Actually, it’s pretty clear they are planning on completely gutting this company. They’re taking on debt to buy this deal, which they will put on the company. Their pitch is to eliminate jobs with AI (which they probably know won’t work) which means they’ll cut most of the staff and “replace” it with AI, likely contracts with companies they own so that they can continue to leech off whatever income comes in from game sales. The company will continue to churn out trash and make some money by repeating last year’s sports game this year but now with AI coding until it eventually declares bankruptcy and is either auctioned off to be stripped for what’s left of its parts or simply shutters forever.
I doubt it. The Saudi-Arabian monarchy doesn’t invest in things because they want to make money. They do it for power, image, and influence in the world. They just threw a lot of money into the E-sports world cup in Riyadh. I think they’re buying what’s needed to make Saudi-Arabia a gaming hub. They’re doing the same thing with sports and racing and all sorts of entertainment. For that reason, I doubt they’ll strip EA for parts. All of the competitive games that EA makes will suddenly have tons of prize money and developer-backing for competition and E-sports. And the final big event will always be in SA.
Yea fair there is definitely the sportswashing angle on this, but they are absolutely leveraging debt for this purchase which they will put on the company. Their deck also talks a ton about AI, which is where the AI/stripping angle comes from. As to whether they can just ignore the debt because oil money, that’s I suppose another question entirely.
Good suggestion a friend gave me: Go to the Electronic Arts Steam page and mark them as an ignored creator. It won’t block everything EA but can add a banner to EA products that says you’ve added them to your ignore list.
I’m not convinced this is worse than being publically traded. Now instead of being beholden to faceless investors who only care about number go up, it’s one specific owner? I mean, considering who it is, it isn’t better. But I struggle to imagine it as worse.
Doesn’t matter, I’ll still either avoid their games or pirate.
Co-op/freelance > small business > large single-owner business > publicly traded business > private equity business.
The hordes of faceless shareholders is mostly regular people’s retirement accounts. It’s still a net-negative for society, but now it’s not even helping someone retire comfortably. With Saudi Arabia involved, that means it’s also going to be laundering the image of a monarchy.
A few years ago everyone was talking about how crown prince Bin Salman ordered the brutal execution and dismemberment of a journalist. Now the E-sports world cup is in Riyadh.
Depends on the private holder. Look in example to Valve (Steam), who are a private company and do well and good for themselves, the gaming industry and their fans (relative speaking for the most part).
But a super rich Saudi Arabia people and Kushner, Affinity Partners’ CEO and the son-in-law of President Trump connection, I don’t know man. BTW its not just one owner, as I understand. The difference to stockholders is, that a few people who don’t understand videogames have direct power and control over the company, while stockholders are many little.
I think this is a potential windfall for gaming… Sure, it could be terrible, as other commenters have stated, but EA was already terrible. A national investment fund may very well have a better understanding of long-term investment and pull away from lootboxes and microtransactions. I’m certainly not holding my breath… but if I were in a position to buy an entire catalog of IP that people loved in their youth, I think this could be a sound strategy.
If Saudi Arabia took EA and all it’s properties and made it what 90’s gaming was… this would be monumental and I think it’d pay off; as well as a slap in the face of the modern game publishers’ business model.
We just saw this with Silksong: Make a good game, treat your customers with respect, and we will break records for you, even if it takes a decade. If the Saudis don’t act like vulture capital and instead play a longer game, they have the money to fund actual quality development.
If someone is an asshole, then they probably are just an asshole. If everyone is an asshole, you should look at the common denominator of all those interactions.
People dislike having to educate the same basic lessons over and over again, when it is very easy to search why tariffs are bad. It is not a community where people are going to spoonfeed you information that you didn’t even directly ask for.
The simple answer is because we live in a global economy and you can’t possible make everything that needs to be made in a single country. The more complex answer can be found by reading articles about it. Take this one, which was the first hit I found on a web search:
The trouble with tariffs, to be succinct, is that they raise prices, slow economic growth, cut profits, increase unemployment, worsen inequality, diminish productivity and increase global tensions. Other than that, they’re fine.
Please, I’m begging you to just explain what you’re trying to say instead of exclusively being a giant fucking asshole for no reason at all. They’re the one who read my comments and somehow thought I was in need of an explanation of why tariffs are bad instead of an explanation of the joke.
Well that’s the point, it is not a joke, they want to highlight that tariffs are stupid. That was already the first answer you got.
Then you said you did not understand that, and you didn’t ask for an explanation, so you got a cheeky answer. Then you complained that nobody explained it to you. Now you got another explanation. And as a response you complained about it being not what you asked for.
Now here I am, explaining to you why you got the responses that you got. And let me guess, you will complain about it too.
Well then. Looks like this troll is embedded. I’m sure that account has been here longer than my current account. Congrats. You win the internet prize for useless metrics.
Because US produced cardstock sucks ass. Maybe someone will change that in the future; it’s more likely than things like die cast sheet metal, which is an industry that has to be rebuilt from almost scratch. The Game Crafter, the most popular board game prototyping service in the US, gets their cardstock from Germany, because they want it to not suck.
There’s currently not enough industrial capacity in the US to manufacture card games. Simple as that. Trying to do it would likely end up still being more expensive than the tariffs, and probably delay your product.
The U.S. has a very small industrial capacity for manufacturing tabletop games — especially board games.
“The news is bad from every angle, but especially so for card games and RPGs printed in China,” they said. “The choice seems to be either 1) a massive price hike to pay the new import taxes, or 2) go to a direct sales model that removes the hobby distributors from the equation.”
That's the sad fact, yes. American designers don't seem to be interested in innovating. I wish I knew why, or what would inspire the majority to do more than Kickstarter grift.
What are you talking about? / There are hundreds if not thousands of american made game companies, many of which are card games.
I passed a shop just the other day that has a store front for advertising but is a working print and design house. 90 percent of the store is basically a assembly house with a writer and design area up front. They do it in the open to inspire others (and to get noticed) even though none of the sales happen there, it’s all mail and online.
Because I'm American. On the design side, I want to support games from designers who are infected with the same memes (classical definition) as I am. I want to see people who are culturally like me innovate, based on concepts that feel natural to me. I've gotten to a point in my life where I'm not interested in trying to figure out what a dev in Germany was thinking in their translated rules.
On the manufacturing side, I believe that we need to support domestic production and industry. I want to see jobs be created for Americans that aren't just advertising, marketing, and entertaining.
I'm not bothering to deny anything. You've made your beliefs clear, and there's no way I could change your mind. You're concerned with the idea that it could help fascists, and I'm concerned with the idea that it'll give some Americans productive jobs rather than BS ones. The concerns are not related.
You can find plenty of those. What you can’t do is find games with all the components manufactured in the US. Cardstock, in particular, just doesn’t exist in US production at the quality card games would want. If you want stuff that isn’t semi-transparent in bright light, then you don’t buy cardstock from US producers.
I think calculating the rays in a different way does constitute as rethinking the pipeline, especially when we consider that path tracing is one of the most computationally heavy processes in computer graphics. In fact path tracing is so heavy we don’t even do full path tracing (as in we don’t calculate all the possible rays), we essentially cheat by calculating a handful of rays and then sending it through a denoiser (which is why it takes a second to calculate the shadow of your character). There’s a lot of performance to be found in raytracing and if they’ve found some then that’s a pretty big deal.
I do know all of this, it’s just dedicated hardware for a step we’re currently simulating in shaders. Dedicated hardware that if I’m not mistaken exists on NVIDIA graphics cards already.
That’s an added capability, not a rethinking. But it will enable raytracing in a way that is far less expensive.
arstechnica.com
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