Saudi Arabia’s purchase of Electronic Arts, the biggest leveraged buyout in private equity history, officially closed earlier this month. With that deal done, a new Game Developer report has found that an awful lot of employees are expecting much more stringent control over what kinds of games they are and are not allowed to make.
This isn’t really new, strictly speaking. After the buyout was announced, current and former EA employees alike expressed concerns about a potential crackdown on some games, particularly those that are visibly diverse and inclusive, like The Sims. Former BioWare lead writer Trick Weekes summed it up aptly, predicting that “guns and football” will be fine, but that “gay stuff” will likely be out.
Despite EA’s various efforts to reassure employees that its “cultural values“—a functionally empty term to begin with—will remain intact under Saudi ownership, Game Developer has found that doubts persist among employees. One current employee told the site they believed the purchase was a way to distract from its “regressive” human rights record by “co-opting an established and comparatively progressive company culture.”
That’s a known phenomenon called “sportswashing,” and it’s been raised multiple times previously with regards to the EA buyout—in no small part because Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler and, through his chairmanship of the country’s Public Investment Fund, EA’s new boss, has previously stated outright that he’s happy to use it to achieve his goals. “If sportswashing is going to increase my GDP by way of one percent, then I will continue doing sportwashing,” he told Fox News in 2023. “I don’t care.”
Being a private company grants EA a certain freedom to do what it likes, but that doesn’t mean the company will necessarily just embrace an anti-inclusive agenda: Instead, one employee predicted that “projects just won’t get signed because they don’t align explicitly with what the Saudi government wants,” or that EA won’t even pitch them in the first place to avoid antagonizing its new owners.
“It’s certainly hard to feel good about being bought out by a regime that’s very much at odds with progressive society, so it is surely detrimental to anyone who finds this buyout morally odious,” one employee said, raising the point that Saudi Arabia’s notoriously oppressive regime is in itself an issue for some employees.
Another said that “if EA had a culture that had any semblance of a moral backbone, it wouldn’t get into bed with a prince who’s disgusted by many of its current employees’ sexualities and ethnicities,” adding that the presence of Jared Kushner, through his Saudi-backed Affinity Partners investment firm, “just adds insult to injury.”
The problem many employees are faced with is that moral objections sometimes have to take a back seat to the practicalities of survival, and the videogame industry is in an extremely bad state. One employee said they “feel gross just thinking about it, but there’s nowhere else to go. I’d love to leave, but the jobs aren’t there, and I have bills to pay.” Employees who own vested shares in EA will make a good dollar on them thanks to the PIF’s premium buyout offer, which may help dull the moral sting, but employees who don’t hold shares, including many who are classified as “temporary fulltime,” won’t even get that.
In a way, that reflects the broader state of EA as a whole. Being owned by the ruler of a regime that continues to oppress women and members of the LGBTQ+ community, and who is credibly accused of ordering the murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, is bad on its face, but the massive debt EA took on to finance the deal means massive layoffs seem almost inevitable, along with the cancellation of games that don’t meet sufficiently lucrative financial targets. None of that has happened yet, but the mood among the rank and file certainly sounds grim.
“There was a time where execs engaged more and provided more earnest answers about the company, and it genuinely felt like they cared about us,” one employee said. “It was years ago though. Now it’s mostly just tired corporate bullshit.”
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