According to the Wall Street Journal, Electronic Arts is close to a $50 billion take-private deal led by a consortium including notably Silver Lake and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF).
If confirmed, this would mark another milestone in the ongoing consolidation of the gaming industry, following Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision and Take-Two’s $13 billion purchase of Zynga in 2022, and Tencent’s tie-up with Ubisoft.
We have long argued that M&A is inevitable in this industry. What stands out here, however, is the profile of the suitors: investment firms with no or limited operational synergies with EA, a first for a transaction of this scale. Still, the financial and strategic rationale is straightforward. Financially, EA generates highly predictable and substantial cash flows thanks to its annual sports franchises, while trading at undemanding levels (~20x FY26 EPS pre-report).
Strategically, PIF is already a major EA shareholder and has been building its gaming footprint through notably its gaming investment firm Savvy Games Group, which acquired Scopely and Niantic for nearly $10 billion over the past two years. Potential synergies with EA are therefore conceivable.
The key question remains why EA would agree to such a modest premium—around 20% compared to Activision’s 45% in 2022. The looming console cycle transition for PlayStation 5 and Xbox may partly explain management’s willingness to crystallize value sooner rather than later.
At the sector level, the implications are broadly positive. In addition to strategic buyers (Microsoft, Netflix, large game publishers…), investment firms are now emerging as a new class of acquirers. Importantly, an EA buyout would not only mark one of the largest private equity-led transactions in gaming but also further shrink the pool of listed video game assets, increasing the scarcity value of remaining players—most notably Take-Two, the only major AAA publisher outside Asia.
