Fans sighed but understood when EA's free-to-play Skate reboot from 2025 started its ongoing Early Access period with microtransactions, but EA vice president of advertising Alexander Dao seems curious to see if that sigh could turn into a dry-heave as the publisher toys with in-game ads.

Dao recommends some developers start designing in-game ads during their production periods, telling The Game Business in a new interview, "As you think about new games that are coming out, as you think about free-to-play experiences that are happening on the console side – like our Skate game – those are opportunities where, if you actually design them with the right advertising and brand experience in there from the get-go, it just makes it easier."

Earlier this summer, EA established the EA Advertising "platform" for brands eager to test gameplay ad placements, emphasizing in an announcement that EA Sports games were particularly ripe for "participatory experiences where brands come to play."

If you're gagging, that means it's working.

At the time, EA had already introduced the home improvement store Lowe's to Madden NFL, partnered with Visa credit cards, and added Vans shoes to Skate. But Dao reminds developers, too, to invest in the "huge opportunity" of in-game ads.

"Building the advertising experience is really retrofitting it in," Dao says about the current state of in-game ads, but if developers help, "it makes it feel more native and it creates more flexibility in the types of brands that can come in and out."

I recoil at the idea of advertisements feeling "native" to video games that aren't inherently advertisements, like the promotional games of yore spanning diet sodas, fast food, and beer. At the same time, EA Advertising is really just making an enthusiastic return to those Wild West days of video games between the '80s and early 2000s when games like NFS: Underground 2 were glad to laser-blast you with Best Buy billboards while you were cruising.

Many of my favorite games from childhood were congested with ads, and the in-game product placement in the dress-up game Stardoll at age 10 still influences my closet with fashion brands like Miss Sixty and DKNY. It worked!

I find that frightening – especially now that companies have more opportunities via smart refrigerators and unskippable YouTube ads to tattoo our retinas with their stuff.

In 2026, game developers are already tasked with navigating mass layoffs, studio closures, and game cancellations – if EA ends up successful in guiding them to create more in-game ads, forcing them to obey the financial interests of a company that could dissolve their job at any moment, then there will be no more room for artistry. Just fear and Mountain Dew assets.

After "incomprehensible" Xbox layoffs, id Software producer says worker-owned studios are "the only path forward."

The day I never thought I'd witness is near – EA is finally introducing an autosave feature to The Sims 4… you know, a good 12 years after its 2014 launch.

How many Sims have I lost to random crashes? How many houses have perished before my eyes due to buggy shutdowns? Too many to count, I'd say – and sure, I could've been more vigilant about saving, but The Sims 4 has needed an autosave feature for well over a decade now.

Some of the best Sims 4 mods (I'm looking at you, MC Command Center) have tried to rectify the issue, but EA hadn't officially addressed it… until now. On July 21, the studio is finally adding an autosave ("AutoSave," as EA calls it) option to the life sim – but that's not all.

As outlined in its latest Laundry List of upcoming fixes, EA says, "This month we're introducing a new AutoSave to The Sims 4, and rolling out Memory Boost to Mac and console players to improve overall performance for more Simmers."

The team is also looking to target "the top-reported issues from players via EA Forums."

The autosave feature is undeniably the most eye-catching tidbit here, though. So… how will it work, exactly? "Quietly in the background, automatically creating save points at key moments while you play," apparently.

"You can customize when AutoSave happens in Game Save Settings, with options like saving after traveling between lots, after a period of playtime, or at important gameplay milestones."

There's another option for Simmers who hate themselves (I kid, I kid). "If you'd rather stay in control, Save Reminders like the friendly (or slightly grumpy) gnome notification… can prompt you to create a manual save at the frequency you choose. Together, these features help reduce the risk of lost progress while giving you the flexibility to save the way you want."

Not bad, EA. Not bad at all. It just took, erm, 12 years.

EA goes into some of its other big tweaks, too, like the Memory Boost system that "improves how The Sims 4 manages memory while you play, helping deliver a smoother experience with reduced lag, improved frame rates and responsiveness, shorter loading times, and a lower risk of memory-related crashes."

It sounds like, all in all, The Sims 4 will crash less – and when it does crash, it'll be far less painful thanks to autosaving.

I don't know about you all, but I think this is a step in the right direction – even if it's coming a bit late to The Sims 4. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some mods to delete…

The Sims 4's microtransaction Marketplace has officially shown me the door after 24 years of Simming.

There's too much carnage to keep up with – Xbox is in the middle of chopping up 3,200 jobs, Ubisoft's on track to have made a total of 4,000 layoffs since 2022, and Embracer is now indistinguishable from a natural disaster, having laid waste to $2 billion-worth of acquisitions by closing, canceling, and setting fire to everything unlucky enough to be in its path. Helldivers 2 studio Arrowhead QA manager Dave Gallacher has seen it all, and he despises it.

"Each structural point of our industry is controlled by money and those with it have been greedy morons for the past 10+ years," Gallacher, who spent 10 years at DICE before joining Arrowhead this summer, says in a LinkedIn thread discussing worker-owned studios as the possible answer to mass layoffs. "How Ubisoft and Embracer leadership aren't in prison absolutely eludes me for their shady tactics, and the victims are very much these thousands of talented developers we're hoping can summon money out of the ether to start studios."

That's a painful analysis, but Gallacher has clearly been working with it for a while. Last week, as Xbox began culling thousands of positions and leaving studios bleeding out the neck, Gallacher said in another LinkedIn post, "For the past 3 years, I've used the phrase 'this year is going to be a bloodbath,' relating to the games industry. And somehow it gets worse each year."

"Where is that money going?" he continues. "A deluded CEO speaking of reaching 'billions of players' whilst pouring the newly pilfered wages of talented Devs into the plagiarism machine (AI). Absolute darkest timeline shit."

Microsoft. Ubisoft. Embracer. EA, Gallacher's former employer, which reportedly laid off Battlefield 6 devs after they helped make a game that sold 20 million copies. Epic Games, which exterminated more than 1,000 jobs in March after being disappointed its $26 billion game Fortnite is waning in popularity. There's not a single angel among these video game industry behemoths, only vultures.

Since I read and write about layoffs and game cancellations nearly every day, recently, I find it difficult to feel anything toward it that resembles optimism. I also play video games for fun every day, and my own headlines about money and lost jobs knock around the back of my head while I grapple with the fact that, despite everything, I still love playing video games.

"Some parts continue to drive obsessive behaviour, some parts make you want to go play in traffic," Gallacher said earlier this week in another post about the video game industry. "It's complicated." There's not much else to say – just, if Ubisoft and Embracer leadership ever do go to prison like Gallacher fantasizes, I think it should be the one from Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.

Sony's attack on physical goods spreads to Crunchyroll as it adds a $14 subscription requirement just to access its store.

So, to recap, Destiny 2 studio Bungie was just smashed over the head with mass layoffs, certain Xbox Game Studios teams are reportedly moving toward the same fate, EA disposed of many Battlefield 6 devs despite selling over 20 million copies, and these are just some of the apocalyptic changes the video game industry has endured since spring. Naturally, even developers unaffected by layoffs are feeling the effects of all the carnage.

One such developer is Cyberpunk 2 associate game director and CD Projekt Red designer Paweł Sasko, who writes in a harrowing Twitter post, "Some days I feel our industry is imploding.

"Teams and game projects are getting slaughtered every second day," Sasko continues, "to the point it's hard to keep up. We are blessed to be still hiring, for all our games." The developer encourages others to browse CD Projekt Red's open job listings, which span multiple departments for titles like The Witcher 4 and the secretive, new IP Hadar.

CD Projekt Red began laying off about 9% of its staff in 2023, so it itself isn't impervious to the destructive past few years that gaming legend Brenda Romero described as "crashier" than the infamous video game crash of 1983. All the more reason, then, for CD Projekt Red developers to be as outspoken about the industry layoff trend as they have been; the studio's localization QA analyst Paula Mackiewicz-Armstrong also urged other devs this April to unionize in response to the "over 1,000" positions at Epic Games impacted by its recent, ruthless batch of layoffs.

Mackiewicz-Armstrong said at the time, "I've seen some hard times and some remarkable changes and improvements that make CDPR a great place to be right now. I just wish others in the industry could have the same." I'm sure many share that sentiment.

Bungie studio head reportedly leaves after 16 years with the company following mass layoffs and Destiny 2 death spiral.

Paralives, the colorful new indie answer to EA's own life sim gem, The Sims 4, encourages all sorts of mods (yes, even NSFW mods) – but the most famous adult mod in the entire genre won't be making its way to the recent game.

The mod in question here is WickedWhims. If you've not heard of it, it adds a whole lot of spice to The Sims 4… as well as various real-life features, like birth control, family planning, health simulations, and much more. It's known very well in the Simming community – heck, it's launched a whopping 400,000 times a day. So, it comes as no surprise that fans have been wondering whether or not its developers would bring it to Paralives.

Husk, also known as HelpfulHusk, who helps work on WickedWhims (and its more SFW counterpart, WonderfulWhims) alongside creator TURBODRIVER, says that it isn't – sad news for all of us who hoped for a Paralives counterpart of the adult mod.

They confirm as much in response to a fan asking about it online, writing, "Sorry to say that's not happening!" When asked why not, Husk explains that they're not too certain.

"I dunno, just telling you what TURBO said," Husk states. They do tease "what the other person said is as good of a list of reasons as any," though, pointing to another reply under their own.

That one cites a few potential reasons that WickedWhims won't come to Paralives – a different game engine, the difficulty in transferring assets, problems with re-exporting animations in Blender, and "mod files can easily be stolen in the [Steam] Workshop."

To top this all off, "They'd have to do all this and keep up with their current mod." Well, this all certainly makes sense – but that doesn't mean "someone else" won't step up to the plate, as folks are now discussing over on Reddit.

As one person puts it, it's "the way of the Internet." Indeed… and a quick browse at the Steam Workshop shows me that we've already got a very aptly named "UncensoredParas" mod available to download.

Over on NexusMods, there are even more. So, yeah… we don't have too much to worry about, although I will admittedly miss all of the extra features that WickedWhims adds to The Sims 4 in Paralives, honestly.

Searching for more new games to wishlist? Here are the best games like The Sims 4 out there right now to explore.

I'm a sucker for a good tactics game – which is why Star Wars Zero Company already has me buzzing. It's a genre where almost any game could announce a tactics spinoff and I'd be down. Persona 5 Tactica? Sure, why not? Rayman Raving Rabbids and Super Mario forming a strategic alliance? Hell yeah. The power of a good tactics RPG even works when I'm not into the series itself; I'm not huge into Final Fantasy, but damn if Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles isn't an all-timer. And my Marvel fatigue was swiftly cured with a helping of Marvel's Midnight Suns.

And then there's Star Wars. I'll be frank, The Rise of Skywalker stank so much that any love and interest I had in Star Wars left me. I haven't watched any of its many TV series, I never played Star Wars Jedi: Survivor – despite loving Fallen Order – and I haven't had any desire to go back and watch the older films I actually do like… but the series' upcoming strategic foray has me looking from across the room like your da staring longingly at that photo of him holding a big fish.

Force pull

But that's the thing: Star Wars seems perfect for the tactics RPG treatment it's getting with the rather XCOM-like Star Wars Zero Company. As fun as the space wizards and midi-chlorians are, as I've gotten older, I've come to appreciate that the world is a lot more interesting outside of the Jedi and Sith. Sure, you have a Padawan on your squad, but having an R-series droid offsets that. I just know for a fact there's going to be a point when you face off against one of those magical bastards and things are going to feel bleak, like Darth Vader at the end of Rogue One bleak. I live for it. Plus, one of your team is a former boxer called Kabb Uppercut and if that isn't "Glup Shitto" adjacent I don't know what is.

But, thinking about how interested I am in a franchise I had sworn off of due to the virtue of it becoming tactical, it got me thinking. Why the hell has there never been another Metal Gear Acid?. If you know me, you know I may like Metal Gear, perhaps even a lot; and obviously Metal Gear is a massive series, but if there was ever to be something about it I'd call niche it would be the PSP duology.

Here's the pitch: first, take Metal Gear's tone, world, and somewhat approximate versions of its characters; second, make a story that is somehow more out there and silly than the games it's based on – the first game opens with psychic puppets hijacking a plane – and finally, adapt the stealth gameplay into a tactical RPG and imbue that with a deckbuilder with cards based off of older Metal Gear and Kojima games.

A stealth-based Tactical RPG deckbuilder doesn't sound like something that should work, and yet the duo of games stick out as two of the best games the PSP has to offer, and I'd say Metal Gear Acid 2 is among the best tactics RPGs ever made.

While it's not as punishing or hardcore as XCOM, what Metal Gear Acid does best is tension. The stealth aspects are extremely important on some missions, as – just like in the main series – you are not equipped to take on an army with ease. Which means every turn, and every card you can use to make a move, takes on even more importance. It's the same logic that means my Astromech GOAT in Zero Company will be racking up a sith kill count one way or another.

The deckbuilding itself also rules. Rather than just playing with cards each turn, your cards are given values like you've seen in games like Slay the Spire, except the catch here is rather than not being able to use cards if you don't have enough points, you can use whatever you want, as instead, points contribute to your turns, with the points you use needing to be counted down before you can take another.

This in-turn blends into the strategy RPG elements nicely, as something like the Metal Gear Rex card – which does 300 damage – is very powerful, but unless you are ending a battle with it or are far enough away from the next enemy, you're going to be at a major risk since it'll cost you 30 points to use. Again, it's the kind of balance I can also see Zero Company leveraging to explain why its ensemble cast aren't simply only to fight together, but complement one another.

Deckbuilders and tactics games have probably never been more popular than they are now, and so I ask, where is Metal Gear Acid 3 Konami? I see the publisher handing off Castlevania's reins to Dead Cells dev Evil Empire and think of what the likes of Fights in Tight Spaces dev Ground Shatter could do with Metal Gear. I know the series is still in a bit of limbo without Kojima, so why not bring things back gradually with a new iteration of one of its best spinoffs?

With such a lively franchise, a more ambitious attempt at the concept without the PSP's constraints could allow for some fantastic tactics design within that universe. When I see the cast of Star Wars: Zero Company combining moves, I can't help but think of the Rat Patrol's synchronized, nanomachine-enhanced teamwork in Metal Gear Solid 4 – those are the kind of team moves I'd love to orchestrate. At the very least get the Acid games into Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Volume 2 or into PlayStation's growing Classics Catalog of PSP games, I beg of you.

Can't wait a long time to visit the galaxy far, far away? Check out our best Star Wars games for what you can play in the meantime!

Paralives is finally here, gracing fans of The Sims 4 with a viable competitor – one that folks already can't get enough of, apparently.

Those of us with a penchant for life sims have been waiting quite some time for a new title to play. Sure, inZOI is still receiving updates, but it's still arguably a bit empty – and sadly, other promising projects like Life By You have simply fallen to the axe of cancellation.

Paralives is proving to be a strong contender already, however, having only just launched yesterday and boasting a "Very Positive" rating on Steam with thousands of reviews to back it. It's colorful, fun, and a cozy breath of fresh air for the community – so much so, in fact, that Paralives has managed to reach over 250,000 excited players.

The developers reveal as much in a new post, celebrating the nearly-300,000 sales they saw in eight hours and stating that they "look forward to the future" of the game. So do Paralives fans, I'd argue, judging by all of the feedback thus far (hi, it's me… I'm "fans").

One review sees a player declare that they'll "probably never go back" to The Sims 4, while another exclaims, "We've all needed a proper Sims competitor for a long time, and every project has to start somewhere. I recommend giving the game a try and supporting it – it has good potential and the right direction!"

Plenty of others cite EA's own life sim, praising Paralives in the process – which I get as a Simmer myself, honestly.

As one such review reads, "For the price of one Sims 4 expansion, you'll get this lovely indie game with ALL future updates being free." They certainly do have a point, seeing as all of The Sims 4 DLC adds up to some $1,500 or so.

Overall, the vibes are positive, though – lots of people are pleased with the build mode, Para creation, and the fact that it's Early Access, which means that there's a plethora of features yet to come.

Only time will tell just what we'll get, but judging by the Paralives roadmap, we've got a lot to look forward to – pets, pools, seasons, and all.

Searching for more new games to wishlist? Here are the best games like The Sims 4 out there right now to explore.

Setting a price for your game can be a difficult question. Development tends to be expensive and time-consuming, but you don't want to price out your audience either. According to an industry expert, studios have been losing out on sales for years due to pricing mandates on certain platforms, leading to certain publishers making practically nothing in some regions.

At a Digital Dragons talk attended by GamesRadar+, Tom Kaczmarczyk, the founder of IndieBI, spoke about how now setting individual prices for particular countries can cost devs significant amounts of sales. "If you don't fix your prices in Poland, which many, many publishers and developers still don't," he says.

"You do see a substantial suppression of sales, and when you fix it, you see a boost in sales," he elaborates. "We've seen some of our clients, when we adjusted the pricing in Poland for them, have their revenues in Poland [undergo] substantial growth, like basically leapfrog many other similar countries."

The issue is common pricing, whereby whatever amount you set for the US or Britain is just converted automatically to every other currency where Steam, the Nintendo eShop or whatever you're using is available. This seems fine and dandy until these currencies fluctuate to a large degree, potentially causing the price of your release to nosedive.

"If you look at some platforms, Xbox in particular has never forced developers to update their regional pricing in countries where they experience currency collapse," he points out. "On other platforms, on Steam and Switch, there have been mechanisms that force the developers to update those regional prices, so that they would actually not be leaking effectively free units."

Fixing this can be quite simple - in some cases, it's simply inputting a number into a box on the backend of your game's listing - and yet major publishers still have this problem. Kaczmarzyk points to EA as an example, because the corporation see minimal returns in pretty large markets because of this.

"For some games, we've seen 40% units being sold in Argentina, which generates no revenue whatsoever. It's just region surfing, and then we sell it over again," he states of the process. Whether you're a developer or a player, this is something to keep in mind the next time you're wondering about the price-tag of a game. You could be getting an amazing deal, and if you're selling it, you could be doing yourself a massive disservice.

After many disappointments, The Sims 4 fans desperate for cozy competitors find hope in indie gem Paralives as new gameplay showcases height sliders and more: "My jaw dropped"

Paralives – the promising, colorful indie competitor to The Sims 4 first unveiled in 2019 – is on life sim fans' minds thanks to a plethora of new gameplay videos ahead of its release.

Just in case you're out of the loop, Paralives is set to launch in a few days on May 25, and in preparation for the big day, content creators have been uploading new gameplay footage – footage that has impressed many of us life sim stans.

It's no secret that many folks have felt as though EA is letting us down with The Sims 4, after all, and there's not a plethora of other games to look to. In fact, most of them have met some sort of ill fate.

Sure, inZOI is still receiving updates and all, but it's arguably far emptier than The Sims 4 is still, and other promising projects like Life By You have straight up just… been canceled. So, yeah, it's brutal out here – but Paralives may turn things around for the cozy community.

One of the first elements that has excited fans, for example, is the game's opening. It's not your run-of-the-mill Create-A-Sim knockoff, but rather a more immersive start.

In Paralives, as one fan notes in an online post, you begin on a train and are "able to select or create a household and NPCs to customize your gameplay experience" – something that's "so cool." I certainly agree, and lots of prospective players do, too.

"My jaw dropped when I saw it," exclaims SimMattically, a well-known Sims 4 creator. Another person comments, "Ong this is low-key giving Animal Crossing vibes with the train start; I can't wait."

The train is an adorable throwback to openings like that of Animal Crossing: New Leaf, but it's not the only reveal from all the new gameplay clips that has fans thrilled.

As YouTuber OnlyAbiDoang shares in a thread, there are height sliders – yes, really. No longer will you need to sift through various lists of the best Sims 4 mods to find a way to make your Sims tall or small, as Paralives has that built in as an actual feature.

"Short and tall kings and queens, your time to shine starts here," reads the top comment – and it so is. Another fan chimes in, "Not even most recent AAA games bother adding a height slider anymore when they have character creators… If an indie game can manage to do it well, what excuse do the rest of games have not to?"

I suppose they've got a point, as a big Sims 4 player who has yearned for proper height sliders for years now.

There's more, as well. The build mode has us Simmers in a chokehold, too. Over on Reddit, somebody admits, "videos of the Paramaker and build mode have completely convinced me on the potential of this game."

Honestly, mood – I mean, just have a look on YouTube at the building… "Being able to flip the toilet paper orientation is ridiculous attention to detail, and I love it," as a fan puts it in the replies. Need I say more?

I suppose we'll find out how Paralives truly runs once it releases to the public in a few days – I know I'll be holding my breath waiting until then, anyway.

Searching for more new games to wishlist? Here are the best games like The Sims 4 out there right now to explore.

Over a year after it was finally revealed, the upcoming strategy game Star Wars Zero Company has been rated in Korea, suggesting an imminent release date announcement.

Despite only being officially unveiled around a week before Star Wars Celebration just over a year ago, Star Wars Zero Company has been a long time coming. Reports of Bit Reactor – a new studio at the time, formed by former Firaxis devs – working on a Star Wars game emerged in 2022, with more details coming out a few years later that shed light on what type of strategy game it would be. Safe to say, people have been waiting a while for it, and thankfully, it seems like that wait won't be too much longer.

As spotted by a user on ResetEra, Korea's Game Rating and Administration Committee (GRAC) published its age rating for Star Wars Zero Company. The rating given to the game says it's appropriate for ages 15 and up, citing realistic depictions of violence and vulgar language being used within gameplay. Interestingly, the GRAC rating also cites the game's ESRB rating as T, suggesting the ESRB has rated it despite the rating not being publicly available yet.

As someone who saw Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and thought it was so obnoxiously terrible that it single-handedly put me off of caring about anything Star Wars since (I know Andor seems fantastic, maybe one day), I'm counting on Zero Company to be the thing that gets me back into the franchise, cause Star Wars XCOM seems like an easy slam dunk – especially one set in the Clone Wars era. I just hope it doesn't suffer the fate of Marvel's Midnight Suns, where everyone loves it, but "everyone" is the 10 people who actually bought it.

Star Wars Zero Company will kill story characters, Fire Emblem-style: Narrative lead says "I lost an argument about permadeath, and it was good that I did."

Flush with Saudi money and eager to close its pending acquisition, EA reports a "record" financial year in its latest fiscal release.

The company's net bookings, up 9% year on year to $8.026 billion, were buoyed by Battlefield 6, dubbed "the best performing Battlefield" in a fiscal year. After an explosive launch, Battlefield 6 went on to set "numerous" records for the franchise, EA says.

You may recall that Battlefield 6 was made by developers who were hit with widespread layoffs in March as EA proved once again that demonstrating an ability to make good, critically acclaimed, and hugely profitable games will not shield you from the whims of investors.

Following these layoffs, Battlefield 6's momentum dropped throughout the year. A newly announced roadmap hopes to win players back through way more maps and features.

EA also makes its billions through in-game monetization and its library of sports games, of course, reporting "mid-single-digits" growth in net bookings across EA Sports FC 26, FC online, and FC mobile.

Apex Legends even gets a mention in the report, with EA praising the game's "strongest" quarter of the year "reflecting continued momentum as engagement and monetization continue to improve."

No earnings call was held alongside the report due to EA's pending acquisition. "There are a limited number of regulatory reviews outstanding, and the parties are working diligently to complete these remaining reviews," EA says of the deal, which would see it go $20 billion in debt but, the company insists, not compromise its "creative freedom and player-first values."

Multiple analysts told GamesRadar+ last year that they expect a post-buyout EA to double down on live services and sports at the expense of "new ideas and innovation," with studio closures and layoffs looking unavoidable – much to the dismay of Bioware fans, who were already hanging on by a thread. The silver lining here, analysts speculated, is that EA may also pawn off some IP, letting other people actually do something with them.

Despite assurances otherwise, there are also concerns that, under the company's new owners, led by Saudi Arabia's Private Investment Fund, series like The Sims will face new censorial pressure. Developer Maxis stressed earlier this year, clearly responding to those concerns, that "creative control, guided by our values of inclusivity, choice, creativity, community, and play, has not changed."

EA tells employees worried about layoffs after $55 billion buyout that there will be "no immediate changes" to your jobs, and I think "immediate" is the key word here.

Voice actors don't always get the credit they deserve. Despite bringing characters to life and then representing games at events, they're sometimes treated as mere footnotes in the development process. A performer on Dragon Age: Inquisition credits two stars of Baldur's Gate 3 with helping to raise the status of such contributors across the board.

"Video game acting is, at times, hard, demanding, and also challenging, and it's also joyous, and it's filled with, literally, blood and sweat and tears, especially if you're on the [performance capture] stage," Alix Wilton Regan, who voiced the female Inquisitor in Inquisition, told GamesRadar+ at the BAFTA Games Awards. "So video game actors, they deserve their flowers, because we help pull the audience in to elevate the writing, the animation, the direction, the tone."

Truer words are rarely spoken. Voice actors give nuance and personality to the cast, deepening the narrative and creating a closer connection with the audience. They can, and often do, help elevate great games into masterpieces.

"I give a massive shout-out here to the Baldur's Gate 3 crew, because they were the ones who made all the other video game actors sit up and take note and realize, 'Yeah, actually, we are loved, our work does have value, and we too deserve to stand up and be counted,' Regan continues.

"I've literally said this to, like, Jennifer English's face, or Neil Newbon. I've been up to Ben Starr, and I'm like, 'You changed the game,'" she adds. Starr, ever the charmer, turned it around on her by pointing out that she voiced the Inquisitor, a huge role in a widely-regarded RPG.

Baldur's Gate 3 might be more pertinent to recent memory, but the third Dragon Age installment was the fantasy adventure du jour for a while there. It's hard to imagine any of these projects without these performers involved, and long may their success continue.

Baldur's Gate 3 was "lightning in a bottle," Astarion actor says, and "proved a lot of things" that big companies "who are just really chasing the money need to learn from"

One led to a movie where Jeff Goldblum gets beat up by a tyrannosaurus while the other inspired centuries of strange little girls like me hosting tea parties for their eyeless teddy bears – but Jurassic Park and Alice in Wonderland have an important connection through the former's creator, Michael Crichton. Without him, ex-Doom developer American McGee may have never made the Alice action game in 2000 that, 26 years later, still represents one of publisher EA's most beloved series.

"I can't say that, looking back on my childhood, that I remember or recall being the world's biggest Alice in Wonderland fan," McGee admits to YouTuber Tucker Hazell in a new episode of his Dev Dive interview series. McGee enjoyed Lewis Carroll's 1865 bedtime tale about following the White Rabbit into dreamland, where a bite of cake makes you tall before the Queen of Hearts slices your throat. But he says, "I really had to be hit over the head by coincidence, and other people kind of bringing it to me. and making mention of it multiple times before it clicked in my head, like, 'Duh, I should make a game out of this, right?'"

"One of the first people to mention this to me was Michael Crichton," recalls McGee. According to him, as McGee worked creatively with Crichton on what eventually became the Timeline franchise, the writer told him something like, "'Yeah, Alice in Wonderland,'" as they discussed story ideas.

"I was like, 'Yeah, yeah, whatever, Michael Crichton,'" says McGee.

"I think one of my initial reasons for kind of dismissing it was that, 'Well, that's for kids,'" he explains. "I don't want to do something so light-hearted."

McGee had just been fired from Quake developer id Software in 1998, but then he got "hit by the lightning of luck" a few times and "somehow got, you know, this mysterious phone call from Michael Crichton, which ends up dragging me into his world. And then that parlays into getting a job at EA," where McGee says he once got into a "Quake death match" with late actor Robin Williams.

"You know, I'm hanging out with Marilyn Manson for Christ's sake," McGee blurts. "I want to do something, you know, a little bit darker, more edge."

But Alice ignored the blaring shock rock music and kept knocking. "At some point," says McGee, "it percolated, and it stewed in my head long enough, [...] and it kind of crystallized almost immediately as this dark, gothic, psychological exploration set in the world of Wonderland."

McGee still doesn't consider himself an Alice in Wonderland expert. He says the first Alice game was made to be "a line in history where you think you know Alice in Wonderland from the books, but I've just burned down her house and killed her family."

I, however, identify myself as a steward of all Alice nonsense, and as a hardcore fan of both Carroll's original books and American McGee's Alice games, I believe they all contain an admirable, grotesque sentimentality. Like rabbit foot taxidermy. However, perhaps unfortunately for the late Michael Crichton, there aren't any dinosaurs…

Alice Madness Returns creator American McGee is making a spiritual successor, and he's not worried about EA: "There's a kind of obvious overlap, but not one that gets us in trouble with the lawyers."

In an attempt to counter the notion that EA is replacing human labor with AI, CEO Andrew Wilson says the tech has somehow created more jobs within the publisher. As much appears to be what's happening in the QA department, at least.

He addressed concerns during Iicon, a games conference in Las Vegas organized by the Entertainment Software Association, the same outfit behind the now-defunct E3. "I saw some data recently, I think, now almost all – like 85% – of our quality assurance [work] is done with some kind of machine learning or AI-driven algorithm," he explains during an on-stage interview, per Game File.

"Yet as a company, we hire more QA people than we ever have," he adds. I have to say, that seems counter-intuitive to the whole workflow. Why bother with the new technology if it's requiring more hands on deck and not less? And isn't the whole pitch that it'll streamline processes? I digress, back to Wilson.

The jobs being given to AI are basic, according to him: "The simple stuff – turn the box on, turn the box off, boot it up, shut it down, does it crash, all these things."

Real people come in afterward to analyze the readouts and findings. Given the proclivity of hallucinations and simply bad data, this part seems intrinsic if you want quality assurance that actually assures quality.

When questioned about if AI is taking jobs at EA, or just augmenting them, Wilson says it's only mostly the latter at present. "So far, it's been almost entirely augmentation," he says.

Wilson previously stated that AI is at "the very core of our business" in 2024. Amid the announcement of the publisher's proposed buyout by a group of investors including Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners last year, EA said it "will maintain a thoughtful, steady approach to AI."

There have been reports of EA bringing in chatbots for mandatory use across the business, including for HR and managerial matters. These claims remain unsubstantiated, but from what Wilson's said here, the tech is making its way into certain facets of the development pipeline, and that doesn't appear to be changing for the time being.

EA asked former Doom dev American McGee to make his next game "'more sexy,'" so he pasted "dildos onto the head of a giant snail" and "they stopped making those requests."

I thought I'd learned a lot about American McGee's 2011 game Alice: Madness Returns in the years since declaring the grungy fairytale series some of my all-time favorite games, but I never knew about… the dildo snails.

"I tried searching my emails for it and failed," former id Software developer McGee says on Twitter. "Then I tried to Google it. Yeah, don't try to Google it." Dildo snails aren't the kind of thing human hands are meant to go searching for. But, at the time of Madness Returns' production, Alice publisher EA was practically begging for it.

McGee provides insight into his former relationship with EA – it curdled when the publisher passed on his careful pitch for a third game, Alice: Asylum – in an April 23 Twitter post. He reacts to a compilation of teaser trailers that fans have been noting for 15 years as incongruous to the game. McGee explains, "It would be fair to say that there was a fairly big disconnect between the game I wanted to make and the game EA Marketing wanted me to make when we were developing Madness Returns."

"The marketing team felt strongly that a Hard M title focused on gore, horror, and featuring a 'psychotic' Alice was what audiences would respond to best," he continues. This is evident from watching those teasers – in one, Alice has her hair fluffed in quintessentially 2011 scene girl layers, wearing a tight, pristine white apron she quickly soils with blood as she opens her mouth and a front tooth pops out.

In the Madness Returns game that launched, horror lives in dirty floorboards and the back of Alice's mind – it's rarely as explicit as a spilled bucket of blood. And Alice's outfits prioritize whimsy over dressing for your body type – the Caterpillar dress, for example, wraps her in bulbous insect parts and tops her off with a twirly pair of antennae. Her 19-year-old sex appeal is never part of Madness Returns… especially because it's a game where the heroine kills her lecherous abuser in the end.

But EA didn't get it. McGee summoned the snails. He says, "I did NOT want [to] portray Alice as a psycho, cover her in blood, or 'make things more sexy' (yes, that was a request)".

"Famously, I pasted dildos onto the head of a giant snail in response to the 'sexy' request and emailed that to the Marketing team. They stopped making those requests."

GamesRadar+ resident retro gaming enthusiast and writer Dustin Bailey also alerted me to how McGee, in his own words during a 2025 interview, spent a lot of time "protecting Alice" from EA as they asked for her "to have a shorter skirt."

"Out of my office!" says McGee. "I was mad. I was like, 'Are you kidding me? Do you know what this story is about? And you're asking me what happens if you look up her skirt?"

The brave snails with dildos on their heads finally taught EA the lesson it was having trouble with, and fans received an appropriately stylish fantasy game. Anyway, "I liked the marketing for what it was," McGee mentions in another Twitter post. "Excellent quality and content. Just slightly misaligned with what we developed."

Alice Madness Returns creator American McGee is making a spiritual successor, and he's not worried about EA: "There's a kind of obvious overlap, but not one that gets us in trouble with the lawyers."

Developer American McGee had to learn he was destined for goth greatness at some point, so why not during Quake 2's development? Somewhere around 30 years ago, he found out he was interested in telling stories through video games in a way his co-workers at id Software didn't care for, and it eventually led him to create my favorite, graveyard smash Alice games.

In response to a clip from his 2000 game American McGee's Alice on Twitter, the former Doom developer remembers the moment he discovered others at id Software weren't eager to use the studio's proprietary Quake engine for "proper cinematic storytelling."

The gameplay clip demonstrates what he means: it's from early in Alice, when the wayward girl gives into her anger at everyone who seeks to confine her, developing ram horns and an itchy red glow. The Rage gives her temporary invincibility, plus a firepower buff, and in the short clip, we see a player using it to demolish enemies in seconds. Then they push open a few squeaky doors and wander into a series of treacherous, floating puzzle sections characterized by black-and-white tiled floors, winding stone staircases, and the sneering Cheshire cat who delivers advice through insults.

"The proper order of things is often a mystery to me," he says at one stage. "You too?"

The game camera tracks Alice in different ways throughout all of it, to set different moods. It gets in her face when she's full of Rage, then it zooms out at odd angles when she's navigating a puzzle and disoriented.

McGee's interest in constructing a game this way – with emotional layers – he says in his Twitter post, traces back to "this one time at id Software when we were working on Quake 2 and everyone piled into [late video game artist] Paul Steed's office to check out what Valve was doing was our tech. And there was a cinematic scene with characters moving around while a crane operating and multiple cameras panning around to convey some element of the narrative. Proper cinematic storytelling using the Quake engine!"

"And I let out a breathless 'WOW,'" McGee continues. "The whole room turned around and scowled at me. Ha. That was the moment I knew, 'OK, well. I want to tell stories with this tech. And these guys don't.'"

McGee was eventually fired from id Software in 1998, though, he says in another Twitter post, "I have no idea why I was let go from id. In the meeting where I was told I was being let go, I recall [studio co-founder John] Carmack or someone saying something along the lines of, 'We feel you no longer fit in here.'"

That day, McGee "first cried," he says, then "I began smiling. Then laughing. And the first chance I was given to do something on my own with that tech? Well, I pushed it as hard as I could in relation to surreal visuals and cinematic storytelling. 26 years later and I can still say 'Wow.'"

Alice and its 2011 sequel Madness Returns, which McGee says "felt like magic" to make, stun me with their narrative and stylistic ambition. Plenty of developers have tried to imitate them in the decades since they were made, but the games are surely made with a secret recipe combination of fairytale horror and dizzy platforming that I don't think anyone other than McGee understands. That's why I nervously confirmed with him earlier this spring that he was working on a spiritual successor to the games – and why I'm overjoyed that he is.

Alice Madness Returns creator American McGee is making a spiritual successor, and he's not worried about EA: "There's a kind of obvious overlap, but not one that gets us in trouble with the lawyers."

Despite a purportedly huge launch, 2026 hasn't been especially kind to Battlefield 6, what with EA laying off a number of devs associated with the FPS back in March. Now, in order to generate some renewed buzz for the shooter, the roadmap for the rest of the year has been unveiled, and I hope you like new maps, because there are plenty.

To start us off, in May, two classic areas have been re-imagined to the "visual fidelity and gameplay" of Battlefield 6, a press release states. First up is the one players have been waiting for, the remake of Railway to Golmud, from Battlefield 4.

Not only is this the return of a fan-favorite sandbox, but it'll be the biggest map of the current selection to date, helping to ease some of the displeasure at the lack of substantive playgrounds in the sixth mainline entry so far. Right on the heels of Railway to Golmud, then, is a redux of Grand Bazaar from Battlefield 3, renamed Cairo Bazaar.

A quads mode for Redsec is coming, and some new weapons to boot. Moving into July for the next phase, another two maps are included: Tsuru Reef and Wake Island. They both contain large bodies of water, which is fitting because naval battles are coming in tandem. Custom lobbies and spectator mode are part of the July rollout as well.

Proximity chat is on the docket too, for an undetermined date, and a further three maps will come in the fall, as we head into the one year anniversary of the game's release. Likewise, there'll be further avenues for especially skilled players to test their mettle.

"The Open and Elite competitive series, the pinnacle of competition in Battlefield, will arrive this year following our work with players in evolving the Ranked Play experience," says the press release. "This series will showcase the absolute best competitive play that Battlefield has to offer on the global stage."

"The fundamentals of FPS should drive our decision": Battlefield 6 designers say developers have a "responsibility" to make games intuitive

The Sims is dead. Long live The Sims. The death rattle began in September 2024, when publisher EA officially announced that The Sims 4 was to graduate into an ongoing, Fortnite-like platform. The same announcement revealed there would be no Sims 5 incoming, and that upcoming multiplayer venture Project Rene is set to exist alongside The Sims 4 instead. Whatever wariness I had for the end of the life sim's generational format can't compare with the truth of seeing the thing I love being taken out back and quietly put down.

The Sims 4's future is hanging over it like a guillotine, and in a selfish way, it's a distraction. I can't even enjoy its latest expansion – Royalty and Legacy, something I was so hyped for as a huge lover of The Sims Medieval – in good faith. How can I crown myself princess of the realm when the new microtransaction system cements The Sims 4 as just another live service game?

Not with a bang, but with a "glarch"

The Sims 4 Marketplace is my nemesis. I'm not here to slate battle passes and paid add-ons as a business strategy – what goes on between you and your credit card is none of my business, pal – but rather how and why these premium currencies put me off games as a 31 year-old.

Battle passes, seasonal content drops, and the "exclusivity" factors ascribed to them are there to feed our FOMO in this age of instant gratification, and unfortunately, it's proven to be a lucrative cash grab. Anyone can fall victim to such a siren song. Nickel-and-diming isn't exactly a new phenomenon in the world of gaming.

Premium in-game currencies and microtransactions have been around longer than battle passes, following a proud tradition of shoving quarters into arcade cabinets. And there I was thinking gaming had come such a long way since Pac-Man. Part of the reason you'd stump up the big bucks for something like those massive Neo Geo carts was to get away from the money hungry machines.

Alas, the beast has only transformed. Free-to-play games (FTP) with optional microtransactions, once heavily identified with mobile gaming, have now become the de-facto way to play online with pals across devices, with games like Fortnite being played by millions and the game itself having peaked at 44.7m players as of 2023.

EA took The Sims 4 free-to-play on Steam in 2022, and at the time, I shrugged it off. Despite its obvious positioning as a tempting ground, dangling exciting expansion packs in front of gamers on a budget, The Sims 4 is one of the best free Steam games as long as you can ignore the upselling that has been rampant ever since The Sims 4 adopted a more storefront-like splash page.

But now it's 2026, and The Sims 4 has just received its very own microtransaction system to boot.

Dag dag for now

If Royalty and Legacy really does turn out to be the 21st and final Sims 4 expansion pack, as the rumor mill claims, players will still be able to purchase in-game currency called Moolah using their real-life pennies and exchange it for new build or buy-mode items.

You can buy acne patches with Moolah. You can buy new t-shirts with Moolah. I used to download things like that for free from community modders back in 2007, or at least I would have if pimple patches as fashion choices had been a thing when I was 12. There's nothing about the Sims 4 Marketplace that serves me as someone who's been playing it since launch. I already have all the Sims expansion packs I want, and I'm not going to be buying a handful of acne patch accessories for £5 just because.

The end result is the unfortunate commodification of something that was once the life sim’s biggest strength: its creative community, and all the clever things it would come up with to enhance one another’s Simming experiences through the best Sims 4 mods.

It's confronted me with the fact that the free-to-play business model is precisely that: a money-making business model. In this case, one that caters to the younger end of the admittedly broad age spectrum of Sims 4 players, for whom microtransactions have always been a loud and proud norm in their games since they can remember.

If this is the future EA thinks we want for The Sims 4, it's certainly not the one I had in mind. Maybe it's time I return to The Sims 2 for good. At least it has pizza.

Explore some games like the Sims 4 if you're also on the hunt for your next life sim obsession.

Will Wright blazed through the early video game industry like a comet – he co-founded Maxis, created the very first SimCity, The Sims in 2000, and released the ultimate life sim Spore in 2008. Much more quietly, Wright has spent the last decade on an AI-enabled, psychoanalytic thing with huge ambitions and zero budget, but he's determined to keep it breathing.

"Kind of like Frankenstein," Wright tells Vulture in a new profile. It's called Proxi: Yesterday’s You Tomorrow, and Wright's studio Gallium Studios revealed it at Game Developers Conference in 2018, though the idea of it has been nagging at Wright since 2016. In the years since, Wright has spent millions of his and investors' dollars, laid off his staff in 2024 when the money ran out, and is now retaining a few unpaid developers to make it happen. One day.

Gallium's website advertises a few cutesy shots of its pea-headed avatars, or Proxies, getting married, having sandwiches at a picnic table, and observing a fish fly off a campfire grill and get stuck in a UFO's alien beam. The game part of it is to "experience and share memories" through simulacrum, Proxies of people you know in real life in an effort to "discover hidden connections between your memories" – like the thread between a good, spring day at the park and the time you swear you got probed on Mars, seemingly.

To help you thoroughly analyze all these likely fuzzy memories, Proxi uses an AI algorithm to create and sort your inputs, and players also earn points for adding memories with conceptual throughlines.

Investors don't get it. Even Wright hasn't fully decided on what Proxi should be, 10 years later. He worries about "nested memories, basically" – multiple memories made in the same location – and importing your Proxi into genealogy websites to communicate with your ancestors through AI. The Sims creator has made a real mess. But "I'd much rather have a glorious failure than a mild success," Wright says.

The Sims turns 20: Creator Will Wright reflects on the battle he waged to get one of the best games of all time made.

Battlefield 6 launched in October to generally very solid reviews, with our own writeup awarding the FPS 4/5 stars and calling it "a carefully-crafted and layered multiplayer" experience with a lackluster main campaign. The game has a "generally favorable" 83 Metascore and EA has said it was "the biggest launch in franchise history" (which doesn't gel with the studio's recent layoffs, but that's beside the point).

So, what's the key to Battlefield 6's success compared to its closest competitor, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, which launched a month later to a much less enthusiastic reception? Well, no one knows for sure, but in a panel during this year's Game Developer's Conference, Battlefield designer Jac Carlsson explains the developer's philosophy toward game feel and stresses the importance of function over form.

"How do I balance the aesthetic goals versus the core function of the game?" says Carlsson. "So if we lean into a kind of military fantasy, right? A military simulation, in a way, Battlefield also has a dash of arcade shooter to it, but at the top and foundation of it all, the team agree that the fundamentals of FPS should drive our decision. This means solid input, so low input latency, and movement and firing that is connected to the reality of the gameplay and the rhythm of the game.

"Good game feel, in this sense, starts with understanding what game you have. If you strip away everything and just look at the core function of it, it's an FPS, so the first person movement, firing, damage, has to guide what I call the alignment of perception in gameplay."

It's here that things get a little nebulous, but essentially, it sounds like Carlsson is saying DICE has a certain vision for how a new Battlefield game will look, but it builds that vision around core elements of gameplay rather than vice-versa.

"So response time and aesthetics are important, but they're not enough, because the qualitative behavior of that response is what's going to determine the player's ability to intuitively sequence motions and actions," says Carlsson, adding that he feels a "responsibility" to "convey the sensory input you will get in the real world, but in the game world." In essence, to make the game's controls feel intuitive, if I'm picking up what Carlsson's putting down.

Again, it's vague, but it's still an interesting insight into DICE's broad-level approach to FPS game design, especially when Battlefield 6 so recently dethroned Call of Duty for the FPS crown.

Skate dev announces layoffs days after breaking paywall promise and announcing more aggressive monetization, but "our work on skate. continues."

As Dragon Age 2 turns 15, because time slows for nobody, former lead writer on the series David Gaider has taken some time to reflect on the slightly troubled sequel. A victim of publisher demands, the follow-up to Origins didn't quite land how anyone hoped, due in no small part to constantly shifting goalposts.

Remembering the development of Dragon Age 2 in an interview with The Gamer, Gaider recalls the period being a "big jumble," thanks to EA. "I had started plotting out the Dragon Age: Origins sequel. I was going into the whole thing with Solas and the stuff that eventually ended up in Inquisition," he says. "And then there was a sudden change."

That "sudden change" was EA looking for something from BioWare to release during the fiscal year ending in March 2011. Star Wars: The Old Republic had been delayed, and a full game seemed too ambitious, therefore DLC for Origins became the plan.

"I was just thrown because I was like, 'Oh, what do I want to do here?' I guess I could set up the story beats to come, like, set up the exalted march on Kirkwall," Gaider says. Then, another curveball arrived: "It was only as we were starting to put that together that I remember being told, no, it's not expansion-sized. It's a full sequel that we're going to do at the time of an expansion."

Oh dear. This led to a lot of internal scrambling and long hours, as Gaider and the other lead devs pushed to make something worth shipping in a fraction of the type typically needed. BioWare's own design philosophies were part of the problem.

"BioWare as a team did not know how to make a small game. We planned for a big game," Gaider remembers. "And when we're told this is a full sequel, initially for the first four months of work, we're assuming that it was going to be much bigger."

In one instance, he talks about going into a writers' room where all sorts of quest-lines were laid out on sticky-notes, and just taking away chunks. "I had to take out half of them," he states.

This led to a smaller-feeling sequel – no open-world, more concentrated doses of exploration, and less backstory all round – but one that still resonated with some fans. We eventually got a grander, more epic sequel in Dragon Age: Inquisition, and Dragon Age 2 serves as the cult entry. I consider it the Final Fantasy 8 of the series, and honestly, there are much worse results from this kind of situation.

Dragon Age and Anthem veteran argues risk-averse AAA games have become "too homogenous" and "soulless," which might lead fans to accept generative AI.

By all visible metrics, Battlefield 6 had a wildly successful launch far exceeding any previous entry in the venerable FPS series – a fact which EA was keen to brag about last year. But that hasn't saved the devs who worked on it from wide-ranging layoffs, according to a new report.

EA has laid off workers at Criterion, Dice, Ripple Effect, and Motive, according to a new report from IGN. All four offices are part of what EA calls "Battlefield Studios," and collaborated on Battlefield 6. Employees were reportedly told that this was part of a "realignment" effort across the studios, and one not connected to the company's impending $55 billion buyout, though specific numbers and more detailed reasoning for the layoffs have not yet been made public.

Shortly after the game's release in October, EA called Battlefield 6 "the biggest launch in franchise history," with over 7 million units sold in the first three days alone. In December, analysis firm Alinea estimated that the game had sold over 20 million copies, with a total of 26 million players once you figure in the free-to-play Redsec battle royale.

It was even the best-selling game in the US last year, beating the new Call of Duty release for the first time in the 23 years that the two military FPS franchises had been going head-to-head. But success has never offered much insulation from layoffs in the game industry, especially with pre-release reports suggesting that EA had poured $400 million into Battlefield 6 and expected the game to reach more than 100 million players.

While the game was well-received at launch – Joel called it "deep enough to be tactical and simple enough to be accessible" in our four-star Battlefield 6 review – its post-launch content has struggled to keep players coming back for more. The devs have been taking steps to address specific complaints about things like map size as part of Battlefield 6 Season 2, but the 'mixed' recent review on Steam suggest those changes aren't really breaking through.

Skate dev announces layoffs days after breaking paywall promise and announcing more aggressive monetization, but "our work on skate. continues."

Just yesterday, EA unveiled that The Sims 4 was getting a new feature – the "Marketplace," as it's so aptly dubbed – to sell what are essentially paid mods and custom content.

As the studio described in its announcement, The Sims 4 Marketplace "is an intentional evolution of a multi-year strategy to support custom content creators" and is accompanied by the arrival of a new real-money currency: Moola.

I, as a long-time Simmer myself, was a bit shocked to hear the news – after spending over $1,500 on DLC (including the fan-created Kits, which sound similar to what'll be on the Marketplace), it was a hard pill to swallow. I feel like sprucing up the base game experience should come in one of two ways, personally: browsing roundups of the best Sims 4 mods to download for free, or exploring updates from EA.

Enough money goes to full, developer-led paid DLC, or so I believe (I mean, come on, the last one just launched last month, and expansion packs release pretty regularly) – and it seems I'm not the only one who feels this way.

Online reactions to The Sims 4 Marketplace have been pretty uniform in structure. Folks are overall not thrilled. Under one Reddit post, they share their thoughts, comparing EA's new feature to Bethesda's own Creation Club – another unpopular service for paid mods in games like Skyrim.

"Soooo it's the Bethesda creation club," comments one player. Another adds, "This is hilarious, they just copied Bethesda." My personal favorite reads, "EA is basically reheating Bethesda's nachos. Remember the Creation Club?"

Simmers are also pointing out that The Sims 4 Marketplace is "basically microtransactions" – and they're not exactly wrong. It feels like a return (none of us wanted) of The Sims 3 Store, except nothing is free. And while it might feel like supporting creators outside of EA, they're not really getting the full cut themselves.

As someone points out in a thread elsewhere, "I really hope all the CC creators who signed up for this Sims 4 Marketplace eventually realize they're being played by EA, only getting 30% profit from your creations is truly a slap in the face and insulting."

Others are just annoyed that this is happening at all. "This isn't Minecraft, which is a stable one-time price game with additional content," a player outlines in a separate post.

"Sims 4 costs 1,000 dollars for many main features, and now wants to pile a Marketplace on top of that. Base game alone is boring and bland, save corruption looms. This is horrible."

In other words, the community is not happy. One silver lining, at least, is the fact that this opens up some new possibilities for console players who didn't have access to mods and custom content before. But, uh, I'm still not excited, though.

The Sims 4's biggest sex mod, WickedWhims, is launched 400,000 times a day according to its creator

I am admittedly frustrated to report that The Sims 4 is getting a new feature that many of us might have preferred to live without – a paid "Marketplace" where we can, you guessed it, purchase custom content and mods from fellow fans.

It's not the thought of paying hard-working players for their work that upsets me. It's the fact that, after spending over $1,500 on DLC (and, yes, you read that right), I will now be able to spend even more to spruce my base game experience up.

The Sims 4 Marketplace, as EA has so aptly dubbed the feature, is pretty much The Sims 3 Store but for the more recent life sim. See some sofas you like? Ready your wallets, they'll cost you.

As EA describes it in a new announcement, "This is an intentional evolution of a multi-year strategy to support custom content creators, expanding from co-developed Kits to Creator Kits and now The Sims 4 Marketplace and the Maker Program. This has all been thoughtfully built over the past few years to expand the reach and celebrate these incredible creatives."

As it stands, Kits themselves are $5 each. Prices on the Marketplace will vary.

It's not set to go live as a feature until March 17, when it'll roll out first on PC and then consoles in the coming months.

EA explains that it'll be fully integrated into The Sims 4 for a more seamless experience while shopping, and will introduce a new real-money currency: Moola. While the developers stress that the Marketplace "does not replace free content" and every purchase supports the creative fans selling their content, it's all understandably worrying.

I'm not the only one concerned, either. Comments under EA's official social media post on the upcoming virtual store prove as much. "BIG yikes," reads one. Another player writes, "Rest in peace, The Sims 4, I knew this was coming."

Others point out that the company will also make money off this, implying it's disingenuous to frame it as a net positive for custom content and mod creators. "I… can't even describe the horror I'm feeling."

The Sims 4 Marketplace is evidently not exactly proving popular with the community – but to be fair to EA, it isn't out yet. There's a chance it'll be okay, and I mean, I guess this does finally allow console users to have a go at downloading custom content and mods.

Hoping to spruce your base game up for free before the Marketplace lands? Browse through our roundup of the best Sims 4 mods available to download.

30-year video game industry veteran American McGee once helped make Doom and Quake, but now he's spending time on James, the protagonist with bedhead who only exists in the preliminary stages of storyboarding – plus, as "my middle name," McGee tells me during our recent Zoom call. But since James is set to star in the follow-up to McGee's 2011 cult classic Alice: Madness Returns, he, as Alice's fellow orphan in arms, might have the power to bring back the franchise fans like me assumed was really, really dead.

In 2023, publisher EA shut down McGee's meticulously crafted pitch for Alice: Asylum, a proposed third game in the American McGee's Alice series that began in 2000. Hurt, McGee planned to retire from games entirely – but, this year, the character James and McGee's stuffed animal business Plushie Dreadfuls began clawing him back. McGee is now working to create a spiritual successor to Alice: Madness Returns, an official Plushie Dreadfuls game set in a semi-alternate universe populated by 330 button-eyed plush rabbits.

"It's like a rocket that took off without us knowing that there was even a rocket there to begin with," he says about Plushie Dreadfuls, which McGee and his wife Yeni Zhang started in 2015, "as I was trying to get out of the game development world." The pair made their first rabbit plush while supporting Alice: Asylum, as an homage to the white rabbit Alice clutches in her first game when she retreats into Wonderland, a treacherous fantasy representative of her slipping sanity.

While looking at the spill of moody concept art and narrative ideas McGee has been posting to his social media since December, when he first announced his intentions of making a Plushie Dreadfuls game, I see Alice's ghost everywhere. It's in the balance of whimsy and death McGee often experiments with, evidenced in artist Si'yann's concept art of an inviting hat shop propped up by a human skull leaking mercury.

Sometimes, the spirit of Alice is even more obvious – while blue tears ribbon down his face, James holds the Plushie Dreadfuls Alice rabbit McGee also sent me after our interview. Its cleft lip seems unhappily pursed, and in keeping it on my bed, I've observed that its black hole eyes seem to notice what I'm feeling before I do.

Or, I'm just projecting onto a stuffed animal again. James does it too. To him, the Alice plush is "the only thing that feels real," McGee writes in a narrative outline. Like his games, McGee's stuffies exist playfully in the shadows – striped with scars, they're not as sunlit as their cute exteriors would suggest. They put me in the place fellow rabbit enthusiast and Silent Hill designer Usagi Tanaka first told me about regarding his Robbie the Rabbit mascot – "cute but scary," a zone where you can acknowledge tragedy without being engulfed in it.

In returning to gaming, McGee credits Japanese fans who attended a Plushie Dreadfuls pop-up shop in Tokyo in December – inspiring him with handwritten notes about how much his Alice games meant to them.

"It was really, really moving," McGee says. "I literally cried on a couple of occasions, and I felt bad for the people that brought me these notes, because they suddenly have this grown man crying in front of them." But, you know, tears make space for epiphanies, and the experience made him "realize that, I still have these stories to tell," McGee says. "I can't just sit on these [ideas], because when I sit on ideas like that, it makes me crazy."

So "softly. On soil that looks like velvet. Smells faintly of smoke and sugar," as McGee writes in a Plushie Dreadfuls story outline, "I've made an explicit point to link the start of the Plushie Dreadfuls game with the end of Madness Returns. And, in doing that, you [can] call that a spiritual sequel," McGee says. "There's a kind of obvious overlap, but not one that gets us in trouble with the lawyers."

In that sense, the in-progress Plushie Dreadfuls game is helping McGee "achieve a certain level of closure," and he expects fans will feel the same.

"Alice, in some ways, she was drawing off of past experiences that I had as a child," McGee explains. "With writing the character for James, it's a very similar thing. He's an orphan, but he's been adopted into this kind of dark, evil family." Since the Plushie Dreadfuls themselves are shrunken totems of emotion and mental health conditions, McGee emphasizes the game will be about exploring those feelings.

Alice, blood-splotched and indignant, instead had the more active goal of pushing her abuser in front of a train. Revenge, to her, is indeed pastry cream sweet. With this in mind, I ask McGee what the Alice games might taste like.

"That's a tough one," he says. "I would imagine people might suggest, on the outside, they taste sweet, interesting – you know, when you first fall into that world. But in the center is something dark and gooey and bitter." With the Plushie Dreadfuls project, I'm looking forward to taking another bite.

12 years on, the bleakly beautiful world of the Alice games is enchanting as ever.

Battlefield 6 producer Alexia Christofi has explained why Battlefield 6 is only releasing two maps per season when previous games had more going on by this point in their lives.

Battlefield 4 – what many consider to be the last great Battlefield game before 6 released – had ten maps on launch, but by the time it hit the one-year mark, it had 22 extra maps added to its rotation. And while Battlefield 6 is adding two maps per season, some players are a bit disappointed things aren't happening faster, given that Battlefield 4's launch year had what equated to almost two maps per month.

Speaking to Gamesbeat in an interview, Christofi explains, "We're releasing on a cadence where we feel the maps are up to quality and we're happy with how they play, the variety they give to the players." She adds: "There are worlds in which we release hundreds of maps, but they're not fun. We never want to do that. We have to make sure that the maps feel good to play, that they're fun to play."

Christofi continues, "I completely empathize with players when they want more maps and more content. They talk about that because they're passionate about the game, passionate about the franchise." However, she emphasizes, "we're a team of a certain size. We don't want to sacrifice quality."

Of course, it's a double-edged sword, because if maps are taking too long to come out, people won't be happy, but if maps release constantly and feel like rushed trash, people still won't be happy. Not to mention Battlefield 4 charged for maps back in the day, which in the era of battle passes and live service likely won't work out well for anyone.

Battlefield 6 Season 2 delay "broke that pace" of the "smooth launch," but lead hopes update will be "the foundation"

Battlefield 6 Season 2 is finally here, and producer Phil Girette thinks not only is it the FPS' "strongest season" so far, but it's also going to be "kind of the foundation going forward," hopefully making up for its delay's disruption to the game's "smooth launch."

Battlefield 6 Season 2 was meant to launch last month, but Season 1 ended up being extended to "allow extra time to further develop and refine Season 2 as a result of community feedback." Speaking in a recent interview with TechRadar Gaming, Girette says the devs "were super happy to have had a smooth launch for once" when Battlefield 6 first released, but acknowledges that this was disrupted.

"Going into Season 1, I think the key thing there because, [...] there were a lot of people spending a lot of time playing it, what kind of broke that pace is the extension we did of Season 1," he admits, even if Season 2 needed that extra time "in the oven" for improvements.

"Season 2 is definitely bigger than what we have done in Season 1," he says. "We have the maps, we think they're going to be quite strong. We have the additional gameplay mechanics. We have popular vehicles coming back like the Little Bird. There's a whole new addition in REDSEC itself as well."

Although Girette questions if "the perfect Battlefield season" even exists, he says: "Everyone sat together and said, 'This is really, really strong.' We want to use Season 2 as kind of the foundation going forward – this is the level we need to hit. We hope that the players think the same, but I think this is going to be the strongest season [yet]."

Elsewhere, it's been acknowledged that Battlefield 6 fans are begging for larger maps, but "maps are one of the most time-intensive things that we build," so the devs are going to "need some more time" for that particular bit of feedback.

As Battlefield 6 loses more ground to Arc Raiders after Season 2 delay, lead says devs have "taken a lot of different steps" to prevent more holdups: "We need to make sure those hit as expected."

A recurring complaint of Battlefield 6 has been the size of the maps, with the FPS lacking the bigger playgrounds the series is known for. The devs are aware of this, and on the back of Battlefield 6 Season 2's launch, they're keeping player requests in mind, but it's not a simple creative choice.

Phil Girette, a producer on Battlefield 6, explained to TheGamer why it can't be an immediate shift. "We see that feedback, and hear it very loudly," he says. "More maps is, of course, something that we will look more into. But also maps are one of the most time-intensive things that we build. We'll need some more time."

He points out, rightly, that Season 2 has two maps, one of which is on the bigger end of the scale. These things are part of what EA and the Battlefield studios want to bring to the shooter, but getting them to standard is, as he suggests, a process.

"We need to make sure that the maps hit the quality and match the expectations of what the players want," Girette states. "We're already testing Golmud Railway early on Labs now, so that's a step in the right direction."

Indeed, Golmud Railway, a fan-favorite map from Battlefield 4, is getting remade for the current installment. Although it's in playtesting, it might be a while before we actually see it, and understand what changes were made. Nonetheless, it'll bring some of the scale and explosive energy people are clearly yearning for.

While it mightn't be everything you'd like from Battlefield 6, Season 2 still has plenty to offer, even if it did arrive slightly late. Two modes, on top of a pair of new maps, should provide ample chaos, while we wait and see what the next major updates have to offer.

As Battlefield 6 loses more ground to Arc Raiders after Season 2 delay, lead says devs have "taken a lot of different steps" to prevent more holdups: "We need to make sure those hit as expected."

After a huge launch, some of the wind was taken out of Battlefield 6's sails with the delay of Season 2. Originally meant to arrive in January, it was pushed back a full month, rolling out today, February 17, instead. In the face of competition from the likes of Arc Raiders and the imminent Marathon, a prominent dev says the hope is for Battlefield 6's rollout to be tighter going forward.

"We saw the content we had planned for Season 2 and we wanted just to give that a little bit more time in the oven to polish things and make sure we hit the expectations that players have," Phil Girette, producer at Battlefield 6 studio DICE, tells Gamereactor.

"Obviously, once you plan out seasons, there's a lot of things that come with that like the marketing work behind it, making sure the timings affect not only the game itself but many, many other things," he continues. "Absolutely, we need to make sure those hit as expected and we have taken quite a lot of different steps in different departments to make sure that the players get the seasons immediately once the season is planned to end."

In other words, measures have been taken to mitigate this happening again. Maintaining something the size of Battlefield 6 is an all-consuming prospect. You have to constantly monitor and balance how players are engaging with the existing modes and features, while putting together the additions that'll keep the FPS feeling fresh and exciting.

Two new maps and a pair of new modes is a lot of work across development and playtesting. Besides the internal quality control, you have the added pressure of whatever other games are competing for your community's attention. A tough reality the devs on Battlefield 6 have to be aware of is there are other shooters people can be playing instead, and once they leave, they might not come back, regardless of what you do.

At least Battlefield 6 Season 2 is providing plenty for the community to blast into. With any luck, the rest of the roadmap from EA and the Battlefield studios will hold steady.

Battlefield 6 season 2 finally delivers a big map and more, but I have bad news for anyone who doesn't like being poisoned or shot in the dark: you're going to be poisoned and shot in the dark.

The legacy of The Sims 2 has always fascinated me. At the tender age of 11 I spent much of 2006 trawling YouTube for Sims 2 fan creations, be it short original movies or narrativized takes on my favorite emo anthems. Almost every 30-something I speak to can relate. It's a unique shared experience that feels fundamentally 2000s, and I've not come across something quite like it since.

Still captivated by the Sims 2 music video subculture and its symbiosis with early YouTube, I wanted to catch up with the scene. Where are its creators now? Could the community still be out there some 23 years later? I put some feelers out on Reddit, expecting more nostalgia than active signs of life. Instead, I found a community more driven than ever.

Long ago...

With a plethora of free, fan-made mods available and with YouTube established a year after The Sims 2's 2004 release date, EA's life simulation game offered the perfect filmset. I haven't managed to track down the first ever Sims 2 music video or Machinima on YouTube but the earliest ones date back to 2006, when the first generation of Sims 2 fan media was born.

Through Reddit, I find Sims fans who share the same core memories – namely, watching fan-made music videos for Avril Lavigne's Girlfriend and Sk8er Boi. "This topic is probably my Roman Empire," Redditor such_a_sweet_sorrow tells me, detailing their first taste of fan-made Sims 2 videos on YouTube in 2008. A number of us worshipped jaydee227's incredible vid-ification of Helena by My Chemical Romance. I can still remember its custom content, including an uncanny recreation of the ballerina from the official video.

"[Helena] was so ahead of its time and I still don't know how some of the shots were pulled off," says creator simthesize. "When I saw it for the first time, my jaw was on the floor. It made me realize that virtually anything is possible in this game."

The slew of fan-made web shows, also known as Machinima, were just as foundational. To find out more, I reached out to Tori, known on YouTube as fenderchick2010, who was most active during that era.

"What made Sims 2 Machinima captivating is that it was largely made by teens, for teens," she reflects. Tori's first video was called Left Behind, an adaptation of the Left Behind: The Kids book series she created for a ninth grade school project in 2006. The video is no longer on YouTube, but Machinima fans might recognize her most popular work: the first episode of Cahuna Beach High, a Degrassi-like high school drama series. "I also made that in ninth grade, but was 14 by that point. It was the first Machinima video I created, other than the brief trailer, that was fully intended for an online audience."

The opportunity to build a strong following and community around a video game – especially at a time before algorithms, content creation, or a glut of social media – speaks to how unique and expansive EA's second-gen life sim was. As Tori puts it: "We went from observing the dollhouse in Sims 1 to living in the dollhouse in Sims 2."

While Tori remains active in the still-thriving Machinima community and is actively pursuing bringing her series to television, simthesize returned in a more casual capacity.

"I was around 12 when I made my first video using The Sims 2," he tells me. He'd been most active in the community between 2007 and 2009. "It was a total incoherent mess made up of random clips recorded in the lowest resolution possible. But I remember the excitement of just being able to do that – record scenes and combine them with some random song playing in the background."

In 2025, simthesize made his comeback with a frame-by-frame recreation of Evanescence's Bring Me to Life, inspired by his favorite FMV, regevaway's Everybody's Fool. "I wanted to see what it’d be like to make these videos as an adult, and it's been so much fun. It's become my main pastime now."

The pastime demands more than stringing clips together and calling it a video. This was (and still is) a cinematic artform in its own right.

Viewers grew to expect a sophisticated level of production as the Machinima community developed, with artsy camera angles, framing styles, and editing techniques raising the creative bar each year. The goal was to make something that made people wonder how on Earth you managed it with such little in-game utility – and most of the time, the answer was software Sony Vegas.

Thnks fr th mmrs

"Pretty much everything I did as a kid [were] random videos I made for fun, so while I remember that period very fondly and I was quite proud of some of them, it's nothing to write home about," says simthesize. "And of course, they were the videos that I cringed the most looking back at. For example, my most watched video ever ended abruptly mid-verse because I just ran out of clips to use and I didn't feel like going back into the game to record more."

Tori shares a similar fondness for her earlier work – specifically Bloom, a series about gifted teenagers in the late nineties. "Bloom Episode 1 is the work I'm most proud of. It's not perfect, but it's the best example of how my filming, editing, and writing skills have progressed over the years," bolstered by the "unique challenge of finding and making custom content for the series" given its 1997 setting.

"Sims Machinima is kind of a dying art, and that saddens me," Tori muses. She notes how technology has grown in tandem with Sims creative communities over the past three generations, with a trend toward Let's Play-style YouTube content and TikToks becoming the norm as of The Sims 4.

"Most 2000s Sims machinima creators never showed our faces: we existed as screennames with a Sims profile picture. Internet safety was drilled into us millennials, but Internet anonymity norms have changed. Younger Gen Z and Gen Alpha Sims fans seem more drawn to Sims influencer personalities than specific series, if that makes sense, and they want to feel like they know the simmer behind the videos."

Tori is holding fast to her roots, though. Bloom took "a few years to write, another year to prep, and months of filming and editing," but her goal for this year is to make the next nine episodes happen. "Bloom is a passion project for me, and I want to finish what I started. I don't think I've ever enjoyed creating a series as much as I've enjoyed creating Bloom."

Much like Tori, simthesize has ambitions to keep growing as a Sims 2 Machinima creator. He might've left some childhood projects unfinished, but his newer work – like Woohoo in the City – is a different story: "By virtue of being an adult I am much more intentional about them," he says.

The Sims-ification of Sex and the City was a much faster, enjoyable job than the Evanescence project. "There was a lot of overthinking involved, as I didn't want to walk away from the project feeling like I did a worse job than a 12 year old version of me would. Or even worse – that I abandoned it."

Dag dag

In the 20 years since Sims 2 took over the digital airways, a lot has changed. Game content creation is everywhere in 2026, and the advent of TikTok, YouTube shorts, and Instagram reels fundamentally changed how we consume it.

YouTube's enforcement of copyright protection played a role in this. By the time it was fully realized by 2009, many of our favorite FMVs were muted and eventually taken down. Though some were eventually reuploaded, the crackdown was enough for the trend to go out of style by the time The Sims 3 fully took off. Attention-grabby clips pulled from long-form Let's Plays are far less labor-intensive for the modern content creator – now a paid job –and require little to no modding, which EA has made harder to implement.

Ultimately, the dawning of new Sims generations slowly led to Sims 2 fading into the background. But despite all that, The Sims 2's role in shaping Tori, simthesize, and avid fans like me is hard to overstate.

"It dawned on me that I've been playing The Sims 2 on and off ever since 2004," says simthesize. "It's actually kind of a constant in my life."

Tori echoes the sentiment. "Sims videos remind fans of their youth, before they had jobs, bills, kids of their own, and more responsibilities. Societally speaking, older Sims videos remind people of 2000s Internet. YouTube was new, full of unpolished homemade videos, and less algorithm-driven than it is today."

"Social media felt simpler and actually social," she continues. "Monetization on early YouTube barely existed, and now, people often associate YouTube with influencers and podcasts. The 2000s were a simpler time in many ways, but I think we all say that about past decades!"

Machina and FMVs remain truly human initiatives, taking the freedom of sandbox gameplay and translating it to a tightly-executed entity of its own, enshrined digitally. I didn't make Machinima or own a computer powerful enough to download thousands of custom content items to make my own My Chem videos, but bearing witness to the rise of fan-made content and the primitive wonders of mid-2000s Internet feels like a reward in itself. Thanks for the memories, Sims 2 – they really were so great.

Still building your collection? Here are the best Sims 4 expansions to pick up right now in 2026!

The next season of Battlefield 6 kicks off soon, and we've gotten a quick rundown on what's in the offing for the FPS. Two new maps and a pair of limited modes headline the additions, while progression is getting more fine-tuned to make playing all the more rewarding.

Contaminated is a new map that'll be in the first part of Battlefield 6 Season 2. It's "designed to deliver focused combat with multiple pathways and flanking opportunities," according to an official preview. It sounds intense, but also quite tactical.

The first new, limited mode is actually unnamed as yet, but it'll expand the storytelling and "introduces a new element of tactics in the fight against Pax Armata." All very intriguing! Details are low for the second map and mode, but the former is described as "high intensity," and the latter "will require players to battle through an underground base covered in darkness."

The Battle Pass will be "more rewarding," letting you move through the ranks more quickly, and challenges have been altered to be more "streamlined." There won't be as many mode-specific hurdles to jump through, the sidearm challenges are being taken away, and assists will count for your dailies, making earning those rewards considerably easier.

Weapon balancing and player movement have both been tweaked, along with change to make audio clearer and more useful in active combat. EA and the devs at Battlefield Studios provide an update on the revamped Golmud Railway map. Originally from Battlefield 4, it's getting a rework for this installment, and players have been testing it.

Reactions are good thus far, apparently. "Players noted that the map feels familiar while still offering something new, including improvements to the northern town area and added cover that better supports infantry movement and engagements," the post states.

Golmud Railway will come in a later season. For now, Battlefield 6 Season 2 starts on February 17.

Battlefield 6 was the US' best-selling game of 2025, finally dethroning Call of Duty after a 23-year-long feud between the juggernaut shooters

The Sims 4 is a game about life, and life is about sex – at least in part, right? While sexual encounters in-game are portrayed in a way that would be appropriate for network television, it's little surprise that the game's most notable mod would arguably be the one that makes it all X-rated. The mod's popularity is no secret, but a new interview with its creator puts a massive figure on that success.

"On average, 400,000 people per day" play the mod, according to a machine translated interview of creator Turbodriver from German outlet Taz (thanks, PC Gamer). "That's how often my server is pinged, at least, because someone starts the game and has installed the mod." Some nuance of Turbodriver's comments may be lost in the AI translation, but that figure of "400,000" is impossible to mistake no matter what language you speak.

WickedWhims does much more than simply wipe out the pixelated blur that covers Sims' naughty bits in the base game. It also introduces features like birth control, simulations of menstrual cycles, and STDs. The additional bits of depth these features add to your Sims' sex lives are popular enough to have spun into a separate mod called WonderfulWhims, which comes without the smut.

It's impossible to fully contextualize what 400,000 daily users means in the context of the overall Sims 4 playerbase, because daily active user counts are not publicly provided. EA reported in 2024 that 85 million people total had played The Sims 4, but that includes players on console where mods like WickedWhims are not available.

Similarly, SteamDB reports concurrent player counts ranging from 20,000 to 40,000 depending on the time and the day of the week. But that doesn't give us a perfect insight into the number of daily players. More importantly, it only counts players on Steam – not the EA app, where The Sims 4 was available for six years before coming to Valve's platform.

However it compares to the wider pool of The Sims 4 players, 400,000 daily users is a nearly unbelievable level of success for any mod. "I can hardly believe it myself," Turbodriver says. "But it's true."

"The Sims has always been more than a game": Maxis says its values aren't changing amid EA's buyout as it works on "the next evolution" of the series.

Details on Mass Effect 5 are still scarce, but BioWare seems to be ramping up production by hiring for a new lead developer.

BioWare's executive producer and Mass Effect 5's project director Michael Gamble jumped online earlier today to share a job opening at the studio for a production director. "Hi, I'm hiring a very important senior leadership role," Gamble tweets. "They'll report to me and it's gonna be awesome."

Whoever gets the role will be responsible for making sure the studio as a whole is on the same page in regard to high-level concepts, and will already need over 10 years of experience on AAA games and "deep expertise in ARPG and RPG development," according to the job listing. They'll also need "a passion for the Mass Effect universe to serve as a high-impact leader on our next Mass Effect title." EA's job board currently doesn't include any other openings for BioWare specifically.

Mass Effect 5 is now the only game in production at the famed RPG maker after BioWare spent decades as a multi-project outfit, perhaps due to the soft launch of Dragon Age: The Veilguard and the layoffs that followed in its footsteps.

At the start of last year, we learned the next Mass Effect was still in its pre-production phase five years on from its first reveal trailer, which revealed that Liara T'Soni was back alongside remnants of the galaxy-threatening Reapers. Our only hint as to what the game is actually about came from Liara unearthing N7 armor. Although, whether this is a direct sequel or one set in the distant future is unclear since Liara, and all Asari, are, you know, capable of living for hundreds of years.

OG Mass Effect Shephard actors would be there "with bells on" if BioWare brought them back for Mass Effect 5

Battlefield and Call of Duty have been wrapped up in a seemingly eternal feud for as long as both have been around, which is give or take 23 years. They're the shooter equivalent of Ares vs. Athena, Tom vs. Jerry, Coke vs. Pepsi - forever destined to be at odds for the title of the military shooter – and for the first time ever, Battlefield has come out on top.

Veteran games industry analyst, Circana's Mat Piscatella, recently released a list of the best-selling video games of 2025 in the US based on dollar sales. Lo and behold, for the first time in series history, Battlefield 6 comfortably topped the list ahead of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. Here's the full chart:

1. Battlefield 6
2. NBA 2K26
3. Borderlands 4
4. Monster Hunter Wilds
5. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7
6. Madden NFL 26
7. EA Sports College Football 26
8. EA Sports FC 26
9. The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered
10. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6

The rest of the list also includes the immortal Minecraft, Elden Ring: Nightreign, and Pokemon Legends: Z-A, which may have actually charted higher if Circana's data included digital Nintendo sales.

In over two decades, a Battlefield release has never placed higher than a Call of Duty game on the chart until now. What's more impressive is that, since 2009, only three games have beaten the annual shooter franchise on the year-end list: 2013's GTA 5, 2018's Red Dead Redemption 2, and 2023's Hogwarts Legacy.

This is also the first time since 2008 that Call of Duty hasn't managed to cling onto at least the second-place position, back when Call of Duty: World at War had stiff competition from multiple Wii games and GTA 4.

Franchise fatigue might finally be part of the reason why Black Ops 7 underperformed this time around, but a less-than-stellar reception didn't do the game any favors, either. The latest Call of Duty currently has 'Mostly Negative' reviews on Steam, as well as one of the worst Metacritic scores in the series' record books.

Activision makes big Call of Duty announcement: "We will no longer do back-to-back releases of Modern Warfare or Black Ops" mainly "to ensure we provide an absolutely unique experience each and every year"

Battlefield Studios has revealed a new community update detailing some of the plans for Battlefield 6 season 2, including a brand new multiplayer map and the return of the classic Battlefield 4 map, Golmud Railway.

EA gave a fairly comprehensive overview of its plans for Battlefield Labs testing for season 2 "and beyond" on its official website. The season 2 update was recently delayed because EA wanted to give Battlefield Studios more time to refine the new content following community feedback, and in this new community update, it's revealed that one of the things being tested in Battlefield Labs is a new map called Contaminated.

"We'll be evaluating how vehicle gameplay and aerial presence interact with infantry combat, alongside cover and asset placement, and objective boundaries," EA says. "We'll also be testing how the map's unique gameplay mechanics function in live matches, as well as the tools available to players to interact with them."

EA didn't share a whole lot of specifics about the new map, but it did confirm that it's comparable in size to older Battlefield maps like Battlefield 1's St. Quentin Scar and Battlefield 5's Arras, and falls somewhere between between Eastwood and Mirak Valle. It also revealed the first official image of the map, showing off some sparsely forested mountainside terrain, which you can see below:

EA confirmed that Golmud Railway is coming to Battlefield 6 at some point, but not exactly how you remember it from Battlefield 4. EA says the classic Battlefield map is "being rebuilt for today's Battlefield, not simply ported forward," and that its goal "is to preserve what made the map so memorable in Battlefield 4, particularly its combined arms gameplay, while improving how it plays and supports Battlefield 6 systems."

Likewise, EA confirmed Golmud Railway will be the biggest Battlefield 6 map to date, giving the developers the chance "to expand gameplay on a larger scale."

In terms of gameplay testing, future Battlefield Labs sessions geared toward season 2 content will focus on the new AH-6 Little Bird vehicle, "allowing us to evaluate how it fits within the broader vehicle ecosystem and how it performs across different combat scenarios."

Beyond season 2, Battlefield Studios will be doing some early testing on Aircraft Radar, as it will be "an important part of the aircraft gameplay experience," and exploring "a tuning package focused on rocket and vehicle interactions, including early adjustments to weapons such as RPGs and TOW launchers, as well as vehicle handling considerations when countering rockets."

Finally, EA declined to give a firm answer on the oft-requested solo playlist in Battlefield 6's Redsec battle royale mode, saying more internal testing is needed.

"This work is focused on understanding where Solo play can best fit within the broader Battle Royale roster, including how it affects match flow, survivability, and long-term engagement when featured alongside other Battle Royale experiences," says EA. "These tests are part of our ongoing effort to make informed decisions about how Battle Royale is structured and presented over time, rather than committing to a single permanent configuration."

Battlefield 6 season 2 is now due to launch on February 17, with an extension for season 1 having been released on January 20.

Battlefield 6 update nerfs jets for some reason and makes melee attacks quicker ahead of Season 2: "You guys really hate the thing you're famous for"

It's now been a week since Anthem's demise, but it suddenly seems a whole lot more likely that fans might be able to get BioWare's looter shooter up and running again themselves, even if EA pulled the plug on its servers.

Previously, Anthem executive producer and Dragon Age veteran Mark Darrah explained that "Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months before launch," and while he's not sure if they'd still work, "the code is there to be salvaged and recovered." As he explained at the time, this would mean the game wouldn't have to rely on dedicated servers, but rather "let the server run on one of the machines that's playing the game." In combination with that, had BioWare been able to add AI party members, Anthem could have feasibly been playable in a single-player format, but alas, that was never to be.

Except, as spotted by Kotaku, it looks like fans might be able to pull something of a revival off themselves. Over on YouTube, one user who goes by And799 has shared a proof of concept "Anthem Client as Server testing" video (below). Not only do they show the game loading up and running again, but they even open it in a second window to connect a second player to the session. While things look a bit laggy here, the point is the idea – you can see both characters moving around, totally connected by the user's alternate server. Oh, and did I mention that they posted this only five days after the EA servers were shut down? Fans work fast.

Don't expect the return of Anthem to come from And799 specifically, though, or any time soon, as they note in the video description that "this is just a POC from my research and experiment and does NOT represent the current progress of the private server/revival project that is currently in progress." They also note: "Seems like the majority of the player data are handled through bioware's server instead of blaze and it is required for the game to be able to load offline."

They don't explain exactly what revival project they're referring to here, but looking around online, there's been chatter within the remaining Anthem fanbase across Reddit and Discord from folks hoping to bring the game back, including from one server (known as The Fort's Forge) which they're part of. While it doesn't look like enormous progress has been made at the time of writing, it's obviously very early days, and fingers crossed And799's findings are indicative of the fact that there's real hope of folks actually pulling this off.

Dragon Age veteran defends studio's attempt to make something different with Anthem: "BioWare's always been changing."

A new Battlefield 6 patch is coming tomorrow, to parlay the slightly longer wait for Season 2, since it was delayed into February. The tweaks and changes are mostly minor, sorting out small bugs and tightening up different aspects, but there are a couple of gameplay changes that you’ll definitely feel, for better or worse.

One that immediately stands out is nerfing jets, making it so their cannons have to land 40% more hits to opposing flying vehicles to take them down. You’d think, reading that, there was some exceedingly apparent imbalance. But there isn’t, and in fact, jets are disproportionately weaker in terms of vehicles, even compared to other air transports.

So, err, good luck using one for any length of time if you decide to take to the skies during a match. Players aren't too pleased either. "Another nerf to vehicles. You guys really hate the thing you're famous for," says one response. "Did you just reduce damage from jet cannons, but air radar is still broken after three months? True joke," says another.

At ground level, melee attacks are becoming smoother and, by extension, deadlier. Knives will be quicker, and they and sledgehammers are being tweaked for less buffering. Timing of melees is getting mercifully refined as well, to help in those instances where a split second can make all the difference. Sprinting is getting tightened up to boot; using a melee attack will only interrupt your run up to when it lands, instead of stifling your flow from the moment you press the button.

There are a couple of handy little UI changes as well, including letting players change the reticle color on weapon and gadget scopes. Numerous fixes are included, among a selection across nearly every facet of the game, making this a relatively unexciting patch for tangible gameplay, but one that should make playing quite a bit smoother.

Redsec gets a look in, too, with the most notable bullet point being the disappearing armor bar now being fixed. This update goes live tomorrow, January 20, while Season 2 kicks off on February 17.

Battlefield 6 gets unwanted Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 comparison as AI accusations fly against "hollow and low effort" new artwork

Heading into launch, Anthem was often called a "Destiny killer" – though that was a label assigned by press and enthusiasts, not by the devs at BioWare themselves. Yet by the time Anthem launched in 2019, it seemed clear that the devs had missed some key lessons from Bungie's looter shooter. As veteran producer Mark Darrah explains in a new interview, BioWare was still trying to take lessons from the venerable Diablo series rather than Destiny.

"I think it took Anthem a very long time to admit to itself that it was a looter shooter," Darrah tells Destin Legarie. That tracks with a 2019 report from Jason Schreier at Kotaku, where sources at the studio reported that leadership at BioWare pushed back on any reference Destiny at all, despite devs suggesting that they should be learning from the market leader in the genre.

"From a design perspective, the number one touch point for Anthem was actually Diablo," Darrah says. "So it was trying to be like that. I feel like maybe it could have done that. I don't know." But, he notes, Blizzard had a multitude of Diablo games to learn lessons from, and he admits that Destiny might've provided "easier lessons" for Anthem's development.

"First of all, more directly comparable," Darrah continues. "They're both shooters. They're both looter shooters. Whereas, you know, Diablo is what, a looter sworder?" Diablo predates the looter shooter genre by some time, and Darrah says "I think there's always a danger in using something with that level of pedigree as your exemplar because it gets permission to be different by being so much older."

Diablo's DNA is easy to see in pretty much any game that focuses on loot drops – whether that's Destiny, Borderlands, or Anthem – but, as Darrah suggests, it's very much its own thing. Blizzard's game established its identity in an era before players demanded MMO levels of content from their loot games, and the areas that Destiny got right – like bespoke raid and dungeon activities and rewards that define the endgame and remain essentially unmatched in the genre – could've provided good lessons to BioWare in their own game.

Anthem "did permanent damage to the careers of a lot of game devs" says Dragon Age veteran, and he's not sure he or BioWare ever "came back" from its spectacular failure.

Legendary Tom Clancy's The Division lead Julian Gerighty, who's worked at Ubisoft in some capacity since 1999, will soon leave the military looter shooter for Battlefield Studios under EA.

This move comes a little over a week after Ubisoft announced it would "improve efficiency and reduce costs" by closing its recently unionized Halifax studio, impacting 71 positions, and a month after Battlefield lead Vince Zampella's tragic death. About the major change, Gerighty writes on Twitter, "It's time for me to hang up my go bag (keeping the watch) as I go on another grand adventure."

"The Division future burns bright, and I can't wait for you to discover what the teams have been working on," he continues. "Long live The Division and Godspeed!"

Gerighty joined Ubisoft studio Massive in 2014 as The Division's creative director, and in 2024, he assumed an executive producer role. In its own farewell post to Gerighty on Twitter, Massive decrees, "Once an Agent, always an Agent. We're thankful for everything you gave this universe. You'll always be part of it. Good luck."

"While we'll miss him, his mark will live on at Massive and we'll continue to bring the world he's been part of creating to our players for years to come." To this effect, Massive instructs fans "don't worry" – it still plans on making "an ambitious, unchanged commitment for the future with The Division 2, The Division 2: Survivors, The Division Resurgence and The Division 3."

The Division 3 lead says it's "shaping up to be a monster" game and Ubisoft Massive hopes it'll be as big as the first looter shooter.

The death of Anthem, BioWare's maligned live-service RPG, comes as the Stop Killing Games initiative has put increased pressure on developers to create end-of-life plans that would keep these sorts of games available in the future. GOG's managing director, Maciej Gołębiewski, knows a thing or two about the practical realities of preservation, and he hasn't arrived at a clear answer yet.

"Game preservation is a very complicated riddle," Gołębiewski tells Eurogamer. Giving old games official, legal re-releases – as GOG does – requires tracking down IP holders, patching the games to work on modern hardware, and making sure all this work is commercially viable. "No one can do it for goodwill because this is not how salaries are being paid," he says.

That's certainly true from the perspective of a business like GOG, but sometimes this kind of work is done with pure goodwill – as is the case with the custom community server project for The Crew, the now-dead Ubisoft racing game that kicked off the Stop Killing Games effort in the first place. But certainly, you can't count on fans to bring back every dead multiplayer game, especially when these projects are always at risk of being shut down by IP holders.

"Resurrecting and bringing back multiplayer titles is something that's very complex, something that's very difficult, but it's very visibly becoming a matter of discussion among gamers, among regulators and publishers as well," Gołębiewski says.

The key objective for Stop Killing Games is to, through EU legislation, force publishers to implement end-of-life plans for online games that would keep them playable even after official servers shut down. Some publishers have already started making steps in this direction. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League got an offline mode as part of its final update last year. Knockout City arguably provided a gold standard for multiplayer preservation in 2023, with the devs offering players all the tools they need to host their own private servers.

It seems even Anthem had some form of local server infrastructure during development, but there's no telling how much time and effort it would've taken EA and BioWare to implement that back into the flagging game.

"What is a fair end-of-life cycle for a game?" Gołębiewski muses. "Should it just be buried and killed and no one can access it any more, and people who spent five or seven years working on it cannot really look at their creation any more because the service turned off? There is a very interesting and very complicated discussion that Stop Killing Games probably kick-started out of frustration."

Gołębiewski reiterates that GOG's mission is to "make games live forever," but he – like many in the industry – fears regulatory restrictions might restrict the types of games publishers will fund. That'll leave publishers saying, "'Okay now I need to put up the funds to create it, promote it, and then upkeep it for 10 years, 20 years, because the regulator said so,'" as Gołębiewski puts it. "That might in turn cause there to be fewer cool games for gamers."

But Stop Killing Games is explicitly not asking for decades of support from publishers – the effort wants offline modes or private server functionality to be provided to the community so that players can have access to the important parts of the games they've previously bought. At that point, the game is out of the publisher's hands. Whether that's a financially viable solution for every live-service game is the big question/

"I don't have the perfect answer yet," Gołębiewski concludes, "but it's good that the discussion is taking place."

Anthem fans say goodbye to BioWare's looter shooter on its server shutdown day, mourning the "potential" that was lost: "Such a waste."

In the nearly 18 years since its release, Mirror's Edge has built a sparkling reputation for its sparkling buildings and blue skies. This, apparently, wasn't developer DICE's plan.

The parkour game's developers reflect on its now incomparable look and feel in a new interview with Design Room, where they admit Mirror's Edge was originally set to join its apocalyptic siblings – like Gears of War or Fallout 3 – in looking very, let's say, piss yellow. But looking at this corroded version of Mirror's Edge literally made people nauseous.

Senior producer Owen O'Brien explains that "Mirror's Edge started off looking like every other Unreal game, to be honest." But here's where listening to your body is important. O'Brien says, "we found that when you were moving very fast through the world, you got simulation sickness very quickly. We discovered that it was lessened if you made the world cleaner and less detailed."

So players' subconscious selves demand prettier, squeakier video games, I guess. But these instructions from their third eyes were ultimately beneficial to Mirror's Edge, which would have otherwise looked like every other game in 2008.

Even art director Johannes Söderqvist calls the game's initial art "generic," featuring stereotypical signs of dystopia like "more run-down, sort of New York-style rooftops with these water towers" instead of the sleek, futuristic silver skyscrapers it ended up with. Mirror's Edge looked "pretty brown, like a regular game, if you will," he says, which "wasn't bad; it looked good, actually. But there was no style to it, or a fairly generic style."

"Holy s***, jumping is back": After 11 years, Assassin's Creed Mirage brings back the parkour feature fans have been missing since Unity – a jump button.

Anthem, BioWare's maligned loot shooter, is officially dead. This week's server shutdown rendered the always-online game completely unplayable even to those who already own it – a practice the Stop Killing Games initiative has been fighting for close to two years now. According to producer Mark Darrah, the seeds of the future Stop Killing Games envisions were in Anthem until shortly before launch.

In October 2025, Darrah published a post-mortem video running down Anthem's post-launch fortunes. Near the end, he describes his vision for Anthem Next – an ultimately abandoned plan he believed could've given the game a No Man's Sky-style turnaround. Crucially, this plan would've included locally hosted servers – something that already partially existed during development

"Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months before launch," Darrah explains. "I don't know that they still work, but the code is there to be salvaged and recovered. The reason you do this, it pulls away the costs of maintaining this game. So rather than having dedicated servers that are required for the game to run, you let the server run on one of the machines that's playing the game."

These comments have come back into the news thanks to a nearly four-hour compilation video Darrah posted this week. Responding to those headlines, the Stop Killing Games account on Twitter says that end of life plans "for games like this is what SKG is about."

While Anthem is a pretty widely maligned title, Stop Killing Games says in a follow-up tweet that "it really is as simple as the principle of one man's trash is another man's treasure. If you put money into the game, you should have a voice on whether you get to keep it or not. You as the customer should have the final say as to when you're done with a game, not the company."

"Stop Killing Games has actually changed the timeline": As EU petition comes to successful close, founder says "unending overtime" has him ready to "take a break for the next 10 years," but he's sticking around until it's done'

Less than seven years after launch, Anthem is dead for good, and that's especially unfortunate when its executive producer reckons the plans to overhaul the looter shooter "could have" led to a No Man's Sky-level comeback before they were ultimately scrapped.

Speaking to Destin Legarie in a new interview, Mark Darrah – executive producer of Anthem, Dragon Age 1, 2, and Inquisition – is asked about Anthem Next (essentially Anthem 2.0) and what impact that could have had on the longevity and reception to BioWare's multiplayer romp. For context, Anthem Next was officially scrapped in February 2021, although at that point, the plan was to "continue to keep the Anthem live service running as it exists today" (a statement that hasn't aged well at all).

Legarie asks if Anthem Next would have "actually saved" the game, and "would it have been No Man's Sky [...] revolutionary-level updates," to which Darrah says: "It could have been."

Darrah has previously spoken about Anthem Next in his YouTube series discussing what happened with the game (which he's now handily summarized into one mega video compilation, below). He discussed that BioWare's decision to work on what would eventually become Anthem Next was "definitely the right call, and arguably if we had never announced a roadmap, maybe this decision could have happened earlier. The decision was made to set that act structure aside so that the project could focus on what needed to be done, not upon what it had announced beforehand. And arguably, this is what should have probably happened from the beginning."

Later in the video, he noted that Next was "in the process of trying to fix Anthem to make it have a broader appeal, to make it regain its footing as a live service," and shared that he thinks that EA's decision not to continue with that pursuit "was a mistake." With that said, he explained that to save Anthem, he would have suggested a different approach to Next that would have instead involved porting to current-gen consoles and crucially moving to "locally hosted servers."

"Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months before launch," Darrah continued. "I don't know that they still work, but the code is there to be salvaged and recovered. The reason you do this, it pulls away the costs of maintaining this game. So rather than having dedicated servers that are required for the game to run, you let the server run on one of the machines that's playing the game." This, he added, could have worked alongside an additional move to add AI party members to the game, allowing people to play it like a single-player game.

Alas, we'll never know whether Anthem Next or Darrah's own ideas could have saved BioWare's looter shooter, but it'll forever be a shame that it never really got a proper chance to reach its full potential like No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 famously did after their own rocky launches.

Anthem "did permanent damage to the careers of a lot of game devs" says Dragon Age veteran, and he's not sure he or BioWare ever "came back" from its spectacular failure.

The likes of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and Blue Prince enjoying such success over the past year injected some much-needed optimism into the industry. They proved it's still possible for teams of varying sizes to thrive and make releases that resonate with a wide audience. But as we move forward, It Takes Two director Josef Fares doesn't want the triple-A space to stagnate in favor of smaller ambitions, purely because he wants to keep getting games like GTA 6.

"You do hear, after the success of things like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, that the AA games are taking over," he tells The Game Business. "But I would not be able to live without a AAA title. I really want to play the blockbuster games. You can't do GTA for $10 million."

He believes, "we need both," and as publishers and investors see the incredible work being done in various corners of the medium, it's crucial not to get too obsessed with replicating what seems like a winning formula. "It's important not to get stuck in ideas, like AA is a new thing, or indie is a new thing, or 'blah, blah, blah' is a new thing. We need the diversity," he states.

"I hope that publishers don't just look at a game like [Expedition 33], which has been super successful, and think, 'Oh, AA is a new thing. Let's only do that.' I don't believe in that," he continues. "You had a huge amount of AA games that came this year, which nobody cared about. Let's remember that."

The creative ecosystem flourishes when options exist in as many lanes as possible. It’s as worthwhile to have GTA 6 on offer as it is Ball x Pit, for whatever any prospective player may be looking for. As Fares alludes too, there are plenty of games in AA and in other tiers that fall flat for all manner of reasons; Anthem being one recent prolific example.

Through Hazelight Studios, his development company, Fares has directed No Way Out and Split Fiction in addition to the aforementioned It Takes Two. All co-op experiences, they scratch particular itches themselves, and it'd be just as foolhardy to consider Hazelight an absolute aspiration as it would Sandfall, when the best bet remains getting behind solid creativity wherever and whenever possible.

GTA 6 reportedly might not be "content complete," but while Rockstar won't "release in any sort of compromised state" the November launch date still feels "more real" than before

EA has just announced that Battlefield 6 Season 1 has been extended – which, more pertinently, means that the Season 2 release date has been delayed. The new season will land roughly a month after it was previously expected, which the publisher says will allow for more development time in order to address feedback from fans.

"The first season will now run until the launch of Season 2 on February 17, with the Season 1 extension update being released on January 20," EA says in a press release. "This extended launch has been implemented to allow extra time to further develop and refine Season 2 as a result of community feedback." There are no details on what, specifically, is set to change with this extra development time.

The Season 1 extension update will include a variety of "fixes and stability improvements," as teased in an official blog post, but details on those have not yet been provided. The extension will include some minor bonuses to keep you playing, like daily login rewards, double XP weekends, a duos-themed Valentine's Day event, and a Portal showcase.

EA's biggest offering for the extended Season 1 is the Frostfire bonus path, which you can complete concurrently with the Season 1 battle pass. This will unlock a weapon package, soldier skin, and some XP boosts.

By all accounts, Battlefield 6's launch has been wildly successful, but some of that inevitable post-launch live-service malaise has already started to set in. Players are making AI accusations against "hollow and low effort" new artwork, the current selection of Battlefield 6 maps is starting to wear pretty thin, and balance issues have been drawing complaints for months. Here's hoping Season 2 can help set things back on track.

Looking for the best Battlefield 6 guns and weapons? We've got you covered.

BioWare looter shooter Anthem is officially dead, and looking back, its executive producer isn't sure he or the studio ever truly "came back" from it.

Anthem was never considered fantastic – it was largely thought to be fairly average - but, as highlighted by the swarm of folks paying their respects to the game as it was ultimately shut down, many believed it had a lot of potential that went to waste.

Executive producer Mark Darrah – who held that same role on Dragon Age: Origins, 2, and Inquisition (and was a director on the first two) – has been brutally honest about the game and its development in the past. He previously acknowledged that, a few months before launch, the devs knew they were targeting a Metacritic score in the 70s rather than BioWare's usual target of the 90s, and he now says he believes the game "did permanent damage to the careers of a lot of game devs."

In a lengthy new video released publicly on Anthem's shutdown day (below), Darrah says: "To be honest, I'm not sure that I came back from Anthem. I think that's true of a lot of people."

He explains: "Anthem did permanent damage to the careers of a lot of game devs, to the mental health of a lot of game devs. I think even with BioWare itself, you can trace some of the issues that it's had in more recent years back to this time period.

"I don't think Anthem is 100% to blame [for] everything that's happened since 2019, but definitely there are seeds of damage that continue to grow from that point onwards."

Since Anthem's launch, the only all-new game (so, not Mass Effect Legendary Edition) released by BioWare has been Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Veilguard's development wasn't totally smooth sailing, either – the RPG was previously called Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, and the devs even experimented with a multiplayer concept for it, but obviously, that didn't end up happening. Alas, its sales didn't meet expectations, and EA boss Andrew Wilson concluded that despite the "high-quality launch," the game "did not resonate with a broad enough audience in this highly competitive market."

Now, BioWare is working on a new Mass Effect game, unofficially known as Mass Effect 5. Details are still incredibly light on the ground, and there's no word on how long we might be waiting before it finally releases.

EA hits like Battlefield 4 and The Sims 4 were given time to bounce back from rough launches because they were "too big to fail," whereas with BioWare's Anthem, it wasn't "a given that it was going to be that big."

The day has come – Anthem is being shut down for good today, less than seven years since its launch, and fans have been saying goodbye forever to the BioWare looter shooter.

While Anthem is far from phenomenal – with a Metacritic score of 59 marking it as decidedly average – it's never fun to see the plug get pulled on a game, especially an online-only title that's not being given any kind of offline mode to keep it playable in some form going forward. Over on social media, players have been sharing their goodbyes, with many taking the game for one final spin before its demise.

"Goodbye Anthem. You had so much potential, such a waste…" reads one post. "As one of the most notorious 'Destiny killers,' its shutdown is a good reminder that keeping a looter shooter alive and well for years is a nearly impossible task."

'Potential' is a term that's coming up a lot in these farewell posts. "Last night I logged into Anthem for the last time. Toured the map one last time, did some missions," another begins. "Had some fun. People can feel how they want, but the potential this game had was undeniable. The flying was spectacular."

"A game that could have been great," reads another. "The feel of moving around, flying and shooting? Top notch. Better than any official Iron Man game. I want sci-fi super-suits to feel like this everywhere. But the mission design was a mess. Levels were designed like they were for a regular ground-based FPS."

"I'll miss the amazing world of Anthem," a fan laments. "Did a goodbye round of fort Tarsis and got in my favorite Storm Javelin to do some missions and free roaming. A bitter sweet goodbye."

Looking around online, it seems that at the time of writing Anthem is still kicking despite it being at death's door. Neither EA nor BioWare ever confirmed what time the servers will be shut down, so it's not clear exactly how much time we have left. Make the most of it while you can, anyway.

EA hits like Battlefield 4 and The Sims 4 were given time to bounce back from rough launches because they were "too big to fail," whereas with BioWare's Anthem, it wasn't "a given that it was going to be that big."

When it comes to heartbreaking moments in Mass Effect, the number one spot will always belong to the exit of Dr. Mordin Solus. But in second place is Garrus and Shepard’s promise to each other before heading to war against the Reapers, a scene so poignant, it almost made Jennifer Hale break down.

She recalls doing the scene for the Behind the Voice podcast, mentioning that it's the time during her tenure voicing the female Commander Shepard where the emotions started catching up to her. "The goodbye scene with Garrus kicked me hard," she says.

"90% of the work – maybe 85% now – is cold reading. I've never seen a line until I say it," she continues. "That scene with Garrus took me by surprise. I saw it, and I was like, 'Oh – oh…' And as I was doing it, I was starting to break, I was starting to cry, and I was like, 'No, no, no!'"

In her words, "Shepard doesn't cry," and she took a moment to re-center herself before restarting the scene. The exchange in question is deeply impactful, with two soldiers who've been through hell and back realizing this might be the final time they get to square up together.

As is typical of both, there are no tears, only a solemn vow to find each other afterwards for an alcoholic beverage or three when all is said and done. Garrus breaks rank to order Shepard to give the Reapers hell, something they absolutely take to heart. It's poetic and heartrending, and given the lump in my throat revisiting it on the back of this piece, I can only imagine what it was like in the booth for Hale.

After three glorious games performing as Shepard, Hale's been emphatic about returning to the role in Mass Effect 5, if BioWare will have her. If the series does bring back the commander, maybe Garrus can make an appearance, and they can go for that drink. Hey, we can dream, right?

Mass Effect 5 remains in development amid $55 billion EA buyout, and BioWare is now "heads-down and focused exclusively on" the RPG, with "lots of romances to figure out."

Anthem's shutdown seemed inevitable. Released by BioWare in 2019, the game offered a hybrid of the studio's traditional RPG storytelling and loot-driven combat in the Destiny style, but both sides of the game undercut each other at every turn. It earned the worst Metacritic score for any game in BioWare's history, though it has a small cult of fans who latched onto the promise of its combat and flight gameplay. Those fans are now preparing their mourning rituals for the game's impending death.

While Anthem is technically fully playable in single-player, it requires a constant internet connection – which means that once servers shut down on January 12, you'll no longer be able to hop in. With that date now less than a week away, fans are getting in the final bits of playtime where they can, and the Anthem subreddit is starting to fill with players saying their final goodbyes.

"One last flight around Bastion" is the title of a popular post from user RobRagiel, who adds that "I enjoyed it till the end and I have a lot of good memories. It was an honor, Freelancers." The post includes a clip of a brief flight path, demonstrating what's certainly the game's brightest point.

There's currently no official way to buy Anthem on any platform if you're looking to join the players saying goodbye, but used copies of the console versions are abundant and PC keys remain available on grey market resale sites. "I should've bought coffee but eh why not," says EngineerFrosty6633 in a post showing off their new purchase of Anthem, which ran about five bucks – a minor slap of reality among those who remember pre-ordering the game back in 2019.

Another post asks if others are "still pissed off" about Anthem's shutdown. "This is the game that deserves the [No Man's Sky] treatment," Ok_Type3663 laments in a comment. Still another post suggests that fans "petition EA" to develop an offline patch for Anthem so that some part of it can live on, though it seems few have much hope such an effort would have much effect.

The PS4 version of Anthem launched to a Metacritic score of 54, by far the lowest of any BioWare release over the studio's storied history. (BioWare's second- and third-worst rated releases are the PC and Xbox One versions of Anthem, respectively.) Even the game's most ardent defenders wouldn't try to argue that it's flawless, though they've found things to latch onto, praising the combat and particularly the robust flight.

I played Anthem around launch, and I found it a pretty miserable experience from top to bottom even then. The combat, in my memory, was little more than a chaotic jumble of blasts from and against indistinct enemies. The much-ballyhooed flight system ended up just leaving you so distant from opponents that it was tough to even tell what was going on. And, of course, the issues with the game's pacing, structure, and storytelling are very well documented.

That doesn't mean I'm happy to see it die so completely, of course. Anthem remains an important artifact of the modern gaming industry – one of the most high-profile examples of what happens when a beloved studio tries to force itself into a live-service box. It marks a turning point for BioWare's reputation, and the repeated stories we've begun to hear about the development hell Anthem went through are going to have a lot less context when the memories of what the game was actually like begin to fade.

It's also a prime example of the kind of thing consumer rights efforts like Stop Killing Games are engaged in trying to prevent. Anthem sold some 5 million copies, and every player who bought the game – whether they ended up enjoying it or not – is about to have their access to it revoked.

Certainly, I'd never expect a publisher like EA to support a multiplayer game in perpetuity, but equally, there's something sad about seeing a game like Anthem – one which took so many years and so much work from developers to bring to life – disappear like some monument of sand, destroyed when the changing tide inevitably wipes out its foundations.

Someday all of the best online games will be dust in the wind.

As development on Mass Effect 5 apparently continues amid EA's current buyout, one question floating around is whether or not Commander Shepard would make a return. Should they do so, the voices that brought the character to life would be more than happy to reprise the role.

Both Jennifer Hale and Mark Meer, Shepard's female and male voices, respectively, did an interview responding to fan enquiries on Fall Damage, and it didn't take long before the possibility of coming back popped up. "I like to think Shepard is alive in all of our hearts," Meer comments, with Hale responding: "Shepard is alive if you make it so."

She then encourages people to contact the "powers that be" - EA and BioWare - to request some more of the Normandy's finest captain. "We will be there, because we should not go," she adds. "I would be there with bells on if they offered for me to play Shepard again."

Meer wouldn’t be far behind. "I agree, but only under any circumstances," he says in typically tongue-in-cheek manner.

Bringing back Shepard presents some narrative quandaries for the developers. Depending on what you chose over the course of the original Mass Effect trilogy, they may or may not be around any more, and if they return, the devs would be making at least one of the endings more canonical than the others.

In theory, anyway. There's always the conceit of cloning or using tech like cryogenics, or placing events somewhere on the timeline where Commander Shepard is just around normally. The possibilities are there, is what I'm saying. Given the tumultuous state of the industry, I'm happy more Mass Effect remains feasible, and if the trilogy's fateful protagonist remains involved, all the better.

Fans find Mass Effect 5 art of a Krogan civil war hidden in BioWare's N7 Day post, studio lead says "I want you to see stuff. But it's not the time…yet"