EA is private now. The buyout closed August 4 at roughly $55 billion, financed with about $20 billion of debt, which makes it the largest leveraged buyout in history. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund holds 93.4%, with Silver Lake and Affinity Partners holding the rest. Shareholders got $210 a share and the stock came off the Nasdaq.
Six weeks later Xbox cut another 268 roles and moved Halo to Activision.
What happened at Xbox
On September 22, Chief Content Officer Max Booty’s memo laid out cuts across Halo Studios, other first-party studios, and the management and central functions layer. Bloomberg reported 268 roles, PureXbox counted 286, and a Washington state filing put the local total at 277. Pick your number, it’s the same event.
These come out of the roughly 3,200 roles Microsoft said in July it would shed at Xbox by mid-2027. Booty described the restructuring as about three quarters done, which is a strange thing to find reassuring.
The structural changes matter more than the headcount:
- The next Halo moves under Activision, led by a new team kept separate from Call of Duty.
- Playground Games and Turn 10 merge into one studio covering Forza and Fable.
- Activision also picks up oversight of Rare and World’s Edge.
- Ninja Theory had two potential deals fall through and has begun consultation with staff over a proposed closure.
Ninja Theory is the one worth sitting with. Hellblade was the kind of thing a big publisher funds precisely because it isn’t a franchise, and that is apparently no longer a category anybody is funding.
The pattern
Paramount Skydance closed its Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition on October 6, folding Warner Bros. Games into Paramount Games Studio. Across the industry, tracker counts for 2026 layoffs by end of September land somewhere between ten and fourteen thousand depending on who’s counting, on top of five years of cuts that have taken something like 57,000 jobs out of games.
None of this is a story about bad games. The games are mostly fine. It’s a story about who owns them and what those owners need out of them.
A $20 billion debt load has to be serviced. That money comes from somewhere, and the somewhere is the catalog: more aggressive monetization, fewer expensive bets, franchises run harder, and studios that don’t map cleanly onto a franchise getting merged or closed. That’s not cynicism, it’s just what leverage does. The financing decides the product.
Where that leaves anyone who buys games
Here’s the part that connects to everything else on this site.
When a studio closes, its games don’t get maintained. When a publisher changes hands, the account system, the launcher and the license servers behind your library belong to somebody new with different priorities. The thing you think you bought is a license that depends on a company choosing to keep a service running, and the industry just demonstrated how fast the company behind that choice can change.
We go on about this with media servers and NAS boxes because the logic is identical. A library you hold is durable. A library you can access is a permission, and permissions get revised during restructuring.
For games specifically that means buying DRM-free where the option exists, keeping installers for anything you’d be annoyed to lose, and treating “it’s in my account” as a convenience rather than a guarantee. GOG exists for exactly this reason and it is worth the minor friction.
None of which is a boycott pitch. Buy what you want to play. Just don’t confuse a storefront entry with a copy.
Sources: the EA buyout record, GeekWire on the Xbox restructuring, Deadline’s account of the same memo, Inven Global on five years of industry job losses.