By Nelson Schneider - 09/28/25 at 03:06 PM CT
Industrial Gaming has been in the hands of three major players in the Triumvirate of Evil for longer than most young-adult Gamers have even been alive. Yet, starting with the Microsoft buyout of Activision to feed the floundering Xbox Division, these big players have fallen by the wayside, one-by-one.
Not long ago, Ubisoft was the next to fall, after finding itself in such a dismal state that no legitimate *scoff* players in Big Gaming even wanted to buy them, and ended up splitting the company in half, while giving custody of their most lucrative IPs to Chinese Communist Party apparatus, Tencent.
Now Electronic Arts is circling the drain as well, with the announcement last Friday that they were in talks to be bought-out by two private equity firms and Saudi Prince, Mohammed bin Salman to the tune of $50 billion.
Activision becoming part of Xbox, Ubisoft feeding itself to the Communists, and EA going private: It feels like the end of an era. Of course, with the dismal state of Gaming as a whole, with Xbox and PlayStation floating the idea of ending consoles, and Nintendo’s hollowed-out skin-suit committing the same acts that made most Gamers hate the Big 3 when they held all the power, it doesn’t really look like catastrophic destruction as much as it looks like a much needed reset – or “Market Correction,” in finance lingo.
On the other hand, I can’t help but question why Silver Lake, MBS, and Affinity Partners would actually want EA. This is the EA that won the Worst Company in America booby prize TWO YEARS back-to-back. This is the EA that started the trend of buying, ruining, then gutting or shuttering beloved Single-A studios, like BioWare. I really don’t think a bunch of private equity empty suits will have any good ideas for reversing that trend. Even more baffling, Embracer Group, one of the largest and most well-known videogame holding companies went through the process of de-grouping last year, since apparently holding a bunch of unpopular videogame companies that don’t even release very many games anymore turned out to be a poor investment.
Who could have guessed?!
With Microsoft continuing to allow the bits of Activision floating in the Xbox Division’s sour guts to idle away with nothing to show, and with Ubisoft coming off a string of cancellations and flops, expecting something different from EA seems... Retarded?
The bright side of Big Finance and Private Equity getting into Gaming – if there is one – is that it clears out a lot of space in the Gaming landscape for smaller players to really show what they can do.
