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BioWare’s future under EA in question, studio veteran warns, if it makes “the kind of games that this new company isn’t interested in making anymore”

by admin October 2, 2025

BioWare veteran Mark Darrah has discussed the $55bn private acquisition of EA and what the future holds for the RPG studio, suggesting it could be sold to pay off debt.

The buyout, announced earlier this week, is by a group of investors comprising Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, and investment firms Silver Lake and Affinity Partners. Of the $55bn, $36bn is in equity with the remaining $20bn in JPMorgan debt, which EA will need to cover.

In his latest YouTube video, Darrah (best known as a producer across the Dragon Age games) suggested EA may be looking to sell off some of its biggest IPs and studios in order to service that debt.

Dragon Age The Veilguard Review: The BEST Bioware Has EVER Been! (Spoiler-Free)Watch on YouTube

Darrah explained EA is incentivised not to take risks, and selling off an IP only for it to become a huge success elsewhere would be a notable risk. Doing nothing “keeps them from getting into trouble”, but now that incentive could be completely flipped to drive immediate revenue.

“EA has a huge repository of dormant IPs that are just sitting there dormant,” said Darrah. “It seems unlikely that the new resulting structure is going to be eager to suddenly revive a bunch of those IPs.

“So one option might be to sell the whole lot of them for a hundred million dollars if you can get it, because a hundred million dollars can come off the debt. You might even see them toying with the idea of shedding some of their existing studios. Maybe they shut them down, but maybe they look for opportunities to sell off entire studios, or entire groups.”

He continued: “It makes a tonne of sense for this new group to want EA Sports whole and strong and to continue doing what it’s doing. EA Entertainment…may make a lot less sense. So you could imagine potentially all of EA Entertainment being sold off to another group with deep pockets.”

EA Goes Private For 55 Billion?!Watch on YouTube

He even suggested that, as this deal has likely been in the works for a while, it’s conceivable EA’s new structure was intentionally planned to make it easier to sell off parts of the business. As such, EA owns plenty of studios that haven’t shipped a game in a while, or have experienced problems, or make “the kind of games that this new company isn’t interested in making anymore”.

Darrah noted EA has “a lot of momentum” in not selling studios, but added “we’re in a new world now”. “It’s incredibly unlikely that EA stays exactly as it currently is in a private structure, especially carrying £20bn worth of debt,” he said.

So what does this all mean for BioWare specifically?

“For the studios that have more of a track record, especially a track record that maybe doesn’t line up with your own political views…you’re going to look at that studio and wonder how you make them fit into your new structure,” said Darrah.

“It’s hard to imagine that you have BioWare pivot from having very progressive messaging to having the reverse because it’s what the government wants. It’s hard to imagine that the public perception of a game that comes out of BioWare, even if you do do that, isn’t apocalyptically bad.” That would mean leaving the studio alone, or assuming it no longer fits in the organisation.

While Darrah is, of course, merely speculating, the deal certainly brings the future of all EA’s studios into question. Yet with the progressive nature of its RPGs, BioWare’s future under a Saudi-owned company is particularly uncertain.

In a statement to employees, EA CEO Andrew Wilson said the company’s “values and our commitment to players and fans around the world remain unchanged”.

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October 2, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Final Fantasy Tactics – The Ivalice Chronicles director is a big PC gamer, and says he was ‘very particular’ about making sure they got the new UI just right

by admin October 1, 2025

Final Fantasy Tactics: The challenges of bringing it to PC – YouTube

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“They’ve actually done it: Not only can I finally play Final Fantasy Tactics on my PC, but this timeless classic has been done justice,” begins our 91% review of The Ivalice Chronicles, the long, long-awaited remaster of one of the all-time great strategy games. As the developers at Square Enix have recently attested, pulling off the revival for PC and modern consoles has been no easy task, in part because the original source code no longer exists.

In a new interview with PC Gamer at the Tokyo Game Show last week, director Kazutoyo Maehiro went into more detail about the specific challenges of adding a new PC-friendly interface to a game designed for the original PlayStation.

“I myself play a lot of games on PC, so … I was very particular making sure we got it right,” Maehiro said. “Tactics is a turn-based strategy RPG, so you might be playing it for a while. You’ll spend a lot of time with your hands on the mouse and keyboard. One of the things I wanted to make sure was people wouldn’t get tired from playing for extended periods of time. So when it came to that, it was a lot of discussions within the team: What kind of shortcuts could we have, what kind of ways can we make the mouse easier to use? We went through a lot of different iterations and discussions together to make that happen.

“We also looked at a lot of different strategy RPGs and RTS games as well. We would look at what kind of controls they’re using, what’s the standard that people have or what people are comfortable with, and we used that as a base to make what we have.”

The Ivalice Chronicles producer Shoichi Matsuzawa added that Maehiro wasn’t kidding about being particular. “Even down to the speed of the scrolling, he’d tell me ‘the scroll’s just a little bit off here,’ and I was telling him ‘we don’t have time for this! The schedule does not allow for more adjustments.'”

The duo also discussed making sure the game worked well on the Steam Deck, though it’s currently rated Playable rather than Verified due to some small text. That was a deliberate trade-off—they decided they weren’t willing to sacrifice any of the important information they needed to fit onto the screen.

Our TGS interview also covers updating Final Fantasy Tactics’ script to support its newly added voice acting without losing any of its sharp political commentary, as well as the archeological process of digging through the game code from past releases to cobble together this definitive version.

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October 1, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

EA Boss Thanks Employees For Making $55 Billion Private Equity Sale Possible

by admin September 30, 2025

The $55 billion sale of Electronic Arts to Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and a group of other private equity investors is a big deal. Some people are going to make a lot of money off it. Others may lose their jobs when the interest bill for the debt-financed portion of the leveraged buyout comes due. CEO Andrew Wilson, who will remain in charge of the Madden and Battlefield publisher even after the sale closes, is thanking his employees.

“This moment is a recognition of your creativity, your innovation, and your passion. You have built some of the world’s most iconic IP, created stories that have inspired global communities, and helped shape culture through interactive experiences,” he wrote in a companywide email to staff after the deal was announced on Monday, a copy of which was obtained by Kotaku. “Everything we have achieved–and everything that lies ahead–is because of you.”

EA stockholders, which would include Wilson, will receive $210 per share. The executive was granted $31 million in cash and stock awards for the company’s last fiscal year, up $5 million from the year prior, even as the company laid off rank-and-file employees and hit sales snags in EA Sports FC, Apex Legends, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard. The 25 percent premium on the company’s mid-August share price comes with a catch, however. A whopping $20 billion of the buyout comes from debt, the interest on which could exceed hundreds of millions of dollars annually, or the budget of multiple AAA blockbusters per year.

“We are entering a new era of opportunity,” Wilson wrote in his email to staff today. “This is one of the largest and most significant investments ever made in the entertainment industry. Our new partners bring deep experience across sports, gaming, and entertainment. They are committed with conviction to EA–they believe in our people, our leadership, and the long-term vision we are now building together.”

He continued,

Our mission at EA to—Inspire The World To Play—continues to guide everything we do. Our values and our commitment to players and fans around the world remain unchanged. With continued rigor and operational excellence, we can amplify the creativity of our teams, accelerate innovation, and pursue transformative opportunities that position EA to lead the future of entertainment. Together, we’ll create experiences that are bold, expressive, and deeply connected to inspire generations of players around the world.

I am excited to continue as CEO, working alongside our leadership team to advance our strategy. United by our vision, we will deliver experiences that transcend platforms and empower players everywhere to create worlds, characters, and stories that are bold, interactive, and deeply connected.

Thank you for your creativity, your commitment, and the passion you bring to EA every day. This is a historic moment, and with the support of our new partners, the future we are building together is brighter than ever.

EA instituted a return-to-office policy earlier this year which would require anyone living within 30 miles of an EA office to come in at least three days a week, while others not designated as remote would need to relocate. At the time, Wilson said the goal was to ignite the “kinetic energy that fuels creativity,” but some employees saw it as a way to incentivize more “voluntary” layoffs.

Alongside the likelihood of layoffs are questions about Saudi Arabia’s human rights record and the new ownership’s potential impact on creative freedom within the company and public messaging, including its annual Pride events across its various franchises, most notably The Sims. Wilson told staff EA’s “values” will remain unchanged, but didn’t lay out specifically what they are. The sale is set to close in mid-2026 pending shareholder and regulatory reviews.

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September 30, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

MOBA “15 Years In The Making” Shuts Down Before Leaving Early Access

by admin September 29, 2025

A MOBA that’s been in development for 15 years and launched into early access in May 2025 to a “mostly positive” Steam rating has unceremoniously shut down. The game never left its early-access period and, according to developer Lunchbox Entertainment, couldn’t keep going despite the team’s best efforts.

You may have never heard of this game before now. Titled Sirocco, it’s a 5v5 naval brawler where customizable boats try to send each other to the bottom of the sea. It started as a Warcraft 3 mod over a decade ago before the team made the concept–a sort of Battleships-esque multiplayer online battle arena–a full-blown game. It’s only ever peaked at 882 players some four months ago, according to SteamDB data. And now, with the game barely cracking 30 players at any given time since its May 2025 launch, Lunchbox Entertainment has decided to pull the plug on Sirocco servers.

“We are shutting down our servers indefinitely on August 20, 2025 at 3PM ET,” the team wrote in a Steam update post. “After that time, the game will be unplayable. […] We are sorry for the inconvenience and grateful for your support. If you have questions, reach out in Discord and we will do our best to help.”

In the official Sirocco Discord server, developer Jack of Boxes gave a bit more details on August 18, writing that the team is proud of the game and hopes to bring it back.

“Hi everyone, getting emotional just writing this,” Jack of Boxes wrote. “Today is the day we pull the plug on our servers. Despite our best efforts, we can’t keep Sirocco going. So, we’ll be shutting things down [on] Wednesday, the 20th. In other words, Sirocco will go offline in two days. All Patreon supporters who [subscribed] in the last 90 days have been refunded. As much as it sucks to shut off the servers, we’re really proud of Sirocco and we are going to do everything we can to keep making games so one day we can bring back Sirocco in the future when we have more resources. […] Thank you all for being a truly amazing community. You all have gone above and beyond to make our game and community the best it could be and, for that, I can’t thank you enough.”

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September 29, 2025 0 comments

A cave with a skull and a waterfall where the Forgive Me quest begins

Product Reviews

There’s a sidequest in Borderlands 4 based on a meme making fun of Soulsborne games and it’s great

by admin September 29, 2025

Borderlands 4 is in a tough place when it comes to tone. The over-reliance on literal toilet humor in Borderlands 3 was so universally disliked that a follow-up was always going to pare it back a bit. Which Borderlands 3 does, though sometimes too much. The villains in particular end up feeling like personality-free zones, some of them not even having enough going on to fill the empty space on their introductory title cards. They’re just names and hit points.

The sidequests squeeze in some of the personality the main questline leaves out, and even (whisper it) reference the occasional meme. My favorite so far is Forgive Me, a quest based on a viral joke about the storytelling in Soulsborne games—a joke tweeted by Borderlands 4 head writer Sam Winkler back in 2022.

(Image credit: Sam Winkler)

Because the internet is the way it is, Winkler ended up having to explain in the replies that he actually likes FromSoftware games, saying, “I am begging anyone who thinks I’m dunking on fromsoft to learn how to make fun of the things you love”. And if you needed further evidence, the Forgive Me quest in Borderlands 4 is an extended gag about Soulsborne storytelling that clearly comes from a place of deep knowledge and appreciation.

Forgive Me isn’t marked on your map. It begins in a cave in the Cuspid Climb area of the Terminus Ranges, with a waterfall pouring out of a giant skull at the entrance. Near a sword embedded in a fire a badass psycho attacks you, dropping a Desecrated Bolt as he dies. When you pick it up you hear the words “Zanzibart… forgive me” and begin an unmarked quest that instructs you to “Find Zanzibart’s resting place”, though it doesn’t add a marker for it.

You’ll need to find another cave in the Terminus Ranges, this one in Stoneblood Forest to the north and accessible by grappling point. There you’ll face the Cursed Myrmidon of the Cruel Dawn in combat and be left wondering if you can possibly have a crumb of context.

(Image credit: Gearbox)

At which point Vycarias, the Lore-Singer, a character who is a cross between a fantasy sage and a YouTuber who reads out flavor text will emerge from out of nowhere to monologue at you for nine minutes straight about the Shatterglass Plain, the Nevergreen, the Red Requiem, and a bunch of other proper nouns you’ve never heard before. It’s like reading a dense wiki entry for a game you haven’t played, and I applaud the voice actor who plays Vycarias for nailing the tone. It’s the kind of commitment to the bit that I enjoy about Borderlands, and I hope I keep finding it in Borderlands 4’s sidequests and inevitable DLC.

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September 29, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

The Gathering Is Making PlayStation Cards, And They Look Great

by admin September 26, 2025

Magic: The Gathering has become the Fortnite of trading card games, and as annoying as I find the practice of constantly dumping different IPs together, even God’s strongest soldiers are not immune to propaganda. At MagicCon Atlanta, Wizards of the Coast and Sony announced that PlayStation series are getting seven different Secret Lair drops for various games, and folks, I want those Last of Us cards.

On October 27, Wizards of the Coast will be selling seven PlayStation sets, with most of them covering different franchises in the console maker’s catalog. However, both The Last of Us and God of War are getting two sets. The former will have a pair of cards for both the first game and its sequel, while the latter will cover both the original Greek storyline and the reboot’s Norse one. With the exception of the Last of Us and God of War sets, most of these drops just seem to feature one card with their respective games’ protagonists. The set will drop at 9 a.m. Pacific Time that Monday.

The full line-up includes:

The Last of Us Part I
The Last of Us Part II
Uncharted
God of War: Greek
God of War: Norse
Horizon Forbidden West
Ghost of Tsushima

Though it’s not surprising that Sony would want to spotlight its current stable of prestige action games, I’m bummed there’s not more classic PlayStation representation here. Give me Parappa the Rapper, you cowards. But that’s pretty par for the course these days with Sony. Even its upcoming concert series is leaning heavily into its new stuff.

I don’t play Magic, but I did buy the Sonic cards they put out earlier this year just to get the Shadow the Hedgehog one. He’s sitting pretty on my shelf, so I guess I’ll also buy the Last of Us ones next month, to keep him company. You know, as long as they don’t sell out before it’s my turn in the queue.

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September 26, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Modded Borderlands 4 guns are being sold on Ebay, but the sellers aren’t making much money

by admin September 26, 2025

Modded Borderlands 4 guns and equipment are being sold on Ebay with tailored gun parts and effects. However, as of writing, it doesn’t appear this grey market of modded loot is particularly profitable.

Ebay – a public e-commerce marketplace – is no stranger to gaming related side hustles, with numerous account, cosmetic, and service sellers setting up camp there over the years with the release of popular online video games. Eurogamer reached out to one Borderlands modded gun merchant to find out how it’s going.

“It is fairly difficult to do as they have included a new encryption method to the guns this year that makes doing specific builds very very hard and will take, I would imagine, a long time to get perfected” states one Borderlands modded weapon reseller to Eurogamer under anonymity.

Check out the Borderlands 4 story trailer here!Watch on YouTube

This new encryption method implemented by Gearbox not only makes the act of modding the exact weapon you want difficult, it’s also making prospects of profit for resellers unlikely due to the cost of getting the decrypted values for weapons people will actually pay for. When asked how successful business is, the seller told Eurogamer:

“Not very successful. I’ve sold maybe three or four since release, which is around £15 to £20, which doesn’t even cover the costs to build the guns, but I don’t do this to make money or profit.

“To make the modded guns you often need to pay for tables that data miners have made that breakdown gun parts. Each part of the gun has an encrypted value, so does the rarity, manufacturer, level etc and the tables can be expensive to buy at around £50 to £100.”

As such, at the moment, it appears that the grey market for selling modded Borderlands 4 loot is more for the hobbyists rather than those looking to make a buck from a hot new release (unless you’re a data miner able to sell off valuable info, rather than the sought after weapons themselves).

Whether or not this will become a great problem as time goes on, and more of the game’s loot encryption is broken down and made publicly available, remains a potential problem for the future. Although as a PvE game, the modded gear seller made an argument for why the practice of modding isn’t doing any harm:

“Borderlands games have always been modded and I’ve modded them since Borderlands 1 and every game in between. It’s a huge part of why I love the games so much.”

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September 26, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

First Zelda, then Pokemon, and now HoYoverse is making its own Animal Crossing with Petit Planet

by admin September 25, 2025

Chinese developer MiHoYo (HoYoverse) has officially unveiled a new game, its first life sim adventure. It’s called Petit Planet, and it’s the second new announcement in a month, following on from the studio’s Pokemon-like, Honkai: Nexus Anima.

Much like Nexus Anima, Petit Planet is very much taking cues from established games to help the developer enter a new genre, this time being the cozy life sim genre of games like Animal Crossing, and The Sims.

MiHoYo describes Petit Planet as a “cosmic life simulation”, but it very much has Animal Crossing vibes. The announcement press release even teases how players will get to spend their time with “unique” neighbours.

It has a clever setup, where players are tasked with nurturing and growing their own planet before they can connect it with other planets to form a galaxy. There’s a big element of creativity and sharing in this, too, which we get a hint of in the trailer.

What you’ll actually be doing on your own planet is very much in-line with what you expect. There’s fishing, mining, cooking, planting, crafting and so on. You can pick outfits for your characters to wear, design homes, arrange spaces and do other Sims-like things.

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The big focus, however, is on the different connections you can make with your companions and their planets, adding an element of relationship building to the mix. In the trailer, we also get to see players leaving their own islets and venturing into unknown areas to discover new recipes and find rare creatures.

Galactic Bazaar is the game’s hub area, where everyone gets together to hang out after a long day’s work and form connections with other players.

Petit Planet is in development for PC and mobile – though specifics weren’t announced. If you’re interested, you can sign up to be among the first to play the aptly-named Closed Beta Coziness Test, which you can do on the official website.

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September 25, 2025 0 comments

(L to R): OpenAI President Greg Brockman, NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are seen standing side by side.

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Nvidia plans to splash OpenAI with cash, pouring out $100 billion for ChatGPT’s creator and making last week’s Intel investment look like a drop in the money bucket

by admin September 23, 2025

Big tech is capable of throwing around some eye-watering amounts of cash. As you may recall, Nvidia announced $46.7 billion total revenue during its Q2 2025 earnings call. That’s not just a lot of moolah, but serious spending power.

As such, this week, Nvidia announced it will be investing $100 billion into OpenAI. Part of this mountain of money will go towards supplying the steward of ChatGPT with data centre chips. Details have yet to be finalised, but a letter of intent signed by the two companies announced plans to deploy 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems for use in OpenAI’s data centres.

The two companies were hardly strangers to begin with, but this latest deal gives Nvidia a stake in one of its biggest customers. Nvidia’s investment in OpenAI will eventually take the form of non-voting shares in the company. OpenAI will then use the resulting cash flow to buy the aforementioned AI chips. Ultimately, this latest pledge of $100 billion makes last week’s surprising news that Nvidia would be putting $5 billion into Intel look like a drop in the bucket.

Once this most recent deal is finalised, sources close to the company claim the plan is for Nvidia to invest an initial sum of $10 billion, followed by a hardware rollout sometime towards the end of 2026. The first gigawatt of power will likely take to the stage of Nvidia’s upcoming Vera Rubin AI compute platform, which was first revealed back in March.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman explained in a statement that it was all about maintaining a competitive edge in an increasingly crowded field, saying, “Everything starts with compute. Compute infrastructure will be the basis for the economy of the future, and we will utilize what we’re building with Nvidia to both create new AI breakthroughs and empower people and businesses with them at scale.”

But Nvidia spending money on OpenAI so OpenAI can then buy Nvidia hardware has raised some concerns; if this flow of cash looks a little circular to you, you’re not the only one concerned about the potential shape of things to come.

Speaking to Reuters, Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon commented, “On the one hand this [deal] helps OpenAI deliver on what are some very aspirational goals for compute infrastructure, and helps Nvidia ensure that that stuff gets built. On the other hand the ‘circular’ concerns have been raised in the past, and this will fuel them further.”

Though that said, it’s perhaps too early to start throwing around words like ‘antitrust,’ particularly as the US Trump administration is all in on AI. Still though, the proposed 10 gigawatt data centres will demand power equivalent to the needs of 8 million U.S. households; despite Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s suggestion that AI customers ‘pace themselves’ and other major big tech players looking to nuclear to meet AI’s power demands, there may come a time when such a power imbalance can no longer be ignored.

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September 23, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Microsoft is making Xbox consoles even more expensive in the US

by admin September 19, 2025

Starting on October 3, Microsoft says Xbox consoles will be getting yet another price bump, this time ranging anywhere from a $20 increase on the company’s entry-level model to $70 for a special edition model with 2TB of storage. If all of this sounds familiar, there’s a good reason, the last time xbox prices were raised was only a few months ago in May.

The price increases breakdown as follows:

Xbox Series S (512GB): $400, up $20 from $380
Xbox Series S (1TB): $450 up $20 from $430
Xbox Series X Digital: $600, up $50 from $550
Xbox Series X: $650, up $50 from $600
Xbox Series X 2TB Galaxy Special Edition: $800, up $70 from $730

Those are fairly significant increases, especially when you start comparing Microsoft’s higher-end Xbox Series X consoles to the competition. For example, the Series X Digital (which doesn’t have a disc drive) now costs $50 more than a PS5 Digital Edition. For the $800 Xbox Series X 2TB Galaxy Special Edition, price comparisons are even worse. It’s now more expensive than the $750 PS5 Pro, and at least Sony’s console gets you better performance for its high price.

Engadget has reached out to Microsoft for more information on the price changes. We’ll update this article if we hear back.

As of right now, Microsoft credits the need to raise prices on “changes in the macroeconomic environment,” which likely has to do with the impact tariffs implemented by the Trump administration are having on importing electronics into the US. It’s worth noting, however, that the company has also been shifting its focus away from home consoles in favor of bringing the “Xbox experience” to other platforms.

Sometimes, that’s just by publishing formerly Xbox exclusive games on the PS5 and Switch, but it also includes creating the first Xbox handheld with ASUS and emphasizing Xbox game streaming wherever it makes sense. Given the frequent sales on the Xbox Series S, there’s a world where Microsoft’s entry-level console might still be worth considering. For anything else, though, streaming or waiting for games to come to other platforms increasingly seems like it makes the most financial sense.

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September 19, 2025 0 comments