EA about to get Toys R Us'd. It should be illegal to be able to put the debt from a leveraged buyout on the company's balance sheet.
EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners
161–170 of 461 posts
Re: EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners
#162Like them or not, EA has been a major force in gaming for over 40 years (I used to work there). They invented the term "Game Producer". Their early vision for promoting Game Designers like hollywood Directors was ahead of its time. They have a hallway lined with gold discs of million seller hit games. They basically created the casual gaming industry (The Sims Division, Pogo, Casual Divisions) in a time when games we…
I am old enough to remember a time when I had positive associations with being an "EA game".
The games in question were on my Commodore 64. But still, there was such a time.
EA has a reputation for buying companies and draining all of their reputation for money. The first company that the EA of today did that to was EA itself. There was a time it was just a gaming company.
Actually it was about up to the Origin acquisition that I still had at least some positive feelings for them, before the pattern really settled in. After that, though, I got nothin'.
Re: EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners
#163Although I'm not optimistic, there's a small chance this might shake up the sorry state of EA Sports. The incessant focus on microtransactions and features that are essentially just sports themed slot machines over actual solid gameplay has kept me far away from those games for a long time. EDIT: I think I might have worded that poorly. I do NOT think a change is going to happen, at least not one for the better, espe…
It's a leveraged buyout. They're going to need to pay those billions in debt, so predatory practices should not be stopping.
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Re: EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners
#164PIF: Saudi Arabian State fund. Affinity Partners: Jared Kushner.
Assuming the usual follow the money angle, what's the political play here for Kushner and the White House?
Re: EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners
#165They basically bought FIFA (now called FC). It's a very simple money-printing machine, with plenty of people addicted to it with its gambling/gache style game. All the other IP barely make any revenue and will likely get even less attention. RIP Bioware.
For a moment, I thought you were saying they bought FIFA itself. Which doesn't seem out of the question, FSM knows they're for sale in every other way.
FIFA the game, I guess this comes with the context of it being EA.
Maybe this will be part of a bigger acquisition... or maybe they have already acquired everything they could, except that they don't want make FIFA look like a bad saudi organization?
Re: EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners
#166[flagged]
Back in the 80s there was a Playboy article about how influential the Saudi's in USA because of their overflowing oil money. I guess it never changed they just got a good PR management to fix their image for a few decades and they are in the spotlight again.
Re: EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners
#167PIF also has a controlling stake in SNK (who just released a new fatal fury videogame), and has a close relationship with TKO, especially including Saudi Arabia getting a WrestleMania. MBS is known to love "attitude era" WWE wrestling and this move tells me he was probably also a big fan of FIFA growing up.
Of course this is entertainment-washing at the end of the day, but I just find it funny the that MBS is going about it: buying EA the same way I would buy a used copy of NHL 97.
Re: EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners
#168[deleted]
Re: EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners
#169They basically bought FIFA (now called FC). It's a very simple money-printing machine, with plenty of people addicted to it with its gambling/gache style game. All the other IP barely make any revenue and will likely get even less attention. RIP Bioware.
I had who spent 1500 USD in one year on ultimate team. In Brazil, around 2015. That was _quite a lot_ of money in Brazil at the time.
I have many friends that spent $10K+. Some see it as an investment as you can flip things.
It's a digital market, NFT-esque, sold as a game.
Re: EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners
#170AAA gaming feels so tired (and tiresome) that this news barely registers for me. The last EA game I played was the excellent C&C remaster - and EA's main contribution was getting out of the way of the project. They still own the rights to a ton of legendary IP - SimCity, Command & Conquer, Battlefield, but I don't have illusions that new iterations of that IP will be any good. I know this is probably part of the Saud…
Between the fact that I'm on the "no time" part of the "time to play but no money, money to buy but no time, pick one" saying, indies, some still-functioning Japanese studios, and the burgeoning "AA" segment of the market, where people in the 2020s use 2020s technology with a team of maybe a dozen or two to put out what would have been AAA games produced by hundreds of people in the 2010s, I've had no use for the AAA space for a while. Or the gacha space; you don't need to create an open wound in your wallet just to play some decent games.
I've noticed this attitude is not yet "mainstream" but the first and the second derivative of its prevalence ought to worry the AAA industry. If their moat essentially collapses to "we can afford to spend a bazillion dollars on marketing" their death won't be too many years behind.