Among those laid off is the now-former senior creative director of The Sims 4 developer Maxis, Anna Huerta, who took to LinkedIn to confirm that she was among those let go from the company.

“After some incredible accomplishments at EA, my role as Senior Creative Director of The Sims was impacted by today’s restructuring. I’m incredibly sad that I won’t get to continue working alongside such talented people on projects we care so deeply about, but I’m looking forward to whatever comes next. I love making games, but what I value most is working with people who share a passion for creativity, collaboration, and building a strong studio culture.”

While it would have been easy to assume that Motive Studios would be relatively safe since the team is working on Marvel’s Iron Man as well as providing support for Battlefield 6, it appears that among those affected, layoffs from the studio include concept artist Brandon Le and senior gameplay designer Jamieson Shearar, both of whom took to LinkedIn to confirm this.

Ripple Effect has been hit by layoffs as well, with multiple of its now-former employees taking to LinkedIn to announce that their roles had been cut. This includes character artist Corey Thomas, outsourcing artist Brandon Garcia, and technical artist Turner Spring. The team was hit by these cuts while it was in the midst of offering ongoing support for Battlefield 6 and was even working on a “new experience” for the shooter.

Similarly, Respawn Entertainment – the studio behind Apex Legends and the Star Wars Jedi series – has also been hit, losing employees like UX project manager Randall Wong and operations product manager Catheryn Grant.

The cuts come in light of EA announcing its larger plans for the company through a publicly posted internal email that was also sent out to its employees. Through this, the company has said that it is working on a brand-new American Football project, dubbed Gridiron, and is also working on bringing back the Fight Night boxing game franchise.

“We have two new projects in development you’ll hear about over the next few months, including a brand-new, social-first open-world experience for our American Football team that we call ‘Project Gridiron,’ and we are also in pre-production to bring back a beloved, fan-favorite in Fight Night, leveraging capabilities from our simulation fighting team.”

According to COO David Tinson and chief studios officer Cam Weber, the company has canceled many of its in-development projects, including Mass Effect. The two have said that the company is “making deliberate choices” that would help it recognize and capitalize on “the greatest opportunities” for players and the company itself alike.

It is currently unknown whether these layoffs will also start affecting the sports game development teams. However, reports have indicated that the College Football franchise might go to the back burner in five years.

The Mass Effect adaptation has been in the works for quite some time at this point, and no real details about it have been revealed. However, earlier this year, the production faced some criticism over reports indicating that the show was being rewritten to cater to “non-gamers”. Co-showrunner Daniel Casey has since denied these claims, and went as far as to say that the original claims caught him off guard.

“So, I can’t talk about the specifics of what I’m writing (I’ve signed NDAs, etc.) — but for whatever it’s worth, that article by the Ankler caught me off guard just as much as you,” Casey wrote. “I don’t know where that ‘non-gaming audiences’ quote came from or who said it, but at no point has that been said to me.”

The adaptation was seemingly “on the verge” of being greenlit before head of global TV at Amazon MGM Studios, Peter Friedlander, reportedly asked for rewrites so that it could be “more appealing to non-gamers”. No further details about these alleged rewrites have come up.

It is worth noting that Amazon has a spotty track record when it comes to adapting gaming franchises into TV shows. While the live-action adaptation of Fallout has seen plenty of praise from critics and fans alike, others, like Like a Dragon: Yakuza, have been criticized due to the major changes made throughout the story and characters.

As for whether or not Mass Effect would make for a good TV adaptation, the potential show could easily capture the sci-fi adventures of Commander Shepard and the crew of the Normandy in an episodic manner while still building up to the larger threat looming on the horizon – the Reapers. However, there is also the question of whether this adaptation will follow the original trilogy’s story or if it will attempt to tell an entirely new one with a separate cast of characters.

In the meantime, BioWare announced that it is shutting down earlier this week. In its official blog post, the studio also said that its early development on the next Mass Effect game had come to an end. Later reports have indicated that this is part of large-scale layoffs at EA affecting around 400 employees. In an internal letter to the staff, COO David Tinson and chief studios officer Cam Weber said that many other projects had also been canceled, and that the company was making “deliberate choices” that could “align talent and investments where we see the greatest opportunities for players and long-term growth.

In light of this, a pair of now-former writers on the canceled Mass Effect project have spoken about how much they enjoyed working together at BioWare, and that the title would have been quite cool.

This is according to an internal staff letter by chief operating officer David Tinson and chief studios officer Cam Weber. Other projects have reportedly been cut alongside the next Mass Effect. “Across our portfolio, we’re making deliberate choices to align talent and investments where we see the greatest opportunities for players and long-term growth.”

It should come as little surprise that Electronic Arts is reportedly investing in its sports titles and free-to-play battle royale shooter Apex Legends. However, it also has the next entry in the Star Wars Jedi franchise and Marvel’s Iron Man developed by Motive (whose internal trailer leaked last August). While Battlefield support will continue, DICE is reportedly working with Respawn Entertainment on a new project, potentially the next Star Wars Battlefront, based on recent rumors.

Of course, depending on how it performs in the coming years, EA could also cut down on the College Football series. Despite a strong revival in 2024, sales have been down for this year’s entry. Coupled with high costs for player likenesses, arenas and whatnot, it may go on the backburner within the next five years based on recent reports. Stay tuned for more updates on that front in the meantime.

Origami claims that “at least” 250 people at Ubisoft Montpelier are working on the project and looking to enter alpha. While there was originally a huge focus on multiplayer with numerous planets, Ubisoft has seemingly scaled back and is now focusing on single-player “mainly” with a “strong story.” Co-op will still be supported, but a player hub for interacting with each other is seemingly no longer planned.

Of course, for anyone who’s followed Beyond Good and Evil 2 for all these years, this is just one more report to add to the pile. There’s no word on when we’ll see updated gameplay, much less a release date or platforms. However, if it’s any consolation, creative director Fawzi Mesmar said Ubisoft’s restructuring process hadn’t affected the project earlier this year.

More recently, Rik Godwin, who worked on Assassin’s Creed Shadows as a writer, was brought on as a consultant last September. Progress is seemingly being made, slowly and steadily. Here’s hoping it stays the course and eventually culminates in a release.

Sharma had announced the layoff plans back in July when she also cut around 1,600 jobs across a variety of Xbox’s studios and divisions. At the time, she spoke about the company’s margins being 3-10 times lower than other comparable companies, and mentioned that Xbox had simply spread itself too thin by pursuing so many investments that ultimately didn’t end up paying off.

“As that happened, our core business weakened, and we added more teams, more investment, and more time, hoping for a better outcome. And now the industry is facing the most severe hardware crisis in its history. We must reset Xbox.”

This move was followed by another round of layoffs affecting 268 employees, and even involved some reshuffling, with the Halo franchise being handed over to Activision. Halo Studios, in the meantime, is tasked with continuing to provide ongoing support for older Halo titles like Halo Infinite and this year’s Halo: Campaign Evolved.

“Since 2018, we have aggressively expanded our studio portfolio while the number of games created each month across the industry now outpaces the last ten years combined,” said Sharma. “We now find ourselves competing not only with the largest publishers, but also with smaller independent studios. It is neither possible nor desirable to own every great independent studio.

“We have also learned that we are not the best home for every type of studio; in a typical year, we lost 64 cents for every dollar we invested. As we reset Xbox, we will help independent creators succeed by providing open development tools and audiences to realize their vision.”

Sharma’s plans will culminate before the end of fiscal year 2027, with planned job cuts totalling up to approximately 3,200. In the meantime, reports have indicated that the recent rounds of layoffs have helped Xbox return to some semblance of growth. Noting that the company was in “freefall” following the Game Pass price hikes from last year, which led to a massive loss in subscribers, Sharma reportedly said during a recent town hall meeting that “we’ve started to return to growth.”

The move has also resulted in Xbox divesting itself of four of its studios – Undead Labs, Compulsion Games, Double Fine Productions, and Ninja Theory. The company may also be looking to spin off Arkane Lyon into an independent studio. However, no details about the studio’s fate have been revealed, at least for now.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has also spoken about the recent “streamlining” that Xbox has gone through, and said that it has been “great to see”. As for the future, the company wants to “invent the right sustainable business model that allows us to deliver gaming to more and more people.”

“People really need to understand that designing a console is a 5+ year process. Sony and MS never intended to release consoles for over $1k. There was just no way they possibly could have expected RAM/NAND prices to go up by 5x.” Responding to another social media user about rumors regarding the memory for the PS6 costing Sony $680 per console, KeplerL2 said, “PS6 BOM is approximately $200 lower than Magnus.”

Magnus is the AMD-designed chip that will power Microsoft’s Project Helix. The chip is rumored to be quite large and will be capable of slightly more horsepower than the AMD chip in the PS6. For comparison, the PS6’s chip is capable of 40 TFLOPS (trillion floating-point operations per second) of compute, while Project Helix’s Magnus is capable of 56 TFLOPS.

While many in the industry have called for Sony and Microsoft to push back their console release plans to wait for memory prices to stabilize, the production pipelines for Project Helix and the PS6 are noted as already being too far along for delays to be possible. In fact, KeplerL2 claimed last month that chips for both consoles had already been “taped out”.

The term “taped out” means that both companies have worked with chip-makers like AMD to finalize the design of the hardware that would power the consoles. The term itself has roots in the 1970s, when chip designs used to be written on magnetic data tapes before they could be shipped to fabrication plants. In the modern day, the process of taping out essentially means that the company has sent the design files to the fabrication plants that will then start actually building the chips.

As for whether a potential delay would help either of the companies, forum users have noted that Sony and Microsoft had to deal with challenging markets when they both launched the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, respectively. Despite supply chain constraints due to the global pandemic at the time, Sony and Microsoft decided to go ahead with launching their consoles because keeping them stocked in warehouses would just end up being more expensive in the long run.

“You can apply this logic to the PS5 launch. The PS4 was selling extremely well in 2019, and component costs and shortages were hitting the industry hard due to COVID in 2020. The first interview regarding potential PS5 hardware was in April 2019, while we already had that Amethyst announcement regarding next-gen last year.”

In the meantime, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has been discussing how the company needs to figure out how it can make next-generation consoles more affordable for consumers.

“DICE and, from what I’ve heard, Respawn are working on Battlefront 3. Not sure what this means for Battlefield.” In further replies, he even spoke about how cool it would be for a new Battlefront game to come out without EA having to put the Battlefield series on ice for the time being. “I want both Battlefield and Battlefront in the same cycle. Would be awesome. And yes, Star Warsdogs does sound cool.”

The last two Battlefront games were both released in years that lacked any Battlefield games, with the first entry of the 2010s revival coming out in 2015. Its sequel, aptly titled Star Wars Battlefront 2, was released in 2017. For the sake of comparison, 2015 was largely marked by post-launch support for Battlefield 4 along with the release of spinoff title Battlefield Hardline. Similarly, 2017 only featured post-launch DLC releases for the World War 1-themed Battlefield 1, with the next entry in the shooter franchise being released in the following year.

Interestingly, a report from this week has indicated that Lucasfilm has been in talks with Destiny and Marathon developer Bungie. According to Giant Bomb’s Jeff Grubb, DICE wouldn’t be working on Battlefront 3. “If the Force is not entrusted to DICE, it could land at none other than Halo, Destiny, and Marathon developer Bungie.” He did note, however, that “there are conversations at the very least about who should take it on,” and that it isn’t “in the works yet.” As for why Disney might be going with another company for a new Battlefront game, Grubb has reported that Disney has a “bad taste in their mouth from working with EA for a very long time.”

In the meantime, Star Wars fans have had plenty to enjoy thanks to new releases like Zero Company and Galactic Racer. While the franchise used to be known for offering quite a bit of variety across different genres in the 1990s and 2000s, the 2010s were largely marked by a few new Star Wars games that never really took any major risks when it came to game design. Lucasfilm Games executive Douglas Reilly has said that the company now plans to be less restrictive about what kinds of games are made using the IP.

He said that Lucasfilm is trying to be “more flexible about, like, who we’re willing to take pitches from and good ideas can come from a lot of different places.” Ultimately, this means that the company is “exploring all kinds of things [with] large and small partners that I think are going to continue to surprise folks who are like, ‘Oh, they’re doing a thing with them. That might be interesting to see how that turns out.”

For more details about recent Star Wars games, check out our reviews for Zero Company and Galactic Racer. Both titles are available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.

While Disney, which owns the rights, is certainly considering the same, it could tap into an unusual alternative: Bungie, developer of Marathon and Destiny, according to Giant Bomb’s Jeff Grubb in the latest Game Mess Mornings episode.

“If the Force is not entrusted to DICE, it could land at none other than Halo, Destiny, and Marathon developer Bungie,” he said. He noted that the game doesn’t seem to be “in the works yet,” but “there are conversations at the very least about who should take it on.” And while DICE is still in that conversation, Disney reportedly has a “bad taste in their mouth from working with EA for a very long time.”

That last part is probably an open secret, as Star Wars Battlefront 2 caused massive controversy in 2017 due to its Star Cards. The backlash spurred government regulatory measures against loot boxes in some countries. Of course, DICE remained committed to removing the system, overhauling its progression, adding new content and improving several other areas to the point that the sequel became very well regarded among fans.

Regardless, Bungie is an intriguing choice because Marathon, despite some ambitious plans for the coming months, isn’t exactly setting the gaming world on fire with its player numbers. Nevertheless, it doesn’t seem set in stone, so stay tuned for more updates.

The job listing notes that responsibilities include coordinating “the launch of physical Xbox games across all platforms.” The Supply Strategist will also have to “lead development and oversee execution of global supply positioning strategies across all stages of the product life cycle, ensure that inventory is positioned to deliver working capital/cost/service goals, and oversee the sales and channel execution of those games.”

The fact that Xbox is continuing to invest in its supply chain management indicates that the company doesn’t have any plans to end the production of discs for its games. As one Reddit user has noted, however, this isn’t a brand-new job position. Rather, the position has already existed, and Xbox is simply trying to replace whoever was in that role before this. It is worth noting that Xbox would be unlikely to pursue filling out this role if it didn’t plan on continuing with physical releases of games for its platforms.

While the company hasn’t yet made any outright statements about what it plans to do with physical games in the future, CEO Asha Sharma has said that it wants to “make sure people have a choice” between physical and digital media. “I know players love physical media, and I know there’s a lot of benefits in digital media, and I want to make sure people have a choice.”

On the subject of Project Helix – the company’s next-gen console – Sharma was hesitant to offer any concrete details regarding whether it would have a disc drive or not. However, she spoke about how affordability is going to be a big factor in the potential success of the console.

“This next generation, we have to be thinking about efficiency and affordability alongside performance. As an industry, we’re in the middle of ‘Rampocalypse’. All of the industry needs to start to innovate on affordability and efficiency. That is something that we have not had to do [previously].

“But with the crisis that’s currently happening in hardware and components, it is absolutely something all of us need to be thinking about and innovating on and giving people more choice in terms of how they play their console and how they purchase their console.”

In the meantime, Xbox has continued to offer more options to its users by recently launching its disc-to-digital initiative. Through this, users can convert their Xbox One or Xbox Series X game discs into digital licenses, allowing players to start playing without having to keep the disc in the console. However, the company has also noted that this won’t allow players to simply give their old discs away.

“A disc-to-digital license is associated with the qualifying game disc. Without possession of the qualifying disc, you may lose the disc-to-digital licensing benefits. For example, if you lose, sell, give away, or otherwise no longer possess a qualifying disc, access to associated disc-to-digital licenses may be limited or revoked.”

While behind Ghost of Tsushima’s almost seven million sales in the same period, Elliott claims its revenue is $407 million versus the latter’s $418 million. Yōtei costing $70 instead of $60 and seeing fewer discounts since launch are reportedly contributing factors, and it apparently sold 500,000 copies in this year’s third quarter.

As for the Complete Edition, almost 50,000 players have reportedly purchased the $15 upgrade since its launch, generating more than $2 million in revenue. Interestingly, Yōtei allegedly had 150,000 daily average players for two months before October 1st, and peaked at 327,000 when Echoes of Sekigahara went live.

Ghost of Yōtei is available on PS5, and while Sony reportedly planned to port it to PC, that never happened when it returned to making its single-player titles console-exclusive. Check out our review of the base game here, and our impressions of Echoes of Sekigahara and the free Most Wanted mode. Spoiler: If you liked Atsu’s initial revenge tour, you’re likely to enjoy the expansion.