Submitted 2 weeks ago by ampersandrew@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3lzxzk5aifs2w
In a deal involving a company owned by Jared Kushner, a company that is basically just the Saudis, and $20B of debt.
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.
What are the odds of getting the golden jet in your ultimate team?
Buy now 20 Jamales one gold drops guaranteed 40% discount.
It would be interesting if EA pulled away from lootboxes for their owner’s ideological reasons.
You can bet they’ll pull away from LGBTQ+ representation.
Maybe they’ll remove the gambling. Probably not but it would be good if they did.
Except ea lost the FIFA licence in 2023.
Didn’t as much lose it as they called FIFA (an organization worse than EA)'s bluff when FIFA wanted like a billion for the naming rights.
It doesn’t exactly scream “Shariah Compliant”, no.
The religious skirting around the doctrines of their faith is a feature, not a bug.
The only part of the religion that matters is the part that lets them treat women as sex slaves anyways.
Why do people always connect saudi to Islam when it’s pretty obvious no muslim other than Saudis likes the Saudi family as they are infamous for their practises. While even a slight hint at israel and Judaism or rich jewish assholes with judaism would get you down voted to the ground even when it’s an appropriate callout.
I was already not buying their crap.
Now I can do so gleefully.
I set EA to Ignore on Steam two years ago. Ubisoft too.
They don’t even make anything anymore. Just sports games, mobile games and Sims expansions.
Oh, cool, another buyout where the buyer doesn’t have to actually pay for it, they just take out a loan and magically make the company pay for it.
Basically Tesla, oof
This shit needs to be made illegal. All it does is kill off businesses. Sears and JoAnn Fabrics both died to this trash.
Toys R Us too 🤬
It’s the workers who pay the price for the greed of the CEOs, shareholders, and the new owners.
E A Sports. It’s in the shame!
going private with debt is a sign of upcoming bankruptcy, possibly dissolution
Nah the Saudis are desperate to diversify. And they have the money to do it.
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.
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?
Let’s say gamers do that. The average EA/“Fifa” buyer will see the box art with Messi/Whoever and buy the fucking game.
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.
I downloaded every EA game ever made and I don’t even want to play any of them. I have the files imprisoned on my computer, forever. Bwahahaha!
Yeah but we can also make a FOSS version of PlantsvsZombies & Sims
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 post
To add to this, Jason Schreier is a well known, and well sourced, gaming journalist.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Schreier
But you aren’t wrong. There’s literally no way to know that via Bluesky unless you’ve happen to read his stuff from Bloomberg and before.
Hell yeah, Jason Schreier is thé GOAT !
The new FIFA will be crazy. To celebrate a goal, you can now kill and dismember a sideline reporter.
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?
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.
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-dimes 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
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?
Guess I am not playing Battlefield 6 then…
Hop on the finals, my man, it’s made by ex-DICE employees.
Just when you thought EA couldn’t suck worse they find a way!
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
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 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.
I would be so happy, they own a lot of great IPs that are just rotting on the vine.
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.
Mmmhhh, The FIA president, an Emirati, recently consolidated all power a 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.
Good riddance. I hope by “private” they mean we won’t hear from them again–they’re a very private company, they keep to themselves, and never say anything. That sort of private.
Truly sad times
Not because of EA, but because of the private equity shit. They want to control everything
A link too the article in the skeet. businesswire.com/…/EA-Announces-Agreement-to-be-A…
they don’t make good games anymore anyway
I haven’t bought an EA game since Mass Effect 3. This is just one more reason to never give them my money.
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?
And the worst get worst-er
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 references 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.)
I won be purchasing anything EA.
FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Just when you think EA can’t get any shittier, they find another way to lower the bar.
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
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.
lordnikon@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Toys R Us anyone?
arudesalad@piefed.ca 2 weeks ago
So we won't even get a shitty titanfall 3?
Red_October@piefed.world 2 weeks ago
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.
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
EA 0.00052 seconds after hearing Nintendo is the worst game company…