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Saudi Arabia takes its biggest step yet into the biggest of culture war arenas:
EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners for $55 Billion
Electronic Arts has been bought up by the Saudi investment arm PIF, alongside Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners and PE giant Silver Lake. The trio paid $55Bn for EA, albeit in a leveraged buyout involving $20Bn of debt financing(!).
On the surface, nothing too interesting, perhaps another example of the incredible growth in private equity. And that might be all there is, just 3 funds thinking there is untapped potential in what was an often poorly run gaming giant. However, PIF is almost certainly the largest owner, and AP News identifies the deal as part of the Saudi strategy. I expect Kushner is either wetting his beak or acting as a lightning rod for the Saudis, while Silver Lake probably needed no encouragement to get in on the deal.
The Saudis appear to have identified major cultural industries in Sports and Gaming as prime opportunities for...something? "Sportswashing" makes sense for the tiny nations and city states like Qatar and Abu Dhabi which have no real power outside of their resources, but it's not clear what Saudi Arabia gains from pumping hundreds of billions into these industries. Much has been said of the desire of MBS to diversify Saudi Arabia, and at least with this deal there is room to move EA functions into the country, but it's a drop in the bucket. The leveraged nature of the deal is also unusual; that's the kind of option you typically pursue when asset stripping - neither the Saudis nor Silver Lake needs that kind of business.
You know, there are two stories about EA, and I don't know which one is true, or if it's a synthesis of both.
One is EA the strip mining vulture capitalist. Rolling up to independent studios with deals too good to refuse, and then putting them on permanent crunch status churning out mediocre sequels until the studio gets shut down.
The other is EA the naive savior of struggling independent studios. Studios that find themselves in over their heads, with cost running away from them, literally about to run out of money with their next opus still 6 months to year from release. So EA comes in, thinking if they give Lord British, Peter Molyneux or Chris Roberts a years worth of financing in exchange for ownership and some oversight, the ship could be righted.
In the 90's, I was 1000% on team Origin, Bullfrog, Westwood, etc.
After each of these luminaries ran their respective Kickstarter scams and mismanaged the projects to degrees that are legendary, I'm more sympathetic to EA.
Anyways, the point I'm eventually getting to, is I will laugh my ass off if EA turns out to be every bit the lemon to the Saudi's private equity firms as buying up Origin and Bullfrog were to EA in the 90's. Personally I can't remember the last time I bought an EA game, and it's hard to imagine anything about this acquisition making them worse. There might even be some upside! It's hard to imagine the Saudi's letting another game be as gay as Veilguard was.
I think the answer is it is likely to be both. Small independent auteurs are notoriously bad at upscaling and dealing with success. Bailing them out to make mediocre sequels in a corporate environment is also a bad idea (from the point of view of quality video games). Let small studios churn and burn creating gems then destroying themselves as they get over-ambitious. At least sometimes you get some diamonds.
I'll take Kerberos as a relatively recent example (10 years ago ish). They made Sword of the Stars a 4X space sim, it was excellent for its budget and time. They did well and for the sequel promised the universe and delivered a buggy mess that did not do half the things they said it would (it is after a number of expansions and patches a solid game but still). You can manage ships in real time rotate them to switch armor facing, and armor is tracked per facing, and each weapon has a different penetration profile, and then outside the first few battles never have the time to do any of that because your fleets are too big. Each race has its own FTL method so they play very differently, but it was supposed to have espionage, political rivalries and much much more). If they were bought out after SotS1 (which was on the cards from Paradox I think, who in the end just became their publisher) I think the sequel would have been safer, less ambitious and probably at launch better (maybe laden down with 50 DLC's though) But shooting for the stars and mostly missing at least gave us something interesting. Where some of the game is like 10/10 and other parts are just..missing entirely.
I think that's sometimes better than 7/10 COD X In Space. or whatever.
sots1 was a buggy trashmess with broken damage profiles for their laser/missile/cannon mix. Kerberos had a grand vision and simply couldn't execute. a smaller scope might have worked better but then it'd have lost its magic.
however my own winner for overambitious nonsense is star citizen. it is the quintessential space sim, combining the worst of 90s suboptimal UI with 2000s busywork gameplay loop grind and 2010s predatory monetization. If there ever was a reason why a studio exec was necessary to keep a visionary in check, its anything to do with chris roberts. he shit the bed with freelancer being way too complex for no reason, and then developed star citizen in retaliation to fulfil his luke skywalker starfighter elite pilot roleplay fantasy, a fantasy shared by many a space nerd. whether people actually LIKE flying around in a claustrophobic cockpit in space flipping around the elliptical plane nauseatingly or spending 10 minutes travelling through jump gatea for the sake of "immersion" is secondary to roberts and his fans. what matters is that they get to pretend theyre really hanging out with luke about to take out the death star. a noble enough aim, save for the fact that they made flying a spaceship not fun at all.
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Creativity is so idiosyncratic, I'm not sure you can ever distill any method or approach as yielding superior results to any other, because it's all just so dependent on the creatives involved, and the times they existed in.
That said, something clearly went very, very wrong with independent studios in the 90's. There seems to be a reoccurring theme where success begets failure. Where then a bunch of 20-something (probably autistic) manchildren find themselves with millions of dollars, they go down some incredibly terrible rabbit holes. They turn their offices into playgrounds, they endlessly chase some perfect creative vision, many lose the will to do actual work entirely.
I don't think it's as bad as the lottery curse or NFL millionaires. I think many of them walked away from the industry never having to worry about money again. But their successful creative prospects more or less died after their first life changing hit.
I think Westwood, Blizzard, Maxis and id Software held out the longest. I'm not sure why honestly. Possibly the 20-somethings who won the lottery were better prepared to handle the success. Which is not to say the quality of their games never tapered off. But you didn't see these catastrophic collapses the way you saw with Origin, Bullfrog, and others. Technically id Software still exists, if in a nakedly Ship of Theseus kind of way.
I think the 90's was the tipping point where a small number of people with a vision in gaming could do a lot with not a lot. (Arguably we are maybe returning to that with the advent of AI tools and the like?) I learned to program in Basic on a Commodore 64. I could in the 90's make simple games on a 386, that didn't look much off what professionals were doing. Soon after that, the number of people you needed would increase, and the amount of time I think.
So you got just got an expansion of who could get into being a game designer. But without necessarily having to have any kind of business acumen to run anything bigger than a few people working together. Maybe not just video games, Games Workshop was on the verge of collapse until it was bought out by management (rather than the designers) and turned in a more commercial direction in 91.
Creative Assembly is maybe the anti-example, founded in late 80's with a tiny workforce and increased in success until they could afford to do Shogun in 99. Bought out by Sega in 2005 after success with Medieval and Rome Total War which is when Tim Ansell got out. So he was able to scale it up from doing ports of MS-DOS games with 2 people to a hundred with 3 well regarded games under their belt when he sold it. Whether he could have scaled it to where they are today is an open question (though so to is whether Sega have been great at that either).
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At least for id, I think it's in large part because Carmack is both a workaholic and a genius, so even as he was buying Ferraris and starting space companies he never stopped grinding away. He never really let himself rest on his laurels. Rage is probably the worst game they ever put out (prior to Carmack's departure), and it was half decent.
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