Paradox Interactive is getting a new boss: Deputy CEO Mattias Lilja will take over from current CEO Fredrik Wester in January 2027, a move Paradox said "is a natural evolution of how the company is already led."

"My plan was never to be CEO for life. The goal was to build the foundation before passing the baton on for the next chapter in the company’s journey," Wester said in today's announcement.

"Since I returned as CEO, we’ve streamlined our strategy, rebuilt our pipeline and developed our commercial offering. Mattias has had a central role in laying this foundation, and now is the right time to hand over. Given his experience and vision, he is exceptionally well positioned to take the company to its next level."

As his statement implies, this is his second tenure as Paradox CEO: He held the position from 2009 to 2018, when he resigned and was replaced by Ebba Ljungerud. But Ljungerud's tenure was rocky, and she resigned in 2021 over "differing views on the company's strategy going forward," at which point Wester returned to the role.

In many ways, Lilja has been calling the CEO shots for a few years now anyway, while Wester's focus has increasingly been on Paradox's "long-term development and goals." And he, like Wester, is also a returnee: He left the company in 2020 after five years in various executive roles, but returned in 2021 along with Wester as "chief of staff." Lilja's LinkedIn profile says his primary duty was to "support the Paradox CEO in leading the executive team, aligning the strategic plan with the day to day operations," and that he would "act as the stand-in for the CEO when needed."

"I approach this role with great humility," Lilja said. "Paradox has a unique DNA that has made us one of the greats in deep and engaging strategy and management games. Now we’re stepping up the pace: we will make further investments in our core business, push the boundaries of our game design, work even more closely with our loyal players, develop more and better tools and services that benefit both modders and players, and continue to sharpen our ways of working and our organisation, with player value in focus."

Reaction among the Paradox community on Reddit seems guarded at this point, which is perhaps understandable given how it went the time the company got a new CEO. PC Gamer's Fraser Brown took a deep dive into that in his 2024 report on "the Dark Age of Paradox Interactive," which includes thoughts from Lilja on the "challenges" of success and what he saw as the future of Paradox.

Even back then, Lilja was clearly helping chart the company's course, and there's also some optimism among Paradox follower in the fact that he seems likely to carry on in Wester's footsteps—and an apparent understanding that Wester has been eyeing the door for a while now anyway.

Lilja will take over as Paradox CEO on January 4, 2027.

The PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted sponsored by Pot Noodle is right around the corner, airing December 3. Of course, counting down the 20 Most Wanted games is all fun and, er, games, but what makes it truly special are the friends we make along the way. Returning to host the main show is the award-winning Frankie Ward, and our own presenter Midas and FGS presenter Jules Gill will be hosting the pre-show together—what is this, a crossover episode?

Last year, Frankie Ward was Commander Ward, piloting a ship through outer space, while BAFTA-nominee and Baldur's Gate 3 narrator Amelia Tyler was her trusty and not-at-all-evil shipboard AI—she was a disembodied floating head, kind of like Viki from I, Robot. This year, well, you'll have to wait and see who Frankie becomes, I'm not going to ruin the surprise now.

Frankie Ward is a long-time host on the show, and brings charm and passion to every game she talks about. This is her third show of the year, so you're likely familiar with her already, but for those of you who aren't: Frankie is an award-winning presenter with years of experience, as well as plenty of esports knowledge. We're in great hands.

As for the pre-show, that will be headed by Midas and Jules Gill, Future's very own presenters. PC Gamer fans will be used to seeing and hearing from Midas on our videos, but Jules is usually found over on the Future Games Show. They'll be interviewing guests as we get ready to count down the 20 Most Wanted games with you all.

Remember to tune in December 3 via PC Gamer's YouTube, Twitch, or Steam pages, or anywhere that hosts video, really.

The happiest time of year is just around the corner, folks. The PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted sponsored by Pot Noodle will be airing December 3rd, and we'll be counting down The Council's 20 most anticipated games.

There's one major change this year, though. We've gone from counting down the top 25 games to the top 20. We've made this decision to ensure each game gets its time in the spotlight, meaning the show will be more enjoyable to watch. Also, The Council have recently unionised and refuse to count more until we agree to give them bathroom breaks, which we simply will not do.

The Council remains, as ever, an inscrutable bunch of journalists, developers, celebrities, creators, streamers, gaming luminaries, and just generally people whose opinion on videogames carries some weight.

How we selected the nominees

Each year, we knock our heads together and puzzle over how to whittle down the thousands of upcoming games into a list of just 100. Several factors go into this, such as how many wishlists a game has on Steam, how interesting a trailer is, the position of the stars at the time a game was first announced, and generally just how excited those of us at PC Gamer are for a title.

The full list awaits below, and the top 20 are nestled within it, but you'll never be able to figure out which ones they are. And if you do, please don't share your findings on the internet or you'll ruin the whole show. You'll notice there are fewer than 100 games, and that's because each year, some come out before the show or unfortunately get cancelled. Try as we might, we can't get The Council to predict the future—we'd all be retired by now if they could.

How the final 20 Most Wanted list is selected

The Council gives each game they're excited for a score from one to five, with one being passingly curious to five being intensely, worryingly hyped. If a member has no interest in a game at all, they simply don't vote on it and that is counted as a zero.

We also take into account how many members of The Council voted for each game so that any with the same average score have a reliable tiebreaker. Some other factors go into the weighting, too, like if we've had no news about a game in a long time or, again, where the stars are and what they think of the whole thing.

And now, presented in alphabetical order, is the long list. Make sure to catch the top 20 when the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted airs December 3.

The PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted 2026 nominees

4:Loop

About Fishing

Alien: Isolation 2

Among the Wild

Among Us Story: On Guard

Another Door

Arma 4

Atomic Heart 2

Attack on Titan 3 / A.O.T.3

Bad Magpie

Barely Breathing

Black Myth: Zhong Kui

Blight: Survival

Blood Message

Carcass Clad

Cassette Beasts 2002

Chrono Odyssey

Clockwork Revolution

Clowntown

Company of Heroes - Definitive Edition

Cordura

Crazy Taxi: World Tour

Crossfire

Cuphead Sequel

Darksiders 4

DeadRoot

Dinghai: The Ocean Pillar

Divinity

Don't Starve Elsewhere

Duskers 2.0

El Paso, Elsewhere 2

Exodus

Fable

Final Fantasy VII Revelation

Frostpunk: 1886

gen ATLAS

Gone Feral

Grave Seasons

Guild Wars 3

Gundam Rogue Orbit

Guns of Eschaton

Hack '95

Haex

Haunted Chocolatier

Ill

Impermanence

Into the Wind

Join Us

Judas

Kingmakers

Last Harbor

Light No Fire

Lords of the Fallen II

Magicians: The Devil’s Deal

Mars Tactics

Marvel's Blade

Max Payne Remake

Maximum Thunderness

Metro 2039

Mighty Cuphead Adventure

Mr Magpie's Harmless Card Game

My Cannibal Family

Outward 2

Persona 6

Pipes.exe

PVKK: Planetenverteidigungskanonenkommandant

Recur

Red Kiss

Resident Evil Veronica

Sated

Saw: Genesis

Senua

Signet City

Spyro: A Realm Beyond

State of Decay 3

Stellar Blade: Blood Rain

Stranger Than Heaven

Stronghold 4

Sword Hero

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin

The Expanse: Osiris Reborn

The Pines

The Witcher 4

The Witcher Remake

The Wolf Among Us 2

Thief: The Dark Project Remastered

Tides of Annihilation

Time Strike

Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis

Total War: Warhammer 40,000

Vampire: The Masquerade — Eternal Whispers

Virtua Fighter Crossroads

Vivarium

Void Diver: Escape from the Abyss

Wardens of Avalon

Wo Long 2: Wings of Ember

Black Forest Games, German developer of early Kickstarter success Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams, as well as remakes of the first two Destroy All Humans games, and, er, Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back, has announced it's leaving THQ Nordic after nine years within the Embracer Group subsidiary.

Following a management buyout, Black Forest has founded an indie studio group called Third Signal. "Some of the best games of the last decade came from teams of fifty, not five hundred," said Third Signal's founder and CEO Andreas Tobler. "Black Forest Games is one of them, and the right studio to launch Third Signal. Our vision is to build a developer-driven group and give teams the independence, resources and creative freedom to continue their creative legacy and bring their own ideas to life."

Black Forest Games was founded by staff of Spellbound Entertainment, creator of the Desperados series and Arcania: Gothic 4 before being closed in 2012. As Black Forest Games they mostly worked on revivals of existing series, and were developing a game based on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic The Last Ronin before it was canceled and then revived as a Platinum joint. They were also one of the studios under Embracer's umbrella hit with layoffs in 2024, losing roughly 50 staff.

"We are grateful to THQ Nordic and Embracer for nine good years and the games we made together," said managing director Adrian Goersch. "Now, we're excited to shape our own future as owners again, to work on an exciting new project with a great team and strong partners behind us."

As part of its July 2026 wave of Xbox job cuts, Microsoft laid off a reported 136 developers from id Software, a studio whose name is synonymous with expertise in shooter design and engineering. Today, "approximately 20" of those former id developers announced the formation of Hidden Horses, an employee-owned game studio boasting "over 250 collective years" of game dev experience between its co-founders.

"This team has spent years building games together, and we realized that what made that experience special wasn't just the projects we worked on; it was the people we worked with," Hidden Horses engine programmer and co-founder Dustin Land said in a press release. "Hidden Horses is an opportunity to keep that team together, build something of our own, and create the kind of old school shooters that we think people want more of."

On its website, the studio says it was formed as a democratically governed, developer-owned company so it can prioritize "long-term health over short-term growth, longevity over quarterly returns, and innovative gameplay over shady monetization"—for the sake of its games, and the studio staff creating them.

"We're creating a studio where the developers share in its success and have a commitment to it beyond just another job," said co-founder and executive producer Andrew Willis, "I think that when people have a stake in something’s success, they are more committed to it.”

The studio is planning to launch a Kickstarter campaign to support the development of its first planned game: a singleplayer arena shooter called Danger Pay, in which players will participate in a televised ultraviolent game show inspired by works like The Running Man (the 1987 movie, not the 2025 one) and 1990's Smash TV—a game that, I've just now learned, got a novella adaptation in 1992. So. Now I get to have that knowledge bouncing around.

"We've had the privilege of spending our careers making games for incredible communities of players," said Johnmichael Quinlin, studio co-founder and tools programmer. "Now we have the chance to build something new together, and we're excited to invite those players along for the journey from the very beginning."

If you want to stay posted on what Hidden Horses is up to, you can follow the studio on its Bluesky account.

A Bloomberg report says Fairgames, a PvP heist shooter announced by Haven Studios and Sony in 2023, has been cancelled. In something of a surprising twist, a PlayStation rep told the site there will be no layoffs as a result of the cancellation, as Haven will "shift its focus to collaborating with other development teams across PlayStation Studios, while also exploring new creative opportunities."

While it was announced three years ago, work on Fairgames appears to have started even further back, in 2021. Just a couple months after her high-profile split with Google Stadia, Assassin's Creed co-creator Jade Raymond announced the formation of Haven Studios, which was "working on an unannounced new IP for PlayStation."

In 2022, right around the time former PlayStation boss Jim Ryan was talking about launching 12 live service games by 2025, Sony acquired the studio outright; a year after that, Fairplay was revealed to the world.

But things have not gone smoothly since then. Helldivers 2 was a massive hit, but seven of those planned games were cancelled before release. Of the remaining games, one was Marathon, which endures but has not lived up to expectations, and another was Concord, one of the most famously disastrous game launches in years, which was taken offline less than two weeks after it launched, never to return. A live-service spinoff of the Horizon series, Hunters Gathering, was also reportedly rebooted after negative feedback from playtests.

The Concord catastrophe in particular seemed to shake Sony, which began reversing its live service strategy just a few months later. Fairgames itself looked to be in trouble in 2025 when Raymond departed Haven, reportedly after an external playtest left PlayStation leadership "concerned about how the game was received and its progress."

The Bloomberg report says a more recent large-scale playtest produced similar results. "While the test demonstrated strong operational excellence, live ops readiness and community engagement, player feedback and retention results were mixed and fell short of the goals we had set,” PlayStation executives Sean Decker and John Doyle wrote in an email sent to Haven Studios employees. "Combined with challenging market conditions in the PVP shooter genre, we have made the difficult decision to cease development on the game."

The one bright spot to the cancellation is that no jobs will be cut because of it: A Sony rep told Bloomberg that Haven "will shift its focus to collaborating with other development teams across PlayStation Studios, while also exploring new creative opportunities."

Two years after the release of Unknown 9: Awakening, its one and only game, Bandai Namco's Reflector Entertainment is closing.

The shutdown was revealed in a notice posted by Banda Namco (via Game Informer) saying the company "has passed a resolution to dissolve and liquidate its consolidated subsidiary Reflector Entertainment." The decision was made "after comprehensively considering future business plans, necessary additional investment, and the possibility of profitability and business continuation," Bandai Namco said.

Unknown 9: Awakening, featuring The Witcher star Anya Chalotra as a woman able to travel into a mysterious dimension known as the Fold, showed potential in our pre-release preview as a "linear, narrative-driven, set-piece laden" game drawing from Xbox 360 releases of the late 2000s.

The full game, however, landed with a thud. A month after launch, Reflector laid off 18% of its workforce; a few months after that, in January 2025, more layoffs followed as an in-development project was cancelled. Reflector CEO Herve Hoerdt said at the time that the decision "correlates directly with the failure of the studio's ambitious and courageous first project [Unknown 9: Awakening]," which "didn't come near the company expectations."

Reflector confirmed the coming end of operations in its own message on LinkedIn, writing that "after reviewing the progress of our latest project in pre-production, future development requirements, and current market conditions, Bandai Namco concluded that it could not justify several more years of investment."

Bandai Namco said the liquidation of Reflector Entertainment is expected to happen "once the necessary procedures according to local laws are completed," but a concrete schedule has not been set.

Sony took another step back from the PC today, announcing that the PlayStation Plus app for PC will be "retiring" on December 10. I can't really blame it for this one, though: Almost nobody was actually using it.

"PlayStation believes in providing high-quality experiences to our players, and we regularly review offerings to ensure we are focusing on experiences our members value most," Sony wrote at the tail-end of a PlayStation Blog update detailing the PlayStation Plus game lineup for November.

"With a very small number of eligible PlayStation Plus Premium members (less than 0.4%) using the PlayStation Plus app on PC, making this change allows us to focus on enhancing high-quality experiences that more of our members want to use. As a result, the PlayStation Plus cloud streaming app on PC will no longer be available."

The end of the app seems to fit pretty well with Sony's recent about-face on PC gaming: After a brief period of enthusiasm for bringing its big exclusives to PC, Sony began a walkback earlier this year, shifting its focus back to consoles exclusives. It hasn't explicitly acknowledged or explained the change in strategy, but as PC Gamer's Morgan Park wrote in May, the thing speaks for itself: Rather like Xbox "recommitting" to its console, "Sony is responding to a waning interest in consoles by reinforcing its 'narrative singleplayer games' as system sellers once again.

"Multiplayer games like the upcoming Marvel Tōkon will still come to PC, but if you want to play the next prestige action game from the likes of Naughty Dog or Insomniac, you'll need a PS5," Morgan wrote. Or, when the time comes, a PlayStation 6.

Similar to Xbox cloud streaming, the PlayStation Plus app on PC was really more noteworthy for the selection of older PlayStation games it offered to PC gamers, rather than major new releases. Given that, I think the end has come for exactly the reason Sony cited: Not due to any strategic realignment, but simply because nobody's using it in the first place.

Just over a month after Paramount closed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery and renamed itself as Skydance, the company's games division has laid off an unspecified number of employees.

Reports of the cuts first surfaced earlier today on LinkedIn, where multiple employees reported being let go. Lead engineer David Vera, who was not among those put out of work, said the studio "lost a ton of great talent," while another post by principal environment artist Dana Klaren listed more than 25 people who'd been let go, including himself. Senior gameplay and game AI programmer Rebecca Vessal said in her own message that "most" of her team had been let go.

Prior to their merger, both Paramount and Warner had their own game divisions: Paramount actually had two, Skydance Interactive and Skydance New Media, which were mashed together into Skydance Games Studio earlier this year. The merged company announced that it will be publishing PlatinumGames' upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin; Skydance New Media is also working on Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra, although the current status of that game is unclear.

On the other side of the equation, Warner Bros. Games had struggled to follow up on the 2023 hits Legacy of Hogwarts and Mortal Kombat 1; the division was assessed as being of "relatively minor" value by Netflix when it was in the hunt for Warner, although Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters said he was "super excited" about some of the properties the deal would provide access to.

And now, as we've seen many times previously, consolidation means cuts, which Skydance confirmed with Variety. "As part of our ongoing efforts to position Skydance Games for long-term growth and success, we are implementing reorganization and operational shifts across a few areas of our business," a rep said in a statement.

"We have stepped back and taken some time to consider where we are investing our efforts and have made the difficult decision to scale down some of our projects. As a result, there are roles impacted. This is not a reflection of the talent, dedication, or creativity of those affected and we are grateful for their contributions. We are committed to approaching the process with transparency, care and respect for those who are leaving the company."

Killing Floor studio Tripwire Interactive has laid off 36 employees in what it says "was certainly not an easy decision, but unfortunately a necessary one for the organization."

The cuts at Tripwire are quite substantial: A source at the studio told PC Gamer that roughly 40-50 employees are left following the layoffs.

"Our team is focused on our internal projects, including active development of Maneater 2, ongoing work on Killing Floor 3, and publishing efforts under the Tripwire Presents label," the studio wrote in a message shared on LinkedIn. "We are continuing to give the best support possible to all of our games and remain committed to our awesome community."

Maneater 2 was announced in September, five years after the release of the original, which was a significant success for Tripwire. But the studio has had difficulty replicating that success, even with its best-known game series: Killing Floor 3, released in 2025, remains mired in "mixed" user reviews on Steam, and its concurrent player count on the platform is a small fraction of its 2016 predecessor.

The layoffs also come less than a week after Tripwire announced an expansion of its Tripwire Presents publishing division to include "scaled publishing support of smaller independent developers"—essentially offering a variable suite of services to what Tripwire publishing director Bryan West called "scrappy developers" who could a little assist with their games in specific areas.

Friends, it's once again time to set sail on the stormy seas of democracy and answer a vital question: which are the best games of 2026 according to a set of 22 distinct categories? Also there are three other categories, but they're chosen by judges and not the public, so it's less the stormy seas of democracy and more the technocratic autobahn of experience-based decision-making.

It's time for the Golden Joystick Awards 2026 Presented by Pot Noodle, is what I'm saying, and you (yes, you) are invited to watch when the big show airs at 10 am PT / 1 pm ET / 6 pm GMT / 7 pm CEST on Wednesday, November 11, 2026.

This year's host is Alix Wilton Regan, most recently the voice of Lara Croft in Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, but most notably for me the voice of Alt Cunningham in Cyberpunk 2077, Specialist Traynor in Mass Effect 3, and Loghain's lieutenant Cauthrien in Dragon Age: Origins. Real heads know.

The show goes out on every streaming platform you've heard of and perhaps a few you haven't. You can watch the ceremony live via YouTube, Twitch, Steam, TikTok and X as well as Future Games Show, PC Gamer, WhatCulture Gaming, IGN, Ginx TV, eClutch, Niconico, Kuaishou and Bilibili.

There are a whole bunch of games in the running for the GJAs numerous gongs, and I genuinely don't know which of them will come out ahead. We've got 007 First Light, Big Walk, Crimson Desert, Control Resonant, Dispatch, Forza Horizon 6, Meccha Chamelon, Mewgenics, Resident Evil Requiem, and plenty more. It's a gamut of games—a game-ut—and you'll have to tune in to see which ones go home with their arms heaving with trophies.

On a recent visit to Jackbox Games HQ here in Chicago, I got to speak with developers and studio leadership about their process, history, and place in the industry. Given, you know, everything, I'm pretty much contractually obligated to ask about AI in conversations like this. Here's what CEO Mike Bilder had to say on the topic:

Dominic Armato is adventure game royalty, but an early adventure game experience almost killed his enthusiasm for videogames: "The one that really sticks in my head is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," he says. "It was just evil. I was a kid, and I'm trying to play this game that's one of the most difficult text adventure games ever written … It's not a happy memory. It's a miracle that I stuck with videogames at all."

Yet persist with games Armato did, becoming an avid fan of the point 'n' click adventures designed by LucasArts. This led Armato to audition for and be cast as mighty pirate Guybrush Threepwood for 1997's The Curse of Monkey Island. It's a role he would reprise for every subsequent Monkey Island game, including the remakes of The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2, as well as 2022's excellent Return to Monkey Island.

Alongside Monkey Island Armato has appeared in games like Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast and Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. He's also an experienced dining critic, running his own food blog Skillet Doux until 2015, before working as a food writer for The Arizona Republic and the Phoenix New Times.

Armato is currently working on a new project, while also pondering a potential return to voice acting. "I'm trying to start doing voiceover for games again, so we'll see if I'm successful in that," he says. But he took a break from reviewing restaurants to show me around the grog-spattered tavern of his Steam library.

What game are you currently playing?

I am currently playing Chants of Sennaar. I've been doing a lot of flying, so I've been wearing out the Steam Deck lately. I was actually trying to start Silksong, but I screwed up and forgot to start it up once before I got on the plane, so I couldn't run it. I was like "Oh, crap, I gotta play something else!" So I picked up Chants of Sennaar instead and I got hooked into that.

I'm enjoying that one an awful lot. I dig those slow-paced puzzle games that have an idea. You get a little bit of a world. You get a little bit of a story in there. It's kind of atmospheric, and there's some good [mysteries] in there, and you can just live in them and solve puzzles for a while.

I very much enjoy that genre. I'm not really a genre gamer in general. I tend to pick and choose the real shining examples of each genre. But I would probably be lying if I didn't say I was maybe a little more drawn to that kind of game a lot of the time.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

I just finished replaying Control in preparation for the new one.

I'll play anything Remedy. I love Remedy so, so much, and with the new one coming out, I wanted to go back and replay the first one again. So now I'm primed and ready.

The feel of that game is so great. It's so unashamedly Twin Peaks meets X-Files meets brutalist architecture, which was weirdly right in my wheelhouse. I like all brutalist architecture, so I'm just happy walking through that space.

I've always enjoyed [Remedy's] games, but I really got obsessive about it with the last few installations. I loved Max Payne, I really enjoyed the original Alan Wake, and I certainly would have always said I liked their games. But those last two were absolutely phenomenal.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

That is Maniac Mansion.

I don't mean to front here, because while I am an old school LucasArts fan big time—and I was even before I got to work with them—I've got to be honest, I'm still not clicking with Maniac. Every once in a while I will pick it up. I'll give it another shot and I get 10 minutes in and I'm like "Oh, this is tedious, man".

Maybe it's that old Hitchhiker's feeling again, where at some point I feel like I'm banging my head against the wall … I realise it's this important, seminal game in the LucasArts universe, and so much came out of that. But it has yet to click with me, and yet I still leave it on there because I feel compelled. It's like when you've got some food that just doesn't quite sit right with you, and you think 'I'm just gonna keep trying it, and maybe one day it will reveal its beauty to me'.

You can see the genesis, the root of that style. But it's in a phase of development where it is interesting, but it hasn't quite yet become entertaining. That's where it is for me. I find it fascinating, especially from a historical standpoint, but it's not quite entertaining for me yet.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

I have potentially two here. Steam will tell you it's Red Dead Redemption 2 at 289.8 hours, which mostly makes sense because that was my COVID lockdown game. In a bit of fortuitous timing, in the fall of 2019 I had this moment where I thought, "You know what? My kids are pretty much grown up now. I have time for videogames now. I can maybe actually justify having a gaming rig again. I always was a PC gamer and switched to console when I had little kids."

So I built a big badass gaming PC right at the end of 2019. Three months later, it was like, "Well, OK then." I got the 32:9 monitor. I went huge with the whole thing. So basically, me for the lockdown, we're stuck in the house, and RDR2 was every day. Most of that 300 hours wasn't even playing the game. I would just get on a horse and ride.

Now, that's what Steam will tell you. But I am quite confident that I put far more hours into Thief: The Dark Project.

I played that game in an absolutely obsessive fashion, where I'd spend 15-20 hours completing a level. It should have gone through at least one full day/night cycle, but it's [always] nighttime in the game, and my rule was always that I wasn't allowed to do anything else until I had knocked out every single enemy on the level and stacked them all in one corner. Then I could explore and find absolutely everything without worrying about getting caught.

I played recently and I hadn't picked it up in a while—it had probably been like five or six years—and it comes back right away. The little leans, the half-creep across hard floors, the jerky thing you do to move across [metal] floors without making any noise.

It's getting a little old and creaky, and it's not quite as immersive as it used to be, but it's still close enough … even today, I can't think of any game that has nailed 3D sound in the way Thief did. Maybe there's some I haven't played, but I remember walking to some room and hid[ing] behind the bar, and you can hear exactly where the guard goes walking around the corner. You don't even need to see any of it to understand what's going on.

So that's one of my all-timers, and I'm absolutely certain that I put more time into that.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

This is a weird one. You know when you have those bizarre little time-waster games that you don't have to put any brain power into whatsoever? Forbidden Island. It's just some dumb port of a tabletop game, and that's my "Oh I'm gonna sit down and have my lunch and I'll tap this on the side". So that's the one I think, I don't know what I'd do without that.

It's a great co-op tabletop game. When I play it on the PC, I just play all the characters myself. You know how that is. For my dad, it was Solitaire. Whatever Solitaire game was being sold on the computer, he'd take a break for a few minutes and play Solitaire. And that's like my thing. [To] rest my brain for a minute, I'll just play one game of Forbidden Island, and it takes 10 minutes and then I'll move on.

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

This is really bizarre, but it's a little utility called Klack, and it's one of those ones that pipes in mechanical keyboard noises when you're typing on a laptop PC.

I spent a number of years as a dining critic, and I wrote a lot and I missed the noise of a keyboard. I installed this app on my laptop so that I would have little mechanical keyboard noises as I type, and I swear to God it helps me write. I don't know why. It makes no sense whatsoever, but my writing flows easier when I've got that clackety clackety clack mechanical keyboard noise.

There was one point, not too long ago, where I turned it off for some reason, and then I went through a period of two or three weeks where I just felt like, "Man, I'm having a really hard time. The words aren't flowing. I'm really having a hard time writing this month." And then, all of a sudden, I realised, "Oh shit! I turned off Klack!" And it all started going out again.

It's the dumbest thing in the world, but I swear to God it works.

Generally, how tidy is your desktop screen?

Extremely, and it really stresses me out when it's not. In real life, I tend to inspire a lot of clutter, but digitally I run a tight ship. On my gaming PC, the only thing that will be on my desktop is something game related, or my notes on that game, or my spreadsheet for that game, and that's it. Then as soon as I finish that game, I'll get rid of those, stick them in the archive, and start the next one. On a work machine, it's whatever I'm working on that day, as that's it.

[With] my files, I start with the six-digit date code—that's year, month, day—so they all autosort. [I have] every single photograph for the dining criticism work I do. I still have, photographed, every single menu, every single dish I've eaten for the past 15 years. I have the spreadsheet that has notes on every single restaurant dish I've eaten over the last 15 years … I'm up to 23,569 restaurant dishes right now. And actually, I'm running a little behind. I haven't updated it in a couple of weeks.

Deadline reports that a Canadian documentary about the history of BioWare was already two years into filming when EA closed the studio. Now, it's becoming a sad goodbye to a legendary developer.

"The BioWare founders are my hometown heroes," the documentary's writer and director Akash Sherman said. "It's a privilege and responsibility to share the journey of underdogs who came together to create deeply beloved storytelling. Their golden era kindled a spark in me and in an entire generation. With the studio's recent closure, the film is now a profound valediction."

The documentary, Massive Effect: The BioWare Story, features interviews with the studio's founders, Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, and Augustine Yip, as well as developers Casey Hudson, Mark Darrah, David Gaider, Drew Karpyshyn, Aaryn Flynn, Mac Walters, Trent Oster, James Ohlen, and Caroline Livingstone, voice actor Jennifer Hale, former CEO of EA John Riccitello, and vice president of Lucasfilm Games Douglas Reilly.

"When the production team asked for our blessing to tell the BioWare story, we were honored and genuinely moved," Muzyka and Zeschuk said in a statement. "BioWare was never just about the logo or the building. It was about deeply emotionally engaging stories and characters, brought to life by the amazingly talented people on our dev teams, and our excellent production and distribution partners who helped us bring those stories successfully to all corners of the planet, and our passionate fans who defended those worlds, championed them and carried them forward. We're proud this film honors those who made it all possible. The best stories never really end. They live on in our memories and wait for someone to pick them up again."

Massive Effect: The BioWare Story is scheduled for release next year. Meanwhile, composer Sam Hulick has shared a re-scored version of the leaked trailer for Mass Effect Universe as his own way of saying goodbye, though apparently Amazon's Mass Effect TV series is still in the works.

In a Thursday, November 5 interview with Yahoo Finance (via TechRadar), AMD CEO Lisa Su emphasized the company's AI commitments. Separately, in a Q3 2026 earnings call, Su forecasted an overall "dobule-digit" slump in PC sales in 2027.

Earlier this year, Electronic Arts was snapped up by a consortium including Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) and the investment firms Silver Lake and Affinity Partners in a deal worth $55 billion. According to Reuters, now the PIF and Silver Lake have their sights set on Unity Software, the company behind the multiplatform game engine of the same name.

Silver Lake is already one of Unity's bigger shareholders, owning roughly 8% of the company since investing around $400 million in it back in 2017. "Silver ​Lake’s Egon Durban also sits ⁠on Unity's board," as Reuters notes, "a dual role that would typically lead him to recuse himself from board deliberations on a sale."

The deliberations so far apparently include a valuation of about $25 billion, though since then Unity's most recent earnings report has come in, showing profits higher than estimated. Unity's come a long way since the Runtime Fee scandal, but it's not all about improvements to the engine like its ability to integrate with Unreal. As Reuters reports, "Strong ⁠growth in Unity's AI-powered Vector advertising platform helped it post its first quarterly profit on a GAAP basis since going public in September 2020."

The first thing that happened to EA after it was acquired was mass layoffs and being saddled with $18 billion of debt. I can't imagine anyone actually working at Unity has their fingers crossed for this deal to go through, but the videogame industry does seem determined to speedrun its way into a consolidation crisis where three consortiums own everything and almost everyone is unemployed.

Ultima creator Richard Garriott was one of several developers on a recent panel hosted by the Georgia Game Developers Association, and Lord British was in fine form. Calling himself the "great-grandpa" of the group, he began by summarizing the current problems faced by the videogame industry.

"It's not just one thing," Garriott began. "I think if it was one thing it would be a lot easier to diagnose and come back from, but it's a lot of folks who don't understand videogames trying to make money off of videogames, it's a political climate, it's a billion things. All the threads have woven together into this horrible knot that we're seeing now."

He went on to describe a cycle he's seen play out multiple times over his years in the industry, where a technological advance comes along and everyone races to make a simple game that highlights that advance—whether it's the CD-ROM or a 3D-rendering pipeline or the internet—and only in the short gaps between these leaps forward is there much demand for something deeper.

"That cycle has been normal," Garriott said. "But we're at a new one, and this new one is machines are now fast enough to where the bells and whistles are no longer what's important." Without another advance having the same impact, he said, "we're at this kind of creative cliff where I think people don't know exactly what to do to prevent it and I think we've lost a lot of the original creators that were associated with those IPs and the bigger companies, and so I think we're floundering."

Garriott also had something to say about the way publishers have responded to the current state of the industry—by canceling games and laying off staff. Referring to his own publisher, Origin Systems, which he sold to EA in 1992, Garriott said, "Origin pre-EA, we never cancelled a project. Our theory was that if that team is capable of getting across the finish line, even if it doesn't sell well, they'll now know what it feels like to finish. And they will get feedback from the sales and the public as to what they did and didn't do right and so that team will be more strong, the individuals will be stronger, and we'll be able to circle back and do a more competent game next time.

"If you cancel a project, that means all those people on that team think you the publisher suck, because obviously their idea must've been brilliant, and so your willingness to cancel it was not their fault, but you the evil publisher. And half of them are probably going to leave or get fired, and maybe you'll scoop a few of them over into some other project that's now the priority project, but we thought that was a bad move on our own."

Things changed once EA snapped up Origin and took control, however. After that? "We canceled more projects than we completed by a long shot," Garriott said.

Two weeks after literally calling "bullshit" on EA's decision to close BioWare, immsim legend Warren Spector has posted a follow-up message on LinkedIn that avoids the spicy language but sounds angrier than ever.

"I recently posted my thoughts about EA’s shuttering of BioWare," Spector wrote. "Those of you who read my post know that I was unhappy. I remain so.

"The tragedy of so many layoffs the last few years hasn’t been lost on me, but for some reason, BioWare hit me on an emotional level nothing before had. I was gut-punched."

But some readers, he continued, replied to say that BioWare's best days were behind it, and that shutting it down was a "sound business decision." Those reactions appear to have re-stoked Spector's rage, as he said those people missed his actual complaint: That the game industry executives who are responsible for these problems are never the ones to suffer the consequences.

"If studio-level people leave, resulting in dilution of talent, someone is creating an environment that pushes them out. Do those culture-killers pay any price?" Spector wrote in his new message. "If executives misread the market, over-hire, or make decisions that result in under-funded, over-funded, poorly-marketed games, do they lose sleep, let alone jobs? Do those same executives suffer like developers when the needs of financial partners and investors take precedence over players, does anyone up there care?

"Is there ANY accountability left in this world?"

Then he took direct aim at Electronic Arts' C-suite with some very large, ugly numbers:

• Andrew Wilson, chief executive officer: $38.65 million
• Laura Miele, president, EA Entertainment and Central Development: $13.7 million
• Stuart Canfield, chief financial officer: $11.3 million
• Jake Schatz, chief legal officer: $8.4 million
• Mala Singh, chief people officer: $8.3 million

Those figures represent the total compensation given to EA's executives in its 2026 fiscal year—a single 12-month period. They're also significant increases over the previous year: Wilson, for instance, got $30.5 million in 2025, while Miele's was given $9.1 million.

Ironically, those EA executive salaries aren't even directly related to the BioWare closure. Wilson's $8 million raise (and all the others), which was awarded in part for "meeting all milestones for a high-quality launch of Battlefield 6," came just a few months after laying off employees at the studios that made it—Criterion, Dice, Ripple Effect, and Motive—and entirely shuttering Ridgeline Games, which had been working on a new, more story-focused Battlefield game.

"Tens of thousands of do-ers and makers are out of work and these people think they're worth that kind of compensation?" Spector concluded. "And if you think this is a discussion about 'sound business decisions' I hope you never get anywhere near running a business. Or at least that people have the sense not to go work for you."

Spector's frustration and anger comes through here even more clearly than it did when he dropped his uncharacteristic curse, because it's focused: Waving our hands and bemoaning the bullshit might be briefly cathartic, but pointing the finger at these guys over here and saying "this is why" brings the problem into focus like the sun through a magnifying glass.

Sadly, pushback on compensation packages of this size are extremely rare. An analyst report in 2020, when EA shareholders took the unusual step of rejecting a proposed pay hike for the company's executives, said the failure rate of such proposals was just 2.7% in 2019, and 2.6% in 2018. Wilson was paid more than $21 million that year.

On Tuesday, tens of millions of Americans voted in midterm elections to deliver a sweep of generational Democratic victories in federal and state races, reflecting a leftward electoral shift that's being interpreted as a nationwide rejection of Trumpism.

But even as Republican candidates and incumbents suffered defeats in what had traditionally been considered some of the party's most entrenched strongholds, the midterms also issued a stinging rebuke to another major source of voter frustration: Data centers. At nearly every opportunity, Americans voted in favor of local ballot measures to halt, slow, or stymie the pace of data center construction in their communities.

As tracked by Data Centers on the Ballot, across the 47 local midterm elections in the American cities and townships that featured ballot measures on data center construction, voters favored restrictions on the rate of data center expansion in 38 of the 39 completed counts. Of the eight races that remain open, voters supporting additional data center restrictions are leading in all six of the races with only partial reporting. For the two remaining races, no results have yet been posted.

Here's the rundown of the types of measures voters are supporting:

• In ten of the closed races, voters approved adding megawatt caps for data center projects to their city or town charters. Typically, those towns selected 25 MW caps; for comparison, a planned OpenAI facility in Effingham County, Georgia is expected to demand 3,200 MW. Voters in favor of megawatt caps are leading in two partial counts.
• Ten of the elections included non-binding advisory questions posed by village councils and town electors, asking whether voters thought their towns should permit or restrict data center development. In nine closed races, voters voted in favor of restriction; pro-restriction voters are leading in the remaining partial count.
• In seven closed races, voters rejected rezoning measures that would permit the construction of data center sites, and voters opposing a similar rezoning decision are leading in another partial count.
• Voters in five races approved outright bans on new data center constructions, and a similar ban is leading in one race with partial reporting. In two other races, measures that would require voter approval before new data center construction can progress have either passed or are leading.
• In six other completed races, voters opted for other data center restrictions, like temporary moratoriums and additional conditions on data center tax benefits.

At time of writing, only one ballot measure that would have introduced data center restrictions failed: In Harwood, North Dakota, voters refused an amendment to the city charter that would have required Harwood to commission an independent review before approving new data center construction or expansion.

Aside from that one exception, it's not hard to suss out why so many of those measures have passed. NBC exit polls show that 56% of yesterday's midterm voters considered AI data centers either "crucial" or "a major factor" in their choice of Congress person, with data center opponents driven by concerns of environmental toll, energy costs, noise pollution, and—one must imagine—the upward-spiraling cost of RAM.

France's Syndicat des Travailleureuses du Jeu Vidéo (STJV) union has accused Microsoft of sabotaging work on Marvel's Blade and then using the inevitable results to justify Arkane's closure.

The union said development of Blade "is going fine," and that the game is on par with Arkane's previous body of work, which includes the Dishonored series, Prey, Deathloop, and the sadly overlooked Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. Despite that, "workers have to face the harsh reality: our studio might get closed because, and only because, Microsoft decided to, even if that means sabotaging the game it funded."

"Microsoft chose to justify the closure on economic reasons," the union wrote. "But Microsoft is actually why those economic reasons even exist. Because after freezing hiring for 19 months, which artificially caused delays and additional cost, Microsoft now uses those same delays and additional costs as a reason to close down the studio."

Closing Arkane would defy "financial logic," the union claimed, as it would likely cost more money than just allowing it to finish Blade—and furthermore, it added, Arkane is profitable—"just not profitable enough for Microsoft."

"Microsoft is responsible for the situation Arkane is in today. Microsoft is responsible for the situation the workers are in today," the union said. "So Microsoft has to take full responsibility here and act accordingly."

While its "dearest wish" is to see Arkane "live on," STJV said the studio's future has to go beyond just completing Blade. And if that's not feasible and Arkane must close, it falls to Microsoft—"the company who decided that Arkane has to shut down"—to take care of the hundreds of lives it has thrown into turmoil. Given Microsoft's essentially limitless resources, the union believes the company has a moral obligation to go beyond the bare minimum required by law: "We will not allow the lives of Arkane Studios' workers to be destroyed without the company paying a fair price."

The union is not aiming low with its demands. First, "to give employees control over the decisions that shape their future" while acquisition negotiations are underway:

• Go beyond the mandatory Work Council consultation, and actually give employees representative & unions a say in the discussion to choose a potential buyer.
• Setup a protection fund for employees on the level of the PSE compensation in case workers get fired for economic reasons by the buyer in 24 following months.

Should Arkane ultimately be closed, it demands Microsoft "funds commensurate with Microsoft’s status as a corporation" to ensure employees are properly compensated:

• A redundancy payment of 200K€ ($225,000).
• Two years’ redeployment support funded by Microsoft.
• The introduction of shared resources for training and studio creation, with a residual bonus to enable all employees to look to the future with confidence.
• Compensation up to the redundancy payment for independant workers’ contract breach.

Those are big asks, but the union isn't wrong about the resources Microsoft has at its disposal: Microsoft's net income for the first quarter of FY27 was $36.6 billion. Xbox is a small contributor to that total, but it is a part of Microsoft, and that makes it Microsoft's issue to deal with.

For now, the fate of Arkane remains unresolved: The studio fell victim to the most recent round of cuts at Xbox, but a recent report indicated that it might yet find a home with a new owner. I've reached out to Xbox for comment on the STJV union's demands and will update if I receive a reply.

A new kind of Steam problem has emerged: Games keep missing their release dates because Valve can't keep up with approving them.

Several frustrated indie devs have publicly posted about the limbo status of their finished games in the past week—including the developers of Food Devils, Wheel Make It, and Cubic Earth—saying that their applications have gone unanswered after up to 20 days, despite Valve's listed review window of three to five business days.

In the case of Cubic Earth, developer structmira hasn't been able to contact Valve and has no choice but to wait. "Our game's trailer amassed more than 60,000 views on YouTube, and we had more than 6,000 wishlists," the developer told PC Gamer over email. "Now, our Steam Community page is rapidly filling with player complaints, and we've lost all momentum."

Valve commented on the backlog today in the form of a Steamworks update aimed at helping developers pass the preview process. In it, the company admitted that it's "running a little behind" with wait times that are up to double the usual.

"We aim to test every game build in a timely manner, typically within 3-5 days. However, we're running a little behind right now and taking up to 12 business days," Valve's FAQ reads. "Much of that delay is due to having to re-review games, which isn't great for you or for us."

The update itself is, primarily, a new series of checklists that places the onus on developers to submit better applications that "pass review quickly the first time." The most significant new requirement is to have "run your game through Steam for at least five minutes" to make sure it functions correctly, which you'd think wouldn't need to be said. The tone of Valve's request suggests that it's also surprised by the state of some of the games it's being asked to approve..

"Believe it or not, sometimes we review builds that have not ever been played through Steam," the update reads. "This means that even if a game runs smoothly when a dev launches their executable directly, they might have missed basic steps that would impact a user installing and playing via Steam."

Other checks include confirming which of those "common redistributables" a game needs before submission, confirming cloud saves and achievements are in order, and adding a minimum of five screenshots to the store page that depict gameplay (another obvious, but apparently necessary standard).

Though Valve did not comment on why a logjam in its processes has developed only recently, despite the number of new Steam games rising rapidly every year, the elephant in the room is AI.

New language models capable of whipping up functioning games very quickly, and Valve's laissez-faire curation, has prompted an explosion of AI slop games on Steam in the past few months—most of which don't receive much visibility, unless you're unlucky enough to browse Steam Next Fest without the "personalized" mode on. A Valve developer recently acknowledged that there's a slop problem on Steam, but said that they don't want to "be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn't use."

If you look at today's update through that lens, perhaps Valve isn't so much speaking to experienced developers with these obvious-sounding guidelines, but vibe coders who lack basic game dev understanding. Also today, Itch.io announced that it deleted "a couple terabytes of AI slop" from its videogame storefront to combat the wave of low-quality games appearing online.

Whatever the cause of the holdup, Valve said more changes are coming to the build review process, but this is a "great starting point."

A new report from Bloomberg says Dishonored developer Arkane might not be as doomed as it appeared last month, as multiple companies have made offers to acquire the studio.

Citing "people familiar with the negotiations," the Bloomberg report says Ubisoft is among Arkane's suitors, as are at least two other unnamed gaming companies. Xbox has also considered selling the studio to its own management, effectively making it independent, although whether that option is still on the table isn't clear.

Despite producing an enviable slate of acclaimed immersive sims over the years (until it was compelled by senior leadership to do otherwise), Arkane fell victim to the Xbox "reset" in July that saw thousands of employees laid off (with more still awaiting their fates) and four studios cast adrift. Arkane avoided being the fifth, reportedly thanks to France's "Florange Law" that compelled Xbox to search for a buyer before pulling the plug.

The deadline for that search was November 13, after which Arkane would be shuttered—but a few weeks ahead of that date, Microsoft extended it by a month, to "explore options, including finding a partner to support the studio through the development work still ahead," a reference to the Marvel's Blade game Arkane currently has in development. That extension suggested there was at least some hope that Arkane might find a new home, instead of being closed.

Going from Xbox to Ubisoft could be viewed as a "frying pan to fire" move, given Ubisoft's own ongoing financial struggles, layoffs, and closures. But Arkane's immersive sim expertise could be a good fit for some of Ubisoft's biggest properties, including Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and—yes, I'm just going to say it—Splinter Cell, which would be magnificent in the style of Dishonored. Arkane and Ubisoft both being French companies can't hurt, either.

I've reached out to Xbox and Ubisoft for comment on the report, and will update if I receive a reply.

This week, Bethesda Game Studios is celebrating its 40th birthday—a celebration that included the full name reveal of The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel, successfully completing the eight-year task of adding a word to a thing.

In addition, Bethesda is commemorating the occasion with the launch of a 40th anniversary site collecting the anecdotes and favorite memories of studio staff, including one Alan Nanes. Now a design director, Nanes was originally hired at Bethesda as one of its first full-time QA testers—and by his own description, he got the job by being a pleasant fellow to spend time with.

According to Nanes, his history with Bethesda started during Morrowind's development. He was close friends with Bethesda devs in multiple departments, and it was an era where that was enough to get you in the building.

"Things were a bit 'Wild West' back then, and my friends allowed me to hang out (yes, before I was an employee) there, playing multiplayer games with them and just getting to know everyone," Nanes wrote. "Eventually, Todd Howard noticed my presence in the studio and asked if I wanted to test out their new game."

In time, his impromptu testing sessions started attracting an audience of Bethesda developers who would pick his brain about their design choices, scribble notes, and debate with each other about potential tweaks to the game while watching over his shoulder.

"It was an extraordinary feeling, the first time I felt like I was contributing to the creation of an actual videogame (I believe you can find my name in the Morrowind manual's credits under 'Special Thanks')," Nanes said. "After this became a regular occurrence, Todd Howard and Ashley Cheng seemed to decide having full-time, in-studio QA would be a valuable addition to the team, and I took on that mantle."

Nanes later graduated to a quest designer position for Oblivion, and was more recently credited as lead companions designer on Starfield. But while his tenure at Bethesda might've had a storybook trajectory, the history of QA workers at the studio has been a contentious one in the years since Nanes was hired.

Driven by frustrations surrounding compensation, advancement opportunities, workload, and more, QA workers at Bethesda's parent company ZeniMax initiated a unionization vote in 2022, officially forming ZeniMax Workers United - CWA—then the largest videogame union in the US—when the vote succeeded in January 2023.

Those frustrations remained unaddressed as contract negotiations with Microsoft stalled for over two years, driving the QA union to vote overwhelmingly in favor of authorizing a strike in April 2025. Its contract was ultimately ratified in June 2025. When a number of those QA workers were affected by Xbox's July 2026 layoffs, that contract allowed the union to enter into an "effects bargaining" process to negotiate severance terms for its impacted members, culminating in "a significant agreement" in September 2026.

Longtime Microsoft executive Helen Chiang was made Xbox's first-ever chief operating officer as part of the 'reset' in July, a role that gave her "end-to-end P&L responsibility across content, hardware, platform, and services." Then, just three months later and with virtually no fanfare, she was gone, amidst an anonymous claim that she was "terminated for policy violations."

Saying it was important "to set the record straight," Chiang has now formally denied that claim in a lengthy LinkedIn post, saying she did not:

• "Leak confidential company information to the press"
• "Leave Xbox to join a competitor"
• "Engage in discrimination, bullying, harassment, insider trading, embezzlement, or other fraudulent activity"
• "Leave because I was passed over for a bigger role"

The record-straightening did not get into why Chiang did leave Xbox, although she seemed to imply that it was not an amicable departure: "I believe in fairness, accountability, and holding ourselves to the standards we expect of others. Those standards only mean something when they're applied consistently. I have serious concerns about how they were applied in my case, and I believe those concerns deserve to be taken seriously."

The sudden split seemed doubly strange because prior to taking the COO job at Xbox, Chiang spent more than 20 years at Microsoft, nearly all of it with the Xbox division—rising from Xbox platform business manager in 2007 to corporate vice president of the Minecraft franchise in 2020, a position she held for more than six years. The memo announcing Chiang's departure was also notably restrained: "Helen Chiang is leaving Microsoft today," Xbox CEO Asha Sharma wrote. "I'm grateful for her years of service and wish her well."

"I share this because I don't want my departure reduced to an inaccurate story about incompetence, ambition for the next big job, or a Nelson-level scandal. My story is about staying true to your core values, especially when it is hard. That's the legacy I hope to leave behind," Chiang wrote in her message.

"This is not how I ever imagined my story here would end. And it is not the whole story."

I've reached out to Microsoft for comment on Chiang's message and will update if I receive a reply.

Six months after the disappearance of Nagoshi Studio's website, a Google-translated notice in the Japan government's Kanpo website (via Gematsu) says the company has now officially closed its doors.

Founded by Yakuza creator Toshihiro Nagoshi in 2021 after a run of more than 30 years at Sega, Nagoshi Studio's first game was revealed at the 2025 Game Awards as Gang of Dragon—although the reveal was really just a brief CGI clip of Ma Dong-Seok that could have been lifted straight from Korean action film The Outlaws.

The wheels came off just a few months later, though, when NetEase pulled funding for the studio, amidst a broader pullback from external studio support over the previous year. Nagoshi Studio reportedly had no success finding another benefactor to fill the gap, and two months later, in May, the studio's website disappeared.

No official proclamations about the fate of the studio were forthcoming, though, and the Steam page remained online, so faint hope of a last-minute rescue persisted. Now, I'm afraid even that's gone, although the Steam listing is still up if you want to poke around at what might have been.

Better idea: Just watch The Outlaws.

It seems it isn't just Steam that's being flooded with AI slop. Indie games storefront itch.io has reported that the number of new game pages being created per day on the site has doubled in the past two months, and just like Valve's much bigger distribution service, the finger is being pointed at AI.

Over on Bluesky, itch.io shared an image of a bar chart labelled "game events". The chart shows that, between August 3 and October 30, the number of new game pages being created per day has risen from around 3,000 to regularly surpassing 6,000. It's a ratio that more or less matches the increase in Steam demos showcased at the most recent Next Fest, which rose from around 4,000 to over 8,000.

While Itch doesn't explicitly point the finger at AI as the cause, it heavily infers it. When Bluesky user Tommy's Homemade Games asked "Do you know why?" Itch responded "take a guess" followed by emojis of a crying face and a robot. Another Bluesky account, BardZaku, asked "is it AI dreck?" to which the account replied with an emoji of a face with bags under its eyes.

The rapid uptick in Itch pages also coincides with the launch of Claude Opus 5, which arrived on July 24. The latest iteration of Anthropic's LLM—which is now at version 5.5—has proved particularly adept at reverse engineering code. This has had a bunch of knock-on effects in various areas of game development, ranging from much faster decompilations of old games, to Steam being flooded with AI slop, and developers cancelling public demos out of concerns their games will be cloned.

Anthropic has since updated Claude to reign in its ability to directly copy games, but it's currently hard to tell whether it has stemmed the broader flow of AI generated games. Indeed, it's worth pointing out that AI Generated games now comprise a good portion of the pages listed on Itch. Out of 1,769,316 listed on Itch at the time of writing, 131,929 are tagged as AI Generated, approximately 7.5% of the total. That's a lot, considering how long AI coding tools have been around.

But to play devil's advocate, Itch is a storefront that allows AI games, and if people are downloading and enjoying these games, then adding them to the store is fair enough, right? Well, Itch also points out that, although the number of games appearing on Itch per day has doubled, "the number of downloads and purchases has *not* doubled". This suggests these AI games are clogging up the site for nobody's benefit, not even the people 'making' them.

The question, then, is what's to be done about all this? The replies to Itch's initial post are filled with calls to ban AI generated games from the store. But as pointed out by AI researcher Mike Cook, simply banning these games is unlikely to solve the problem.

"I think that would be a good move. But it won't change this graph, unfortunately," Cook wrote on Bluesky. "You need a team of people to enforce it, or a very dicey public reporting system. Even then, it's a lot harder to detect than people think." Valve has also cast doubt on the efficacy of a ban on AI coding tools for games released on Steam, though its opinion is heavily influenced by the company's laissez-faire approach to operating its storefront.

Another possibility is to simply let this trend play out. There is a viral element to the ongoing surge in AI generated games, as people post their vibe-coded works online for attention and social media clout. But Itch's statement suggests that people aren't properly engaging with most of the games being uploaded.

Hence, it's possible that the people behind these games may eventually lose interest, moving on to whatever attention-grabbing scheme big tech facilitates next. The risk, of course, is that the audience also loses interest in what these storefronts offer before that happens. After all, nobody wants to wade through a tsunami of slop to get to the games they want to play.

On October 29, bedrock fanfiction website Archive of Our Own (AO3) was taken down for maintenance that was initially predicted to last 12 hours. Later that day, the estimated downtime was upped to two to four weeks. On October 30, the site's volunteer leadership shared a more substantial update about the security intrusion behind the takedown.

At the time of writing, the team is "still in the early stages" of determining the scope of the intrusion. AO3 has assured readers and authors that the archive itself and associated data (bookmarks, kudos, etc.) remain intact. Donor information is stored on a completely separate system, meaning that data is safe.

The AO3 team is "unable to rule out" that its user database was compromised in the hack. AO3 user accounts include emails, usernames, IP addresses, and hashed (encrypted) passwords. In an abundance of caution, the team advises users to update passwords they may have reused from AO3⁠—but that's just good practice in general, gamers.

Over the coming weeks, the team anticipates that AO3 will be brought back in a "degraded" state, meaning incomplete or read-only access, as well as further intermittent downtime. As for why this happened, that remains unclear.

AO3 is a very widely-used service, and the sheer numbers game of weak passwords combined with emails in its user database could make it valuable on the black market. I also don't think you can rule out a more ideological motivation for such an attack, given fanfiction's long association with women and the queer community.

Either way: It's just poor form. Very meanspirited. An invitation to several lifetimes' worth of bad karma. I see AO3 on a continuum with The Internet Archive and Wikipedia as a holdout of a more utopian internet, a website that exists, uncorrupted by money, because people like it and it's good. Why would you mess that up for everybody?

Anthropic has updated Claude Opus 5.5 to "steer it away" from letting users clone other developers' games, after weeks of Steam being overrun with AI slop and outcries from the game development community.

In an update spotted by X user Chasm (via Game Developer) Anthropic added a new rule to Claude Code's "Rules". Listed under "tengu_heron_brook", the rule reads, "Do build original games, games in a genre, and games from the user's own designs and assets. Do not build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original."

The addition was later confirmed by Addy Osmani, a member of Anthropic's technical staff. In a response to Chasm's post, Osmani stated, "We added two sentences to Claude Code's prompt on Opus 5.5 to steer it away from recreating someone else's specific game because using Claude to infringe IP is against our usage policy."

Osmani added that "original games, genre games, and games built from your own design are meant to keep working. We'll continue to iterate to ensure that we're striking the right balance. In the meantime, if Claude turns down something that's yours, send it my way."

Opus 5.5 has proved adept at reverse engineering code, causing all manner of disruption within the games industry. The effects range from rapid decompiling of old console games to the PS5 being jailbroken.

Anthropic's latest change arrives in the wake of multiple reports from game developers that their games and demos have been flagrantly copied with the aid of AI. This has led several studios to cancel planned public demos of their games for fear that the code in those demos will be reverse engineered and used to create AI clones.

This all occurred within the broader issue of Steam witnessing a massive influx of low-effort, vibe-coded games, many of which are heavy imitations or direct copies of existing titles. While low effort game clones are not a new issue within the games industry, the most recent Steam Next Fest saw the number of showcased demos double over the previous event, with AI assisted games accounting for most of that increase.

Valve itself has admitted that Steam has a problem with AI slop. But the company is reluctant to resolve the issue by simply banning AI coding tools. At Steam's Indie Connect event last week, Valve's Tom Giardino explained that Valve doesn't want "to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn't use."

As for what Valve does plan to do about the problem, Giardino didn't have a specific answer, only that "making Steam a smarter and more dynamic platform is the starting point of our philosophy." In the meantime, he suggested that developers make their games harder to copy, stating "you need to keep growing your game by adding features, personality and creativity that stem from your own perspective."

While it's true that the games being cloned are often small and not especially complex, it's worth pointing out that many of the most important games released in the last few years are relatively simple designs. Games like Vampire Survivors, Balatro and Peak are all built upon elementary concepts. And yes, those games have spawned endless imitators. But it's one thing to riff on their ideas with your own design, quite another to lift their codebase wholesale.

It's been almost 15 years since BioWare co-founders Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka announced their retirements from the videogame industry, and they've been resolute about staying out of it ever since: Muzyka continues to head up the ThresholdImpact investment firm he founded in 2012 and holds multiple roles at the University of Alberta, while Zeschuk owns Blind Enthusiasm Brewing Company, also based in Alberta, where he works with a small handful of other BioWare veterans.

But Zeschuk stepped back into the videogame spotlight, briefly, following last week's closure of BioWare by parent company Electronic Arts, telling 80lv that he got the news hours after it happened because he was on a fishing trip, and by the time he flew home a couple days later, he'd "already shelved it away."

"I wasn't there to share in the moment, which in some ways was nice because I was able to kind of just take my time with it," Zeschuk said. "I’m not saying it doesn't hurt and doesn't suck. And I think it's kind of sad. It's actually, in some ways, saddest for the city of Edmonton, where we're from, because we were kind of this beacon of hope and excitement and possibility. We showed you could do something really special in a place that was not known for doing things like that."

Zeschuk said he had his own "emotional moment" about BioWare years ago, when he left the company; his real concern now is for the people at the studio who now find themselves out of work: "Anyone getting put into the job hunt is a sort of terrifying endeavor and super sad."

He also said he has no regrets about the EA acquisition, saying it offered "stability" as the studio continued to grow and that "we saw there'd be value in being part of something bigger rather than going our own way and taking all the risks." At the same time, he had a feeling when EA was acquired by Saudi Arabia's PIF that it probably wouldn't go well for BioWare, because it doesn't fit into the guns-and-sports model: "BioWare makes these kind of unusual games that take a long time and they're complicated and so it's easier just to pump out sports games every year and that's a better business model in some ways."

Zeschuk was also critical of the idea, seen in the recent wave of studio mergers and AI-powered cutbacks, "that you can just kind of recreate great games with random people and AI. It doesn't work," Zeschuk said.

"The other harsh reality of almost all these companies, the people that go down the business track never really come from the development track. Because none of these people have ever made a game, like, never really sat and made one, like, from start to finish, even a small thing, they just don't know how it works."

Zeschuk does know how it works, and he was clear that he's not interested in going back. "For me it was time to go, and I kind of walked out of the games business without any intention of ever returning. I'm happy being a consumer and playing games," he said. "I have my opinions on how to make stuff, but as enticing as it would be, it's just not [worth] the personal struggle and cost and effort required to make a great game. Having gone through the crucible of game development, I'm not going back in there."

Denis Dyack, known for his work on games including Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain and Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, says big game developers are "abusing early access" by using it as a marketing tool for highly polished games that are ready for full release anyway. That, Dyack believes, has shifted expectations for early access releases overall, and made life more difficult for indie developers who rely on the process to actually get their games finished and launched.

"They can put up a polished product and rake in cash," Dyack told GamesIndustry. "It's a marketing beat for them. So, that leaves players often expecting a near-perfect game that, in our opinion, defeats the purpose of early access, which is a collaborative development process based on player feedback.

"AAA publishers are abusing early access, skewing player expectations in such a way that it heavily disadvantages smaller independent developers."

Dyack said games like Subnautica 2 and Path of Exile are "drastically changing the landscape and players' expectations," which in turn has led to "significant barriers to entry" for less polished games like Dyack's current project, Deadhaus Sonata, which is now in early access on Steam.

Ethan McKinnon, who joined Deadhaus Sonata developer Apocalypse Studios as creative director after the game's rough early access launch earlier this year, added that "players naturally compare everything in the same marketplace, so smaller teams are being held to a much higher standard than they were in the past."

Interestingly, Subnautica 2 creative director Anthony Gallegos seemed to agree with at least part of Dyack's proposition, saying in the same report that early access is "not a few edge-case games participating anymore."

"Early access could mean a game like ours doing long-term open development, or it could be a game three months from a 1.0 release that's effectively doing a paid beta soft launch and using the Early Access term as a way to soften player expectations," Gallegos said. The result, he continued, is a "more diverse and confusing landscape."

I think that point is more salient here than any perceived 'abuse' by big publishers: It's tough to set meaningful broad expectations for "early access" when it's such a loosely defined term in the first place. But even though I'm not entirely convinced by Dyack's argument, he and McKinnon do have sensible advice for developers looking at early access launches: Ensure the game runs well, pay attention to Steam reviews, and connect with influencers who can get it in front of eyeballs.

Dyack admitted that Apocalypse Studios missed those points with the early access release of Deadhaus Sonata earlier this year. "We failed to prioritize the basics right from the get-go," Dyack said. "Also, we didn't handle Unreal Engine properly at the time and didn't do a good job explaining what made our game cool and different. In a lot of ways, we were too focused on what made our game so different and unique that it took our attention away from making sure we got the basics done right."

McKinnon put it more simply: "Developers need to treat early access like a real launch, because players do."

EA took the axe to BioWare last week after a long, slow death partially born of mandates to either work on live service games that didn't work (Anthem) or pivot from live service games in messy, chaotic development cycles (Veilguard). A report from Vertical Slice now also claims that its employee morale is at an all-time low.

Speaking to the site's Chris Kerr, choosing to remain anonymous, sources state that "Morale has been terrible. The line we kept hearing is 'do less, better' but it just felt like we were doing the same amount with less people."

It doesn't help that "upper management was very excited about Claude and the possibilities of [generative] AI, much to the chagrin of my team." It's not entirely shocking that generative AI is exciting the executive class—and, to give credit where it's perhaps undue, there are places in which the use of AI could, if applied conservatively, save on busywork.

But in an utterly brutal industry environment, none of these employees seem keen on the idea that management might replace them with AI while not understanding their jobs: "The message from every single manager I've heard is 'this is the future, you have to get onboard'," writes one source, while another adds: "They won't tell you these tools are a mandate, but they'll make it impossible or very difficult for you to do your job without [them]."

Another source in the article claims that there is a sense that "EA executives cannot fail, only be failed. They've been fortunate that [EA Sports FC] sells and makes so much money that it can finance their bad bets."

That is a pervasive feeling—one does have to wonder why the axe falls first on the employees rather than, say, executive-level pay or bonuses, some of which could fund the yearly salaries of dozens of employees handily. Take Battlefield 6, for instance, which laid off several developers and then paid EA's CEO $38 million for the game's success.

To further put it in perspective, Andrew Wilson's yearly pay was worth roughly 305 median salaries at the publisher's studios in 2025.

To return to BioWare for a moment, the report also paints an ugly picture of the mismanagement of that studio. Predictably, the constant cajoling to try and get it to make a live service masterpiece.

"A lot of money got wasted going down these roads that didn't lead anywhere," says one source, while another writes: "There was never a desire to take risks. Never a desire to do anything interesting. It was just 'here is what these 14 UXR [User Experience Research] studies are saying, so we've got to do it this way."

Like the cherry on top of a terrible sundae, Vertical Slice's reporting ends with an eminently quotable summation of the entire fiasco: "That the recent email about the organisation changes [sounded like] it was written by a robot best sums up EA. A cold dead place that's slowly decaying as leadership pilfers every last cent, leaving the rest of us to worry about how we feed our families."

Cast your mind back to January and you might remember a sit-down we had with some of the leaders of a newly-independent GOG. The DRM-free storefront had separated from its former owner—CD Projekt—and returned to the arms of its original cofounder, Michał Kiciński. Back then, Kiciński told us that publishing was one of the several moves GOG was considering in its post-CDP life. Well, the day has finally come.

"Together with an independent publisher, Retrovibe, we’re joining forces to launch Retrovibe by GOG, a new initiative supporting independent developers in bringing their games to players across PC storefronts and consoles," reads the announcement press release.

The publisher will do, well, publisher stuff. Funding, marketing, hobnobbing with content creators and game journalists (an unenviable task), and getting games certified for release on all of the good Lord's wonderful platforms.

Why has GOG signed up with Retrovibe in particular? Well, there's an affinity between GOG's focus on releasing and preserving old games (good old games, you might say) and Retrovibe's focus on games that capture some sort of classic essence. But a big reason is that Retrovibe was also cofounded by Kiciński: in our January chat, he noted that he had a 50% stake in the publisher.

So it was probably a relatively easy marriage to make happen: "With GOG now under the ownership of its original co-founder, Michał Kiciński, who also co-founded Retrovibe, the two companies have an opportunity to work more closely together," says the announcement, touting Retrovibe's publishing nous and GOG's "platform expertise, marketing capabilities and connection to PC players worldwide."

The new publishing chimera already has a game under its stamp: Cop Bastard, which releases tomorrow, the 29th of October. It has a very good name and a sort of 'what if you equipped a John Woo protagonist with a bodycam' aesthetic. Our (formerly our) Robin Valentine wrote that there was "definitely something alluring about Cop Bastard's brand of deep-fried retro weirdness" when he tried it last year, though he feared it might not hold up over a full playthrough.

Also on the GOG/Retrovibe docket is Project Warlock: Lost Chapters, the third in the Project Warlock line of boomer shooters. It's not as good a name as Cop Bastard but it does have a great look to it..

You might notice that, despite officially being embraced into the GOG publishing bosom, both those games are not GOG-sclusives. They each have Steam pages as well as GOG releases, which I confess to being quite happy about, if for no other reason than GOG's Galaxy client doesn't yet have its promised Linux build.

Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro Digital Games have a new boss, and it's kind of the old boss. Dan Ayoub, who spent the past couple years as senior vice president of digital games at Wizards, has been promoted to the big chair, where he'll head up Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons, Duel Masters, and Hasbro Digital Games.

Ayoub will take the place of John Hight, who left the position in July after just two years on the job. On the videogame-specific side of things, Ayoub will now oversee two major projects in development: The Mass Effect-like sci-fi RPG Exodus being developed by Archetype Entertainment, and the third-person action-adventure Warlock: Dungeons and Dragons, being made by Invoke Studios.

"[Ayoub] was selected after a rigorous search that evaluated dozens of internal and external candidates," Hasbro said. "He is the first internal candidate promoted into the role."

Ayoub has real experience in the biz: Prior to joining Wizards of the Coast, he served as executive producer and studio head at Halo studio 343 Industries, and also spent more than a year as vice president and general manager of co-development studio Certain Affinity.

"I'm honored to lead Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro Digital Games, and grateful to Chris [Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks] and the leadership team for this opportunity," Ayoub said. "Magic and D&D have been part of my life for as long as I can remember, and the teams behind them are among the best in the world. We'll put fans first, respect the artists and creators who make these worlds come alive, and set an ambitious course for growth across tabletop and digital. I can't wait to get started."

But he also comes into the new role at a challenging time. Despite going hard on videogames in the immediate aftermath of Baldur's Gate 3, Hasbro has struggled to actually follow up on it: The company recorded a $56 million non-cash impairment earlier this year arising from the cancellation of several games in development that were expected to release "in 2028 and beyond."

Potentially complicating matters further, Cocks, the Hasbro CEO, is a vocal AI enthusiast. He recently indicated that he wasn't pushing to incorporate it in Hasbro games because people "just don't want it," but he was also clear that he views widespread generative AI use as the inevitable future: "You can't ignore it, you can't stick your head in the sand." In that light, Ayoub's remark about respecting "artists and creators" might be seen as a little more meaningful—but how that holds up in the long run, we will have to wait and see.

Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun developer Auroch Digital appears to be headed toward significant layoffs. In a statement posted to social media, the studio said that despite its "creative success, the same market conditions that have challenged so many of our fellow developers have now also affected us." As a result, Auroch Digital is restructuring, and has begun a redundancy consultation process that will impact "around a quarter" of its employees.

"Over the past year our colleagues have delivered amazing games like Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2 and Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! to wonderful reception from our players," the Auroch Digital statement said.

"Despite that creative success, the same market conditions that have challenged so many of our fellow developers have now also affected us. Consequently, we have made the decision to restructure the studio to work through a turbulent and uncertain time in our industry."

The initial redundancy message, as reported by GamesIndustry, was deleted just hours after it was posted on October 26, although at least two Auroch Digital employees have also reported the redundancy notification. Two days later, on October 28, it was re-posted; a reason for the deletion of the original announcement has not been provided.

The cuts come despite a good run for Auroch Digital over the past few years. Released in 2023, Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun was "the first truly exceptional Warhammer 40,000 game since Dawn of War," we declared in our 85% review; the follow-up, Boltgun 2, is "sick," in the words of PC Gamer shooter expert Morgan Park, and currently holds an "overwhelmingly positive" rating on Steam.

Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War didn't meet quite the same enthusiastic response—I enjoyed the preview build I played but our reviewer Nova Wright did not care for the full release—but the studio also has Warhammer Survivors in the pipe, set to launch on November 10, and it looks very promising.

The seeming bad news also comes less than a year after Auroch Digital was acquired by Roundtable Interactive in a deal backed by EMK Capital.

AI's a touchy subject in the development industry, but in other areas it's a lot less controversial—take Japan, for instance, which is embracing the technology a lot more than audiences in the West are. That's not to say there isn't any push back at all, mind.

Still, an example of how there's more of a positive spin on it overseas comes courtesy of a Famitsu interview (translated here by Automaton) where seasoned JRPG devs from Square Enix seem broadly positive on the tech—and are repeating some oft-heard talking points that I, at least, am personally very bored of, even if I wouldn't dismiss them out of hand.

Hiromichi Tanaka, who worked on many Final Fantasy games during his tenure (which ended in 2012), says that the creations of the future "will definitely come down to how well people can master the use of AI." Yoshinori Kitase (also a veteran, and current producer on Final Fantasy 7: Revelation) concurs, saying: "major game companies will need to rethink their development methods to avoid being swept away by this wave."

Kitase points out that we've already had an increased wave of indie games from the popularisation of accessible game engines, and "when you add support from new tools and technologies on top of that, even people with limited experience can more easily make games."

We have seen a touch of that in all of these decompiled games, but there's also the fact that people with limited experience are also able to just up and steal ideas easier, too. And I'm not talking about a corporate aversion to piracy, here. The developers of Moonlighter recently had to yank their ReVamp demo from Steam because it was getting cloned—that's an indie dev having its hard work copy-pasted.

Kitase does at least acknowledge that people don't tend to find purely AI-generated or cloned slop tasteful, though: "Humans need to be involved in the initial step of turning zero into one," a turn of phrase he uses to describe the human creative spark and original ideas. "That will never change. The next generation of creators absolutely needs the ability to turn zero into one."

Tanaka adds that this'll turn the industry into a "competition of ideas". Which is a nice fantasy on paper, though I'm not entirely sure it's panning out that way in practice—as mentioned above, indie developers, already on rocky ground in an unkind industry where discoverability is a nightmare, are at risk of either having their games cloned or drowned in a sea of AI slop.

As we've noted before on this very site, there really is just no winning in the videogame industry, particularly under current conditions. Make an unsuccessful game? Make the kind of game you didn't want to make, but were pressured into? Layoffs. Make a successful game? Layoffs. Currently making a game? Believe it or not, layoffs.

As is the case with Ghost of Yōtei developer sucker punch, which has reportedly—per an internal email sent to Aftermath and confirmations from an ex-employee to the site—been hit with 24 layoffs, around a 10% reduction in staff.

This is despite the fact that Ghost of Yōtei, the studio's most recent game, was a commercial success: It sold 3.3 million copies in its opening month, making it the 11th-best selling game in the US in 2025. It continued to rake in the cash, hopping over 5 million copies in just a handful of months.

The email itself reads: "After carefully observing the challenges in the market and reviewing the team needs for our next project, we've decided to make some staffing reductions. Several positions across Sucker Punch will be eliminated as a result.

"We know this is a lot to take in, and we want to assure you that we did not make this decision lightly. We have given this a lot of attention and worked to support our affected colleagues during this transition as well as we can. … There's no getting around that this is a hard day. Next week we will go into more details about the future."

In—and I want to wrap this word up in air quotes here—fairness to Sony here, challenges in the market have been absolutely miserable. An AI bubble has sent everything tits-up for the foreseeable future, games are getting far more expensive to make, outpacing the prices at which they're sold, and Covid-19 overhiring didn't help.

And yet, part of me thinks you should be able to make a nearly top-10 selling videogame and probably be secure in your job for, like, a year at the very least. This doesn't smack as a sign of a healthy industry. Besides, it's not like you're seeing Sony's executive staff taking a pay cut.

Warhorse Studios, the developer behind Kingdom Come: Deliverance and an upcoming RPG set in JRR Tolkien's Middle-earth, has announced it's been targeted in a cyberattack, the results and details of which are yet to come out.

In a post on X, the studio told followers that "We're sorry to share that Warhorse Studios has been hit by a cyberattack. We're working with cybersecurity specialists to secure our systems and understand the full extent of what happened. Thank you for standing with us."

In a statement to Czech media, studio CEO Martin Frývaldský said (the following is machine-translated) "This is a serious incident for Warhorse Studios and for everyone affected. Our immediate priority is to secure the systems, determine the full extent of the breach, and take all necessary steps to protect our employees, partners, and our community.

We are deploying all necessary capabilities and resources to address this situation." Though he did not reveal any more details as to what the purpose of the attack was or what its impact has been.

The most obvious target for hackers would be details on Warhorse's two currently announced upcoming games: a Lord of the Rings RPG and a new Kingdom Come adventure.

A successful attack could open up Warhorse to the kind of leaks that have plagued Rockstar in the build-up to GTA 6, as rogues with early builds leak materials left and right, outside the tight confines of studio marketing plans. It could also be the case that hackers are targeting player data, something else entirely, or had no specific plan in mind.

Whatever the case, we'll keep this story updated as more details come out.

When I started working at PC Gamer in 2014, I began what I didn't realize at the time would become a bit of a ritual. A few weeks before the San Francisco Game Developer's Conference that year, I sent the creator of one of PC gaming's first masterpieces, Prince of Persia, an email asking if he'd be in town. Jordan Mechner politely responded that he wouldn't be making the trip from his home in Paris to San Francisco that year. But I kept trying when the conference rolled back around, thinking maybe this would be the year the stars aligned.

It took a decade, but in 2024 we finally made it happen: Mechner joined a roundtable I hosted alongside other veterans from designing PC games in the '80s and '90s to explore their long careers. Afterward, we talked some more just one-on-one—but in the busy aftermath of the conference, that interview never ended up making its way online.

So here it is now, covering his autobiographical graphic novel, why we may not have seen the last of adventure game The Last Express, and how every generation of fans now has its "own" Prince of Persia.

The many princes of Persia

When this interview was conducted, Ubisoft hadn't yet canceled its remake of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, which would've been the first new 3D game in the series in 15 years. The latest 2D game, The Lost Crown, was still fresh, and would be followed not long after our conversation by another 2D game, The Rogue Prince of Persia.

PC Gamer: It's interesting to see different visions of the Prince existing simultaneously now, though obviously Prince of Persia has evolved many times over its history.

Jordan Mechner: I think the Montpellier team made really smart choices with The Lost Crown, and doing Prince of Persia as a 2D Metroidvania, with an emphasis on the fantastic elements and the visual style that harks back to anime. It's also reminiscent of the early 2D Prince of Persia games and of the first Sands of Time.

Even fans of the 2008 Prince of Persia, I think, will find in the mythology and a lot of visual elements things that will make this feel like a Prince of Persia game to them in the best way. With no risk of it being confused with a photorealistic, fully 3D AAA Sands of Time-type game.

I loved the 2008 Prince of Persia. That game got a bad rap: People were like 'it plays itself. You don't have to do anything.' But I thought the fluidity of the movement in that game was just incredible. I loved it.

And the visuals are absolutely beautiful. There's, there's a lot to like about the 2008 Prince of Persia, and from my vantage point, from what I hear from fans, it has its own devoted, passionate following. Just as much as the Sands of Time trilogy, or the original 2D game.

That's the funny thing about Prince of Persia: That these constituencies are so separate, that there's all three of those. And then there's the Prince of Persia movie, because for many people, especially people who are around 30 years old today, the Prince of Persia movie is Prince of Persia for them, because they weren't the right age to have played any of the games.

There's a new generation of gamers for whom The Lost Crown will be the first Prince of Persia they encounter. It's incredible to be part of something that's had so many lives.

It's slightly surreal for me to hear you say the word 'Metroidvania' because it's such a gamer genre, but it also didn't exist when you made the original.

Of course, I made Prince of Persia about the same time that Metroid and Castlevania were being made. So it's a term that didn't exist, and we didn't have genres in those days in the sense that we do now. I think all of these we would have called platform games or action adventure games.

I don't know if you played Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, or some other version of a Metroidvania? What did it feel like for you having made a platformer that set a lot of precedents, and seeing that genre evolving over the years?

I've never been a Metroidvania player—I would say Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is actually the first Metroidvania game that I've played and really gotten into as a player. And I'm just enjoying it so much. As a 2d gamer, games that stand out to me are Inside and Limbo, which I thought were really beautiful. I also enjoyed some of the recent Rayman games.

Do you remember much about Prince of Persia 3D? Did you work on that game or consult on that game at all?

That was an internal Broderbund project. So I wasn't on the team, but I knew them.

I had been at Broderbund when I was making Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame, which was my last, Broderbund Prince of Persia game. After that I had the idea to do a third episode of the trilogy in 2D. But this was 1993, tthe year of Doom and online multiplayer shooters, and so doing a 2D game just kind of didn't excite publishers, the way it had a year earlier.

So instead of that, I created Smoking Car Productions and The Last Express. While we were making The Last Express, Broderbund, then I think partly looking at Tomb Raider, came around to the idea of doing Prince of Persia as a 3D game. I wasn't involved, but wished them well. And they kept me in the loop.

Do you remember playing that one?

I played the first two levels. It was on PC, and I was a Mac gamer. So it wasn't really my genre, I didn't have a PC that was powerful enough to really enjoy it. So I only saw a bit of it.

Today I hear surprisingly often from gamers that they really enjoyed Prince of Persia 3D and have fond memories of it. So we should probably add that to the list of versions of Prince of Persia that each have their little camp.

I've never played it, but I'm really curious now to go back. It sounds like there wasn't anything you took directly from it. But I'm curious what was going on in that time between Prince of Persia 3D coming out, and you making your own 3D version with Sands of Time?

When I saw Tomb Raider I I was impressed. It blew my mind: it was the first third-person real-time 3D game I'd seen. I was making The Last Express at the time, which was a very different kind of game. But seeing Tomb Raider, I thought 'well we don't need to do Prince of Persia in 3D now. They've just done it. And it's great.'

But seeing Tomb Raider, and then seeing Prince of Persia 3D a few years later, my feeling as a gamer was that I missed the speed and fluidity of 2d gaming. Advancing up to the edge of a block and trying to point yourself in the right direction, and then missing the jump, as a gamer I just had more fun playing the 2D games. Of course, this was a stage in the evolution of 3D. So when I met the Ubisoft Montreal team in 2002, and they pitched the idea of doing a Prince of Persia for the PlayStation 2 generation, my first reservation was, 'how well is this going to work in 3D?'

That reservation was blown away when I saw the first animation tests and had the chance to meet the team and we all got excited about the possibility of taking the action vertical, and using parkour and these sort of Cirque du Soleil acrobatics. So rather than just walking into the edge of a platform, lining up and jumping, you could chain movements together with fluidity.

Plus the fantastic technical innovation of being able to press a button on the controller and rewind your gameplay in real time. Those two things together were so powerful that I jumped on board this project and volunteered to write the script and story.

The story that we created with a dagger that can turn back time, and an hourglass, was constructed to take advantage of and to highlight these gameplay elements of the rewind and the parkour.

How did your relationship with Ubisoft originally come about?

Yves Guillemot called me in 2001.

That'll do it.

Ubisoft had just acquired Broderbund's games portfolio, and he said 'we have a new studio in Montreal that we'd like to talk to you about doing a new Prince of Persia gaming for the new generation of consoles.

Ubisoft had started, fun trivia, as the European distributor of Broderbund's games at the time of The Last Express. But of course that was just the beginning. They grew quickly and by 2001 they were one of the largest, fastest growing French game studios and they had just opened the studio in Montreal, which also was growing quickly.

You mentioned the time mechanic, which was obviously a huge part of that game. The main thing I remember about it that I loved was the little narrative flourish of the Prince going, 'Oh, no, that's not what happened' when you would die and get to rewind. Do you remember how that bit came about?

That was one of the most fun and interesting aspects for me as a screenwriter, the idea that the entire game would be told in past tense voiceover narration. I was really inspired by Hollywood films from the '40s, like Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard, which start with the voiceover setting the tone. It's sort of a somber tone, because the character is telling the story after something terrible has happened. There's an inexorable feeling about it. You know that as you get to the end, you're going to find out, it comes together, brings you up to the present moment and you're going to see who the character is telling the story to and why.

In Sands of Time, you find out that the prince is telling the story to Farah, and why it's so urgent that she understand. So this was a sort of an experimental technique, and one question was: 'Is it going to work? Or are players going to find it strange or frustrating to hear the voice of their character talking while they're on screen trying to do something or trying to solve a puzzle?' But it did work. It worked beautifully.

And then of course, the question of how does this fit with the possibility that you can die and it's game over? It was just natural. The whole thing is a story being told. So even though the player just got killed, that narration can continue: 'No, wait, I didn't fall off that ledge, I just got confused for a moment.'

It's such an elegant way to avoid, if you're trying to give the player a clue, just having the character talking to themselves. That filmic technique works really well.

The voiceover let us do so many things that are beyond what we could do just in the moment-to-moment gameplay alone.

It fills out the world of the story, gives you more of a sense of the prince's character and backstory, and also develops the relationship between the Prince and Farah, their banter and the little arguments they would have, without having to add any additional animations.

After Sands of Time did you think about staying on and doing the next Prince of Persia or again, were you ready to move on to a new thing?

Having just done the game The Sands of Time, I was excited about pitching that to Hollywood studios as a movie. It was Disney and Bruckheimer who went for it. And then I was fully involved for the next couple of years as the first screenwriter of the Prince of Persia movie.

While I was doing that, the Sands of Time team that I'd worked with went on to create what was going to be the next-gen Prince of Persia sequel to The Sands of Time, originally called Prince of Persia Assassin. And there was then a second team that sort of quickly, like in just a year, made Warrior Within, and then The Two Thrones.

But as we know, Prince of Persia Assassin, at a certain point, was changed to Assassin's Creed, and so from the point that it was no longer Prince of Persia. I had no more involvement. By then, I was on to other projects back in Los Angeles.

What did you think at the time of The Warrior Within? As a kid who played original Prince of Persia, when Warrior Within was coming out, and the music was nu metal, I was like, what is this?

The decision, from Sands of Time to Warrior Within—the mandate to change it from Teen to M was a marketing mandate. It wasn't the team's idea. It wasn't my idea… Yeah, I regret it.

For gamers who played it and have fond memories, it is what it is, a lot of water under the bridge. But at the time, I thought it was unfortunate to take such a radical turn from something that, in The Sands of Time, had worked and had been well-received, had won awards, gamers loved it. Warrior Within iterated and improved on many aspects of the gameplay, the combat, but in terms of the storytelling and the tone, it really took a different direction.

But that was what marketing wanted.

Assassin's Creed has become Ubisoft's vehicle for 'let's go to this place in time and depict it in incredible detail.' What was your perspective on Assassin's Creed at the time? It grew out of Prince of Persia, but also seemed to represent your interests so strongly. Were you like, 'man, I wish I was working on Assassin's Creed?'

I feel honored that something that became so huge and has been so long-lived came out of Prince of Persia. That's the best thing a creator can wish for, to have something that takes on a life of its own and just goes on so far beyond what one person could create.

In my own work in Prince of Persia, in The Last Express, and in my graphic novels, Liberty, Monte Cristo, Templar, I've always been fascinated by history, by creating fictional adventures set against real historical events. Alexandre Dumas was the master of that. I adapted Dumas' work directly with the modern Monte Cristo. And Replay, my family memoir, is deeply enmeshed with 20th century history, but it's a true story. So I have my way of doing things.

As far as the Knights Templar, it's funny because when I saw Assassin's Creed involved the Templars, I was ironically deep into writing Templar, which is a graphic novel. But, of course, Ubisoft's approach and their storytelling and way of using history is very different from mine.

There was one other little bit of Prince of Persia history that I'm curious if you had any memories from: The Super Nintendo version that was done by a Japanese developer, Arsys Software.

The Super Nintendo version was the one with the beautiful cover [by Japanese artist Katsuya Terada].

Did you go over to Tokyo and meet with Japanese developers?

No, that was the funny thing about Prince of Persia, I didn't work on any of the ports. I never met any of the teams. They would just arrive one day, a cartridge that had been sent from Spain or Japan. By this time I was done with Prince of Persia I was traveling back and forth.

When I was at Broderbund we would gather around and play [a new version of] the game and be surprised. This was before the internet so when I was kept in the loop it would be by fax, or I would receive envelopes filled with Xerox copies of faxes of design documents. 'This is the storyboard that the team in Japan sent us.' But it would all be written in Japanese.

So I would look at it and go, 'this looks cool.'

But I remember playing the Super Nintendo version for the first time. Usually with ports I would just pick up the joystick, play the first level or two and say, 'okay, so that's how they did it. Great.' There were too many ports and too many versions for me to play the entire game each time, and by the time I played it it was too late to have meaningful feedback anyway because it was done.

I remember playing level one of the Super Nintendo version and reaching a point where I was like, 'wait a minute. There wasn't a room here.' When I realized that they had changed the levels and actually doubled the length of time and doubled the size of the game, I had the feeling of seeing the movie of a book that I had written. That it was going to be similar but different.

For the first time I had the experience that every other person in the world who played Prince of Persia had: Of seeing a level for the first time that they hadn't built themselves and played a million times in playtesting. And not knowing what was around each corner.

I was like, 'Wow, I feel like I finally get a chance to play this game as a player.'

From The Last Express to Hollywood and the book world

You're really immersed in the book world these days, and have written a number of graphic novels. Is that where your passion is right now?

Comics and graphic novels were sort of my first passion as a kid. I was already 12 years old when the Apple II and Space Invaders arrived on the scene. Before that I was deeply into comics. Thanks to Prince of Persia, starting with a movie in 2010 and then having had the opportunity to do graphic novels like Templar, as a writer in collaboration with artists and now drawing again myself, it's kind of coming full circle.

I feel so lucky to have had the chance to work in all of these media that I've loved, video games, movies, and graphic novels as well.

Are there other moments in your life that Prince of Persia, or one of your other games, opened the door or connected you with a person that, in hindsight, you can scarcely believe?

Too many to count.

On the Prince of Persia movie set, 2008 in Morocco, meeting these film legends: I've enjoyed their films, and then one after another having them tell me about their childhood experience playing Prince of Persia. Or even as an adult.

Sometimes people that I never would have expected. One surreal moment was at a friend of mine's movie shoot, visiting the set and seeing William Hurt in his trailer, being late to the shot—and as he's being called to set and not going because he was playing The Last Express on his PC in his trailer.

That was a surreal moment.

At some point, Paul Verhoeven was maybe going to make a Last Express movie. What happened?

Yes, so I adapted Last Express as a feature film for Paul. That was around 2011. That was amazing. One of my favorite directors. He's probably best known for Robocop and his big Hollywood films, but for me Black Book when he went back to Europe is just an incredible film about the Dutch resistance during World War 2.

I think he was in so many ways the ideal director for Last Express. We didn't get to make the movie, but I at least had the wonderful experience of developing the script with him.

That movie could have been really amazing if he had directed it. What is the rights situation with The Last Express today? Do you have the rights to the game?

I do.

Have you thought about doing a remaster? Would it even be possible to take the surviving art assets and upscale them to 4K or modern tech? That seems like it could be a huge undertaking.

That's a great question. The Last Express was technically a very challenging development at the time, but I think with today's technology, there are so many aspects of that that will become easier. We have the original assets we shot on 16 millimeter film, using blue screens, and then transferred to digital. All of the film and the D-1 tapes are at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester.

So all of that's been archived. We have the sound files, the actors' performances. So I think all of the assets to do a remastered Last Express are there. Of course, it would take a team that wants to do it.

Is that something you would be interested in? I get the sense that you often do a project and then you go 'Okay, on to what's next.'

Personally, returning to a game that I've already spent years making in order to spend years remastering it, that's not my highest priority. It's not that I wouldn't enjoy it. But there are too many new things that I want to create that only I can do.

You were based here in San Francisco when you were working on The Last Express, right?

Yeah, and also while I was making Prince of Persia. I lived in Presidio Heights and I was driving across the bridge to Marin.

I'd love to hear about that time in your life, working on games here and what the games industry in San Francisco was like.

I'm from New York originally, so when I first came to San Francisco in 1984 for Karateka, I was just struck by the beauty of it. The bay, the bridge, on a clear day, it's just so dramatic and so atmospheric. There's something, you know, there's a magic about San Francisco that I always appreciated.

During the Prince of Persia years from like '86 to '90, and then I came back for The Last Express in 93 to '97/'98, each time the feeling was that the city was growing. The tech booms, every wave changed it. In the early '80s all of that was new. There was Lucasfilm, there was the Skywalker Ranch, ILM. And then in the early '90s, of course, the internet was starting.

Always there [were people saying] that 'if you'd only been here 10 years ago, the city was a magical place.' Already in the '80s, they were like, 'oh, yeah, but San Francisco in the '70s, that's when you really wanted to be here.'

Being from New York, I know that every city has that. It's just layer after layer. But there was a special energy in San Francisco in the '90s.

Where was your studio?

It was on Jackson Square, on 414 Jackson Street, Smoking Car Productions. We were right around the corner from the Zoetrope building, and Coppola was still there.

We would sometimes see him in the cafes around North Beach. And we did the voice recording for Last Express in the Zoetrope studios. There's sort of a feeling of being part of history.

San Francisco had its filmmaking, sound recording community when we did the film shoot here. It's a small but vibrant community of technicians. The interface between the filmmaking, post-production community and the tech, video game community was, at that time, new. For many of the technicians who worked on The Last Express, it was their first time working on a computer game and even finding out what a computer game was.

They were often astonished to see, 'Wait, you have real actors here? You're recording massive amounts of dialogue? You're actually focused on the performances? What's the story? This sounds like something of real quality.'

The idea that a computer game could be more than just blocky pixels and beeps and buzzes, the general public was just becoming aware of this.

Even other games that used actors and filmed at the time, it was almost always just for video sequences, right?

Myst had just been a big success and had reached a large general public who were struck by the beautiful rendered images like no computer game they'd ever seen before. And then the sequel to Myst used digitized video, composited. There was The Journeyman Project. But for The Last Express, we were doing something different. I didn't want it to look like digitized video. That's why we shot on 16 millimeter film and rotoscoped it to give the impression of hand-drawn animated line art.

Did you have anything in mind that you were going to follow The Last Express with if the game had been a financial hit?

The protagonist, Cath, was conceived as a hero who could have a series of adventures, like Indiana Jones or Corto Maltese. Of course, we only did that one adventure, but I've definitely had plenty of other adventures and historical periods in mind for him.

Maybe a graphic novel someday?

Funny you should mention that. Hopefully about a year or two from now, we'll be talking about a The Last Express prequel graphic novel.

You've got to tell Digital Eclipse [who developed The Making of Karateka] to get on the remaster for the game to time it with the graphic novel.

Oh, a Digital Eclipse remaster of The Last Express would be awesome. That would be so cool. The people to tell the stories are around, and the archives are in the Strong Museum of Play. It just needs somebody with a studio to say, 'yeah, this is what we want to do.'

Microsoft has announced a new "voluntary exit offer" aimed at making drastic cuts to its headcount. A CNN report says roughly 60,000 of the company's employees are eligible for the buyout offer, a number that represents roughly 27% of its total full-time workforce, which the company's 2026 annual report says stands at approximately 223,000 people.

"This offer gives eligible employees who may be considering a future outside the company a new choice to make that transition now with support. It also gives participating organizations another way to adapt their workforce to changing needs," Microsoft chief people officer Amy Coleman said in a memo sent to employees.

"The Voluntary Exit Offer reflects an important part of how we're evolving our approach to change: creating greater flexibility and, where possible, more ways for employees to shape their next chapter. This builds on what we learned earlier this year through the Voluntary Retirement Program."

The CNN report says Microsoft's buyout offer is part of its effort to balance its spending on AI services, and was preceded by its first-ever voluntary buyout program for employees in the US in April, and then layoffs of roughly 4,800 people in July.

The buyout offer is limited to employees in the US, UK, India, and Canada, and not all employees are eligible: Coleman said participation in the program "varies based on each business's priorities, customer commitments and workforce needs." Employees who want to take advantage of the buyout will leave the company on December 31, according to the CNN report.

Whether Xbox is one of the participating businesses was not specified—I've reached out to Xbox to ask and will update if I receive a reply.

The Golden Joystick Awards' Ultimate Game of the Year voting is now open—celebrating its 44th consecutive year, the votes will remain open until 8 pm ET / 12 am GMT, October 30. It's a stacked roster of nominations this year—with some of our own favourites here at PC Gamer listed to take the crown.

Here's an official list of the nominations:

• 007 First Light
• Big Walk
• CONTROL Resonant
• Crimson Desert
• Dispatch
• Forza Horizon 6
• Phantom Blade: Zero
• Pokémon Pokopia
• PRAGMATA
• Resident Evil Requiem
• STAR WARS: Galactic Racer
• The Blood of Dawnwalker

Speaking personally, it's a tough one for me to pick—Crimson Desert is maybe the most technically impressive in terms of scope, releasing with not only a billion systems but also receiving massive updates over the course of the year. So many, in fact, I'm sort of wondering when anyone else at Pearl Abyss is gonna take a break.

Star Wars: Galactic Racer has devoured hours of my time, and I've been playing it so much I've developed a new callus on my thumb, whereas Dispatch was a short-but-sweet romp and one of my favourite superhero stories in recent memory.

The awards will be hosted by Alix WIlton Regan, the new voice of Lara Croft (and also the female protagonists in Veilguard and Inquisition), as well as a bevy of special guest appearances.

Regan says: "We’re celebrating the greatest games of the past 12 months—and, more importantly, the incredibly talented teams who made them happen. The people who put in thousands of hours creating virtual worlds for us to get hopelessly lost in. Get ready for an evening of special guests, spectacular games and plenty of silly jokes."

You can go ahead and cast your vote now at goldenjoysticks.com—the show itself'll be debuting on all major streaming platforms (YouTube, Twitch and X) on Wednesday, November 11, but you've only got until October 30 to get your votes in.

Valve's mandatory AI disclosures are once again at the centre of the discourse, mostly thanks to Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, who has long been vocally against them. The debate has been reheated in the same month Epic Games proudly announced it will pivot to "AI first" development on its forthcoming Star Wars and Marvel crossover. Then it announced an AI game jam, before walking back its requirement for AI to be used.

But the true battleground has been on Elon Musk's X, where Sweeney's refocused his reticule on Steam. One of his most repeated notions this time around is that forcing developers to disclose AI use is inherently political.

"Forcing developers to write a political statement to be used against them by the hate mob they're [Valve is] helping organize is abhorrent," he wrote on October 24 in response to some AI loving guy who works at an AI company.

Later, to another user: "These AI statements are just as partisan as mandatory political essays or forcing developers to list their voting history to drive cancel campaigns and public struggle sessions."

And then: "There is a real economic cost to Valve’s foray into forced political disclosures. Besides taking 30%, they’re also taking a potentially even larger fraction of developers’ revenue and livelihood by undermining their business with these AI hate campaigns."

(Later, when a user wrote this is a "big opening for Epic if Valve doesn't figure this out", Sweeney replied "Yep!")

On October 25: "They [Valve] are burning down the businesses of good developers to enforce their politics. A year from now they’ll all be using AI, games will be better and made faster, and they’ll pretend their hate mob posting the death threats wasn’t wrong but merely misunderstood."

In Valve's defence—and I rise in Valve's defence trepidatiously—the AI disclosure was initially imposed due to a seeming uncertainty with how use of this "legally murky" technology was unfolding in the game dev space. "Today's changes are the result of us improving our understanding of the landscape and risks in this space, as well as talking to game developers using AI, and those building AI tools," Valve wrote at the time. "This will allow us to be much more open to releasing games using AI technology on Steam."

"We'll continue to learn from the games being submitted to Steam, and the legal progress around AI, and will revisit this decision when necessary."

Why didn't Epic Games Store do the same? I'm not taking a swipe at EGS here, easy as it may be, but Epic Games' shopfront publishes a tiny slither of what Valve's does. In 2024, 1,100 games were released on EGS. Steam's figure was 18,433. Given that volume and the "legally murky" environment, the AI disclosure starts to look a whole lot more sensible.

Leaving aside whether insisting on AI disclosures in 2026 is inherently political—and I'm not denying it is, if inadvertently—Sweeney's posts on X do labour to imply that Valve is an anti-AI company taking a steadfast anti-AI stance, which, manifestly, it is not. Gabe Newell himself was an enthusiastic supporter of OpenAI in its infancy, donating $20 million to the then nonprofit enterprise. His most recent public comments on AI are not unlike those made by very many other enthusiastic tech billionaires, albeit less hyperbolic. That Valve will refresh its AI disclosure requirement in the medium to long term future seems inevitable to me.

But I do wonder what Sweeney dislikes more: anti-AI sentiment, or Steam?

It's an unusual time for him to revive this debate with such vigor. We are living through peak slop. The majority of games that release on Steam every week are irredeemable. The latest Claude model is facilitating the rapid thieving of game concepts and even code. Graphical assets, in-game music, in-game voices, generated using AI, immediately signal their provenance and are ugly as hell.

I don't doubt AI use in game dev will increase, but it will probably need to tend sharply away from the sensorial. Optimistically, most serious developers will realise that the vast majority of us don't want to see or hear that shit. I suspect that for most people, anti-AI sentiment, at least where games are concerned, isn't principled: it's a visceral emotional response.

Top Steam games by revenue (October 13 - 20)

Modern Warfare 4's official release date was October 23: its placement here is thanks to a pre-order incentive granting early access to the campaign. It's not a bad result, obviously, but I'm surprised it didn't topple PUBG. COD games do seem more spiritually at home on console, I guess.

Enshrouded hit 1.0 after a stint in early access, hence its reappearance here. Of particular note is something not shown in the above list: Over the Hill, the chillaxed offroading sim by the creators of Art of Rally, hit number 11 on the revenue charts for this period. That's a damn good result, and well deserved.

To provide a little bit more (slightly random) context: the new Castlevania game, which released on the same day as Over the Hill, came in at number 15. It's surprising that an offroading game would outperform a new entry in one of the medium's most beloved series. But then: the Snowrunner and Mudrunner games are extremely popular.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

You'll never play every game. In fact, most people won't play most games—plenty of games release on Steam to approximately 0 user reviews, and last year, more than half of the 19,000 games that came out had fewer than 10. But that doesn't mean indies and anything else outside of the biggest blockbusters are all sent out to die. So far in 2026, all-original indies have been making waves.

That insight comes courtesy of Sensor Tower (via GamesIndustry.biz), which recently published an industry analysis report sharing some trends among the year's breakout hits. For reference, a breakout is defined in the study as a game which sold at least 500,000 units in its first 30 days. While ultimately based on estimates as not all publishers release sales numbers, the report is full of interesting tidbits.

The most noteworthy findings in the report are thus: there were 76 breakouts between September 2025 and August 2026, up from the previous year's 55. Indie breakouts shot up from 13 to 33, making up 43% of the pack, and 35 of the breakouts were non-sequels—around 53%. 27 of those were made by indie studios. Nine of the indie breakouts were friendslop hits like Meccha Chameleon and RV There Yet?, while 18 were debuts in other genres, such as Escape From Duckov and Megabonk.

Triple-A blockbusters have not really budged, according to the report. Last year they had 27 breakouts, this year they had 28 (notably, due to the methodology used, some huge games are excluded from this report: no free-to-play games like Marvel Rivals are included, and Call of Duty isn't accounted for.) But this does suggest a strong showing for cheap, often low-spec indies with novel ideas and multiplayer, and if you're longing for something new amidst all the proximity voice chat, you'll be happy to hear that both non-sequels and non-friendslop are making up a sizable portion of the year's hits.

Jordan Thomas grew up during the shareware era of PC gaming, fed a steady diet of free game demos by his father. "This is embarrassing in a way, but the first one I remember connecting to enough to do drawings at school—and it's so immature—but it's old Commander Keen," he says. "It was a quick segue from that into Wolfenstein and Quake. So weirdly, Commander Keen was a gateway drug into darker games that would then become my focus for a very long time."

Indeed, Thomas' debut in the games industry was dark in the most literal sense, as he was hired by Ion Storm Austin to work on Thief: Deadly Shadows. There, Thomas built that game's most famous level, The Shalebridge Cradle.

Following Ion Storm's closure, Thomas moved to Irrational, where he led the design of BioShock's Fort Frolic before moving to 2K Marin and directing BioShock 2. After working on BioShock Infinite, Thomas founded the indie studio Question, producing games like The Magic Circle, The Blackout Club, and South Park: Snow Day.

Question's most recent game is The Killing Stone, a dark roguelike deckbuilder inspired by Shakespearean drama which has just launched out of early access. "It's set in the 17^th century, and you can play it in 17^th century authentic dialogue—so it's for the real sickos," Thomas says. "It's a series of very strange, deckbuilder-with-a-twist style challenges, where you're trying to un-curse a family's decks, which is pulling sins out of their souls, sins that they inherited from their matriarch."

Thomas took a break from Shakespearean sin-eating to show me around the water-cooled pleasure district of his Steam library. We talked about Hellraiser's hidden influences, immersive sims' hidden comedy potential, and how Path of Exile helped Thomas survive development of The Blackout Club.

What game are you currently playing?

I've spectated my friend's playthrough of Hellraiser: Revival, and now I've just started it myself. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Hellraiser fan from way back, and this is the most lurid possible incarnation of this. But I am really interested in the idea of a decaying relationship in non-Euclidean space, and the people who made this game get that. They're doing it with the chassis of another game that I loved and that fell away. And oddly, I didn't expect that to arrive as a Hellraiser sequel, but that was Condemned.

I prefer melee to shooting for many reasons. I've long since reached saturation point with guns in this country and in my life, so I moved into melee and stayed there. But there wasn't a lot available in first-person [in 2006]. Condemned was right up my alley, and I still would have loved to do a sequel to it or something.

[Monolith]'s programmers of the enemies were early pioneers in finding semi-systemic, often designer-aided, smart things for the enemies to be doing, that helped you believe they had an agenda and they were thinking about things before you entered the room. Again, I wish I'd had the chance to merge Condemned with the immersive sim genre, where the spaces were more plausible and you could approach these spaces from any angle. Condemned was a little more linear, though you still had some freedom in their arenas.

You're on the trail of this Serial Killer X character, and you're ripping locker doors off walls, and it's all about breakable melee weapons. And this is where you'll see it in Hellraiser, exactly that formula for the first half.

Also, my friend Xalavier voices the protagonist, so I just wanted to see him put through hell. Strange Scaffold helped out with [The Killing Stone], and [we're] very grateful to him for that.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

Just before Hellraiser, I played REPO with my regular crew. Speaking of immersive sim systemic interaction, man, I've never laughed so hard playing a multiplayer game. And even if you account for the friends-as-content success model, which is huge right now, it's still just so well thought out and so expressive that we keep coming back to it.

I tell the story, when I'm trying to sell other imsim nerd types on it, of the moment that a friend was carrying my severed robot head back to the cart to safely resurrect me at some point in the future, and I was controlling a third-person camera around my head, and I'd got just enough battery life to scream at my friends not to turn around and look backwards, because there was a monster behind them that only kills you if you look at it.

I was like, "This game is amazing." I'd never seen a moment like that happen before, where my limited agency death mattered, the camera mattered, the limited communications governed by the battery. All of that came together, plus the enemy design, to create this moment of "Don't look behind you."

The Blackout Club is a long conversation that would eat a lot of our time, but it's definitely true that [in terms of] four friends going into a hostile space and starting out relatively vulnerable and having to improvise—lots of people crack each other up playing The Blackout Club too.

But The Blackout Club also had this live story component, which was so all-consuming. The thing I'm proudest of about that game is that people are playing it when they're not playing it. They were off on the Discord trying to solve mysteries like true crime. Whereas REPO, it's all about the physical … every piece of your body is physicalised.

On Thief 3, I've told this story before, but I got a feature into the game because Paul Weaver, the executive producer at the time, was trying to shut everything down, but he wanted to say yes because I'd built up a lot of good faith, and it was the oil slicks, when they're placed near stairs, would fling guards [down them]. He said, "You can have it if it makes me laugh." We showed it to him and he immediately cracked up.

A little while after Ion Storm Austin shuttered, we were pitching around a comedy immersive sim that's like Burnout with people. It was all about trying to get the most horrific things to happen, and REPO probably would have been very good friends with it.

That's why I'm not particularly devoted to continuing to bang the immersive sim drum anymore … people who took pieces of it are solving things in a way that renews the conversation.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

It might be X-COM, the original.

I played it for research for what would become The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. What I chiefly remember—before the trauma began with such a strange, hand-me-down [project]—was the game Exquisite corpse. That's what we call it here. Where you draw a piece of a monster and then fold it down, and somebody else draws the torso of the monster and fold it down, and you unfold it and get this ridiculous thing. That was The Bureau.

But for pure research, looking back at the original thing, I was reminded that the power of negative space is media agnostic, or genre agnostic, if you prefer. It [had] these very heavily pixelated tiles, but the movement of the enemies, the camera paid attention to it off in the fog of war. I remember people talking about being deeply scared by this game when they played it back in their formative game years because of that movement.

That part still holds up. You are constantly worried about what's out there in the darkness. And it made me think that my love of top-down tactics would not necessarily be mutually exclusive with my love of horror, right? That I could do something like that. Unfortunately, not at the time, not for The Bureau, because the goals were very different. But that's the main thing that struck me about it.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

[For] the entire development cycle of The Blackout Club, myself and Ken Strickland—who was not yet working with us, we were working together when he was still at Ubisoft on the South Park stuff—we played, constantly, Path of Exile.

I was in a rough spot. I was essentially awake all the time during the day, trying to help the team drive the development, but at night running the live encounters and scheduling the next ones and wanting to take notes for everything that I thought players were thinking and what needed to be woven into the live story.

Originally, the thought was I would have more support on that. That didn't happen. All we had was once every week or two, we would have a visit from an actual actor, and I would be Cyrano de Bergerac-style whispering into their ear … but yeah, running all of that, there was this incredible need for stress relief. Path of Exile absorbed all of that damage to the tune of 7613 hours.

The main thing I remember about it is a permanent remark being made in my head over the joy of pruning and also building branches of this ridiculous character-growth bonsai, where optimising for just that one extra point could make all the difference in your build. I really prided myself on not taking builds from influencers or anything, just building my own. Of course, I was collaborating with another [person who is] much more talented than I am at systems design in the form of Ken Strickland. So the dialogue was really wonderful because he understood what the hell I was talking about.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

There are probably two answers. The first is Darkest Dungeon 1, because my family loves it. You can steer Darkest Dungeon 1 in such a way where the really gruesome stuff isn't necessarily there. The power of Wayne June's narration affects everybody regardless of age. So it's become a strange collaboration. I remember hearing a young voice say, "Let's play the torch game!"

The other one is Baldur's Gate 3. I didn't realise this until last year, but the mod scene for that game has breathed life into a thing that I already played beyond playing, right? And if that continues, if it becomes Skyrim-like in its infinite divisibility, then I have no reason to uninstall it.

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

I'll say Audacity, because since The Blackout Club, I had to do a lot of my own audio editing of the often-live or very lo-fi recordings that we got of the actors in their own homes. We had this special provision from the union to go into their homes and set up their ability to invade players right then and there, which was amazing. So we had this crazy tour of various actors' homes.

I'm very proud of that, actually. For a low-budget game, we were very loudly pro-union and we wanted to work with union talent. I'd approach Critical Role and say, "Hey, I think you guys would make good gods. Would you like to haunt players and have them figure out slowly, maybe at some point, who they're talking to in real time?" So they're all union, of course. And Ashly Burch, the main character that you play at the start, is union. So we went to SAG and said, "We're doing something that's never been done before."

Anyway, I had to edit some of what we got from them into what we call god-casts, and it would be a current event summary … so I had to learn Audacity. And even now on the Killing Stone, I'm constantly using it to tweak things here and there.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

Terrible. It's terrible. In fact, there was a snapshot going backwards through time of desktops that I had to just completely core dump. It's like, OK, this is horrific, so we're just gonna do a snapshot of everything here in case I need it again, and it goes into a folder which just looks like that previous horrible desktop, and then the new one becomes that bad.

By the way, it's mainly because of Audacity. For some reason, I don't want to organise or store all the variants of this given voice line that I've messed with, I need them all still there at a glance.

On May 24, 2000, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney shared a public statement (the specific platform or venue eludes me) on the closure of Looking Glass Studios, a canonical PC gaming institution and originator of the immersive sim genre (maybe don't call it that, though). The statement was resurfaced by immsim enthusiast account Sinnoware on Twitter, and Sweeney has since responded.

Here's Sweeney's original statement from 2000 in full:

Responding to the post's resurfacing, Sweeney stands by his assessment of this prior moment of studio closures and industry uncertainty: "Sometimes the creative magic that makes a game loved by some isn't accompanied by the economics of a viable business," he wrote. "Game businesses are businesses, and though one can invest in anticipation of future profit or growth, ultimately a company must earn enough to pay the bills.

"This is a challenge all game makers face, and it's magnified during downturns. The solution? Make a great game, make it efficiently, and set the budget based on the size of the audience that will pay for it. Technology that helps achieve that is, in my opinion, good."

A number of prominent industry figures took issue with Sweeney's take. Danny O'Dwyer of Noclip and Arkane co-founder Raphael Colantonio both emphasized the lingering artistic impact of Looking Glass. Gloomwood developer Dillon Rogers wrote Sweeney's statement off as "the mindset of an asshole CEO."

I'm not particularly fond of Epic's games or Sweeney's 'metaverse' vision for the future of the industry. I am a huge fan of Looking Glass. Indeed, many of my favorite games were born of beautiful, doomed studios that were ultimately sacrificed before Mr. Market: Looking Glass, Black Isle, Troika, and now BioWare.

That's what's tough for me here: There is an uncomfortable ring of truth to Sweeney's words, even as I find them infuriating. If the future of the industry fully belongs to Roblox, Fortnite, and EA Sports brought to you by Jared Kushner and the Saudi Public Investment Fund, I don't want to be a part of it. But that's who's winning.

Whatever I feel like saying about Thief's incredible fictional world or Ultima Underworld's inescapable influence, the market leaders can just point to the scoreboard: More hearts and minds, more money, more influence, more impact. These are not what's most important to me, but they are what matter to the wealthy few who own and shape the future. All of my protests about artistry and meaning end up sounding like cope. "By MIT Grads, For MIT Grads" was, unfortunately, a very sick burn.

If you disagree with Sweeney's premise for what truly matters in games, I think it's worth being realistic about where he has a point. But there are also aspects of his argument where I think it's valuable to push back and reframe things.

Sweeney speaks in terms of balance sheets and profitability, and while that's relevant to Looking Glass' story and those of many smaller studios shut down in recent years, there's a more arcane logic behind many recent shutdowns and mass layoffs:

• Bluepoint: A remaster studio shut down by Sony after it was pivoted to a multiplayer God of War.
• Arkane Austin: A successor to Looking Glass that was mired in the confused, live service-adjacent Redfall.
• BioWare: My hobby horse remains the cancellation of the original Dragon Age 4 in favor of Anthem.
• Tango Gameworks: There was seemingly no reason. It looks to have been operating within its means. Thankfully it was saved by Krafton.

On that note, we've been keeping a running tally of ways to get laid off in the videogame industry that defy common sense. Many studios are being shut down based on mathematics well beyond my ken. They had clear remits and devoted fanbases, but were sent to chase down short-lived industry fads, then punished for it. Others are amputated or hollowed out seemingly for short term, quarter-to-quarter improvements in stock price. And as O'Dwyer pointed out, Epic laid off 1,000 employees in 2026, even as it remains an industry juggernaut⁠—would it have had to close its doors if it kept paying those salaries?

It feels almost trite to point out that the impacts of layoffs, shutdowns, and failed business strategies are softened the higher up you go in a company's hierarchy, with the crowning absurdity that the executives calling these shots never bear the brunt of the consequences. Things are somewhat different in Japan, which coincidentally has been relatively insulated from this crisis.

In the absence of a new and cooperative industry that altogether sheds things like leveraged buyouts, high-paid executives, and high store fees (which to be fair, Sweeney has been ahead of the curve on criticizing), I do think there are stabilizing compromises that the CEOs and billionaires of this industry could choose to make at any time, ones that prioritize sustainability and human decency while still making them money. I'll let you know if that ever happens.

As reported by The Verge, Xbox Chief Operating Officer Helen Chiang is leaving the company after three months in the role⁠—though Chiang had previously been a Microsoft employee for 21 years. Xbox had not previously operated with a COO in its hierarchy, and the role was created as part of CEO Asha Sharma's controversial brand "reset."

Sharma announced the personnel change in an October 23 internal memo, and did not offer an explanation for Chiang's departure. "Her immediate responsibilities are being split up between other Xbox leaders for now," Sharma wrote. "We'll share more on COO leadership as plans are finalized."

Microsoft shared a boilerplate statement on the departure to Eurogamer: "We don't discuss individual personnel matters. We're grateful for Helen's years of service and wish her well." However, an anonymous source within Microsoft also told Eurogamer that Chiang was "terminated for policy violations."

According to Sharma's original reset announcement, the COO was tasked "with end-to-end P&L [profit and loss] responsibility across content, hardware, platform, and services." Given Xbox's current focus on cost-cutting and maximizing revenue, that sounds like a fairly key role in Sharma's project.

It's hard to imagine Chiang's departure having any significant impact on Xbox's strategy or its execution, but it hardly inspires confidence to see such a quick turnaround in an executive-level position, particularly given the overall instability and uncertainty at Xbox.

Well, here's a headscratcher. Paolo Pedercini, developer of Future? No Thanks! recently admitted to using generative AI in his ecosocialist satire while also referring to the technology as "a technofascist, anti-human and anti-art project." Now, the developer has removed several AI generated voice lines from the game, following a backlash to his use of the very technology which the game lampoons.

You might remember Future? No Thanks! from another recent controversy, whereupon the game was briefly delayed after Steam held up its release while it reviewed some fleeting nudity in the game. Pedercini—who also goes by Mollieindustria—received considerable support during that debacle. But the reaction to Future? No Thanks' AI use has been rather less supportive, prompting Pedercini to rework the game and respond to the backlash.

Pedercini originally revealed his AI use in a blog post (via Rock, Paper, Shotgun). Apparently, the game contained several voice lines generated using text-to-speech, which Pedercini claimed, "used to be an uncontroversial technology and an early application of neural networks" before "AI bros started commercializing AI voices". Alongside this, the game also includes "a tiny fraction" of AI generated code, which Pedercini said he used for things like "fixing a shader I didn't write which broke after an update" as well as "finishing touches and minor debugging."

In this blog, Pedercini defended his AI use by pointing out that Future? No Thanks! "satirizes generative AI and the careless ways it can be used," adding that the "100% no-AI stance" adopted by many game developers "is very recent, and the game was being developed before a consensus emerged." He also cited his role as an academic and game design teacher, stating "I have to look into these tools which most of my students use, and I was trying to figure out if there are non-brain-rotting ways to do so."

Yet it seems these arguments failed to convince Pedercini's audience, as yesterday he published another blog post revealing he has now removed the offending TTS voice lines, replacing them with lines by human actors. Apparently, these lines were "recorded earlier this year," but Pedercini opted not to use them because he "thought the actual uncanny text-to-speech was funnier in that context."

Although Pedercini has removed the lines, he's clearly not happy about it. In the second blog, he stated that he believes that "the game is worse not, but only, like, 0.001% worse." He also included a "personal update" through which he responded more broadly to the backlash.

"Somebody from Bluesky (the Twitter/X clone) dragged me due to a post disclosing what I foolishly thought a minor use of generative-AI in Future? No Thanks!" he explained. "I gave versions of that statement multiple times before, whenever asked by festivals and events." He also pointed out that, per Valve's updated AI disclosure rules, "Steam doesn't require disclosure of generative AI for things like code assistance, so many people assume their favorite indie games don't use AI at all just because the developers stay mum".

The post then took a weirder turn. Pedercini admitted that his original blog "was not a good post," and that he thought "nobody would read it", before claiming that his AI disclosure resulted in "more insults than the time at the height of GamerGate when Adam Baldwin unleashed his half million followers on me." He followed this by linking to a list of game developers that reject generative AI, claiming that "all studios" who haven't disclosed genAI use are "using it for coding in some capacity" and began his signoff with "I drank from the chalice of blood. Nothing will ever redeem me and my cursed little game."

As for what to make of all this (at least, the bits that aren't about drinking blood), I can sort-of understand Pedercini attempt at deploying TTS voice lines for satirical purposes, and he's correct in saying that TTS has a history that goes back further than modern LLMs. If that was all the genAI in the game, it would be more defensible.

But the fact he's also used generative coding tools for clearly non-satirical purposes is much harder to defend. Also, if you're making a game that satirises generative AI, the primary audience for which is going to be people who are avowedly against generative AI, it's probably prudent to ensure that the creation of said game is as far removed from generative AI as possible.

Yet among the references to gamergate and accusing the entire industry of secretly using AI, Pedercini did make two other points worth noting. First, he said that players who bought Future? No Thanks and "feel betrayed" by his use of AI can request a refund by emailing their Paypal or Venmo information to him. Second, he promised that his next project "will be completely hand-coded", as he had already determined that "AI-assisted programming is bad for me."

The death of BioWare has provoked a whole lot of tributes, memorialisation, and plain old nostalgia as all sorts of people come together to remember the bangers the erstwhile king of RPGs put out in its prime. CD Projekt Red, imsim founding father Warren Spector, and we here at PCG have all been trading BioWare memories (and sometimes lamenting the influence of EA, which acquired the studio back in 2007).

But the BioWare classics were big enough bangers to transcend videogames in their influence. Over on Bluesky, award-winning sci-fi and fantasy writer Nora Jemisin (better known as NK Jemisin) has been mourning the studio too.

"RIP Bioware. The [Mass Effect] and [Dragon Age] games were a literal inspiration, and I can't count how many times I've replayed my faves," Jemisin wrote. "I made lifelong friends on ME3 Multiplayer. I still think Jennifer Hepler is the best game writer I've seen, and Jennifer Hale's the best VA."

Hepler was a long-time Dragon Age writer who "was pretty much in charge of the dwarf origin story" in Origins, and also shaped much of the setting's dwarven culture in general. Jennifer Hale, meanwhile, is Jennifer Hale: Dynaheir, Mazzy Fentan, Bastila Shan, the female Commander Shepard, and plenty else. Many people, myself included, first became aware of Hale through her contributions to BioWare's RPGs.

"Watching what's happening to the game industry [right now] is so frustrating," Jemisin continued. "It was the goose that laid the golden eggs, guys. All you had to do was not kill it." Alas, every new year brings bigger and more expensive games that demand bigger and more dramatic returns. When they fail to bring them in? It's devs who suffer, as evidenced by the swingeing bout of layoffs that have afflicted the industry over the last several years. Rarely ever touches the executives, though. Funny how that works.

The closure of BioWare has not come as a huge surprise. The LGBTQ-inclusive developer of Mass Effect and Dragon Age, which hadn't managed to transmute development mayhem into sales success and whose games aren't ideal environments for loot boxes, did not seem likely to be admired by its new owners, Saudi Arabia and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. Employees at the legendary RPG studio started working on their resumes as soon as the acquisition was announced.

But even if BioWare's new owners had been miscellaneous investors rather than Saudi royalty, the outlook would not have been good: This is what private equity does.

Public companies are of course plenty capable of blowing things up all on their own. EA's pre-acquisition attempt to turn BioWare into a live-service shooter studio was one of the great missteps of the live service goldrush, and Microsoft's pursuit of shareholder value has led to thousands of layoffs and numerous game cancellations.

But there is a particular, systematic way that leveraged private equity acquisitions consume companies rather than nurturing them. In the wake of BioWare's closure and 400 layoffs across EA, we have updated our previously-reported overview of the process that has led to the demise of a number of game studios and other companies.

How private equity acquisitions work

Ostensibly, the goal of a private equity acquisition is to optimize the bought-out company's performance for long-term returns, tapping underutilized potential—like EA's mobile business—to increase profits. But private equity firms have gained a sinister reputation thanks to a counter-intuitive strategy by which firms cannibalize their own acquisitions to extract maximum profits at the expense of the acquired company and its workforce.

That grisly process begins with the leveraged buyout, the most common form of private equity acquisition.

"A leveraged buyout just means the company is bought using a combination of borrowed money, or debt, and private equity," Kiplinger senior investing editor Karee Venema told PC Gamer last year. "The purchased company's balance sheet is used as collateral against the loans taken out to purchase it."

In other words, the "leverage" in the leveraged buyout is debt. Crucially, the collateral for that debt is the assets of the acquired company, not of the private equity firm itself. The investors are able to limit how much capital they have to supply for the buyout, while limiting their financial risk if repaying the loan—in EA's case, a $20 billion loan from JP Morgan—proves insurmountable. The private equity firm might have agreed to the terms of the loan, but repaying it becomes the purchased company's responsibility.

Reading that might produce a faint, dissonant tingle in the back of your mind. You might be wondering, "If private equity firms can take out loans that only their companies are responsible for, could they bleed more money out of a valuable company than they paid and avoid any consequences when that company goes bankrupt?"

And you'd be right to wonder, because that's exactly what private equity firms have become infamous for doing.

If you're not terribly concerned about a company's long-term survival, there are myriad ways to drain it of as much value as possible. As the Guardian wrote in 2024, private equity firms have made a habit of hollowing out company workforces and raising prices to pull in unsustainable profit margins, aiming to cut loose before the resulting decline in product quality tanks sales and consumer sentiment. Others have liquidated company assets, selling off real estate, subsidiaries, and intellectual property to enrich the firms' investors.

Sometimes, those sold assets will end up driving the company further into debt through "sale-leaseback agreements," where the firm will arrange for the company to sell its real estate properties, pocketing the profits while the company is forced to pay rent to continue using its own business space. Meanwhile, the firm is likely extracting additional "management fees": standard 2-and-20 terms see firms taking an annual 2% of a managed company's assets and 20% carried interest on all profits above a certain margin, while the company might face additional monitoring fees, transaction fees, and more.

Private equity has maimed retail franchises like Party City. It has brutalized digital media outlets like the Gizmodo Media Group and demolished local news across the US. It's left hospitals full of bats and increased mortality in retirement homes. A report using S&P data found that in 2024, private equity-backed companies accounted for more than 10% of all corporate bankruptcies and over 50% of bankruptcies with over $500 million in liabilities—but "despite their role in precipitating bankruptcies, private equity firms often emerge financially unscathed."

"There have certainly been instances of this—the 2017 bankruptcy of Toys 'R' Us is top of mind for me," Venema said. "But there have been successful private equity buyouts, too."

Hilton, for example, was arguably better off in 2018 when Blackstone sold its remaining stake from its 2007 LBO—sometimes called "the best LBO ever" in financial circles. And Dell, Venema said, went from a $25 billion buyout in 2013 to being valued today at nearly $100 billion after going public again in 2018.

But in the games industry, we've seen other cases where private equity has caused carnage. Just this week, in addition to BioWare's closure and hundreds of layoffs at EA, Scum developer Gamepires announced that it's laying off employees after being acquired eight months ago by the Emona Capital-backed Splash Damage Group. Just a few weeks before acquiring Gamepires, Splash Damage had performed its own layoffs in November 2025, only two months after it had been purchased in its own private equity acquisition.

EA's uncertain future

EA's fate may not be as dramatic as that of Toys 'R' Us. Saudi Arabia has invested heavily in gaming in recent years, and EA's sports games and shooters are opportunities for profit and global influence, even as triple-A gaming struggles with enormous budgets and increased competition for attention.

What we know for now is that, after laying off around 400 people, EA is continuing development of Marvel's Iron Man and the next Star Wars Jedi entry, as well as a Sims game codenamed "Project Evergreen"—though after BioWare's shuttering, Sims players are understandably concerned about what ideological pressures EA's new owners will exert on its developers.

EA Sports is of course not going anywhere, and Battlefield 6 and Apex will get continued support. And EA has confirmed that Respawn and DICE are collaborating on a new project, rumored to be the next Star Wars Battlefront.

But if EA still has any capacity to support the development of games outside of the most mainstream, highly-monetizable categories, it's tough to imagine it lasting.

Arkane Lyon may soon be facing closure, according to a new report by French site Le Monde, which says a deadline to find a buyer for the studio will land on November 13, at which point Microsoft could close the studio outright. Microsoft has since extended that deadline by a month, however, so it can continue to pursue alternative options.

Arkane Lyon was caught up in this year's vortex of Xbox layoffs, announced in July, which will see roughly 3,200 people put out of work. Xbox also dumped four studios: Double Fine, Compulsion Games, and Undead Labs all went independent (and almost immediately laid off large numbers of employees) while Hellblade developer Ninja Theory appears to be closing outright. Because Arkane is based in France, Xbox couldn't just drop the hammer on it. Instead, it began a legally-required consultation process "to review potential strategic options."

The Le Monde report says that on July 16, 10 days after the Xbox layoffs were announced, Arkane management informed employees that Xbox intended to close the studio. France's "Florange Law," however, requires companies with more than 1,000 employees who want to close a facility to undertake a search for a buyer first.

The deadline for that requirement in Arkane's case is November 13, after which Xbox will presumably be free to close the studio. That option is definitely on the table: The Le Monde report says documents signed in July and published on a French government website on August 10 specifically reference "the plan for the complete and permanent cessation of the company's activities" and "the subsequent plan for the dismissal of all employees for economic reasons."

The report also says the Printemps Écologique and the Syndicat des Travailleureuses du Jeu Vidéo (STJV) unions were seeking to have the November consultation deadline extended to allow for redundancy negotiations and the buyer search to continue, and that has now happened.

"We have extended the consultation period by one additional month as we explore options, including finding a partner to support the studio through the development work still ahead," a Microsoft representative told PC Gamer, referring to the Marvel's Blade game currently in development at Arkane. "This is a defined extension, and we remain committed to keeping the Works Council informed throughout the process."

Regarding the documents referencing the planned closure of Arkane should a buyer not be found, the rep said that they "are part of the required consultation process and do not represent a final decision."

The Le Monde report says 217 people are employed by Arkane. Sources close to the studio say that despite being announced three years ago, at the 2023 Game Awards, Marvel's Blade still has years to go before development will be complete.

Early BioWare

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

Dragon Age

Mass Effect