It's official: EA is going private.
(bsky.app)
from ampersandrew@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world on 29 Sep 12:44
https://lemmy.world/post/36640173
from ampersandrew@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world on 29 Sep 12:44
https://lemmy.world/post/36640173
In a deal involving a company owned by Jared Kushner, a company that is basically just the Saudis, and $20B of debt.
threaded - newest
A link to the article in the skeet. businesswire.com/…/EA-Announces-Agreement-to-be-A…
It was pretty dry, so I opted for the skeet instead.
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.
Toys R Us anyone?
So we won't even get a shitty titanfall 3?
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?
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
All I want is more BT 😢
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 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.
I won’t be purchasing anything EA.
E A Sports. It’s in the shame!
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
The post replies also provide more context as someone that doesnt understand the legal lingo of the official article
To add to this, Jason Schreier is a well known, and well sourced, gaming journalist.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Schreier
But you aren’t wrong. There’s no way to know that via Bluesky unless you’ve happen to read his stuff from Bloomberg and before. It’s almost like Twitter is a terrible format for news or something…
Hell yeah, Jason Schreier is thé GOAT !
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
I personally don’t care that huge companies that make bland boring flash stuff every year get thrown around to even crappier companies. I never bought their games, and will continue to not buy them. when I hear these games move to another company, I’ll assume they are just as crap and avoid them too.
It’s not so much about the shovelware crap they release every year, but rather about the IPs that they own but aren’t doing anything with.
I’m not sure that’s the likeliest situation, given the Saudis’ stake in so many other gaming companies. If memory serves, they’ve got in the neighborhood of a 10% stake in Nintendo and outright ownership of SNK.
You should be worried if you at all care about video games. Yes, EA sucks. But even a decade or so ago they were pretty much one of the big two and are still one of the biggest “developer” houses.
Because we already saw this play out with Embracer et al and increasingly with Microsoft. Video games are a horrible investment. If you make a "good game"and do all of your PR right and get REALLY lucky? Yeah, you can buy a yacht or twenty. But that comes after 2-8 years of expensive development with many points where you have to just keep throwing money at it in the hopes of success.
And EA was one of those companies that could get away with that because their sports games are so popular that they can fund development of the entire company AND still make a solid profit.
Because
That isn’t how this works. You don’t say “Wow. Development is really expensive and has no guaranteed ROI. Let’s fund external development that we have even less control over”.
As Swen et al constantly remind people: Baldurs Gate 3 is not a model that studios can follow. It was a once in a lifetime convergence of circumstances. Larian had been making CRPGs for close to two decades at that point and had used multiple kickstarters to modernize their stack in a genre that had mostly been forgotten. And they STILL needed 3 years of early access and a LOT of marketing money (BG3 was a fricking keypoint of Stadia for crying out loud).
That isn’t what Mass Effect or Dragon Age or Mirror’s Edge will get. At best they will get cheap remasters by Nightdive (which would actually be nice but…). More likely they will get the kind of “Are you sure this isn’t a mobile game? From the 2010s?” that we see plaguing Warhammer 40k and the like.
It’s a problem only for the AAA industry, The market is correcting. It’s becoming clearer risky 200+ million dollar investments on one game that takes 8 years to make and flops on release isn’t working. This year especially showed the AA/indie scene thriving, so maybe this will just encourage smaller scale projects and investments in smaller companies
No, it really isn’t. Rather than just regurgitate what the “video game devs hate you but I love you so give me money” twitch streamers continue to say, actually listen to some developers.
Xalavier Nelson Jr has been pretty vocal about how incredibly hard it is to be an indie dev these days. And Strange Scaffold (his studio) is pretty much exactly what everyone says they want: They release REALLY interesting games on budget with no DLC. And people “wait for sales”. Which makes pitch meetings REALLY difficult which, in turn, makes getting more funding to keep making games REALLY difficult. And that is for a very established studio with a solid portfolio. Let alone actual new developers who are finding their funding cut or cancelled over the past five or six years.
I’ll also add on: What you are seeing are not “AAA games”. At this point? You basically have the GTAs and Call of Duties and Star Citizen and MAYBE some of the higher profile Sony games that fit that bucket. The AAA market more or less died with THQ where they released a string of games that were REALLY good but just couldn’t justify the development costs.
What we are mostly seeing are what would historically be considered AA/A games. Large scale games made by (ass pulling) O(10) headcounts with a LOT of money and MAYBE a support studio or very heavy contractor usage if they are more AA. And that is the market that is increasingly being destroyed. Which mostly leaves the “B Game” studios and the “I spent the past 10 years making this in my free time” indie studios and… I shouldn’t have to explain why the latter is not sustainable.
And just to highlight this: Geoff Keighley has decided his latest obsession is bragging about how small studios are because he is, and always has been, an obnoxious prick who actively hurts the industry. And one of his favorite things to bang on is Sandfall’s Clair Obscur. Which is a truly amazing game… that increasingly can’t be made anymore.
en.wikipedia.org/…/Clair_Obscur:_Expedition_33#De…
Founded by devs who had been heavily trained by the Ubisoft pipeline and all the benefits of working for a massive super studio. Questionable amounts of funding from Kepler Interactive in 2023 (right before the pandemic) that was used to headhunt LOTS of developers from major super-studios/publishers. And then they used said funding to hire “dozens” more contractors.
Clair Obscur is an “indie” game in the sense that Sandfall don’t have long term obligations. But it was made by easily over a hundred people with major publisher investments. And, much like with my example of Larian above, much of the staff and techniques were trained on other games over the course of literally decades. Like, we ALL shat on Mindseye and the idea that “someone who looked at GTA is gonna make a GTA” and so forth. That IS what Clair Obscur was. It was just successful (in large part because more traditional JRPGs are on the decline and many people in The West had been ignoring it… so even more parallels to BG3).
As more and more of those publishers die off or are only interested in VERY short term investments? That money goes out the window. And as the major studios/super-studios like EA get shuttered? That pipeline that allowed Broche et al to understand enough about large scale project management to make their own games goes out the window. And more and more developers leave the industry because they need to live. Which means all the “I’ve been animating for 12 years” are gone and it is just the fiver crowd who need to “build out a portfolio” for one of the very few remaining jobs.
Honestly to me it seems like nothing has actually changed, except the names of the teams behind critically acclaimed games.
Like, your point about being an indie developer being hard is, well, just ask anyone who was making indie games 1, 2, or even 3 decades ago. It’s always been a lottery where 1-3 games a year hit it big and the rest can only barely fund themselves.
Though I do think you have a good point about asking what PP considers AAA. Something I’ve noticed is that there’s a bunch of people who, for whatever reason, see some big AAA release and act like it’s not AAA because it’s the first time they’ve heard of the studio / publisher. BG3 is the most obvious example of this (~400 people from my search). Expedition 33 also outsourced a ton of it’s work so it also gets paraded around as “only 30 devs!”. It’s especially frustrating that people will call these games a “wake up call” for AAA studios as if it’s not a huge risk.
Though I don’t think EA (and from what I’ve seen Ubisoft) dying this slow death is a herald of the industry at large dying. We’re seeng a lot more publishers that try to carve out their own little corner of the industry, such as NewBlood, Iron Gate, Hooded Horse, and as you mention Kepler. They’re funding and releasing plenty of successful titles. I think there’s space for, and already space taken, for various publishers to fill the same position as EA did in it’s prime.
You also seem to take this argument that these megapublishers are a prerequisite to having people with proper gamedev skills? As I see it, that’s either not changing, is effecting nearly every industry in NA & EU, or just not a thing. Valve, for example, when making Half Life, realized their game sucked when they were most of the way through development because they were learning as they went. So they scrapped most of what they built and what they remade is what we know as HL1, and that’s well over 2 decades ago. To my understanding Sandfall did a similar thing with E33 but what I saw on the subject might have been embellished and/or I’m misremembering.
No, it really hasn’t. At least, on the PC side.
if we go back to the 80s and 90s? SO much of what has defined video games actually were indie games. You just needed to call up a magazine and ask if you could put your game on their demo disk (often actually a floppy at those points…) or let the ten people on usenet know you had a BBS with games on it. Probably the most famous example of that is fricking DOOM but so much of what EA would acquire, fail to make a good sequel to, and kill, came out of that mindset.
Then the early 00s were heavily characterized by mods being heavily platformed by the larger studios (a decent number of modern day studios actually came out of Make Something Unreal), demo discs getting even bigger (because now they were CDs), and the rise of The Internet meaning that it was possible for small publishers (fucking Strategy First) to do direct to consumer sales and games like Mount & Blade and later Minecraft being directly sold as direct downloads to sickos.
Then we had Steam and… okay let’s ignore the Steam Greenlight program because that was just bad. But it mostly removed the barrier and made direct to consumer sales almost trivial. And it made it REALLY “easy” to show that you had a solid game to make that pitch meeting for the “last few years” of development a lot easier. More on that in a bit.
And as games became more expensive to create (if you tried to sell Soldat today… well, just go look at Soldat on Steam), publishers were more and more needed. Sometimes as blatant “Embracer published this” and sometimes as “just” investments that never really get disclosed but leads to weirdness where one pissy investor means a game can never be sold again.
Which gets back to the 2020s. Economic uncertainty and the realization that “just fund this studio for 10 years” guarantees nothing have made it a wasteland. Again, plenty of developers have been very open about this. NoClip even did a series of lite documentaries about their attempts to go through the process of making a game and it is bleak (Danny repeatedly compared it to being on Tinder… Which raises a few questions but I am sure somebody told him how much being single sucks). There is less and less money to go around and it is more and more going to the surest of sure things. All but guaranteed to make back the money and then some? Yeah, but this studio is promising us a 5x return so…
Which gets to Hooded Horse et al. I fucking LOVE Hooded Horse and Kitfox and so forth (still not sure how Microprose suddenly came out of nowhere to become just as big a part of my entertainment as they were… 30 years ago). It is also very worth understanding that they are mostly swooping in on games that have been in development for 4-10 years and just need some money to dedicate time to polishing things up and making assets (Caves of Qud and Dwarf Fortress are great examples of this). Or are devs/studios with MASSIVE pedigrees and, quite often, the rights to remaster/re-sell their back catalog (this is more a Microprose thing).
Which gets back to the role of major studios.
HL1 was published by Sierra and fronted by former Microsoft devs (you ever wonder why GabeN gets off on sticking it to Windows?). They had a start-up funded by independently wealthy developers and, according to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Life_(video_game)#Deve…, one million (1990s) dollars advance and STILL involved going into potentially serious debt to make.
Which, again: Technical abilities developed on someone else’s dime. Good chunk of cash from getting in early on the rise of frigging Microsoft. And publishers who would throw (doing rough inflation math) about 2 million dollars at a project because “why not”.
And… you know how publishers got the money to do that? Sierra was a frigging powerhouse in the 90s. So much of the adventure genre was kinda just them and they had already branched out to strategy, party games, delicious copaganda, etc. Like… en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_Sierra_Entertainment_v…
Everyone loves the idea of someone making something truly ground breaking in their baseme
I would be so happy, they own a lot of great IPs that are just rotting on the vine.
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.)
Got you covered, fam.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/9b465fcc-744f-4a73-b4d2-201bda2d55e2.jpeg">
There’s other versions around as well and I have no idea which is the original. Just replace “Bioware” with any studio that EA has purchased and chances are there is a version of this comic that followed that news.
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
Nah the Saudis are desperate to diversify. And they have the money to do it. I know it’s leveraged but they’ll see it through.
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?
What do you mean “before”? This right now is the start of that.
I think they were asking for a timeline… you gotta start the popcorn at just the right time so it’s nice and hot when shit starts to get good… you don’t want it during the previews.
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.
Maybe they’ll remove the gambling. Probably not but it would be good if they did.
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.
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.
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 doesn’t exactly scream “Shariah Compliant”, no.
The religious skirting around the doctrines of their faith for personal gain is a feature, not a bug.
The only part of the religion that matters is the part that lets them treat women as sex slaves anyways.
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?
So basically EA got tired of watching Ubisoft and Nintendo fight over who is worse and dropped a nuke.
Luckily EA hasn’t published anything I care about in over a decade. No big loss.
EA has been dead to me since the mid 2000’s when they turned Battlefield 2, which I had purchased at full price, into a severely unbalanced Pay-To-Win game.
It only went downhill since then.
Do I remember right that the special forces add-on was an online only purchase? I’m pretty sure the euro forces one was at least. I remember not having the new weapons for a long time until I could log in to my account on a friends computer with it installed.
No idea, I refused to even entertain the idea of purchasing it after EA pressured everyone to buy it by putting them at a disadvantage against those who bought it and even kicking them out of a server if it changed maps to an SF map. EA hasn’t gotten a penny from me since.
As a big Star Wars fan this hurts though. The Jedi: Fallen Order and Survivor games where my favorite Star Wars content after Andor since Disney took over. I was looking forward to the last game in the trilogy. But I don’t want these people to get any money and I’m also afraid that the project will be affected anyways :/
You can bid the chance of having (good) Mass Effect games good bye.
Pretty sure that ship sailed like 10 years ago.
I liked Andromeda.
This is apparently a game made by some of the old guard at BioWare.
Reminds me a bit of Andromeda mixed with ME1. Less focus on being part of a military organization from what I see.
www.exodusgame.com/en-US
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:
The new FIFA will be crazy. To celebrate a goal, you can now kill and dismember a sideline reporter.
Weird how everyone is mad or upset about EA going out of business. I look at this as a positive. EA makes 90% shit games and 10% games that are unique or could be good that I refuse to buy on the grounds that it is still owned by EA.
If the few decent IPs get sold off to a different company I might actually buy it as long as it’s not one of the other mega shit companies. At least now there’s a chance.
Rest in peace Mass Effect.
Old BioWare did splinter into Archetype and are working on “Exodus.” I am not yet sold, but looks more like a harder sci-fi, since traveling at near FTL is actually one way time travel.
Hard, relativistic STL sci fi can still get super weird, see: www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/48545a0f6352a
Or Gundam.
The physics of the mechs (from my very sparse knowledge of Gundam) are pretty questionable, lol, which is fine because they’re there to be spectacular.
Gundam is a weird mix of hard sci-fi (spin gravity, no FTL) and utter ridiculousness (the mechs themselves, literal space magic.)
And bringing it to the next level by talking about lagrange points and how important they are.
Plus Anaham Electronics being the real bad guy ads another layer to realism
It’ll be interesting seeing how the worst games company manages to find a way to become even worse.
I wonder if there’s any entities that they do partnerships with that have provisions in their contracts against this, curious if the sports leagues do. They’re notoriously protective of their IPa and rights
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?
Let’s say gamers do that. The average EA/“Fifa” buyer will see the box art with Messi/Whoever and buy the fucking game.
Haven’t bought an EA game ever. I think I’m already ahead of the curve XD
NHL 95 was awesome…
Fair, EA abandonware is pretty good. Anything currently actively being developed (2010s onward) is not worth playing.
If it doesn’t have the cube, sphere and cone, stay away.
How many gamers bought Veilguard?
EDIT: I just checked and it looks like the only game EA released since Veilguard that was targeting the general gaming audience (i.e. wasn’t a sports game, a Sims expansion or a mobile game) was Split Fiction. Battlefield 6 will be out in a couple of weeks so we’ll see how that does.
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.
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.)
So romance options…
HAH! the sims is about to get nuked
They will be fine. Y’all need to choose a side. MBS himself had to step in to make sure this deal happened when officials stooped it as it was investing in Israeli companies too. He doesn’t give af about shariah.
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.
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.
Damn, it really happened. Crazy.
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?
R.I.P Mass Effect.
It’s resting since 2012, not peacefully though :/
They first zombified it in 2017 and now they’re poking its corpse every few years on the 7th of november
So THAT’S why they allowed Battlefield 6 to be so good. Had to pump up those player interest numbers.
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.
It’s only about 20% debt.
The word “only” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
Leveraged buy outs are usually at least 50% debt.
Because it just wouldn’t be a story without a Trump family angle.
It saves so much time for him to be buying a failed company. It cuts out all the leg work he has to do.
If a company bought EA it would make sense if they were buying it for the IP. Someone who actually knows how to run a business could probably turn it around, but why is he buying it does he have another game studio that I’m not aware of?
Just when you thought EA couldn’t suck worse they find a way!
I haven’t bought an EA game since Mass Effect 3. This is just one more reason to never give them my money.
The first EA game I got was M.U.L.E. (circa mid 80’s) for the Atari 800, the last was Battlefield 3. I was an avid supporter until they turned all greedy, I would have purchased many of their titles after BF3 if they were not such greedy devils.
When EA started it was focused on making the game developers ‘rock stars’ to attract and show appreciation for the good game developers. They lost that vision along the way to feeding their own selfishness.
EA, Its not in the game
What difference does this make honestly? They’re already a shit company, what do I care who owns them?
The idea of playing a new Mass Effect owned by Jared Kushner.
Meme:
Ea: was I a good game company.
Grim Reaper: No!
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.
$1500‽ What the fuck‽
Don’t forget how many years it went live and the absurd number of expansion packs.
The game’s 11 years old, a constant flow of DLC and expansions adds up over time.
So just don’t buy it all at full price I guess.
That’s over 100$ 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
… And?
A shit ton of those couldve been free updates lol
Well, their artists did make additional assets though, even if they may be recoloured versions.
.
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
Oh yeah, they milked that shit as much as they could. Really ruined the franchise with their bullshit.
I dunno man. Consider it aspiration! Pirate 1500 minimum in EA games.
I wouldn’t even take that shit for free.
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.
<img alt="Screenshot of the Steam store page, showing the “Add All DLC to Cart” button with a total of $993.79. Most of the DLC is priced down anywhere from 30 to 50%." src="https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/ac985570-66e5-4720-a8d8-c0074e83afde.webp">
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.
Paralives I expect to gain a decent following for life sim games it should release fully early next year from my understanding. Inzoi, from what I gather, is not it, and I doubt it’s doing well.
I don’t know much about ea’s sports games. I also come from the pov of a mostly console player. I have a Lenovo go, but I only can play less demanding games on it.
It’s funny, when I got it, I was so stoked to play the sims 4 with mods. Wow what a headache it is to mod the game with constant flood of mod/game breaking updates. Too much of a headache.
Fleshed out games at release. Mods should be an afterthought, not a necessity, same for pirating. I want to give good devs money for their good games. Anything less, it’s not worth my time or self respect.
Haha. Anyway have a good day stranger!
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…
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!
Yeah but we can also make a FOSS version of PlantsvsZombies & Sims
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, they made some bangers before going evil.
Truly sad times
Not because of EA, but because of the private equity shit. They want to control everything
.
Right before bf6… well o7
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.
Basically Tesla, oof
This shit needs to be made illegal. All it does is kill off businesses. Sears and JoAnn Fabrics both died to this trash.
Toys R Us too 🤬
It’s the workers who pay the price for the greed of the CEOs, shareholders, and the new owners.
How much couch money do I need to acquire Westwood’s NoX out of this?
I was thinking about this deal and… I guess it makes sense the Saudis want in on the gaming industry. I recall a long while ago an old article about the industry (probably second hand via Polygon) that noted just how much Saudis whale on mobile and loot box games. It was so disproportionate, their nobility was like 2% of a mobile title’s revenue… literally just a few big families.
So my thinking is, EA, being the kind of shitty company it is, is actually probably pretty popular among Saudi nobility. That and FIFA, of course — imagine pay to win when you have infinite money.
They lost the FIFA games…
“Lost”.
They lost the fifa name, but fc is basically the same, and it still has all the players and club’s in it soooo… Its just a name change sadly
I’m more cynical than that, I think it’s that Kushner and the Saudis have both identified gamers as a group susceptible to be influenced by auth-right messaging, and they want a piece of that.
Makes me think why Houthis and the Iranians hate them. Not just sectarian but also wanton excesses of kingdom.
Take Two is next.
Wait, can I still play Skate or Die! on my Commodore 64?
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.
I’d love to see the sports leagues pull their licenses
I gave up on EA a long time back, and them not making Alice: Asylum was the final nail in their coffin.
And the worst get worst-er
101 how to make your company’s bad public image even worse.
Is this better or worse than being a public company?
Yes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Sail the high seas.
Why is an anti-Semitic meme the picture for this post? Did a Jewish CEO buy the company?
That’s the profile picture for the reporter whose bluesky post this links to.
Saw that. I thought the article poster was being racist.
Dude what?
Nevermind it’s the reporters selfie. I thought this was a racist joke against EA.
Wtf? You think an image of a person makes something anti-Semitic? You see someone that looks Jewish and your first thought is this is anti-Semitic? Get off your high horse.
Had an EA Play so I could play NHL and FIFA, and the occasional ME Trilogy replay. Canceled it the moment the news broke about Kushner and the Saudis. Had paid for the year and was willing to sacrifice the final five months in the name of morality. But luckily they refunded me the difference.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer company
For a preview of what happens, look at the embracer buyouts. This is essentially a funeral
Yup. Or Toys R Us, or Debenhams (UK), or any other number of LBOs which led to the death of the company.
Hopefully it’s a leveraged buyout and this is the death of EA.
Edit: Haha I clicked the link and it really is an LBO.
It is a leveraged buyout.
Yup I added an edit. LBOs should be illegal man. Just search how many companies have been bought like this and then driven out of business.
EA has not been able to send the Auth Codes 2-factor to my e-mail with my own domain for ages.
The support (probably AI) sends me a link to a support article about 2-factor authorisation every time. EXACTLY THE ARTICLE WHERE YOU HAVE TO SCROLL ALL THE WAY DOWN TO CONTACT SUPPORT.