I’m sure that the new Saudi owners and Jared Kushner will be looking into hacking up human developer cost by any means necessary.
Was “Yakety sax” playing in the background when they said that?
It will do the opposite. More costs and less profit.
Goddamnit. I was actually looking forward to BF6
Root access to PCs, EU chatcontrol, and AI together!!! Unlimited profits!
So business as usual, then.
Well yeah, if they cook the books like Private Equity always does, they can suck some profit out of it while destroying the company. And then later blame it on AI, why not? … Shit, the New York Times and the Washington Post would probably roll with that story.
As someone who uses AI regularly for software engineering and ~2/3 of the time finds it very effective…
…there is no way it can produce quality games or gaming experiences.
I look forward to watching EA collapse. Get rekt.
There always places. I’m skeptical about saving significant money but what about graphical or story elements? I’m not too familiar with how games are built but ai can generate arbitrary “artwork” and even music
The human employees may use AI to help speed things up or do repetitive/monotonous tasks, but without human oversight the AI will be functionally worthless for most things due to lack of knowledge over instructions. Add on the insecure and unoptimized code AI spits out and it’s gonna be fun watching the dumpster fire.
For me the beauty of some games is the knowledge of the writers involved in a story or the composers for the music.
If I know upfront it’s all AI generated I think that’d ruin it for me. But I realize that’s just my opinion.
As a developer/tech lead who also uses ai i bloody agree. This is going to be baaaadddd. Didnt know ea could get worse
People still buy fifa, they always dod and always will. And with the billions they spend on lootboxes, they probably make their money back
Damn, I was actually looking forward to battlefield 6. Haven’t bought an EA game in probably 10 years, so the loss isn’t that big of a deal. And with COD being shit for 12 years, my FPS days might be over.
Delta Force has a Battlefield-ish multiplayer mode. It’s free to play and you unlock new characters and guns as you advance. (Then there’s an extraction mode too if you’re into that.) I just tried it for the first time after the beta several months ago and I thought it was alright. No jets, but still solid.
Honestly I don’t like the air vehicles of battlefield, so that’s not a ding against it in my book.
It’s very stupid to install a rootkit spyware on your computer to play a video game. Now that spyware is owned by the Saudi government too. Assuming you play on PC.
I’m a playstation guy. My computer savvy days are way in the rearview.
Maybe start a gang war PvP in gtav? I’ve never played gtav so I don’t know if that’s even possible
I’ve never played their multiplayer. I’ll just play fallout 4. Close enough, right?
This going to be a total venture capitalist play. It was already set that the fifty billion dollar acquisition was also going to be placing EA in like twenty billion in debts. They’ll flood it with more debts, piece the IP’s all out, legal launder the money, and take ea into bankruptcy.
EA is dead.
yeah, good riddance. As long as ubisoft doesn’t suck up the bigger ips it can only get better
I hope they sell spore to a better company
I’m just really glad that I don’t play any games from EA…
Since Bioware is just a shell of its former self, I only care about Hazelight’s games which are published by EA. It takes two is one of the best games ever made.
I really liked EA. Back on the C64 and the Amiga.
Looks like everyone needs to boycott EA
Sorry to be the one laughing at you.
But I need you to really think hard on this.
If people haven’t boycotted EA by now, what in the wild hells makes you think this is the straw that’s gonna break that mutant camels back?
bye, rest in piss.
here’s hoping for a source code leak so we can preserve the classics and such. maybe they’d cut some costs in security.
Don’t cry for EA, it’s already dead.
I cry for Shepard.
Oh man, this is hilarious from the outside because I’ve worked for private equity before. They are the biggest hype bros that exist. They are in their own reality every time. They can see something as small as a random tweet and think that it’s the truth. There’s no way this goes well for them.
2 examples. Long story but if you want to hear how smart “Private equity” is in tech, here are my two anecdotal experiences:
First, I was an engineer on a project that we were wrapping up a major “V2” rewrite of. We were weeks from finishing this now year long project. They came and asked “How long until released” and I said a month until clients can start using the beta. (Padding a week or so just in case). They didn’t just come back and say “You have a 2-3 weeks”, they came back and said “You have 1 week because we have signed contracts saying that it’ll be ready by then”. What. I was the head engineer. On whose authority did they do that? Who told them it would be ready? Of course no one, they just said it should be done, engineers lazy, they super smart. The project isn’t done in time of course, clients pissed, and they fired the dev team. I hear a year later the entire org had shuttered. They pissed away the entire investment.
Second, again working leading up a major project, a whole new idea in the fintech space. Team is jazzed. We push for 9 months and we release - zero bugs, not a cent lost, we test scaling and we should be able to handle millions of users - we’re ready. We release to… zero fanfare. None. We had no idea what was happening, we’re engineers so we’re used to it but no one cared. Turns out we were being acquired! Hooray said the investors! So much money! The other company claims to be doing what we are already… interesting since we had a novel idea. So we merge, and we decide to do a bakeoff (test each product against each others). Ours of course passes. Theirs tips over after 100 users. Ruby on Rails monolith, they’ve never had more than 100 users. Turns out they just slapped some stuff on a postgres database and called it a fintech product. Business investors at the top high five, show off how much money they’re going to make. Same thing, our loyal customers who were excited for our product got pissed and left. They lied to everyone else about the product just like the other place, the lies eventually caught up, and the stock tanked. Now they have two worthless companies. From what I heard they didn’t make a single sale in Q1 or Q2 of this year, and are shuttering the offices and moving engineering to India. Typical big brain business move.
Never work for private equity. If you ever get bought by private equity immediately start planning your exit. This is a card game to them, they’re sitting at the table in Vegas and are doing anything they can to make it look like the company is valuable just long enough to con someone else into buying it. If they make any profit it will go to them, the company will not see a dime of it. Your budgets will be less than shoestring, you will not have bonuses or dinners out, everything goes to them. You immediately are replaceable, with any, and I mean any developer or AI bullshit being able to replace you. Everyone at EA should be looking for new jobs right now.
One of the many things that’s infuriating about this is that these people are so profoundly stupid, but they keep getting all the money and power. If there was any justice in the world, people like the decision makers in your stories would be living a very spartan life somewhere, reflecting on how they are so fucking senseless.
And yet people continue to worship these “job creators” and “visionaries”.
Trust me man, I’ve thought the same thing. The first story? With the contracts signed? If they had just asked me and listened to me it would have been successful. We had clients chomping at the bit wanting the new app, and obviously people ready to sign. We had guaranteed money - but it all failed because they thought they knew better than the head engineer.
The real kicker? You want to know the absolute punchline? This was a educational platform specializing in live video for professors, to aid with virtual students. This story happened in late 2019.
Any time I hear “capitalism breeds innovation”, I feel like grabbing a chair and swinging it.
Engineers and creatives breed innovation. Capitalism exploits it.
“Capitalism managed to accidentally not choke an innovative project in the crib again! Yet another win for capitalism!!”
Yeah. I’ve been a part of two companies acquired by private equity, and the playbook is to cut all spending on employees through any means. Slow pay all vendors until they won’t work with you. Kill product development. Raise prices in predatory fashion. And… while the books briefly look good and before it all falls apart in a few years… sell to someone.
Both times, it did not work. Well, I guess it worked for whoever sold the company to private equity. And I guess the private equity installed leadership of tall confident sounding idiots made big salaries and bonuses, which is nice. I’m just not sure where the money came from. If I understand capitalism, it probably came from our taxes somehow.
It’s such a well known play now, I keep wondering who would possibly think buying from private equity is a good thing
A sucker is born every minute.
Well, it’s good to the management that sells the company. They get paid.
I’m imagining that picture with ea as death visiting Westwood and bioware etc.
But to the left you see ea death is in its own room and opening the door is the figure of private equity. A bloodstained tzeentchian nightmare screeching from the void.
If Bioware wasn’t already dead from the corporate bullshit that was Dragon Age 4 (and that comes from me who still found enjoyment in DA4), then this is. I doubt that Mass Effect 5 game will ever see the light of day.
But you think ME4 will?
ME4 was Andromeda.
Kinda. But that’s like saying Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel was 3, and 3 was 4, even though 4 just came out, and isn’t 5.
Ostensibly, they’re actually working on ME4 which would be labeled thusly.
We have no official name, the bloggers and media are calling it Mass Effect 5, it’s the fifth Mass Effect game, this is just pedantics now. Until there’s a title, Mass Effect five is perfectly fine.
Except I’ve only seen it called Mass Effect Four.
First story is not exclusive to private equity. Sales and even business owners have no idea how long things take. We once had a project that would take about a year, sales signed the contract to be done in like 1 month. The saving grace was the client delayed their start date, giving us the time we needed. Another one: guy buys an old building with plans to tear it down and build a new one. Tells the news “we’ll break ground next month”. Two years later they break ground.
This is a card game to them, they’re sitting at the table in Vegas and are doing anything they can to make it look like the company is valuable just long enough to con someone else into buying it.
It’s not even a card game, it’s lotto scratchers.
A card game implies they give thought and treat each situation unique and change strategies
They’re buying billion dollar companies left and right hoping for a quick payday because they’re obsessed with watching their bank account numbers go up.
Private equity is why y9u should never rely on a paid or profit service.
EA is not yet bad enough? They are actually trying to make it even worse?
Or is behind all this some rich, disappointed gamer who wants to ruin EA with a vengeance?
