Submitted 5 months 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.
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?
Is he a weed baron?
His dad is the president of Nintendo!
Damn, it really happened. Crazy.
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.
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.
So romance options…
They will be fine. Y’all need to choose a side. MBS himself had to step in to make sure this deal happened when officials stooped it as it was investing in Israeli companies too. He doesn’t give af about shariah.
HAH! the sims is about to get nuked
Guess I am not playing Battlefield 6 then…
Hop on the finals, my man, it’s made by ex-DICE employees.
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.
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?
How many gamers bought Veilguard?
Haven’t bought an EA game ever. I think I’m already ahead of the curve XD
Let’s say gamers do that. The average EA/“Fifa” buyer will see the box art with Messi/Whoever and buy the fucking game.
I wonder if there’s any entities that they do partnerships with that have provisions in their contracts against this, curious if the sports leagues do. They’re notoriously protective of their IPa and rights
It’ll be interesting seeing how the worst games company manages to find a way to become even worse.
Rest in peace Mass Effect.
Old BioWare did splinter into Archetype and are working on “Exodus.” I am not yet sold, but looks more like a harder sci-fi, since traveling at near FTL is actually one way time travel.
Hard, relatavistic sci fi can still get super weird, see: www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/48545a0f6352a
Weird how everyone is mad or upset about EA going out of business. I look at this as a positive. EA makes 90% shit games and 10% games that are unique or could be good that I refuse to buy on the grounds that it is still owned by EA.
If the few decent IPs get sold off to a different company I might actually buy it as long as it’s not one of the other mega shit companies. At least now there’s a chance.
The new FIFA will be crazy. To celebrate a goal, you can now kill and dismember a sideline reporter.
Wow did not see this coming. Saudi Arabia is desperate to diversify so from that angle it makes sense. Kushner wants in lol. That’s a big buyout though. Well, things are going to get weird.
You can bid the chance of having (good) Mass Effect games good bye.
This is apparently a game made by some of the old guard at BioWare.
Reminds me a bit of Andromeda mixed with ME1. Less focus on being part of a military organization from what I see.
Pretty sure that ship sailed like 10 years ago.
I liked Andromeda.
Luckily EA hasn’t published anything I care about in over a decade. No big loss.
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 :/
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 in 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.
So basically EA got tired of watching Ubisoft and Nintendo fight over who is worse and dropped a nuke.
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.
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.
The only part of the religion that matters is the part that lets them treat women as sex slaves anyways.
The religious skirting around the doctrines of their faith is a feature, not a bug.
It doesn’t exactly scream “Shariah Compliant”, no.
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.
Instead of lootboxes, you cut open journalists to get your prizes.
Buy now 20 Jamales one gold drops guaranteed 40% discount.
What are the odds of getting the golden jet in your ultimate team?
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.
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?
What do you mean “before”? This right now is the start of that.
I think they were asking for a timeline… you gotta start the popcorn at just the right time so it’s nice and hot when shit starts to get good… you don’t want it during the previews.
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.
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.)
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 would be so happy, they own a lot of great IPs that are just rotting on the vine.
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.
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)
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 post replies also provide more context as someone that doesnt understand the legal lingo of the official post
E A Sports. It’s in the shame!
I won be purchasing anything EA.
I was already not buying their crap.
Now I can do so gleefully.
Just when you think EA can’t get any shittier, they find another way to lower the bar.
A link too the article in the skeet. businesswire.com/…/EA-Announces-Agreement-to-be-A…
obinice@lemmy.world 5 months ago
R.I.P Mass Effect.
tatann@lemmy.world 5 months ago
It’s resting since 2012, not peacefully though :/
They first zombified it in 2017 and now they’re poking its corpse every few years on the 7th of november