offices.
The truth is EA will be just as aggressively profit driven as it already is, the new owners will try to reduce costs just like always, and IPs that sell more will continue to be prioritized just like before.
- Essentially a private company can be owned by a dickhead, or a nice person who's not all about profitmaxing. A publicly traded company is forced to maximize shareholder value.
  Valve as a publicly traded company would quickly become another EA/Microsoft/Whatever, because it's only the next quarter that matters. Valve under GabeN has been built to bring in large, and yet sustainable profits.
  EA's new owners are going to be the absolute worst. So it's going to be a worse company than before.
  Consider that Erik Prince's murder-for-hire company is private. So is Xitter now that Melon bought it.
  So it's not that private companies are better, but rather that they have the capacity to be better. And it all depends on the owners.
- The reason Steam is less bad is that its president is less of a dick. The reason that works is because he's not beholden to other shareholders, because he's the majority owner himself. If they were publicly owned, he wouldn't have the liberties to make long-term decisions instead of (only) short-term money grabs.
  But his decisions most likely aren't the result of some bleeding heart morality so much as a less shortsighted profit calculation. Newell is still a billionaire, and not just because of the assets Valve owns. He apparently has several ships, which is several more than most people can afford. He also owns a custom yacht manufacturing company, which is also a lot more than most people can afford (both the products and the company). He might not be as all-around awful as other billionaires, but you don't get this rich through your own work alone.
  Private ownership isn't a guarantor of customer-friendly behaviour. It just eliminates one factor forcing companies to prioritise profits, but it can't replace customer protection regulations and oversight.
Depends on your perspective.
This is bad from a business, creativity, and human rights standpoint.
However, it's good that a shitty company like EA with predatory products is going to be even more exploitative and predatory from here on out.
I enjoy watching the useful idiots get taken for a ride.
- Haven’t bought an EA game in over a decade. Don’t intend to change that anytime soon.
Public companies have a hard wired compulsion to increase value for shareholders. Every single decision is made with profit in mind. In the best cases you get milquetoast, inoffensive material everyone can enjoy. Ultimately, this leads to a relentless and aggressive pursuit of endless growth at any cost.
Private companies can take a loss here and there, they don't have to report a bad quarter and so they can plan ahead. Which allows them to do two, non explains things. That approach allows them to build a robust and loyal consumer base which is quite valuable. So they'll sell it off again and let the public companies milk them dry. They can also get up to some horrendously evil shit behind closed doors in a foreign country where the laws only apply to people who aren't the ruling family and never have to answer for it. Though that kind of thing is usually reserved for like, chemical manufacturers and labor intensive luxury food markets. It may be that the Saudis are just diversifying and want a propaganda mouthpiece. Or one of the royals REALLY likes FIFA.
Hard to say.
Yes.
If it's gone public, then generally going private is a bad thing. It's usually some investors that are going to do something bad with the company.
A company that starts and stays private may be all the better for it (but that's hardly assured either). If they are a success and didn't bring a lot of investors, then it generally means they actually care about the work intrinsically.

Sail the high seas.

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 🤬
It’s the workers who pay the price for the greed of the CEOs, shareholders, and the new owners.
Basically Tesla, oof

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

I gave up on EA a long time back, and them not making Alice: Asylum was the final nail in their coffin.

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!
- Yeah but we can also make a FOSS version of PlantsvsZombies & Sims
- $1500‽ What the fuck‽

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.
- 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.
- Toys R Us anyone?
- So we won't even get a shitty titanfall 3?
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.
- Buy now 20 Jamales one gold drops guaranteed 40% discount.
- What are the odds of getting the golden jet in your ultimate team?
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.
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?
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.
The religious skirting around the doctrines of their faith for personal gain is a feature, not a bug.
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.

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.

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.

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.

Truly sad times

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

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

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.

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.

E A Sports. It’s in the shame!

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.

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.
- Eh some of their stuff from the 80s was pretty groovy.
- 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 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

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.

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?
- Is he a weed baron?
- His dad is the president of Nintendo!

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.

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

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

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?

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

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

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.

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

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

Meme:

Ea: was I a good game company.

Grim Reaper: No!

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 personally don't care that huge companies that make bland boring flash stuff every year get thrown around to even crappier companies. I never bought their games, and will continue to not buy them. when I hear these games move to another company, I'll assume they are just as crap and avoid them too.
- It's not so much about the shovelware crap they release every year, but rather about the IPs that they own but aren't doing anything with.
I would be so happy, they own a lot of great IPs that are just rotting on the vine.

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 :/

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.

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.

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.

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.
Dude what?
- Nevermind it’s the reporters selfie. I thought this was a racist joke against EA.

What difference does this make honestly? They’re already a shit company, what do I care who owns them?

EA, Its not in the game

I won't be purchasing anything EA.

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

Take Two is next.

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.

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]

Right before bf6… well o7

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

Damn, it really happened. Crazy.

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?

So romance options...

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.
HAH! the sims is about to get nuked

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