// KOTAKU — GAMING
EA Tells Devs Its Saudi Arabia Owners Won’t Make Creative Decisions, Queer Fans Don’t Buy It
On Tuesday, August 4, Electronic Arts was officially sold for $55 billion to Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), Silver Lake Partners, and the private equity firm Affinity Partners, which is owned by Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The deal was first announced in September of 2025, and now that it’s finally happened, many workers and fans are anticipating mass layoffs as EA seeks to service $18 billion in debt, with the publisher telling debt investors that it would cut $170 million in costs through new “organizational efficiencies,” according to reporting from Bloomberg. Sources tell Kotaku that while said investors have been made aware of these plans, the company has kept its workers in the dark about the potential for cuts.
EA held a town hall presentation for its global workforce the day after the deal closed. According to sources who viewed it, executives spoke about the change in broad terms but did not go into specifics, or acknowledge the ongoing concerns about layoffs, and told developers its new “partners” would not be involved in making creative decisions. Since the announcement of the acquisition, many fans and developers of queer-inclusive series like Dragon Age and The Sims have expressed concern that EA’s games may no longer allow same-sex relationships, feature trans-inclusive design, or have any sort of queer representation due to Saudi Arabia’s criminalization of same-sex relationships and transgender expression. Only time will tell if this claim that the new owners will not be making creative decisions will prove true.
Sources also tell Kotaku that there was a Q&A segment at the town hall in which the company answered questions that those sources suspect of having been composed by the executive team, because there was no discussion of the layoffs or budget changes that employees are concerned about.
“I think we’ve learned to expect nothing from town halls that wouldn’t be in a press release,” one source tells Kotaku. “And the EA employees who don’t work on one of the frequently mentioned ‘pillar’ IPs of sports, Battlefield, Sims and Apex Legends have been waiting for the axe for a year and still don’t know it’s going to come.”
For workers, the wait has been agonizing, but for fans who have long looked at EA games such as The Sims, Apex Legends, and the RPGs of BioWare as some of the few releases in the AAA space where they could consistently find queer characters and stories, there’s nothing left to wait on. As far as they’re concerned, EA being owned by the Saudi government and the extended family of President Donald Trump marks the death knell of the company’s surprisingly consistent championing of queer characters and storytelling.
Kotaku spoke with fans of EA’s studios and particularly of the queer representation in its games, and they all had similar stories. Whether it was meeting love interests in Dragon Age, realizing they could make same-sex pairings in The Sims, or becoming deeply invested in the visibly queer Legends of Respawn’s hero shooter, all their lives had been profoundly impacted by EA’s surprising track record of trailblazing LGBTQIA+ representation over the past few decades. Some used these games as a vehicle for self-discovery, while others found community in their fellow queer players.
“I was a ‘92 baby; games were just starting to enter the mainstream and I had a rough childhood so needless to say, even from a very young age the storytelling potential of games was important to me,” Kabu, a nonbinary Apex Legends fan, tells Kotaku. “Apex Legends came along at a time when as a queer person I really needed it; things were starting to look pretty bleak for queer and trans people in the U.S. (looking back to 2019, that was really just the tip of the iceberg, huh). I was feeling incredibly disenchanted with gaming as a whole. Then someone mentioned to me in passing that one of the characters in Apex was nonbinary. Feeling some of my hopelessness quelled by the idea