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?
Titanfall is cooked. They’re 100% killing the servers. I guess we’ll have to go back to the northstar client.
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.
It would be interesting if EA pulled away from lootboxes for their owner's ideological reasons.
Maybe they'll remove the gambling. Probably not but it would be good if they did.
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.
Basically Tesla, oof
This shit needs to be made illegal. All it does is kill off businesses. Sears and JoAnn Fabrics both died to this trash.
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.
Rest in piss, EA
If we're lucky, they'll do a Toys-R-Us and make EA fund it's own buyout.
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?
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...
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.
The new FIFA will be crazy. To celebrate a goal, you can now kill and dismember a sideline reporter.
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.
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?
His dad is the president of Nintendo!
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.
Just when you thought EA couldn’t suck worse they find a way!
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.
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.
Luckily EA hasn't published anything I care about in over a decade. No big loss.
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.
Truly sad times
Not because of EA, but because of the private equity shit. They want to control everything
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?
I haven't bought an EA game since Mass Effect 3. This is just one more reason to never give them my money.
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.)
I won't be purchasing anything EA.
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.
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