Electronic Arts

Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) is an American video game company that develops, publishes, and distributes games for personal computers, consoles, and mobile devices, headquartered in Redwood City, California.¹⁶¹⁴ Its portfolio spans licensed sports franchises such as EA SPORTS FC, Madden NFL, and the former FIFA series, alongside brands including The Sims, Battlefield, Apex Legends, Need for Speed, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age.¹⁶¹³ The company trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker EA and reported annual revenue of roughly $7.5 billion for fiscal 2025.¹¹⁴ It employs about 14,500 people and, before its 2025 buyout, carried a market capitalization of roughly $51 billion.¹⁴¹⁶

Founding and early years

EA was incorporated by Trip Hawkins on May 28, 1982, months after he resigned from Apple?, where he had worked since 1978 and watched the firm grow from fifty employees to a Fortune 500 company nearing $1 billion in annual revenue.⁸ Hawkins had committed to founding the company in the summer of 1975, reasoning it would take about seven years for enough computing hardware to reach homes to create an audience for the games he wanted to make.⁸ Affordable microcomputers such as the Apple II, Commodore 64, and Atari 400/800 supplied that audience, bringing number-crunching power to home desks.⁸ He funded the venture personally for six months, working first from his home and, from August, from an office at Sequoia Capital.⁸ The company was briefly named Amazin’ Software; Hawkins wanted to call it SoftArt to recognize software as an art form, but abandoned that after a request from Dan Bricklin of Software Arts, and in October 1982 the first twelve employees and an outside marketing agency settled on Electronic Arts.⁸¹⁶

Hawkins envisioned a publishing company working with the best independent talent to make the computer game industry equivalent to film, books, or music, crediting and compensating its designers as “software artists”.⁸¹³ EA shipped its first titles in spring 1983 — Hard Hat Mack, Pinball Construction Set, Archon, M.U.L.E., Worms?, and Murder on the Zinderneuf — packaged in gatefold sleeves bearing the designers’ names and a graphic design meant to evoke rock albums.⁸ Three of the first six games later entered the Computer Gaming World Hall of Fame, and a fourth charted on the bestseller lists of the day.⁸ Another early hit, Doctor J and Larry Bird Go One on One (1983), a basketball game boosted by the involvement of Julius Erving and Larry Bird, introduced Hawkins’s practice of involving celebrities in the design and promotion of games, a business he later identified as the origin of EA Sports.⁸

To build the business, EA reduced the discount it gave software distributors and, after Larry Probst joined as vice president of sales in the fall of 1984, bypassed distributors to deal directly with retailers, keeping a larger share of the profits for itself.⁸¹³ The company also distributed games for other publishers, including Lucasfilm Games, SSI, and Interplay.⁸ Its founding staff worked out of San Mateo, California, which remained the headquarters until a 1998 move to nearby Redwood City.⁸

Shift to in-house development and acquisitions

EA developed no games internally in its earliest years, functioning as a conduit for professional developers, but the philosophy changed and by the early 1990s it began operating in-house studios.¹³ To sustain the conduit it had promoted its designers almost like gaming rock stars, giving them visibility on game covers while keeping a good portion of the profits, but scaling the business meant abandoning that model.¹³ Hawkins left the company in 1991 to start 3DO, a maker of video game consoles, and after his departure EA grew chiefly through the acquisition of competing developers, using them to produce sequels of popular games year after year to build multi-year franchises — a practice of annual releases and updates that EA is credited with pioneering.¹³

A defining acquisition came in 1991, when EA — then a California-based production and distribution company of about 200 employees with no real internal development capabilities — paid Don Mattrick $11 million in cash and shares for Distinctive Software, the Vancouver studio he had co-founded with Jeff Sember.⁶ Distinctive, which by 1991 posted more than $5 million in annual revenue and a staff of 77 and had worked with publishers such as Accolade, Konami, and Brøderbund, became EA Canada, home to most of EA’s sports franchises and the Need for Speed series, and grew into EA’s largest studio.⁶ Mattrick had begun as a teenage programmer, releasing the arcade game Evolution at 17 and building a catalog of racing titles such as Test Drive and Stunts before the sale; under EA he oversaw the NBA Live, NHL, Triple Play, SSX, MVP Baseball, Fight Night, and FIFA Soccer franchises and created the Need for Speed series in 1994, before rising to president of EA’s worldwide studios and later leaving to lead Microsoft’s Xbox business.⁶⁹¹³ EA Canada’s Burnaby office grew to employ more than 1,000 people, and former Distinctive staff went on to found other studios, including Radical Entertainment, Gas Powered Games, and Relic Entertainment.⁶⁹

Further acquisitions followed. Origin Systems, developer of Ultima and Wing Commander, ceded ownership to EA in 1992; Maxis, creator of SimCity and later The Sims, and Bullfrog, whose founder Peter Molyneux later complained of EA interference over release schedules, were also absorbed, along with Westwood, maker of the Command & Conquer series, and DreamWorks Interactive, creator of Medal of Honor.¹³ Other purchases included Manley & Associates, Mythic, JAMDAT Mobile, and, in 2006, DICE; the company consolidated its sports presence through studios including Sega Sports Studio, Black Box, and Studio 33.¹³

EA Studios today comprises more than 20 studios and over 6,000 creators globally, including BioWare, Codemasters, Criterion, DICE, Maxis, Motive, Respawn Entertainment, and PopCap, responsible for franchises such as EA SPORTS FC, Battlefield, Apex Legends, The Sims, Madden NFL, Need for Speed, Titanfall, and Plants vs. Zombies.²⁷ The company organizes its work through divisions including EA Studios, Maxis, and EA Mobile, the last making interactive content for phones and tablets.¹³ It operates offices across North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region, with EA Canada in Burnaby and studios in Stockholm, Guildford, Bucharest, and elsewhere.¹⁹²

EA describes itself as a global leader in digital interactive entertainment and reports more than 300 million registered players.¹⁸¹⁵ Its games run on Microsoft Xbox, Sony PlayStation, Nintendo systems, PCs, and mobile devices, and are distributed through the EA app and storefronts such as the Apple App Store and Google Play.¹⁴ The company was voted “Worst Company in America” for two consecutive years, 2012 and 2013, in a reader tournament run by the Consumerist website, chiefly over microtransactions and requirements that players remain online during a game.¹³

Leveraged buyout

In September 2025, EA agreed to be taken private in a transaction the company billed as the largest private-equity-backed buyout in history.¹²³ The Wall Street Journal reported the price as $52.5 billion, while Eurogamer and other outlets described the deal as worth $55 billion.¹²³ The acquiring investor group comprised the private-equity firm Silver Lake, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners.³¹² Kushner, chief executive of Affinity Partners and son-in-law of U.S. President Donald Trump, called EA “an extraordinary company with a world-class management team and a bold vision for the future”.³ The PIF, which had increased its EA stake in 2023 and held 9.9 percent, rolled its stake over; it is chaired by Prince Mohammed bin Salman and also holds stakes in Nintendo, Take-Two Interactive, Embracer, and Capcom.³¹⁰ Chairman and CEO Andrew Wilson was to continue leading the company, with the transaction expected to complete in the first quarter of fiscal 2027.³¹ The buyout was financed in part by a $5.75 billion loan sale led by JPMorgan, and EA’s shareholders subsequently approved the sale.¹³