For months the $55 billion leveraged buyout of Electronic Arts read like a deal that might yet trip over its own scale. This week, that ambiguity evaporated. EA has told investors it expects the transaction to close next week, with — in the company’s own framing — “all regulatory approvals required” now in place. Roughly a week on from the European Commission’s sign-off, the last procedural hurdle is gone. What remains is paperwork.
The buyers are worth restating plainly, because the combination is unusual even by the standards of modern games M&A. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, private equity heavyweight Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners — the firm founded by Jared Kushner — are the three parties taking EA off the public markets. When it lands, this becomes one of the largest leveraged buyouts in corporate history, not just in gaming.
Why ‘private’ is the word that matters
Most coverage will lead with the price tag. The more consequential word is private. Once EA delists, the quarterly-earnings treadmill that has shaped a decade of its decisions — the live-service pivots, the monetisation experiments, the FIFA-to-EA-Sports-FC rebrand economics — no longer plays out in public view. That cuts both ways. Freed from short-term market pressure, a private EA could in theory make longer bets. But a leveraged buyout means the company also inherits a mountain of debt, and debt demands servicing regardless of how patient the owners claim to be. Historically, LBOs have a habit of turning “long-term vision” into cost discipline.
The ownership question nobody at EA will answer on the record
The Saudi involvement is the part that will define the headlines, and reasonably so. PIF already holds stakes across the industry — Nintendo, Take-Two, Embracer, and its own Savvy Games vehicle — but taking outright control of the publisher behind Battlefield, The Sims, Madden and Apex Legends is a different order of influence. It hands a sovereign wealth fund with a well-documented human-rights record a controlling seat at one of Western gaming’s biggest tables. That regulators waved it through on competition grounds does not settle the softer questions about editorial independence, labour, and which markets or subject matter a Saudi-owned EA might quietly avoid.
None of that is speculation the sources make — and it’s worth being honest that the deal documents won’t spell it out either. What we can say is concrete: the approvals are done, the timeline is days not months, and EA’s public-company era is ending.
What to watch after the ink dries
The interesting signals come after close. Watch for leadership changes, studio restructuring, and how aggressively the new owners lean on live-service revenue to service the debt. If the first post-deal year brings layoffs framed as “efficiencies,” that will tell you which reading of “private” won out. For now, the mega-deal that seemed almost too big to finish is about to do exactly that.