EA announced overnight it's closing Mass Effect and Dragon Age studio BioWare in a new round of cuts that include the elimination of 400 roles across the publisher. But while it confirmed BioWare's 50 workers are affected, and that Skate studio Ripple Effect was being downsized, it did not say where the other 350 job cuts would come from.
Following the sudden closure of Bioware last night, people from across the games industry have shared their sympathies for those employees losing their jobs, and said farewell to one of the most influential RPG developers of all time.
Marvel's Wolverine may not have had the best critical reception, but that clearly didn't discourage consumers. The action-adventure from Marvel's Spider-Man studio Insomniac has topped US video game sales in September, despite releasing exactly halfway through the month.
EA has closed its longtime studio partner BioWare, the iconic development house behind Mass Effect and Dragon Age, impacting around 50 staff who were in pre-production on the next Mass Effect game. In the aftermath of EA's decision, one of those affected has shared a little about the project, claiming it would have featured unprecedented levels of player freedom and choice reactivity.
Multiple games - including Final Fantasy 14 and Umamusume: Pretty Derby - have faced outages and other issues following this week's discovery of a serious PHP vulnerability.
Oof. I expected this day to come but the news has left me winded nonetheless; BioWare, the creator of so many beloved role-playing series and games - Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Baldur's Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic - has been closed. EA decided it had no place for it under its new Saudi and private investment ownership. So Mass Effect 5 has been canned, and a studio that helped shape an industry and popularise role-playing games over the course of 31 years is no more.
An internal trailer for the cancelled Mass Effect game that was in-development at BioWare prior to its closure this week has appeared online. It's confirmed to be real, too, amid some initial suspicions it may have been an AI generated fake.
It's been 19 years since the release of Half-Life 2: Episode 2, and yet the ceaseless clamour for a Valve game with a number '3' in its title continues. And following a swell of reports suggesting Half-Life 3 isn't just real, its development is well underway, a Valve developer has gone and sent the internet a-chatter all over again by publicly, albeit accidentally, referencing its codename during a livestream.
After EA's sudden shutdown of developer BioWare, upcoming crossover items themed around Mass Effect appear to have been removed from Battlefield 6.
After getting caught up in Xbox CEO Asha Sharma's devastating layoffs and cuts earlier this year, Arkane Lyon - the beloved immersive sim studio behind the likes of Dishonored and Deathloop - reportedly only has until November to find a buyer. If the search fails, it will be shut down.
Legendary Nintendo developer Shigeru Miyamoto - who led development on classic games such as Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - has argued that the rise of generative AI tools won't necessarily replace human talent.
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Masahiro Sakurai has spoken about the pitfalls of generative AI use in game development, saying that while he believes the technology will result in a surge of unoriginal video games, human creativity - such as that shown by designers like Ico's Fumito Ueda - can't be replicated.
Chinese action game Phantom Blade Zero already appears to be outperforming massive games like Gears of War: E-Day and Control Resonant on Steam, despite still being days from release.
Modern Warfare 4's DMZ extraction shooter mode has only been out for two days - and only for those who pre-ordered the game - but already players are up in arms over a particular trait that allows competitors to revive themselves after being killed.
A deal between Netflix and Xbox has supposedly fallen through because of one minor quibble: Netflix wanted to adapt the console maker's games for $500m, not $800m.
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