This article was originally published on July 24, 2026 - read the full issue

By Rob Fahey

In the midst of the high drama surrounding Xbox in recent weeks, it’s easy to forget that the fate of one of gaming's other great edifices is also currently being decided. Yesterday, the European Union approved the $55 billion buyout that will take Electronic Arts private – the second-largest acquisition deal in game-industry history, after Microsoft’s $68.7 billion buyout of Activision Blizzard in 2023.

Approval from the EU’s competition and anti-subsidy watchdogs is an important hurdle for the deal to clear, though it never seemed likely that it would get tangled up by these kinds of investigations. Unlike the scrutiny of the Activision Blizzard deal, which attracted plenty of submissions and lobbying from other interested parties around the industry, the EA deal has largely passed by without so much as a shrug.

That’s because while EA is a tremendously consequential company to the industry as a whole, it’s being acquired not by a platform holder or another industry player, but by a financial consortium with minimal existing interests in the gaming space. That fact may set competition authorities at ease, but ever since the bid was first announced last September, the identities of those involved in the purchasing consortium have been creating misgivings for lots of other people, from fans of the company’s games to staff at its studios.

Private-equity apocalypse

The key names behind the consortium are Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund (PIF); Affinity Partners, an investment firm headed by Jared Kushner; and Silver Lake, a US private-equity firm that generally specialises in technology investments.

Regardless of those specific identities, customers and employees alike have generally learned to fear the worst when private-equity firms take over major companies. The private-equity sector’s reputation for vulture-like asset stripping is hardly undeserved. The past two decades are a graveyard of successful, respected companies that were hollowed out and destroyed after private-equity firms took over, extracted the most valuable assets, and lumbered what remained with brutal levels of debt.

Silver Lake’s involvement in this private-equity deal also comes with specific baggage given its links to former EA CEO John Riccitiello. Riccitiello isn’t confirmed to be involved in the EA bid in any way, but he co-founded private-equity firm Elevation Partners with investor Roger McNamee, who also co-founded Silver Lake. Silver Lake’s only previous dealing with any gaming company, incidentally, was a 2017 investment in Unity, whose CEO at the time was John Riccitiello, following up a misstep-laden tenure at EA with a catastrophic run at Unity’s helm. Even if that’s all coincidental, the spectre of Riccitiello’s influence returning to EA as one of the four horsemen of private equity is a grim one.

Remarkably, though, that concern is a secondary one for most people. Instead, as the deal moves towards becoming a reality, the most prominently voiced fear is about political interference in EA’s output and creative decision-making. The possibility of being entangled in ham-fisted attempts at reputation laundering by Saudi Arabia – or of having a chill of disapproval over content decisions from Saudi investors – certainly doesn’t fill anyone with joy; but if anything, the involvement of Kushner and Affinity Partners is even more concerning.

Affinity’s stake makes the EA deal look less like an isolated investment decision and more like part of a pattern, fitting in alongside the recent takeovers of other major media companies by conservative oligarchs in the United States. Buying a major videogame publisher isn’t quite so obvious a political move as, for example, the Ellison family’s weaponisation of their Oracle billions to buy up media firms with the open intent of interfering with broadcast-news channels. Nonetheless, videogames exert their own influence over cultural conversations, especially among younger generations; the fear that political control over this area of culture is a key motivation for the deal isn’t unreasonable.

Swimming against the tide

The concern that EA is going to start finding thumbs pressed on many of its decision-making scales is only made more valid by how profoundly strange this acquisition is from a purely business perspective. The $55 billion bid comes even as other major companies are pulling back from large gaming investments. Tencent, which has been building a portfolio of gaming subsidiaries and investments around the world for years, is slowing the pace of its investments and reportedly even considering downscaling holdings in some areas. Google and Amazon have dropped or scaled down gaming ambitions, and Netflix has gone quiet over its erstwhile plans. Microsoft’s issues with Xbox, too, are arguably part of the broader movement of corporate giants that made strategic bets on gaming and are now cooling on the sector.

The reasons for the pullback aren't hard to identify. Soaring development costs in triple-A production have made profitability hard to reach even for well-established franchises, while various live-service gambles simply haven't paid off. Add to that the fact that these companies' attention has been drawn to a newer, shinier thing in the form of the speculative bubble around generative AI, and it's no wonder their interest in gaming is waning.

Until recently, it looked like the Saudi PIF was part of that broad movement as well. Back in 2023, there were reportedly cold feet over a planned €2 billion investment from the PIF that sent Embracer Group into a tailspin, which in hindsight was actually the first canary to snuff it in this particular coalmine. Yet now, as everyone else in the world pulls back and reassesses their investments, the PIF is on board with a deal almost as big as Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard bid – a proposal, incidentally, that the Microsoft of 2026 would almost certainly not pursue were it on the table today.

Under these circumstances, it’s entirely fair for players, staff and anyone else involved to be concerned that this deal is more about political and cultural influence than purely financial or business-driven considerations. If that’s the case, the coming years could be very rough indeed for EA, because such attempts to turn cultural and media industries into political bludgeons have historically been both commercially disastrous and creatively barren – but the damage done in the attempt can be severe nonetheless, both to the companies themselves and to the lives and careers of those who work there. 

Whatever your feelings about EA as a company, under the circumstances – an industry battered by layoffs and closures in recent years – everyone should hope that these misgivings are unwarranted. We can only hope that one of videogames' most prominent and storied publishers can actually thrive after this deal, rather than becoming mired in some unholy concoction of private-equity avarice and misguided peddling of political influence.

This article was originally published on July 24, 2026 - read the full issue