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.
Good riddance
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” .
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.
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.
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.
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.
I will never forgive EA for destroying Maxis.
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.
The liquidation shall continue until
moralstakeholder wealth improvesWhile* stakeholder wealth improves
Do you know, why EA is the worst company in the whole US of A? It’s because Ubisoft is in France.
Good one!
I can’t wait to play Battlefield 7: Saudi Victory Over The Jews.
fml
Given their bubby buddy relationship with the Zionist Supremacist Nation, it will more likely be “Saudi Victory Over The Persians”.
Jews Victory over The Jews?
I don’t understand why you’d buy something and then essentially destroy what it was. Everyone sees you doing this, are they actually going to make money?
Yes. Just like a farmer can make money butchering their cattle, these private equity type fucks always find a way to pocket every penny.
It’s even better than that: it’s buying the farm by indebting the farm itself to then butcher the cattle, sell all buildings, sell the lands and sell the tractors, keeping the money.
Private Equity keeps the money from selling the valuable parts of the company whilst the debt is owed by the company, which is now bankrupt and if they properly use Bankruptcy Law or even just Tax Law (by having the bankrupty of their “investment” go down on their books as a loss) they might even manage to extract a bit more money out of the rotting corpse.
Just another Blue Star Airlines
But the CEO’s job will be okay right?
Just wait for the article that the CEO is getting a $700 million bonus.
I would say “never has there been a more moral case for pirating the sh*t out of everything this company makes”, since they always exploit and lay off their workers after projects are done, shut down studios, etc…
…but most of their stuff is recycled sports drek, so don’t even pirate it. Just ignore it, and tell everyone you know how horrible EA is and has always been, and who its new owners are. Hopefully they’ll never buy their crap again either.
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
Judging by MBS’s steam account, the next Battlefield is going to be an extraction shooter about the coalition of the willing securing pipelines and putting out oil field fires. Also Tehran doesn’t get nuked in the game, it got nuked 20 years ago, and this is framed as a Bad Thing With A Silver Lining. The Line is your primary hub city and your ground vehicles are things like solar powered Abrams and cybertruck but good
I’m having trouble clicking on your tvtropes link there
Imagine of lots of game developers that gets fired now goes out and start working on indie-games.
Funded by who? EA has tens of thousands of 100k/year employees
What else are they going to do? Flip burgers for minimum wage? Depends on how much they personall liked developing games relative to making big money I guess…
Game devs make shit money so they were all in it for the games, but realistically most won’t have savings to work for free for the next few years to put out an indie game.
Going indie from scratch means going no income for years for a project that may never succeed, not everyone can afford the risk. Existing indie studio have very limited hiring capacity compared to the amount of people getting laid off from big companies.
AFAIK Schedule 1 is developed by a single dev still in college.
That is insane. Makes me wanna go play it now.
