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EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners

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261–270 of 461 posts

Re: EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the entire idea that games should be promoted like hollywood movies is _exactly_ what precipitated this whole downfall. Games are not movies nor should they be like movies. Personally I hope there are tons of layoffs. The entire industry needs to be rinsed clean and refreshed, especially the US gaming industry.

Would you mind saying more about this? Why does promoting games as if they were movies is an issue? Is this just about the rising development costs of AAA games, or is there something else here that you're alluding to?

A movie is something you watch, a game is something you play. It's not there to tell you a grand story. It's there to wrap some good gameplay in some storytelling packaging. A game is closer to a novel than it is to a hollywood movie. The most loved games (high replayability is a key component) often have quite lacking "story" if any story at all. What makes them shine is how they feel to play, even better if they encourage your own imagination to invent your own story. When you try to make a game into a movie the true focus is lost. If your game can only be played "once" (not including tacking-on achievements/side-quests/etc) then your game is a movie and not a game.

Re: EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners

#262

Videogamers have fickle tastes that can change on a whim, and the entire dev stack for game development is becoming more accessible and commoditized, creating massive amounts of competition. Even more so when it comes to squeezing beloved franchises out. Multiple franchises have died under EA (Sim City anyone?), and one of the top franchises EA owns basically has morphed into a "Middle East combat simulator" (Battlef…

> Multiple franchises have died under EA (Sim City anyone?) Cities: Skylines managed to fill that gap, but then C:S2 was an utter dud on release. I think part of the problem is that we've reached a point where the players expect each individual citizen to be simulated, with the traffic to match, but doing that creates such a massive demand on CPU power that even a modern monster system will struggle once your city re…

I'd say the bigger problem was games claiming that's what they did when they clearly didn't.

Re: EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners

#263
“The transaction positions EA to accelerate innovation and growth to build the future of entertainment.”

Unless some of that cash is staying on the balance sheet, they will NOT be investing in growth and innovation.

PE is not what I normally think of when I think of innovation and (non-financially engineered) growth.

Re: EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners

#264

Found this: > The investors are betting that AI-based cost cuts will significantly boost EA’s profits in the coming years, people involved in the transaction told the Financial Times. It halfway makes sense. EA is priced at current game production costs, but if that goes down, it'll be worth more. The other side of that is that someone might be able to vibe code with "make the next iconic video game franchise in the…

It’s also not a given that AI will improve the cadence of their workflow to begin with. I could easily see a churn-heavy org incentivizing devs to throw workslop over the fence and offload the responsibility of verification to other teams.

Re: EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners

#265
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume the acquisition is mostly about the sports games and Battlefield but EA really is sitting on some fantastic IP: Bioware, Westwood, and Maxis were all great studios.

I think "were" is the correct tense. EA's dictates for SimCity (2013) ended up crashing that franchise entirely, and a decade into The Sims 4, EA has admitted it's planning on endless expansion packs for Sims 4 rather than making a Sims 5, with the community largely debating whether or not the best Sims game is Sims 2 or Sims 3.

Right, they have plenty of good and dormant IP, they're just uninterested in or bad at executing on it. Cities Skylines (1, not 2) did well, for example.

Re: EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk. Are private equity firms not asking for constant growth? Seems unlikely to me. I think most companies satisfied for being sustainable are probably owned by their original founders or their families, not private equity.

Not necessarily. Private ownership can give you the benefit of operating at a stagnate revenue since it still represents a positive income stream for the owners. This is an impossible status for public ownership as people don’t want a stock that stays at 10usd for multiple subsequent quarters. They see it as an investment. So you either have to offer significant dividends or find a way to show growth. If not, investo…

Tesla's revenue has been stagnant for a few years now and its stock price keeps going up.

Re: EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners

#267
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Muhammad Bonesaw grew up on Age of Empires, and enjoys(/enjoyed) CoD. They also want to use it to shape global perspective. I think signs are good, or at least less-bad.

Interesting - how do you imagine that he would use the likes of CoD to shape global perspective?

I mean, presumably the same way the US military has been using AAA shooters (and Hollywood) to shape global perspective the last few decades. I can't say I'd be against a few big titles where the brown guys get to have the starring roles...

That said, given Saudi Arabia's whole vibe, one can't expect that angle to go all that well for anyone else's representation (Women, Israelis, LBGTQ+ folk...)

Re: EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners

#268
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t think EA could get more evil but here we are. I remember when they were the good guys. I’d see that EA logo on my Commodore 64 load up and I knew I was in for something amazing like Archon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon:_The_Light_and_the_Dark

Company is worth of 50 billion, while everyone hates it these days?

People forget that most 'gamers' aren't the hardcore terminally online strong opinion type you'll find in internet forums. Most are playing FIFA, Madden, and various other sports games. They don't have any opinion on EA other than "that's that company that makes the cool games I like".

Re: EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners

#269
post #207

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…

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.

In my experience at Maxis (2021-2024), EA 202X was quite a nice place to work

Re: EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners

#270

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.

Nah, EA's history is laden with terrible decisions, killing creative teams, neglecting good project's marketing and killing them in the process because they had another internal game in the same genre and the like. It's a fucking cesspit of a company.

And they sit on a lot of good franchises and they literally do nothing with them.

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