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Notes -
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.
EA is the devil, I still have not forgivven them for doing in Westwood. It's a great pain to me they own the Battlefield franchise, I loved 1 & 2 myself. The new one looks promising but I'm waiting to see how they'll manage to fuck it up.
You mean 1942.
it's not that hard to count in battlefields: 1942, 2, 2142, 1943, 3, 4, 1, V, 2042, 6
At this point I'm almost expecting them to pull the 2010s most annoying fad and just name one "Battlefield" with no qualifiers so we have to start adding dates behind the dates to remain unambiguous.
I mean, they already did this in the 2010s with Battlefiled One, did they not? I don’t think it will happen again for a bit. Their next game is maybe 50% likely to be another Bad Company or Vietnam era one, 30% it’s a Cold War one, 20% something else (maybe 10% space age and 10% a 90s/2000s confused middle)
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