Yesterday I had a pile of EVE Online things to cover, today it is the video game industry more broadly, or big players therein.  So off the the bullet points… so many bullet points.

  • EA Kills Off BioWare, Video Game Community Mourns
    • Aftermath – Electronic Arts Closing BioWare, Laying Off Hundreds
    • Ars Technica – RIP BioWare: EA shuts down storied RPG studio after over three decades
    • Ars Technica – Leaked Mass Effect: Universe trailer gives a taste of what we’re all missing
    • PC Gamer – RIP BioWare: EA has shut down the legendary RPG developer
    • PC Gamer – With BioWare dead, EA lays out its ‘next chapter,’ and it’s pretty much as predicted: Guns and football are fine, and everything else is under the microscope
    • WCCF Tech – EA Shuts Down BioWare and Cancels Its 50-Person Mass Effect Project
    • Massively OP – EA officially shuts down BioWare and lays off 400 workers in the process
    • Game Informer – EA Is Shutting Down Legendary RPG Studio BioWare
    • Game Developer – EA closes BioWare after 30 years of game development
    • Parallel Context – Alas BioWare
    • Going Commando – Bye-Bye BioWare

It is one thing to think something bad is going to happen, to expect it, to feel like it is on the horizon, and another thing when the bad thing actually comes to pass.

So my write off last year of EA and whatever it was before the Saudi acquisition, didn’t do much to help when the dirty deeds occur.  The pain is real.

BioWare Bye-bye

EA announced this past week that they are shutting down the 31 year old studio that brought us so many great titles.  Sure, it has been part of EA for 19 years, and EA had already slowly sucked much of the life out of the place.  But there was always hope for something else out of them while they lasted.  Now that hope has been erased.

About 400 people are being laid off as part of this because that is what the industry is about these days… and this is just the first big cut, the item at the top of the list.  More will follow.

  • Xbox, where “Reset” means “Layoff”
    • Xbox Wire – Continuing Our Reset
    • Game Developer – Microsoft CEO says Xbox is simply ‘streamlining’ after cutting over 5,750 jobs in three years
    • Polygon – Xbox reportedly planning 3 more rounds of layoffs
    • Massively OP – Xbox is reportedly queuing up for three more layoff rounds starting as soon as this month

Asha Sharma would like to take a moment out from the previously announce layoffs, still in progress, to announce three fresh new round of layoffs.

I don’t know what else to add other than a company declaring that it has a plan doesn’t mean that it is a good plan… or even a coherent plan.  And if that plan seems diametrically opposed to their previous plan, well the message seems to be that they are just pretending they know what they are doing.  Everybody who rode the video game boom up thought they were brilliant when the wave elevated them.  Now reality has arrived to show us what they really are.

  • XBox Cloud Gaming Prices
    • Ars Technica – Xbox wants you to pay 24 to 40 cents per hour to stream games you already bought
    • Polygon – Xbox confirms Cloud Gaming’s new pay-as-you-go prices

Cloud Gaming?  More like Clown Gaming!

From the Ars Technica article above, if you just want to use XBox cloud gaming without game pass, this is what it will cost per hour.

  • 10 hours for $4 (~$0.40/hour)
  • 25 hours for $8 (~$0.32/hour)
  • 50 hours for $12 (~$0.24/hour)

Like, have they even seen the Nvidia cloud gaming pricing?  I mean, the XBox plans are cheaper than buying a new PC these days thanks to AI data centers gobbling up all the resources, but Nvidia is cheaper still… with free tiers.  Ad supported free tiers, and you are limited to one hour gaming sessions, but not to just one hour of gaming.

I don’t know.  Again, those are pretty trivial pricing schemes in the grand scheme of things, like the cost of hardware.  You have to take out a loan to buy a high end video card these days.  But, like so many thing, I expect those prices will go up in a year because you are paying to play your game on their hardware, and the hardware prices are going up for everybody.

  • The Next XBox Will be More Costly
    • Ars Technica – Microsoft reportedly projects $1,200 to $1,800 price for 2028 Project Helix
    • Aftermath – $1200-$1800 For A Console Is Such Commercial Suicide

One of the arguments for consoles was always that they were cheaper than a gaming PC.  Of course, with the price of everything going up, they probably still are.  But nobody’s salary is going up as fast.  More business for cloud gaming?

  • XBox: The RTO Will Continue until Morale Improves
    • RPS – Xbox reportedly mandate four days a week in office for staff close to Microsoft’s Washington HQ, up from three day requirement
    • Kotaku – Xbox Employees Who Survive Upcoming Layoffs Will Be Rewarded With More Mandatory Time In The Office If They Live Within 50 Miles

Just piling on at this point probably, but the boss wants to feel good about herself by being able to look out over the sea of serfs toiling on her behalf, looking as busy as possible to avoid being the next one on the chopping block.  And if there are not enough cubes for everybody, you can bet that will be solved with another “reset.”  Better tell her you read the latest gushing profile of her on whatever business site is trying to help rehabilitate Xbox this week.

  • AI Slop Turns Steam Next Fest into Steam Slop Fest
    • PC Gamer – Steam Next Fest has over 8,000 demos, as worthless vibe coded slop levels up
    • PC Gamer – Developer cancels public demo of its upcoming horror drinking game, fearing it will be instantly cloned by AI vibe coders
    • Aftermath – Game Developers Fear That Thieving AI Vibecoders Will Make Free Game Demos A Thing Of The Past
    • Aftermath – All My Hobbies Are Getting Slopped Up, And It’s Exhausting
    • EuroGamer – Steam Next Fest 2026 has more than double the number of demos than last year, but how much of it is generative ‘AI slop’?
    • Destructoid – PC gamers are annoyed with Steam Next Fest’s abundance of AI titles
    • Kotaku – Steam Next Fest Has Become A Massive Disaster And A Grim Look At The Future
    • GameSpot – AI Slop Presents A Much Bigger Problem Than Just Flooding Steam Next Fest
    • IGN – Steam Fans Are Begging for a No-AI Filter as Steam Next Fest Is Filled With Slop

Leaving aside all the other problems with LLMs, the fact that it gives people with no talent the impression that they are artists or creators is still a huge downside.  According to the PC Gamer article linked above, there are over 8K demos for Next Fest, almost double the last time, and a big percentage of them are awful AI slop copies of other awful AI slop titles.

Meanwhile, real devs are afraid that their new titles will be swiped and recreated by AI if they even show them off before launch.  Everything is just fodder for the plagiarism machine to make bad copies of original ideas… or unoriginal or even bad ideas… such that anything good gets lost in a plague of bad clones.

AI does not “democratize” the creative process, it just floods the internet with crap.  Sturgeon’s Law about 90% of everything being crap will need to be revised.  AI is making 99.99% of everything crap.

I have no sympathy of the huge mass of AI slop merchants making everything worse.  If you used AI to copy somebody else’s game you are not a game developer, you are a leech on the industry.  It is all a hunt to get rich quick on the next Flappy Bird or whatever

Steam needs to put an AI Content flag on titles so people can exclude them from searches.  I appreciate the efforts of the current AI statements that Steam requires, but they are not enough.  To start with, most of them look like bald faced lies or whiny justifications.  I literally saw one earlier that claimed that the videos of game play were not made with AI.  Yeah, but what about the actual game content?  All AI slop.

I am not going to claim to be a purist.  We live in a world where most companies are requiring devs to use AI as at least a coding assistant.  That is going on with my projects as well.  I highly doubt, being part of Microsoft, that WoW Forever hasn’t been partially assembled with AI coding assistance.  That is just the reality we have to live in these days.  If something is flagged for using AI to assist coding, that isn’t an automatic dismissal from me.

But it is one thing to use the tool with care and another to use it as a manure spreader to flood the zone with shit.

We do not want the Tim Sweeney version of the future where he fires his devs because he can vibe code awful, broken versions of the Epic Game Store.

We are still in the “drug dealer handing out free samples to get you addicted” stage of the AI bubble.  I cannot wait for the moment when the bills come due and the AI companies have to start charging what it really costs to produce all that slop.  I have never been more in favor of barriers to entry than I am today.