Just when you think EA can't get any shittier, they find another way to lower the bar.

Saudi owning FIFA is hilarious seeing most of its profit comes from gambling. Muslims my ass 😂 Not that they ever practiced what they preached anyway—Islam or not, religion has always been nothing but a tool of oppression to rulers.

I was already not buying their crap.

Now I can do so gleefully.

Oh, cool, another buyout where the buyer doesn't have to actually pay for it, they just take out a loan and magically make the company pay for it.

E A Sports. It’s in the shame!

going private with debt is a sign of upcoming bankruptcy, possibly dissolution. but with Kushner and the Saudis, probably more a sign of money laundering

Surely gamers will find it within themselves once in their lives to actually not buy garbage from a country that doesn’t even want them alive. Surely gamers, even though they’ve never been able to find it with themselves before, will somehow figure out how to do the right thing for once in their lives And not fund this shit country.

Surely this is the line in the sand.

Who the fuck am I kidding?

Rest in piss, EA

This is a genuine question and not a passive aggressive one: why make the submission a link to a social media post when that post is mostly just a link to a news site anyway? (you could include link to or even quote the commentary either in the submission body or a comment if you think it's a valuable addition)

edit: has since been answered in another comment orz, I opened this and then was talking to people for a while before commenting

Y'all shouldn't be buying EA games anyway.

The new FIFA will be crazy. To celebrate a goal, you can now kill and dismember a sideline reporter.

I couldn't be ​more ​excited about ​what's ​ahead,” said Jared Kushner, Chief Executive Officer of Affinity Partners.

Because it just wouldn't be a story without a Trump family angle.

Huge fucking yikes on the privacy side of things, if you didn’t learn from the other 100 negatives about this company…. Enjoy fucking yourself and the world. Stop feeding evil.

I’m surprised that there isn’t any government organization that controls or oversees this kind of buyout, especially when so many billions are involved.

EA has basically been dead to me for a very long time, even though I know a couple of people who work there.

While the whole Saudi Arabia / Private Equity angle is terrible, part of me thinks/hopes/wishes that this is part of their whole sports-washing angle - and there is a slim but non-0 chance that there will be an improvement in the quality of their studio output over the next few years.

I’ll continue to avoid buying their games, but it would be nice to see those that still do not getting nickel-and-dimed as hard as they currently are.

Who knows, there is also the potential that this buyout backfires and Saudi’s human rights abuses become even more public knowledge as a result?

When times are as bad as they currently are, we have to hope.

Guess I am not playing Battlefield 6 then…

Just when you thought EA couldn’t suck worse they find a way!

Holy shit, that is a lot of debt... EA is going to be absolutely gutted. I imagine the ones gutting it will be paid generously for the trouble though.

Huh.

So who's betting that EA dissolves over the next few years and they start passing their IPs around to other companies? Not sure how I feel about this because on one hand it could end with EA in the gutter and their dead franchises in the hands of companies that still know how to make games

Mmmhhh, The FIA president, an Emirati, recently consolidated all power and made himself dictator of the association. Now the Saudis bought EA, the publisher that releases the F1 game. Bet the next thing to happen is a Qatari will buy Formula One, the current owner has already stated that he is willing to sell for the right offer.

Luckily EA hasn't published anything I care about in over a decade. No big loss.

Good riddance. I hope by "private" they mean we won't hear from them again--they're a very private company, they keep to themselves, and never say anything. That sort of private.

(I know that's not what it means)

Truly sad times

Not because of EA, but because of the private equity shit. They want to control everything

A link to the article in the skeet. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250929186526/en/EA-Announces-Agreement-to-be-Acquired-by-PIF-Silver-Lake-and-Affinity-Partners-for-%2455-Billion

I haven't bought an EA game since Mass Effect 3. This is just one more reason to never give them my money.

So how long before the private equity firms strip mine EA for all it's worth, and force it to rent back it's offices, which force it to bankruptcy?

they don’t make good games anymore anyway

Could it be that these guys are going to "Where are we going, Papa EA?" them in a few years?

(Can't find a link to the referenced comic on my phone but basically EA is known for buying up smaller studios and then closing them only a few years later after sucking them dry. This led to a comic of them taking little unsuspecting companies into the dark woods to end them.)