Well that’s the end of EA. The owners will tear it apart and bleed it dry.
People have been predicting the death of EA for over twenty years.
Meanwhile, they release another Madden and another FIFA and another Sims and another Star Wars, then mint themselves another $7B. Nevermind that all of these games are just reskinned copies of the games they’ve been releasing going back to the mid-90s.
Yesn’t.
That may have been somewhat true in the past, but it is hard to articulate just how big of a hole they are in right now. The leveraged buyout has pushed EA’s debt to over $20Billion USD.
They make that money back or they might not, but they are going to absolutely pillage and destroy the company in the process. The word that often follows “leveraged buyout” is “bankruptcy”. It’s a tale as old as corporate history.
Maybe. But there’s an enormous amount of money to wring out of EA, even with the debts. And you can go back decades to read about their deplorable labor practices. This isn’t even the first time EA has been subjected to this kind of aggressive cash hungry squeeze.
Wait when was the last time they were leveraged for $20B?
Another Sims? Don’t be daft. They’ll release another Sims DLC and get all the money with much less effort.
Seriously, 4 has been a cash cow for over a decade now, with biannual expansion packs.
I bought battlefield 6 still enjoy it. And I bought the first year college football came back. But haven’t bought one since. And have hardly touched it. Game was much harder than the old days
I did a buad report on EA going on 20 years ago. TLDR they’re basically Martin Shkreli but a corporation.
Like Martin Shkreli in that they’ll increase the price of a life-saving drug 20x without consequences, or like Martin Shkreli in that they’ll go to prison for defrauding rich investors?
Seriously fucked up that the second was considered a crime, but not the first, in Shkreli’s case.
Probably the former as I doubt defrauding a Saudi prince would result in mere incarceration.
Fair, though since it was a leveraged buyout, I reckon it would be JP Morgan Chase who’d be getting defrauded. The only question is whether MBS wants that kind of image for the saudi PIF.
Essentially, MBS and Kushner would find a way to spin all the valuable IPs into other companies and leave only the debt and maybe some IPs at EA Games. Then it becomes a worthless company that owes JPMorgan Chase 20 billion with a fairly high interest rate.
Well, the natural evolution from “keep on squeezing existing IP without inventing anything new” is "“keep in squeezing long published games without publishing any new games” .
Good riddance
lol this guy thought that was EA’s final form! /s
I don’t care what they do. Even if I hadn’t already been boycotting EA for 10+ years, I’d never install Saudi-owned ring-0 “anticheat” software on any of my computers.
Boycott harder!
Well my days is not buying EA products are certainly coming to a middle.
Do you know, why EA is the worst company in the whole US of A? It’s because Ubisoft is in France.
Good one!
Anyone who did not see this coming is an idiot.
EA is… in a loooot of debt lol. Thats why they needed a buy out.
It takes a lot of money to make the same games for 25 years straight, change the front logo, the names of the players, make tiny tweaks and market it.
Maybe they need to start releasing Sims 2025, 2026, etc.
I will never forgive EA for destroying Maxis.
The problem is that they actually needed that much money for such mediocre games. They poured money into it and still made it an inferior game.
Sims was actually fun at the time… Until they did all the expansions
But, I really wish it was black and white. That was the best game
Black & White would have worked so well with VR.
It worked well even without it
We shouldn’t have to remove the ladder for the pool in the Sims or play with fireworks. Should be able to pick them up and throw them
Oh I’m not disputing that the game we got was a good one, just that it seems like such an obvious concept for VR. I thought the sequel was disappointing. Focused entirely too much on warfare as the only viable strategy, and I missed the variety of wacky side quests and secrets scattered around the maps.
They are in a lof of debt because of the buy out.
They’re also in a lot of debt from making dog shit for the last 15 years.
They’ve been making dogshit for a lot longer than that.
They used to have good games in addition to the dogshit ones. Now it’s just the dogshit. Though to me the cutoff was 14 years ago, when they made the last Mass Effect game.
Touché.
Kind of yes, but actually no.
We just see that debt now, its explicit.
EA … was subject to a leveraged buy out, that they sought out. They did this… because they needed cash, now.
What that means is that their internal financials were an absolute shit show… that they had, up untill that point, basically just legally lied about, hid, downplayed.
They fluffed up their balances and returns and cashflows in ways that are legal to do, but if you actually do due dilligence, you could read the writing on the wall.
Its basically the same as any other US company that got bought out / sold itself to private equity in the last 10 or 15 years.
Difference is, EA is so huge, it had to be bought out by essentially a sovereign wealth fund.
They’ve not had a lot of success in the 2020s except for sports games they obviously pay a lot of money in licensing fees for.
The Sims.
You do not want to know how many ‘dlc’ there are for your digital dollhouse.
As well as entire community of enthusiastic corporate boot lickers with a ‘cozy’ aesthetic.
Shit company gets worse
A lot of people are glancing over the fact that now a country is running this Video Game company. I’m not betting that the Saudis will: Open up old IPs, take care of labor costs, respect the players, not install spyware onto customer’s machines and report their party affiliation or any government secrets stored on said machine.
If you didn’t trust EA being run by a private company then I bet you won’t trust EA being ran by a government.
Games are essentially attack vectors with kernal level access to your computer.
The united States is looking at doing something about Chinese gaming companies, yet we are okay with handing over what is essentially a back door over to the Saudis.
I just think its weird what malware we are okay with.
Games are essentially attack vectors with kernal level access to your computer.
Some games, with very specific anticheat. Let’s not spread misinformation.
That being said, yeah I don’t get it either - I refused to play Valorant for this reason.
All games with kernel level anticheat, that isnt’t open souce.
There, fixed it for you.
Kernel level AC is literally a root kit, in some cases also a boot kit.
It has never made any sense to allow this shit on your computer. Sorry if marketing convinced you otherwise.
I mean even games without anti-cheat are attack vectors. Some 18 year old kid is going to prison because his game stole crypto.
Also that’s pretty much what I was explaining, I just assumed everyone already knows what I’m talking about. I wouldnt say its misinformation, just lazy short hand and me expecting the audience here to be caught up enough to know what I mean.
Even worse: Jared Kushner is involved as well.
The Saudi Absolute Monarchy aren’t exactly know for their concern for the average person or their ability in managing anything that’s not the kind of business which is basically a self-operating money printing machine, like Oil.
They paid 53 bil for something that has only 300 mil /year in profits?
A 200 year ROI (interest on the 20 bil loan for the leveraged buyout that ea itself will need to pay) doesn’t seems too bad
CEO Andrew Wilson is set for a massive payday. The company’s last SEC filing before going private pointed to a $77 million payout for the last fiscal year, double the number that was previously reported.
One of the finer aspects of unfettered capitalism.
That’s actually crazy.
For reference, Split Fiction’s development cost was ~$40 million USD over ~3-4 years, ~75 devs. That’s one of EA’s better games, and not cheap.
Yearly, $77 million could basically fund Battlefied development (with BF6 rumored to cost $400 million, maybe?).
It’s 11% of what they’re looking to cut!
Even if the rationale for the bonus is “Andrew Wilson put Battlefield back on track,” that’s still a good chunk out of the profits of ~500M of BF6 game sales so far.
It’s 1% of EA’s entire yearly revenue they last reported, $7.84B.
The liquidation shall continue until
moralstakeholder wealth improvesWhile* stakeholder wealth improves
Leveraged buyouts should be illegal
Well, there goes the last remnant of possibility for a dragon age or mass effect revival.
Replaying Dishonored 2, still mad about Arkane.
It’s like the long game is to kill gaming from two directions. Game Studio deaths and making PC components unaffordable for working class.
That’s what I’m worried about. I played the Mass Effect Trilogy several times and they’re my all times favourite.
But this Saudi Arabia deal is not good for the industry because as we know, Saudi Arabia is a very conservative muslim country and it will destroy the creative process.
The funny thing is Mass Effect destroyed the series themselves with Andromeda. No Saudi help necessary.
That game was such a bleached out, thin piece of repetitive garbage. Every character, and their dialogue, was about as deep as a guard NPC in Skyrim.
Season 8 of GoT had better production value.
But everyone was hoping the next Mass Effect game would return to its sources, not continue the “My face is tired” series. But I was hoping too much.
ME manages to incorporate just about every SciFi trope in a good way, have punchy dialogue and characters, offer chills at some points, and have a great overarching plot. More importantly, they give it an ending.
BioWare really fucked themselves with that EA deal. I don’t see them saving themselves like Amplitude did. I suppose there’s DDO, it’s still around, love of D&D being what it is within D&D communities The devs made a deal with Warner Brothers and now it’s Standing Stone, but how often has that happened? Mostly, studios just die.
It’s like the long game is to kill gaming from two directions. Game Studio deaths and making PC components unaffordable for working class.
They can kill AAA gaming, but devs will just learn to adapt to the hardware limitations of their time. If you’ve got a device you can install stuff on, devs will figure out how to make it run games. They may not be as shiny, which is practically sacrilege to the AAA player community, but so long as we have hardware, we’ll have games.
I grew up with a card catalog and had Netscape navigator at college right out of high school. Stellar graphics are great, preferred, but not necessary. Would I care if graphics/engine quality went back to Dragon age origins or II? Mass effect the original? Even FO:NV? No. But I want the story level, complexity, and total game time to be triple digits when being completionist about it. Witcher 3 is lovely but it’s the quality of darkness in it that makes it so compelling.
Even without the hardware limitations, good, immersive stories that keep you as involved as GoT before the writers stopped writing are already in short supply.
I’m presently replaying the Dishonored games. There’s only so much of that a person can do. Games worth the time sink are already in short supply.
Candy crush and similar bullshit can’t replace good games.
All those things you want are divorced from the hardware for the most part, though. A gripping story has virtually no bearing on hardware requirements. Map complexity could be maintained by simply scaling down the graphical polish. Total game time is also almost totally decoupled from hardware strength.
If anything, I would argue that AAA’s constant emphasis on graphics detracts from those. Maps can be more complex if they have less polygons and processing. They could spend more time fixing up the stories if they weren’t hemorrhaging money on art that’s way more detailed than it needs to be, and they would be more free to pivot if they need to because it’s not as expensive to edit whatever needs it. It’s way easier to make more content to extend the game time when it doesn’t cost the moon and stars to add more fresh art to flesh it out.
Sure, but even with all that, what are the odds? Given the amount of “dated engine” and such in review commentary.
If there’s no relief on hardware, the odds go up. Game devs have been able to constantly chase higher highs because consumer hardware has constantly evolved. There’s been zero pressure to optimize or to rein in the graphics because a ton of people can still play day 1, and a bunch more will become able to play them soon as they yearn for it and strive to upgrade.
But if users can’t upgrade because hardware is obscenely expensive or rare? That stops being the case. They have to cater to the average consumer in AAA because they desperately need to recoup the obscenely massive investment in development. If they refuse to optimize, if they insist on pushing graphics to ever new heights, they won’t sell shit because nobody will be able to run it. The market will demand that they start working within some limitations.
Or the AI bubble pops, hardware goes back to being affordable, and the idea of limitations becomes little more than a bad dream to execs.
Hey, I went back and played both NWN and NWN2 base campaigns. I don’t care. But others will emit a never ending keening wail and possibly break their own bank accounts on it.
Bloodbath… Saudi Arabia
How literally are we talking here?
Unnecessary employees will be invited to the nearest consulate
And? What fucks are there left to give about a publically malicious/murderous government buying a publically malicious company which publically destroys their creatives ability to stay alive in this capitalist shitscape?
I want the heart and soul of those studios (the creatives) to create a tsunami of indie studios to revive the long lost connection between the gamers and the makers.
We have to support indie devs if we want gaming to be better for all involved.
Sell 700 one million dollar skins
Don’t tempt the whales
