Not referencing the Saudi Arabia portion here specifically but LBOs as documented in the book Barbarians at the Gate (covers Nabisco/RJR tobacco) gives me basically zero hope for the future of EA. EA was already rabid cost-cutters and RIF specialists, and they won the most hated company award for however many consecutive years for a reason. Giving them crushing debt to go along with their propensity to give large executive bonuses and stomp their workforce is not a good recipe long-term
Are there any examples where a company was purchased via a leveraged buyout and the company went on to be more profitable afterwards? Because the only examples I know of resulted in the purchased company going bankrupt fairly quickly.
Many sports teams come to mind. Pretty much any F1 team that exists is now worth a lot more on paper than it was purchased for. A few EPL teams come to mind too.
leverage increases the disparity of returns (so some companies are definitely out of business because the of the leverage put on them) but by far the vast majority of LBO’s are at least moderately successful.
I don't think you're right. During its last fiscal year on the stock market, Twitter reported a net loss of $221 million.
We don't have exact insights to X.com's books, but we have credible reports from the Financial Times that they produced over a billion dollars in ebitda in 2024. This is completely possible with a 50% revenue drop. They laid off 80% of the company, something like 6,000 people.
Beautiful turnaround if those figures are reliable, but like Munger calls them, EBITDA tends to bullshit metrics derived by cobbling up bullshit to hide that a company is losing cash.
Just like Figma booking $700M in 2023 profits which was only possible because of the $1b Adobe breakup fee. Proceeded to lose $732m on $749m in revenues the very next year.
A big part of why Twitter needed to cut expenses drastically after the buyout was that it suddenly had an extra >1$ billion of yearly debt repayments to handle.
IIRC Musk wanted to get an LBO, but wasn't able to find anyone willing to loan the money.
Keep in mind that a LBO is actually a good deal for the bank, because if the purchased company goes bankrupt, the bank can recoup their investment by liquidating the company.
However, that only works if there are assets to liquidate. This can include physical assets, valuable IPs, or favorable lease agreements. In other words, anything that someone else would want to purchase.
Twitter, being a website, doesn't have a whole lot of assets they could sell. Which meant that other collateral was required for Musk to secure financing.
It would be fantastic if EA went away. They've been such a blight on the entire industry, killed off or destroyed so many good franchises, developers, and studios.
I was hoping the launch of early access skate. would be received poorly, it was due to the beloved franchise being made into a Fortnite-like money grabbing scheme, would cause them to run backwards and fix it releasing an actual skate series game with some live service features but a solid focus on the original franchise. However that hope is dwindling.
Does EA 202X stomp their workforce? I had a vague idea that this was largely a thing of the past.
The wiki article linked cites a lot of abuse, but all of it is nearly 2 decades old. My understanding was that it course corrected, and is one of the better gaming firms to work for ATM.
Jason Schreier (sp?) is probably the journalist with the best track record on covering EA and it’s generally been rotten all the way down. His recent book Play Nice focuses on just Blizzard but I wouldn’t be surprised if he does one on EA someday because they are in a league of their own when it comes to toxic workplace practices
From a cursory search, he dunks on mismanagement in EA fairly regularly, but I'm not finding a lot of evidence of him reporting on worker abuse. (Layoffs in a failing sub-studio are shitty, but aren't that. Vision whiplash is shitty, but is also not that. Management mandates to implement features that you know will tank your game are shitty, but are also not that.)
I'll defer to people who claim to work there now (avanderveen in the other replies). If you want my perspective, your parenthetical is describing worker abuse. Severance-avoidant layoffs and crunch are shitty and _are_ worker abuse -- in my opinion.
EA won the most hated company award because video game players are dramatic. Charging $5 for a launch DLC is a drop in the bucket compared to the ways that some larger more critical companies can affect your life.
EA has been a target of scorn for a while because of a laundry list of issues (including pay-to-win schemes, loot boxes, treatment of employees, etc.) which is long enough to warrant its own dedicated wikipedia page.
TBQH Valve/Steam is a major factor in this gambling in games scene but gamers love them. So I don't think this is the real reason gamers have a problem with EA.
My defence with Valve is that at least on their stuff you most of time get stored credit. With the rest it is same, but it is actually drown the drain.
For me, it's their support for linux and their easy return policy for games that don't end up working. Gaben could light an orphanage on fire and I'd forgive him.
Not so, but if you're to pick one company over all the others as being the most deserving of your ire, EA seems like a rather strange choice compared to, say, Nestlé [1], Chiquita [2], The Coca-Cola Company [3] or Shell [4]. One might even wonder if there isn't something wrong with your priorities.
Sure, their “crimes” are minor compared to RealPage raising rents on everyone but it wasn’t because gamers were dramatic. It was most hated because it was so in your face.
Nah, EA's history is laden with terrible decisions, killing creative teams, neglecting good project's marketing and killing them in the process because they had another internal game in the same genre and the like. It's a fucking cesspit of a company.
And they sit on a lot of good franchises and they literally do nothing with them.
Video game players are hilariously, pitiably dramatic. I remember the announcement of $80 Mario Kart being dangerous,immoral,evil.
Guys... I spent that much at a bowling alley with 2 other people; once, for 2 hours of bowling and a soda. I'm not saying that's a good thing. I'm saying that in terms of recreation, compared to anything else, it's still insane bang-buck. Let's also not forget video games are discretionary spending, meaning they could charge $400 and it would still not be any more immoral than an expensive handbag. It would just mean that I'm not buying it, just like how I don't buy expensive handbags.
Edit for reply: > In general, if you find yourself thinking a group of people are "just being dramatic" then you're probably missing context.
According to what law of reasoning is this true?
According to Occam's razor, the most likely explanation is simply dopamine addicts getting frustrated they'll be feeling even more guilty about their spending habits, as they continue spending regardless. Otherwise, an $80 game doesn't hurt any more than seeing a $1000 monitor stand.
Edit for reply 2: > Why edit rather than reply?
Because "posting too fast, please slow down, thanks" is a blunt and poorly thought through instrument.
> Video game players are hilariously, pitiably dramatic.
I'm a gamer and I 100% agree with you.
The simple fact is, AAA game prices have been stuck at $60-70 for 30 years. Despite $60 in 1995 being worth ~$127 today, games are still $60. They haven't kept up with inflation. Games are relatively cheap while development costs for AAA are ridiculously high.
A typical SNES game had 10-30 people working on it and would have it done in 1.5-3 years. AAA games will have typically 1,000-3,000 and could take 3-7 years, so we're talking 100-200 times the development cost.
Now, compare the best-selling SNES games [0] to the overall best-selling games [1]. Modern AAA games barely reach 10x the unit sales as old SNES games.
I play a lot of Paradox strategy games. There is a new game coming out that they sold a premium edition with three pre-sold DLC (for something like $20 additional) with a roadmap of a year of post-release development. Some people are outraged that something is planned to be developed and released 6 months after release because that is somehow keeping pay walling game that should have been in the base release. The prices of games are incredibly low. Seeing a movie in theaters costs $20 a ticket and theyll charge $8 for the soda, and gamers are outraged by a $10 dlc that cost $100k+ to develop.
The problem is that DLCs are annoying. They lead to fragmentation and in some ways lead to being unable to experience everything. And they leave you with the feeling that you are being milked.
In the 90s it was simple - you get the game, 12 months later you get the expansion, then comes the sequel. The problem with DLC is the same as with objects - there are too many of them and they are too small. And the ratio of game/dollar is not that good.
Are people pointing out that trump is marching us into autocracy and fascism 'dramatic' or just paying attention. Any communities gripes are just 'drama' if you don't know what they are talking about.
Videogamers have fickle tastes that can change on a whim, and the entire dev stack for game development is becoming more accessible and commoditized, creating massive amounts of competition. Even more so when it comes to squeezing beloved franchises out. Multiple franchises have died under EA (Sim City anyone?), and one of the top franchises EA owns basically has morphed into a "Middle East combat simulator" (Battlefield).
I'm sure the Saudi investors think this might be one way to get influence over the west, or maybe they just like playing FIFA, but I can see this buyout becoming a big stinking turd investment in the long run.
> Multiple franchises have died under EA (Sim City anyone?)
Cities: Skylines managed to fill that gap, but then C:S2 was an utter dud on release.
I think part of the problem is that we've reached a point where the players expect each individual citizen to be simulated, with the traffic to match, but doing that creates such a massive demand on CPU power that even a modern monster system will struggle once your city reaches the high 6-digit population. Simulating 100K vehicles in real time isn't easy. Even if you're not rendering them all because of draw distance limitations, you're still running path finding regularly if you want vehicles to be smart and try to bypass traffic jams, not to mention just trying to make them respond to traffic signals and not rear-end each other.
Am I wrong in reading this will add 20b in debt to EA the company, and not the purchasers? Because it seems like just servicing that debt will immediately put the company in a bad position.
Was anything of value lost? EA was long dead due to its predictable and constant lack of content creation abilities, and Saudi Arabia isn't known for even involvement in great creative contents. Meanwhile, Nintendo Switch 2 is still sold out in some places. This feels more like EA shareholders got an exit than SA gained anything.
EAs customer base has been pretty negative on the state of the product for the last several years. I can't imagine this move will do anything but accelerate the trends driving brand dissatisfaction.
Customers feel like they are being treated like ATM machines, while the tens of billions of revenue are clearly not going into new, exciting creative endeavors. I suppose all of this makes sense when you consider that EA is a 45 year old company.
I wondered about a situation similar to this for the King of the Hill reboot. Seemingly almost every episode contains exuberant praise for Saudi Arabia. Hank would mention how it felt more America than Texas, and how much he loved Saudi Arabia over and over. I haven't seen any public information about Saudi funding being involved, so maybe this is all baseless.
Back in the 80s there was a Playboy article about how influential the Saudi's in USA because of their overflowing oil money. I guess it never changed they just got a good PR management to fix their image for a few decades and they are in the spotlight again.
I want to start by saying I have no skin in the game here. While not perfect, Saudi has very clearly moved "Westernly" on many ideas, most notably social and economic ones. It can even be argued that their recent moves in that direction have made it near impossible for the other large economy companies to move too far the other way. Th
At what point does the narrative about their investments on the larger stage become less pejorative?
"Why does everybody have such a low opinion of this oppressive theocracy?" Gee, it's such a mystery.
Remember when the current leader of Saudi Arabia lured a Washington Post journalist into a Saudi consulate, had him tortured to death, and cut into pieces to dispose of the evidence? What a bunch of merry pranksters. We really should lighten up.
>Maybe the narrative changes when their approaches towards human rights does?
Clo$e. The narrative change$ whenever the $audi$ decide that they want it to. U$ually, thi$ involve$ $omething, but I can't figure quite what that "it" could be.
>While not perfect, Saudi has very clearly moved "Westernly" on many ideas, most notably social and economic ones.
My man, they can kill you for drawing a stick figure.
Let that sink in.
SA is still a single-export economy, and those who are smart enough to get out of SA, do so. From personally having very close relationships with a few folks who worked on the NEOM project, the Saudi locals are not prepared to do any work at all, just spend money and export the work to consultants. It's about posturing, not rolling up their sleeves.
Yeah. They don't have a good track record, and that's before the (partially justified) Islamophobia kicks in.
Before anyone thinks I'm Islamophobic, I equally detest and mock all religion.
I do find it funny that if there is an afterlife, Abraham is there, and absolutely befuddled as to why all of his disciples seem to hate each other and want to kill each other.
> While not perfect, Saudi has very clearly moved "Westernly" on many ideas, most notably social
Citation very much needed. It's still a country where you can be executed for being gay, protestors against government projects get murdered in the streets, and anyone vaguely critical against the government (that includes being critical for things which have since been allowed, like women driving) being imprisoned for long periods of time. Oh, and did they not execute a dissident in a consulate? Did they not bait various government detractors living abroad to return to Saudi under threat of harm to their families?
It's still a reactionary theocracy. It has liberalised, socially, in the years since MBS has had de facto control, there is no denying that; but they're nowhere near "westernly".
> At what point does the narrative about their investments on the larger stage become less pejorative?
When their sportswashing and investmentwashing ends up entirely working. It will probably take years, Khashoggi's murder was still only 7 years ago. It will also depend a lot on how their World Cup works, a lot of the world will be watching that one closely and it will have big ramifications.
Sure, 2 inches per year, 2 steps ahead 1 step back in a good year. In 2000 years they may approach current levels of personal or religious freedom that average western country has. Till then, its absolutely horrible place if you are in any sort of minority group, or woman, or want that pesky freedom for you or your children.
The USA isn't the only country in the "western world", please stop equating the two.
Even for Britain, France, Germany, the countries with the biggest far right/reactionary political groups, where there are legitimate chances for them to end up in power, none of them are religious. Or even that socially reactionary for that matter.
Since only nine Vice-Presidents have succeeded through death/resignation, and zero Speakers of the House, I don't think there is much danger of a theocracy even if the Speaker wants there to be one. Furthermore, in the unlikely event he becomes President, Congress still passes the laws and the Courts still require the laws to be constitutional. The whole system is designed to thwart things like this.
But let's not ignore the danger from the Left. Sure, a transcendant, self-sacrificing God is out of the picture, but enthroned in his place is My Self-defined Sexual Identity, or depending on the variety, Those We Define to be Oppressed. In the new atheist Puritanism, dissent will get something worse than wearing a scarlet letter. The problem isn't theocracy, per se, its the fact that dissent is not tolerated, and the Left isn't any better here.
Never mind third in line, the dude who is currently President just put out a memorandum declaring "anti-Christianity" to be on the same level as "support for the overthrow of the United States Government."
I really wouldn't go this far, there is _way_ too much religion in US politics for proper separation of church and state. When elected politicians regularly quote religious documents in their reasoning for making decisions, agreeing and disagreeing with others, etc. you can't claim a theocracy isn't on the cards.
No, it has not. But you cannot deny that religion being a visible, daily, part of politics, and being very often quoted as justification for political, and even worse, judicial decisions, is closer to a theocracy than it is to separation of church and state.
> There is the COVID sect. They even masked themselves outdoors in public - like the women in Iran back in the day. Without any evidence - and they did it even against evidence. It was a very religious thing
Bloody hell are we still at this nonsense today?
Public health authorities, across multiple continents, said to mask up. Did it limit spread? Yes, it did, and studies proved so. What the hell is your problem there? May I remind you the initial heavy weeks with makeshift morgues in ice rinks and refrigerated trucks, and military hospitals being deployed? Lockdowns and masking and vaccine mandates were reasonable, and reasonably effective, remedies for how horrific things could get (and did get, at the start, in multiple countries).
> There is the climate sect. There are many young followers with strong believes - but nobody has ever read any book on atmosphere science. And nobody has read any recent paper on the subject. Once you do, you'll find it very surprising how little substance is behind their dogmas.
Aha, so trusting the scientific consensus is "a sect". Do enlighten us, how is climate change not real? Or is it real, but God given? Or what is your deal?
> Another group now shouts for war - and if you listen to them they're about as intelligent as the worst kind of crusaders back in the day.
What war? Putting Russia back in its place? Si vis pacem, para bellum. The only thing a bully would understand is strength.
It's an interesting move because the PE playbook is to buy a company and jack up the prices and cut half the workforce while doubling the workload of the other employees.
EA is already widely reviled for this stuff so it will be like getting blood from a stone
Not referencing the Saudi Arabia portion here specifically but LBOs as documented in the book Barbarians at the Gate (covers Nabisco/RJR tobacco) gives me basically zero hope for the future of EA. EA was already rabid cost-cutters and RIF specialists, and they won the most hated company award for however many consecutive years for a reason. Giving them crushing debt to go along with their propensity to give large executive bonuses and stomp their workforce is not a good recipe long-term
Are there any examples where a company was purchased via a leveraged buyout and the company went on to be more profitable afterwards? Because the only examples I know of resulted in the purchased company going bankrupt fairly quickly.
Gibson Greeting Cards (1982) by Wesray Capital, Bought for $80M (only $1M in equity), sold for $220M within 18 months
Hilton Hotels (2007) by Blackstone Group, Despite the 2008 crisis, refinanced and sold with a $14B profit
Safeway (1986) by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Restructured, sold underperforming stores, returned to profitability
HCA Healthcare (2006) by KKR & Bain Capital, Strong cash flow supported debt; remained stable and profitable
Dell Technologies (2013), Silver Lake Partners, Went private, streamlined operations, and rebounded strongly
RJR Nabisco (1989) by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts Iconic LBO; despite controversy, generated $53M profit
So 50/50 odds on completely destroying the company (and jobs) or generating some minor wealth for a handful of investors?
Many sports teams come to mind. Pretty much any F1 team that exists is now worth a lot more on paper than it was purchased for. A few EPL teams come to mind too.
leverage increases the disparity of returns (so some companies are definitely out of business because the of the leverage put on them) but by far the vast majority of LBO’s are at least moderately successful.
This give you some idea of the volume https://www.ropesgray.com/en/insights/alerts/2025/07/us-pe-m...
Heinz, Hilton, Dell.
Dell did pretty well after going private
But its buyout was lead by Michael Dell.
Why "but"?
Having the original founder leading the buyout is not typical. The Dell situation was much more like Steve Jobs returning to Apple than a typical LBO.
Hilton's LBO essentially have saved the brand.
Twitter is yet an unfolding story but it seems to be working.
Twitter isn’t collapsing, but it’s hardly more profitable. In fact, the last numbers we know about them show >50% drop in revenue.
I don't think you're right. During its last fiscal year on the stock market, Twitter reported a net loss of $221 million.
We don't have exact insights to X.com's books, but we have credible reports from the Financial Times that they produced over a billion dollars in ebitda in 2024. This is completely possible with a 50% revenue drop. They laid off 80% of the company, something like 6,000 people.
The reports I have seen have shown significant decreases in revenue, from around $5B in 2021 to $2.5B in 2024: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/
I’m not sure about profit, but I do know that Twitter made $1.4B in profit in 2019 according to their SEC filings.
Right now Twitter is steadily shedding users and watching ad revenue steadily drop. Looks like it's in a slow death spiral to me.
Twitter produced $1.2B in ebitda in 2024 according to the Financial Times. Are you sure you're not mentally operating on 2022 data?
I wonder how well they are doing on that "I" there...
>ebitda
Beautiful turnaround if those figures are reliable, but like Munger calls them, EBITDA tends to bullshit metrics derived by cobbling up bullshit to hide that a company is losing cash.
Just like Figma booking $700M in 2023 profits which was only possible because of the $1b Adobe breakup fee. Proceeded to lose $732m on $749m in revenues the very next year.
Was Twitter an LBO? I thought the funding came from Musk taking on the debt.
A big part of why Twitter needed to cut expenses drastically after the buyout was that it suddenly had an extra >1$ billion of yearly debt repayments to handle.
IIRC Musk wanted to get an LBO, but wasn't able to find anyone willing to loan the money.
Keep in mind that a LBO is actually a good deal for the bank, because if the purchased company goes bankrupt, the bank can recoup their investment by liquidating the company.
However, that only works if there are assets to liquidate. This can include physical assets, valuable IPs, or favorable lease agreements. In other words, anything that someone else would want to purchase.
Twitter, being a website, doesn't have a whole lot of assets they could sell. Which meant that other collateral was required for Musk to secure financing.
It's still a leveraged buyout.
But wouldn't a "true" LBO be where the acquired company takes on the debt?
And Musk didn't act alone, I am not sure how much others contributed, but there were other people/companies involved.
Did you see the HBO movie version of Barbarians at the Gate? I thought it was pretty interesting. You can watch it all on youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS4ENJCIYNM
Loved the movie (and the book). The movie is highly entertaining for a business movie.
This is a fantastic movie that was lost to time!
It would be fantastic if EA went away. They've been such a blight on the entire industry, killed off or destroyed so many good franchises, developers, and studios.
You had any hope for them?
I was hoping the launch of early access skate. would be received poorly, it was due to the beloved franchise being made into a Fortnite-like money grabbing scheme, would cause them to run backwards and fix it releasing an actual skate series game with some live service features but a solid focus on the original franchise. However that hope is dwindling.
Does EA 202X stomp their workforce? I had a vague idea that this was largely a thing of the past.
The wiki article linked cites a lot of abuse, but all of it is nearly 2 decades old. My understanding was that it course corrected, and is one of the better gaming firms to work for ATM.
I do not have first hand experience, but my impression from being in the industry is that modern EA is not at all like the "EA spouse" era.
Jason Schreier (sp?) is probably the journalist with the best track record on covering EA and it’s generally been rotten all the way down. His recent book Play Nice focuses on just Blizzard but I wouldn’t be surprised if he does one on EA someday because they are in a league of their own when it comes to toxic workplace practices
From a cursory search, he dunks on mismanagement in EA fairly regularly, but I'm not finding a lot of evidence of him reporting on worker abuse. (Layoffs in a failing sub-studio are shitty, but aren't that. Vision whiplash is shitty, but is also not that. Management mandates to implement features that you know will tank your game are shitty, but are also not that.)
Maybe it's pay walled.
Do you have a source?
I'll defer to people who claim to work there now (avanderveen in the other replies). If you want my perspective, your parenthetical is describing worker abuse. Severance-avoidant layoffs and crunch are shitty and _are_ worker abuse -- in my opinion.
In my experience at Maxis (2021-2024), EA 202X was quite a nice place to work
EA won the most hated company award because video game players are dramatic. Charging $5 for a launch DLC is a drop in the bucket compared to the ways that some larger more critical companies can affect your life.
EA has been a target of scorn for a while because of a laundry list of issues (including pay-to-win schemes, loot boxes, treatment of employees, etc.) which is long enough to warrant its own dedicated wikipedia page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Electronic_Arts
EA doing any amount of shenanigans isn't making people sick, killing people, making people homeless or destitute. Their crimes are minor and petty.
Addictive gambling for kids is hardly minor and petty. Many children have spent thousands on EA Sports games.
TBQH Valve/Steam is a major factor in this gambling in games scene but gamers love them. So I don't think this is the real reason gamers have a problem with EA.
My defence with Valve is that at least on their stuff you most of time get stored credit. With the rest it is same, but it is actually drown the drain.
For me, it's their support for linux and their easy return policy for games that don't end up working. Gaben could light an orphanage on fire and I'd forgive him.
So I guess that no other matter can receive attention if some people are homeless in the world?
Not so, but if you're to pick one company over all the others as being the most deserving of your ire, EA seems like a rather strange choice compared to, say, Nestlé [1], Chiquita [2], The Coca-Cola Company [3] or Shell [4]. One might even wonder if there isn't something wrong with your priorities.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_of_Nestl%C3%A9
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiquita#Criticism
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Coca-Cola
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_plc#Controversies
So EA also does not help starving children.
Sure, their “crimes” are minor compared to RealPage raising rents on everyone but it wasn’t because gamers were dramatic. It was most hated because it was so in your face.
Nah, EA's history is laden with terrible decisions, killing creative teams, neglecting good project's marketing and killing them in the process because they had another internal game in the same genre and the like. It's a fucking cesspit of a company.
And they sit on a lot of good franchises and they literally do nothing with them.
Video game players are hilariously, pitiably dramatic. I remember the announcement of $80 Mario Kart being dangerous, immoral, evil.
Guys... I spent that much at a bowling alley with 2 other people; once, for 2 hours of bowling and a soda. I'm not saying that's a good thing. I'm saying that in terms of recreation, compared to anything else, it's still insane bang-buck. Let's also not forget video games are discretionary spending, meaning they could charge $400 and it would still not be any more immoral than an expensive handbag. It would just mean that I'm not buying it, just like how I don't buy expensive handbags.
Edit for reply: > In general, if you find yourself thinking a group of people are "just being dramatic" then you're probably missing context.
According to what law of reasoning is this true?
According to Occam's razor, the most likely explanation is simply dopamine addicts getting frustrated they'll be feeling even more guilty about their spending habits, as they continue spending regardless. Otherwise, an $80 game doesn't hurt any more than seeing a $1000 monitor stand.
Edit for reply 2: > Why edit rather than reply?
Because "posting too fast, please slow down, thanks" is a blunt and poorly thought through instrument.
> Video game players are hilariously, pitiably dramatic.
I'm a gamer and I 100% agree with you.
The simple fact is, AAA game prices have been stuck at $60-70 for 30 years. Despite $60 in 1995 being worth ~$127 today, games are still $60. They haven't kept up with inflation. Games are relatively cheap while development costs for AAA are ridiculously high.
A typical SNES game had 10-30 people working on it and would have it done in 1.5-3 years. AAA games will have typically 1,000-3,000 and could take 3-7 years, so we're talking 100-200 times the development cost.
Now, compare the best-selling SNES games [0] to the overall best-selling games [1]. Modern AAA games barely reach 10x the unit sales as old SNES games.
Margins are thinning.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Super_Nin...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...
I play a lot of Paradox strategy games. There is a new game coming out that they sold a premium edition with three pre-sold DLC (for something like $20 additional) with a roadmap of a year of post-release development. Some people are outraged that something is planned to be developed and released 6 months after release because that is somehow keeping pay walling game that should have been in the base release. The prices of games are incredibly low. Seeing a movie in theaters costs $20 a ticket and theyll charge $8 for the soda, and gamers are outraged by a $10 dlc that cost $100k+ to develop.
The problem is that DLCs are annoying. They lead to fragmentation and in some ways lead to being unable to experience everything. And they leave you with the feeling that you are being milked.
In the 90s it was simple - you get the game, 12 months later you get the expansion, then comes the sequel. The problem with DLC is the same as with objects - there are too many of them and they are too small. And the ratio of game/dollar is not that good.
You are simplifying the arguments.
In general, if you find yourself thinking a group of people are "just being dramatic" then you're probably missing context.
Why edit rather than reply?
Are people pointing out that trump is marching us into autocracy and fascism 'dramatic' or just paying attention. Any communities gripes are just 'drama' if you don't know what they are talking about.
Gamers will forgive anything if the games are good. But EA is nothing but a slop factory.
Videogamers have fickle tastes that can change on a whim, and the entire dev stack for game development is becoming more accessible and commoditized, creating massive amounts of competition. Even more so when it comes to squeezing beloved franchises out. Multiple franchises have died under EA (Sim City anyone?), and one of the top franchises EA owns basically has morphed into a "Middle East combat simulator" (Battlefield).
I'm sure the Saudi investors think this might be one way to get influence over the west, or maybe they just like playing FIFA, but I can see this buyout becoming a big stinking turd investment in the long run.
> Multiple franchises have died under EA (Sim City anyone?)
Cities: Skylines managed to fill that gap, but then C:S2 was an utter dud on release.
I think part of the problem is that we've reached a point where the players expect each individual citizen to be simulated, with the traffic to match, but doing that creates such a massive demand on CPU power that even a modern monster system will struggle once your city reaches the high 6-digit population. Simulating 100K vehicles in real time isn't easy. Even if you're not rendering them all because of draw distance limitations, you're still running path finding regularly if you want vehicles to be smart and try to bypass traffic jams, not to mention just trying to make them respond to traffic signals and not rear-end each other.
I'd say the bigger problem was games claiming that's what they did when they clearly didn't.
I wonder if someone could figure out how to implement HashLife for this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45413083
Am I wrong in reading this will add 20b in debt to EA the company, and not the purchasers? Because it seems like just servicing that debt will immediately put the company in a bad position.
That is how a leveraged buyout works. See: Toys "R" Us.
Step 1. Take out a giant loan.
Step 2. Buy a company on credit.
Step 3. Stick company with the loan used to buy it.
Step 4. RIF, cut costs, reduce quality, break contracts, and discontinue goods and services.
Step 5. Sell everything of value.
Step 6. Send that company into bankruptcy.
Step 7. Rinse, lather, and repeat.
It doesn't matter much whether the purchasers personally hold the debt or the debt is held by EA, which is wholly owned by the purchasers.
Was anything of value lost? EA was long dead due to its predictable and constant lack of content creation abilities, and Saudi Arabia isn't known for even involvement in great creative contents. Meanwhile, Nintendo Switch 2 is still sold out in some places. This feels more like EA shareholders got an exit than SA gained anything.
Similar article, no paywall: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/electronic-ar...
EAs customer base has been pretty negative on the state of the product for the last several years. I can't imagine this move will do anything but accelerate the trends driving brand dissatisfaction.
Customers feel like they are being treated like ATM machines, while the tens of billions of revenue are clearly not going into new, exciting creative endeavors. I suppose all of this makes sense when you consider that EA is a 45 year old company.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45413083
And more previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45400478
This will be a great way for the Saudi's to influence western opinion of them. It won't take long for the kingdom to take editorial control.
The Kingdom of Saud - It's in the game.
Interesting, they purchased pokemon go this year also. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz61yxv6evjo
I wondered about a situation similar to this for the King of the Hill reboot. Seemingly almost every episode contains exuberant praise for Saudi Arabia. Hank would mention how it felt more America than Texas, and how much he loved Saudi Arabia over and over. I haven't seen any public information about Saudi funding being involved, so maybe this is all baseless.
I may accept it if they can make a SimCity 5 that doesn't suck.
Back in the 80s there was a Playboy article about how influential the Saudi's in USA because of their overflowing oil money. I guess it never changed they just got a good PR management to fix their image for a few decades and they are in the spotlight again.
Hopefully they sell Blizzard's IP to a different company.
Blizzard is part of Activision (now Microsoft), not EA.
Blizzard has been in the absolute toilet for years and was never associated with EA in any way.
I want to start by saying I have no skin in the game here. While not perfect, Saudi has very clearly moved "Westernly" on many ideas, most notably social and economic ones. It can even be argued that their recent moves in that direction have made it near impossible for the other large economy companies to move too far the other way. Th
At what point does the narrative about their investments on the larger stage become less pejorative?
They literally just killed another journalist after torturing him for seven years https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turki_bin_Abdulaziz_al-Jasse...
Another murder last month, this one they killed for the crimes of attending protests and funerals: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde23/0239/2025/en/
Two years ago they sentenced this man to death because he tweeted something they didn't like to less than ten followers: https://www.uscirf.gov/religious-prisoners-conscience/forb-v...
Wikipedia says that one of the charges was “financing terrorist activities”.
Ironic in the most morbid of ways.
They have a well documented and known human slave trade for their laborers in the kingdom.
Maybe the narrative changes when their approaches towards human rights does?
"Why does everybody have such a low opinion of this oppressive theocracy?" Gee, it's such a mystery.
Remember when the current leader of Saudi Arabia lured a Washington Post journalist into a Saudi consulate, had him tortured to death, and cut into pieces to dispose of the evidence? What a bunch of merry pranksters. We really should lighten up.
Meanwhile... we have a former terrorist who posed after cutting multiple persons heads off speaking at the UN....
Is that related somehow or are you just trying to diminish the awfulness of Saudi Arabia's government by bringing up the awfulness of some other guy?
Just bringing up the absurdity of it. I wasn't trying to say Saudi isn't as bad, I meant to say they're all terrible
Awful people run the world.
>Maybe the narrative changes when their approaches towards human rights does?
Clo$e. The narrative change$ whenever the $audi$ decide that they want it to. U$ually, thi$ involve$ $omething, but I can't figure quite what that "it" could be.
>While not perfect, Saudi has very clearly moved "Westernly" on many ideas, most notably social and economic ones.
My man, they can kill you for drawing a stick figure.
Let that sink in.
SA is still a single-export economy, and those who are smart enough to get out of SA, do so. From personally having very close relationships with a few folks who worked on the NEOM project, the Saudi locals are not prepared to do any work at all, just spend money and export the work to consultants. It's about posturing, not rolling up their sleeves.
The kingdom literally butchered a journalist for writing about what they were doing. Islamaphobia about sharia law bullshit doesn't even apply.
Yeah. They don't have a good track record, and that's before the (partially justified) Islamophobia kicks in.
Before anyone thinks I'm Islamophobic, I equally detest and mock all religion.
I do find it funny that if there is an afterlife, Abraham is there, and absolutely befuddled as to why all of his disciples seem to hate each other and want to kill each other.
> I want to start by saying I have no skin in the game here
We all have skin in the game when there's an actor on the world stage that kills its critics buying up huge orgs in our society.
> While not perfect, Saudi has very clearly moved "Westernly" on many ideas, most notably social
Citation very much needed. It's still a country where you can be executed for being gay, protestors against government projects get murdered in the streets, and anyone vaguely critical against the government (that includes being critical for things which have since been allowed, like women driving) being imprisoned for long periods of time. Oh, and did they not execute a dissident in a consulate? Did they not bait various government detractors living abroad to return to Saudi under threat of harm to their families?
It's still a reactionary theocracy. It has liberalised, socially, in the years since MBS has had de facto control, there is no denying that; but they're nowhere near "westernly".
> At what point does the narrative about their investments on the larger stage become less pejorative?
When their sportswashing and investmentwashing ends up entirely working. It will probably take years, Khashoggi's murder was still only 7 years ago. It will also depend a lot on how their World Cup works, a lot of the world will be watching that one closely and it will have big ramifications.
> It has liberalised, socially
I think that's what they meant by "moved westernly".
Sure, 2 inches per year, 2 steps ahead 1 step back in a good year. In 2000 years they may approach current levels of personal or religious freedom that average western country has. Till then, its absolutely horrible place if you are in any sort of minority group, or woman, or want that pesky freedom for you or your children.
Criticism and insults from people like you is exactly what they need to go faster. /s
The western world seems to be reverting to theocracy. It will be interesting to see where these 2 cultures meet in the middle.
The USA isn't the only country in the "western world", please stop equating the two.
Even for Britain, France, Germany, the countries with the biggest far right/reactionary political groups, where there are legitimate chances for them to end up in power, none of them are religious. Or even that socially reactionary for that matter.
Also, even the US is not in danger of becoming a theocracy.
This is a dangerously ignorant statement. You need to read up on the dude who’s now third in line for the presidency.
Since only nine Vice-Presidents have succeeded through death/resignation, and zero Speakers of the House, I don't think there is much danger of a theocracy even if the Speaker wants there to be one. Furthermore, in the unlikely event he becomes President, Congress still passes the laws and the Courts still require the laws to be constitutional. The whole system is designed to thwart things like this.
But let's not ignore the danger from the Left. Sure, a transcendant, self-sacrificing God is out of the picture, but enthroned in his place is My Self-defined Sexual Identity, or depending on the variety, Those We Define to be Oppressed. In the new atheist Puritanism, dissent will get something worse than wearing a scarlet letter. The problem isn't theocracy, per se, its the fact that dissent is not tolerated, and the Left isn't any better here.
Never mind third in line, the dude who is currently President just put out a memorandum declaring "anti-Christianity" to be on the same level as "support for the overthrow of the United States Government."
I really wouldn't go this far, there is _way_ too much religion in US politics for proper separation of church and state. When elected politicians regularly quote religious documents in their reasoning for making decisions, agreeing and disagreeing with others, etc. you can't claim a theocracy isn't on the cards.
Maybe we have different definitions of theocracy. According to your definition, has there been a time in the past when the US was a theocracy?
No, it has not. But you cannot deny that religion being a visible, daily, part of politics, and being very often quoted as justification for political, and even worse, judicial decisions, is closer to a theocracy than it is to separation of church and state.
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Who's shouting for war, and with whom?
> There is the COVID sect. They even masked themselves outdoors in public - like the women in Iran back in the day. Without any evidence - and they did it even against evidence. It was a very religious thing
Bloody hell are we still at this nonsense today?
Public health authorities, across multiple continents, said to mask up. Did it limit spread? Yes, it did, and studies proved so. What the hell is your problem there? May I remind you the initial heavy weeks with makeshift morgues in ice rinks and refrigerated trucks, and military hospitals being deployed? Lockdowns and masking and vaccine mandates were reasonable, and reasonably effective, remedies for how horrific things could get (and did get, at the start, in multiple countries).
> There is the climate sect. There are many young followers with strong believes - but nobody has ever read any book on atmosphere science. And nobody has read any recent paper on the subject. Once you do, you'll find it very surprising how little substance is behind their dogmas.
Aha, so trusting the scientific consensus is "a sect". Do enlighten us, how is climate change not real? Or is it real, but God given? Or what is your deal?
> Another group now shouts for war - and if you listen to them they're about as intelligent as the worst kind of crusaders back in the day.
What war? Putting Russia back in its place? Si vis pacem, para bellum. The only thing a bully would understand is strength.
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Don't confuse stock and flow
Sadly enough there are many in the US who are actively working to move the US towards the world you painted above.
Oh nice, hopefully this means they can not chase profits as much
This means they need to chase profits even harder. Someone's gotta pay that debt.
It's an interesting move because the PE playbook is to buy a company and jack up the prices and cut half the workforce while doubling the workload of the other employees.
EA is already widely reviled for this stuff so it will be like getting blood from a stone