EA doesn’t belong to shareholders anymore. It belongs to Saudi Arabia.
A $55 billion deal has taken the publisher of Mass Effect and EA Sports FC private, with an investor consortium led by the Saudi sovereign Public Investment Fund now holding the keys. No more public trading. No more quarterly earnings calls. Just a new set of owners with their own ideas about what should exist in a video game.
And BioWare’s next sci-fi epic is sitting right in the middle of it.
Silver Lake is in on the deal too, along with Affinity Partners, the firm founded by Jared Kushner, son-in-law of U.S. president Donald Trump. That’s the ownership group now steering the studio behind Commander Shepard.
The PIF already owns a piece of everything you play
This isn’t Saudi Arabia’s first move into gaming. PIF and its fellow investors already hold major stakes in Nintendo, Capcom, Nexon and Take-Two, among others. EA just joined a list that keeps getting longer.
Which raises the question fans are asking out loud: what happens to a franchise built on inclusion when it’s owned by a country where homosexuality is a criminal act?
Mass Effect has never been shy about it. The series has carried a diverse cast across a decade and a half, with LGBTQIA+ relationships and characters from all kinds of backgrounds baked into the storytelling rather than bolted on. It’s believed that content like that could now be censored, and not just in Mass Effect. The Sims is in the same position.
The subreddit isn’t taking it well
Over on r/masseffect, the reaction landed fast.
“I honestly fear for the open-minded future of our franchise,” one post read. “Mass Effect was a big part of my life, and I loved that it tackled topics that might be controversial in its own way. It was never in your face, but subtle enough to be believable… especially with the choice of a badass female Shepard.”
Another user found a stranger kind of optimism in it: “Maybe they sell Mass Effect to a publisher who gives a s*it.”
That’s where the fanbase is right now. Half grieving, half hoping the game gets shipped somewhere else entirely.
Nobody knows where this game actually is
Here’s the part that makes the timing so uncomfortable. Mass Effect 5 has been confirmed by BioWare, but its development status is a mystery.
The game was first unveiled at The Game Awards back in 2020. It would be the next mainline entry since Mass Effect: Andromeda, which launched almost a decade ago. That’s a long time to hold your breath.
Project director Mike Gamble confirmed the team had moved its focus to Mass Effect 5 after Dragon Age: The Veilguard shipped. Since then? Details have been scarce.
So the sequel is somewhere in development, under a publisher that changed hands for $55 billion, inside an industry where the same investors keep showing up on the cap table.
How this deal reshapes the game industry, or Mass Effect 5 specifically, remains to be seen. But the last confirmed thing anyone heard about the game came from a director saying the team had finally turned its attention to it. Everything after that is silence, and now the silence has a new landlord.
