And? What fucks are there left to give about a publically malicious/murderous government buying a publically malicious company which publically destroys their creatives ability to stay alive in this capitalist shitscape?
I want the heart and soul of those studios (the creatives) to create a tsunami of indie studios to revive the long lost connection between the gamers and the makers.
We have to support indie devs if we want gaming to be better for all involved.
Sell 700 one million dollar skins
Don’t tempt the whales
CEO Andrew Wilson is set for a massive payday. The company’s last SEC filing before going private pointed to a $77 million payout for the last fiscal year, double the number that was previously reported.
One of the finer aspects of unfettered capitalism.
That’s actually crazy.
For reference, Split Fiction’s development cost was ~$40 million USD over ~3-4 years, ~75 devs. That’s one of EA’s better games, and not cheap.
Yearly, $77 million could basically fund Battlefied development (with BF6 rumored to cost $400 million, maybe?).
It’s 11% of what they’re looking to cut!
Even if the rationale for the bonus is “Andrew Wilson put Battlefield back on track,” that’s still a good chunk out of the profits of ~500M of BF6 game sales so far.
It’s 1% of EA’s entire yearly revenue they last reported, $7.84B.
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
Do you know, why EA is the worst company in the whole US of A? It’s because Ubisoft is in France.
Good one!
Bloodbath… Saudi Arabia
How literally are we talking here?
Unnecessary employees will be invited to the nearest consulate
Leveraged buyouts should be illegal
So, destroy its game making capabilities and just make money for the next 20 years from of microtransaction on existing content.
Kinda of a natural progression of AAA game publishers given the way things are nowadays.
Though how many devs does it take to increment one number for the new version of the game?
It massivelly depends on what changes and how well in terms of software design the whole is done, and judging from what I’ve seen, for multiple reasons (it’s easier to exploit yound and naived developers and those don’t know how to do good software design; performance tends to be a big thing in games dev and performance optiomizantion generally goes against good software design; it’s an area that tends towards experimentalism rather than well though integrated software design) gamedev isn’t an area of software development were software design tends to be good.
It’s EA. Just search for “2026” replace with “2027”.
KSA is staggeringly rich but can’t pay for their purchase.
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.
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.
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.
I will never forgive EA for destroying Maxis.
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.
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.
Well my days is not buying EA products are certainly coming to a middle.
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
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” .
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
lol this guy thought that was EA’s final form! /s
Finally, some good news. Maybe Saudi Arabia bought EA to burn it down and make the world a better place.
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!
Shit company gets worse
