In a deal involving a company owned by Jared Kushner, a company that is basically just the Saudis, and $20B of debt.
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Wow did not see this coming. Saudi Arabia is desperate to diversify so from that angle it makes sense. Kushner wants in lol. That’s a big buyout though. Well, things are going to get weird.
From the articles linked elsewhere this is between PIF (Saudi Arabia), Silver lake (American), and affinity partners (Jared kushner)
From wiki about affinity partners:
Kushner’s firm received commitments of more than $3 billion by the end of 2021 to invest in American and Israeli companies that are expanding in India, Africa, the Middle East and other parts of Asia. The largest investor by some margin is the Saudi government’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, which has allocated $2bn of its nearly with Kushner stating that he hopes to open an “investment corridor between Saudi Arabia and Israel”,[2][3] seen internationally as a “sign of warming ties between two historic rivals”.[4] Officials who headed the Public Investment Fund objected to investing in Kushner’s firm, but Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman overruled those officials.[5]
Guess I am not playing Battlefield 6 then…
Hop on the finals, my man, it’s made by ex-DICE employees.
How’s the player count?
It’s crossplay, so it’s harder to directly estimate, but using SteamDB (so not counting being matchmade with console players) roughly 15-20k playing at any given time.
Better than I thought it would be. (Steam population is all that matters to me, thanks.)
Need a new FPS cause I’m bored of Marvel Rivals/Overwatch, PUBG, and CoD Mobile. I’ll check it out, thanks. (Fingers crossed they did Rush right this time. It hasn’t been fun since Bad Company 2.)
Y’all shouldn’t be buying EA games anyway.
At this point, I see pirating The Sims as a moral imperative. There’s no reason the full game should be ~$1500.
$1500‽ What the fuck‽
Don’t forget how many years it went live and the absurd number of expansion packs.
… And?
A shit ton of those couldve been free updates lolWell, their artists did make additional assets though, even if they may be recoloured versions.
deleted by creator
And…? Cyberpunk, monster hunter, witcher, … All got visual updates in their lifetimes :p
Witcher, baldurs gate, monster hunter, gta5 and more got actual content updates too
The game’s 11 years old, a constant flow of DLC and expansions adds up over time.
So just don’t buy it all at full price I guess.
That’s over 100$ every year in dlc
Or $25 a quarter, and that’s if you buy every single thing they release.
There’s always the whales, but personally I’d skip the “Horse Ranch” expansion, or the one that added Fairies.
cries in Paradox
I dunno man. Consider it aspiration! Pirate 1500 minimum in EA games.
I wouldn’t even take that shit for free.
Oh yeah, they milked that shit as much as they could. Really ruined the franchise with their bullshit.
The franchise basically created the microtransaction.
As much flak as Oblivion got for horse armor, the Sims did it first.
I can’t wait to never play either of those games. Thank Ahura Mazda for indie games.
Hell yeah, interrobang!
underrated unicode character
If people are willing to pay it…
Due to Steam’s Autumn Sale putting the DLC anywhere from 30-50% off, you can currently get the complete game for the low price of only… $993.79.
I wish I was kidding.
And It won’t run.
So many of these DLCs are outright broken. For instance, the For Rent pack very well will corrupt your save file. I’ve had a glitch happen that was a for rent glitch, and I don’t even have the pack. Dine out doesnt function, my wedding stories doesn’t function. The game is still bland with $1000 of DLC.
It’s so bad, they added a toggle to turn off “unused packs” that break your game. You can now just uninstall them through the UI. Stuff you paid for, you can turn it off now, so your game runs more smoothly. Except, when It rolled out, it broke people’s games when they tried to use it, said they didn’t own the pack anymore, so you couldn’t turn a pack back on. Absurd.
Fuck The Sims 4, Fuck EA.
Rust console, is an old game, they released a new version to upgrade to new systems. Free to people who already owned the first gen game. They did this well imo. EA could never.
Why you might as well sail and get a fixed pack for basically free.
Or just find a better game. There are plenty of games where you’re not expected to pay and download additional files to have rain.
The Command and Conquer series has only a few or no equivalent right now, as far as I know.
There is INZOI, which should be superior to the Sims series, but its hardware requirements are very demanding.
Despite the existence of superior racing sims, some people still play NFSU2 but enhanced with mods.
I’m saying because in some places people like the games more than the corporation owning those titles (and sitting on, while keep on selling the games with the loot boxes), they’ll just pirate those copies.
Yeah but we can also make a FOSS version of PlantsvsZombies & Sims
I downloaded every EA game ever made and I don’t even want to play any of them. I have the files imprisoned on my computer, forever. Bwahahaha!
I was already not buying their crap.
Now I can do so gleefully.
They don’t even make anything anymore. Just sports games, mobile games and Sims expansions.
I set EA to Ignore on Steam two years ago. Ubisoft too.
Just when you think EA can’t get any shittier, they find another way to lower the bar.
EA 0.00052 seconds after hearing Nintendo is the worst game company…
Going private could have been a net positive. But, not from venture capitalists, and certainly not from the Saudis.
Also, taking on this much debt as part of the buyout is just asking to be gutted and carved out, complete with record-breaking layoffs.
So we won’t even get a shitty titanfall 3?
All I want is more BT 😢
Why does it even matter? Why would you buy it?
I wouldn’t buy it if it was bad, but any form of titanfall 3 would at least be something
Titanfall is cooked. They’re 100% killing the servers. I guess we’ll have to go back to the northstar client.
And now we wait for the potential “spiritual successor” 🤞 .
You mean Diesel Knights?
Toys R Us anyone?
All we can hope for is that after EA gets absolutely gutted, a bunch of new indy splinter studios spring up to use their development experience minus the corpo cash grabbery.
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.
There is, but do you know who Jared Kushner is?
His dad is the president of Nintendo!
Is he a weed baron?
And the worst get worst-er
101 how to make your company’s bad public image even worse.
they don’t make good games anymore anyway
They’ve never made good games. They sometimes allowed one of their devs to make a good game when they weren’t looking, but no one is perfect.
No, they made some bangers before going evil.
Eh some of their stuff from the 80s was pretty groovy.
Didn’t they make Archon?
Yeah Archon, the Might & Magic series, Road Rash etc.
FIFA 99, Need for Speed : Underground, The Sims 2, C&C : Red Alert 2, SSX3, Black and White, LOTR 2 & 3, Burnout 3, Battlefield Vietnam, …
There was a time when they were good, but they fell out of grace in the second half of the 2000s
They had a reputation for buying better companies to own the IPs and gutting the teams before the late 2000s. It’s sort of cathartic seeing that happen to them now, but not really because all the shitheels who made those decisions will probably be getting a nice payout while the actually workers will just get kicked to the curb.
They accidentally made a really good Star wars game several years ago, but when they noticed they abandoned it. All the reviews for it were basically along on the lines of, this is really good, but don’t expect any updates.
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.
The only part of the religion that matters is the part that lets them treat women as sex slaves anyways.
Except ea lost the FIFA licence in 2023.
Didn’t as much lose it as they called FIFA (an organization worse than EA)'s bluff when FIFA wanted like a billion for the naming rights.
It would be interesting if EA pulled away from lootboxes for their owner’s ideological reasons.
You can bet they’ll pull away from LGBTQ+ representation.
Yeah. There’s domestic pressure for this anyway, unfortunately.
Maybe they’ll remove the gambling. Probably not but it would be good if they did.
It doesn’t exactly scream “Shariah Compliant”, no.
Instead of lootboxes, you cut open journalists to get your prizes.
What are the odds of getting the golden jet in your ultimate team?
Wasn’t that Qatar?
You are not wrong and I am.
Buy now 20 Jamales one gold drops guaranteed 40% discount.
The religious skirting around the doctrines of their faith for personal gain is a feature, not a bug.
Why do people always connect saudi to Islam when it’s pretty obvious no muslim other than Saudis likes the Saudi family as they are infamous for their practises. While even a slight hint at israel and Judaism or rich jewish assholes with judaism would get you down voted to the ground even when it’s an appropriate callout.
Edit: I am not challenging the comment, i am just curious as to why. One reason I could think of is that jews are considered an ethnic group so they may not be religious at all but that could apply to any religion no?
How much couch money do I need to acquire Westwood’s NoX out of this?
Rest in piss, EA
If we’re lucky, they’ll do a Toys-R-Us and make EA fund it’s own buyout.
This is exactly what happened. To the tune of $20 billion.
The EA studio slaughterhouse is about to go into overdrive.
Is this better or worse than being a public company?
Reddit, and by extension Lemmy, have this infatuated vision of how private companies are actually great for customers because whenever somebody asks about Steam the explanation given is that if this were a publicly traded company it would be horrendous but because it’s private everything is perfect and there are rainbows inside their offices.
The truth is EA will be just as aggressively profit driven as it already is, the new owners will try to reduce costs just like always, and IPs that sell more will continue to be prioritized just like before.
Essentially a private company can be owned by a dickhead, or a nice person who’s not all about profitmaxing. A publicly traded company is forced to maximize shareholder value.
Valve as a publicly traded company would quickly become another EA/Microsoft/Whatever, because it’s only the next quarter that matters. Valve under GabeN has been built to bring in large, and yet sustainable profits.
EA’s new owners are going to be the absolute worst. So it’s going to be a worse company than before.
Consider that Erik Prince’s murder-for-hire company is private. So is Xitter now that Melon bought it.
So it’s not that private companies are better, but rather that they have the capacity to be better. And it all depends on the owners.
Public companies have a hard wired compulsion to increase value for shareholders. Every single decision is made with profit in mind. In the best cases you get milquetoast, inoffensive material everyone can enjoy. Ultimately, this leads to a relentless and aggressive pursuit of endless growth at any cost.
Private companies can take a loss here and there, they don’t have to report a bad quarter and so they can plan ahead. Which allows them to do two, non explains things. That approach allows them to build a robust and loyal consumer base which is quite valuable. So they’ll sell it off again and let the public companies milk them dry. They can also get up to some horrendously evil shit behind closed doors in a foreign country where the laws only apply to people who aren’t the ruling family and never have to answer for it. Though that kind of thing is usually reserved for like, chemical manufacturers and labor intensive luxury food markets. It may be that the Saudis are just diversifying and want a propaganda mouthpiece. Or one of the royals REALLY likes FIFA.
Hard to say.
If it’s gone public, then generally going private is a bad thing. It’s usually some investors that are going to do something bad with the company.
A company that starts and stays private may be all the better for it (but that’s hardly assured either). If they are a success and didn’t bring a lot of investors, then it generally means they actually care about the work intrinsically.
Yes.
Depends. This is a leveraged buyout and there are countless examples of other companies bought like this and they don’t last long.
They take on massive debt to buy it. Then they shift that debt to the company they bought and away from the individuals. Then that company is crippled paying down interest so they can’t innovate (not that EA did), then they’ll have to cut costs and the product will diminish. Likely pay out billions in dividends to the buyers can make profit and in 5-10 years EA will go bust or get sold again.
The banks will be left holding the bag, but probably covered their loses by that time so can write off the rest of the debt.
Depends on your perspective.
This is bad from a business, creativity, and human rights standpoint.
However, it’s good that a shitty company like EA with predatory products is going to be even more exploitative and predatory from here on out.
I enjoy watching the useful idiots get taken for a ride.
Haven’t bought an EA game in over a decade. Don’t intend to change that anytime soon.
This specific instance? Worse.
It’s being bought by blood money (Kushner’s $2billion investment/bribe to hush up the US government about the brutal murder of a US resident journalist at the hands of the Saudis). Plus a country that somehow is even more squeamish about content than the US is in charge - look forward to way more censorship.
Sail the high seas.
Right before bf6… well o7
It’ll be interesting seeing how the worst games company manages to find a way to become even worse.
