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EA employees brace for the worst under Saudi ownership: 'Hard to feel good about being bought out by a regime that's very much at odds with progressive society'
Despite assurances from management, some workers believe the company will be subject to censorship by its new owners.
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Saudi Arabia's purchase of Electronic Arts, the biggest leveraged buyout in private equity history, officially closed earlier this month. With that deal done, a new Game Developer report has found that an awful lot of employees are expecting much more stringent control over what kinds of games they are and are not allowed to make.
This isn't really new, strictly speaking. After the buyout was announced, current and former EA employees alike expressed concerns about a potential crackdown on some games, particularly those that are visibly diverse and inclusive, like The Sims. Former BioWare lead writer Trick Weekes summed it up aptly, predicting that "guns and football" will be fine, but that "gay stuff" will likely be out.
Despite EA's various efforts to reassure employees that its "cultural values"—a functionally empty term to begin with—will remain intact under Saudi ownership, Game Developer has found that doubts persist among employees. One current employee told the site they believed the purchase was a way to distract from its "regressive" human rights record by "co-opting an established and comparatively progressive company culture."
That's a known phenomenon called "sportswashing," and it's been raised multiple times previously with regards to the EA buyout—in no small part because Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler and, through his chairmanship of the country's Public Investment Fund, EA's new boss, has previously stated outright that he's happy to use it to achieve his goals. "If sportswashing is going to increase my GDP by way of one percent, then I will continue doing sportwashing," he told Fox News in 2023. "I don't care."
Being a private company grants EA a certain freedom to do what it likes, but that doesn't mean the company will necessarily just embrace an anti-inclusive agenda: Instead, one employee predicted that "projects just won't get signed because they don't align explicitly with what the Saudi government wants," or that EA won't even pitch them in the first place to avoid antagonizing its new owners.
"It's certainly hard to feel good about being bought out by a regime that's very much at odds with progressive society, so it is surely detrimental to anyone who finds this buyout morally odious," one employee said, raising the point that Saudi Arabia's notoriously oppressive regime is in itself an issue for some employees.
Another said that "if EA had a culture that had any semblance of a moral backbone, it wouldn’t get into bed with a prince who's disgusted by many of its current employees' sexualities and ethnicities," adding that the presence of Jared Kushner, through his Saudi-backed Affinity Partners investment firm, "just adds insult to injury."
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