How does a literal country purchase a game studio anyway?
Let’s say you’re a monarchy. You want to help yourself to money from the state without looking corrupt. So you create a sovereign wealth fund, completely control it, and help yourself.
Saudi Arabia is our ally who helped coordinate 9/11.
The Saudis only want ea for the kernal level anticheat in ea games.
Which is odd because we are considering banning tencent due to these concerns.
As if I needed yet another reason to never buy an EA product again in my life.
I wish they made good games so I could boycott them. Instead of infinitely remaking the same four sports games.
dont forget your sims 4 chairs packs
This is EA we are talking about, I’m not sure how much worse the Saudi ownership can make it.
Reminds me of that Ricky Gervais golden globes roast, where he looks at the actors in the face and says something like “half of you would happily work for Al Qaeda if your production company demanded it”
In 5 years someone will publish an article about how the representation of minorities in EA games fell off a cliff starting this year.
so leave. let shitty and/or immoral people join up. it’s not going to get better — why are you still there?
Then fucking quit?
Better yet, form a union and wreck their little purchase.
Fuck EA
Saudi: “Hey you know that part in Mass Effect where you punch a reporter? Can you expand that to a whole game?”
In fact take it further and cut em up
BONESAW IS READY
Doing the big racist speech to your crew about humans being alone, but without all the awkward cuts to your non-human crew members.
“Hey remember Tali in Mass Effect? Yeah make all the women dress like that”
EA gonna be paying the Meta tax soon so atleast people will get a pay bump while they work at Evil Arts unless they were brought just for the IP’s, then nobody gonna work there soon.
EA has been dead for over a decade honestly. With the new Saudi owners they are just being turned into a zombie.
Holy shit you aren’t kidding!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Electronic_Arts_games:_2020–present
I’m looking at the releases and honestly none of those games are Day 1 must buy for me.
I think the Saudis bought it for the sports games. And those games are pretty cookie cutter and they sell well thanks to the chuds.
Everything is just a remake of something good from 20 years ago, an expansion pack for The Sims, or a sports game. Although in slight fantas to them Star wars squadrons actually was good. I think the leadership forgot about that that one because it never even had micro transactions or loot boxes or anything.
If you like strategic fps, Battlefield has always been the best game in my eyes. I bought it right before news of the purchase came out… Let’s just say I wasn’t impressed. Fuck the saudis, but Kushner is the real ghoul.
Also skate doesn’t exactly have any competitors. I have always loved skate, and would consider the new one quite enjoyable (if its code wasn’t 50% computer-crashing kernel level nonsense).
Most of it seems to be remasters, sequels and EA Sports Game <inser year>.
Isn’t EA mathematically doomed to die off due to the absurd amount of profit they need to pay off the debt the saudis put on them so that they could own them? Like, who cares about actually working there, you’re as good as already laid off. The sword of damocles is swinging.
Well aside from how EA and the Saudis suck for distinct reasons - that blatant crime has to end.
‘We bought your company and it owes us the price we paid for you!’ Nope. Fraud. Jail.
A tale as old as time. Hedge fund buys a company. Company has too much debt from the buyout. Hedge fund strips out assets of the company. Company dies.
I think the sword of damocles more dangles menacingly than swings.
The pendulum in The Pit and the Pendulum is the sharp object that swings.
Despite assurances from management, some workers believe the company will be subject to censorship by its new owners.
Assurances from anyone with an MBA are worth less than nothing. They are professional liars. They pretend they aren’t with the bullshit “optimism isn’t lies”, except it absolutely is when you KNOW your optimistic interpretation is bullshit. It’s like that Dr. Nick bit.
Dr. Nick: “With my diet, you can eat anything you want, any time you want!”
Marge: “And you’ll lose weight?”
Dr. Nick: “You might! It’s a free country!”
Assurances from anyone with an MBA
What about assurances from MBS?
You better believe it.
If it benefits the company to lie about impending layoffs, then management will lie. It’s baffling how many people have difficulty with this concept.
I don’t know why you got downvoted. This is a valid point.
It’s almost as if people who will “toe the line” are more likely to get promoted to management. Until the leopards come for them as well.
When has EA ever been in alignment with progressive society?
Every time it’s convenient for them and their bottom line. Like literally everytime that benefits them to do so and not a hair longer
They’re in alignment with a sense of pride and accomplishment, I guess?
June 1st to June 30th. They highlight the lipsevice to LGBT stuff in dragon age
Ever since Dragon Age Origins? Their published games ever since then have been incredibly LGBT safe.
Wasn’t that BioWare?
EA owns BioWare, and has since 2007. Dragon Age came out in 2009.
Still was developed by BioWare and not EA.
EA hasn’t written its games even going back to the MS-DOS era. It’s just a publisher.
Yes they do, they also own a bajiliiian franchises going back decades that are sitting in the scrap heap. But don’t pretend they don’t do their own products ever or never have.
I’ve actually been inside one the studios on multiple occasions m
That’s how these big companies work, they have multiple studios working on multiple games. You still expect the subsidiaries to mostly mirror the top end.
EA will just shut down a studio if they don’t like what they are doing. BioWare is mostly responsible for dragon age. EA helped but not with the original game. My brother worked on that game for months, EA was basically the distributor
EA has always employed warming kettle strategy. Buy an awesome and beloved independent studio, let them just keep doing awesome stuff, and then go “well, looks like you’re not keeping up with our growth targets, guys, guess we need to keep a closer eye on how you’re doing.” And again. And again.
Sounds accurate
Published by EA, they’ll allow anything that makes their investors happy and they push for that.
They put “art” in their name, thought it was enough concessions to the unproductive concept called “culture” and then they made sure to focus on compensating this benevolent act by creating as many shitty products as possible.
Historical tangent: Electronic Arts was originally supposed to be named “Electronic Artists” (as a play on United Artists, the film company). The whole reason the company was founded was because Atari and Activision made game designers anonymous cogs in the machine. EA was like “we’ll actually pay solid compensations and we’ll actually put your name on the cover, how’s that sound?” But, of course, the founders noticed that they weren’t the artists in question, the game designers were, so they changed it.
I mean, you were working for ea
EA was relatively progressive no? You can disagree with their market strategy but it was a liberal, western company.
Liberal just means rainbow capitalism
Even “baiting with progressiveness for profit” matches the pattern of western company.
Good for profit is still good, no? Now you got no good for profit - which seems much worse.
You dorks are so funny. Guess there’s no worker solidarity when it comes to your stupid games.
It was just a joke, I have family friends fired from the FIFA games. It’s good to laugh once in a while, especially at yourself.
