EA tries to calm employees amid $55 billion sale to consortium

In late September, industry reports surfaced that Electronic Arts (EA) was preparing to go private in a massive buyout deal. This information was later confirmed: EA officially announced it had agreed to be acquired by a consortium of investors for $55 billion. The investors included Jared Kushner-linked private equity firm Silver Lake and Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF).

The deal immediately raised a ton of questions in the industry. The main concerns centered on EA taking on $20 billion in debt obligations, and it's unclear how this will impact the company's future. Employees and players are concerned about whether EA will be able to continue making the same games under new management and whether developers will retain their influence over creative decisions.

In an attempt to address these concerns, EA updated its internal FAQ for its employees. The question "Will our culture change as a result of this deal?" was answered with a new answer stating that "EA will retain creative control" and that "our values, focused on creative freedom and player freedom, will remain intact." When asked about the shareholders' influence, the company stated that the consortium "believes in our vision, our leadership," and "invests in the creativity that defines EA."

However, another section of the FAQ raised doubts. Regarding AI, the company assures that it will "take a thoughtful and measured approach to AI", viewing it as a tool to "empower our teams creatively." This position is at odds with recent reports citing current EA employees.

According to them, the company's approach cannot be called "balanced." Instead, management aggressively pushes AI in every task, especially code generation tools. These tools are reported to create "mountains of problems" and generate low-quality code, which programmers then have to fix manually. However, this process can truly be called "reimagining workflows" using AI.