Well, it’s happened. EA’s thumbs up from the European Commission, the $55 billion leveraged buyout by Saudi Arabia, Silver Lake and Jared Kushner-founded investment firm Affinity Partners has gone through. With the publishers now privately owned and saddled with a bunch of debt, questions loom about what their future will look like.

The CEO of Helldivers 2 studio Arrowhead, Shams Jorjani, hopes the answer won’t be EA narrowing further into “a sequel-and-mega-franchise machine”.

“The industry needs business diversity as much as it needs creative diversity — the more studios and publishers operating at different scales, taking different bets, the healthier games get,” Jorjani said in a quote emailed to RPS the day the acquisition went through. “EA’s portfolio has always had that range: Battlefield, the Sims, and Mass Effect are some of my favourite blockbusters of the last 15 years, but so are Split Fiction and Unravel, and classics like Command and Conquer Generals Generals and SimCity 2000 (yes, 2000) that still hold up. This deal is consolidation, no question — and I wonder whether new ownership optimizes for the safe bet, more sequels, more mega-franchises, over that breadth.

“I’m hopeful this leads to more of that range, not less, but if it turns EA into a sequel-and-mega-franchise machine, that’s a real waste of one of the best catalogues in the industry.”

As much as I’ve long yearned from the return of series EA have shelved, like Burnout and more recently both the rally games of Codemasters and Need For Speed, I’ve got zero confidence in this deal leading EA to suddenly reverse course and stop moving towards being a company who only make a handful of the biggest game series. Beyond racing games, BioWare laid off staff following Dragon Age: The Veilguard, leaving doubt as to whether they’ll ever do anything beyond Mass Effect again.

The nature of the deal itself doesn’t point to EA suddenly being given a bunch of financial freedom to invest in series beyond their biggest hitters. According to Bloomberg, the company have taken on $18 billion in debt as part of the takeover. “EA’s annual Ebitda [Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortisation] is around $1.5 billion, which should be enough to service the interest payments. But the publisher has told debt investors that it will cut $700 million in annual costs including $170 million in “organizational efficiencies,” Jason Schreier posted to BlueSky not long after the deal went through. “In other words: mass layoffs.”

So, more cuts going forwards, as unions feared.

Nothing about any of that screams taking chances on any revivals of series or new projects which aren’t major cash cows like EA FC, Battlefield, Madden, The Sims, or games set in the Star Wars universe.