Copyright Wccftech
In the final week of September, a report from The Wall Street Journal claimed that Electronic Arts (EA) was going private in a massive $50 billion buyout, with the major investors being Silver Lake, a private equity company run by Jared Kushner, and the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund (PIF), among others. A few days later, the news would be confirmed, with EA officially announcing it had agreed to be acquired by this 'Consortium' of investors for $55 billion, and the video game industry has had endless questions ever since. Questions about the $20 billion of debt that EA takes on with this deal, and what impact that will have on EA's future. Questions about whether EA will be able to continue making the kinds of games it makes now under its new ownership, and if the developers making those games will still be the ones who get to say what goes into those games and what doesn't. In an updated version of its FAQ about the deal for EA employees (first spotted by Game File), it seems like EA has tried to answer that question. Under the question, "Will our culture change as a result of this deal?" a new line has been added which claims that "EA will maintain creative control and our track record of creative freedom and player-first values will remain intact." Additionally, under the question "What influence will these stockholders have on creative or business decisions?" EA claims "The Consortium believes in our vision, our leadership and our focus on creating games, stories, and content that reflect a range of experiences and delivering them to our global player community. They're investing in the creativity that defines EA." If this deal goes through, we'll see where these claims stand once we've seen EA release a game under its new ownership. Of course, there's the chance that these claims remain true, and that none of the new owners will try to influence creative control over EA titles. Or, we could see a similar situation to Fatal Fury adding Cristiano Ronaldo to the game. Interestingly, another element of the FAQ goes against a report from last week. Under the question, "Will our approach to AI change under new ownership?" an answer line reads, "We will maintain a thoughtful, steady approach to AI. AI is a tool to empower our people to put creativity first by reimagining workflows and amplifying the creative power of our teams." A Business Insider report, which quotes several current EA employees, does not describe EA's approach to AI as "steady" or "thoughtful," but rather that EA is pushing AI on its employees in every task, with tools meant to produce code in particular, causing a mountain of issues that then need to be fixed manually. That said, workflows going from what they used to be, i.e. a programmer writing code, doing their best to make no mistakes, to having an AI tool write hundreds of lines of code without any care for the quality of it that then has to be fixed manually, does count as workflows being "reimagined" by AI if you think about it.
