Every signature is in and the date is now official
The regulatory wait is over. On 30 July, Electronic Arts told the US securities regulator that 'all regulatory approvals required to complete the Merger have been obtained', and that the deal will close on 4 August. A week ago we covered Europe's green light and the one review still pending; well, nothing is pending anymore.
From that day, the publisher of EA Sports FC, The Sims, Battlefield, Apex Legends and Dragon Age leaves the stock market after more than three decades and goes private: Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) as lead investor, with investment firm Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, the vehicle of Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law, completing the consortium, as reported by Vandal.
The largest leveraged buyout in history, and not just in gaming
The numbers are dizzying from any angle. It's $55 billion, the second-largest deal in gaming history behind the $68.7 billion Microsoft paid for Activision Blizzard. And around $20 billion of it is debt loaded onto EA itself, which makes this the largest leveraged buyout in history, ahead of any bank, hotel chain or utility.
That debt is not an accounting footnote: it gets paid out of the company's profits. And an EA that owes $20 billion is an EA with less room for experiments, something we flagged when Europe approved the deal and which now stops being a hypothesis and becomes the business plan.
Inside the studios everyone is holding their breath, starting with BioWare
Inside EA, the mood is not celebratory. At studios like BioWare it's taken as read that the new owner will prioritise the franchises that already print money — football, The Sims, battle royales — and that anything underperforming will have fewer lives than before: the next Mass Effect ships with that pressure built in. The Sims team, for its part, has promised in writing to keep its 'values of inclusivity, choice, creativity, community and play', a sentence that reassures exactly as much as the fact that it needed writing.
Nothing changes on your console on 4 August: the games stay where they are and the servers stay on. What changes is who decides what happens to the biggest publisher a state has ever bought, and that will show over the coming years, one game at a time.
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