Good?

1982:

It’s been a rotting corpse for a while now.

The $20B was printed by JPMorgan Chase bankers so that Jared Kushner and the Saudis could buy EA at 45% off. In return, the saudis promise that they can siphon $20B from fired workers back to the bankers over the next ~10 years.

As someone who understands the differences between soccer games I can tell anyone who actually gives a fuck about soccer game quality and is not gacha addicted will confirm current FIFA/FC is utterly shit.

They are probably paying billions in so many teams and players licensing while everything has miniscule improvements or even removing stuff (like Volta game mode).

Every year EA is reporting lesser and lesser profits from the FC series, and doesn't help that after the first weeks the yearly games start rotting in store shelves while asking 60+ Euro. They make money from the whales spending salaries on player card packs on FUT, and they are quite angry too. Konami is down the corner gaining more and more revenue and users yearly from the FC refugees (not that f2p eFootball is good either).

"I don't care who wins. I just want EA to lose." Star Wars guy

This, they destroyed the art of US video games because it was promoting bad values like gay marriage in The Sims

A lot of what this means is a pivot to the highest yield games. So... more GACHA and other lootbox style gaming. Cheaper assets, more redundancy in levels, shorter and cheaper cut scenes, etc.

But this is normal operating procedure in a bust-out style business model. EA's going to be boiled down and stripped just like so many prior studios, from THQ to Bioware.

Has it been more than a shell in the last decade or two?

I hope, by some odd twist of fate, that Maxis is spit back out into its formal glory. Most likely it'll just kill more good game series.

Indeed. I think it would be in their best interest to find work elsewhere before they end up getting laid off at the most inconvenient time.

Beyond that it should be amusing to watch this company go down in flames.

It's like buying a house, and then expecting the house to pay the mortgage.

Has been for many years

Already have.

Unfortunately, will the EA Sports fans and Battlefield fans do the same?

I have good news and bad news on that front. The good news is that the original wing commander dev is making a spiritual successor to the game. The bad news is that it's star citizen.

That was exactly my thought. Extract cash for the owners through massive cuts, gut the company and discard the husk. Classic leveraged buy out scheme.

Thing is, could they even get enough from selling the IP to cover the purchase?

In the example of Toys'r'us, it ends up being theft against other creditors, suppliers, workers, etc, who end up not getting paid when it collapses.

In bankruptcies the entity who introduced the debt should be liable for it (the new parent company)

Maybe private equity will do to EA what they did to Toys’R’Us!

samesies!

They aren’t, they will make money stripping EA for parts and once the husk is spent it will be disposed of.

Why not? Were you alive 17 years ago? Have you already forgotten how much money Madoff took? How much money was lost to the subprime ponzi?

Stay the course, this will go great.

I mean... you're talking about the company that makes billions of dollars a year on FIFA games, which are already only one step removed from AI slop. I don't seriously think EA's customer base will care; the quality of the games made by EA is already low enough that I don't believe the use of AI will move the needle. And honestly, will anyone care if it's AI updating the rosters and title to FIFA 26? I guess I feel bad for the working devs putting food on their table, but is that the job that want?

It's probably AI videos games made by AI for AI to play. People need to do stuff like mining and growing organs, they can't do anything nice anymore like play games

Been playing the entire Battlefield franchise since 1942

Note to readers: 1942 is the name of a game, not the year of release

OMG I played so much M.U.L.E on the C64. Archon and Jumpman, also.

They already do, the only difference is now the slop will be made by AI instead of underpaid developers in Romania.

EA being on the recieving end of what they've been doing to others for years

Just sitting here playing the long game, waiting for EA to finally implode and get sold off for parts so we can finally get a new Command & Conquer.

My first thought was they'll probably use it to generate endless slop assets for The Sims, since people seem to pick up whatever they put out for that.

How many EA games require you connect to their servers just to play? How many have ToS where you need to install any updates before you play? How long before these PE folks figure out they can push updates to even older games that add data mining capacity?

The image being so small makes it funnier.