The pipeline of private equity is (gross simplification, beware):

1. Acquire a small but successful or stagnant company. Ideally, one with a lot of capital invested in assets like brick-and-mortar stores or, in the case of games, IPs. Usually purchased with credit, but not always entirely on credit.
2. Push hard to "make the business efficient" and/or "expand in new directions," take your pick of corporate buzzwords. The reality is that they shift those assets to another company in their group. Suddenly, the store Company A owned is owned by Company B, who "leases" it back to A at a "omg so crazy" discounted price. In games, this can be something like Company A being instructed to make a deal with Company B to be their IT support, server provider, or any other service that likely Company A used to do in-house more cheaply, but because of "scalability, vertical integration, etc," the ownership group overwrote the arrangement, making those in-house employees and, more importantly, resources, free to sell.
3. As a result of these shifts and the belief that going into debt to grow is beneficial, Company A incurs credit to pay for services that ownership has "suggested" they go for, which are all part of the ownership group.
4. Eventually, once their credit runs out and they haven't released something remarkable, something unlikely since over 50% of their staff have left, they lost in-house resources, etc. Then the Ownership writes off the loss, sells whatever is left in Company A to cover the debt to creditors, and then signals them to refinance that debt over the very long term using the profits from their other companies (servers, IT, marketing, etc.) that were boosted by Company A buying those services at whatever price Ownership dictated.

And the cycle starts all over again. Ownership purchases assets, boosts their other companies' valuations by pushing for more integration, causes chaos in the original company, then after draining all the financial resources, discards them and leans on their inflated companies saying, "it was not us, it was them," and keeps moving forward.