Why Did Jared Kushner and Saudi Investors Take Over EA Games?

In what may be the largest leveraged buyout on record, the publicly traded video game publisher Electronic Arts, Inc. has agreed to go private after being purchased by a consortium of investors comprising private equity giant Silver Lake, Jared Kushner‘s Affinity Partners, and the Saudi Public Investment Firm, or PIF. The cash buyout, totalling $55 billion, is a staggering sum, even in the supercharged world of private equity, where billions are regarded as mere Monopoly money. The deal is certain to change the landscape of the video game industry, which generated an estimated $187 billion in revenue last year.

But why would Kushner and Saudi investors—who share a considerable stake in Affinity Partners, in addition to direct involvement in this deal via the PIF—be interested in Electronic Arts? Does Donald Trump’s son-in-law really love The Sims, or EA’s wildly popular suite of sports games? Strange as that question may sound, it’s not terribly far-fetched to assert that the answer is yes. This deal is about games as a cultural force as much as it is about economics.

After a 2015 restructuring, the Saudi government has been using the Public Investment Fund to rapidly diversify the nation’s revenue streams in ways that increasingly reflect the interests of Saudi Arabia’s ruler and PIF chair Prince Mohammed bin-Salman. First came an aggressive and ongoing campaign to make Saudi Arabia a sports destination, with the nation spending enormous sums of money to lure organizations and players to Saudi events and initiatives. This is what commentators call “sportswashing”—a term used for any institution that’s interested in burnishing its sullied rep through the staging of athletic competition—and it’s only one of the ways this investment benefits the Saudi regime. The nation’s governing bodies have sought to rehab their reputation for committing human rights abuses and killing journalists simply by not acknowledging this history, and by buying things a lot of people like. Such investments are also founded in economic necessity: Saudi oil revenue is in drastic decline, and the PIF’s exorbitant spending spree is an effort to diversify the nation’s revenue streams.

Now the sports playbook is being repeated in increasingly visible ways, from the current Riyadh Comedy Festival to the EA acquisition. This last deal is the latest in an ongoing campaign for Saudi Arabia to become a gaming hub, which a 2023 Verge report referred to as “gameswashing.”

EA’s value in the video game industry largely stems from its sports franchises, which reliably deliver tremendous sales every year. Two titles rise above the rest: The first is Madden NFL, regularly among the top-selling games every year, as the only officially licensed NFL simulation on the market. (The NFL’s deal with EA has been regularly renewed every few years since 2004, and is likely to be renewed again when the current extension expires in 2026.)

But while Madden gets much of the attention in the United States, EA’s real heavyweight is the soccer game EA FC. (The game was formerly known as FIFA, before EA’s partnership with the FIFA organization ended in 2022.) FC is notorious for minting money through a game-within-the-game called Ultimate Team, where players can spend endless amounts of money for packs of digital “cards” that represent individual soccer players. The players in those packs are random, as are their stats, which gives Ultimate Team players a slot machine-like compulsion. They want to acquire cards of their favorite players, but also the best version of their favorite players, because winning games will get a player even more cards. It’s ingenious, terribly extractive, and almost every major sports game on the market has a feature like this now—but FC has long been the most profitable of them all.

All of these assets make EA an appealing blue-chip acquisition for private equity investment, especially since, as the Financial Times reports, those investors believe that the company’s operating costs can be lowered significantly with the use of AI. (A claim no one in the games industry has managed to deliver on just yet.) EA’s sports games also dovetail nicely with both the Crown Prince’s real-world soccer efforts and his nation’s continued gaming investments, which seek to further entangle the nation with the global economy and ultimately lure jobs to Riyadh.

The irony here is that the video game industry, like so many corners of entertainment and culture, is in trouble. Traditional games have struggled in the wake of “games as a service” like Roblox and Fortnite, which let users play for free but charge fees for subscriptions and in-game merchandise, with exclusive merch sold during limited-time brand collaboration events. Old-fashioned games are expensive to make and can take years to produce; they are a high-risk industry where all parties involved are uniquely vulnerable, and in dire need of the sort of cash Saudi investors have been happy to spend in nearly every field.

On September 28, Saudi Arabia announced its latest endeavor: the Saudi Film Fund’s rebrand as Riviera Content, with new investments totalling $32.5 million Saudi riyal (about $8.7 million USD). Universal Studios and Columbia Pictures were both named as collaborators in the fund. It’s a smaller data point than the EA purchase, but these announcements are all of a piece, and all examples of money spent for the same purpose. The goal here seems to be for Saudi Arabia to be as inescapable as the oil that gave the nation its wealth to begin with—to have a hand in everything you see on a screen or in an arena, to put its dollars into things you can’t live without. So that, by extension, you can’t live without Saudi Arabia—and whatever Saudi Arabia chooses to do with its power.