Original Mass Effect cinematic designer Armando Troisi isn't worried about BioWare developers' ability to handle a sequel as precious as Mass Effect 5. The company's executives, however…

"It's one of those things where, if people get out of the way and let game creators just do their thing, you never know the magic that they can create," Troisi tells FRVR about the next Mass Effect game in a new interview.

"I think, obviously, there's a lot of different things that come to play in making a game of that scale," Troisi continues. "But trust your people and try to change the world with everything that you try to do. And I think that they can do it. I'm rooting for them."

Mass Effect 5 was first announced at the 2020 Game Awards. Despite the years passing slowly with few updates, Troisi remains confident in the project because the original game's devs, such as lead designer Preston Watamaniuk and art director Derek Watts, continue to work at BioWare.

"They're the OGs, you know? I don't think there's anything that I could tell them that they don't know what to do," says Troisi. But while the heart of BioWare is maintained by its accomplished developers, the body of the company has changed over the past 20 years.

Executives overseeing both BioWare itself and owner EA have an increasingly rusty reputation after mangling Dragon Age: The Veilguard's 2025 release, shutting down looter shooter Anthem in 2026 after seven years, and, uh, accepting Saudi Arabia and private equity investor Jared Kushner as their overlords in a new $55 billion buyout. Yeah. On that last note, some EA devs now worry that "projects just won't get signed because they don't align explicitly with what the Saudi government wants or implicitly because [EA will think] 'oh, we're going to try and cater these things [to our owners] because if we pitch something else the government may not like or approve of it.'"

Ex-EA senior manager Emmanuel Rosier shares these concerns, saying in August that BioWare was "struggling as a studio, as a brand have been struggling in recent years, and I don't know if they [EA] will keep funding that one."

Mass Effect 5 is, in theory, in ongoing production and a lucrative opportunity for BioWare, but Rosier says, "I will believe it when I see it, the next Mass Effect game, let's put it that way." Even former BioWare executive Mark Darrah is preparing his doomsday bunker, anticipating a future where, "if [EA's new owners are] coming in, and they're very involved, they're going to do a lot of damage."

So, sure, BioWare developers have no problem making Mass Effect 5. What's truly uncertain is whether or not its executives will let them.

"I think BioWare can do it," Troisi reiterates, "if we just leave them alone to do what they do best."

EA goes $20 billion in debt as part of its $55 billion buyout, and the BioWare fans who've already waited 8 years for Mass Effect 5 are terrified of how the company might cut costs.

Things reportedly aren't going well at Star Wars Zero Company studio Bit Reactor. Apparently, most of the team that worked on the tactics game were quietly furloughed right before it came out, and the company claims it intends to bring them back if sales prove good enough.

This comes from Game File, which reports that a large number of Bit Reactor's devs were furloughed mere weeks before Zero Company's release. Exact numbers are unknown, but one source says 80% of the staff, while another mentions the studio being run by a skeleton crew.

Zachariah Scott, a former artist at the studio, accused management of "concealing the fact that the team was furloughed weeks ago," this past week on LinkedIn, mere days after the project's launch. Alison Kelly, a co-founder of Bit Reactor who's been involved in an ongoing legal dispute with the company since 2024, mentioned similar in a filing from August 12.

A Bit Reactor representative confirmed the furlough to the outlet, but wouldn't go into specifics. The choice, per this rep, was made by the studio itself, and not by EA or Disney, and the intention is to bring people back at some point, implying Zero Company going gangbusters would change matters.

The reason for letting people go, even temporarily, is that money ran out before Zero Company came out. In comments made to Game File, Scott says that many of the employees he's spoken to aren't confident the whole team will be restored, regardless of what happens.

So far, Star Wars Zero Company is doing well. It's the third top-selling game on Steam at the moment, and it's got an 85 on Metacritic. Greg Foertsch, Bit Reactor's other co-founder, was touting future plans during interviews at Gamescom 2026.

Foertsch is tied up in Kelly's lawsuit, since her premise concerns being pushed out before her 2024 exit. She's suing for $20 million in damages, while Foertsch's counterclaim is that she was never a co-owner and that he's made accusations about her performance, which she denies.

Bitter, contentious, and unlikely to be resolved any time soon. Zero Company is Bit Reactor's first game. We'll keep you informed on what goes down in the months ahead.

Star Wars fans say if you love The Clone Wars and Bad Batch, you should play Zero Company

I hire Tagoz Tru fully expecting him to die. The Weequay bruiser isn't one of Star Wars Zero Company's big-name signings, like Tel-Rea the Jedi ronin or Cly Kullervo the Mandalorian bounty hunter. These characters – both of whom I have to google, just to make 100% sure they're not lifted from some Star Wars cartoon – come with their own dedicated side quests and hours of bespoke voice acting. And even they can be lost forever in battle. So what chance does a randomly rolled recruit like Tagoz have?

Better than I'd expected, as it turns out. Zero Company's permadeath is a tradition borrowed – like so many of this game's essentials – from XCOM, the seminal tactics game in which you fed faceless soldiers into an extraterrestrial meat grinder. There, finishing the campaign with a couple of dozen body bags to your name could be written off as an unqualified success.

Zero Company dangles this threat right from the beginning, killing off one of your starting roster in the tutorial, just to show that it means business. But that also illustrates just how thoroughly you need to fail for this ever to be a concern.

Death stars

A character whose health bar hits zero will drop to their knees, where a squadmate can revive them, Gears Of War-style. They'll get back up with an injury that limits their combat effectiveness, and it's only on the third wound that you lose them forever. At least on the default difficulty setting, it's pretty hard to get anyone killed, but that doesn't mean it has no effect.

Just knowing that permadeath is possible powers some brilliantly tense final turns. Most missions feature an objective – slice this computer terminal, rescue these captives – then an extraction, to pull you from one side of the map to the other. By the time the extraction zone appears, generally on the far side of an enemy reinforcement spawn point, your squad might have taken a wound or two achieving their objective. So, do you hunker down and fight off those reinforcements before a nice peaceful stroll to the exit, or just try to make a run for it?

The latter might sound like the easy option, but it can require at least as much brainpower to pull off. Each operative gets a very different mileage out of their three Action Points per turn – a heavy like Tagoz Tru isn't going to be able to keep up with a fleet-footed Jedi – and you probably still want to stick to cover, unless you've got some plan for running between the raindrops.

This leads to a lot of squinting at every character's abilities, which are presented on a thumbstick-friendly radial wheel. Is there some way of shunting spare AP from your speedier characters to the slowpokes? Can you tie up the pursuing foe with overwatch covering fire, or protect a more exposed route using smoke grenades?

Finally, if one of the retreating party does take a hit and get downed, do you send someone back to revive them, at the risk of the rescuer also catching a laser bullet? Once there's at least one body in the extraction zone, you can choose to end the mission there and then, leaving the others behind MIA. I'm not entirely sure how this works, though, because I can never quite bring myself to do it. No man – or Weequay – left behind.

Base elements

Back at base, you're dropped into the body of Hawks, the custom-created protagonist you can bring into missions as another unit (but, story requirements aside, don't need to). Wandering about the place in over-the-shoulder third person, chatting with squadmates, it's all very reminiscent of being aboard the Normandy, in Mass Effect.

Zooming the camera in from the aerial perspective of turn-based battles, to show that these little chess pieces actually have detailed faces and expressive animations is a cool trick, and it all holds up impressively well to close scrutiny. But look past all that and you'll find something that once again hews pretty close to the XCOM formula.

There are research projects for you to choose between, providing upgrades which won't bear fruit until after your next sortie, and opportunities to convert experience earned in missions into level-up rewards. There's also a med-bay where you can heal up those injuries, in exchange for cold hard credits. Even in the glory days of the Galactic Republic, it seems, the galaxy didn't offer free healthcare.

Running Zero Company, the eponymous mercenary outfit headed up by Hawks, you never have quite enough money to afford everything you want. That next big-ticket upgrade is tantalizingly out of reach, unless you're willing to let a couple of employees tick along with permanent injuries. So yes, it might look different – and incredibly shiny – but underneath it's that same old 'just one more go' XCOM magic.

Personally, I don't have a huge problem with Zero Company's reticence to reinvent the wheel. Not least because, well, it's a really damn good wheel. Besides, it's been long enough.

In the decade since XCOM 2, we've been blessed with a wide variety of takes on the format, from Into The Breach's bonsai-tree perfection to Mewgenics' wild excesses. And of course, Marvel's Midnight Suns, the missing link between XCOM and Zero Company, which was more experimental (for good and ill).

Having played them all, I've still got room in my heart for a more conventional take – especially one with the kind of big-budget production values I never expected to see lavished on this genre. Even when the game is idling, waiting for you to punch in your next set of orders, laser fire will dance across the battlefield, as both sides lay down suppressive fire. Occasionally, one of these blasts will connect with Tel-Rea's lightsaber and be deflected with an effortless flick of the wrist. And every time, my eyes light up like a child watching their favourite toys come to life.

This spectacle is offset, however, by frequent technical issues. Beautiful as they are, the animations don't always line up perfectly – I often find myself cursing a shot that has missed its mark, before the game catches up a second or two later, remembers to display a damage number and my target crumples to the ground. The camera can struggle to keep up, too, so that I'm left to watch some pivotal manoeuvres from the far side of a wall. A day-0 patch has been promised that will hopefully iron out these kinks, but they persist throughout my time with Zero Company, right up until the eve of launch.

Tru faith

Still, none of these bugs – nor the game's more conservative design choices – is enough to dampen my enthusiasm for just one more go. And shallow as it might sound, at least some of that comes down to the fact that Zero Company isn't just an XCOM-like game but a true Star Wars game.

There's something deep in my DNA that will always thrill at the sight of an R2-style Astromech launching a health stim from the top of its head, across the battlefield and into the waiting hand of a Jedi. When my scoundrel-class unit automatically finishes off an enemy clinging onto their last two health points with a quick burst from their blaster, it carries all the associations of Han and Greedo in the Cantina. Playing Zero Company has even helped give me a fresh fondness for the Prequel Trilogy droid army. Those might not be great films, but that's not the fault of Lucasfilm's art department, and the Droideka is a design classic.

These superficial boosts aside, what can Star Wars offer the tactics genre? A veritable toybox of abilities for you to play with.

In my campaign, Tel-Rea barely ever ignites her lightsaber, because I'm too busy Force Pushing and Pulling enemies into crates and over the edge of cliffs, and positioning her in 'Noble Stance', the overwatch-equivalent ability that returns blaster fire to sender. Cly Kullervo has a Boba Fett-style jetpack that not only allows her to flank enemies but spits a circle of fire wherever it lands; touching down in the middle of a now-burning crowd, you can follow up with a few quick-draw shots from her blaster pistol, each refunding your AP as long as it's fatal.

As you move up the upgrade trees, even the more unassuming characters can grow into distinctive heroes. I spec Tagoz Tru into a damage-eating tank, making the most of the high health and defence he had when I recruited him (stat boosts attributed, in a wonderfully characterful touch, to his history of hard labor). This is not exactly an unusual role for a unit in a tactics game, admittedly. But then there's this mission, one that begins with my objective complete and demands only that the squad make it safely to the extraction, with a Vulture drone hot on their heels, blowing up sections of the level and insta-killing anyone lagging behind.

I let the rest of the squad run ahead to safety while Tagoz brings up the rear, using his taunt and retaliation abilities to draw and then return enemy fire. When things begin to get hairy even for his formidable health bar, Tagoz is protected by a smoke grenade courtesy of my little Astromech, then buffed with a performance-enhancing stim from Hawks.

So, the mission ends with Tagoz drugged up to the eyeballs and shrouded in smoke, the gray cloud lighting up red and blue by incoming and outbound blaster fire, as a strafing drone closes in overhead. I fully expect him to die – and what a way to go! – but at the last minute, a change of heart: Hawks and the Astromech can surrender their own AP and pass it over to their Weequay saviour.

Tagoz dodges laser and rockets and makes it to the extraction, on the last turn before everything gets blown to hell. It's a perfect reminder of why I play every XCOM-style tactics game that comes along, and all the sweeter for knowing that, having brought Tagoz along not much caring if he lived or died, I can't stand to lose him to permadeath – and for how perfectly Star Wars this moment feels. I'm willing to forgive a lot, for a game that can leave me feeling like I've dropped a proton torpedo down the exhaust shaft of my own personal Death Star.

Star Wars Zero Company was reviewed on PC, with a code provided by the publisher.

Check out our best strategy games ranking for more battles that'll make you think!

While EA is largely known as the sports, Battlefield, and Sims factory these days – they also occasionally allow BioWare to release an RPG if the studio does so quietly enough – the studio's catalog includes many, many more franchises. What's going to become of all those IPs after the Saudi Arabia-led buyout of the company? Well, maybe some of them can be sold off to more attentive homes.

That's an idea posited by Emmanuel Rosier, who served as a high-level manager at EA for the better part of a decade, apprising the company of industry and market trends likely to affect their fortunes. Now he's the director of market intelligence at the third-party industry analysis firm Newzoo, and recently spoke to PC Gamer about the situation EA now finds itself in.

"They have a lot of dormant IPs that have not been used for so many years," Rosier says. "You know, they have IPs like Ultima, they have IPs like Wing Commander and this and that, and it's not being used at all. So the question is, would some of them be maybe sold, or will they hire studios to leverage these IPs? Because we see every day the importance of IPs."

EA's taking $20 billion in debt as part of the buyout, and it's widely expected that mass layoffs are going to be a big part of getting that debt under control. Selling off old IPs could be a way to get the cash flowing in a hurry, and as much of a struggle as it's seemingly been for BioWare to even get Mass Effect 5 made, I have my doubts that anyone's going to be able to convince the higher-ups at EA – never mind the even higher-ups in the new ownership group – to sign off on a big-budget revival of an even older series.

"I think there are plenty of IPs like that at EA that nobody cares about at this moment," Rosier says. "I think probably they will leverage that either by just selling it or trying to find external studios that can work on that. Maybe mobile games."

I don't know about that whole mobile games idea – the last time EA translated a classic series into a mobile game, we got Command & Conquer: Rivals. That game was, by many accounts, pretty good, but it left traditional RTS fans feeling burned, and the backlash was so severe that EA built a lavish remaster of the original games as something of a make good.

Ultima and Wing Commander, specifically, are every bit as foundational to their respective genres as Command & Conquer is to RTS games, and the fact that they're sitting in some grand EA vault like the artifacts in Raiders of the Lost Ark is hard to swallow. Never mind the likes of SimCity, Burnout, Dungeon Keeper, Populous, SSX, Spore… the list goes on and on.

I'm not one to demand revivals of every old game, as I do think old franchises have often already had their time to shine. But the fact that so many of these games aren't even available on Steam these days, with their legacy left to wonderful fan patches and sketchy abandonware sites, hardly seems right.

Many of the best RPGs available today simply would not exist without Ultima's influence.

EA, the publisher behind games like Battlefield 6 and The Sims 4 and parent of Mass Effect developer BioWare, is on many a player's mind right now following the $55 billion deal that saw its buyout – one that might spell disaster for Mass Effect 5, apparently.

Although we don't know too much about the next Mass Effect game as BioWare has been too "busy" to share its progress, it's been underway – or at least in some sort of pre-production state – since its reveal way back in 2020.

It's safe to say that all of this doesn't exactly inspire the greatest confidence in folks… and neither does the fact that a trio of private investors led by Saudi Arabia has just acquired EA, to put it lightly.

Former senior manager at EA Emmanuel Rosier, who now works as the director of market intelligence at industry analyst Newzoo, explains how he feels about BioWare following the recent buyout in a new interview with PC Gamer.

"They've been struggling as a studio, as a brand have been struggling in recent years, and I don't know if they [EA] will keep funding that one," he states. "I think that's the biggest question mark for me."

So, what about Mass Effect 5, then? "I will believe it when I see it, the next Mass Effect game, let's put it that way," Rosier says. "I've worked many years with BioWare, sometimes it can stretch for years and years until something comes." That checks out.

After all, Dragon Age: The Veilguard took nearly a decade to develop – and also suffered a rework of sorts as well. It's hard to tell what'll happen with the new Mass Effect, put simply.

"I think everything can happen at this moment," as Rosier concludes. "They [EA] can pull the plug very, very easily. And if the new investors, they don't have that many feelings about the history of the portfolio, they will take the most financially sound decision most probably."

I hate to say it, but I do fear the former EA lead is right here – anything could happen, and it's likely that profits are being taken into account above… well, everything else.

Only time will tell what the fate of Mass Effect 5 will truly be, but I'll be keeping my own fingers crossed that the new RPG from BioWare ends up coming to fruition someday – with a teaser (anything at all, please) sometime soon, to boot.

EA devs feel "the threat of layoffs at all times," especially after Saudi Arabia acquisition: "It's hard to see how teams or games that underperform wouldn't be dissolved"

EA developers were already having a bad time before the publisher was acquired by a trio of investors led by Saudi Arabia in a $55 billion buyout. Now the deal is done, EA has gone private, and its developers are feeling more pressure than before.

Anonymous EA workers describe their tense work environment in a report from Game Developer. While EA has been attempting to cure staff concerns about the Saudi Arabia buyout for a year now, sharing a half-hearted guarantee in 2025 that "there will be no immediate changes to your job," one worker says the reality is, "Everybody just assumes they are under the threat of layoffs at all times."

"Given how things have been across the industry at large," they continue, "but also internally at EA. There is also some amount of cynicism in that we expect they won't be enacted as mass layoffs anymore but rather as waves of small layoffs in order to bypass [Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification] notices" – layoff warnings required by the US government in the event of a large workforce reduction. GamesRadar+ has reached out to EA for comment about these staff concerns and the likelihood of layoffs.

Of course, EA never needed something as weighty as a fat buyout to use as an excuse for layoffs. This spring, the publisher laid off workers across four different studios that helped create Battlefield 6, which EA called "the biggest launch in franchise history." After the Battlefield 6 job cuts, EA's newest financial report showed that CEO Andrew Wilson made 305x more than the average EA employee last year, and he could qualify for $125 million in severance depending on how things go with EA's new owners.

The average game developer doesn't get a money parachute like Wilson. As part of its buyout agreement, EA is meant to pay back $18 billion of the total debt it took on now that its deal has closed with Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake investors, and Jared Kushner's Affinity firm.

EA has reportedly committed to slicing off $700 million in yearly costs to help finance this debt, with $170 million of that downsizing meant to come from changes in "organizational efficiencies." Workers don't seem to think the publisher is referring to Andrew Wilson's $38,649,984 salary when it says "organizational efficiencies."

"It's hard to see how teams or games that underperform wouldn't be dissolved or sold off," another employee tells Game Developer. "The history of leveraged buyouts shows that this is the playbook, no matter what our executives insist will be different."

They continue, "I have no internal secret information – we don't need any to see how this thing plays out – but the only unknown (and fear) is how soon and how deep things need to get cut back to pay off this debt. Any year that EA's cash flow goes down, rather than up, will be bad for employees." It all feels bad, really.

EA staff fear new Saudi Arabia owners will police their games: "Projects just won't get signed because they don't align explicitly with what the Saudi government wants."

EA employees worry the company's new Saudi Arabia-led owners will, quietly or loudly, police what content is permitted based on the country's standards.

Multiple anonymous EA staff spoke to Game Developer about uncertainty within the company following EA's $55 billion leveraged buyout, which has seen the company go private under a group of investors. The supermajority belongs to Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, though Silver Lake and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners are also in the mix.

"The [crown] prince is not going to get on to a town hall and say 'we are no longer doing these things' but instead projects just won't get signed because they don't align explicitly with what the Saudi government wants or implicitly because [EA will think] 'oh, we're going to try and cater these things [to our owners] because if we pitch something else the government may not like or approve of it,'" says one EA employee.

Saudi Arabia's PIF has been accused of using entertainment and sports investments to launder the country's reputation for human rights violations. In a statement released as the EA deal closed, PIF deputy governor and head of international investments Turqi Alnowaiser bluntly said, "Entertainment and sports are key areas of strategic focus for PIF, and are among the fastest growing and evolving sectors around the world."

Another EA employee adds: "It's certainly hard to feel good about being bought out by a regime that's very much at odds with progressive society, so it is surely detrimental to anyone who finds this buyout morally odious. It's not a good feeling."

One source singled out how Saudi Arabia treats queer people, saying they "feel dirty" working under its ownership. EA games like The Sims have been praised for LGBT representation and cultivated a large queer audience, leaving the fans – and, evidently, creators – of such games especially worried under Saudi leadership.

Per UK-based LGBT charity Human Dignity Trust, "Saudi Arabia criminalises same-sex sexual activity between men and between women. The gender expression of trans people is also criminalised. Sentences include a maximum penalty of death. There is evidence of the law being enforced in recent years, and LGBT people are regularly subjected to discrimination and violence."

In October, not long after the buyout was revealed, EA told employees that "our creative freedom and player-first values will remain intact" even under Saudi ownership.

In January, seemingly seeing the writing on the wall, The Sims leaders at Maxis affirmed their commitment to inclusivity. Studio leaders promised that "creative control, guided by our values of inclusivity, choice, creativity, community, and play, has not changed," and that those values would continue in "the future."

EA's recent internal response to such concerns is called "unsatisfactory" in Game Developer's report, with several employees pointing to "vague reassurances" about the future of the company. "It hasn't done enough to quell a lot of the fears over job security or creative influences with Saudi owners," says one staffer.

A 2025 town hall meeting is singled out – specifically, the moment that one of the directors of EA's lifestyle pillar was allegedly caught saying "little babies" by a hot mic. There was apparently some debate over their meaning, but this comment didn't exactly assuage concerns.

Cost-cutting measures planned in response to the $18 billion debt EA's taken on as part of its leveraged buyout have made mass layoffs at the company look inevitable.

Saudi Arabia's $55 billion takeover of EA could waste "one of the best catalogues in the industry" by reducing it to a "sequel-and-mega-franchise machine," Helldivers 2 boss worries.

Although The Sims 4 sadly doesn't feature an open-world map the way that The Sims 3 (my beloved) did, one talented modder has stepped up to the plate and is making it feel a lot more seamless and united.

How is he doing that, you might ask – and the answer is, well, by changing up the boring world selection screen and transforming it into a map that's almost reminiscent of The Sims 2 (minus all of the customization, but we can't win 'em all).

Aptly dubbed "The Immersive World Map" by creator SimMattically, the mod is rightfully making rounds online as it does what Simmers have hoped EA would do for years.

SimMattically describes it in a recent online post, calling the exciting new mod "a complete overhaul of the world selection screen, featuring a custom map design and a seamless layout that connects all Sims 4 worlds together."

He notes that it's available in early access over on Patreon, and you bet I'm running… not walking.

An attached video shows the map in action, too, and I'm all the more convinced I need it in my game.

It's downright stunning as well, combining all worlds into one unified map that just… well, makes sense. From Chestnut Ridge to San Myshuno, everything appears to fit perfectly, with bodies of water spacing out "continents."

Thematically, it all aligns, making navigation easier and less of an eyesore. I'm evidently not alone in thinking so, either, as comments show many already deem it one of the best Sims 4 mods to date.

"Beautiful and gorgeous," writes one Simmer. Another calls the mod "so sick." SimMattically confirms that it works with custom world map replacements, too – a dream come true.

He put a lot of effort in as well, stating he "did a ton of research" on every region "to see what real-world places they're based on." Then, he "tried to match them with the right culture, climate, and geography." EA could (or, perhaps more accurately, would) never.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a Patreon to subscribe to and a brand-new world map to behold – borders be damned. Maybe one day we'll even see a worthy open world mod come to light, too… a girl can have hopes here, right?

EA finally admits adding autosaves to The Sims 4 is a good idea after 12 years, slapping a band-aid on over a decade of heartbreak from crashes and lost progress

BioWare parent company EA was acquired by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund plus private equity firms Silver Lake and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners in a $55 billion deal this month, which is indicative of the world we live in. Fans are understandably concerned that the Dragon Age and Mass Effect studio will get cut and have its organs sold if its new overlords decide they only care about EA's biggest franchises, but former BioWare executive Mark Darrah thinks the company can make it out alive.

The developer discusses the topic in a new YouTube video; in the comments, he replied to a fan hoping for "Bioware and its staff to survive this," saying, "I do too. There are several ways that happens." But if BioWare survives, it won't be without sacrifice. So prepare those organ donation bins.

In one potential scenario, according to Darrah, EA sells BioWare along with its IP, back catalog, and possibly even access to its proprietary Frostbite engine. Darrah says, "Certainly, if I was buying BioWare, I would want everything. I would want the entire back catalog. I would want all the tech. I would want unlimited rights to use the tech that's still owned by EA, so that I could do remasters and remakes."

But Darrah wonders who, at this point in video game history and the layoffs Armageddon, would even want to purchase an entire company. Instead, Darrah pictures EA bundling poorly performing IP and auctioning them off at a discount, getting bored and leaving BioWare alone, or selling BioWare IP individually, like slices of pizza. Though, "I don't know who's looking to buy IPs right now. Again, money's really tight."

So, uh, does Darrah really think BioWare has a chance? Kind of. It seems to depend on how good EA and its new owners want to look. Darrah suggests BioWare could even end up independent if EA decides to relinquish it for "entirely" PR reasons, or BioWare could be protected by an imaginary "son-in-law of a Saudi prince who really loves Mass Effect." Hey, you never know.

But "chances are, if [EA's new owners are] coming in, and they're very involved, they're going to do a lot of damage," says Darrah. OK. Perhaps there's no hope after all.

Saudi Arabia's $55 billion takeover of EA could waste "one of the best catalogues in the industry" by reducing it to a "sequel-and-mega-franchise machine," Helldivers 2 boss worries.

EA could never really understand Dragon Age or why people would even want to buy games in the fantasy series, according to a former BioWare producer, which probably explains the years of reported corporate intervention that led to Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

Ex-BioWare producer Mark Darrah – who had a hand in everything from the original Baldur's Gate games, almost the entire Dragon Age series, and Anthem – recently spoke about the beloved but troubled franchise in an interview with FRVR. And, as you might have been able to guess, EA was always a little confused by Mass Effect's fantasy cousin.

"I think you see it in the way that EA interacted with the two franchises," Darrah says. "I think that if you are not a person who plays CRPGs, it's very hard to look at a game like Dragon Age or a game like Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 and understand why anyone would want to play this nerdy piece of garbage. Whereas they look at something like Mass Effect and go, 'OK, it's a Star Wars game.' Like, I get it, even that might be too nerdy for me, but I get it."

2008's Dragon Age: Origins was in development before the publisher eventually scooped up BioWare, but past that point, EA supposedly saw the series as "too niche, too backwards, too old-school."

Mass Effect was an action game with cover-based shooting – from afar, it looked close enough to Gears of War or other shooters that were popular from that era, but Dragon Age was a different story. A high fantasy world full of complicated politics and a game that mixed real-time action with CRPG tactics was apparently less palatable to EA execs.

"You can blame some of the things where Dragon Age has always seemed to be in this perpetual state of flux, a lot of that coming from pressure from EA because people don't understand why people would want to buy this hardcore, tactical thing," Darrah explains.

While Dragon Age: The Veilguard came out after Mark Darrah's tenure at the studio, EA's misunderstanding of the franchise seemingly affected that game's production as well. The story goes, Dragon Age 4 reportedly started life as a smaller scale, more focused RPG that was eventually put on pause, before restarting development as a live-service multiplayer game. It was again rebooted one last time into what we now recognize as The Veilguard, a game that didn't meet the publisher's sales expectations. Layoffs at the storied studio followed shortly after its launch.

Dragon Age is "unlikely" to continue at EA, says former lead David Gaider, but if you gave him the keys to the RPG he'd take it somewhere "dark" and "do things that will make people upset."

EA has now officially gone private, with its $55 billion acquisition by Saudi Arabia's Private Investment Fund, Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners, and Silver Lake now closed. And, after all that, there's reportedly already the threat of mass layoffs looming.

Plans for the big buyout were first outlined last year, at which point it was revealed that the transaction would be partly funded by EA taking on a whopping $20 billion in debt – "$18 billion of which is expected to be funded at close." The acquisition plans, in general, already had some employees and studio veterans concerned about potential layoffs to follow – after all, we saw that same thing happen with Activision Blizzard after its buyout by Microsoft – and, according to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, that's now looking even more likely.

Schreier posts on Bluesky that EA taking on $18 billion in debt means it's "putting it on the hook to pay ~$1.8 billion/year in interest," making it an even more daunting figure. Right now, he adds, EA's earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) fall around $1.5 billion – a number that "should be enough to service the interest payments."

However, Schreier continues," the publisher has told debt investors that it will cut $700 million in annual costs including $170 million in 'organizational efficiencies,' per Bloomberg. In other words: mass layoffs."

EA's annual Ebitda is around $1.5 billion, which should be enough to service the interest payments. But the publisher has told debt investors that it will cut $700 million in annual costs including $170 million in "organizational efficiencies," per Bloomberg. In other words: mass layoffs

— @jasonschreier.bsky.social (@jasonschreier.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-08-05T13:36:04.643Z

Following the announcement of EA's acquisition plans last year, the publisher had directly addressed whether the private ownership would "lead to layoffs," to which it provided perhaps the least reassuring answer. "There will be no immediate changes to your job, team, or daily work, as a result of this transaction," it said at the time, with no indication of what its definition of "immediate" was.

Despite this, EA CEO Andrew Wilson now says in a statement that "we're entering this next chapter from a position of strength," and that with its new partners, "we'll invest boldly, accelerate innovation, and build the next generation of games and experiences."

It was reported last year that EA's new investors were hoping that AI could be used to help reduce the company's operating costs to manage its shiny new debt, though at the time it wasn't clear what exactly it'd be used for, but the prospect of it wheedling its way into game development and potentially replacing real workers was obviously a concern.

In April, Wilson said that around 85% of the company's quality assurance work now uses AI, but he claimed that "we hire more QA people than we ever have," with humans required to analyze the findings of the AI. Regardless, it's understandable that there's a lot of unease and uncertainty from fans looking at the situation from the outside right now.

Saudi Arabia's $55 billion takeover of EA could waste "one of the best catalogues in the industry" by reducing it to a "sequel-and-mega-franchise machine," Helldivers 2 boss worries.

Right on schedule, the acquisition of EA by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake, and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners has closed. One of the biggest publishers in gaming has been bought.

EA is now a private company following the biggest leveraged buyout in history, with the deal clocking in at $55 billion – in considerable excess of EA's previous market value. A $20 billion chunk of that is debt.

Control of series ranging from The Sims and Battlefield to Mass Effect and Dragon Age is now in the hands of a group of investors collectively referred to as the Consortium, with Saudi Arabia's PIF holding a super-majority of the company.

In a press release, EA CEO Andrew Wilson, who was recently awarded an $8 million raise thanks to the success of Battlefield 6 after the people who made Battlefield 6 a success were rewarded with layoffs, says, "This moment recognizes the extraordinary people whose creativity, ambition and passion have made EA one of the world's leading interactive entertainment companies."

"We're entering this next chapter from a position of strength with partners who share our vision and ambition," Wilson continues. "Together, we'll invest boldly, accelerate innovation, and build the next generation of games and experiences for the hundreds of millions of players and fans who inspire us every day."

Turqi Alnowaiser, deputy governor and head of international investments at the PIF, a group which has been accused of using acquisitions in entertainment and sports to launder Saudi Arabia's public image and reputation for human rights violations, adds, "Entertainment and sports are key areas of strategic focus for PIF, and are among the fastest growing and evolving sectors around the world. Together, the Consortium is uniquely positioned to be a long-term partner to EA’s management team in driving sustained growth and innovation for EA and the industry."

This press release arrived shortly after EA closed its investor relations page, which previously archived calls, reports, and other documentation related to quarterly earnings, strategic planning, leadership changes, and other financial red tape. With the company now privately owned, such reports will no longer be shared publicly, turning one of the most influential publishers in the industry into a complete black box.

The deal's closure will surely only intensify concerns that EA's new owners will take a hacksaw to the company's IP, either by censoring existing series like The Sims or abandoning less profitable series like Dragon Age. The latest installment, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, disappointed EA leadership.

Considerable structural changes typically follow deals like this, and with EA making layoffs already amid wider games industry turmoil, there are concerns that many employees will be cut in the quarters ahead. Multiple games analysts also told GamesRadar+ that EA may pawn the rights to some IP instead of outright burying them.

Additionally, US senators argued the deal presents "foreign influence and national security risks."

Last year, EA told employees that "our creative freedom and player-first values will remain intact" even after the buyout.

Saudi Arabia's $55 billion takeover of EA could waste "one of the best catalogues in the industry" by reducing it to a "sequel-and-mega-franchise machine," Helldivers 2 boss worries.

EA's $55 billion deal to go private officially closes today, with the company falling under the ownership of a group of investors led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. It's natural to wonder what that means for the future of one of the games industry's most enduring and prolific publishers, and not everyone's optimistic.

In a statement sent to GamesRadar+, Shams Jorjani, CEO of Helldivers 2 studio Arrowhead Game Studios, expresses concern that the buyout could mean fewer original ideas and more "safe bet" investments in tried-and-true franchises.

"The industry needs business diversity as much as it needs creative diversity — the more studios and publishers operating at different scales, taking different bets, the healthier games get," says Jorjani.

"EA's portfolio has always had that range: Battlefield, the Sims, and Mass Effect are some of my favourite blockbusters of the last 15 years, but so are Split Fiction and Unravel, and classics like C&C Generals and SimCity 2000 (yes, 2000) that still hold up. This deal is consolidation, no question — and I wonder whether new ownership optimizes for the safe bet, more sequels, more mega-franchises, over that breadth."

EA is a massive publisher with a diverse network of internal studios which will hopefully continue operating under new ownership despite the ever-present threat of post-acquisition restructuring. $55 billion buyouts don't typically spell good news for the creative independence of developers, but Jorjani is "hopeful this leads to more of that range, not less," warning that "if it turns EA into a sequel-and-mega-franchise machine, that's a real waste of one of the best catalogues in the industry."

Jorjani's fears are actually among the tamer reactions to the Saudi PIF's takeover of EA. Prominent developers think it means layoffs and studio closures are coming, while US senators are sounding the alarm on potential "foreign influence and national security risks."

Meanwhile, the Human Rights Watch has accused Saudi's PIF of investing in sports and entertainment to "whitewash the country's abysmal human rights record," which carries potentially dire implications for EA's commitment to inclusivity in games.

Despite Battlefield 6 layoffs, EA paid its CEO 305x more than its average employee last year thanks to an $8 million bonus increase — and he could net another $125 million in severance as buyout looms.

After Dragon Age: The Veilguard, it's hard to imagine the series' future – or a comeback of its past RPGs in the form of remakes. That doesn't mean a return of the original entries is entirely impossible, though. Trent Oster, BioWare co-founder and RPG veteran, believes as much, anyway.

In a new online post, the industry legend, who now serves as the CEO of Beamdog, writes, "I've seen a fair bit of chatter about the impossibility of remastering Dragon Age. I like to think of myself as someone who talks a bit, but more often lets my work speak for me. In my opinion, it is possible, but in no means a trivial exercise."

In other words, remasters or remakes could happen – but that doesn't mean that they will, or that they'd be a simple feat for developers. Oster's opinion has quite the foundation, too.

As he says, "Having led the development of both of the engines that were smashed together to make DA:O and DA:2, I have a unique perspective on the tech under the hood." So, if any dev out there knows how possible it is (and if it's possible at all), it's probably him.

Not everyone agrees with Oster about the possibility, though – or, at the least, they're not sure that remakes or remasters are in the cards right now.

Mark Darrah, who co-directed Dragon Age: Origins and directed its sequel, thinks we shouldn't expect a remaster of the original trilogy like Mass Effect's own even if one would sell "super well." According to him, "basically no one at BioWare" now knows how Dragon Age and its engine work anymore.

Darrah also isn't certain about a series comeback of any sort for Dragon Age, saying, "I suspect that it wouldn't happen" as publisher EA "owns a frightening number of IPs that are dormant" already.

I suppose that checks out, considering the likes of American McGee's Alice, Mirror's Edge, SimCity, Spore, Titanfall, and… I could go on. It's sad to think about, of course, but it definitely doesn't inspire any hope for BioWare's RPGs.

Although I would love to see Oster's thought that "it is possible" ring true and remasters or remakes come to light, I'm not sure I'll hold my breath.

Dragon Age and BioWare veteran says games could learn a thing or two from how the movie business makes money.

It's official: EA's $55 billion deal to go private will close next week. The company has confirmed in a new SEC filing that the controversial deal has cleared all the required regulatory hurdles and will close on August 4. The deal will see a group of investors led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund take ownership of the company.

"As of July 30, 2026, all regulatory approvals required to complete the Merger have been obtained," the company says in its SEC filing. "Electronic Arts currently expects the Merger to close on or about the close of trading on August 4, 2026. Completion of the Merger remains subject to the satisfaction or waiver of the remaining customary closing conditions set forth in the Merger Agreement."

The deal will see Saudi Arabia's PIF take ownership of 93.4% of EA's shares, with 1.1% going to Affinity Partners, an investment firm led by US president Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The remaining 5.5% go to Silver Lake, another investment group.

The European Commission cleared the deal under the EU Merger Regulation just last week, concluding that the "transaction would not raise competition concerns, given its limited impact on competition in the markets where the companies are active."

The deal has been controversial on multiple fronts. Developers have worried about layoffs and studio closures. US senators have feared "foreign influence and national security risks." And players have been concerned that the influence of Saudi Arabia's PIF, which Human Rights Watch accuses of using sports and entertainment investments to "whitewash the country’s abysmal human rights record," will dramatically impact EA's willingness to continue developing inclusive games.

Despite Battlefield 6 layoffs, EA paid its CEO 305x more than its average employee last year thanks to an $8 million bonus increase — and he could net another $125 million in severance as buyout looms.

EA managed to act a little morose earlier this year when it forced Battlefield 6 studios into "realignment" and laid off workers, but it seems CEO Andrew Wilson is doing fine. The executive made 305-times the average EA employee's salary in fiscal year 2026.

The publisher explains, in a newly amended annual report (thanks, Eurogamer), that "the annual total compensation of our median employee was $126,612," while "the annual total compensation of Mr. Wilson, was $38,649,984."

That's $8,120,149 more than Wilson made in fiscal year 2025, though the boss' base salary remained at a humble $1.3 million. Ultimately, the "Compensation Actually Paid" to Wilson, which EA describes on page 31, totaled $77,231,168. So "the ratio of these amounts is 305 to 1," EA says of the $38.6 million figure, but the full picture is even more sobering.

Additionally, the publisher notes on page 29 of its financial report, Wilson could be eligible for an additional estimate of $125 million under any "qualifying termination," which includes firing "in connection with a change in control." EA has no doubt strategically baked in this "'double-trigger' severance" benefit, as the publisher calls it.

A team of investors under Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF), Silver Lake, and the investment firm led by US President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, Affinity Partners, currently stands to acquire EA in a $55 billion deal recently approved by the European Commission. That $125 million could be very useful for Wilson if things dramatically change for him during or after the merger.

It also sounds like Wilson was recently allowed to fly around in the company plane for fun: "In fiscal year 2026, Mr. Wilson was permitted to use corporate aircraft for personal travel, subject to a 75-hour cap," writes EA. So that's nice for him, too.

Meanwhile, many laid off Battlefield 6 developers are probably still looking for work after, EA admits again, delivering a "high-quality launch" that "achieved meeting all milestones." It's a shame they didn't benefit from that launch. Andrew Wilson, however, is still doing fine.

Dragon Age veteran says a series comeback would be difficult with EA's "frightening" graveyard of dormant IP: "I suspect that it wouldn't happen."

The Mass Effect Legendary Edition in 2021 provided the perfect modern way to enjoy BioWare's beloved sci-fi trilogy. Sadly, it's unlikely we'll ever see the first three Dragon Age games get the same treatment, according to Mark Darrah, who co-directed the first game and directed the second.

That's not for want of trying either, as Darrah tells FRVR there was an internal campaign to re-release the original Dragon Age installments, but logistics just weren't in anyone's favor. "I think what you want is a Champion’s Edition," he says.

"My plan was like, we're going to do a 'Champion’s Trilogy,'" he recalls. "These are three games with three different important figures. And we're going to group them in, collect them together [...], we're going to retroactively turn it into a trilogy."

The term Champion's Edition stems from Street Fighter; the re-release of the second installment, Street Fighter 2: Champion Edition, is the third most successful arcade game ever. On its face, packaging Dragon Age Origins, 2, and Inquisition together seems like a sound idea, but there are a lot of technical hurdles.

The first two use the Eclipse Engine, while the third was developed using Frostbite, and they don't feed into each other as directly as the Mass Effect games. The Mass Effect trilogy was made using the Unreal Engine for all three installments, and each sequel was built to incorporate your character from its predecessor.

Dragon Age 2 allows you to do that directly from Origins, but to do it for Inquisition, you had to upload your save to an outside app. It's cumbersome, and even if BioWare or parent company EA wanted to make this happen, finding support would be hard because the underlying tech is outdated within the industry.

"There is basically no one at BioWare anymore that understands the Aurora Engine [the basis for Eclipse]," Darrah says. "There's basically no one outside of BioWare anymore that understands the Aurora engine. So unlike Mass Effect, which is Unreal, there are basically no companies that could help you."

It doesn't help that the last game in the series, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, performed underwhelmingly in terms of sales following a turbulent, decade-long development cycle. There won't be much impetus to invest in the franchise right now, no matter how strong the case might be for nostalgia. A shame, because after Baldur's Gate 3, there are generations of fans who'd probably love these fantasy RPGs.

Darrah thinks so, too. "Could a Dragon Age remaster sell really well? Yeah," he says. "I think it sells super well because even at the time, Dragon Age Origins wasn't the most attractive game. There's a lot you could do there to make it [...] a lot better looking."

Dragon Age veteran says a series comeback would be difficult with EA's "frightening" graveyard of dormant IP: "I suspect that it wouldn't happen."

A new Dragon Age game would have a very difficult time getting off the ground, according to the series former producer and long-time BioWare veteran Mark Darrah.

BioWare's epic fantasy series hasn't had a smooth ride as of late, which is odd considering Dragon Age Inquisition was a critical and commercial smash. After a decade-long gap between games and multiple internal reboots, Dragon Age: The Veilguard tripped past the finish line when it came out in 2024 to mild sales.

Speaking to FRVR, Darrah says the Dragon Age: The Veilguard and the series' wider troubles were perhaps "happening because of EA's complicated relationship to shipping games at all." He then recalls how "someone once described to me EA as a hedge fund with a video game hobby that it wished it didn't spend so much money on, and I think that remains true."

The BioWare veteran of over 20 years doesn't see things changing anytime soon, either. "I have no concept of who could, would, possibly pitch that at EA," he says, partly because "EA owns a frightening number of IPs that are dormant." You can perhaps find Dragon Age laying in a damp cell alongside Titanfall and Mirror's Edge, then.

As for the reasons why a new Dragon Age project could hit a proverbial wall, well, there's quite a few. "The problem is I don't know who at BioWare would pitch a Dragon Age," he continues. "So the other option is somebody else within the EA organization decides they're gonna pitch a Dragon Age and, what I expect would happen if they try to do that, is somebody at BioWare would essentially become one of those people jumping under the vents to rip that person apart. I suspect that it wouldn't happen for a variety of reasons."

For context, BioWare's been hit hard by mass layoffs at EA multiple times over the last few years, meaning the storied developer might not even have the bandwidth to make a Dragon Age game alongside its next Mass Effect.

Complicating things further is the impending proposed buyout of EA by a group of investment firms led by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Group. Darrah questions whether the publisher's new ownership would even be interested in the series or the studio at all: "I could argue yes and no… do you want BioWare at all in this world?"

"It's a really compelling place to be left in": Dragon Age fans aren't giving up on the RPG – they're expanding it.

E3 is best remembered for its glitzy press conferences, where big publishers put their best feet forward as they showcase their games to massive audiences online. But it wasn't always that way. Just look at when Square turned the much-anticipated US reveal of Final Fantasy 8 into a desperately awkward stalling match.

In 1998, Square was riding high on the success of Final Fantasy 7, a game which had proven a hit even in North America, where JRPGs had historically been a niche genre. At the time, Square had mostly partnered with Sony to publish its PlayStation titles, but that was about to change with the formation of Square Electronic Arts.

As the name suggests, this would be a joint venture between Square and EA to help bring the Japanese company's games to market in North America. (Another company, Electronic Arts Square, would do the same for EA's games in Japan.) At E3 1998, they detailed this partnership in front of journalists, highlighting titles like Parasite Eve, Xenogears, and yes, Final Fantasy 8 as among the first to be published by Square Electronic Arts.

That press conference was not meant to be seen by the public, but an attendee by the name of Anthony Parisi happened to be there, filming with a camcorder. Parisi's tape – alongside an absolute treasure trove of other materials related to E3 – was recently published as part of the Video Game History Foundation's digital archive, giving us what the group calls "possibly the only surviving video of the US debut of Final Fantasy VIII."

It sounds momentous, but if you follow the link above, scroll to the 57:19 mark in the video, and watch the whole 35-minute press conference for yourself, you'll find that it feels like anything but a big deal.

A handful of EA and Square reps sit down behind an innocuous table and simply tell members of the media about what they plan to do. It is a press conference in the most traditional sense, and the exact kind of thing E3 was for before the livestreaming era.

Eventually, the execs run down the games they're showing at E3 and, alongside the hands-on demos, promise "a preview of Final Fantasy 8." In the video, we hear someone near the camera quietly whisper, "Nice."

A Square rep politely asks attendees to refrain from filming this preview, but thankfully, this camera operator chooses to outright ignore that request, pointing the camera directly at the projector screen.

Yes! Anthony Parisi's tape from E3 1998 has possibly the only surviving video of the US debut of Final Fantasy VIII, including six full minutes of the Squaresoft staff fumbling with the projector trying to get the trailer to playarchive.gamehistory.org/item/3996212...

— @gamehistoryorg.bsky.social (@gamehistoryorg.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-07-24T20:17:54.786Z

Except the screen remains blank. Audio from this mystery trailer begins to play several times, but video never accompanies it. Minutes pass. It's unclear exactly how many minutes pass, because there's a cut in the middle of the footage. When we come back, Square and EA are setting up to take questions from the audience in a seemingly impromptu Q&A session as others continue to try getting the projector running. At one point, the microphones cut out too.

This keeps happening for at least seven minutes in front of a crowd increasingly restless to see Final Fantasy 8 – it's probably even longer, given the jump in the footage. At long last, the lights dim, and the video begins to play… completely without audio. The crowd gets one last laugh in before they finally get to see the trailer, complete with soundtrack, debuting about a minute of impressive CG footage featuring the soon-to-be beloved protagonist, Squall.

It's all a fun reminder of what the old E3 was: an event for publishers to show their upcoming products to retail buyers and members of the media. E3's more public face, where these "press conferences" turned into high-production events broadcast for gamers around the world, wouldn't really get underway until the mid-'00s.

There's one more detail from this press conference I want to highlight – one that I found pretty notable given the constant mass layoffs happening around the game industry, many of which are directly tied to major publishers overspending on mergers and acquisitions with other studios. The partnership between EA and Square, it seems, was intended to be very different.

"As opposed to many joint ventures, this one will actually create jobs, as opposed to reduce jobs in the industry," then EA president John Riccitiello argued, which is a downright stunning thing to hear a video game executive say now, nearly three decades later. "This is not an efficiency proposition, this is an effectiveness proposition. This is going to build this industry, and build the businesses of Square and EA."

Of course, Riccitiello was leading EA when it would shut down multiple studios and lay off thousands of employees through the late '00s, so I guess not all joint ventures are created equal. Square Electronic Arts would disappear after the Square Enix merger, but not before bringing us North American players some of the best JRPGs of all time.

This is our ranking of the best Final Fantasy games of all time.

A group of investors led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund have received approval from the European Commission to go ahead with their proposed acquisition of EA, the blockbuster game publisher behind Battlefield, The Sims, and EA Sports titles.

Last year, EA confirmed it had entered a deal to go private and fall under the joint ownership of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF), Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners (a private investment firm led by US President Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner). Should the $55 billion buyout proceed without a hitch, Saudi Arabia's PIF will own 93.7% of shares, Silver Lake will have 5.5%, and Affinity Partners will hold onto 1.1% of the company.

That mega-deal is now one step closer to closing since the European Commission just concluded that the buyout wouldn't lead to significant competition concerns. (Good spot, Game Developer.)

"The European Commission has approved, under the EU Merger Regulation, the acquisition of sole control of Electronic Arts Inc. of the US by the Public Investment Fund ('PIF') of Saudi Arabia. The transaction relates primarily to the production and distribution of video games for mobile devices, PCs and consoles, as well as the organization and commercialization of video game competitions, commonly referred to as electronic sports events," the European Commission's website explains.

"The Commission concluded that the notified transaction would not raise competition concerns, given its limited impact on competition in the markets where the companies are active," the note continues. "The notified transaction was examined under the normal merger review procedure."

The buyout has been subject to much scrutiny in the months since it was made public. Several The Sims content creators quit EA's Creator Network earlier this year, citing long-term concerns over the ethics and history of the publisher's would-be owners. Saudi Arabian authorities, for example, have frequently been accused of countless human rights violations over the years.

For now, check out the new games of 2026 and beyond.

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!