The deal could go through as early as next week:
As reported by the The Wall Street Journal, gaming giant EA is set to go private—that is, no longer be traded on the stock market—in a $50 billion deal with an investor group. This would be the largest such leveraged buyout ever recorded.
According to the WSJ's anonymous sources, EA could be sold for as much as $50 billion, though the final price has not yet been agreed on, and EA has an estimated market value of $43 billion. The group of investors reportedly includes the private equity firm Silver Lake and the government of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund.
The deal could be announced as early as next week, and would be the largest leveraged buyout ever recorded. A leveraged buyout is when a private equity firm uses a significant amount of borrowed money to seal the deal, with the asset set to be acquired used as collateral in the debt.
This effectively leaves the acquired company liable for the debt—if its income can't adequately service the debt, it will bear the consequences of a default, not the investors who made the purchase, and that usually means closures and layoffs. As reported by the Los Angeles Times, one such leveraged buyout eventually resulted in bankruptcy and closure for the once-ubiquitous toy retailer, Toys R Us.
The fact that the reported cost of the deal—up to $50 billion—is close to EA's estimated value (what's $7 billion between friends?) could give reason for optimism that EA's debt burden would be proportional to its means. Even aside from eventual bankruptcy, though, there's precedent for acquisitions like this causing massive disruptions to the company: Microsoft cut 1,900 jobs at Xbox in January 2024 shortly after its acquisition of Activision-Blizzard, and Blizzard Entertainment was heavily affected in particular.
[...] EA, much like its competitor Ubisoft, has struggled in recent years. Once formidable titans, both have been left behind as consolidation efforts have turned Microsoft and Sony into unassailable super heavyweights. At the same time, smaller publishers like DreadXP, Devolver, and Playstack have become ubiquitous at the other end of the budget spectrum.
EA lost the lucrative FIFA license, leading to its new, genericized EA FC series. Beloved RPG developer BioWare was sharply downsized after Dragon Age: The Veilguard proved a relative sales failure. The impending release of Battlefield 6, which has seen massive beta numbers and a positive critical reception, is looking like a much-needed win for the company.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 30 2025, @02:24AM (2 children)
Reminds me of:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/10/slash-and-burn-is-private-equity-out-of-control [theguardian.com]
https://www.fastcompany.com/91129776/what-really-killed-red-lobster-bankruptcy-private-equity [fastcompany.com]
Well maybe this case might be a shining light in the shitty darkness. What are the odds?
Also reminds me of people playing pass the parcel, but where the parcel is a huge debt, every time the parcel is passed the debt grows and some finance people get richer. All till the music stops...
Then lots of us get to enjoy the Socialism part of Capitalism: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/privatizing-profits-and-socializing-losses.asp [investopedia.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by aafcac on Tuesday September 30 2025, @03:10AM
Possibly, unlike other industries there's a lot more ability for smaller companies to create great games, and people seem to be losing interest in AAA games due to the restrictions that are placed in how those games can be made in order to make the money back.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 30 2025, @08:54PM
Financial Times: Video games maker Electronic Arts strikes $55bn deal to go private [archive.md]
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Tuesday September 30 2025, @05:08AM (5 children)
I fail to see a value in this trade.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/EA/financials/ [yahoo.com]
It will take about 50 years to return $50B investment...
So, what's really going on?
The kinder you are, the easier it is for wicked people to morally coerce you.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 30 2025, @08:51AM
Maybe it's access to an installed base of software whose installers have already agreed to terms and conditions, and existing software installed which supports "updates" to that software over the internet.
Software likely loaded on high performance machines running high speed connections, where the load of additional software and bandwidth won't likely be noticed, besides the bonus is likely to be submarined...a sleeper cell ... dormant until called for a one - time use, after which the bonus is securely deleted, but leaving the updater software intact for the next buyer to arrange use of that machine.
How much is an internet connection proxy to a completely ignorant ( of the bonus connection ) gamer, ( who already streams gigabytes of high speed megabytes/sec,) worth?
Let the gamer get woke up at 3AM by the TLA that traced that child porn ( or whatever ) transfer to him. And, of course, the bonus payload deleted itself after use, awaiting another OTA update to reload another bonus for another customer.
There is nothing left in the gamer's machine that would incriminate the gamer. Just another thing that happened, but no evidence that the proxy software was ever *in* that machine.
I would say that opportunity to covertly relay sanctioned files would be of great value to certain parties.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Unixnut on Tuesday September 30 2025, @12:45PM (2 children)
They will probably saddle EA with debt, sell off all valuable assets (e.g. sell and lease-back/rent type agreements), squeeze every ounce of profit out of the existing "cash cows" until they die, then bankrupt the whole thing and write off the debt.
I haven't looked into the details of the acquisition, but if it was a leveraged buyout [investopedia.com] then the buyers would have effectively used EA's own money to buy them. In which case they didn't invest their own money, and the method mentioned above may well provide good returns for a few years until all that is left is a dried out carcass.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 30 2025, @04:12PM (1 child)
This sounds remarkably like how Trump runs businesses.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Tuesday September 30 2025, @05:19PM
It's exactly how 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney made his money [businessinsider.com] prior to entering politics. That these kinds of machinations are completely legal is just part of the fun.
That said, I'm for this: What usually happens when a corporate raid like this goes through is that the original company winds up completely bankrupt. Which means there's a decent chance that the older EA titles become abandonware, technically under copyright but with no entity left to enforce it.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 4, Interesting) by c0lo on Tuesday September 30 2025, @09:16PM
An interesting perspective
Electronic Arts' $55B buyout doesn't add up [substack.com]
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 30 2025, @05:15AM (2 children)
RIP EA Games. It may have been dying for a long time, but the private equity parasites will destroy everything that's left in order to maximise the amount of money that they can extract.
(Score: 2, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday September 30 2025, @04:32PM (1 child)
I, like you, used to get pretty annoyed about private equity folks, because everything I liked that went PE, soon went chapter 7, but I felt better once I realized there's a single word mistake in your post.
Its "saprophyte" not "parasite"
Parasite implies the host would live or at least not die that quickly without the parasite's interference.
PE is definitely a saprophyte, they ONLY feed off already dead companies.
EA is dead, all that remains to see is what kind of useful mushrooms can be harvested off the corpse as it rots.
Think of PE as being the business recyclers or liquidators who arrive BEFORE the chapter 7. There's an entire ecosystem of people acting as recyclers or liquidators AFTER chapter 7 but PE does the same thing before.
There's no point in getting mad at saprophytes, it's certainly not their fault they have a corpse to feed upon. Get mad at the people who ran the company into the ground, not the hungry vultures who came along later.
No company ever sold out to PE because "they were too successful" or "the future was too bright". The selling out is a gamble where the existing team thinks they will get less money doing self-saprophyte ops vs more money if they sell out to professional experienced saprophytes. Honestly in the case of EA they're probably correct.
"Overall more money will be made all around, if these guys shut down the company than if we try to shut it down ourselves"
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 30 2025, @06:46PM
A parasite just needs to host to live long enough to reproduce and/or find a new host. Arguably, PE is more like a virus.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Tuesday September 30 2025, @02:02PM (2 children)
It's probably not a great loss. EA have not been making good games for a long time. They are not alone in this tho. When I see what new games are coming the interesting once are rarely from the big companies. They just do remakes and the same game over and over again. Just looking at all the games they have released over the last decade or so it's just franchise games, remakes, remasters or the Spots-Game-Franchise-Year-Edition. Whoooo ... It's been like that since forever tho, it used to be the same in 80's and 90's, it was just perhaps more fresh back then. For some reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Electronic_Arts_games:_2010%E2%80%932019 [wikipedia.org]
Then it's the whole thing of unfinished or unpolished games. Endless patching. Downloadable-content, DLC. The in-game-shops. I'm surprised people put up with it or the people that thinks that this is somehow great.
Also I guess the requirements are always increasing. Perhaps not in the relevant parts. Everyone likes a nice looking game. But considering the amount of people involved and the budgets involved eventually, or already, it becomes untenable. Every game have to sell multi-million of copies or the studio that made them is going bankrupt. It's fail and die with every game.
It's probably worth a mention to that they seem to have a certain leaning in what they include in the game story wise. Seems they want to take sides and pander to certain section, that are not really big in the gaming consumer market. For "diversity" or whatnot. So the same issue that a lot of movie/TV/entertainment companies appear to have. Seems like their customers/consumers are not as into it as the creators/investors are. The whole go woke, go broke thing. Not saying it's the case but every time it comes up it does seem to sort of have a point. It's clearly not what at least a segment of their potential consumers like or want. So why force it upon them? Clearly it isn't doing great things for them. There is a difference between delivering what their customers want and shoving things down their throat or telling them that they should like this for reasons, even tho they don't.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday September 30 2025, @04:41PM
Follow the money, check out their financials. They suffer from the same problem as Hollywood and legacy media in general, risk taking is expensive and the share holders will not tolerate it.
They literally can't afford not to produce infinite slop. They can predict the decay rate in revenue from slop based on historical data and reasonable estimates of the last 5, 10 sequels or clones. They can spend $5M on infiniteSequel+1 if the revenue of the last sequel was $6M and each sequel drops 5% in revenue. So they do. Infinite commodity slop is all they can afford to make, according to their bankers.
Their financial posture doesn't allow for risk taking, toss in $10M at a 1 in 3 chance of $50M, oh heck no.
The Hollywood analogy is also hilarious as there was an "invasion" around 1990 of video games are going to go hollywood WRT tons of money spent on art, music, special effects, famous name stars, in game video, various other filler materials that no actual gamers actually wanted. DEI is kind of like that, nobody wanted it, except some outsiders, but they could afford to wedge it in, for awhile. Well, they also went Hollywood WRT financial capitalization, and just like Hollywood they can't take risks so its all remake slop until they crash and burn and clear the industry sector for newer companies.
This news is a good thing for gaming in... 2027 and later, maybe even as soon as 2026.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aafcac on Tuesday September 30 2025, @06:51PM
I think this was probably more or less inevitable as jurisdictions started to crack down on loot box and even where it is legal, you've had people getting tired of having to pay money to effectively skip parts of the game. Which makes for a game that really sucks without paying for the loot boxes and at a time where people are struggling with inflation, there's only so many loot boxes you can buy only to get something of negligible value, Same basic thing goes for ad supported games, over time the cost of the electricity and bandwidth come out to be more than just buying the game. It's probably part of why more and more mobile games don't offer the option of permanently removing ads in favor of shorter subscription periods.
I remember trying Dungeon Keeper mobile and it was basically unplayable without spending a bunch of money on microtransactions.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday September 30 2025, @08:42PM
EA "won" the distinction of being voted the Worst Company in America in 2012 and 2013. They've appeared on other, similar lists such as Most Hated Company and Most Hated Corporation.
There are far eviler companies than EA. Big Oil and Coal tops my list. They create and publish climate disinformation to confuse the public about whether their product is the cause of a slow moving disaster that eventually will lead to significant ocean rise, forcing the abandonment of trillions of dollars of coastal infrastructure, and worse even than that, could cause mass crop failure, famine, war, and the collapse of civilization. Most of the state of Florida could end up underwater. That's a Hell of a consequence for corporate malfeasance that, sickeningly, is all too common. Unethical behavior from the gaming sector doesn't come with such severe consequences. If such disaster comes about, and we survive it, Big Oil and the entire system of capitalism will be forever tainted.
In 2nd place is Fox. They do more than engage in unethical behavior and corruption, they promote it. They've made themselves the darling of anti-intellectualism. They are the real world counterpart of the propagandistic media organizations of the dystopian novel 1984. And they're right in the thick of Climate Change denialism.
3rd place goes to weapons manufacturers. Shoot 'em up games are one thing. Weapons manufacturers enable the making of that all too real. They view war as an opportunity to make huge profits. Sick.
(Score: 2) by jman on Wednesday October 01 2025, @02:15PM
Can't wait for their first post-going-private release: M.U.L.E. 2027!