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

The closure of BioWare and layoff of roughly 400 people at Electronic Arts is being rightly excoriated as an example of the corrosive effects of capital on pretty much everything good. But that same sort of thing happens, maybe more often than we'd like to think, on smaller scales, too. Case in point: Gamepires, creator of open-world survival game Scum, which announced last week that it's putting people out of work.

The bad news came via an unattributed message posted on X: "A difficult decision has been made to reduce the size of the Gamepires team, which means saying goodbye to colleagues who've helped shape Scum and the studio. This step is necessary to help Gamepires adapt to challenging market conditions and long-term sustainability."

It's all very bloodless and generic—the sort of statement that could've come from just about any game studio making layoffs over the past six months or so.

What makes this particular case feel so egregious, though, is that Gamepires was acquired by Splash Damage Group, in a deal backed by Emona Capital, just eight months ago. And that acquisition was made just three months after Splash Damage made major layoffs of its own, so it could "remain agile and adaptable in what has been a very challenging market." And those layoffs came just two months after Splash Damage was acquired by then-unnamed private equity investors.

Splash Damage hasn't released a game since Gears Tactics in 2020: Its planned next big thing, Transformers: Reactivate, was cancelled in 2025. Gamepires' survival game Scum, meanwhile, is still ticking over nicely on Steam, where it's being regularly updated with hotfixes and content updates.

In fact, Splash Damage said when it acquired Gamepires that "bringing the teams together around Scum gives Splash Damage Group immediate, meaningful work to focus on," adding, "That stability has been important for protecting roles and giving the studio a solid foundation for its future. Splash Damage Group is currently just under 150 people, and we will be working closely with Emona to grow the group over the next few years."

Yet here we are, eight months later.

So, to recap:

• Splash Damage gets bought up by private equity
• Splash Damage lays off employees
• Splash Damage, backed by private equity, acquires Gamepires
• Gamepires lays off employees

The number of people put out of work wasn't revealed, but in response to our inquiry Splash Damage issued the following statement:

"Gamepires is part of Splash Damage Group and has reduced the size of its team in response to challenging market conditions and to support the studio’s long-term sustainability.

"These redundancies have affected colleagues we work closely with, whose work has helped make SCUM what it is today. We know this is difficult news for those leaving. We have great respect for their work and the contribution they’ve made to both the game and the studio.

"Development of SCUM will continue, and we’ll keep working with our colleagues at Gamepires to support updates and new content."

Yesterday, EA announced that it's closing BioWare, the studio behind beloved RPG franchises like the original Baldur's Gate games, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. Alongside BioWare's closure—and the cancelling of its next Mass Effect project—EA is reportedly laying off around 400 people in an effort to "align talent and investment" in the wake of its record-breaking private equity buyout.

While recent years have brought no shortage of high profile studio closings and game cancellations, the news of BioWare's shuttering has prompted an outpouring of sympathies and frustrations from the fans, fellow developers, and former studio staff. Among those mourners is former BioWare game director and ex-general manager Casey Hudson, who reacted to the news on X to say that BioWare's influence will continue even if the studio itself doesn't.

"This is sad news on multiple fronts—for those of us who worked there, for our friends and colleagues at BioWare who are impacted, and for fans who were looking forward to the next Mass Effect adventure," Hudson said. "I started my career at BioWare and will forever be grateful to the founders, Greg and Ray, for inviting me to join in BioWare's legendary journey. Its legacy will live on through those who were part of it and continue to create games through a passion for unforgettable stories, worlds, and characters."

During his tenure at the studio, Hudson had a major influence on some of BioWare's most-loved releases, working as project director on both Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and the Mass Effect trilogy. After leaving BioWare in 2014, Hudson returned in 2017 as its general manager—before ultimately departing a second time in 2020, following the troubled development and launch of Anthem, the studio's ill-fated live service shooter.

Since then, Hudson's been acting as proof of his own assertion about BioWare's lasting influence in game development. Following the 2021 founding and subsequent 2024 closure of his NetEase-acquired studio, Humanoid Origin, Hudson announced in 2025 that he'd started yet another new company: Arcanaut Studios. There, he—and a team stacked with other ex-BioWare devs—are currently at work on Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic, a "narrative-driven action RPG" that Hudson has called a "spiritual successor" to KotOR.

Hudson's far from the only developer who's reaffirmed BioWare's continuing impact on game development since the news of its closure broke. CD Projekt joint CEO Michał Nowakowski noted how BioWare offered crucial support during the development of the Witcher 1, while Larian CEO Swen Vincke wrote on X that the studio "led the way in making RPGs big."

Legendary immersive sim developer Warren Spector offered a more blunt reaction to BioWare's shuttering, calling the closure "utter bullshit."

Immersive sim legend Warren Spector shared some thoughts on yesterday's closure of BioWare, and they're uncharacteristically spicy—so much so that he led into them with a warning for sensitive readers.

"I try very hard not to curse at any time but especially in public. Unfortunately for my vocabulary and the delicate sensibilities of some who read this I can’t control myself. Hell, I don’t want to control myself," Spector wrote in a brief message on LinkedIn.

"BioWare is more than just another studio. For decades it's played a central role in the history of our medium. They, for many years, as effectively as any studio, married art and commerce. Their work changed things."

And then, the cursing, and the warning that sensitive readers should cover their eyes while Warren gives 'em both barrels: "This is such bad news, such a devastating historic event all I can say is that it’s utter bullshit. Anyone who participated in this travesty should be ashamed."

It is perhaps not the eruption of ear-scalding profanity you were expecting (or hoping for), but the truth is that Spector has been a studiously even-tempered professional throughout his career. I don't know if I've ever heard him publicly say anything harsher than "heck" or maybe "gosh darn" for as long as I've been following him—PCG pal Joshua Wolens described Spector as "so pure, like if hot chocolate was a guy," and I think that pretty much nails it.

Easy as it is to joke, though (and I suspect Spector is playing to character somewhat here), his message does very aptly reflect the weight of the moment. The closure of BioWare is a pronounced symptom of an industry (and a world, really) that's gone wrong in some very fundamental ways. What kind of multi-billion-dollar game company, supposedly one of the best, looks at a studio like BioWare and says, "Nah, I can't do anything with that?"

The fact that EA managed to make mild-mannered Warren Spector—who's supposed to be enjoying his retirement—straight-up call bullshit on the whole thing speaks volumes about how bad a botch this really is.

But he wasn't finished. "Maybe all of the people who participated—the folks in suits (real or virtual) should lose their damn jobs," Spector continued. "I ask them to ponder this: What do you contribute to gaming? What price do you pay for failure? I’d love to see THEM on the unemployment line instead of the people who do real work. Why is it always the do-ers and makers who pay the price? Someone explain that to me!

"I wish I had more curse words."

Spector is correct: As we've seen so many times before, it's never the C-suite that suffers when the axe falls and hundreds or thousands of the people who actually make games get put out of work. Roughly 400 people lost their jobs at EA yesterday, including those impacted by the BioWare closure; CEO Andrew Wilson, meanwhile, was paid more than $38.5 million in 2026—$8 million more than he was paid in 2025. Regardless of whether or not Spector has more curse words at his disposal, I think he picked absolutely the correct one for the moment: This is bullshit.

Mass Effect 5 is officially cancelled and EA's shutting BioWare down, putting an end to decades of some of the best RPGs in gaming—and while I don't have too much positive to say about BioWare's later run (Veilguard was a decent action RPG with a story I couldn't stand), much of that has to do with EA's management of it.

Regardless of my nervousness towards ME5, I think it's a shame that I never got to find out whether it'd fix my issues with the Veilguard's storytelling or not. Especially since it's just been revealed that an award-winning science fiction author was on board.

Derek Künsken is a science fiction author who has won an Asimov Reader's Award (from the Asimov Science Fiction magazine) in 2012 for The Way of the Needle. More recently in 2021, he also snagged an Aurora Award (from the Canadian SF and Fantasy Association) for Tool Use by the Humans of Danzhai County. He's often a finalist in these categories, too.

Künsken wrote on X: "I have a weird announcement. On and off for the last five years, as a contract writer, and as a senior writer on staff, I've been hoping to be allowed to say where I worked. Today I finally got the green light: I've been working on the next Mass Effect.

"Unfortunately, the light turned green because BioWare is being shuttered. Over the coming weeks, I'll get more clarity on what I can say about what I did and saw and learned. I hope it's more than nothing—what we were cooking was really cool. I can say that everyone I met at BioWare was a decent human being, an expert in their field, and was ambitiously imaginative about what a future experience of Bioware could be. Working closely with Parrish Ley and Mary DeMarle will be highlights of my writing career."

I want to clarify my above cynicism: Even when I'm critically tearing into a videogame for its writing, I do so with the understanding that there's a huge gulf between what a writer puts in and what actually comes out. Videogames are monstrously complicated beasts, and sometimes development cycles are so terribly tangled that even solid authors can't spin a good yarn out of them.

For instance, writers who produce some of the best companions in RPGs (Tali'zorah, Mordin Solus, and Solas) don't turn around and create a Taash because they got hit very hard with a brick in between games and became bad at their job—more often than not, the structure of the studio has changed enough to make that job very hard. That David Gaider, the guy who made Dragon Age, left partially because he was done EA's increasing hostility towards the craft makes me confident in that assumption.

All this to say, I don't know if Mass Effect 5 would've been an incredible story: But I will say it's a damn shame that none of the work Künsken put into it (a clearly talented science fiction writer in his own right) will have a chance to prove me wrong. Or the work of any of the game's writers, for that matter.

On October 20, the CEO for "AI storytelling" company Nura Studios posted a now-deleted tribute to Amanita Design's 2009 cult classic Machinarium. I saw a glimpse of the video while it was still live and it was undeniably AI generated, but that probably goes without saying given its provenance.

It wasn't good, but then: Amanita Design is one of the most visually distinctive studios in the world. The Czech-based team is also among the most assertive, if its response to Nura Studios' video is anything to go by.

"The audacity to feed Machinarium assets to AI, make AI slop animations, and call it a love letter…," the studio tweeted of the AI tribute. "Love letters are supposed to be handwritten. This looks disgusting and has nothing to do with us or our craft."

Ouch. Under these circumstances a studio would normally politely ignore the clumsy advances of a mob like Nura Studios, whose mission is "to empower creators with a human-led AI platform to bring high-quality stories to life", and whose website looks like this:

So it's gratifying to see Amanita push back.

Nura Studios CEO Sylvio Drouin did show remorse. "We are so sorry for the post we did," Drouin tweeted. "We thought it was an homage to your amazing work and I already deleted the posts, again please accept our sincere apologies."

Amanita Design has yet to publicly accept the apology. Its next game, Machinarium 2, was announced earlier this month.

BioWare was a legendary studio, and its shocking closure today has inspired numerous tributes from fans and fellow game developers alike. One of the most notable came from CD Projekt joint CEO Michał Nowakowski, who credited the studio for the big role it played in bringing The Witcher to life.

It's hard to overstate the impact BioWare had on computer RPGs, from effectively resurrecting the genre in the 1990s with Baldur's Gate through the creation of Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age, and Mass Effect. But less well known, outside of RPG fan circles at least, is that its influence goes far beyond that. CD Projekt, which is arguably the contemporary equivalent of BioWare, literally got started with BioWare games.

The relationship began when CD Projekt approached BioWare and Interplay about localizing Baldur's Gate for Poland; it got the gig, and the Polish release became a major hit. A subsequent deal to localize Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance fell apart when Interplay did, but CD Projekt's relationship with BioWare held firm.

"Bioware has been a massive part of CDPR history," Nowakowski wrote on X. "We befriended them when localizing and selling Baldur’s Gate games in Poland, Czech, and Slovakia. And later they were great help when lending us their engine for Witcher 1, sharing their wisdom and even giving us a spot at their booth at E3."

That was the Aurora Engine, BioWare's followup to the Infinity Engine, and was used for Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, and as Nowakowski said, The Witcher, the RPG that introduced CD Projekt to the world and market the beginning of its journey to game industry powerhouse. In a 2014 interview with Polygon, CD Projekt co-founder Marcin Iwinski talked about the studio's early days working with BioWare and Interplay, and how it moved quickly to work on The Witcher after that Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance fell through: "It all started, in a way, with Baldur's Gate."

And BioWare did in fact share space with CD Projekt at E3, giving the studio a chance to show its new RPG to the world: Ryszard Chojnowski, a translator and localizer whose credits include both The Witcher and Baldur's Gate 2, shared a pair of photos showing CD Projekt's corner of BioWare's booth at E3 2004:

Nowakowski concluded, "I had a pleasure to visit them a few times in Edmonton and also host them in our Warsaw office. Very sad for the people affected, but also sad to see a legendary brand go down. Not a great day in the games industry."

Not a great day indeed.

Following the shocking closure of legendary RPG studio BioWare, Electronic Arts has posted a lengthy missive laying out its plans for "EA's next chapter," which sounds very much like cuts almost across the board.

I'll spare you the corporate gobbledygook about challenging assumptions, confronting assumptions, and imagining new possibilities, and cut straight to the chase: The plan is to do fewer things with fewer people focusing on its biggest franchises. What that works out to practically:

• Shooters: More Battlefield, more Apex Legends, and "bringing together our Respawn and DICE studios to collaborate on a future project."
• Action-adventure: Marvel's Iron Man and the third Star Wars Jedi game are still happening, but "beyond that, we will concentrate our efforts on fewer simultaneous, large-scale projects."
• EA Sports: Full commitment to EA Sports FC, plus a new American football game creatively codenamed "Project Gridiron," and Fight Night is coming back.
• Lifestyle: The Sims will continue but "Project Lotus," originally presumed to be a sort of precursor to The Sims 5, has been paused. The Skate dev team, meanwhile, is being cut to "build a healthier and more sustainable business."

Of course, there's also a gross little nod to BioWare and the end of Mass Effect: "As we focus on these larger opportunities, we've had a small team at BioWare working on early-development for Mass Effect. We've made the decision not to move forward with this development, which means we’re closing the studio and our Edmonton workspace. BioWare is a legendary studio that helped define the role-playing genre, and we do not take this decision lightly."

The message doesn't specifically reference the layoff of around 400 employees at Electronic Arts reported by Bloomberg, but it does say some of the changes announced today "are difficult, especially for the people and teams across the company who are directly affected," which is the sort of mealy-mouthed guffola put out by C-suites when they don't want to say with clarity that they just hacked out a significant chunk of their workforce.

One other thing I find interesting about this announcement: It's attributed to Cam and David, who I assume are Cam Weber and David Tinson, recently installed near the top of EA as president and chief studios officer, and president and chief operating officer. The name of Andrew Wilson, Electronic Arts CEO, is rather notably absent. Make of that what you will—but for the record, EA confirmed that Wilson is still the chief executive.

The post is short on detail, but the broad gist of the whole thing—cuts and concentration—aren't entirely surprising given the company's recent acquisition by Saudi Arabia, which saddled it with $20 billion in debt and owners not known for their liberal mindset. Plans for massive cuts were reported in early August, and a possible merger with Saudi-owned Savvy Games Group has also been rumored. But former BioWare lead writer Patrick Weekes made the call more than a year ago, when the EA acquisition first happened, predicting that "guns and football" games would be fine, but "gay stuff" would be out.

BioWare is closing, and the next Mass Effect game is cancelled.

The legendary RPG studio was founded in 1995 by doctors Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk and Augustine Yip, and was responsible for a number of classics, including the original Baldur's Gate games, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and more recently, the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series.

"What generations of BioWare built together is something to celebrate and remember," said the studio in a statement published on social media. "These games became so much more because you played them, debated your choices, fell in love with the characters, and made these worlds your own."

After establishing itself in the PC gaming canon in the '90s and early 2000s, BioWare was acquired by Electronic Arts in 2007, and became a mainstream RPG powerhouse with the release of the Mass Effect trilogy and first Dragon Age games.

A 2017 follow-up to the Mass Effect trilogy, Andromeda, wasn't as well-received as the originals, and the studio's 2019 detour into live service shooters, Anthem, failed to catch on. Anthem is widely considered one of the great management blunders of the live service gold rush, and its servers were finally shut down for good earlier this year.

BioWare's most recent game, 2024's Dragon Age: The Veilguard, also "underperformed," according to EA.

Last year, it was announced that EA would be acquired by a consortium made up of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and investment firms Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, the latter of which is owned by Jared Kushner, son-in-law of US president Donald Trump. The acquisition was finalized this August.

When the deal was announced, some employees and outside observers were not confident that BioWare would have a future following the acquisition, with one employee saying last year that it felt like "a matter of time" before the axe fell.

The next Mass Effect game was first teased in 2020, and was expected to bring back characters from the original trilogy. In 2025, BioWare said that "a core team at BioWare" was working on the game after layoffs at the studio.

Alongside the BioWare closure, EA is laying off around 400 people across the company, according to Bloomberg.

In a letter shared with employees and published on EA's website, the company said that "saying no to some things we're passionate about allows us to focus our teams and resources so we give our biggest opportunities everything they need to succeed."

The letter was signed by EA chief studios officer Cam Weber, who until recently headed up EA Sports, and EA COO David Tinson.

I don't send my Pokémon cards off to PSA to get graded. I'm too emotionally attached to my cards to ever sell them, so paying the hefty fee for grading doesn't really make sense for me, plus I'm a naturally anxious person. So when I heard the latest news of almost $1 million worth of TCG being stolen right outside PSA's headquarters my position was cemented.

Police in Santa Ana, California have confirmed the theft of an estimated $963,000 worth of TCG after several card collectors were notified that a truck carrying their collections had been burglarised in mid-October.

"The pallets contained various trading cards, including, but not limited to, sports cards and Pokémon cards," the SAPD explained to The Athletic. "The exact value of the stolen items has not yet been determined, pending further investigation. The investigation remains ongoing. Anyone with information regarding this incident is encouraged to contact the Santa Ana Police Department."

According to reports, a FedEx driver left their truck unattended outside of the Santa Ana office of PSA, a collectibles grading company, for around 60 to 90 minutes. This left enough time for the thieves to break off the lock to the truck and make away with all the packages.

FedEx released a statement to ABC7 reassuring customers that "the security of our customers' shipments is a top priority, and we are working with local law enforcement in their investigation."

PSA has also confirmed in a statement to IGN that it has promised to refund customers affected. It will hand them out "based on fair market value up to the maximum insured value" of the cards and has deactivated the certificates of all the stolen goods.

This is another sad incident in an increasingly long line of TCG thievery. Just a few months ago two men pleaded guilty to stealing over £71,000 worth of Pokémon TCG, and TCG shops have seen an increase in burglaries over the past few years as card prices go up. With no sign of it getting better I feel as if the only fix is for The Pokémon Company to flood the market, devaluing cards, and thereby removing the incentive to resell. Because let's be honest, a piece of cardboard shouldn't be selling for $70,000.

European game rating agency PEGI has begun increasing its age ratings for games that contain "paid random items," a process that's seeing games initially rated as low as PEGI 3—suitable for all age groups—bounced directly to PEGI 16.

Word of the change came from Connor Hindle, policy manager of the UK's Games Rating Authority. "Since June, newly submitted games have been assessed against an expanded set of criteria within the PEGI rating framework, including new criteria relating to interactive risks," Hindle wrote on LinkedIn (via GamesIndustry). "As the UK administrator of PEGI, the Games Rating Authority has now begun applying these updated criteria to selected existing digital products."

These changes were announced in March, and are part of PEGI's new "interactive risk categories" that include "purchases of in-game content, paid random items, communication features, and features that incentivise players to continue playing." The new categories reflect the ways we view videogames have changed: While rating systems like PEGI and ESRB were initially created over concerns about violence and sex in videogames, the real dangers turned out to be much more insidious.

As a result, any game with loot boxes is now rated PEGI 16 by default, and that's led to some serious upjumps: EA Sports FC 25, for instance, is rated PEGI 3, as are previous games in the series, but FC 27 is PEGI 16: The former game has "no rating issues," but the newer one has a detailed breakdown of the various purchase options on offer, including FC points, a season pass, and player packs.

While PEGI is dropping the rating hammer on loot boxes and other in-game purchases, North America's ESRB has indicated that it will not follow the lead: An ESRB rep said in March that its research indicated that adding "non-content related features" to its rating process could be confusing for parents. EA Sports FC 27 is rated E (Everyone) by the ESRB, with a note that it offers user interactions and in-game purchases.

Moonlighter and Cataclismo studio Digital Sun Games announced yesterday that it had canceled plans to release a wide public playtest of its forthcoming "tower defensevania" roguelike ReVamp. The reason? The rollout of a more powerful AI model in Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 has led to a surge in hastily turned around clones and decompiles, resulting in thousands of cheap and nasty products flooding Steam and Roblox.

The studio doesn't want people to decompile and steal ReVamp's code. It also wants to prevent opportunists rapidly vibe coding a clone that would hit the market well in advance of ReVamp's March 2027 release date.

While clones have obviously existed forever, for a studio to worry that its concept—and its code —may be pilfered and turned around within days is unprecedented. Digital Sun Games is not the only studio to cancel a demo due to these anxieties.

Digital Sun Games' marketing manager, Israel Mallén, reached out earlier this week to alert me to the demo's cancellation. I shot back a few more questions to get a sense of what the current situation is for a small but experienced dev team.

Scaling a "large playtest" down to a smaller, even more private one must come with marketing / exposure setbacks, right?

Yes, it affects us a lot, mostly in terms of how many people we can actually reach. We had tens of thousands of people signed up for the original Steam playtest. Moving it to Discord means we're looking at a playtest of a few hundred people at best, since we're granting access manually.

Moving to Discord is really about control. We can ask people to sign an NDA, we can see their activity on our server, and we can answer questions live as they play. On Steam, the only lever we have is country-based access. There's no way to vet individual users or tell an active player, someone who buys games, leaves reviews, takes part in forums and other playtests, from an account that was just created for the occasion.

With how fast reverse engineering and recompiling tools have gotten, putting a build in front of that many people this early feels too big a risk. It exposes us to someone lifting the idea, or even shipping something similar to ReVamp before we're ready to launch. You could think that ReVamp's gameplay is a bit more complex than something like an idle or incremental game, but the risk is still there.

We'll still do public playtests and demos, just much closer to launch. That means months where we lose the chance to gather feedback at scale and with real players, and get content creators talking about the game. It has a direct impact on how many players we can reach and how visible we are in the market, at a moment where that's already hard enough.

Have you ever worried about quick, opportunistic clones of your demos before this moment, or is it a direct response to the Opus 5.5 avalanche?

We've been making games like Moonlighter and Cataclismo for a decade, and we'd never felt this kind of worry about sharing our games with the community before. If you can’t show your game to the world without fearing it’ll be cloned, something’s broken.

We think platforms need to put real protections in place for original work, so developers can keep sharing their games with fans normally. It's literally how we make a living. In our case, we have the cushion of 250k wishlists and years in the industry behind us, but we're thinking just as much about the developers just starting out. They shouldn't have to make games [while] afraid of this.

How can Valve and other storefronts combat this?

Honestly, it's hard to say. We don't have the full picture of what storefronts are already doing behind the scenes, and none of this is easy to solve at scale. From where we stand, a couple of things could help. Storefronts are probably in the best position to act, since builds already go through them. On the playtest side, more tools to vet who gets access, like account age, playtime or review history, would let developers keep testing in public more safely. It's complicated, and it will definitely need a lot of input from other devs and companies.

Has this changed the team's attitude towards AI use in game dev?

Well, this situation highlights how new risks are emerging very quickly and without any real control. As an industry, we really need to talk about how to make sure original work is protected.

Where do you see this leading indie game dev in the next six months?

Unless measures are taken, public playtests and demos far from launch will feel risky, especially for games with simpler mechanics or visuals that are easier to replicate. No matter how original or catchy your game is, nothing stops someone from downloading your demo and putting out their own version of it.

If that fear spreads and protections don't arrive, developers will hold back. We'll see fewer public playtests and demos. And when they do happen, they'll be much closer to launch, working more as a marketing tool than as a way to improve the game together with the community.

Things seem to have gone from bad to worse for Don't Nod, the developer of the first two Life is Strange games as well as Jusant, Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden, Lost Records, and Aphelion. A month after saying it might not have enough cash to get through January 2027 and that up to 90 people were at risk of being laid off, the studio has begun "safeguard proceedings" aimed at buying it time while it tries to get its financial situation sorted.

Don't Nod has been struggling since 2024, after both Jusant and Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden, despite being well-received by players and critics, sold "well below expectations." Work on two new games was put on hold and layoffs followed in 2025, but despite achieving "significant milestones" in its restructuring plan, the studio is still in trouble.

"The videogame industry continues to face an exceptionally challenging environment, marked in particular by highly selective access to financing," Don't Nod CEO and Chairman Oskar Guilbert said in a financial update. "In this context, our current cash position does not allow us to adequately secure all the financing requirements associated with our operations and projects."

Thus the opening of the safeguard proceedings, which Guilbert said "is a proactive, protection measure ... intended to provide the necessary framework and time to build a sustainable solution, while continuing our operations and preserving the value of our assets, our projects and our expertise."

Safeguard proceedings in France, where Don't Nod is based, are a bit like Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US: Switzerland-based corporate finance advisory firm Hectelion describes it as "a preventive French insolvency procedure available to companies that are not yet in payment default but face difficulties they cannot overcome alone." The process is initiated by the debtor—in this case, Don't Nod—and "provides an observation period of 6–18 months during which creditor enforcement is suspended." During that period, a plan to reduce and reschedule the debt, over a period of up to 10 years, is worked out with creditors and ultimately approved by a court.

Don't Nod may have bought itself some breathing room, but the layoff situation still looks grim. As it said in September, the studio's restructuring plan includes "a refocusing of French operations around a single production line," and that up to 85 people could lose their jobs as a result. Don't Nod also said in the financial update that sales of its latest release, the third-person sci-fi action game Aphelion, "came in below the Group's expectations, weighing on the half-year's performance."

Christofer Sundberg, the founder of Samson developer Liquid Swords, has confirmed the studio's closure, saying that while the console version of the game enjoyed "much greater success" than the PC release, it "wasn't enough to get the company across the finish line."

Reports over the weekend revealed that Liquid Swords had gone bankrupt just six months after the PC release of Samson, which was followed by a console launch in September. "It's been a hell of a ride and a lot of fun, even when the circumstances gave us very little to laugh about," Sundberg wrote. "Building a studio, creating Samson and releasing it on PC and consoles took an enormous amount of work from people who cared deeply about what we were making.

"The console versions met with much greater success than the PC release. We got them out, but that success wasn't enough to get the company across the finish line. Market conditions and some bad business decisions brought us here, and I own my part in that. I can look honestly at what went wrong and still be proud of what we built."

Samson wasn't especially well received when it debuted on PCs, and while post-launch updates have tightened it up, it still holds a very "mixed" rating on Steam, where just 55% of user reviews are positive, and a 51 aggregate score on Metacritic. It wasn't a MindsEye-scale mess, but Sundberg acknowledged shortly after Samson's launch that Liquid Swords "released a game with flaws."

Sundberg said in his message that discussions about how to support Samson in the future are now underway; more interestingly, he added that, with Liquid Swords gone, he plans to open a new studio. Despite the lack of the traditional cooling-off period, it's not surprising that Sundberg is staying in the game dev biz: Prior to Liquid Swords, he was the co-founder and chief creative officer at Just Cause developer Avalanche Studios.

"We make mistakes, we learn, we fall, we rise up, we move on. That's sometimes a painful process, especially when it affects people you care about, but I refuse to give up. I never give up," Sundberg wrote.

"I'll be back at it again soon and will share more about my plans for a new studio. It will be built with the current market in mind, with a solid foundation and business decisions that give the games and the people making them room to succeed. The lessons from Liquid Swords will be part of how I build it. I still love making games."

It's far too early for anything concrete, but Sundberg told PC Gamer that "starting with what we can actually sustain" is the initial goal.

"A small, experienced team, low running costs and a game we can afford to finish without needing every sales forecast to come true," Sundberg explained. "I want room to make a wrong turn, fix it, and keep going without putting the whole company at risk."

Part of that will include using AI in the development process, "to help with prototyping, repetitive production tasks and testing," Sundberg said—although he emphasized that he doesn't see the technology as a game dev panacea.

"We're not looking to replace roles with AI or treating it as a way to save money (or make money quickly), because AI is bloody expensive too. And cutting corners in game development has a habit of coming back to bite you in the ass. You need solid game development experience to make anything that isn't slop and the proofs are already out there."

Sundberg is also aware of the PR risks attached to AI use, which he believes arise primarily from bold management pronouncements about the "AI-first" future with no consideration of what dev teams actually need or what problems are being solved.

"It feels like everyone is using AI, but hardly anyone talks openly about how," he said. "I think a lot of people are still figuring out where it helps and where it creates more work. Then the bill arrives for all those tokens burned, and they realise it wasn't quite the cheap shortcut they imagined.

"I'm positive about these tools, but 'AI-first' isn't a production plan or a business strategy. You need people who understand the work well enough to know when AI helps and when to switch it off. I'd like us to talk more openly about that."

Alongside the news of Liquid Swords' bankruptcy, there were claims that employees had gone unpaid for at least two months. We have since learned that the studio's bankruptcy means those employees will be paid by Sweden's wage guarantee. Sundberg declined to comment on the possibility of compensation beyond that guarantee, but said "there are people at Liquid Swords [he] would love to work with again," although it's way too soon for any commitments.

"I still want to make games with personality, freedom and enough action to cause a small diplomatic incident," Sundberg said. "I just want the explosions on screen to be bigger than the monthly overhead.

"There's plenty of fight left in me, but the next studio needs to work without running on stubbornness alone. I can do that too, but it's quite exhausting in the long-run."

The studio behind the Moonlighter series has announced it will no longer host a public playtest for its forthcoming roguelike due to fears it will be "reverse-engineered, cloned and published". The move comes as a surge in rapidly vibe coded clones floods Steam, Roblox and mobile app stores in the aftermath of Claude Opus 5.5.

"With launch still months away, sharing a build with tens of thousands of players feels like too big a risk," Digital Sun Games' marketing manager Israel Mallén told PC Gamer. The game under discussion is ReVamp, a "tower defensevania" roguelike due for release in March 2027.

"We know we're not the only developers feeling this way, and the more this is talked about, the more likely platforms are to step in."

In its public announcement Digital Sun Games was fairly blunt. "We've been concerned by recent news of games being reverse-engineered, cloned and published before the original is even out. With launch still months away, a large public build of ReVamp felt like too big a risk."

Last week the studio behind Drunken Goddess Reflux canceled plans to roll out a public demo for Steam Next Fest due to similar fears. "We're concerned the demo's content could be used to quickly imitate or replicate the game's presentation and gameplay with AI or other tools, and that such works could be released before launch," a spokesperson for the studio wrote.

Opus 5.5 has proven hugely disruptive to the games industry. It has aided several high profile game decompiles, helped jailbreak the PS5, led Xbox to announce its own AI-centric Xbox Labs, and made developing quickfire clones extremely easy. It's likely why this month's Steam Next Fest has over 8,000 demos, up from around 4,000 in June.

As I wrote yesterday, the speed at which clones can now be turned around is mind-boggling, and will have (is already having) huge ramifications for indie game development and marketing. When the creator of incremental punching game Escape the Walls published footage of their game on X, it was only ten days before at least seven clones were available on Roblox, and at least one on Steam.

We've had two Star Wars games in 2026, both of them quite good and neither of them quite what you might expect from the Star Wars mould: Zero Company, an XCOM-style tactics game, and Galactic Racer, an arcade racing game but Star Wars. And the success of those games means we may see more like them—which is to say, more offbeat Star Wars games from smaller-scale studios—in the future.

Both Zero Company and Galactic Racer were developed by independent studios—Bit Reactor and Fuse Games, respectively—and that "very much is part of the strategy," Lucasfilm Games vice president Douglas Reilly told The Game Business.

"Obviously, huge triple-A games like Battlefront are always going to be an essential part of the strategy," Reilly said. "But one of the great things about Star Wars is it has all kinds of other opportunities to tell stories in different genres.

"The goal has been to find the best partner who makes that experience come alive inside the galaxy far, far away. And it doesn’t have to always be triple-A, sometimes it can be double-A, and it’s really about the experience that we’re delivering and the fantasy we’re fulfilling."

That's a real shift in Disney's approach to making Star Wars games. Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012 and shuttered its games division the following year; not long after that, it signed a 10-year deal with Electronic Arts, granting it exclusive rights to make Star Wars games. That deal was not especially fruitful, and Ubisoft's big-budget Star Wars Outlaws, announced in the waning years of the EA deal, didn't exactly set the world on fire either.

Disney also resurrected Lucasfilm Games in 2021, making it "the official identity for all gaming titles from Lucasfilm"—which, as the sizzle reel made clear, meant Star Wars games—and it's "tried to be more flexible about who we’re willing to take pitches from," Reilly said.

"Good ideas can come from a lot of different places. You don’t have to necessarily be a top five publisher to make a great Star Wars game. There are some hurdles. We have a high quality bar, and that means typically we work with more experienced teams than ones with no track record. But we’re exploring all kinds of things, large and small, with partners that are going to surprise folks."

Of course, there are plenty of familiar-looking Star Wars games in the trench too: Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic, a new addition to the Knights of the Old Republic series, was announced at The Game Awards in 2025, the third and supposedly last Star Wars Jedi game is in development, Quantic Dream is still plugging away on Star Wars: Eclipse, despite recent reports of struggles, and yes, that KOTOR remake is, somehow, still happening.

We are drowning in shit. Steam Next Fest, which kicks off tomorrow, currently has 8,011 matches on its press preview landing page. That's roughly double the amount of demos featured in Steam's June 2026 Next Fest. In June 2022, Next Fest boasted just over a thousand demos.

The vast majority of these demos will be meritless slop. And I daresay many of them—though I have no way to confirm—didn't exist as concepts before October.

If you use social media, especially X, you've probably noticed an explosion of terrible clones and vibe coded mash-ups this month. You can largely thank Anthropic's new 5.5 update to its Claude Opus model for that, which offers massive efficiency gains for vibe coders. It's also been widely used to decompile commercial games and, maybe most famously, jailbreak the PS5.

It definitely feels like we've crossed a threshold this month. On October 10, the creator of Escape the Walls, an incremental punching game which itself uses AI to "increase the speed of creating the game", posted in-progress footage from the game on X.

Prophetically, a user replied: "You have exactly 7 hours before someone makes this on Roblox and gets 20x your revenue".

Right now, on October 19, there are at least seven Roblox clones of Escape the Walls. A competing studio had the audacity to tweet their own clone to the original game's creator. "Our Steam page is live too!" they posted. "Nothing wrong with friendly competition!"

Leaving aside the fact that Escape the Walls is itself pretty crappy looking, the situation highlights the perils of marketing independent games in an age where a clone can be turned around in hours. To wit: as Rick Lane has already reported, the creators of Drunken Goddess Reflux, a "Russian roulette drinking survival" game, has announced it will no longer publish its demo on Steam as planned.

"We are concerned that, based on the content of the demo, works imitating or replicating this game's presentation and gameplay could be quickly produced using AI or other tools and released ahead of the game's launch," a spokesperson for studio Alliance Arts Inc. wrote. The studio will instead hold closed environment play sessions for people who read and agree to a series of "participation requirements".

Elsewhere NoGlyph, the creator of Needle In A Haystack, which is itself a rapid clone of Needle In A Haystack Simulator (see: haystack slop), has accused yet another studio of copying their code in their own clone. "Yesterday, on October 16 a game called A Game About Needle In A Haystack by Little Field Studios came out on Steam," NoGlyph wrote. "It contains code copied from our game. To be clear, this is about our actual code, not a similar idea or similar mechanics."

NoGlyph moves on to offer further proof that the offending studio pulled code directly from their game. "The haystack in our game, meaning how it's drawn, how you dig into it and how gold, lapis and diamond hay work, is something that took a long time to get working properly. When we looked through their game's files, we found 13 of our classes inside it with the exact same names. More than half of the functions in that part match ours exactly. Some of our own error messages are still in there word for word, including one that points to a shader from our project that doesn't exist in their game."

NoGlyph has filed a copyright notice with Valve.

Damn, it sure would be a shame if independent studios stopped releasing demos, or were prevented from marketing their games, because talentless bottom feeders were quickly flipping their ideas into monetizable slop!

Many have made the argument that AI is "good" because it democratises specialised skills and art forms like music, writing, coding, art, and videogame development (which deploys all of the aforementioned). But where videogames are concerned it hasn't democratised anything: it has just emboldened hacks, philistines and scam merchants. Vibe coding a 20 minute blockbuster-looking videogame that resembles the Marvel / Star Wars / Fortnite universes, or vibe coding a Roblox clone of a viral indie, doesn't make you a videogame developer: if anything, it demonstrates why you aren't.

Forgive me, but I don't think someone who hasn't committed time and thought to mastering those pursuits has much hope in producing something valuable with the assistance of AI. You may be able to make something that looks like something else, but you probably don't have ideas. Spending years and years thinking about your craft, being a practitioner, is what generates ideas. Without ideas, you are just playing with the most expensive toy ever built.

Anyone who has made that moronic "democratising" claim has only to look at Roblox and the great piles of worthless slop on Steam to see the actual reality. Steam's discoverability algorithm will probably keep the vast majority of the 8,000+ Next Fest demos out of the public eye, but for those that do go viral, or find an enthusiastic audience, there are hordes of leeches ready to rob you blind, utilising the same technology that's turning PC gaming into a rich person's hobby.

Top Steam games by revenue (October 6 - 13)

You know it's a very boring week on Steam when Dota 2 takes first spot in the revenue chart. So nothing very interesting released, then?

Well, Star Wars: Galactic Racer did, right on October 6, and came in at number four. Given how positive reviews were, and that it's Star Wars, I did kinda expect it to come in at number one.

Gears of War managed to latch onto a top ten position after ranking sixth last week during its first week on sale (it was available as a pre-order before that). Risk of Rain 2 got an actually-decent update and expansion, hence its appearance, and Steam Deck reanimates at number six: there must have been a stock replenishment.

As for Aion 2, people continue to not really like it, based on Steam user reviews, but it's still making bank for NC anyway.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Joe Ziegler might be best known for his role guiding the design of big competitive shooters, but his formative gaming experiences were with point-and-click adventures like King's Quest. "There was something so clever about trying to use all this knowledge about random things like fairy tales to try to solve puzzles inside of the game," he says. "It was just that 'A-ha!' moment where videogames could be these really engaging ways for you to be clever and creative."

Ziegler started out at Pandemic Studios, where he worked as a mission designer on 2009's The Saboteur. But he is best known as game director on Riot's hugely popular arena shooter Valorant, and his more recent oversight of Bungie's extraction-shooter revival of Marathon, which he assumed leadership of in March 2024 following the dismissal of former director Christopher Barret.

Following Marathon's launch, Ziegler left Bungie and is currently working on a new, unrevealed project: "My goal ultimately when I'm thinking about 'What do I direct and what do I make?' is 'Where can I make the coolest thing with the coolest people?'" he explains. "That's part of the reason I went to Bungie in the first place. And now, as I'm looking at this next thing, I'm also in that headspace."

Ziegler took a break from his secret project to show me around the best loot spots of his Steam library. We talked JRPGs, ARPGs, and the forgotten Bungie game that led him to work on Marathon.

What game are you currently playing?

I'm playing a couple right now. I'm revisiting Elden Ring Nightreign again. I play it socially with some friends. We're doing a lot of the Deep of Night and purple boss stuff. It's a game that's near and dear to me.

It's funny because my initial reaction to it was like, "What is this game?" But over the course of time, it's combined my love of soulslikes—I really like a lot of soulslikes—with this multiplayer roguelike, where every run you're building a build and trying to conquer the challenge that's in front of you. The level of difficulty keeps it constantly a mastery challenge—which is something that definitely motivates me.

A lot of it is playing off of your mastery and understanding of stats that exist in Elden Ring. I played a lot of Elden Ring, so it was easier for me to onboard, and I can imagine for people who have not played a lot of Elden Ring, it's impossible to onboard into. But if you do, you begin theorycrafting a lot of things when you're on your run. You're like, "Oh, should I go for a bleed-based run this time around, am I using the right character with the right arcane stats to do that?" All of your knowledge and all of your capability … come together.

The other game I'm playing is Star Wars: Galactic Racer. Someone called it Race the Spire and I totally agree. It's basically a roguelike racer, and I don't know if it's just the change in pace of playing a racer again, but I think it's been really interesting to see that level of roguelike progression folded into a racer … where all the different components of thinking about your racer become more flexible and interesting from a buildcrafting standpoint.

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

Oddly enough, I was revisiting Destiny 2. A couple of people I know were getting back into Destiny 2 a little bit, so it was fun to jump in with them and experience going through some stuff.

I have about 730 hours, so I'm not as hardcore as a lot of other people. But D2 is definitely comfort food …. I was originally playing a Warlock. I played a Warlock for quite a few years, and then I just recently went back to playing a Titan, and I was levelling up my Titan again. And I was playing mostly a prismatic spec.

Way back when I was 16, I played a lot of Myth 2 [with] a friend of mine from high school. And oddly enough, it came with a box that had a ticket to go to E3 at the time, which was really crazy. So the first E3 I went to was because Bungie shipped these tickets. I talked to Jason Jones about this, and he was like, "That was all Alex Seropian, and Alex Seropian's marketing mentality was that." So that's how I remember Bungie. Of course I played Halo, just like everybody else who lived in America.

It was the legacy of all those games, Halo to Destiny, that really drove me to work at Bungie … it was actually a couple of friends that I used to work with at Pandemic who were at Bungie who approached me, and one of them was Justin Truman, the former CEO … we started working on something. But then they needed help on the Marathon project, so I went over to help advise and then they asked me to come take over direction for it, and I did that.

It's always interesting jumping into a project when it's already been started, because part of it is getting everyone together and being like, "What are we trying to do here?" And sometimes some teams will find a unanimous voice, everybody knows what they're doing, and some other teams will have very disparate ideas of what they're doing …. I found this project was… it had some areas where there were definitely some ideas about where we were going, but there were a lot of disagreements across the place.

So part of where I was advising was trying to bring those all together and be like, "Hey, what is the cohesive place you want to go to? And how do we get there?" And then when we landed on that, I could help them drive that.

I'll say this about Bungie, which I really like, and it's still very true about Bungie: it lives in two worlds. One is this world where there's a lot of legacy to live up to, which is a lot of pressure. But there's also this other side of it, which is that it's a very egoless company. In a lot of cases, they are always looking for some way to improve, and the way they do that is, oftentimes, by bringing in people who are new to help them figure out what they are missing.

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

The Secret of Monkey Island—1990 was when it was released. And that's pretty long ago, 36 years now! I feel old.

It's funny, because I've never had the luxury of talking to Ron Gilbert or Tim Schafer, or any of the guys who worked on this whole game. But I will say that The Secret of Monkey Island was formative for me in that adventure game, discovery loop way. Partly because it combined the clever puzzle solving that is iconic for point and click adventure games from that era. But I think that it's that cleverness, that irreverence, that idea of everything being both a pun and world play, and how it plays out, that resonated with me a lot.

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

Ooh, this is going to show my other addiction. I love ARPGs. Path of Exile. I have 3,437.5 hours.

ARPGs to me are [about the] buildcrafting and the cleverness of putting things together. And I think Path of Exile is the most freeform version of that. The level of experimentation you can get in that game is so wide in terms of thinking about how you can make builds.

I play a variety of builds. I have a fondness for playing Totem builds, and then second to that is, when I'm feeling really lazy, I like one-button builds, like Whirlwind builds … that's the fun part of Path of Exile, to be honest, is that it's just such a Rube Goldberg machine of effects and things that you can make, and you're just trying to figure out how to deal the most damage and kill things the fastest.

I think I've changed my expectation around ARPGs because of Path of Exile. It's funny because I've played Path of Exile 2, and it's a little bit more limiting, and it totally makes sense because it's built around more of an action environment. But I definitely feel like Path of Exile one was more meant for me.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

This is a gimme for anybody who knows me, and it's a hint that exists on every interview that I've done, because I wear a Kingdom Hearts necklace on every single one, and that's the game I'll probably never uninstall.

I have this weird tradition where, every once in a while, I'll go back and play through all those games. Part of it is nostalgia, because you're harking back to a time when you were younger and you had a summer break. And honestly, Kingdom Hearts, for all its confusing and overly complicated narrative, it's still a story about growing up, right?

They're all kind of packaged together now, but I will say my favourite is Kingdom Hearts 2. I think it's the one that's most likely to make anyone tear up. I think it has to do with the identity of Roxas and Sora, and the two different sides of that character. The soul that exists there. There's something about innocence that can be painted in different ways. That's really fascinating in terms of characterisation, how they can live two different lives, but they can be so similar to one another, and how they're so connected that way. It's really cool.

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

Any online gamer would probably say the same thing, which is Discord. I've been at companies where we've used it for work. I use it almost every night to hang out with my friends and game. We use it to post dumb stuff to each other. It's just the default social hub for my close friends.

Our little group is a few friends I've been really close with since the Riot days, and so we've changed up games a lot … I will say that every time a new World of Warcraft expansion comes out, we probably play it.

WoW is the other thing I've played a lot, but that's not a Steam game. I will say that I have over three-years of in-game time in WoW, so that's way too high. And we counted one time on Valorant, me and the technical director of Valorant had basically had a comparison like "Which of us has spent more time in Wow?" And I think he came in just around two years, and I came in around three years. I was like, "This is insane."

I would say everybody in the industry was playing WoW a lot for a long time …. I think there's a lot to be said that's positive about the gameplay, and I think a lot of people point to that. But my theory, if you want to hear it, is that it was social media before social media. It was basically the common space that a lot of people could get together and socialise while playing. It was before the Discord era, before any social media hub or even Twitch, right? Back in the Justin TV days. It was the place you could default to go into and get things done, but also just hang out with people.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

Not at all. There's two reasons for this. One is because I change up technology at least every couple of years. So trying to keep everything tidy feels like a fool's errand, because this machine I have is probably about a year old … but the other thing is that I rarely am ever on my desktop. Most of the time, it's covered with some [other] screen. It's either my browser or Discord. So I never really see my desktop. I never access anything from my desktop.

Liquid Swords, the developer behind Samson, has gone bankrupt just six months after its run-based open-city crime sim was released.

As reported by Breakit (via Rock, Paper, Shotgun), a bankruptcy order was issued against the Swedish developer on October 12. According to Breakit, Liquid Swords' staff—around 30 employees—have gone unpaid for at least two months, and it was those employees who petitioned to have the company declared bankrupt.

Liquid Swords was founded in 2020 by Christofer Sundberg, who previously co-founded Just Cause developer Avalanche Studios and co-directed that series' first game. Samson was Liquid Swords' debut title, an open city-crime sim with a distinctive run-based structure, where you play a getaway driver attempting to pay back an enormous mob debt by any means necessary.

Samson was a difficult project for Sundberg and Liquid Swords. The studio initially intended for it to be a much larger action RPG. But the studio struggled to find a publisher for Samson, with one publisher rejecting Liquid Swords on five occasions. Last year, Liquid Swords ran into funding trouble, laying off half its team as a result. It also radically adjusted how Samson plays—which is how the run-based structure emerged.

Upon its release in April this year, Samson received mixed reviews, with unfavourable (and somewhat unfair) comparisons to Grand Theft Auto being compounded by bugs and technical issues. In the months since, Liquid Swords has attempted to buff out Samson's various technical dents, releasing a patch as recently as October 8. Clearly though, that work hasn't produced a surge in interest in Samson, at least not enough to keep the lights on at Liquid Swords.

What happens to Liquid Swords next is somewhat up in the air. The administrator for the studio—Cirio Law—has put the developer and its assets up for sale, including Samson itself, with the bidding window running open until October 21. As for the affected employees, the bankruptcy now means their unpaid salaries will be covered by the Swedish state wage guarantee.

At a glance:

• Qualcomm gets $2 from Arm in the Delaware jury's decision, part of a yearslong licensing dispute between the two.
• Yahoo Finance puts their market caps at $210 billion and $243 billion respectively.
• Qualcomm alleges bad faith action by Arm over tech licensed by the former company from the latter.
• Qualcomm won $1 on its allegations of Arm withholding contractually obligated support on the licensed tech, and $1 on allegations Arm interfered with a deal between Qualcomm and Meta.
• Still undecided: Does Qualcomm get a 5-year pause on licensing payments to Arm, which could total in the billions of dollars?

Reuters reported on the mystifying reward, which makes much more sense in the context of a broader legal battle between Qualcomm and Arm. The two companies are each behind some of the most widely-used processors in the world: Qualcomm's Snapdragon CPUs can be found in most non-Apple smartphones. Arm's titular architecture, meanwhile, is the basis of the Snapdragon CPU, and there are rumblings the future of desktop computing belongs to Arm and not the x86 architecture we've defaulted to for so long.

The Delaware jury found that Arm breached a licensing agreement with Qualcomm, failing to provide patches and support for designs Qualcomm had licensed. The jury also ruled in favor of Qualcomm's allegation that Arm strategically leaked information to Bloomberg News that delayed a deal between Qualcomm and Meta in 2024. The jury sided with Arm over Qualcomm on five other counts.

The big prize for Qualcomm would be proving Arm acted in bad faith after licensing its technology out, activating a five-year freeze on royalty payments specified in the companies' original agreement⁠—that could be worth billions of dollars.

Both sides claimed victory following the $2 decision, with Qualcomm pointing to the two claims it won, and Arm highlighting the five that went its way.

Qualcomm: "We are gratified that the jury found Arm breached its long-standing Architectural License Agreement (ALA) with Qualcomm, failed to honor its commitments, and intentionally acted to disrupt Qualcomm's businesses."

Arm: "Despite Qualcomm’s pursuit of this case in an attempt ​to deprive Arm of billions of dollars under our license agreements, the jury’s verdict confirms that Arm operated in ​good faith under its technology license agreement and its award of only two dollars confirms the merit of Arm’s arguments in the ‌case."

Ultimately, the palace intrigues of these two corporations are unlikely to have practical effects on the yeoman PC gamer, though Arm's potential importance to the future of the hobby means it is of some note. But I hope we can all agree it's very funny that a $243 billion company now owes a $210 billion one two dollars.

Per the United Wizards of the Coast Union (UWOTC-CWA) account on X, WoTC is acting in an entirely unsurprising manner: "Yesterday, Wizards informed us that it doesn’t intend to voluntarily recognize the D&D or Studio X units of our union ahead of a vote. We remain committed to creating a workplace focused on wellness, transparency, and collaboration by winning our coming election."

A union composed of employees from the Magic: The Gathering Arena team unionised back in June of this year, giving WoTC until May to formally recognise it. Obviously, it didn't.

Later in the same month, WoTC sent physical letters to members of the company encouraging them not to go through with it on the vote—and while WoTC did technically adhere to the The National Labor Relations Act, it did also not-so-subtly imply that its current benefits would be "on the bargaining table for both parties to negotiate". These letters were also allegedly accompanied by daily emails to employees.

Basically, it should not come as a surprise that Wizards isn't intending to recognize the full United Wizards of the Coast Union—a coalition now formed of members in both the D&D team and Studio X (Magic: The Gathering's creative staff)—either.

In a statement sent to Wargamer, and circulated to employees before that, WoTC stated it was not a fan in the ways it is legally allowed to do so. That being, lots of circular talk about how everyone has the right to unionise:

"We are best able to keep building great games and a great place to work by working directly with employees, not through unions. In this regard, Wizards is not neutral on the question of unionization … in the end, we will respect the results of the election, no matter what our employees choose."

UWOTC-CWA is bargaining for "fair wages, career progression, and job security," as well as remote work protections and "sustainable workloads: We have been asked to do more work with less regard for our personal lives." Other concerns include healthcare, AI protections, and the ability to have legal ownership of creative work made outside of their jobs for WoTC.

As Wargamer itself is right to point out, UWOTC-CWA does have a strong lever to pull. Namely, that D&D and Magic: The Gathering are incredibly profitable. This earnings report shows that "Wizards of the Coast and Digital Gaming" raked in $568 million in operating profit over the past six months (before adjustments), while consumer products lost $62 million, and entertainment dragged just $23 million through the door.

In other words, if you're making most of your company's profit, you're in a prime position to negotiate with them. Unless your corporation decides to lay off 1,000 people, including those responsible for your biggest commercial success, again.

The developer of an upcoming horror drinking game has cancelled plans for a public Steam demo in favour of private preview sessions, citing concerns that AI vibe coders might use the demo's content to clone the game.

Drunken Goddess Reflux is a "shot glass Russian roulette" drinking game where players square off against an anime demon girl who loves you but also kind of wants to murder you (which sounds like a standard relationship to me), with the goal of getting your girl-frenemy so blotto that she barfs up her soul. Frankly, it doesn't sound like my cup of tequila, although there is a mechanic where the rules of the game grow weirder and wilder the more alcohol you imbibe—which sounds neat.

Regardless, developer Alliance Arts planned to release a Steam demo on October 19, but in a post on X (via Rock, Paper, Shotgun), the studio explained this is no longer the case. Instead, the studio will host "closed online play sessions for a limited number of participants."

"We sincerely apologize for the short notice," Alliance Arts added, before explaining its reasoning behind the demo's cancellation. Apparently, the demo would have come with "some restrictions on posting and streaming gameplay videos", which Alliance Arts decided it wouldn't be able to properly manage.

On top of this, however, the devs are also worried the demo will be exploited to create AI-coded clones. "We're concerned that the demo's content could be used to quickly imitate or replicate the game's presentation and gameplay with AI or other tools, and that such works could be released before launch."

It isn't clear which of these was Alliance Arts' bigger worry, but game developers having their projects vibe-cloned is becoming a more frequent issue. Back in March, a developer shared her game prototype online only to have it cloned within five hours. This isn't the only example either, over on Bluesky, McPixel developer Sos Sosowski shared numerous examples of indie game developers having their works almost instantly copied by AI cloners and released on Steam.

Games being flagrantly copied is not a new problem—the mobile space has struggled with it for years. But the way AI tools have sped up the process is clearly a cause for concern among developers—especially since one of the best ways to improve a game's chance of success in today's crowded market is to share the idea early and build a community around it. As such, unless Valve and other game stores take a firmer stance against outright copycats, we may well see more developers adopt Alliance Arts' approach.

Funcom, the developer behind Dune: Awakening and Conan Exiles, has announced a restructuring process that will result in layoffs at the company, and that current CEO Rui Casais will leave Funcom once the reorganisation is complete.

The decision comes after a shift in direction at Funcom, whereby the studio will focus wholly on supporting its existing survival RPGs. In a statement (via GamesIndustry.biz) Casais said that Dune: Awakening was "the biggest project we have ever undertaken, requiring many years of significant development resources across our studios". He continued that "moving from full production into long-term post-launch development and operations requires a different organisation.

"While we would have wanted everyone who helped build Dune: Awakening to continue with us, we cannot sustain the size and structure required during peak development as we move into this next phase. My focus now is ensuring the process is as supportive as possible for everyone affected, and to treat our colleagues with the respect and transparency they deserve."

Dune: Awakening was a big hit for Funcom when it was released in June last year, with the survival MMO shifting a million copies in two weeks to become the fastest-selling game in the Norwegian developer's history. Despite this initial success, however, the longer-term performance of the game is harder to gauge.

In the months following release, Awakening's player counts dropped substantially, with the game's PvP elements and faction-based endgame receiving a mixed response from the community. Funcom enacted a round of layoffs in October last year, while last month the studio overhauled Dune: Awakening to pivot away from its MMO elements, adding both solo play and PvE exclusive modes (though the game does still support more competitive multiplayer).

Alongside the changes to Awakening, Funcom's other survival game Conan Exiles also received a substantial upgrade this year, getting a new engine, a major paid expansion, and an "enhanced endowment slider" for fancier player-character genitals.

Now that both those reworks are complete, Funcom's plan seems to be to rest on its games for the foreseeable future. In a chat with GamesIndustry last month, Funcom's Chief Creative Officer Joel Bylos said the studio is "not ready to start a new game" and that any plans for future projects amounted to "wispy thoughts in the back of our heads."

Funcom did not share the number of employees affected by the layoffs. But in a press release, the company stated that restructuring "begins now" and that it will not share additional details until after the process has concluded "out of respect for the employees involved." Once the reorganisation is complete, Rui Casais will be succeeded by Scott Junior, Funcom's Chief Product Officer and Executive Producer on Dune Awakening.

US Representative Ritchie Torres, a Democrat from New York City, announced today that he will introduce the "Power To The Players Act."

If it becomes law, the bill will see the US Federal Trade Commission create regulations that protect our "ability to own and play" purchased games, according to Torres' office.

"When you pay for a game, you should own it," says Torres. "Consumers must have the right to own, the right to play, and the right to transfer the games they buy. A game that can be taken away the moment a company pulls the plug is not a purchase. It is a rental disguised as a sale."

The game ownership issue is longstanding on PC, which moved to digital distribution a couple decades ago, but has recently come to the foreground of public consciousness as the consoles also transition away from discs. Earlier this year, Sony announced that it will end physical disc production in 2028.

The related problem of online games being decommissioned before players are done with them has also received more attention in recent years. The Stop Killing Games campaign in particular has raised the issue's profile, arguing that basic offline functionality should be expected when online games are retired. Founder Ross Scott and organizer Moritz Katzner gained an audience with the European Parliament earlier this year.

As one of its prime examples of the problem, Stop Killing Games has pointed to The Crew, a Ubisoft racing game which went offline in 2024, preventing those who purchased it from continuing to play even the singleplayer campaign.

The aim of the Power To The Players Act is to establish and enforce a more genuine ownership of purchased games, as opposed to the revocable licenses we currently buy, and to require that offline modes be made available before online games are shut down.

For DRM-free games, such as those purchased from GOG, ownership is a non-issue: Once you have the game files, you can back them up and use them for as long as you can find a PC that'll run them. Realistically, the FTC is not going to mandate the eradication of software copy protection, so if passed the bill would presumably arrive at a softer definition of ownership.

I've reached out to Rep Torres' office for more information on what enforcement of the bill is expected to look like, should it pass.

Big Walk is the most fun I've had in a co-op game all year, perhaps for a few years; it's certainly at the top of my list for greatest games to play with friends. I'm not the only one who thinks that, just ask about anyone on the PC Gamer team or the other million players who picked the game up in its first week. But not everyone's had the chance to check it out as developer House House confirms that Big Walk still won't be coming to Xbox anytime soon.

"It has always been our intention for Big Walk to be played by groups of friends, and we know that keeping the game off Xbox runs counter to those intentions," House House says. "This decision means that some people will miss out on playing Big Walk with their friends, and we understand the disappointment we're causing. We are disappointed too. We would love for people to be able to play the game on Xbox, but not until Microsoft and/or Xbox have been removed as BDS boycott targets."

It's a tough decision but one that ultimately has its merits. Just last year it was revealed in a report that the Israeli military was using customised and specialised subset of Azure, provided by Microsoft, to store data from intercepted telecommunications in Gaza and The West Bank. This led to employee protests and Xbox being added to the BDS boycott targets.

"We've made this decision with the belief that meaningful change can be made in the world," House House adds. "That coordinated collective action can confront even the most powerful interests, and that one day. Palestine will be free.

House House told players curious about its motives to check the BDS campaign's own explainer as to why it is targeting Xbox and Microsoft. It also recommended reviewing "the successes this kind of pressure has already had on Microsoft, and especially, watching this great introductory piece by People Makes Games."

Three months after the very successful launch of Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, a game that sold two million copies in a single day (three million copies in a week!) and surpassed "annual expectations" in just two weeks, Ubisoft has laid off 70 people from developer Ubisoft Singapore. In a statement provided to PC Gamer, the publisher also said it plans to close the Ubisoft Redlynx studio outright.

This would be reason number two on our list of 25 foolproof ways to get laid off in the videogame industry: Make a game that sells so well, it blows away all expectations and makes even more money than anyone dared hope.

Of course, we've already seen this in play with Black Flag Resynced—Ubisoft Barcelona, a support studio on the game, had nearly a third of its number cut shortly after it launched.

The Ubisoft Barcelona layoffs might seem particularly egregious, coming so soon after it produced a much-needed win for a publisher that's spent the past few years taking big Ls, but it's not the only bad news.

A year after announcing a "restructuring proposal" for Ubisoft Redlynx aimed at reducing costs and ensuring "a stronger prioritization and efficiency across the company’s worldwide studio network," Ubisoft has now decided to close the studio outright.

Founded in 2000 and acquired by Ubisoft in 2011, Redlynx is best known for the Trials motorcycle racing games, the last of which—Trials Rising—came out in 2019. Since then, the studio supported the development of Star Wars Outlaws and released the mobile game Gwen's Getaway; a VGC report says Ubisoft decided to close Redlynx because it's not currently working on anything else, and downsizing wouldn't make it sustainable anyway.

Ubisoft acknowledged "the contributions" of the employees being put out of work in its statement, and said it will conduct the process "with care and respect."

Richard Gray, better known to gamers of a certain age as Levelord, has died. Gray's death was reported on social media by Apogee Entertainment, who paid tribute to his "legendary work on Duke Nukem 3D" and the lasting legacy he left behind.

We are deeply saddened by the passing of Richard “Levelord” Gray.From his legendary work on Duke Nukem 3D to the countless players and developers he inspired, Richard leaves behind a lasting legacy.Rest in peace, Levelord.

— @apogeeent.com (@apogeeent.com.bsky.social) 2026-10-16T23:38:47.968Z

Gray worked as a level and map designer on numerous shooters in the late 1990s and early 2000, beginning with Duke Nukem 3D in 1996. Shortly after that game launched, he left 3D Realms and co-founded Hipnotic Interactive, later renamed to Ritual Entertainment, where he worked on games including Quake: Scourge of Armagon, Sin, Star Trek: Elite Force 2, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, 25 to Life, and others.

He also earned a very specific fame for his "You're not supposed to be here" Easter egg in Duke Nukem 3D, which was only accessible via cheating.

Gray came to the game business at a (relatively, for the industry) advanced age. In a 2016 interview with Duke64Nukem.com he said he was 35 when he made his first Doom level, calling himself "a late bloomer with games," while Apogee founder Scott Miller said Gray was "in his 40s" when the studio hired him out of the Doom mod scene to work on Duke Nukem 3D.

"I hired him to work on Duke 3D in 1994, after seeing some of his really impressive Doom levels—he was pretty active in the mod scene," Miller shared with PC Gamer. "He then moved to Dallas, and worked from our offices. He got along well with everyone and impressed everyone with his dedication and talent. Richard loved to push the engine to its limits and he came up with a lot of fun level design tricks, using portals for example, that our other level designers learned from.

"Richard was also so helpful to anyone who approached him for help getting into the industry or becoming a better designer. He had a terrific sense of humor, too. For example, in Duke 3D he made this hung jury room. A real legend."

Other developers also paid tribute to Gray on social media:

Frederik Schreiber, Slipgate Ironworkers CEO: "Richard was, without a doubt, one of the kindest people I’ve ever met in the games industry. Incredibly humble, remarkably intelligent, endlessly creative, and always a pleasure to be around. Despite everything he had accomplished and the enormous influence his work had on my generation of game developers, he never carried himself as anything other than a genuinely good human being."

Richard B. Gray - LEVELORD11/15/1957 - 10/12/2026Just heard the news that an old friend of mine has passed on. Richard Gray - aka Levelord has departed the planet. I know he's dealt with cancer on and off for awhile now, a word that I cannot stand. Word comes from his wife Olga.

— @joesiegler.blog (@joesiegler.blog.bsky.social) 2026-10-16T23:38:48.226Z

Andrew Hulshult, composer: "Richard Gray was one of those industry vets I always looked forward to hanging out with when I had the chance. He was VERY smart and I always felt like I learned something just from hanging out with him. I'm thankful Rob and Christine Atkins introduced me to him. R.I.P. friend."

Cliff Bleszinski, Gears of War creator: "RIP Richard 'Levelord' Gray. You broke the mold, fella. Guy paved the way for so many level/environment designers."

Devastating news today. Richard “Levelord” Gray was such a great guy. Like many of our friends, I wish I could have hung out with him again. He was full of life, a gentle soul, and an excellent level designer. He was called “Levelord” for a reason.

— @johnromero.bsky.social (@johnromero.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-10-16T23:38:48.301Z

I loved the first episode of DN3D but was more drawn in by E2 and E3 that had such distinctive designs. We’re gonna miss you, man. You were one of the best.

— @johnromero.bsky.social (@johnromero.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-10-16T23:38:47.913Z

Siegler said Gray had struggled with cancer "on and off for a while now." but the cause of death was not announced. He was 68.