Note: As of today, [EA has announced the $55 billion deal to go private has been agreed upon.] In addition to the acquisition, this is a leveraged buyout - EA will take on an additional $20 billion in debt financing as part of this deal. This likely bodes ill for EA game customers as they will almost certainly cut staff in order to lower costs and help service that debt, as well as pursue more ways to monetize in the future. Also, if you own any EA stock, you get a pretty good payday today.
Here is my original post:
Any acquisition typically means some kind of impending layoffs after the deal is settled. The new owners will have new mandates and new objectives, which means old initiatives and old mandates will need to be thrown out. There will likely be some number of projects that don't align with the new mandates, which means they'll be cancelled and the people working on them either shuffled to a new project (if there's any room for them) or be let go. Remember, projects take time to spin up and they aren't always ready to take on new staff. If a project isn't in a state of staffing up already, it'll be very difficult to find room for new people to join the project since there won't be any work for them to do yet.
That said, it's also hard to say for certain because of the involvement of the Saudi PIF (Public Investment Fund) in the deal, because the Saudis aren't simply business for business' sake. They've made a number of strange decisions in the past (e.g. what they did with SNK and City of the Wolves), so they may make similar weird decisions that don't make a lot of sense. I would put the over/under of mass layoffs at 80% within three months after the deal is legally finalized, with 20% accounting for the Saudi weird factor.
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