Ex-BioWare veteran Mark Darrah – who served as a project director and executive producer on Dragon Age 1, 2, and Inquisition – has been discussing the potential impact of the proposed $55 billion buyout of EA, noting that it's "hard to imagine" the DA and Mass Effect studio shifting from "having very progressive messaging to having the reverse."
Assuming that the acquisition goes ahead, EA is going to be owned by investment firms Affinity Partners and Silver Lake, in addition to Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF), and speaking in a new video on his YouTube channel (below), Darrah suggests that there could be "changes at EA in terms of structure, in terms of the games that they're making."
Specifically, he notes, "when you look at the investments that the Saudi group has been making before now, they've been buying a lot of sports-related things." With that in mind, "EA Sports makes a ton of sense, fitting into that portfolio of investing in a lot of sports franchises" and so forth. That's on top of the fact that "EA Sports is where most of the cash is thrown off from the game making business. 75% of EA's money last year was made through live services, a ton of that were the Ultimate Teams from FIFA – or Football Club – and Madden."
However, there are also EA's other games. Even though The Sims has been "a good revenue source," for example, Darrah asks whether the series fits "into potentially the messaging desires of the three groups that are involved in the acquisition? Potentially not, but it's potentially not super out of position."
EA also has studios "that haven't shipped anything in a while, or have shipped things that didn't do very well," with Darrah adding that "the groups working on the Marvel games and, of course, BioWare, are, I think, going to be in a different position."
He continues: "If this is a PR move for the Saudi government as much as it is a financial one, the studios that don't have much of a track record, what you might do is just come in and put your thumb on the scale and push their messaging in directions that you want, in directions that make you look good, or at the very least steer them away from messaging that makes you look bad. But for the studios that have more of a track record, especially a track record that maybe doesn't line up with your own political views – again, BioWare – you're going to look at that studio and wonder how you make them fit into your new structure.
"It's hard to imagine that you have BioWare pivot from having very progressive messaging to having the reverse because it's what the government wants. It's hard to imagine that the public perception of a game that comes out of BioWare even if you do do that isn't apocalyptically bad," he suggests. "So in that case you either have to decide that you're willing to just leave it alone, or you have to think that they don't fit anymore within the goals of this new organization."
Darrah admits he doesn't know "how active this Saudi investment fund has been in pushing its politics into the groups that it invests in," but even so, he believes that "it is going to be a factor going forward."
