Even as we wait for TikTok to come under the control of Trump-friendly oligarchs, we learned today that Electronic Arts (EA), one of the world's largest video game publishers, is being taken private in the "biggest buyout ever."
The investor group shelling out $55 billion for EA — a 25% premium above the pre-announcement stock price — is led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners, and Silver Lake (a private equity firm also involved in the TikTok deal.)
Given EA's recent lackluster performance (revenues grew just 2% in its fiscal year ending 30 June 2025) and the perception that it is losing ground to competitors, it's easy to see the acquisition as something driven by political, not just financial, considerations.
Gaming is where “tech fascism” lives
While gamers span all ages, it's widely acknowledged that online gaming spaces and "game-adjacent" platforms (forums, chat apps) are frequently exploited by extremist groups for recruitment and propaganda.
As adolescents and young men seek social connection and identity online, those who are most socially isolated and vulnerable can be groomed within a shared gaming experience before being introduced to radical viewpoints.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL), knows all about this world. Here's part of the Abstract of her July 2025 article entitled "Misogyny incubators: how gaming helps channel everyday sexism into violent extremism," which was published by the National Library of Medicine:
We face a pervasive and proliferating climate of online misogyny, along with an ever-expanding digital ecosystem that makes it faster and easier to express and share hateful content and harass individuals. In this review article, I explore one explanation for how online misogyny has become so ubiquitous and mainstream, looking at how online and digital gaming communities incubate, channel, and champion hostile sexist and misogynist attitudes, dehumanizing slurs, and other hateful content directed toward women and gender non-conforming people. I situate this mainstreaming of online misogyny within a broader rise of male supremacist violence, including threats, plots, and attacks from misogynist incels, noting that gender-based violence is a demonstrated precursor to and occasional mobilizer of mass violence.
Trump and the GOP have long blamed mass shootings on "violent video games." In recent years, as gaming has become an entry point to the broader (MAGA-friendly) "manosphere," there is increasing evidence that "a growing number of shooters" are embracing nihilistic viewpoints and committing acts of violence in a performative way — including livestreaming mass shootings — to impress their extreme online communities.
Gaming is where reputations are laundered, history is rewritten, and speech is suppressed
For Saudi Arabia, already a major backer of X and xAI, ownership of a major gaming company like Electronic Arts creates an added opportunity to normalize its reputation, even as it continues to be castigated for ongoing human rights abuses.
Trump "saved MBS's ass" during his first term, refusing to demand any retribution for Saudi Arabia's brutal murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi.
This year, after yukking it up with Trump and Musk in Riyadh in May, the Saudis proceeded to execute Turki Al-Jasser for tweets, without a peep from "free speech absolutist" Elon.
And while tweets can earn death sentences in Saudi Arabia, EA's rival gaming platforms have already established that they will not protect free speech, either. In 2019, Activision Blizzard set off a backlash by suspending an e-sports player who voiced support for Hong Kong protesters.
Don't expect the new Electronic Arts to tolerate dissent against either the Trump or the Saudi regime.
Saudi Arabia — described by Human Rights Watch as "a global outlier on women’s rights that also violates the rights of LGBT people" — was blocked from sponsoring the FIFA Women's World Cup in 2023. That kind of problem evaporates within the virtual world of soccer games like EA Sports FC and globally promoted Esports tournaments, where the Kingdom will have no problem inserting its messaging.
At a time when Trump is pardoning insurrectionists while declaring war on all who oppose him, Kushner's newfound ability to rewrite history in shooter games like Battlefield is also alarming. Trump's son-in-law will now have the power to determine how virtual wars are depicted, choose both the "heroes" and the "enemies," decide how atrocities get explained — and which allies are trustworthy.
In all of the gameplay it's selling, the new Electronic Arts will be able to use the real-time data it's gathering to quietly adjust what players experience — what players see within the game, the chatter they hear from non-player characters (NPCs), even the rewards they earn or "unlock." It won't look like censorship. It will all feel like fun.
In the battle for young men's minds, the EA deal is another win for both the Saudi regime and for the MAGA propaganda machine.
But for those trying to prevent kids from becoming radicalized online, it could be game over.
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