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Why private equity acquisitions like the one that just claimed BioWare are so dreaded
BioWare is just the latest casualty in a long history of private equity carnage.
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The closure of BioWare has not come as a huge surprise. The LGBTQ-inclusive developer of Mass Effect and Dragon Age, which hadn't managed to transmute development mayhem into sales success and whose games aren't ideal environments for loot boxes, did not seem likely to be admired by its new owners, Saudi Arabia and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. Employees at the legendary RPG studio started working on their resumes as soon as the acquisition was announced.
But even if BioWare's new owners had been miscellaneous investors rather than Saudi royalty, the outlook would not have been good: This is what private equity does.
Public companies are of course plenty capable of blowing things up all on their own. EA's pre-acquisition attempt to turn BioWare into a live-service shooter studio was one of the great missteps of the live service goldrush, and Microsoft's pursuit of shareholder value has led to thousands of layoffs and numerous game cancellations.
But there is a particular, systematic way that leveraged private equity acquisitions consume companies rather than nurturing them. In the wake of BioWare's closure and 400 layoffs across EA, we have updated our previously-reported overview of the process that has led to the demise of a number of game studios and other companies.
Ostensibly, the goal of a private equity acquisition is to optimize the bought-out company's performance for long-term returns, tapping underutilized potential—like EA's mobile business—to increase profits. But private equity firms have gained a sinister reputation thanks to a counter-intuitive strategy by which firms cannibalize their own acquisitions to extract maximum profits at the expense of the acquired company and its workforce.
That grisly process begins with the leveraged buyout, the most common form of private equity acquisition.
"A leveraged buyout just means the company is bought using a combination of borrowed money, or debt, and private equity," Kiplinger senior investing editor Karee Venema told PC Gamer last year. "The purchased company's balance sheet is used as collateral against the loans taken out to purchase it."
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