Inside EA's $55 billion buyout, from Cliffhanger's closure to Battlefield 6

Electronic Arts $EA agreed in September 2025 to the largest leveraged buyout in corporate history, a deal valued at roughly $55 billion. The transaction would end the company's decades-long run as a publicly traded business. The buyers are Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, the private equity firm Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, the investment firm founded by Jared Kushner. The price tops the 2007 take-private of the Texas utility TXU, which had held the record for 18 years.

The EA buyout arrived after a turbulent stretch for one of the biggest publishers in gaming. The company behind Battlefield, The Sims, Madden NFL and Apex Legends cut roughly 780 jobs in March 2023, then about 670 more in February 2024. Projects died alongside those roles, including an unannounced Black Panther game whose studio, Cliffhanger Games, was closed outright. EA also held the exclusive Star Wars games license for nearly a decade, and questions about a third Star Wars Battlefront went unanswered the whole time.

Timing complicated the story. Battlefield 6 shipped weeks later, in October 2025, and pulled a higher peak of simultaneous Steam players than previous games in the series. That gave EA evidence its development teams could still deliver a major release even as the company's ownership was in play.

The transaction has not closed. Shareholder approval and regulatory clearance both remain outstanding, including a U.S. national security review by CFIUS. EA's board has pointed to a close within its fiscal year 2027. Life off the public markets ends the quarterly earnings cycle, a change EA's leadership has described as more room for long development timelines. The deal also places the debt used to buy EA onto EA's own books. Control passes to a small group of owners, among them a sovereign wealth fund whose reach into entertainment and sports has drawn criticism from lawmakers and advocacy groups.

What follows covers the mechanics of the deal, the layoffs that preceded it, the franchises carrying the company and the questions still unresolved.

Illustration: Quartz

The consortium buying Electronic Arts $EA is made up of three parties: Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, the private equity firm Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, the investment firm Jared Kushner founded in 2021. The agreed price is roughly $55 billion, larger than any previous leveraged buyout, including the 2007 take-private of the Texas utility TXU.

PIF was already on EA's share register before the takeover talks. The sovereign wealth fund had held a stake of about 10% since 2022, assembled through its gaming arm, Savvy Games Group. EA's prospective controlling owner was a familiar name inside the company long before a full acquisition came into view.

Silver Lake supplies the private equity side of the group. The firm has spent two decades arranging large technology transactions and is the member of the consortium with the deepest experience taking listed companies off public markets.

Affinity Partners is the smallest of the three names. Kushner launched it after his time in the White House, and the firm's involvement gives the deal a political dimension the other two participants do not carry on their own.

EA's board approved the agreement in September 2025 and recommended that shareholders vote in favor. The transaction has not closed. It still requires that shareholder approval along with regulatory clearance in several jurisdictions, and EA has pointed to a completion window inside its fiscal year 2027, which extends into early 2027.

What the buyers are acquiring is a catalog rather than a single hit: Battlefield, The Sims, Madden NFL, Apex Legends and EA Sports FC, plus the studios behind them. Those franchises, several of them annualized or continuously updated, are what underwrite a purchase of this size.

Until the shareholder vote and the regulatory reviews conclude, EA remains a publicly traded company, reporting results on the same schedule it always has. The agreement sets the terms. It does not yet change who controls the publisher.

Illustration: Quartz

EA's leadership framed the decision to go private as a way to plan in longer arcs, free of the quarterly reporting cycle that governs publicly traded companies. Game development rarely matches that cycle. A major release can absorb four or five years of spending before it earns anything back.

That mismatch creates friction. A public company that delays a troubled project, rebuilds it from an earlier milestone or cancels it has to explain the decision to investors within weeks. The stock often moves before anyone can judge whether the call was right. Private ownership shifts those conversations to a small group of owners rather than a dispersed shareholder base following earnings calls.

EA's share price also factored into the logic. The company controls franchises as recognizable as The Sims, Madden NFL and Apex Legends, but the stock had lagged peers. A buyout at a premium gives existing shareholders a defined exit price instead of continued exposure to that gap between catalog strength and market valuation.

The buyers have their own reasoning. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund had spent years assembling gaming holdings, including a stake in Nintendo and, through Savvy Games Group, acquisitions in mobile gaming. The fund's push into games sits inside a wider Saudi effort to build industries outside oil. Owning EA outright converts years of scattered investment into control of a catalog spanning sports simulations, shooters, life sims and a long history with the Star Wars license.

Silver Lake brings a different kind of interest. The firm has spent two decades structuring large technology buyouts and working on operational change inside the companies it owns.

The structure carries its own tension. The purchase is financed heavily with debt that would sit on EA's balance sheet once the deal closes. The owners are betting that Battlefield, EA Sports and the rest of the slate can generate enough cash to cover interest payments and still fund development. Leaving quarterly expectations behind does not remove financial pressure. It substitutes one kind for another.

Illustration: Quartz

EA cut jobs twice in the two years before its buyout was announced. The first round, in March 2023, removed roughly 780 positions, about six percent of the workforce. The second, in February 2024, cut about 670 more, close to five percent. Together they took well over 1,000 roles out of the company.

The 2023 reduction came with a reorganization of how EA grouped its teams, pulling resources toward its largest and most dependable franchises. The 2024 round went further and took a game with it. An unannounced Black Panther title, in development with Marvel Games at a studio EA had created to build it, was canceled. That studio, Cliffhanger Games, was closed entirely. The project never reached a public reveal.

Both rounds were framed as a narrowing. EA described its priority as owned intellectual property and established franchises rather than newer concepts that had not found an audience. In practice that meant fewer experimental bets and a shorter list of simultaneous projects.

EA was not alone. The video game industry went through a sustained contraction that began in 2022 and ran through 2024, after the hiring and spending expansion of the pandemic-era surge in player demand. Activision $ATVI Blizzard, Unity and Epic Games all announced comparable cuts in the same window, alongside numerous smaller studios and publishers.

The timing matters for understanding the company that agreed to go private in September 2025. EA did not enter that deal at peak headcount. It entered having already shrunk twice, closed a studio and killed a licensed project built around a major Marvel character. The buying consortium would take over a publisher that had absorbed two rounds of contraction before the ownership question ever reached shareholders. Any further restructuring under private ownership would follow cuts that were already made, not begin a process that had not started.

Illustration: Quartz

A leveraged buyout places the debt used to finance the purchase onto the acquired company's own balance sheet. EA, not the consortium buying it, would carry the obligation to service that debt out of operating cash flow. That mechanic makes a buyout a staffing question as much as a financial one.

The acquiring firms contribute some equity and borrow the rest through loans or bonds. Once the transaction closes, interest payments become a fixed recurring cost the business covers before anything else. Money that might otherwise fund development, marketing or hiring is routed to lenders first. The larger the borrowing, the tighter that constraint.

Media and entertainment supply a long record of how this plays out. Clear Channel, the radio and outdoor advertising group, went private in a leveraged deal completed in 2008 and spent years afterward working through a heavy debt load, selling assets and restructuring. Several U.S. newspaper chains followed similar arcs in the same period, with debt service shaping decisions about staffing and coverage long after the original transaction.

EA's revenue base differs from those businesses. Game sales, in-game purchases and recurring spending in live-service titles generate cash on a pattern that does not track advertising cycles. That changes the math on how comfortably a debt load can be carried.

Silver Lake's own record offers a second reference point. The firm helped take Dell $DELL private in 2013 and pursued a multi-year repositioning of the business rather than an immediate round of deep cuts. Dell later returned to the public markets. The same ownership structure can accommodate a slow rebuild or a fast reduction in costs, and that choice rests with the owners rather than with the financing itself.

No post-close staffing plans for EA have been announced, and the deal has not closed. Shareholder approval and regulatory clearance both remain outstanding, which leaves any decision about headcount under the new owners unresolved. What is known is that EA would enter private ownership with a smaller workforce than it carried in 2022, so any further reduction would start from a lower base.

Illustration: Quartz

Battlefield 6 arrived in October 2025, weeks after EA agreed to a take-private deal, and drew concurrent player counts on Steam that outpaced earlier entries in the series. The launch handed EA a commercial win during a stretch otherwise defined by restructuring news.

The game came from Battlefield Studios, a banner EA created to pool four internal teams on a single project: DICE, Criterion, Motive and Ripple Effect. That setup replaced the older arrangement in which one lead studio carried the franchise while others provided support. A modern Battlefield release — destructible environments, large-scale multiplayer and a separate single-player campaign — had stretched that model thin.

Battlefield 6 returned the series to a contemporary military setting and brought back the traditional class system. Battlefield 2042, released in 2021, had swapped classes for named specialist characters and shipped with technical problems that drew sustained criticism from longtime players. EA spent years patching and reworking that release. Battlefield 6 reversed both choices.

The timing mattered beyond one quarter of sales. If the buyout closes, EA will carry the debt used to finance it on its own balance sheet. Leveraged ownership depends on predictable cash generation. A shooter franchise that sells heavily at launch and keeps players spending through seasonal content is the kind of asset that makes debt service manageable. Battlefield sits alongside EA Sports titles and The Sims among the few EA properties large enough to anchor the company's finances.

The launch also cut against the picture of a publisher in retreat. Two rounds of layoffs and a string of canceled projects had shaped outside reads on EA's development capacity. A Battlefield release that performed at this scale showed the remaining teams could still deliver a flagship title while the ownership structure above them was being rewritten.

For players, the practical effect was straightforward: the series returned to the format that built its audience, and it did so at a moment when EA needed its biggest non-sports franchise to perform.

Illustration: Quartz

No game called Star Wars Battlefront 3 exists, and EA has never announced one. The publisher put out two entries in the series — Star Wars Battlefront in 2015 and Star Wars Battlefront II in 2017 — both built by DICE, the Swedish studio behind Battlefield, under the exclusive Star Wars license EA signed with Disney $DIS and Lucasfilm in 2013.

Naming accounts for part of the confusion. EA's 2017 release reused the title Star Wars Battlefront II, which already belonged to a 2005 game from Pandemic Studios published by LucasArts. A follow-up to that earlier line went into development at Free Radical Design as Star Wars: Battlefront III. The project was abandoned before release in the late 2000s. Footage and partial builds leaked out and circulated online for years. The series has carried an unfinished third chapter across two eras and two owners.

EA's 2017 game ran into trouble of its own. Character upgrades at launch were tied to randomized loot boxes that players could buy with real money. The system drew sustained criticism and attention from regulators in several countries weighing whether such mechanics amounted to gambling. EA switched off real-money purchases shortly before the game went on sale. It later rebuilt progression so upgrades came through play rather than payment, and kept adding content to the game well after release.

EA's exclusivity over Star Wars games lapsed in 2021. Ubisoft's Massive Entertainment released Star Wars Outlaws in 2024, the first major Star Wars title from a publisher other than EA in roughly a decade. The end of exclusivity means a large-scale Star Wars shooter no longer has to come from EA at all, and Lucasfilm can place the property with other studios.

Inside EA, Star Wars development shifted toward single-player action. Respawn Entertainment made Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order in 2019 and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor in 2023. No multiplayer Battlefront-style release has followed the 2017 game. EA has made no public statement linking its change in ownership to the future of the series.

Illustration: Quartz

Andrew Wilson, EA's chief executive since September 2013, is expected to remain in the role after the buyout closes. That continuity at the top would carry the company through the biggest ownership change in its history.

The consortium buying EA has not signaled plans to install an outside operator, unlike buyouts where new owners swap out management immediately.

Wilson ranks among the longest-serving chief executives at a major game publisher. He ran the EA Sports label before taking the top job, and the franchises built there — Madden NFL and the soccer series now sold as EA Sports FC — remain among EA's steadiest earners.

Continuity in the corner office does not mean the governance around it stays fixed. A take-private transaction swaps a dispersed base of public shareholders for a small group of owners. Buyers at this scale typically take board seats to oversee the investment. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners would each be positioned to seek representation, though the composition of EA's post-close board has not been disclosed.

The distinction matters because private equity boards tend to sit closer to operations than public boards do. With fewer owners, each holding a large stake, there is both incentive and access to weigh in on how the business is run. That can extend to which franchises get funded, how quickly costs come down and what the release calendar looks like over several years.

Wilson has publicly backed the transaction, describing private ownership as a chance for EA to plan across longer horizons than quarterly reporting allows. The financing attaches a second set of demands. The deal is valued at roughly $55 billion and funded largely with borrowed money. Servicing that obligation requires management to generate cash on a timetable set by lenders rather than by equity analysts.

The transaction is agreed rather than complete. It still needs shareholder approval and regulatory clearance, and EA's board has pointed to a close within its 2027 fiscal year.

Illustration: Quartz

The EA buyout cannot close until it clears U.S. regulatory review, including scrutiny from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, known as CFIUS. That review applies because the Public Investment Fund is an arm of the Saudi government. EA's board has pointed to a close within the company's fiscal year 2027, which extends into early 2027.

CFIUS reviews transactions that would hand foreign entities control of U.S. companies holding sensitive technology or large volumes of personal data. EA's business touches the second category. Its games and online services gather account information and payment details from players across dozens of countries, and its titles reach those players through storefronts and platforms run by Sony $SONY, Microsoft $MSFT, Valve and Apple $AAPL.

CFIUS is not the only step. Shareholders must approve the transaction as well, and the board's projected timeline leaves more than a year between the September 2025 agreement and a completed deal.

Affinity Partners has drawn a separate line of attention. Jared Kushner founded the firm after serving as a senior adviser in the first Trump administration, and the Public Investment Fund was among the investors that backed it at its 2021 launch. That relationship — a Saudi state fund as both an early Affinity investor and its partner in buying EA — is part of what has pulled political attention toward the transaction.

The broader objections run past the deal paperwork. Advocacy groups and some U.S. lawmakers have criticized the Public Investment Fund's expansion into Western entertainment and sports, pointing to the Saudi government's human rights record. Those arguments surfaced earlier around LIV Golf and the fund's stakes in sports franchises. The EA transaction carries them into video games, an industry that had seen less direct sovereign fund ownership until Savvy Games Group, the PIF-owned group that took a roughly 10% stake in EA in 2022, began buying in.

EA has not responded to those criticisms publicly. Its statements about the transaction have stayed on financial and strategic ground.

Illustration: Quartz

Private ownership removes the quarterly earnings cycle that shapes how a publicly traded publisher reacts to a weak release, but it does not remove financial pressure. Buyout debt still has to be serviced, so EA's development decisions after the deal closes would be made against a different constraint rather than none at all.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard shows how the old constraint worked. BioWare released the game in 2024 after years in development, sales fell short of EA's expectations, and EA reduced the studio's headcount in the months that followed. Veilguard is a single-player role-playing game, with no recurring revenue stream after launch to offset a soft opening. Underperformance followed by visible contraction is the pattern a company answering to public shareholders each quarter tends to follow. A private board could hand a studio in that position more runway. It could also move faster than a public one. A small group of owners with direct financial exposure can act without waiting for an earnings call.

Live-service games sit at the center of the question. Apex Legends and EA Sports FC earn revenue continuously through seasonal content and in-game purchases rather than at a single launch moment, and that model takes years to establish. A title that starts slowly needs sustained funding before it returns anything. How patient the consortium would be with the next one is unresolved. The economics of the model do not change with the ownership register.

Release timing is another open area. Publicly traded companies often schedule major launches so results land inside a favorable reporting quarter. Owners without that calendar can space releases differently, though EA has described no such change.

EA has not announced changes to its slate beyond projects already underway when the deal was disclosed. The decisions that matter — which franchises get funded, which studios get more time, how quickly the debt gets paid down — become visible only after the transaction closes.