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Title buries the lede on the fucked up shit:
Electronic Arts, the maker of video games like “Madden NFL,” “Battlefield,” and “The Sims,” is being acquired by an investor group including Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund in the largest private equity-funded buyout in history.
The investors, who also include a firm managed by Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, and the private equity firm Silver Lake Partners, valued the deal $55 billion.
Private equity suck the life (value) out of a company until there is nothing left. That is probably what will happen here.
it's EA. they've already sucked the soul out of everything.
My thoughts exactly. Since the 2010s EA has been going down the dark path of lootboxes and micro transactions, so there’s literally nothing left to save any more. I’m sure they’re going to find new and profitable ways to enshittify the company even further, but it’s been just total shit for such a long time already that nothing will change the general stench.
I mean, have they had substantive innovations with each copy of their annual sports games?
They’re all reskins of the same game with new stats and such.
Oh, the sports games. Those are a special breed! I think it was NHL 95 or something when I realized that they are pumping these games every year and hardly anything changes in between. Always made me wonder who pays for this trash. Just walk to the nearest game store, buy a used 4 year old NHL of FIFA game, and you’re all set for a long time.
I don’t know how that would work nowadays since steam games are a thing. I guess you just wait for the -90% discount and buy the NHL/FIFA 2019 or whatever.
I think the last sports game I played was Wayne Gretsky's hockey for the n64. There was also the NES football game. which I kept beating my brother at because he couldn't fathom that I was actually dumb enough to blitz every. single. play.
I'm worried they're gonna find a way to extract all the real-time customer data they can find a way to grab and leverage it to sustain profits in our new Palantir-inspired dystopian world.
Holy shit that's scary
Hijacking your comment to remind everyone this purchase comes with rootkit anticheat on millions of devices.
Headline should be “EA gamers computers infected with “anticheat” RootKit to be converted into largest BotNet on planet.”
lol how much more enshittification can EA have?
I only had one game by them on my steam account. Just uninstalled it and removed it from my steam account. Logged into my EA account and "deleted" my account. I use scare quotes because even that's bullshit.. but it's all we got in the US... I'd imagine our friends in the EU and elsewhere have more success in actual data deletion.
https://help.ea.com/en/articles/ea-account/delete-ea-account/
You may still be infected with their “anti-cheat” RootKit, even if you installed from the Steam Store.
Time to nuke Windows and reinstall.
Linux user since 2008, but good looking out :)
What this article doesn't mention is the fact that one of largest burgeoning video game dev regions in the world right now is the middle east. There are a lot of studios that are going to be closed in the near future and moved from America to the middle east, where labor is much much cheaper. The game industry in the United States is circling the drain.
Entertainment in general is rarely profitable. Usually you have to look into the mobile casual games, gambling, and other low cost development games to make reasonable profit.
Movies are the same, without government subsidies and tax cuts, things are not profitable to people who got used to high profit margin.
This purchase most likely tied to Saudi hosting world Cup in a few years along with how FIFA has been very popular in the region.
The interesting part is why Kushner is involved, it could be as basic as to ensure the purchase goes through or as corrupt as Trump was going to stop it if he didn't get a back deal.
So in other words, it'll be run into the ground purposefully within the next three years or so
If I'd be an EA employee, I'd start brushing up my curriculum
A whole lot of money for crap
Well, to be honest there's a lot of potential to make money. Release the same stupid sports titles and just add new players and teams, while only changing year in the logo. Don't really need a HUGE team to keep doing that, while making ridiculous amounts of money. That's where their money is.
Customers are stupid, they keep buying this shit and have been for YEARS.
Its as if.... they already thought of that... years ago!
FYI... I worked on Madden. You would probably be surprised by how big their team is. I know I was.