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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

#391

Post by medstrom »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #252
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Video game players are hilariously, pitiably dramatic. I'm a gamer and I 100% agree with you. The simple fact is, AAA game prices have been stuck at $60-70 for 30 years . Despite $60 in 1995 being worth ~$127 today, games are still $60. They haven't kept up with inflation. Games are relatively cheap while development costs for AAA are ridiculously high. A typical SNES game had 10-30 people working on it and would h…

Are you sure you got your info right? I'd not be surprised if they've been stuck at $60 after adjusting for inflation, i.e. costing around $30 in 1995.

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

#392

Post by tanjtanjtanj »

fidotron wrote: post #299
Aeolun wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is because the credit can never be with those that purely provide money and dictate terms. Nobody thinks the investors are what make the company. It’s the founders.

I spent time as a TD on both the dev and publishing sides - the perception all EA (the publisher) is doing is money and terms is very much mistaken. To take the case of Bioware, the SW:TOR launch was a notable disaster. There is no way in hell Bioware by themselves could have recovered from that, and it took a lot of "external" firefighting to get that under control. OTOH various decisions many people assume came fro…

So we can’t fault EA for creating an incentive structure that rewards self-destructive behavior on the part of their acquired studios?

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

#393

Post by zaptheimpaler »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #194
ecshafer wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

Agree 100%. The talk around gaming remains negative even these past few years as weve seen an insane and growing number of incredible games. This year has an embarrassment of riches in GOTY contenders. There is some very angry and dysfunctional subculture of ranting in the gaming forums that is totally disconnected from reality.

They actively seek out an $80 buggy game to hold up as an emblem of how broken all of gaming is even if there are 100 other amazing games. There’s tons of bad movies and TV and art too, but those cultures celebrate the good stuff instead and ignore the chaff. Gaming forums have some kind of perverse rage echo chamber that’s not representative of most gamers. It’s reminiscent of political discourse where a lot of people just want to “vent” really. The idea of “venting” as commonly understood doesn’t work in big social spaces, it only amplifies the bad stuff as everyone is surrounded by toxicity.

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

#394

Post by mlinhares »

Invictus0 wrote: post #390
stogot wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Try to think clearly for a second. Why would there be a trillion dollar PE ecosystem if this always completely destroyed the company?

Because the goal is short term profit, not long term business success. It makes absolutely no difference if the company survives the process or not, what matters is that the PE firms extract their money from the process.

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

#395

Post by nereye »

tanjtanjtanj wrote: post #387
deanc wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many sports teams come to mind. Pretty much any F1 team that exists is now worth a lot more on paper than it was purchased for. A few EPL teams come to mind too.

Those are just buyouts not leveraged buyouts. No EPL team was purchased with an LBO as far as I know.

[1] “ The Glazer family’s acquisition of Manchester United remains controversial to this day.

Their £790m takeover in the summer of 2005 came by way of a leveraged buyout: when a significant amount of borrowed money is used to fund the acquisition of a company, with the debt secured against that company itself.”

1 - https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/manchester-unit...

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

#396

Post by amelius »

burnt-resistor wrote: post #330
jmuguy wrote: post #235

Am I wrong in reading this will add 20b in debt to EA the company, and not the purchasers? Because it seems like just servicing that debt will immediately put the company in a bad position.

Step 1. Take out a giant loan. Step 2. Buy a company on credit. Step 3. Stick company with the loan used to buy it. Step 4. RIF, cut costs, reduce quality, break contracts, and discontinue goods and services. Step 5. Sell everything of value. Step 6. Send that company into bankruptcy. Step 7. Rinse, lather, and repeat.

Nobody fixed that exploit in the law yet?

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

#397

Post by fair_enough »

missedthecue wrote: post #278
cmdli wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter isn’t collapsing, but it’s hardly more profitable. In fact, the last numbers we know about them show >50% drop in revenue.

I don't think you're right. During its last fiscal year on the stock market, Twitter reported a net loss of $221 million. We don't have exact insights to X.com's books, but we have credible reports from the Financial Times that they produced over a billion dollars in ebitda in 2024. This is completely possible with a 50% revenue drop. They laid off 80% of the company, something like 6,000 people.

I follow Charlie Munger's advice and substitute the phrase "bullshit earnings" anywhere I see mention of EBITDA.

If the GAAP income is negative, the company lost money last year. End of story.

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

#398

Post by tanjtanjtanj »

WorldMaker wrote: post #303
nerdjon wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I disagree and I feel like this is largely parroted without playing the games. SWTOR was maintained pretty well for a while and was fun. The issues with ME3's ending were blown way out of proportion and was still a fantastic trilogy. Andromeda had its issues no doubt about it but I am still mad at a certain website deciding that they were going to just go hard on attacking it. It was a fun game, it had some…

> Anthem... man that game had potential but just was not ready to ship. Was a ton of fun to play and I loved the bits of story we got but it really was just a tease of a story sadly. Anthem came across to me that it had most of its story "filed off" at the last minute. I can't prove it, but Bioware was said to have been working on a Mandalorian game for years and so much of Anthem from the KOTOR-like macguffin that g…

Interesting theory but there’s not a chance that it’s true. Anthem had been in development for like 6 years by the time the idea for the Mandalorian was even pitched by Favreau.

The weird story absence was due to the studio trying to make it one of those live-service “forever games” that would make them infinite money.

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

#400

Post by outside2344 »

Invictus0 wrote: post #390
stogot wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Try to think clearly for a second. Why would there be a trillion dollar PE ecosystem if this always completely destroyed the company?

The PE firms strip the assets, aka have them take on huge amounts of debt, sell assets, and then pay them dividends etc. before they collapse.
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