Electronic Arts is no longer a public company. On August 4, 2026, a consortium led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund closed its $55 billion acquisition of the Battlefield and The Sims publisher — the largest leveraged buyout in history, in any industry, not just games.

The deal, in numbers

The buyout was first announced on September 29, 2025, with EA shareholders offered $210 per share in cash — a 25% premium over the stock’s unaffected price of $168.32. Shareholders approved the deal that December, and it then spent most of 2026 clearing regulatory hurdles, including a Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) review that had a contractual outside date of September 28, 2026. CFIUS clearance actually came through on July 30, and the deal closed less than a week later.

The buying group is PIF, private equity firm Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners, the investment firm founded by Jared Kushner. Once the deal closed, the ownership split left PIF holding 93.4% of the now-private company, with Silver Lake at 5.5% and Affinity Partners at 1.1%.

Where the debt lands

The $55 billion price tag wasn’t paid in cash alone. The consortium put up roughly $36 billion in equity and financed the rest with a $20 billion debt package arranged through JPMorgan Chase, with about $18 billion of that funded at closing. Critically, that debt sits on EA’s own books, not the buyers’ — a standard leveraged-buyout structure, but one that now leaves the publisher carrying an estimated $18 billion in net debt.

The bonds backing the deal were priced between 6.25% and 8.75%, and reporting on the deal puts EA’s resulting annual interest bill at around $1.8 billion. That’s a notable number because it’s higher than EA’s own annual EBITDA, estimated at roughly $1.5 billion — meaning the interest payments alone currently outpace the operating profit the company generates in a year.

Layoffs before the ink dried

EA wasn’t waiting for the deal to close to start cutting costs. The company cut staff three separate times in 2026 — in February, March, and June — all before the acquisition officially went through in August. Days after the deal closed, it emerged that EA had also disclosed cost-cutting plans directly to the banks and investors financing the buyout, a detail that sat awkwardly next to earlier assurances to staff that the acquisition wouldn’t change how the company operates.

Employees across multiple EA studios have told reporters they expect another round of layoffs within the next 12 months, and describe internal communication about job security since the deal closed as inconsistent. None of that is unusual for a company that just took on $20 billion in new debt — LBOs of this size are typically followed by aggressive cost discipline to service the interest payments — but it’s a rougher landing than EA publicly signaled during the year the deal spent awaiting approval.

What changes for players

In the near term, probably not much that’s visible on a store shelf. EA’s release slate — Battlefield, FC, The Sims, its sports titles — isn’t tied to its public or private status, and the company has given no indication that live-service pricing or monetization models are being redrawn overnight. The pressure this deal creates is financial and internal: a private EA now answers to a small group of owners focused on paying down leveraged debt rather than to public shareholders tracking quarterly earnings calls, and that usually shows up over time as tighter budgets, consolidated studios, and fewer bets on unproven new IP rather than as a single dramatic change players notice right away.

It’s also a data point in a broader pattern. Sovereign wealth money, and Saudi PIF money specifically, has been moving deeper into games for years through stakes in companies like Nintendo, Take-Two, and Activision Blizzard’s former parent. EA going fully private under PIF control is the largest single instance of that trend yet, and likely won’t be the last.

For more on how the industry’s finances and headcount have been diverging in 2026, see our breakdown of record profits and record layoffs across the games business, and our look at PlayStation’s live-service strategy collapse for another case of a major publisher’s big bet running into hard financial reality.