In a deal involving a company owned by Jared Kushner, a company that is basically just the Saudis, and $20B of debt.
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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.
This is exactly what happened. To the tune of $20 billion.
The EA studio slaughterhouse is about to go into overdrive.
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?
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.
Makes me think why Houthis and the Iranians hate them. Not just sectarian but also wanton excesses of kingdom.
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.
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
Take Two is next.
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
How much couch money do I need to acquire Westwood’s NoX out of this?
E A Sports. It’s in the shame!
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
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
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 would be so happy, they own a lot of great IPs that are just rotting on the vine.
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.
Honestly to me it seems like nothing has actually changed, except the names of the teams behind critically acclaimed games.
Like, your point about being an indie developer being hard is, well, just ask anyone who was making indie games 1, 2, or even 3 decades ago. It’s always been a lottery where 1-3 games a year hit it big and the rest can only barely fund themselves.
Though I do think you have a good point about asking what PP considers AAA. Something I’ve noticed is that there’s a bunch of people who, for whatever reason, see some big AAA release and act like it’s not AAA because it’s the first time they’ve heard of the studio / publisher. BG3 is the most obvious example of this (~400 people from my search). Expedition 33 also outsourced a ton of it’s work so it also gets paraded around as “only 30 devs!”. It’s especially frustrating that people will call these games a “wake up call” for AAA studios as if it’s not a huge risk.
Though I don’t think EA (and from what I’ve seen Ubisoft) dying this slow death is a herald of the industry at large dying. We’re seeng a lot more publishers that try to carve out their own little corner of the industry, such as NewBlood, Iron Gate, Hooded Horse, and as you mention Kepler. They’re funding and releasing plenty of successful titles. I think there’s space for, and already space taken, for various publishers to fill the same position as EA did in it’s prime.
You also seem to take this argument that these megapublishers are a prerequisite to having people with proper gamedev skills? As I see it, that’s either not changing, is effecting nearly every industry in NA & EU, or just not a thing. Valve, for example, when making Half Life, realized their game sucked when they were most of the way through development because they were learning as they went. So they scrapped most of what they built and what they remade is what we know as HL1, and that’s well over 2 decades ago. To my understanding Sandfall did a similar thing with E33 but what I saw on the subject might have been embellished and/or I’m misremembering.
Like, your point about being an indie developer being hard is, well, just ask anyone who was making indie games 1, 2, or even 3 decades ago. It’s always been a lottery where 1-3 games a year hit it big and the rest can only barely fund themselves.
No, it really hasn’t. At least, on the PC side.
if we go back to the 80s and 90s? SO much of what has defined video games actually were indie games. You just needed to call up a magazine and ask if you could put your game on their demo disk (often actually a floppy at those points…) or let the ten people on usenet know you had a BBS with games on it. Probably the most famous example of that is fricking DOOM but so much of what EA would acquire, fail to make a good sequel to, and kill, came out of that mindset.
Then the early 00s were heavily characterized by mods being heavily platformed by the larger studios (a decent number of modern day studios actually came out of Make Something Unreal), demo discs getting even bigger (because now they were CDs), and the rise of The Internet meaning that it was possible for small publishers (fucking Strategy First) to do direct to consumer sales and games like Mount & Blade and later Minecraft being directly sold as direct downloads to sickos.
Then we had Steam and… okay let’s ignore the Steam Greenlight program because that was just bad. But it mostly removed the barrier and made direct to consumer sales almost trivial. And it made it REALLY “easy” to show that you had a solid game to make that pitch meeting for the “last few years” of development a lot easier. More on that in a bit.
And as games became more expensive to create (if you tried to sell Soldat today… well, just go look at Soldat on Steam), publishers were more and more needed. Sometimes as blatant “Embracer published this” and sometimes as “just” investments that never really get disclosed but leads to weirdness where one pissy investor means a game can never be sold again.
Which gets back to the 2020s. Economic uncertainty and the realization that “just fund this studio for 10 years” guarantees nothing have made it a wasteland. Again, plenty of developers have been very open about this. NoClip even did a series of lite documentaries about their attempts to go through the process of making a game and it is bleak (Danny repeatedly compared it to being on Tinder… Which raises a few questions but I am sure somebody told him how much being single sucks). There is less and less money to go around and it is more and more going to the surest of sure things. All but guaranteed to make back the money and then some? Yeah, but this studio is promising us a 5x return so…
Which gets to Hooded Horse et al. I fucking LOVE Hooded Horse and Kitfox and so forth (still not sure how Microprose suddenly came out of nowhere to become just as big a part of my entertainment as they were… 30 years ago). It is also very worth understanding that they are mostly swooping in on games that have been in development for 4-10 years and just need some money to dedicate time to polishing things up and making assets (Caves of Qud and Dwarf Fortress are great examples of this). Or are devs/studios with MASSIVE pedigrees and, quite often, the rights to remaster/re-sell their back catalog (this is more a Microprose thing).
Which gets back to the role of major studios.
Valve, for example, when making Half Life, realized their game sucked when they were most of the way through development because they were learning as they went. So they scrapped most of what they built and what they remade is what we know as HL1, and that’s well over 2 decades ago
HL1 was published by Sierra and fronted by former Microsoft devs (you ever wonder why GabeN gets off on sticking it to Windows?). They had a start-up funded by independently wealthy developers and, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Life_(video_game)#Development, one million (1990s) dollars advance and STILL involved going into potentially serious debt to make.
Which, again: Technical abilities developed on someone else’s dime. Good chunk of cash from getting in early on the rise of frigging Microsoft. And publishers who would throw (doing rough inflation math) about 2 million dollars at a project because “why not”.
And… you know how publishers got the money to do that? Sierra was a frigging powerhouse in the 90s. So much of the adventure genre was kinda just them and they had already branched out to strategy, party games, delicious copaganda, etc. Like… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sierra_Entertainment_video_games
Everyone loves the idea of someone making something truly ground breaking in their basement with scraps. The reality is that we mostly see evolutions and deep dives on existing games. But what people often forget is that the thing that takes a game to the next level is almost always very experienced developers. And… most of them tend to have some time at a major studio under their belt where they can learn the dos and don’ts and so forth. Get rid of those major studios and suddenly everyone is dependent on finding the right online tutorial and not realizing that the old hats who make said tutorials and come in to “take things to the next level” are all retiring or changing industries for the same reasons those major studios are getting gutted.
And also… the reality is that the Terrarias and Quds of the world are incredibly rare. Mostly we get complete jank fests that barely function and are clearly just someone’s wank fantasy.
I am not saying people need to feel horrible over the death of EA (although… you probably SHOULD considering how many people they employ and how they still make some certified bangers). But this “Fuck it, this massive industry pillar collapsing will have no impact on the industry as a whole” is just plain naivety.
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.
And the worst get worst-er
101 how to make your company’s bad public image even worse.
Luckily EA hasn’t published anything I care about in over a decade. No big loss.
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 :/
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.
Right before bf6… well o7
Is this better or worse than being a public company?
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.
He apparently has several ships, which is several more than most people can afford.
That number for the rest of us being, of course, none.
Well, I can probably afford a small RC boat or something. Not quite the same caliber that could carry humans on the ocean, but more than nothing I guess.
Dangit, now I want to look up how much a model yacht would cost and if I could afford to brag “I’ve got a small fleet of yachts”…
Gabe Newell is basically a benevolent dictator. Valve is proof that private companies have the potential to not completely suck and publicly traded ones basically always seem to suck.
Its just that usually private ones suck as well.
The issue at any scale beyond “local store” is that eventually your customers and transactions become impersonal numbers on a sheet. It’s hard to remember the human on the other side when there’s just too many of them for our brain to actually process as such.
At that point, the drive for profit inherent to our system and essential for subsistence can’t be checked by intuitive empathy alone any more. It requires conscious effort, diligent reflection and the will to be customer-friendly.
When the least scrupulous end up having the most money and owning majorities of private companies, it’s hardly any wonder most of them suck.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
It’s crossplay, so it’s harder to directly estimate, but using SteamDB (so not counting being matchmade with console players) roughly 15-20k playing at any given time.
Better than I thought it would be. (Steam population is all that matters to me, thanks.)
Need a new FPS cause I’m bored of Marvel Rivals/Overwatch, PUBG, and CoD Mobile. I’ll check it out, thanks. (Fingers crossed they did Rush right this time. It hasn’t been fun since Bad Company 2.)
