Avi Lewis, head of the Canadian NDP party, has expressed support for employees laid off by EA last week, and spoke out about the perils of private equity.
Company gets bought off to private equity, strips the assets until bankrupsy. The government steps in and wants to support the employees to take the gutted business.
Im all for support of workers owned businesses.
But seems like the government isn’t dealing with the root cause here.
End result:
Private equity made money.
Good business was stripped out of assets.
Tax payers to support rebuilding.
Just about anyone who worked at Bioware during the golden era has long since moved on and gotten other work, so who would get the IP? Just a studio made up of whichever random people happened to be left when it shut down? If that’s the case, I don’t think that will accomplish anything because the last several Bioware games sucked and nobody liked them, which is a big part of why they’re being shut down in the first place.
If the goal is to get Mass Effect back on track, I think it’d be much more effective to sell the IP to a good studio that knows what to do with it, rather than just give it back to the existing devs so they can take 8 years to make a new game that has a good chance to bomb anyway.
And all that’s assuming that EA is even willing to part with the IP anyway. For all we know they might just want to sit on it forever/hand it off to one of their other internal studios, in which case that’s the end of that.
“Private equity” isn’t a monolithic structure that can be easily defined. It’s just private companies with an exotic corporate structure. You can’t really target them because you will target other private businesses in the process. What you can do is regulate their behavior so that a lot of their financial schemes are no longer profitable. Like, you shouldn’t be able to buy a hospital and then create a shell company to lease it back to itself while investors pocket the rent. PE finds creative ways to stiff banks and consumers with financial engineering and that’s what needs to be addressed.
So wait a minute,
Company gets bought off to private equity, strips the assets until bankrupsy. The government steps in and wants to support the employees to take the gutted business.
Im all for support of workers owned businesses.
But seems like the government isn’t dealing with the root cause here.
End result: Private equity made money. Good business was stripped out of assets. Tax payers to support rebuilding.
Just tax the private equity firms more.
Also, which devs?
Just about anyone who worked at Bioware during the golden era has long since moved on and gotten other work, so who would get the IP? Just a studio made up of whichever random people happened to be left when it shut down? If that’s the case, I don’t think that will accomplish anything because the last several Bioware games sucked and nobody liked them, which is a big part of why they’re being shut down in the first place.
If the goal is to get Mass Effect back on track, I think it’d be much more effective to sell the IP to a good studio that knows what to do with it, rather than just give it back to the existing devs so they can take 8 years to make a new game that has a good chance to bomb anyway.
And all that’s assuming that EA is even willing to part with the IP anyway. For all we know they might just want to sit on it forever/hand it off to one of their other internal studios, in which case that’s the end of that.
“Private equity” isn’t a monolithic structure that can be easily defined. It’s just private companies with an exotic corporate structure. You can’t really target them because you will target other private businesses in the process. What you can do is regulate their behavior so that a lot of their financial schemes are no longer profitable. Like, you shouldn’t be able to buy a hospital and then create a shell company to lease it back to itself while investors pocket the rent. PE finds creative ways to stiff banks and consumers with financial engineering and that’s what needs to be addressed.
Banning leveraged buyouts would be a good start.
The NDP aren’t the government and never have been.
Avi Lewis hasn’t even been elected to parliament.