It turns out Saudi Arabia will own 93.4 percent of EA if the buyout goes through, which is effectively all of it
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/it-turns-out-saudi-arabia-will-own-93-4-percent-of-ea-if-the-buyout-goes-through-which-is-effectively-all-of-it/Open linkView original on lemmy.world
91 replies
Oh good, I can continue not buying EA games.
No, but I may pirate a few now. Just to seed them as a tiny middle finger to the saudis.
I'd have to check but I think the only EA game I even care one iota about would be Dead Space. But I already got the remake for free on PS5 and I pretty highly doubt they'll remake the other two so.. I'm good
If you still buy EA games at this point you better not tell anyone because you’re a braindead fuckwit for sending Saudis your money
I have bad news for you if you drive a non-electric car 😏
Some people have no choice in what kind of car they can afford to drive.
We all have a very easy choice when it comes to choosing your video games
People commonly have a choice not to drive a car in the first place.
Though cultural pressures, as well as some specific areas being genuinely hard to reach, pushes many people towards it anyway. But if you have a choice, choose public.
Have you seen North American public transportation?
Yeah, I have a "choice", but it's 60-85 minutes on 3 busses or a 12 minute drive to get to and from work.
Yeah, North America and US specifically is one of these hard to reach places
Also, 12 minutes drive is a biking distance - if you have any semblance of bike infrastructure, that is. Surprisingly though, even American cities have that sometimes.
This thread is peak Lemmy.
My 15 minute car commute would take over an hour with a bicycle, lead me over multiple busy and dangerous country roads, has three mountains with over 20% elevation that I have to pass, and would be incredibly unsafe in the winter even with studded tires.
Don't get me wrong, I actually do take my bicycle when I'm not in a hurry and the weather is right. But it's a huge time sink and doesn't absolve my of my dependency on a car.
The same commute takes 2 hours with public transport btw so that's even worse
And this is in Germany, not north America
Sad to know!
I'd have to ride several blocks on a 4 lane stroad to go anywhere outside of my neighborhood. It's so depressing.
Feel you - hope you'll have safer ways to bike in the future! Maybe there are some kind of bike advocacy groups in your area?
People do not commonly have a choice here
In America there is near 0 public transit outside of a few major cities
As much as I hate the ruling family of Saudi Arabia… get off it:
https://www.bts.gov/browse-statistical-products-and-data/info-gallery/us-petroleum-use-domestic-supply-and-net-imports
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/how-much-crude-oil-does-us-import-by-country-2025-01-31/
Your information is dated. We are net exporters of crude oil for the past 15-years with majority of import from Canada and Mexico
But for what it’s worth - fully believe renewables are the way forward for geopolitical and ecological stability. This is the more important narrative
Because there exists only one place in the world and that is called US of A? 🙄
Saudi Arabia is still the biggest oil exporter in the world (as of 2024). If you drive an internal combustion car anywhere, chances are high that you paid the Sheiks at least some money for doing so.
Touché 😅
Damn, I didn't know the Netherlands exported any crude oil!
Wait, you think the Saudis buying EA have anything to do with profit? EAs profits and earnings are meaningless to them.
And the rest is Jared Kushner. Enjoy that shit sandwich.
EA was already shit, but somehow they found bread made from shit and built a whole sandwich.
EA games suck nowadays anyway; this was just a buyout for shareholders and founders.
dead space, mirrors edge, original skate
Just listed some of my favorites right there. ME was way ahead of it's time. Banger game.
93 was my jam.
But yeah, I'd play that.
Probably games around year 2000. Not so much recycling back then.
Yep, their early days were bad ass… pretty much like any company that starts out before they become corporate cock suckers
Back in the late 80s they were pretty legit.
Harry Potter and Sorcerer's Stone for PC was pretty good.
Does "It takes two" count as an EA game?
Didn’t need additional reasons to never buy EA garbage, but yeah sure ok.
Yeah the kushner share is a bribe to bypass regulatory oversight, didn't you know?
Do they need Kushner for that? They done a pretty good job funneling money to Him over the last 8 years.
As long as the money keeps coming there won't be any problems.
That's always how it's been!
Boy EA really hit rock bottom and just kept on a-diggin til they struck oil didn't they.
The Evil Ampire gets bought by an evil empire. Huh.
The buyout has effectively already gone through, and as the price has been decided, any money you give to them is directly going to saudi arabia, as they will get that new value.
Effectively all it? That's 93.4%, that's more than 90%, and almost 95%, which is almost 100%, which would be all of it!
This guy maths.
Yeah but it isn’t really redundant (even if it could have been worded better). Someone might believe that the other shareholders have some say in how the company operates when they won’t.
So, as far as control over the company is concerned, the Saudis have 100% control even though they don’t have 100% of the shares.
If you haven't noticed there's a lot of people out there are incredibly dumb, and don't understand basic math, let alone how a company like EA works.
I can guarantee you that there are more dipshits out there than you'd think who would look at that number and say "well it's less than 100 percent, so they don't have total control, so what's the big deal?"
Now as for whether any amount of clarification is enough to convince those idiots that that's not how things work, that's a fair question.
Makes me wonder what the next Sims game will be like
Like will women characters be able to leave the house unescorted?
Your sims will have to pause five times per day to pray.
What we have is literally the censored version by default, they just woohoo?
Dice - mirrors edge, battlefield
Popcap - tons of mobile games
Respawn - Alex legends, Titanfall (ex call of duty developers)
Codemasters - lots of racing games
Criterion :(
SA - fuck up everything.
sounds like a perfect match for EA
Would love to see how do they fuck up the fuck up.
It's the Saudis. Expect heavy sanitation.
I deleted my account, intentionally losing access to all my games. Fuck EA. I will not be associated with murders.
We are all children of
jesuspetro states.Does EA own any other companies/brands that we should be aware of?
Yes, they've been buying up smaller studios for decades and shutting them down.
There's an entire wikipedia page about it.
The only EA franchise I've cared about in the last 15 years was Mirrors Edge. Would love another but I've long given up hope on that.
Take a gander
https://www.ea.com/en-ca/ea-studios
https://www.ea.com/en-ca/games
Unfortunately they have an exclusive publishing deal with the guys who made it takes two and split fiction.
EA (Respawn) peaked at Titanfall 2 and hasn't released anything good since. I set them to Ignore on Steam a few years ago.
Jedi Fallen Order was good though (also Respawn).
Yeah Respawn is a good dev, just a shame they got bought by EA and scrapped Titanfall 3.
And even then they massively fucked up by ignoring all the ddosing for years. It gave us Northstar but it's a paid fucking game, come on man.
Not a loss for me. I liked them when they were still good, on C64 and Amiga. But now? Good riddance. May the sheiks have fun with it.
i'm less worried about me not buying their games and more worried about the folks who buy madden every year even though the last interesting release was 08
08 you say?
Scott the Woz has entered the chat
I mean it's not like they can make it any worse.
Oh great, so now even IF the Sims 5 comes out, I have a moral obligation not to buy it...
Yo ho, matey
It's never going to happen anyway so it doesn't matter x)
Gotta delete the account next.
And the worst thing is, they probably still won't be as self-destructively greedy as they were before.
How is this even legal?
You seem to be under some misconception regarding who actually writes our laws. Hint: they're called lobbyists to get people to ignore the rampant bribery.
Bribery? They are buying a company. That's it. There isn't anything special about it. It's like any other company out there.
And I was talking about the so-called legality of the situation. So, pretty clearly not referring to the headline...
If you're not talking about the headline, what "situation" are you talking about?
Honestly, I'm not sure you're talking about anything.
Again, no legal issues.
How about if you can't follow a conversation, maybe stay out of it? Like, for real, I didn't know that else to tell you.
What exactly about it is it you feel should be illegal?
Foreign country buying a US corporation. Seems like their investment should be capped at like 15%
US companies by foreign companies all the time, look at the food and drink corporations.
This is not a new or strange thing
It's definitely not new, but it's time to start thinking about how strange it is, and start pulling these assholes off their money-merry-go-round.
US Steel is now a Japanese company
It's a world economy. What are you, some sort of maga twit America first and only bullshit?
That is some very black or white, us or them, red team vs blue team thinking. It's very interesting that you immediately jump to that conclusion when I am not even from the US at all. The answer to your question is absolutely not, and the fact that it's a "world economy" doesn't and shouldn't mean any people are obligated to do business with and accept the controlling interest of literal monsters fueled by oil and oil money. Ethics must also be allowed to control the economy, not just money. The world's financial systems have consequences beyond just the economy.
"Stop being such a fascist and let us do business with these fucking murderers"
I don't want them to buy it. But there isn't anything illegal with investors purchasing a company line this no matter where they are from. It's just business, it really doesn't matter who owns them, they suck no matter what
I think its more there is a certain level of baseline public investment in most corporations and it seems dumb to maintain the fiction that people's livelihoods should be sold as a commodity, especially to a bunch of despots
Except many foreign countries have stricter legal frameworks for corporations.
The "corporations are people" legal fiction means they have rights here. Citizen's United has fucked this country in profoundly dumb ways.
I'd think we'd be far more concerned about critical resource companies before we got to worrying about gaming companies, but we can't even do that so I'm not surprised.
Good.
I hope they fuck over workers and customers as hard as possible.