The European Union is expected to approve Saudi Arabia’s US$55 billion acquisition of Electronic Arts.
As reported by Reuters, the deal is set to be cleared by EU regulators on July 30, paving the way for the Saudi’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners and private equity firm Silver Lake to take over the video game giant.
This would be a notable development, as the EU is known for giving particularly intense scrutiny to major acquisitions, including Xbox’s US$69 billion buyout of Activision Blizzard. To help get approval for the deal, Microsoft had to make deals like signing 10-year Call of Duty licensing agreements with PlayStation and Nintendo and selling Activision Blizzard cloud gaming rights to Ubisoft in the UK. It’s currently unclear whether the Saudis and their partners are making similar concessions to get their EA acquisition cleared.
It also remains to be seen what other roadblocks the deal may face. When the agreement was announced last September, it was expected to close around June 2026, but we hadn’t heard any update on that until this EU news.
There has also been significant pushback against the buyout. For one, there’s long-running condemnation of the Saudi’s human rights violations, including the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi after he’d been openly critical of the regime. People have also expressed concerns over the involvement of Kushner, given that he’s the son-in-law of U.S. President Donald Trump. We’ve seen similar scrutiny into Paramount’s pending acquisition of Warner Bros. due to the Ellison family’s close relationship with Trump that has already influenced how it’s doing business.
And beyond all of that, there are concerns about the impacts on EA’s staff should the deal go through. Beyond the usual layoffs that regularly happen following such a restructuring, figures like BioWare veteran Mark Darrah have speculated that the Saudis could influence the games that EA developers make, especially those that are more progressive, like BioWare Edmonton.
CWA Canada, the labour union representing Canadian video game companies like Bethesda Game Studios Montreal, has also urged the Canadian government to scrutinize the EA deal. The union argues that the acquisition threatens the safety and stability of EA’s many Canadian studios (including BioWare, EA Vancouver and Montreal-based Motive) as well as national security by giving the Saudis access to Canadian data.
Image credit: EA
Source: Reuters
