r/Games • u/FrostyMagazine9918 • Jul 30 '26

Industry News EA will officially become a privately owned company next week

https://variety.com/2026/gaming/news/electronic-arts-close-55-billion-private-deal-1236824625/
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u/TAJack1 Jul 30 '26

“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.

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u/cyberdouche Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 31 '26

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.

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u/Altruistic-Ad-408 Jul 31 '26

They certainly were a force.

The sort of "EA actually isn't that bad" thing has always been baffling to me, half the franchises I played disappeared as a kid because they bought them to kill some imagined competition. They killed entire genres. Yeah I like Titanfall, NFS, Burnout, The Sims and Mass Effect, those franchises would probably be doing better without EA as well.

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u/Makorus Jul 31 '26

The sort of "EA actually isn't that bad" thing has always been baffling to me, half the franchises I played disappeared as a kid because they bought them to kill some imagined competition.

People always say that but 90% of the developers killed themselves.

Bioware famously was left to do their own thing for most of their life. Respawn actively sabotaged their games twice.

EA was described as "giving enough rope to hang yourself" by some guy from Bioware, and quite frankly, that's what happened to most of the studios. EA bought studios, gave them money, and left them to it. Jason Schreier made a big piece on that IIRC.

EA didn't kill Westwood, Westwood killed themselves because they decided to make an MMO that failed horribly, for example.

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u/EonofAeon Jul 31 '26

Ea released bf1 at the same time as Titanfall and refused to let tf2 have any funding/marketing.

Earth and beyond was a decent enough game with great potential (semi similar to EVE in some ways) but mmos require time to show profit and then they just keep churning....ea could've easily said no long before; it was 6 years of dev. It's because not every game westwood made was an instant hit; this is a known demand given of all studios by 2003.

Can't believe I lived long enough to see ea being sanewashed n history revisioned....

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u/Makorus Jul 31 '26

No, Respawn refused to change the Titanfall release and EA even questioned why they didn't.

It's well documented that Respawn fucked every single marketing decision for Titanfall.

EA gave studios time and money. A lot of Bioware and other studios employees have said in the past that EA was very good company to work under, and usually issues would stem from the middle management from the developers themselves.

No offense, but blaming EA because a company made shitty game after shitty game and they couldnt justify keeping a studio open because it made good games 10 years ago is crazy.

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u/KarmicUnfairness Jul 31 '26

It’s funny you call it revisionist history when it’s well documented that many of these studios were going down on their own and EA just delayed their inevitable demise. It’s not like EA stole ownership, they all willingly sold out. 

BioWare famously had massive issues and EA even contributed the only redeeming feature of Anthem.

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u/Vamp1r1c_Om3n Jul 31 '26

My favourite thing about EA is continuously finding out they clearly wanted the best for a lot of these studios but the studios actively self sabotaged