Just when you think EA can't get any shittier, they find another way to lower the bar.
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2025
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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
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.
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Rest in piss, EA
If we're lucky, they'll do a Toys-R-Us and make EA fund it's own buyout.
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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...
The new FIFA will be crazy. To celebrate a goal, you can now kill and dismember a sideline reporter.
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?
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
It’s a problem only for the AAA industry,
No, it really isn't. Rather than just regurgitate what the "video game devs hate you but I love you so give me money" twitch streamers continue to say, actually listen to some developers.
Xalavier Nelson Jr has been pretty vocal about how incredibly hard it is to be an indie dev these days. And Strange Scaffold (his studio) is pretty much exactly what everyone says they want: They release REALLY interesting games on budget with no DLC. And people "wait for sales". Which makes pitch meetings REALLY difficult which, in turn, makes getting more funding to keep making games REALLY difficult. And that is for a very established studio with a solid portfolio. Let alone actual new developers who are finding their funding cut or cancelled over the past five or six years.
I'll also add on: What you are seeing are not "AAA games". At this point? You basically have the GTAs and Call of Duties and Star Citizen and MAYBE some of the higher profile Sony games that fit that bucket. The AAA market more or less died with THQ where they released a string of games that were REALLY good but just couldn't justify the development costs.
What we are mostly seeing are what would historically be considered AA/A games. Large scale games made by (ass pulling) O(10) headcounts with a LOT of money and MAYBE a support studio or very heavy contractor usage if they are more AA. And that is the market that is increasingly being destroyed. Which mostly leaves the "B Game" studios and the "I spent the past 10 years making this in my free time" indie studios and... I shouldn't have to explain why the latter is not sustainable.
And just to highlight this: Geoff Keighley has decided his latest obsession is bragging about how small studios are because he is, and always has been, an obnoxious prick who actively hurts the industry. And one of his favorite things to bang on is Sandfall's Clair Obscur. Which is a truly amazing game... that increasingly can't be made anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Obscur:_Expedition_33#Development
Founded by devs who had been heavily trained by the Ubisoft pipeline and all the benefits of working for a massive super studio. Questionable amounts of funding from Kepler Interactive in 2023 (right before the pandemic) that was used to headhunt LOTS of developers from major super-studios/publishers. And then they used said funding to hire "dozens" more contractors.
Clair Obscur is an "indie" game in the sense that Sandfall don't have long term obligations. But it was made by easily over a hundred people with major publisher investments. And, much like with my example of Larian above, much of the staff and techniques were trained on other games over the course of literally decades. Like, we ALL shat on Mindseye and the idea that "someone who looked at GTA is gonna make a GTA" and so forth. That IS what Clair Obscur was. It was just successful (in large part because more traditional JRPGs are on the decline and many people in The West had been ignoring it... so even more parallels to BG3).
As more and more of those publishers die off or are only interested in VERY short term investments? That money goes out the window. And as the major studios/super-studios like EA get shuttered? That pipeline that allowed Broche et al to understand enough about large scale project management to make their own games goes out the window. And more and more developers leave the industry because they need to live. Which means all the "I've been animating for 12 years" are gone and it is just the fiver crowd who need to "build out a portfolio" for one of the very few remaining jobs.
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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.
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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 was pretty dry, so I opted for the skeet instead.
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.
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?
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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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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.
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I won't be purchasing anything EA.
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.
So basically EA got tired of watching Ubisoft and Nintendo fight over who is worse and dropped a nuke.
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]
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