Anyone who did not see this coming is an idiot.
EA is… in a loooot of debt lol. Thats why they needed a buy out.
But the CEO’s job will be okay right?
I can’t wait to play Battlefield 7: Saudi Victory Over The Jews.
fml
Well my days is not buying EA products are certainly coming to a middle.
Gaming layoffs are now on track to eclipse 2024 and 2025 combined.
Judging by MBS’s steam account, the next Battlefield is going to be an extraction shooter about the coalition of the willing securing pipelines and putting out oil field fires. Also Tehran doesn’t get nuked in the game, it got nuked 20 years ago, and this is framed as a Bad Thing With A Silver Lining. The Line is your primary hub city and your ground vehicles are things like solar powered Abrams and cybertruck but good
I’m having trouble clicking on your tvtropes link there
Shit company gets worse
Time to block internet for some wine-prefixes i guess.
Edit: also learned of the
sg(likesu) command.Aaaand there’s the other shoe
Well that’s the end of EA. The owners will tear it apart and bleed it dry.
People have been predicting the death of EA for over twenty years.
Meanwhile, they release another Madden and another FIFA and another Sims and another Star Wars, then mint themselves another $7B. Nevermind that all of these games are just reskinned copies of the games they’ve been releasing going back to the mid-90s.
I bought battlefield 6 still enjoy it. And I bought the first year college football came back. But haven’t bought one since. And have hardly touched it. Game was much harder than the old days
Another Sims? Don’t be daft. They’ll release another Sims DLC and get all the money with much less effort.
Seriously, 4 has been a cash cow for over a decade now, with biannual expansion packs.
Yesn’t.
That may have been somewhat true in the past, but it is hard to articulate just how big of a hole they are in right now. The leveraged buyout has pushed EA’s debt to over $20Billion USD.
They make that money back or they might not, but they are going to absolutely pillage and destroy the company in the process. The word that often follows “leveraged buyout” is “bankruptcy”. It’s a tale as old as corporate history.
Maybe. But there’s an enormous amount of money to wring out of EA, even with the debts. And you can go back decades to read about their deplorable labor practices. This isn’t even the first time EA has been subjected to this kind of aggressive cash hungry squeeze.
Wait when was the last time they were leveraged for $20B?
Good riddance
I did a buad report on EA going on 20 years ago. TLDR they’re basically Martin Shkreli but a corporation.
Like Martin Shkreli in that they’ll increase the price of a life-saving drug 20x without consequences, or like Martin Shkreli in that they’ll go to prison for defrauding rich investors?
Seriously fucked up that the second was considered a crime, but not the first, in Shkreli’s case.
Probably the former as I doubt defrauding a Saudi prince would result in mere incarceration.
lol this guy thought that was EA’s final form! /s
A lot of people are glancing over the fact that now a country is running this Video Game company. I’m not betting that the Saudis will: Open up old IPs, take care of labor costs, respect the players, not install spyware onto customer’s machines and report their party affiliation or any government secrets stored on said machine.
If you didn’t trust EA being run by a private company then I bet you won’t trust EA being ran by a government.
Even worse: Jared Kushner is involved as well.
Games are essentially attack vectors with kernal level access to your computer.
The united States is looking at doing something about Chinese gaming companies, yet we are okay with handing over what is essentially a back door over to the Saudis.
I just think its weird what malware we are okay with.
Games are essentially attack vectors with kernal level access to your computer.
Some games, with very specific anticheat. Let’s not spread misinformation.
That being said, yeah I don’t get it either - I refused to play Valorant for this reason.
All games with kernel level anticheat, that isnt’t open souce.
There, fixed it for you.
Kernel level AC is literally a root kit, in some cases also a boot kit.
It has never made any sense to allow this shit on your computer. Sorry if marketing convinced you otherwise.
I mean even games without anti-cheat are attack vectors. Some 18 year old kid is going to prison because his game stole crypto.
Also that’s pretty much what I was explaining, I just assumed everyone already knows what I’m talking about. I wouldnt say its misinformation, just lazy short hand and me expecting the audience here to be caught up enough to know what I mean.
Imagine of lots of game developers that gets fired now goes out and start working on indie-games.
Going indie from scratch means going no income for years for a project that may never succeed, not everyone can afford the risk. Existing indie studio have very limited hiring capacity compared to the amount of people getting laid off from big companies.
Funded by who? EA has tens of thousands of 100k/year employees
What else are they going to do? Flip burgers for minimum wage? Depends on how much they personall liked developing games relative to making big money I guess…
I don’t care what they do. Even if I hadn’t already been boycotting EA for 10+ years, I’d never install Saudi-owned ring-0 “anticheat” software on any of my computers.
Boycott harder!
I don’t understand why you’d buy something and then essentially destroy what it was. Everyone sees you doing this, are they actually going to make money?
Yes. Just like a farmer can make money butchering their cattle, these private equity type fucks always find a way to pocket every penny.
Just another Blue Star Airlines
Mass Effect team must be shitting bricks.
Should have made something worth playing in the last 10+ years then.
These legacy studios with expensive old heads are going to be a thing of the past.
Thank you for reminding me that just like Todd Howard whoever is in charge of Mass Effect has seriously shit the bed and deserves to get fired (though it’ll never happen, instead their studio will get gutted and they’ll get a raise).
Seems like some former Mass Effect devs are working on a game called Exodus that looks good.
