The video games industry is in the hands of monsters and EA is the latest victim

Video game publisher Electronic Arts is now a private company but that’s unlikely to be good news for its customers or employees.

Electronic Arts (EA) is the biggest independent video games publisher in the West but this week they completed a plan to go private; a plan which involves taking on $20 billion (£14.8 billion) in debt, as organised by the investment arm of the Saudi Arabian government and Donald Trump’s son-in-law.

And to think, people wonder why the video games business is in such a state.

For the last few years it’s become increasingly clear that video game companies have no long term plan for the industry and their only interest is short term profit.

That’s perhaps no different from any other medium but with an estimated 50,000 developers having lost their jobs since 2022 the situation is reaching breaking point – and the worst thing is nobody seems to care.

The job losses are partially a result of overstaffing during Covid, when gaming saw a boost in popularity, but the wider problem has been consolidation, with an increasingly small number of giant, soulless corporations owning almost everything.

The ink is barely dry on EA’s buyout and they immediately started talking about making £125 million in ‘organisational efficiencies’. And you can bet that doesn’t involve cutting back on salaries or bonuses given to EA’s top execs.

The inevitable mass layoffs are made all the more bitter by a statement from CEO Andrew Wilson, that was as repulsive an example of corporate doublespeak as you could ever hope to avoid.

Wilson sought to recognise the ‘extraordinary people whose creativity, ambition and passion have made EA one of the world’s leading interactive entertainment companies’.

No doubt, like Lord Farquaad from Shrek, he feels laying them off anyway is a sacrifice he’s prepared to make, for his bank account.

Those lucky enough to remain are apparently going to help EA enter a new chapter ‘from a position of strength with partners who share our vision and ambition.’

Because nothing says ‘position of strength’ like loading down your company with a debt pile the size of a small country’s GDP.

As well as a financial outrage, this is a moral one.

It is hard to imagine Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) being positively predisposed towards games like The Sims, with its strong LGBT+ support.

Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund has been making attempts to improve the country’s soft power for some time, making investments in sports (they own Newcastle and are hosting the 2034 World Cup) and entertainment that also includes a sizeable slice of Nintendo, as well as Take-Two, and Embracer Group.

The PIF may be sensible enough not to make any changes to EA straight away, but then again that may be giving them too much credit.

After all, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), established the Misk Foundation, which purchased legendary Japanese company SNK in 2020.

Then, for no sensible reason, MBS’s friends Cristiano Ronaldo and DJ Salvatore Ganacci appeared as playable characters in Fatal Fury: City Of The Wolves, angering the series’ hardcore fanbase.

The idea that new owners won’t try to exert creative pressure on their acquisitions is naïve at best, but the debt alone is going to lead to EA concentrating on only its most profitable franchises and devising new and obnoxious ways to fill them with even more microtransactions.

The problem is EA already publishes far fewer games than it used to, as it slowly transitions one from one of the biggest and most versatile publishers in the world to an EA Sports FC and Madden NFL factory.

Over the last decade, all Western publishers have seen the number and variety of the games they publish contract, with Activision long ago having turned itself into the Call Of Duty publisher and almost nothing else.

Likewise, Rockstar Games owner Take-Two sees increasingly little point in making anything that isn’t going to generate billions in revenue, rather than just millions.

That’s why publishers are so obsessed with live service games (in Rockstar’s case that means GTA Online) and creating the next Fortnite, but what’s also become clear is the absolute contempt these companies have for their audience.

A customer exists only to be fleeced of money as often and as deeply as possible, with absolutely no pretence of a two-way conversation.

For a publisher like EA that’s less of a concern because people only come to them to buy the latest football game, and there’s no generally no loyalty attached – as there is with console manufacturers like Sony and Nintendo.

So as long as EA Sports FC 28 comes out as expected next year there’s unlikely to be any uproar if EA narrow their portfolio further and slowly edge out representation in The Sims and other games.

None of this is unusual in any industry, since you can see almost exactly the same thing happening with the attempted sale of Warner Bros. to Paramount Skydance and the right wing-linked Ellison family which owns it.

Unfortunately, unlike that deal, the PIF’s purchase of EA is not being disputed.

And so the publisher that has often been characterised as the McDonald’s of gaming becomes the plaything of one of the most unpalatable governments in the world – two of them really, if you want to count Kushner’s connections to Trump.

Should you care if you’re a gamer? If you like The Sims or any of EA’s smaller franchises then yes, but for many EA Sports FC players there’ll likely be no noticeable change beyond an inevitable increase in microtransactions.

But if you stop to wonder why the video games industry, and the world beyond it, seems to be in such a terrible state at the moment you only have to look at the ghastly collection of short-sighted, morally bankrupt oligarchs in charge of it.

Their only interest is making themselves richer, and they don’t care about anything else, not their own employees and certainly not their customers.

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing Ross.Mccafferty@metro.co.uk. 

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