Only One Committee Stands Between EA and Riyadh

93.7 percent. That is the share of Electronic Arts that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund takes when this deal closes, and the number is doing something the coverage keeps missing. Nobody buys 93.7 percent of a company to be a shareholder. On July 23 the European Commission looked at that number, ran it through EU merger rules, found limited impact on competition, and waved the $55 billion take-private through without conditions.

Brussels was not wrong. It answered a question that was never the concern.

The fair case for the deal is stronger than the outrage allows. PIF has held gaming positions for years without editorial interference: roughly 10 percent stakes in Nintendo, Bandai Namco, Nexon, Koei Tecmo, and Square Enix, operational control of ESL FACEIT, and Scopely, which it bought for $4.9 billion and which now owns Niantic’s games business. Nothing has surfaced to suggest a Saudi note ever landed in a Monopoly Go design review. Andrew Wilson stays as CEO, Redwood City stays the headquarters, and $55 billion in cash is a real outcome for shareholders in an industry that has been shedding staff for three straight years. Norway’s sovereign fund owns pieces of half this business without generating a single think piece.

The trouble is that a 10 percent passive stake and 93.7 percent control are not the same instrument, and competition law cannot see the difference that matters. EU merger review asks whether prices go up and whether rivals get squeezed. The answer here is no, because a sovereign wealth fund does not buy EA Sports FC to corner the football-game market. It buys the place where a few hundred million people spend their evenings. Cultural infrastructure does not show up on a market-share chart, which is why the deal keeps sailing through reviews designed to find something else.

Brussels had one more swing and did not take it. The Commission’s Foreign Subsidies Regulation review, the instrument actually built to ask whether non-EU state money distorts a market, closed its preliminary window on July 30 without a Phase 2 investigation, exactly as Reuters reported on July 17 that it would. That is notable on its own: the two comparable Gulf-state acquisitions, ADNOC buying Covestro and e& taking parts of PPF, both went to Phase 2 and both came out with remedies attached. PIF cleared a $55 billion purchase inside the 25-business-day preliminary window that those deals could not.

Which leaves the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, and roughly nine weeks. US antitrust clearance came through months ago. CFIUS asks a different question, and the two concerns on record are specific. EA’s live-service games collect behavioral data, communications, and payment records from hundreds of millions of accounts. EA is also building AI into its development pipeline and its live platforms. Senators Blumenthal and Warren wrote to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in October 2025 urging “searching scrutiny” of both, and the Communications Workers of America wrote to the FTC and CFIUS the same month flagging the AI development specifically.

Here is the structural fact everyone steps around. Affinity Partners, Jared Kushner’s fund, is in the buying consortium. CFIUS is an interagency committee chaired by the Treasury Secretary, serving in an administration led by Kushner’s father-in-law. I am not alleging anything happened, and no filing does either. But the last regulator standing is one whose chain of command runs to a family member of an investor in the deal it is reviewing, and I have not seen a single person in the approval chain address that in public.

The financial structure is where the sovereign-patience argument gets tested. The buyout runs on roughly $36 billion in equity and $20 billion in debt syndicated by JPMorgan, which CreditSights pegged at about six times EA’s gross earnings at close. EA posted record fiscal 2026 net bookings of $8.026 billion, up 9 percent on Battlefield 6, and net income that fell 21 percent to $887 million. Strong top line, thinning profit, and a debt load that has to be serviced regardless of who signs the checks.

That arithmetic has been running ahead of the closing. EA went through at least three rounds of layoffs in 2026 before the deal closed, and the June wave hit trust and safety, fan care, IT, and recruitment, per TechTimes. The people who moderate the lobbies of the games PIF is buying were cut before PIF owned them. In October 2025 Wilson told staff there would be no immediate changes to the workforce.

When players organized against this deal in May, the standard dismissal was that protest cannot touch a signed transaction. That was correct and beside the point, the same way the twelve state attorneys general who froze Paramount–Warner did not need to win to change what the next deal looks like. Resistance is not a veto. It is the record of who objected while the objecting was still possible.

September 28 is the outside date, and it is not a closing deadline. It is the last day either side can walk without triggering a $1 billion reverse break fee, and it can be extended again the way the June 30 date was. So the most likely ending is not drama. It is CFIUS attaching data-handling conditions, a press release about creative independence, and 14,600 employees waking up to a new owner whose interest in The Sims is that a few hundred million people already trust it. If you play EA games, you are not being asked to approve that. You are being told it cleared review. The only question left is whether “cleared review” is going to keep meaning “nobody found a rule that applied.”

Sources: Game Developer · MLex · Reuters via Yahoo Finance · TechTimes · US Senate · CWA