Online games news
EA sold and it might be a good thing
Online games news Tedious Retro Gamer, 17-08-2026
Online Games Bay
Electronic Arts, a not very pleasant company, was just bought by some not very pleasant people and it might be a good thing.
How could this be a good thing? Some rich a-holes bought something from other rich a-holes and ordinary people should care? Normally, no. But this one is different, because it was something called a leveraged buyout, which is the good news in the whole story.
The leveraged buyout is a very popular sport among rich a-holes, it goes quite similar to people buying a house. I know, who can afford to buy a house now, right? It is the same story with the companies taken over using leveraged buyout - the "people" who are buying that company do not really have the money to do it. So, like ordinary people, who want to buy a house, they go to a bank and ask for a loan. In both cases, the thing they are about to buy, is the thing that will be used as the loan security.
In case of the house, it is a mortgage that the new owners will be paying off for the rest of their lives, but with companies it is slightly different. The leveraged buyout means that the new owners will move that loan onto the company they just bought. In other words, Electronic Arts now will have to pay back the loan that the rich a-holes took in order to buy it. Or to put it in another words, they were bought using their future profits and they have to cover the costs of the credit themselves.
How this usually works out for the company that went through the leveraged buyout treatment? Badly. Often they end up in the hands of people, who have no idea about the business the company was doing, so they just try to milk it to the last cent and then shift it to some schmucks for the small part of the original price. Remember Toys R Us? They ended up bankrupt. Remington Arms, producer of weapons and ammo in US, bankrupt. I mean, seriously, how can you bankrupt a firearm and ammo manufacturer in the US? Carillion, once one of the biggest construction companies in the United Kingdom, bankrupt.
So, what future hold for Electronic Arts? Will one day I will be able to ask a question "do you remember EA"? Well, the vultures certainly begin to circle around it.
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