Videogamers have fickle tastes that can change on a whim, and the entire dev stack for game development is becoming more accessible and commoditized, creating massive amounts of competition. Even more so when it comes to squeezing beloved franchises out. Multiple franchises have died under EA (Sim City anyone?), and one of the top franchises EA owns basically has morphed into a "Middle East combat simulator" (Battlefield).
I'm sure the Saudi investors think this might be one way to get influence over the west, or maybe they just like playing FIFA, but I can see this buyout becoming a big stinking turd investment in the long run.
> Multiple franchises have died under EA (Sim City anyone?)
Cities: Skylines managed to fill that gap, but then C:S2 was an utter dud on release.
I think part of the problem is that we've reached a point where the players expect each individual citizen to be simulated, with the traffic to match, but doing that creates such a massive demand on CPU power that even a modern monster system will struggle once your city reaches the high 6-digit population. Simulating 100K vehicles in real time isn't easy. Even if you're not rendering them all because of draw distance limitations, you're still running path finding regularly if you want vehicles to be smart and try to bypass traffic jams, not to mention just trying to make them respond to traffic signals and not rear-end each other.
I'm sure the Saudi investors think this might be one way to get influence over the west, or maybe they just like playing FIFA, but I can see this buyout becoming a big stinking turd investment in the long run.