One of the world’s biggest video game companies plans to sell to some of the world’s most powerful people
EA confirms deal to sell to Saudis and other investors for $55 billion, going private
Broken by The Wall Street Journal on Friday and confirmed by Electronic Arts today, one of the world’s top video game companies plans to sell to some of the world’s most powerful people, in a $55 billion deal that would take private the maker of Madden, The Sims and Wing Commander.
The new owners would be Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund—who got first billing in this morning’s press release —plus the private equity firm Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, an investment group run by Jared Kushner, son-in-law of U.S. President Donald Trump.
The deal, which EA expects to close between April and July 2026, would see all three partners invest $36 billion into EA, along with $20 billion in debt financing.
“This is one of the largest and most significant investments ever made in the entertainment industry,” EA CEO Andrew Wilson told employees in a message that was distributed shortly after the deal was announced.
“Our new partners bring deep experience across sports, gaming, and entertainment,” Wilson wrote. “They are committed with conviction to EA—they believe in our people, our leadership, and the long-term vision we are now building together.”
The new owners
Silver Lake’s main prior connection to gaming is via the tech company Unity. Silver Lake owns 8.5% of Unity and is its biggest shareholder. Jim Whitehurst, a managing partner at Silver Lake, served as Unity’s interim CEO in late 2023 and early 2024, following the exit of John Riccitiello, himself a former EA CEO. Whitehurst is the executive chair of Unity’s board of directors.
Kushner and Affinity Partners have not previously made big public investments in gaming. Regarding EA, Kushner said today in a press release that he “grew up playing their games—and now enjoys them with his kids.” (Odd side-detail: Affinity Partners’ logo is a mirror image of the logo for Abstergo Entertainment, the evil Templar-controlled gaming company that is featured in Ubisoft’s long-running Assassin’s Creed franchise).
The likely new EA owner with the most substantial gaming ties and most notable background of all is, of course, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, or the Public Investment Fund.
The PIF already owned nearly 10% of EA, which will be rolled over into the new ownership structure.
The Saudi government’s investment in gaming largely via the PIF, has been in overdrive for the past four years.
In January 2022, the PIF announced the $1.5 billion purchase of esports organizations ESL and FaceIt as well as the creation of the Savvy Games Group, a would-be gaming conglomerate. Savvy’s chairman is Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS).
In May 2022, MBS’ Misk Foundation upped its ownership of long-running Japanese game maker SNK to 96%.
In September 2022, Savvy said it would invest $38 billion into gaming. Among its goals: $13 billion earmarked “for the acquisition and development of a leading game publisher to become a strategic development partner.”
In July 2023, Savvy completed a $4.9 billion purchase of Scopely, the mobile gaming company behind the hugely successful Monopoly Go. In the spend-money-to-make-money world of mobile gaming, Scopely has found itself with hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on the game’s marketing, to rake in billions in revenue.
In summer 2024, the Saudi government-funded eSports World Cup kicked off, offering a “life-changing” $60 million prize pool, which was an esports record (The EWC topped themselves the year). The Cup lists Sony as a strategic partner and has featured games from Capcom, Riot, Epic, Activision Blizzard, and more.
In September 2024, Savvy CEO Brian Ward was elected as one of the board of directors for The Embracer Group, the Swedish gaming conglomerate that owns the rights to Lord of the Rings and Tomb Raider franchises. Savvy is the second-largest shareholder of Embracer. (In 2023, the loss of an expected additional $2 billion investment from Savvy contributed to a radical downsizing of the company)
In May 2025, Savvy-owned Scopely completed its $3.5 billion purchase of most of the game portion of Niantic, including its popular mobile game Pokémon Go
Also in 2025, SNK’s newest fighting game, Fatal Fury: City of Wolves, had “one of the most aggressive [marketing campaigns] we’ve seen for a fighting game,” per Fighters Generation. City of Wolves’ promotional campaign included an unusually large $2.5 million tournament prize pool, the branding of one of the year’s biggest—and Saudi-backed—boxing matches as “Fatal Fury,” and multiple and a musical number in the middle of Wrestlemania 41, the biggest event of the year from Saudi government financial partner WWE. (Despite all that hype, poor sales led to the resignation of SNK’s CEO.)
In summer 2025, the eSports World Cup featured a spin-off New Global Sport Conference, which included a talk with Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot. During that talk, Guillemot confirmed a free-to-consumers mini-expansion to 2023’s Assassin’s Creed Mirage. The add-on will be set in 9th century AlUla, which is located in what is now Saudi Arabia. (Ubisoft has declined to confirm that the Saudis are financing the 2025 expansion, but Game File sources familiar with the project are under the impression it is. A Ubisoft rep told me earlier this month that the game update “was made possible thanks to the support of local and international organizations…”)
Over the past several years, the Public Investment Fund has purchased large stakes of publicly traded gaming companies, holding 6.5% of EA rival and Grand Theft Auto maker Take Two, 6.6% of Capcom and 4.2% of Nintendo, among others. (The amounts have fluctuated and in some cases, such as Nintendo, are lower than they had been.)
In 2026, if the deal goes through, the PIF will be joint-owner of Electronic Arts.
In today’s deal announcement, the PIF’s head of international investments, Turqi Alnowaiser, said “this partnership will help further drive EA’s long-term growth, while fueling innovation within the industry on a global scale.”
With Saudi Arabia’s investments into gaming have come repeated pledges from Saudi/Savvy/PIF officials that they won’t interfere with the company’s operations.
Some people in the press, at the game companies and in player communities have nevertheless flinched at the kingdom’s investments in gaming, given Saudi Arabia’s human rights record. Critics see the government-funded gaming play in a similar light to the kingdom’s investment into golf and boxing. Human Rights Watch states: “PIF investments in high-profile sports and entertainment events domestically and internationally are used to whitewash the country’s abysmal human rights record.”
In 2022, Savvy CEO Brian Ward told me that “I’m not over there on an image makeover project.”
Ward said workers in town halls for the esports groups Savvy had purchased grilled Ward and others about the LGBTQ rights and women’s safety in Saudi Arabia. Ward told me in 2022 that he responded to such questions by saying Savvy would operate “with the values and culture of what we know our audience wants and our audience respects–and [what] those of us who have been in the business 25 years like about our industry, being forward-looking and liberal in many respects.”
(In subsequent years, I did not hear of censorship at Saudi-owned studios, but in July, ReaderGrev reported that an Amazon Prime docu-series about the eSports World Cup omitted LGBTQ subject matter from the Saudi version of one of its episodes.)
Ward told me in 2022 that a key goal of the Saudi gaming investments is to support the expansion of game development work in Saudi Arabia and cater to the local player population. Savvy has built up Steer Studios, a development studio in Riyadh.
What’s next?
Financial analysts were mixed on today’s news of an EA deal. One skeptical analyst, Mike Hickey of Benchmark, calling it “a self-serving, opportunistic move by management and the investor group,” according to the AP. A more enthusiastic take from Freedom Capital’s Nick McKay said the deal would “enable EA to increase its focus on long-term growth” without the investor pressure that comes with being a public company.”
EA’s likely biggest game of the year, EA Sports FC 26, launched last week. Battlefield 6, a massive multi-studio collaboration meant to challenge Call of Duty’s dominance in military-themed first-person shooters, launches next month.
Andrew Wilson is expected to remain EA CEO and the company says it will stay headquartered in Redwood City, California.
“This moment is a recognition of your creativity, your innovation, and your passion,” Wilson told workers today. “Everything we have achieved—and everything that lies ahead—is because of you.”
EA reported in the spring that it had 14,500 employees as of March 30, 2025, a continued increase despite two major rounds of layoffs in the last two years, thanks to continued hiring.
The deal’s $20 billion in debt financing and even just the recent history of gaming (or non-gaming) mega-deals suggests that contraction at EA is on the way.
That, plus the PIF’s Saudi government origins have made worried some EA workers. Notably, EA had regularly promoted itself as an LGBTQ-friendly company, celebrating Pride month and granularly discussing issues such as sexual orientation and pronoun selection as elements of the game design in its Sims franchise.
In his note to workers, Wilson said today that “[o]ur values and our commitment to players and fans around the world remain unchanged.”
That didn’t convince one current EA worker, who told Game File that “Andrew Wilson basically said ‘f you’ to all women and LGTBQ employees at EA with this deal.”
Speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss company matters publicly, they also said: “It just shows how many people have been collateral this past year for executives to make out rich. Nothing feels great. And we know, when the deal closes, it’s going to get worse before it gets better, if better is even possible.”
Said another: “I’m nervous about what this means in terms of workforce once the deal is closed, as layoffs usually follow those type of acquisitions.
“And on a personal level,” the second person added, “those future owners are really not in line with my values and beliefs.”
Clarification - 9:38pm: Updated a line in the PIF run-down to clarify that it was Savvy-owned Scopely that bought Niantic’s gaming business, not Savvy buying it directly.
Correction - September 30, 2:34pm: This post originally stated that Silver Lake is a venture capital firm. It’s a private equity firm.
Wing Commander? Isn’t that from the 1980s?
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