Submitted 2 days 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.
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.
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 🤬
Basically Tesla, oof
It’s the workers who pay the price for the greed of the CEOs, shareholders, and the new owners.
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.
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
Nah the Saudis are desperate to diversify. And they have the money to do it.
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
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
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.
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)
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 !
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.
The new FIFA will be crazy. To celebrate a goal, you can now kill and dismember a sideline reporter.
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?
Hopefully it’s a leveraged buyout and this is the death of EA.
It is a leveraged buyout.
Yup I added an edit. LBOs should be illegal man. Just search how many companies have been bought like this and then driven out of business.
And the worst get worst-er
101 how to make your public image even worse.
Guess I am not playing Battlefield 6 then…
Couldn’t happen to a nicer company
Just when you thought EA couldn’t suck worse they find a way!
Is this better or worse than being a public company?
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).
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.
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.
Truly sad times
Not because of EA, but because of the private equity shit. They want to control everything
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 gave up on EA a long time back, and them not making Alice: Asylum was the final nail in their coffin.
Sail the high seas.
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.
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.
FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Just when you think EA can’t get any shittier, they find another way to lower the bar.
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days 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 days ago
Toys R Us anyone?
arudesalad@piefed.ca 2 days ago
So we won't even get a shitty titanfall 3?
Red_October@piefed.world 1 day 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 days ago
EA 0.00052 seconds after hearing Nintendo is the worst game company…