Cover of Command and Conquer, Electronic Arts.
For gamers, Black Friday is the time of year to take advantage of the sales and buy the latest games. From Steam’s all-encompassing sale to the assortment of deals on the PlayStation and Xbox stores, there’s a reason why Q4 accounts for a massive spike in gaming purchases. But this year, the deals come with a catch.
Electronic Arts (EA) has earned a notorious reputation over the past two decades. EA won “Worst Company in America” in 2012 and then again in 2013 — gaming’s equivalent of winning back-to-back Golden Raspberry Awards for worst film of the year. This was not one bad decision or an isolated public relations disaster. As many gamers familiar with the brand today know, this was the culmination of years of business practices so openly hostile to consumers that the gaming community voted to put the video game publisher into the same category as Bank of America, AT&T, and Comcast.
Let that sink in. The 2012 and 2013 votes pitted EA against institutions broadly despised by the American public at a time when memories of the 2008 financial crisis and bank bailouts were fresh. Major banks that had triggered economic collapse and received massive TARP bailouts, telecom monopolies that gouged customers with impunity, and health insurance companies denying life-saving claims were EA’s competition. Yet gamers felt their grievances against EA were worse than the suffering inflicted by these institutions. Most investors would see the public disdain for EA’s business practices as a red flag. However, this toxic reputation turned out to be exactly what private equity was looking for.
That reputation made EA the perfect acquisition target for private equity. In September 2025, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), Silver Lake Partners, and Affinity Partners announced they would purchase EA for $55 billion. While traditional investors might see brand reputation as paramount, private equity evaluates targets through a different lens: predictable cash flows, customer loyalty resilience, and pricing power. Paradoxically, EA’s toxic reputation demonstrated that its business model was bulletproof; rather than serving as a warning against acquisition, its history of exploitation was evidence that consumers would continue buying regardless of how the company treated them. Private equity does not want to fix EA. It is a company already optimized for extracting maximum value from its stakeholders, and private equity intends to push that optimization even further.
EA’s Anti-Worker History
The first major warning came not from gamers but from its own employees. In November 2004, an anonymous blog post titled EA: The Human Story appeared on LiveJournal.com written by a spouse of an EA employee, the post described working conditions that read like accounts from 19th-century factory floors. EA employees worked mandatory 9 AM to 10 PM shifts, seven days a week. EA classified their staff subjected to these conditions as “exempt” employees under California law in order to withhold overtime pay, refused compensation time, and denied additional vacation or sick leave.
In 2004, image production artist Jamie Kirschenbaum filed a class-action lawsuit seeking unpaid overtime wages. A parallel suit emerged led by engineer Leander Hasty, who characterized EA’s engineering teams as an “assembly line” where employees had no creative input and were simply executing predetermined tasks. These were not disgruntled workers complaining about long hours. They were raising questions about whether EA’s business model fundamentally relied on treating human labor as a disposable commodity.
The lawsuits were settled in 2005 and 2006 for $15.6 million for graphic artists and $14.9 million for engineers and programmers. EA achieved something remarkable in these settlements: They admitted no wrongdoing, and — crucially — the agreements were confidential. That confidentiality clause meant no legal precedent was set and EA could not be held up as a cautionary tale. Since it prevented the plaintiffs from publicly discussing the details of their case, the evidence they presented, or even the basic facts of what happened, EA could continue hiring cohorts of new workers and subject them to the same practices. EA had engineered a system where the company could absorb massive legal settlements as a cost of doing business, admit nothing, and keep the same practices intact. This pattern of calculated exploitation, or euphemistically ‘cost-benefit analysis,’would become central to why private equity found EA attractive.
EA’s Anti-Gamer History
Then there was SimCity. In 2013, EA launched a reboot of the classic city-building franchise, but with a twist: The game required constant online connectivity, even for single-player mode. As a massive fan of the city-building genre and specifically the SimCity series, I did not see a problem with this at the time prior to release. I had a stable internet connection and most people purchasing computer games are likely to have access to the internet, so what was the big deal? That decision revealed how EA viewed its playerbase. They justified the constant online activity as a technical necessity; however, it was really about digital rights protection and EA’s fundamental distrust of its own customers. Rather than viewing players as consumers entitled to a functional product, EA viewed them as potential pirates who needed to be monitored and controlled at every moment of engagement. In adding the online connection requirement, EA forwent delivering a seamless experience to players. Servers crashed on launch day and players lost hours of progress due to save failures. Instead of adding server capacity, EA removed game features to reduce server load.
SimCity’s reception was a disaster, receiving a 1.7 out 10 on Metacritic.The botched launch was so catastrophic it effectively killed the SimCity franchise. Yet, the game taught EA a crucial lesson about its own market position. Despite the catastrophic launch and overwhelming negative reception, the game still generated significant revenue because it was built on intellectual property (IP) that players cared about deeply enough to overlook fundamental failures in execution and design. I still bought the game myself, while being well aware of the problems, because I genuinely enjoyed the SimCity series and building cities and watching them grow. Like many other gamers who felt that same loyalty, I was willing to accept a broken product rather than miss out on a beloved franchise. EA had discovered through SimCity that player loyalty to IP could transcend quality, and the company capitalized on this affinity by leveraging such loyalty to overcome even the most severe quality failures. This is the same calculation that private equity is making with the EA acquisition: Consumer loyalty to beloved franchises will outlast any amount of corporate exploitation.
In more recent memory, the 2017 release of Star Wars Battlefront II was another exploitive spectacle despite massive anticipation. The game launched at the standard full $60 price tag; however, EA had engineered a system to skim gamers for even more money. Core characters to the franchise like Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader were locked behind loot boxes or could be unlocked by playing an estimated 4,528 hours, or spending close to $2,100 in additional purchases. The gaming community erupted on Reddit upon realization, directly questioning this model and why EA thought it was feasible to ask their playerbase to complete microtransactions to access core components of the Star Wars franchise. EA responded to the post with what would become the most downvoted comment in Reddit’s History: “The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes.”
This was not a gaffe or misstep, it was a test. EA discovered that even when they came out in the open with their extractive business model, even potentially crossing the line into mocking its consumer base, enough players would still buy the game. The backlash may have been enormous, but it was also survivable. EA could withstand the public perception damage, make cosmetic changes to the loot box system, and move on. EA gauged the tolerance threshold for consumer exploitation.
Regulators did take notice, though, and in April 2018 the Dutch Gaming Authority ruled that four games including EA’s FIFA (now known as EA FC) violated Dutch gambling law because they sold loot boxes and permitted the transfer of items yielded from them. Rather than comply, EA engaged in a four-year legal battle that eventually overturned the ruling. In the United States, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) introduced legislation to regulate “pay-to-win microtransactions and sales of loot boxes in interactive digital entertainment products.” In the United Kingdom, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport recommended in September 2019 that games with loot boxes be regulated under the Gambling Act 2005 and that their sale to minors be restricted.
Despite regulatory pressure from multiple jurisdictions, none of these proposed restrictions ultimately stuck. Like many banks, e-commerce platforms, and big tech companies before it, EA’s legal victories and the failed attempts at regulation cemented the company’s position as ‘too big to fail.’ EA outlasted regulatory pressure through a combination of legal resources, strategic patience, and lack of political will to regulate an industry generating billions in revenue and employing thousands of people. EA learned that while regulation may be threatened, the threat rarely becomes reality if you can afford to wait it out.
Private Equity and EA: A Match Made In Heaven
These two decades of predatory employment and business practices, lawsuits, and public backlash were proof of concept that EA had perfected something most companies could never pull off: The ability to extract value from consumers regardless of regulatory pressure, negative publicity, or even critical technical failure. When a company is despised by its own customers, most investors would not be faulted for concluding that its reputation is a liability. Private equity sees something entirely different in situations like EA’s; they see an expedient business solution to a fundamental problem that has already been solved. The problem is how to make customers continue buying a product even when those customers know the company is actively hostile to their interests. EA has demonstrated this can be accomplished through a combination of IP loyalty and nostalgia, regulation avoidance, and strategic labor exploitation.
Private equity firms operate from a standard playbook: acquire a company, load it with debt, extract cash flows, cut costs to improve margins, and rapidly exit for a profit. This model avoids consideration of the acquired company’s long-term sustainability or its consumer base. Private equity’s strategy thrives when the underlying business already has predictable cash flows, strong customer loyalty, and established pricing power. That is why the consortium of Affinity Partners, the PIF, and Silver Lake are so keen to purchase EA.
The fundamentals of EA’s business make it an ideal private equity target. The company generated roughly 73 percent of its revenue in 2025 from live services, which encompasses the ongoing sale of in-game content, battle passes, cosmetics, and subscriptions. Unlike traditional publishers that depend on new game launches every few years to drive sales cycles, EA’s business model is based on generating revenue throughout the year from each game purchaser. I may have bought the new EA FC for $60, but EA plans on me spending another $500 over the season on card packs for the game’s Ultimate Team mode in order to unlock some of the best players. Meanwhile, another gamer downloads Apex Legends for free, but EA will entice them to spend money through seasonal cosmetics and battlepasses. In gamer-speak, this revenue model is akin to an “infinite money glitch” for private equity.
EA already started axing jobs and curtailing new game development to boost profits ahead of the acquisition. In 2024, EA laid off 670 employees despite posting record profits.These layoffs came during a fiscal year when EA generated $7.46 billion in revenue and $1.21 billion in net income. While EA’s CEO Andrew Wilson earned $25 million, the company eliminated 5 percent of its workforce and closed several studios.
If EA Succeeds, Gaming Industry Falls
The EA acquisition is a signal that the gaming industry is ripe for private equity investment. If Affinity Partners, Silver Lake, and the PIF can service the company’s debt while maintaining profitability through aggressive monetization and cost-cutting, the playbook becomes replicable. Ubisoft oversees Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six. Take-Two owns Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, and 2K Sports. Each of these publishers has already developed existing monetization infrastructure — although not as openly exploitive as EA — through live service games, season passes, cosmetics and other microtransactions.
Industry jobs are being aggressively cut without private equity involvement. The gaming industry has proven that development teams can be treated as disposable commodities, especially as the use of AI becomes more integrated in the development process.
While private equity has a stake in other publishers, the acquisition of EA by Affinity Partners, Silver Lake, and the PIF is a litmus test for whether it can leverage its new market position to further consolidate at the expense of product quality, customers, and workers.
Every purchase of an EA game this Black Friday will signal to private equity that gamers will keep buying regardless of what happens to the people who create the games or what the direct costs will be. If the private equity consortium taking over EA can establish that the playerbase remains loyal through the transition, then they will have validated gaming as an industry ripe for extraction.
This first appeared on CEPR.
The post Black Friday Deals Won’t Save You From Electronic Art’s New Private Equity Overlord appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
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