Earlier this week, on Monday September 29th, it was officially announced that Electronic Arts, publisher of video game series’ including The Sims, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, EA Sports FC, Apex Legends, and more had been acquired by a group of private investors for around $55 Billion USD.
This group of private investors included, notably, the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund, and Affinity Partners (an investment firm whose CEO is Jared Kushner, son in law to Donald Trump).
Understandably, this has concerned a lot of people, myself included.
For a little context, the Public Investment Fund exists in large part to help launder the global perception of Saudi Arabia through associations with popular culture, and to bring in income investments from foreign companies. Their investments in companies such as Ubisoft have reportedly in the past impacted the content those companies produce, with reports for example link PIF funding to the development of an Assassin’s Creed Mirage DLC set in 9th century AlUla, an ancient Arabian city.
Jared Kushner’s political leanings and affiliations are no secret, nor are his connections to and willingness to do work that supports the aims of Donald Trump. A major element of Project 2025, the right wing playbook for advancing right wing political momentum under the new Trump presidency, is the aim of reducing diversity and left wing associated political views in pop culture.
EA as a game publisher may not be perfect, but they do have a number of franchises under their belt that feature queer and disabled representation, as well as games that have benefitted in terms of accessibility by bringing in disabled consultants to help shape the direction of their accessibility efforts. They’re notable for their efforts to release accessibility tools and patents for wider open source use for example under their Accessibility Pledge initiative.
Obviously, there are concerns that EA and the development studios under them may feel pressured to tone back representation and accessibility efforts in series such as Mass Effect, The Sims, Dragon Age, Apex Legends, and more going forward.
EA CEO Andrew Wilson has claimed in a statement regarding the buyout that EA’s core values will not change in the wake of this acquisition, while being very non-specific in that quote.
“Our values and our commitment to players and fans around the world remain unchanged.”
However, at present, that remains to be seen. The proof will be in the games released by EA in the coming years, particularly those that begin development post acquisition.
EA was acquired as part of a “Leveraged Buyout”, which basically means that EA will be saddled with the debt for their own acquisition. The investors borrow the money to purchase the company, then expect that the company’s future profits will pay off that debt. This basically means in practice that EA will be expected to quickly justify the amount used for its purchase to investors.
A concern that I, and many others, have is that we may see studios such as Bioware that happen to focus on games with queer and disabled representation themes shuttered in the wake of the acquisition, framed as money saving exercises to pay off the companies acquisition debts, with the unspoken additional motivation of reducing progressive efforts under the publisher.
Additionally, I will be very much watching for news in the accessibility space for whether or not we see a reduction in accessibility consultants being brought in to work on EA published products.
I hope my fears are unfounded – Maybe the PIF and Affinity Partners will put no pressure on EA with regards to representation and accessibility, and Andrew Wilson will push for those aspects of EA’s portfolio to be unaffected. I hope that I am wrong in my fears, but the signs are not looking great from the offset. These are not reassuring partners, and they paint a picture of the upper level political beliefs in company management at EA. At the most generous reading they represent a publisher wholly unconcerned with the beliefs of those they’ve chosen to receive investment from.
What this means for my coverage of EA games going forward, I need time to make that assessment. I do not want to be putting money into the pockets of the PIF and Jared Kushner’s company if I can personally avoid it, but the number of AAA game developers that I can cover as a games critic without inadvertently funding things that I politically disagree with is ever shrinking.
My gut instinct is that maybe EA published games need to go into the Ubisoft coverage area for me – Generally don’t cover them but make occasional exceptions on this specific show because a specific release does something with regards to accessibility that I cannot reasonably ignore while covering the space.
I say this as someone who loves a lot of work being published under EA, and had the opportunity to work as a consultant for Bioware a few years ago. I don’t want to stop supporting EA’s games, but I find it hard to justify financially supporting the company following this acquisition.
I’m writing this the same day the news of the acquisition broke. I don’t have any great answers right now for how to move forward. I guess for today all that I can say is I hope we continue to see EA publishing games that push forward representation and accessibility efforts. There’s not that many AAA publishers out there right now doing this work, and I hope this isn’t going to lead to a publisher retreating in that regard.