Last month, leftists erupted when it was announced that former gaming titan Electronic Arts (EA) had been sold to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and a firm owned by Jared Kushner. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund joined Kushner’s Affinity Partners to acquire the studio behind the “Madden,” “Battlefield,” and “Sims” franchises in a $55 billion deal.
EA had long been gamers’ preferred corporate villain. A pivot to live-service models in contrast to well-crafted single-player narratives alienated core fans, ballooning budgets meant that the company had to squeeze every penny out of consumers through predatory practices like loot boxes, and activist influencers within the company began poisoning content with their woke ideology. By the time the Saudis and Kushner appeared, shareholders were desperate to ditch a dying company.
When word spread that conservative Saudis would soon control EA, leftist developers and commentators panicked. They feared their propaganda pipeline was closing. Patrick “Trick” Weekes, the writer responsible for the cringiest components of EA’s and subsidiary BioWare’s most recent flop, “Dragon Age: Veilguard,” took to Bluesky to bemoan the news. Imagining a fictional dialogue between the Saudi buyers and EA, Weekes speculated that “guns and football” are in while “gay stuff” was out.
Weekes is right to worry. Game developers have come to realize that saturating their products with woke nonsense is not a recipe for good sales. Players proved it with their wallets. “Veilguard” underperformed EA’s sales expectations by 50 percent. The game hit discount shelves and free-to-play services within weeks yet still failed to find an audience.
The reason was obvious. Viral clips showed “Veilguard” as a parade of ideological box-checking featuring pronouns and genders front and center, as well as the option to give the player avatar post-mastectomy scars. One Weekes-written character became infamous for endless screeds about nonbinary identity and misgendering. Predictably, the game lost EA an ungodly $6 billion in market value, nearly 20 percent of share value. And it didn’t have to be that way.
“Veilguard” was the latest entry in EA/BioWare’s “Dragon Age” series, previously one of the company’s most profitable products. Older gamers remember when BioWare symbolized prestige. “Mass Effect 2” and “Dragon Age: Origins” defined a generation of RPGs, selling millions while earning near-universal praise. That they willingly tanked such a cash cow just to promote woke ideology defies logic. But prior to the Saudi buyout, it seemed like they were willing to do it again.
“Mass Effect,” the other tentpole series in EA/BioWare’s stable of games, had also become a vehicle for leftist propaganda. “Mass Effect: Andromeda,” a game that preceded “Veilguard” by seven years, was a woke debacle. Given the company doubled down on shoving wokeness in their games for nearly a decade, even in the face of declining financial returns, profit clearly was not its driving force.
Which brings us to the buyout. The Saudis’ push into gaming isn’t moral, but strategic. The Public Investment Fund has spent billions to economically diversify the kingdom beyond oil. Riyadh wants to make money, not proselytize. To be fair, Saudi Arabia has plenty of problems, starting with human-rights abuses. But promoting leftist ideology thankfully isn’t one of them.
Weekes may be furious, but he’s probably right; the Saudis will focus on what sells, not what flatters activists. Guns and football sell just fine when they aren’t dragged down by woke albatrosses. If gamers want EA’s glory days back, handing the keys to the desert kingdom might not be the worst way to go about it.
The EA deal is a referendum on who controls Western entertainment. When foreign investors start rescuing American game studios from their own ideological obsessions, it shows the market’s patience for activism-as-art has ended. When Riyadh looks more committed to fun than California, something’s gone very wrong.