In case you managed to miss the big gaming news on Monday, Electronic Arts announced that it's going from a publicly traded company to a private one, thanks to a 55 billion dollar buyout. This is unusual as generally, large companies strive for the opposite, to go public. You hear about things going the other way a lot less often, never mind with such a large sum of money changing hands.
I wasn't sure whether I should write about this on the blog because I'm not really an expert on all this business stuff. People who seem more knowledgeable on the subject mostly seem to think that this will enrich a certain number of individuals while ultimately being bad for EA itself, likely leading to a lot of lay-offs and perhaps even bankruptcy further down the line. So not great news for fans of Bioware games and the like.
However, many of the comments I've read on social media about how this is likely to affect SWTOR have been so utterly hyperbolic and divorced from reality, I feel we need to clarify some things. Remember, The Old Republic is NOT a Bioware game anymore, not in the technical sense anyway. It's being developed by Broadsword!
Also, if you read the article linked at the top, the transaction "is expected to close in Q1 FY27" so nothing's happening as a result of this for at least another year.
Whatever is going to happen as the result of this buyout eventually, I do not believe we have reason to worry about SWTOR in specific. Keep in mind that SWTOR isn't something that EA wholly owns; it's a collaborative project between Disney, Broadsword and EA.
Disney may be making the smallest contribution at this point (unless they are secretly responsible for a lot of the investment in the game) but they are actually the ones with the ultimate power due to owning the Star Wars IP. They could theoretically cause the game to shut down at any time by saying "we no longer want this to represent Star Wars" and that would be it. You can't take the Star Wars out of SWTOR and still have a game. This seems unlikely to be a problem though as based on various dev interviews, the Disney peeps seem to love the game and are quite happy with the work the devs have been doing with it.
The interaction between Broadsword and EA is a lot less clear. Unlike Bioware, Broadsword as a studio is not owned by EA, however EA still serves as SWTOR's publisher. Wikipedia actually has its own entry for video game publisher - and from the sounds of it a publisher's influence can vary a lot, from being heavily involved in pretty much everything but the coding to basically just handling distribution. From the outside we can't really tell just how much involvement EA has in SWTOR nowadays. We know they provide customer services, distribute the game through Origin the "EA App" and handle payments. But do they actually put money into the studio to develop the game and give any direction in terms of what the devs should be working on? For all we know, Broadsword might simply use SWTOR's revenue to pay the devs and then pay EA their cut. We just don't know.
I would personally be wary of assuming that EA in its publisher role is this all-powerful entity that controls everything. It's very much possible for a game dev studio to break ties with a publisher and continue doing their thing without them, such as Bungie did with Activision in 2019. I'm not saying that's what's going to happen here, I'm just saying it's within the realm of reasonable possibilities that Broadsword, with the approval of Disney, could continue to develop SWTOR even if EA wanted to stop being involved with the game for whatever reason. EA doesn't have the power to simply unilaterally shut them down on a whim.
Not that I think it's likely that this question would even come up. SWTOR seems to currently sit in this relatively comfortable spot where it's small enough to not draw unnecessary attention in terms of opportunities to cut spending (What's even left to cut when the team is already this small?) but simultaneously profitable enough that none of the bigwigs feel the need to get rid of it. When EA's new owners are looking into cutting costs, they'll probably look at single player focused studios that are using up money without sufficiently high returns, not so much at live service games whose development teams are already small while contributing a steady pay check month after month.
Yes, there's always a chance that something weird and crazy happens, but that's like worrying about being hit on the head by a meteorite when you go outside. The more likely scenarios are not immediately concerning to SWTOR players, not unless or until we directly hear otherwise. To re-use an image from a few years ago (yes, we've been through this whole panic thing more than once at this point):
(P.S: To be clear, I'm not saying this isn't big news, and you have every right to be concerned about games directly owned by EA as well as the devs working on these games. However, this blog is about SWTOR and my point is that for SWTOR in specific, there is currently no reason to assume that it will impact the game in a major way.)
