In a deal involving a company owned by Jared Kushner, a company that is basically just the Saudis, and $20B of debt.
You must log in or # to comment.
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?
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.
EA 0.00052 seconds after hearing Nintendo is the worst game company…
I was already not buying their crap.
Now I can do so gleefully.
They don’t even make anything anymore. Just sports games, mobile games and Sims expansions.
I set EA to Ignore on Steam two years ago. Ubisoft too.
E A Sports. It’s in the shame!
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.
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.
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.
$1500‽ What the fuck‽
Due to Steam’s Autumn Sale putting the DLC anywhere from 30-50% off, you can currently get the complete game for the low price of only… $993.79.
I wish I was kidding.
And It won’t run.
So many of these DLCs are outright broken. For instance, the For Rent pack very well will corrupt your save file. I’ve had a glitch happen that was a for rent glitch, and I don’t even have the pack. Dine out doesnt function, my wedding stories doesn’t function. The game is still bland with $1000 of DLC.
It’s so bad, they added a toggle to turn off “unused packs” that break your game. You can now just uninstall them through the UI. Stuff you paid for, you can turn it off now, so your game runs more smoothly. Except, when It rolled out, it broke people’s games when they tried to use it, said they didn’t own the pack anymore, so you couldn’t turn a pack back on. Absurd.
Fuck The Sims 4, Fuck EA.
Rust console, is an old game, they released a new version to upgrade to new systems. Free to people who already owned the first gen game. They did this well imo. EA could never.
Why you might as well sail and get a fixed pack for basically free.
Or just find a better game. There are plenty of games where you’re not expected to pay and download additional files to have rain.
The Command and Conquer series has only a few or no equivalent right now, as far as I know.
There is INZOI, which should be superior to the Sims series, but its hardware requirements are very demanding.
Despite the existence of superior racing sims, some people still play NFSU2 but enhanced with mods.
I’m saying because in some places people like the games more than the corporation owning those titles (and sitting on, while keep on selling the games with the loot boxes), they’ll just pirate those copies.
Oh yeah, they milked that shit as much as they could. Really ruined the franchise with their bullshit.
Hell yeah, interrobang!
underrated unicode character
The franchise basically created the microtransaction.
As much flak as Oblivion got for horse armor, the Sims did it first.
I can’t wait to never play either of those games. Thank Ahura Mazda for indie games.
Don’t forget how many years it went live and the absurd number of expansion packs.
… And?
A shit ton of those couldve been free updates lolWell, their artists did make additional assets though, even if they may be recoloured versions.
deleted by creator
And…? Cyberpunk, monster hunter, witcher, … All got visual updates in their lifetimes :p
Witcher, baldurs gate, monster hunter, gta5 and more got actual content updates too
I dunno man. Consider it aspiration! Pirate 1500 minimum in EA games.
I wouldn’t even take that shit for free.
Yeah but we can also make a FOSS version of PlantsvsZombies & Sims
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 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?
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 !
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.
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.)
Just when you thought EA couldn’t suck worse they find a way!
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.
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.
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 :/
