EA’s $55 Billion Buyout Is Official: Saudi PIF Now Owns the Gaming Giant

Nomadnest28.com EA’s has officially gone private, and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund now sits at the center of it. The deal closed today, August 4, marking the largest leveraged buyout in the history of commerce — a title that alone tells you how massive this transaction really is.

The Deal, By the Numbers

The buyout carries a price tag of $55 billion, and a significant chunk of that comes loaded with debt attached to EA itself. That detail matters more than it might seem at first glance, since debt-heavy acquisitions tend to bring pressure for aggressive cost-cutting down the line. Layoffs, studio closures, and canceled projects are all being floated as possibilities, though nothing concrete has been confirmed by EA or its new owners yet.

Shareholders walked away with $210 per share as part of the transaction. That figure represents a 25% premium over EA’s stock price from the last full trading day before news of the deal first leaked, a jump that sent shares climbing almost immediately. PIF’s existing 9.9% stake in EA got folded directly into the new deal structure.

Who’s Actually Behind This

PIF isn’t operating alone here. The consortium includes Jared Kushner’s private equity firm, Affinity Partners, along with Silver Lake, an investment company whose co-CEO Egon Durban previously sat on Unity’s board of directors. This isn’t Kushner’s first move into major entertainment or tech-adjacent investing, and Silver Lake brings its own long track record in large-scale buyouts.

EA CEO Andrew Wilson addressed the closing directly. “This moment recognizes the extraordinary people whose creativity, ambition, and passion have made EA one of the world’s leading interactive entertainment companies,” he said. “We’re entering this next chapter from a position of strength with partners who share our vision and ambition.”

PIF Deputy Governor Turqi Alnowaiser echoed that sentiment, framing entertainment and sports as core strategic priorities for the fund going forward.

A Long Road to Close

This deal was first announced back in September 2025, but regulatory approval dragged the process out for nearly a year. Europe finally signed off in July, clearing the last major hurdle standing between announcement and closing. Now that the transaction is finished, EA has been pulled off the public stock market entirely — meaning outside observers will lose most visibility into how the company performs financially going forward.

Wilson himself remains in the CEO seat for now, though how long that lasts is anyone’s guess. He’s held the role since 2013, a stretch that saw EA’s stock climb from around $27 to where it stood before this buyout. His compensation grew right alongside that trajectory — the latest company filings put his total pay at $38 million for the most recent fiscal year, the same year EA laid off a notable number of developers, including some who had worked on Battlefield 6.

Why Developers Are Worried

Inside BioWare, concern has already taken root. Developers there fear the RPG studio could be an early target for cuts under the new ownership structure. BioWare has built part of its identity around inclusive storytelling and diverse character representation, which makes the studio’s position feel especially uncertain given who’s now calling the shots.

Patrick Weekes, a longtime BioWare writer laid off in 2025, voiced a pointed concern: he speculated that EA’s new owners, PIF included, might steer away from LGBTQ+ representation and political themes that don’t align with the fund’s leadership. Developers on The Sims team have raised similar worries about creative direction going forward.

Frustration hasn’t stayed confined to internal channels, either — cosplayers staged a protest at EA’s California headquarters in response to the deal, a visible sign that fan communities are paying close attention too.

Where This Ranks Historically

As massive as $55 billion sounds, it still falls short of gaming’s biggest-ever acquisition. That record belongs to Microsoft, which spent $75.4 billion acquiring Activision Blizzard. Still, this marks yet another aggressive expansion for PIF, which already owns mobile gaming giant Scopely (the studio behind Monopoly Go) and Niantic’s gaming division, home to Pokémon Go.

Analyst Piers Harding-Rolls of Ampere Analysis expects EA to focus on trimming excess spending and reshaping its workforce to help manage the new debt load. A Financial Times report suggested EA might lean further into AI tools to cut development costs — something the company has already been experimenting with, alongside plenty of other studios chasing similar efficiency gains.

Mat Piscatella of Circana offered a more cautious read on what comes next. “Leveraged buyouts have a certain history that generally hasn’t been great for the acquired companies,” he told GI.biz, a comment that carries real weight given how many LBOs have ended in trouble for the companies involved.

EA’s Last Earnings Report as a Public Company

EA released its final public earnings report on August 3, just one day before the deal closed. Net bookings reached $1.35 billion for the April-June quarter, up $51 million year-over-year, though the number landed below what analysts had projected.

Strong extra-content sales for Apex Legends helped drive that growth, alongside solid full-game and microtransaction revenue from Battlefield 6. Weaker sales for Split Fiction partially offset those gains, especially since the game had launched during the same quarter the previous year. Going forward, EA’s earnings will no longer be public information — a real shift for anyone who’s followed the company’s financial performance over the years.

A Silver Lining, According to Some Industry Voices

Not everyone views this shift negatively. Fiona Sperry, former head of EA’s Criterion Games and now CEO of Three Fields Entertainment, sees real potential in EA operating outside the public market. “I’d be really excited about the opportunity that going private would entail,” she told GI.biz.

Her reasoning centers on how publicly traded studios often rush games out the door to hit quarterly earnings targets, sometimes locking in release dates long before a game’s design is actually finished. “You have to design to the date rather than the other way round,” she explained, “and it’s really hard to do that when you’re trying to innovate.”

Harding-Rolls made a similar point, noting that going private frees EA from constant market scrutiny, potentially opening room for longer-term strategic thinking instead of chasing quarterly numbers. That said, the new investor consortium will almost certainly set its own performance benchmarks — plus there’s that debt load to manage — so it’s not as if EA is now free from outside pressure altogether.