Former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah says that EA could potentially look to sell off its “huge repository of dormant IPs” following the $55 billion acquisition.
Assuming the acquisition is approved, EA is going private, with investment firms Affinity Partners and Silver Lake and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) buying the company in a deal expected to close in the first quarter of FY2027. With that, however, EA will be taking on $20 billion of debt in order to help finance it.
Responding to this news in a video on his YouTube channel (below), Darrah, who previously served as executive producer on Dragon Age 1, 2, and Inquisition, as well as Anthem, discusses the possibility of EA selling some of its IPs in the aftermath of the buyout.
Selling IPs isn’t something that EA has historically done, and “the reason for that,” Darrah suggests, is “in large part because the individuals who would be responsible for making those decisions, for looking for those opportunities, are actually incentivized to not take risks. They are incentivized to not be the person who sold an IP that then turned into a billion-dollar franchise.” Doing “nothing,” he adds, is what “keeps them from getting into trouble.”
Times are set to change though, which could lead to those incentives changing, for example “to shed costs or generate revenue if at all possible,” especially if it was a case of trying to “generate revenue to pay down as much debt as we can as quickly as we can” to ensure that the company isn’t in “a dangerous position.”
Darrah continues: “People who have spent their careers trying to keep their heads down and not do anything that might get them in trouble in the future might suddenly find themselves in a situation where what they really need to do is sell as much as they can.
“EA has a huge repository of dormant IPs that are just sitting there dormant,” he continues. “It seems unlikely that the new resulting structure is going to be eager to suddenly revive a bunch of those IPs. So, one option might be to sell the whole lot of them for $100 million if you could get it, because $100 million can come off the debt. You might even see them toying with the idea of shutting some of their existing studios. Maybe they shut them down, but maybe they look for opportunities to sell off entire studios or entire groups.”
But what IPs could potentially be sold? Darrah reckons that keeping EA Sports intact “makes a ton of sense,” but it might not for EA Entertainment – the side of the company that deals with the non-sports releases, such as Dragon Age and Mass Effect. “You could imagine potentially all of EA Entertainment being sold off to another group with deep pockets, like, say, Sony. This deal has been in the works for a while. It is conceivable that EA’s new structure was intentionally conceived with this action in mind.”
Alternatively, he suggests, “you could imagine that what happens is this new EA plucks all the parts it wants out of EA Entertainment and then sells off whatever is left over,” meaning we could see a “collection of studios that either haven’t shipped a game ever, or in a long time, and studios which have had a lot of trouble, or studios that make games that are expensive to make, or studios that simply make the kind of games that this new company isn’t interested in making anymore. And rather than shutting those studios down, it makes a lot of financial sense to try to sell those off.”
Obviously, Darrah doesn’t know if that’s going to happen – and it doesn’t mean that “suddenly the Dragon Age IP is going to be up for sale” – we’ll just have to wait and see what EA’s approach is.