241–250 of 461 posts
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EA won the most hated company award because video game players are dramatic. Charging $5 for a launch DLC is a drop in the bucket compared to the ways that some larger more critical companies can affect your life.
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Hilton's LBO essentially have saved the brand. Twitter is yet an unfolding story but it seems to be working.
Was Twitter an LBO? I thought the funding came from Musk taking on the debt.
Not referencing the Saudi Arabia portion here specifically but LBOs as documented in the book Barbarians at the Gate (covers Nabisco/RJR tobacco) gives me basically zero hope for the future of EA. EA was already rabid cost-cutters and RIF specialists, and they won the most hated company award for however many consecutive years for a reason. Giving them crushing debt to go along with their propensity to give large exe…
EA won the most hated company award because video game players are dramatic. Charging $5 for a launch DLC is a drop in the bucket compared to the ways that some larger more critical companies can affect your life.
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Hilton's LBO essentially have saved the brand. Twitter is yet an unfolding story but it seems to be working.
Was Twitter an LBO? I thought the funding came from Musk taking on the debt.
Keep in mind that a LBO is actually a good deal for the bank, because if the purchased company goes bankrupt, the bank can recoup their investment by liquidating the company.
However, that only works if there are assets to liquidate. This can include physical assets, valuable IPs, or favorable lease agreements. In other words, anything that someone else would want to purchase.
Twitter, being a website, doesn't have a whole lot of assets they could sell. Which meant that other collateral was required for Musk to secure financing.
Like 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 acqui…
They were pretty universally admired then, as far as I can remember, but not for much longer.
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Does EA 202X stomp their workforce? I had a vague idea that this was largely a thing of the past. The wiki article linked cites a lot of abuse, but all of it is nearly 2 decades old. My understanding was that it course corrected, and is one of the better gaming firms to work for ATM.
Jason Schreier (sp?) is probably the journalist with the best track record on covering EA and it’s generally been rotten all the way down. His recent book Play Nice focuses on just Blizzard but I wouldn’t be surprised if he does one on EA someday because they are in a league of their own when it comes to toxic workplace practices
Maybe it's pay walled.
Do you have a source?
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I want to start by saying I have no skin in the game here. While not perfect, Saudi has very clearly moved "Westernly" on many ideas, most notably social and economic ones. It can even be argued that their recent moves in that direction have made it near impossible for the other large economy companies to move too far the other way. Th At what point does the narrative about their investments on the larger stage becom…
>While not perfect, Saudi has very clearly moved "Westernly" on many ideas, most notably social and economic ones. My man, they can kill you for drawing a stick figure. Let that sink in. SA is still a single-export economy, and those who are smart enough to get out of SA, do so. From personally having very close relationships with a few folks who worked on the NEOM project, the Saudi locals are not prepared to do any…
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EA has been a target of scorn for a while because of a laundry list of issues (including pay-to-win schemes, loot boxes, treatment of employees, etc.) which is long enough to warrant its own dedicated wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Electronic_Arts
EA doing any amount of shenanigans isn't making people sick, killing people, making people homeless or destitute. Their crimes are minor and petty.
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Are there any examples where a company was purchased via a leveraged buyout and the company went on to be more profitable afterwards? Because the only examples I know of resulted in the purchased company going bankrupt fairly quickly.
Hilton's LBO essentially have saved the brand. Twitter is yet an unfolding story but it seems to be working.