GoKawiilis a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
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Electronic Arts has officially become a private company. Last September, EA announced that an investor group led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners would be taking the company private in a $55 billion deal, and on Tuesday, EA said the deal successfully closed. The PIF will reportedly own 93.4 percent of the new company.
The deal includes $20 billion of debt financing — making it the largest leveraged buyout ever — which could mean big changes at EA to justify the deal. As of late, EA has been focusing heavily on its big tentpole franchises, including things like Battlefield, its sports games like EA Sports FC and Madden NFL, and The Sims. Given the stakes of the deal, it seems likely that EA will depend more on bankable releases rather than experimenting on smaller games — a strategy that many of the industry’s biggest publishers, including Ubisoft and Xbox, are shifting toward as well.
”As we begin this next chapter, I’m more optimistic than ever about what we’ll create together,” CEO Andrew Wilson said in a message to staff. “The opportunities ahead are extraordinary, and they’ll be brought to life by our creativity, our ambition, and our belief in what’s possible.”
The deal for EA follows other major video game industry acquisitions in recent years, including Microsoft’s $68.7 billion deal for Activision Blizzard, its $7.5 billion deal for Bethesda Softworks parent company ZeniMax Media, and Take-Two’s $12.7 billion deal for Zynga.