CEO Andrew Wilson is set for a massive payday. The company’s last SEC filing before going private pointed to a $77 million payout for the last fiscal year, double the number that was previously reported.
One of the finer aspects of unfettered capitalism.
That’s actually crazy.
For reference, Split Fiction’s development cost was ~$40 million USD over ~3-4 years, ~75 devs. That’s one of EA’s better games, and not cheap.
Yearly, $77 million could basically fund Battlefied development.
It 11% of what they’re looking to cut!
So, destroy its game making capabilities and just make money for the next 20 years from of microtransaction on existing content.
Kinda of a natural progression of AAA game publishers given the way things are nowadays.
Though how many devs does it take to increment one number for the new version of the game?
It massivelly depends on what changes and how well in terms of software design the whole is done, and judging from what I’ve seen, for multiple reasons (it’s easier to exploit yound and naived developers and those don’t know how to do good software design; performance tends to be a big thing in games dev and performance optiomizantion generally goes against good software design; it’s an area that tends towards experimentalism rather than well though integrated software design) gamedev isn’t an area of software development were software design tends to be good.
It’s EA. Just search for “2026” replace with “2027”.
KSA is staggeringly rich but can’t pay for their purchase.
The liquidation shall continue until
moralstakeholder wealth improvesWhile* stakeholder wealth improves
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.
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?
lol this guy thought that was EA’s final form! /s
I did a buad report on EA once. 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.
Fair, though since it was a leveraged buyout, I reckon it would be JP Morgan Chase who’d be getting defrauded. The only question is whether MBS wants that kind of image for the saudi PIF.
Essentially, MBS and Kushner would find a way to spin all the valuable IPs into other companies and leave only the debt and maybe some IPs at EA Games. Then it becomes a worthless company that owes JPMorgan Chase 20 billion with a fairly high interest rate.
Good riddance
Well, the natural evolution from “keep on squeezing existing IP without inventing anything new” is "“keep in squeezing long published games without publishing any new games” .
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!
Well, there goes the last remnant of possibility for a dragon age or mass effect revival.
Replaying Dishonored 2, still mad about Arkane.
It’s like the long game is to kill gaming from two directions. Game Studio deaths and making PC components unaffordable for working class.
It’s like the long game is to kill gaming from two directions. Game Studio deaths and making PC components unaffordable for working class.
They can kill AAA gaming, but devs will just learn to adapt to the hardware limitations of their time. If you’ve got a device you can install stuff on, devs will figure out how to make it run games. They may not be as shiny, which is practically sacrilege to the AAA player community, but so long as we have hardware, we’ll have games.
I grew up with a card catalog and had Netscape navigator at college right out of high school. Stellar graphics are great, preferred, but not necessary. Would I care if graphics/engine quality went back to Dragon age origins or II? Mass effect the original? Even FO:NV? No. But I want the story level, complexity, and total game time to be triple digits when being completionist about it. Witcher 3 is lovely but it’s the quality of darkness in it that makes it so compelling.
Even without the hardware limitations, good, immersive stories that keep you as involved as GoT before the writers stopped writing are already in short supply.
I’m presently replaying the Dishonored games. There’s only so much of that a person can do. Games worth the time sink are already in short supply.
Candy crush and similar bullshit can’t replace good games.
All those things you want are divorced from the hardware for the most part, though. A gripping story has virtually no bearing on hardware requirements. Map complexity could be maintained by simply scaling down the graphical polish. Total game time is also almost totally decoupled from hardware strength.
If anything, I would argue that AAA’s constant emphasis on graphics detracts from those. Maps can be more complex if they have less polygons and processing. They could spend more time fixing up the stories if they weren’t hemorrhaging money on art that’s way more detailed than it needs to be, and they would be more free to pivot if they need to because it’s not as expensive to edit whatever needs it. It’s way easier to make more content to extend the game time when it doesn’t cost the moon and stars to add more fresh art to flesh it out.
Sure, but even with all that, what are the odds? Given the amount of “dated engine” and such in review commentary.
If there’s no relief on hardware, the odds go up. Game devs have been able to constantly chase higher highs because consumer hardware has constantly evolved. There’s been zero pressure to optimize or to rein in the graphics because a ton of people can still play day 1, and a bunch more will become able to play them soon as they yearn for it and strive to upgrade.
But if users can’t upgrade because hardware is obscenely expensive or rare? That stops being the case. They have to cater to the average consumer in AAA because they desperately need to recoup the obscenely massive investment in development. If they refuse to optimize, if they insist on pushing graphics to ever new heights, they won’t sell shit because nobody will be able to run it. The market will demand that they start working within some limitations.
Or the AI bubble pops, hardware goes back to being affordable, and the idea of limitations becomes little more than a bad dream to execs.
That’s what I’m worried about. I played the Mass Effect Trilogy several times and they’re my all times favourite.
But this Saudi Arabia deal is not good for the industry because as we know, Saudi Arabia is a very conservative muslim country and it will destroy the creative process.
ME manages to incorporate just about every SciFi trope in a good way, have punchy dialogue and characters, offer chills at some points, and have a great overarching plot. More importantly, they give it an ending.
BioWare really fucked themselves with that EA deal. I don’t see them saving themselves like Amplitude did. I suppose there’s DDO, it’s still around, love of D&D being what it is within D&D communities The devs made a deal with Warner Brothers and now it’s Standing Stone, but how often has that happened? Mostly, studios just die.
The funny thing is Mass Effect destroyed the series themselves with Andromeda. No Saudi help necessary.
But everyone was hoping the next Mass Effect game would return to its sources, not continue the “My face is tired” series. But I was hoping too much.
That game was such a bleached out, thin piece of repetitive garbage. Every character, and their dialogue, was about as deep as a guard NPC in Skyrim.
Season 8 of GoT had better production value.
I would say “never has there been a more moral case for pirating the sh*t out of everything this company makes”, since they always exploit and lay off their workers after projects are done, shut down studios, etc…
…but most of their stuff is recycled sports drek, so don’t even pirate it. Just ignore it, and tell everyone you know how horrible EA is and has always been, and who its new owners are. Hopefully they’ll never buy their crap again either.
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.
It’s even better than that: it’s buying the farm by indebting the farm itself to then butcher the cattle, sell all buildings, sell the lands and sell the tractors, keeping the money.
Private Equity keeps the money from selling the valuable parts of the company whilst the debt is owed by the company, which is now bankrupt and if they properly use Bankruptcy Law or even just Tax Law (by having the bankrupty of their “investment” go down on their books as a loss) they might even manage to extract a bit more money out of the rotting corpse.
Just another Blue Star Airlines
How to back up mass effects so they are available to play offline?
They should be in %USERPROFILE%\Documents\BioWare\Mass Effect Legendary Edition\Save.
Saves yeah, but I mean the whole games.
Oh… Well… Sailing the high seas?
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.
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.
Even worse: Jared Kushner is involved as well.
I miss the old days, when they made all sorts of innovative software.
Ad for electronic arts, 1984.
Bigger version here: https://files.catbox.moe/r3e05i.png
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.
AFAIK Schedule 1 is developed by a single dev still in college.
That is insane. Makes me wanna go play it now.
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…
Game devs make shit money so they were all in it for the games, but realistically most won’t have savings to work for free for the next few years to put out an indie game.
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.
Appreciate the recommendation, I will keep my eye on it
And? What fucks are there left to give about a publically malicious/murderous government buying a publically malicious company which publically destroys their creatives ability to stay alive in this capitalist shitscape?
I want the heart and soul of those studios (the creatives) to create a tsunami of indie studios to revive the long lost connection between the gamers and the makers.
We have to support indie devs if we want gaming to be better for all involved.
