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

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

#351

Post by lupusreal »

Ekaros wrote: post #315
lupusreal wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBQH Valve/Steam is a major factor in this gambling in games scene but gamers love them. So I don't think this is the real reason gamers have a problem with EA.

My defence with Valve is that at least on their stuff you most of time get stored credit. With the rest it is same, but it is actually drown the drain.

For me, it's their support for linux and their easy return policy for games that don't end up working. Gaben could light an orphanage on fire and I'd forgive him.

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

#352

Post by dehrmann »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #350
lofaszvanitt wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it is going down the drain then.

Vibe coding absolutely does not work at the scale of an EA Sports game. Even if it could get to a compileable state, there will be loads of performance and memory issues. The kind of code needed for these codebases aren't exactly going to be scraped on Github. And then there's console code rooted in NDA's. Throwing that into an LLM is a great way to be blacklisted as a publisher.

I buy that vibe coding doesn't work at that scale, and there will always be an investor that thinks it does (these aren't being led by traditional tech investors) who's willing to pay, thinking there's an opportunity.

The NDAs don't matter. If there's an exception for tooling like Github, that'll be enough, and enterprise AI code platforms will all hear the same concern and say they don't retain anything. What does matter is there isn't much training data on programming for modern consoles.

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

#353

Post by johnnyanmac »

dehrmann wrote: post #352
johnnyanmac wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vibe coding absolutely does not work at the scale of an EA Sports game. Even if it could get to a compileable state, there will be loads of performance and memory issues. The kind of code needed for these codebases aren't exactly going to be scraped on Github. And then there's console code rooted in NDA's. Throwing that into an LLM is a great way to be blacklisted as a publisher.

I buy that vibe coding doesn't work at that scale, and there will always be an investor that thinks it does (these aren't being led by traditional tech investors) who's willing to pay, thinking there's an opportunity. The NDAs don't matter. If there's an exception for tooling like Github, that'll be enough, and enterprise AI code platforms will all hear the same concern and say they don't retain anything. What does m…

>If there's an exception for tooling like Github

Tools like Git are fine. A 3rd party server like Github is an entirely different playing field. For console SDKs I wouldn't even trust a private Github account. There's a reason the industry standard is whipping up your own perforce server instead.I'm doubtful they'll make an exception for a company that wants to train on their data without consulting them.

But this is all speculation. I haven't seen a recent SDK that talked about these issues, so maybe this is already talked out

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

#354

Post by Tiktaalik »

vkou wrote: post #207
byronic wrote: post #131

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.

I do not have first hand experience, but my impression from being in the industry is that modern EA is not at all like the "EA spouse" era.

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

#355

Post by joquarky »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #260
LarsDu88 wrote: post #193

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 wonder if someone could figure out how to implement HashLife for this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife

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

#356

Post by sph »

mvdtnz wrote: post #338
ddtaylor wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a time in the earlier days of EA where the company had value. That time has passed. The company mainly sits on exclusive licenses and makes minimal changes to the franchises in an attempt to milk cash. The cash milking part has gone downhill recently. I genuinely hope they lose ALL of their exclusive sports licenses. They shouldn't be exclusive to begin with, but enabling these companies to hold the entire…

> There was a time in the earlier days of EA where the company had value. That time has passed. The company that just sold for $55 billion?

Shareholder value != artistic value.

In fact, in videogaming, they tend to be inversely correlated.

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

#357

Post by sph »

pluc wrote: post #132

Between Ubisoft selling to China and EA selling to Saudis, AAA gaming looks bleak.

AAA gaming has looked bleak for the past 15 years, I still do not know why is it such a guiding star for the video gaming world. It is the artistic equivalent of Henry Ford’s assembly line where risk is low, marketing budget is high, and the result is mediocre and bland slop.

AAA gaming is blockbuster cinema. It’s for people that don’t really care about the artistic medium. It’s mass entertainment at the industrial level.

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

#358

Post by djhn »

dehrmann wrote: post #347
WorldMaker wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The debt buyers are the same people that created that debt (the people doing the LBO in the first place). They force the company they just bought to pay them loan terms they set for the privilege of buying the company they just bought. That's why LBOs are pretty much a corporate Ponzi scheme. It's just too bad it is a currently legal Ponzi scheme. It might be nice to have legislation to prevent it.

> The debt buyers are the same people that created that debt (the people doing the LBO in the first place) Sometimes, but not always. I did a quick search on who it is for EA, but didn't find anything. > They force the company they just bought to pay them loan terms they set for the privilege of buying the company they just bought. If the buyers are also the lenders, yes. > That's why LBOs are pretty much a corporate…

The brand reputation gets milked while cost cutting measures result in subpar products and services. Growth targets are gone, now you optimise for cutting costs faster than you lose market share.

It’s not a Ponzi scheme, it just feels like a scam when consumer brands cash out at your expense (the loyal consumer) and slowly bleed the company dry.

You do have to note that this is not a universal feature of PE-backed business.

Take for example power tools, where most of the big players are privately held and owned by PE firms. Reputation and customer loyalty are profitable in this line of business, so QA and product development are alive and well.

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

#359

Post by stogot »

nashashmi wrote: post #234
ARandumGuy wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Gibson Greeting Cards (1982) by Wesray Capital, Bought for $80M (only $1M in equity), sold for $220M within 18 months Hilton Hotels (2007) by Blackstone Group, Despite the 2008 crisis, refinanced and sold with a $14B profit Safeway (1986) by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Restructured, sold underperforming stores, returned to profitability HCA Healthcare (2006) by KKR & Bain Capital, Strong cash flow supported debt; remain…

So 50/50 odds on completely destroying the company (and jobs) or generating some minor wealth for a handful of investors?

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

#360

Post by port11 »

thiht wrote: post #191
nabla9 wrote: post #130

PIF: Saudi Arabian State fund. Affinity Partners: Jared Kushner.

Well that's an easy boycott, EA has been pretty much irrelevant to the video games scene for the past few years anyway.

It is an undeniably strong influence in the video games scene, with increasing revenue each year apart from minor tumbles. I despise what it stands for, but EA being called irrelevant?
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