Saudi Arabia’s All-Consuming Maw Devours Electronic Arts

Well, they found a way to make Electronic Arts an even shittier company. In an move notable for its size, though certainly not its content, a group of investors—including Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, private equity firm Silver Lake, and Jared Kushner's firm Affinity Partners—have purchased EA for $55 billion. It's the second-biggest acquisition in video game history, after Microsoft's $68.7 billion absorption of Activision Blizzard, but unlike that monstrosity, which was subject to antitrust regulations, this feels like a done deal, a straight purchase of one of gaming's biggest and worst studios.

As if that top-line news isn't bad enough, the acquisition is a leveraged buyout, thanks to $20 billion from JPMorgan Chase. I am not a financial expert, but my understanding (thank you, Matt Levine!) is that the bank is loaning this unholy consortium the money to actually make the purchase, and then EA's assets are collateral toward the loan. In terms that the financially stupid (me) can understand, this means the Saudified EA will have to make enough money not just to satisfy the bottomless greed of its private equity overlords, but also to pay back the bank for its $20 billion loan. Historically, leveraged buyouts have been bad for everyone except the people deploying them; rest in peace, Toys 'R Us.

What will this mean for EA as a gaming company? Likely nothing good. While the PIF already owned about nine percent of EA prior to this move, it now sits as the main stakeholder in the company (the PIF also has invested $2 billion into Affinity Partners, to complete this ouroboros of suck). If this acquisition and the new EA follows along the lines of Saudi Arabia's other investments, the blueprint will be simple: There will be a lot of money thrown around on flashy new toys, but the core business will be gutted. This is doubly true thanks to the leveraged buyout aspect of the deal; you can expect budget cuts throughout EA, and smaller developers within the company's umbrella now face existential threats.

The prioritization of profits over everything has long been the modus operandi for EA, but it looks to only get worse. Since I was a former FIFA/EA Sports FC player until the micro-transactional hell got too much to bear, I will use the company's flagship soccer brand as an example. When I began playing these games in the late '90s, the focus was on the offline modes; online gaming was in its nascent stage, after all. That carried through until, I'd say, FIFA 11, which was the first one I remember where Ultimate Team, a game mode that allows players to build fantasy teams out of "cards" that they can earn slowly via playing the game or quite quickly with real money, became a growing concern.

Over the next decade, more and more of the FIFA experience revolved around Ultimate Team, with detrimental effect on offline/single-player offerings. Career Mode, once the calling card for the series, has been a nightmare of bugs and underdeveloped features for over a decade—I'd ask how it's possible that FIFA is one of the few sports games without an online career mode, but the question has a very simple answer: EA doesn't want to funnel online players away from the moneymaker that is Ultimate Team—and Pro Clubs, a mode where players can compete alongside their friends against other groups of friends, has stagnated.

The Ultimate Teamfication of FIFA (now EA Sports FC after the game lost the FIFA license) hasn't just made this series worse, but rather it has had an overarching effect on its main competitor. Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer series was always held up as the soccer purist's preferred alternative to FIFA, with its less arcade-y gameplay, but it became impossible for the smaller studio to compete, and so it turned to micro-transactions and the free-to-play model, where the rebranded eFootball would attempt to copy EA's focus on an Ultimate Team–type mode while totally abandoning the on-pitch realism and deep offline modes that were once its hallmarks. At least eFootball has flopped horrifically since this change; the people who would want this just play EA Sports FC. It's a shame, though, that EA was so successful at making money from its soccer games that it effectively killed its only real competition. With the new ownership in place, I can only see this exploitation getting worse; could EA move EA Sports FC to a similar free-to-play model, lightening the development load (which will certainly lead to or be a result of layoffs) in favor of making more money on a constant basis? (Even with games reaching $70 in this new generation of consoles, the money earned from sales is dwarfed by Ultimate Team micro-transactions.)

Elsewhere, EA controls Madden, Battlefield, and, through BioWare and Maxis, also owns Mass Effect and The Sims. Those are some of the biggest game series in the world—well, Mass Effect was one of those, but has fallen off ever since EA really dug its hooks in after a 2007 acquisition; you can pinpoint the decline to 2009, when EA restructured its RPG division, and certainly by 2016, when it rolled BioWare into EA Worldwide Studios—and they all have had to deal with EA overreach as the parent company aimed to exploit more and more gamers for their money. Who can forget the Star Wars Battlefront II debacle of 2017? (There is also cause to wonder about how BioWare specifically and its openness with including queer characters and relationships in its games will gel with Saudi Arabia's noted antipathy toward homosexuality.)

Under its new ownership, with even more focus on making money at all costs, this will all get bleaker. If EA has value in gaming, it comes from its funding of smaller and more inventive games than its yearly sports-and-shooters series. A recent example: Split Fiction is one of the best and most creative games of 2025, a genre-bending narrative played exclusively as a co-operative experience. The game was developed by Hazelight Studios, which is part of the EA Originals program (meant to support indie games) and which has released A Way Out and It Takes Two, similarly excellent co-op games that engaged with what it means to play a video game with a friend. In the abstract, the success of Split Fiction should push EA to explore independent games more thoroughly, but there's the rub. As Riley MacLeod of Aftermath pointed out, EA CEO Andrew Wilson (who will remain as the boss of the new EA) said in May, after a brutal round of layoffs at the company, that EA should "double down on our biggest opportunities — including our owned IP, sports, and massive online communities." That doesn't sound like a space where a game like Split Fiction can thrive, and this was said before the Saudi-led acquisition, which will likely push EA toward those profit-makers even more thoroughly.

It can even get more dire than this. Saudi Arabia is a leading funder in the AI field, and EA has already not shied away from embracing AI. In a field like video games, AI's most powerful application is in how it can allow top brass to eliminate jobs by having AI produce in humans' stead, with no regard for how incompetent and downright nauseating AI production always is. The hellish combination of EA and Saudi Arabia might only speed up the ways that AI will creep into the gaming industry, another situation where no one wins except all of those who stand to make money.

There really is no silver lining here for the gamer who still holds out hope that EA will put out fun games to enjoy. Of course, the nosedive in quality that EA games have taken over the last decade-plus hasn't really stopped the money train from rolling on; I've bought both versions of the revived College Football series, and both Madden and EA Sports FC continue to sell and make buttloads of money from their Ultimate Team modes and annual roster updates. Battlefield 6 comes out in a few weeks, and will surely sell well, too. EA has always banked on people being too attached to the company's biggest series and will therefore put up with worse and worse exploitation every year. The PIF, and its unscrupulous partners, have just made a $55 billion bet that they can keep those gamers hooked while ratcheting up the money-grubbing, and it pains me to say that it will likely succeed. Maybe I'm wrong, and this will actually cause even a minor dent on EA's bottom line, but it all feels inevitable to me that the reality will be closer to a worst-case scenario.