The biggest buyout in gaming just cleared Europe, and now EA has to pay for it

Gaming 3 min 80 sources

The largest buyout in the industry's history is almost done. It explains the pricier editions, the shelved games, and the layoffs that will not stop.

Key takeaways

EU regulators cleared the $55 billion take-private of EA, the largest leveraged buyout ever, loading the company with debt it never chose.
That debt pushes EA toward its reliable sports cash machines and pricier editions, and away from risky creative games like Dragon Age.
The deal arrives inside a four-year industry downturn, with fresh layoffs at 1047 Games and Hasbro and contract workers cut hardest of all.

The deal is basically done

On Thursday, European Union regulators approved the sale of Electronic Arts [19]. The buyers are a group led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the kingdom’s roughly $1 trillion wealth fund. Alongside it sit the private equity firm Silver Lake and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners [19]. At $55 billion, it is the largest leveraged buyout in history [19]. The deal was announced last September. With Europe cleared and little pushback expected in the United States, it is set to close any day now [19][59].

A leveraged buyout works like this. The buyers put up some of their own money and borrow the rest, then load that loan onto the company they just bought. So EA does not get a rich new parent. EA gets a large new debt [59][65].

Why the debt decides what gets made

From now on, EA has to throw off enough cash each year to service billions in borrowing it never chose to take on [59][65]. That pushes every decision toward the safe and the reliable. EA’s annual sports games, the FC soccer series and Madden, are dependable cash machines. Its riskier creative games are not.

You can already see the tilt. EA Sports FC 27 will ship in three versions: a $70 standard game, a $100 “Ultimate” edition, and a new $150 “Ultimate Plus” [65]. The extra $50 mostly buys in-game currency, 10,000 “FC Points” over five months against 6,000 for the regular Ultimate, to spend inside the game’s card-pack economy [65][59]. The game is not better. There is just more to buy [59].

The creative side looks thinner. Mark Darrah spent 23 years at BioWare as a Dragon Age producer. He called EA “a hedge fund with a video game hobby,” and said he doubts the series will return [80][56]. BioWare, once EA’s role-playing powerhouse, is now a single-game studio working only on the next Mass Effect [56]. There is speculation EA will lean on generative AI and more layoffs to cut costs and cover the debt [59].

For a player, the through-line is simple. When a company is built to service debt, it makes the games that reliably print money and quietly buries the ones that do not.

The cuts were already coming

The buyout lands in the middle of a downturn that has run for four years. One community tracker counts the toll. It logs roughly 8,500 games jobs lost in 2022, more than 10,000 in 2023, and over 14,000 in 2024 [4]. Then about 5,300 in 2025, and already around 4,600 this year, and those are only the losses we hear about [4].

The names keep arriving. 1047 Games, the studio behind the shooter Splitgate, cut more staff last week, a third round, barely a month after launching its new game Empulse [1]. The studio had raised $100 million back in 2021 [1]. Hasbro took a $56 million write-down on cancelled game projects, after telling investors it had poured more than $1 billion into building its own studios [2][70]. Xbox’s chief, Asha Sharma, told staff plainly that the business today is not healthy [63].

The layer nobody counts

Under the reported layoffs sits a second wave that rarely makes the totals: contractors. Big studios run on contract labour, and whole departments, especially game testing, are staffed by people on short, renewable contracts [4]. When budgets get cut, those jobs go first and quietest, because a contract that is simply not renewed never shows up as a layoff [4]. “Industry’s cooked,” one worker put it [4]. The people who lose the most are often the ones the numbers were never counting.

02 · Lesson · why it matters

Why the thing being bought pays for its own sale

Buy a company with borrowed money, park the loan on the company itself, and it spends years paying for its own purchase.

Start with who owes what

EA is being sold for $55 billion, and this week Europe signed off. The interesting part is not the price. It is who ends up holding the bill.

The buyers - a Saudi wealth fund, a private equity firm, and a fund run by Jared Kushner - are not paying $55 billion out of their own pockets. They are borrowing most of it. And the loan does not stay with them. It gets placed on EA. This is a leveraged buyout, and “leveraged” is a polite word for borrowed. The company wakes up the morning after the sale owing money it never asked to owe.

The trick is where the debt lands

Picture buying a house with a mortgage the house has to pay. You put down a little, borrow the rest, and then the building itself is on the hook for the payments. If it cannot pay, you lose your small deposit and walk away. That is roughly the shape of a leveraged buyout. The buyers’ own money at risk is a sliver. The debt rides on the thing they bought.

It sounds like a strange way to buy something. It is also one of the most common ways large companies change hands - in retail, in media chains, in games. The name on the door changes. The debt is what moves in.

Debt is not neutral

A company with a large annual debt payment is not the same company it was the day before, even if every desk sits in the same place. It has a new master it must feed first: the lenders. Every choice now gets weighed against one question. Does this bring in cash, soon, and reliably?

That question has a clear answer at EA. Its annual sports games, FC and Madden, sell every year to the same people, with card packs and currency stacked on top. They are close to a machine that prints money. A brand-new role-playing game is the opposite: expensive, slow, and it might not land. Under heavy debt, the machine gets fed and the gamble gets starved. That is why a former Dragon Age producer can look at EA and reasonably guess the series is finished. Nothing about the games changed. The math around them did.

You are inside the ledger

Here is the part that is easy to miss. The cash that services the debt does not appear from nowhere. It comes from players. The $150 edition, the ten thousand points, the pack opened at midnight - that is the payment, routed through you. When people say a game feels greedier than it used to, they are often feeling a debt schedule they cannot see.

And it comes from workers. The layoffs that run alongside deals like this are not separate news. Cutting people is one of the fastest ways to free up cash for a payment. The player funding the packs and the tester losing a contract are on the same page of the same ledger.

The shape that poses as normal

None of this is hidden, exactly, but it is dressed as ordinary business. “A company was acquired” lands like a weather report. Underneath it is a specific arrangement about who carries the risk and who gets protected. The buyers cap their downside. The company, its players, and its staff carry the weight.

That arrangement can serve the people who built it and still deliver things players genuinely want. People do buy those annual sports games, and enjoy them. Both are true at once. Naming the shape is not the same as naming a villain.

What no single seat sees

The player sees a pricier game and calls the studio greedy. The developer sees a good project killed and calls the bosses cowards. The executive sees a payment due and calls it discipline. Each is staring at one corner of a structure none of them designed, all of them are inside, and no single one can see whole. The company that owns the studio will change hands again. The debt will outlast several of these arguments. Seeing that does not make anyone cleverer about who to blame. It makes the blame sit a little lighter, and the whole thing a little clearer.

03 · Lab · your turn

Buy It With Its Own Money

Rehearse how debt loaded onto a studio starves its creative bets and forces the safe cash machines.

04 · Hope · carry this

Studios get bought and buried, but the people who make games keep making them: the Burnout team is already rebuilding after its studio closed, and a college class project just reached one of the world's biggest game shows. The craft outlasts whoever owns it.