CONTROL Indies

This week in gaming news is an absolute tragic one.

News broke for us this morning that we have to part ways with our beloved developer friends, BioWare.

Electronic Arts today had announced 400 layoffs and several cancelled projects across their portfolio.

These changes include the cancellation of the next and fifth Mass Effect title, as well as the closure of BioWare itself.

This ripped the soul right out of my body when I read it.

Bioware was formed in 1995 and responsible for creating landmark titles in the RPG genre, including Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2, Mass Effect 1, 2 and 3, my beloved, beloved Mass Effect, and Dragon Age.

It was acquired by EA in 2007.

Quote, They also announced the cancellation of Project Lotus, a Mobile Sims title and reductions in Skate Developer Full Circle.

These changes came following the $55 billion leveraged buyout led by Saudi Arabia's investment fund, placing $20 billion in debt onto EA.

And that is an absolute tragedy.

Text in if you also know how to complete the suicide mission without anyone dying.

Shout out.

Incredibly sad considering all the massive layoffs going on right now and unfortunately there's a bit more sad news for developers with indies having massive fear of AI copycats.

We see with the recent Steam Next Fest hit about 8,000 plus new games and there's been a lot of buzz online of people saying that a lot of it is just AI generated.

Alliance Arts and WhoU have cancelled an upcoming demo for their game Drunken Goddess Reflux ahead of Steam Neckfest due to fears of Gen AI copycat games.

Similarly, Digital Sun, the team behind Moonlighter and Cataclysm, will be scaling back public playtesting for their new game, Revamp, due to similar concerns.

They issued a statement to their Discord community that said, "...we've been concerned by recent news of games being reverse-engineered, cloned, and published before the original is even out," said the studio.

With launch still months away, sharing a build with tens of thousands of players felt like too big a risk for revamp.

Yeah, so RuneScape Reignited has been announced and cancelled.

So the developers, Jagex, have cancelled a new WoW classic inspired player journey just two weeks after its announcement due to player concerns.

So, Reignited was intended as a way for new players to experience the game from a fresh starting point, as if the game was released for the first time with a reset economy, which makes sense.

It's well established.

And the removal of microtransactions, plus some zhuzhed up visuals.

Interesting.

However, the community has had a strong negative reception to the news, fearing that veteran players would be left behind and that an additional mode would permanently and artificially fracture the player base, which is like...