{"id":2499093,"date":"2025-10-15T09:16:58","date_gmt":"2025-10-15T13:16:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/saudis-acquiring-electronic-arts-means-fewer-woke-video-games\/"},"modified":"2025-10-15T09:21:24","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T13:21:24","slug":"saudis-acquiring-electronic-arts-means-fewer-woke-video-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/saudis-acquiring-electronic-arts-means-fewer-woke-video-games\/","title":{"rendered":"Saudis Acquiring Electronic Arts Means Fewer Woke Video Games"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">18<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fsaudis-acquiring-electronic-arts-means-fewer-woke-video-games%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2499093&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>Last month, Electronic Arts (EA), the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/microsoft-to-buy-activision-blizzard-for-68-7-billion-in-all-cash-deal\/\" title=\"Microsoft To Buy Activision Blizzard For .7 Billion In All-Cash D...l\">gaming giant<\/a> known for franchises like &#8220;Madden,&#8221; &#8220;Battlefield,&#8221; and &#8220;The Sims,&#8221; was sold to Saudi Arabia&#8217;s Public Investment Fund and Jared kushner&#8217;s Affinity Partners in a $55 billion deal. EA had long been criticized by gamers for shifting away from quality single-player stories to live-service models, exploiting players with predatory monetization like loot boxes, and heavily pushing leftist, &#8220;woke&#8221; ideologies in its games. When conservatives from Saudi Arabia took over, many on the left feared this would end their influence within EA&#8217;s content.<\/p>\n<p>EA&#8217;s recent release, &#8220;Dragon Age: Veilguard,&#8221; which featured prominent &#8220;woke&#8221; themes such as <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/calls-to-fire-the-mandalorian-star-gina-carano-trend-on-twitter-again\/\" title=\"Calls To Fire \u2018The Mandalorian\u2019 Star Gina Carano Trend On Twitter Again\">gender pronouns<\/a> and post-mastectomy scars for avatars, substantially underperformed with sales 50% below expectations, causing a $6 billion market value loss. This commercial failure demonstrated that players reject ideological excesses when they interfere with gameplay.Previous BioWare titles, including &#8220;Mass Effect: Andromeda,&#8221; also suffered from similar critiques.<\/p>\n<p>The Saudi investment is not driven by ideology but by strategic economic diversification away from oil, aiming to make profitable games rather than political statements. the change in ownership suggests a shift in control over western entertainment, signaling that market tolerance for activist-driven content has waned. The Saudis are expected to focus on creating fun, profitable games, potentially restoring EA&#8217;s past success.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Last month, leftists erupted when it was announced that former gaming titan Electronic Arts (EA) had been sold to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and a firm owned by Jared Kushner. Saudi Arabia&rsquo;s Public Investment Fund joined Kushner&rsquo;s Affinity Partners to acquire the studio behind the &ldquo;Madden,&rdquo; &ldquo;Battlefield,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Sims&rdquo; franchises in a $55 billion deal.<\/p>\n<p>EA had long been gamers&rsquo; preferred corporate villain. A pivot to live-service models in contrast to well-crafted single-player narratives alienated core fans, ballooning budgets meant that the company had to squeeze every penny out of consumers through predatory practices like loot boxes, and activist influencers within the company began poisoning content with their <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/weak-government-complicit-media-silicon-valley-are-torching-america\/\" title=\"W...k Government, Complicit Media, Silicon Valley Are Torching America\">woke ideology<\/a>. By the time the Saudis and Kushner appeared, shareholders were desperate to ditch a dying company.<\/p>\n<p>When word spread that conservative Saudis would soon control EA, leftist developers and commentators panicked. They feared their propaganda pipeline was closing. Patrick &ldquo;Trick&rdquo; Weekes, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt27510763\/fullcredits\/?ref_=tt_ov_sm_2#amzn1.imdb.concept.name_credit_category.c84ecaff-add5-4f2e-81db-102a41881fe3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">writer<\/a> responsible for the cringiest components of EA&rsquo;s and subsidiary BioWare&rsquo;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/erikkain\/2025\/02\/06\/this-crazy-explanation-for-why-the-veilguard-failed--proves-that-ea-doesnt-understand-dragon-age-at-all\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">most recent<\/a> flop, &ldquo;<a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2024\/09\/26\/new-dragon-age-video-game-indulges-trans-delusion-with-avatar-top-surgery-scars-option\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Dragon Age: Veilguard<\/a>,&rdquo; took to Bluesky to bemoan the news. Imagining a fictional dialogue between the Saudi buyers and EA, Weekes <a href=\"https:\/\/bsky.app\/profile\/trickweekes.bsky.social\/post\/3lzraqcz3ts26\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">speculated<\/a> that &ldquo;guns and football&rdquo; are in while &ldquo;gay stuff&rdquo; was out.<\/p>\n<p>Weekes is right to worry. Game developers have come to realize that saturating their products with woke nonsense is not a recipe for good sales. Players proved it with their wallets. &ldquo;Veilguard&rdquo; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tweaktown.com\/news\/102746\/dragon-age-veilguard-significantly-underperformed-may-have-sold-less-than-1-5-million-copies\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">underperformed<\/a> EA&rsquo;s sales expectations by 50 percent. The game hit <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/dragonage\/comments\/1h88huv\/no_spoilers_dragon_age_veilguard_is_30_off_on\/#:~:text=%5BNO%20SPOILERS%5D%20Dragon%20Age%20Veilguard,month%20after%20release%20:%20r\/dragonage\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">discount shelves<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tweaktown.com\/news\/103553\/dragon-age-the-veilguard-was-so-successful-its-being-given-away-for-free\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">free-to-play<\/a> services within weeks yet still failed to find an audience.<\/p>\n<p>The reason was obvious. Viral clips showed &ldquo;Veilguard&rdquo; as a parade of ideological box-checking featuring pronouns and genders front and center, as well as the option to give the player avatar post-<a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2024\/09\/26\/new-dragon-age-video-game-indulges-trans-delusion-with-avatar-top-surgery-scars-option\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">mastectomy<\/a> scars. One <a href=\"https:\/\/bsky.app\/profile\/trickweekes.bsky.social\/post\/3lekyeyujxc2n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Weekes-written character<\/a> became infamous for endless <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/realMuqsitAli\/status\/1882101519430164626\/video\/1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">screeds<\/a> about nonbinary identity and misgendering. Predictably, the game lost EA an ungodly <a href=\"https:\/\/www.videogameschronicle.com\/news\/ea-lost-6-billion-in-market-value-following-fc-25-dragon-age-underperformance-news\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">$6 billion<\/a> in market value, nearly 20 percent of share value. And it didn&rsquo;t have to be that way.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;Veilguard&rdquo; was the latest entry in EA\/BioWare&rsquo;s &ldquo;Dragon Age&rdquo; series, previously one of the company&rsquo;s most <a href=\"https:\/\/www.statista.com\/statistics\/1499867\/bioware-select-games-unit-sales\/#:~:text=As%20of%20September%202024%2C%20Dragon,Read%20more\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">profitable<\/a> products. Older gamers remember when BioWare symbolized prestige. &ldquo;Mass Effect 2&rdquo; and &ldquo;Dragon Age: Origins&rdquo; defined a generation of RPGs, selling millions while earning near-universal praise. That they willingly tanked such a cash cow just to promote woke ideology defies logic. But prior to the Saudi buyout, it seemed like they were willing to do it again.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;Mass Effect,&rdquo; the other tentpole series in EA\/BioWare&rsquo;s stable of games, had also become a vehicle for leftist propaganda. &ldquo;Mass Effect: Andromeda,&rdquo; a game that preceded &ldquo;Veilguard&rdquo; by seven years, was a woke debacle. Given the company doubled down on shoving wokeness in their games for nearly a decade, even in the face of declining financial returns, profit clearly was not its driving force.<\/p>\n<p>Which brings us to the buyout. The Saudis&rsquo; push into gaming isn&rsquo;t moral, but strategic. The Public Investment Fund has spent billions to economically diversify the kingdom beyond oil. Riyadh wants to make money, not proselytize. To be fair, Saudi Arabia has plenty of problems, starting with human-rights abuses. But <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3YuVZYV\" >promoting leftist ideology thankfully isn&#038;rsquo<\/a>;t one of them.<\/p>\n<p>Weekes may be furious, but he&rsquo;s probably right; the Saudis will focus on what sells, not what flatters activists. Guns and football sell just fine when they aren&rsquo;t dragged down by woke albatrosses. If gamers want EA&rsquo;s glory days back, handing the keys to the desert kingdom might not be the worst way to go about it.<\/p>\n<p>The EA deal is a referendum on who controls Western entertainment. When foreign investors start rescuing American game studios from their own <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/san-francisco-voters-recall-3-school-board-members-over-closures-woke-obsessions\/\" title=\"San Francisco Voters Recall 3 School Board Members over Closures, &#039;...&#039; Obsessions\">ideological obsessions<\/a>, it shows the market&rsquo;s patience for activism-as-art has ended. When Riyadh looks more committed to fun than California, something&rsquo;s gone very wrong.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<div>\n<p>      Douglas Blair is a cultural commentator and author of <a href=\"https:\/\/douglasblair.substack.com\/\">The Blair Broadcast<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>EA sold to Saudi Arabia and Kushner in $55B deal<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1733,"featured_media":2499094,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Copy-of-Untitled-2025-10-10T162746.000.png","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33651],"tags":[65253,9355,35198],"class_list":["post-2499093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-western-journal","tag-electronic-arts","tag-saudis","tag-video-games"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Copy-of-Untitled-2025-10-10T162746.000.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2499093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1733"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2499093"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2499093\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2499097,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2499093\/revisions\/2499097"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2499094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2499093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2499093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2499093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}