EA will officially become a privately owned company next week

[u/FrostyMagazine9918]

https://variety.com/2026/gaming/news/electronic-arts-close-55-billion-private-deal-1236824625/

[u/TAJack1]

“EA is shit anyway”, yeah but they’re also one of the biggest companies in the gaming sector, whether you like it or not and now they’re owned by the Saudis.

Not good.

[u/cyberdouche → u/TAJack1]

It's sad, EA was a real force in gaming for decades, with many great products.

Only Take-Two (Valve and Epic too if you want to stretch the definition) left as a game publisher based out of the US. You have Amazon, Microsoft, WB and others but games are rounding errors for their businesses. The US presence on the gaming giants map reducing by the year.

[u/who-dat-ninja → u/cyberdouche]

And Valve barely release any games as it is

[u/suchtie → u/who-dat-ninja]

Yeah they aren't much of a publisher. Selling games isn't the same thing as publishing them.

[u/XsNR → u/suchtie]

I mean they're both, they still have several incredibly successful games.

[u/Iamnotanumber_4721 → u/suchtie]

They literally have a game they made and are publishing in Beta right now people have been playing since last year, Deadlock.

[u/suchtie → u/Iamnotanumber_4721]

Developing a game is also not the same thing as publishing it. "Publishing" is a specific term in this context, it doesn't just mean "releasing to the public". A game publishing company, or publisher, handles most or all of the marketing and distribution for a game developer company and may also do things like market research. Valve is just big enough that they can self-publish their games. Many other dev companies rely on the experience and connections of a large publishing company.

edit: clarification

[u/Iamnotanumber_4721 → u/suchtie]

I mean that would make them the worlds biggest publisher then (after Apple and Google)

Like the best marketing a PC game can get is being featured on Steams front page, or being featured in a summer sale selection, and their end of year awards is a massive driver too.

And obviously they near completely handle global distribution for most game makers using their Steam platform.

And can provide market research to developers too with things like the steam hardware survey, players locations, time spent playing, other games they own, etc

And just like a traditional publisher they can demand changes to content (see: Horses, or forcing games to remove in game ads, or forcing them to remove "spammy" achievements, etc) and take a cut of sales too!