Reports: Ea Set to Be Sold to Private Investors for Up to $50b
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Electronic Arts (EA) is reportedly being sold to private investors for up to $50B, sparking concerns about the company's future practices and the influence of private equity on the gaming industry.
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Battlefield
Mass effect
Dragon age
Madden
The sims
Titanfall
Reportedly it was an effort to suppress Call of Duty sales but en effect basically sacrificed Titanfall. Respawn management were very, very unhappy about this.
It's a shame, it was a great game with a fantastic campaign. I have a few hundred hours in the multiplayer too.
(RIP Westwood Studios)
It has not aged well. But at the time was amazing.
Thinking Commander Keen → Wolfenstein 3D → Doom → Quake kind of things.
(Sure there were always expansion packs or similar, but often done by other studios and more of a primitive DLC (Doom II, etc). But Warcraft → Warcraft 2 → Starcraft → Warcraft III was way more of a jump than the various Halos, say.)
It's hard to imagine what you mean here: a holder of shares cannot sell them unless they find someone willing to buy.
Not being able to participate in a private company’s growth is something I find pretty annoying.
For myself but also for society.
Plenty of ways to invest in private companies. You just need wealth and connections.
That’s exactly the problem I’m talking about. Public companies create more equality.
Also, we already let people engage in sports gambling (which is guaranteed to result in a net loss) and cryptocurrency speculation, (which is a zero sum game). I'd rather give people more options to invest in financial instruments that at least in theory have the potential to be positive sum, since we're not going to ban either of the other two any time soon.
the premium paid over the market price takes that into account.
if the new buyers think the old owners have a lower expectation of future earnings than them, then the buy makes sense.
From the other comments about EA's games, it's not like EA is that special of a company. There's always going to be some other company (not necessarily an AAA-games maker) worth putting your capital in and end up doing as well as what the hypothetical EA could do if it were not taken private. (Obviously finding such market-outperformer isn't easy but by the same argument I'm not convinced that EA would be obviously that outperformer either.)
And anyways, shareholders are paid a premium on today’s stock price (which theoretically reflects the current value of future profits, or at least the market’s view on it) in order to compensate for the exact loss you mention.
It happened to a company I held stock in. Years later there was a litigation started with some shareholders contesting the vote process and the results.
If you're a shareholder, you can vote "no" to selling with your shares. Generally, selling a public company requires the majority of the shares to vote "yes" in order to force the minority shareholders to go along with the sale. Usually the share price being offered represents a substantial uplift over the current trading price of the shares (and thus the value of the company). If the transaction unfairly hurts the financial value for minority shareholders they can sue to block the transaction (which does happen).
If you’re an executive or board member with a tons of shares you make millions and can retire immediately (or at least after the transition you agree to is complete.)
But the price doesn't plummet when an attempt to acquire a company is announced.
The price plummets when the holders of many shares want to sell. An attempted acquisition is the opposite of that situation.
The share price is for the current share supply. If the supply increases, then the price goes down.
There is also a confounding effect in the cases where shares have actually flooded the market, where the confounder is whatever the reason for flooding is. But even if you magically forced a mass sale with no negative event causing it, the price would still plummet due to the supply flood.
and then once the deal closes, they aren't shareholders anymore so the company's new owners don't have to care what they think.
(And yes, this means that in practice there is a compelled sale of some fraction of the stock at whatever price the majority agrees to)
Accelerating EAs enshittification seems like it wouldn't require taking them private.
Rather it seems like the investors intend for a change in direction. What that is remains to be seen, but I read this as hopeful, not harmful.
Is that even possible? Granted, this question is purely hypothetical for me, since I’m not buying anything from them as it is, but still…
Maybe a miracle occurs and they actually change for the better? I’ll believe it when I see it.
The only rational way I see out of this is to move to Renewable energy and eliminate the worlds dependence on fossil fuels.
Additionally, there's an incentive to invest this windfall profit into unrelated industries to diversify in preparation for the end of your primary revenue stream.