EA Closes Bioware and Cancels Mass Effect

Hey everybody, welcome to Game Mess Mornings with me, Jeff Grubb, your host from GiantBomb.com. Thank you for tuning in. In this episode, we're going to be talking about the end of Bioware and a bunch, or a big launch, excuse me, for Wolverine. It's going to be a good one because we have Rhiannon Bevan on the show.

Rhiannon, how are you doing?

Oh, it's the death of Bioware episode, so not particularly good, but happy to.

Be here, if that's the right word.

Yeah, well, I'm glad you're here is how I feel for sure. Glad to have you on for this one. We'll get through it together for sure. Yeah, frustrating time in the video game industry. Feels like we've been able to say that every day for quite some time. But yeah, like I said, glad you're here. How are you doing otherwise?

Otherwise, yeah, I'm going. Exciting time in the game. It's a volatile game and time in the industry. Yeah.

Yep. What is that to say?

What is that to say?

I know. Absolutely. Yeah.

Well, I know you were working at the gamer and that's all that stuff's blowing up.

Where can people find you now?

Just so if you want to keep following your stuff, have you had any chance to do any freelance work or can people find you on social media?

Let's let's get that out of the way up top.

So. yeah elephant in the room i got laid off so this is very uh what was really funny i was talking to my girlfriend about the bioware stuff yesterday and she was like i think you're more upset about bioware than your own layoff and i think that's probably true um but yes you can find me on blue sky at re the witch and i really appreciate everyone who's given me a follow because it's nice to still be relevant Other than that, I've got a few plates spinning freelance-wise, so I'm hoping you'll see my name elsewhere soon.

Right now, I've been lucky enough to have a piece up on Start Menu, so please give that out.

Start Menu's also great, so check it out anyway.

Excellent. Yeah, well.

it doesn't feel like there's anywhere else to turn at this point in this industry, but glad we can get you on this show at the very least.

I know I've said that a bunch, but I really do mean it. Absolutely.

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You can also catch the show later with chapters and timestamps on YouTube. Hello, YouTube. All right, we have a lot to get into, so let's start the morning mess with... Yes, EA closes BioWare and cancels Mass Effect. This happened not long after yesterday's show. Kind of the big numbers here, EA is cutting 400 other jobs and then 50 jobs at BioWare. They seem to be moving around some other people at BioWare, but there wasn't a lot of people left at that studio at this point.

Apparently, Mass Effect, yes, it's canceled, but it was also still in very early development.

They hadn't really begun that in earnest still, and it seemed like it was in this limbo, being affected by being sold to Saudi Arabia, that is EA being sold to Saudi Arabia, and Jared Kushner.

That is really relevant here.

You will see shitheads try to say they made the Dragon Age woke, and that's why this studio had to be closed. And of course, anybody with a working brain knows that's not what happened here. What happened here is EA had been pushing their developers to go in a bunch of different directions for a long time. Bioware responded to that, was going to make a multiplayer Dragon Age to satisfy those demands of management at EA. And then in the meantime, EA is putting together a package to sell itself to Saudi Arabia and Jared Kushner that saddled it with $ 18 billion in debt. It's a leveraged buyout, one of these buyouts where one of the ways you get sold is basically just, take on debt to pay for yourself, to pay for the new company, to take you.

It's a nightmare world. We live in that, that debt is going to have to be serviced in the future. So instead of that money that would have once maybe gone and seem, seem to likely to go to making a new mass effect, that money now needs to go to servicing this debt. And they are refocusing all their efforts on anything that can have a lot of microtransactions so they can make.

Even more money. And that money also will go toward servicing this debt.

Um, It is very frustrating to me, Rhiannon, because I love Bioware. I felt like the people who were working there were doing their best to kind of get that studio back into a place that it deserved to be.

Dragon Age, the Veil Guard, is a game that, while.

A lot of people have issues with it, it is a little bit, it has some flaws that are pretty noticeable as soon as you get below the surface, for sure. And all of those can be traced back to its development history. And the fact that that game came out at, all was as seamless looking, appearing as it was, despite the fact that it was cobbled together, was a miracle.

And it's like the people who did that work don't get the credit. They get the blame, which is absurd to me. Rhiannon, how did all this make you feel?

Infuriated. I mean, I've been angry since those post-Vailguard layoffs because I think what a lot of people missed at that time is that was the end of, we now got the end of Mass Effect. That was the end of Dragon Age. I think I covered at the time every single writer who had ever touched the Dragon Age series and every editor who had touched the Dragon Age series was no longer at Bioware as of about early 2025.

And I was devastated and angry because, as you said, they were punished for following their orders from the higher-ups. I think every problem that ever affected Bioware that led to this can be traced back to, I'd say, around Inquisition because that was a huge success, monstrous success. And EA, the response from EA, from what I've gathered from people, is that they were like, oh, well, if it made loads of money, it could have made way more money as a live service. So you were kind of stupid for doing it as a single player game.

Why did you do that?

You never told us that this many people liked your stupid fantasy series. Oh, well, they do. So now it's got to get FIFA money. I think it's Mark Dara from Bioware who did a video saying that they were told that they wanted, that the reward for Dragon Age doing well in Inquisition was to, For EA to say it has to be a $ 1 billion franchise, which is absurd.

It was a very well-performing series. It was not a $ 1 billion. And even then, they tried to cobble together how it could go. So there was plans for live service. There were plans to try and pump out some sequels faster. And EA just made it so none of these could happen.

They were like, okay, make a sequel.

No, no, actually you have to cancel that because now we want a live service and you've got to start from the start. Okay. Oh no, actually maybe a single player sequel is the best idea. So can you, you've got like what, two years to turn a live, so not even to start again, to turn a live service, the bones of a live service into a single player game.

Now I am a diehard Dragon Age fan. I am not particularly fond of the Veil Guard, not because of what the creators did. They did their best, but it, You can tell it was being pulled in a million different directions.

This is how I feel about Metroid Prime 4.

I have the same situation with it where it's like I can see where the developers were struggling with the pieces that they were left with. And that hurts me as someone who deeply loves Metroid Prime. So anyone who deeply loves Dragon Age, I'm sure was having a very similar experience of like, I can see because I know this team and I know what they were trying to go for.

And obviously what they were saddled with here was is, is unacceptable.

If, if what you're trying to make is a great video game and the fact that it happened, that game kind of happens in parallel to Baldur's Gate three, this sort of alternative world of what a, an RPG ass RPG can look like. It just struck home that much harder for anyone who was paying attention. Oh, this, this studio was left out to dry in a lot of ways. And, and you know, I talked to some people who, especially people in the EA ecosystem. And a lot of times it's like, you know, the people in charge of the studios need to share some of the blame. And that's, I bet that is also the case here to a certain degree. But it's clear to me that the original sin with a lot of this is always EA coming back to that table and saying something like that was successful.

It could be a billion dollars instead. We know corporations behave that way. People in this ecosystem will know. Like Vinny telling that story, like, hey, can we get a raise? They're like, well, what if you reach this number? And Vinny's like, we did reach that number, actually. And they're like, okay, well, in that case, reach this number instead. Right to his face, they say those kinds of things. We know corporations do that over and over again. And that is the kind of.

Leadership that does lead to a frustration.

Fractured studio where the talent does want to get out of there and and and then there's you're kind of left with like what does a team like Bioware look like after a while and then I think this is a little unfair that people have been like well none of the people I cared about the made the games I liked are still there First of all.

That's not true.

They were.

A lot of them were.

But even still, a lot of the people that did the work to save those games did so because they loved Bioware.

They loved those games.

And they are your kin if your love is Dragon Age and things like that. And they deserve a lot more respect than what they're getting in this moment. And I know from our side of the internet, from the people who have a reasonable brain, they are getting a lot of it.

But still, it's It's not enough.

And now we have this this EA that is that we kind of could have predicted for a while here was was going to be behaving this way. I think for as devastating as it is that BioWare is closing, not too many people are surprised. It felt like this is where we were headed for a while. It is, you know, when you start looking at them going, hey, we got to service this debt. yeah, they weren't going to see Mass Effect through, but it's like, man, before they were sold to Saudi Arabia, I did believe that we were still going to get Mass Effect, and it's a shame that we're not.

So did I. You know, I can't give an exact figure, but I was told by someone close to the situation last summer, the headcount of Bioware after those layoffs, it was abysmally low. I was taken aback by the number. It was, I believe, less than the 50 that have now been laid off. And so I thought, okay, Sure, the logical thing to do here is if you've got any scrap of sense left in the higher ups is to rebuild Bioware. Now that's tragic because you're not going to get back that talent you've lost, that talent you have absolutely squandered. But okay, start small, grow as the next Mass Effect grows, kind of a bit like how Larian's always doing, like it's sustainable growth targets of growing with the projects, not just sort of like mass hiring people.

And I thought, okay, well, we're going to enter this new period. And the talent attached to the new Mass Effect was phenomenal. There was some really good gets and even more good gets that we're finding out now as people are coming forward and saying they were writers who are now affected by the layoffs. It's just, I understand they need to repay this debt somehow. But this has to be a drop in the ocean compared to all of the various goings on at EA. This just tells me the new owners have no long-term thinking at all.

A great long-term goal would be to say that you are the owners that rebuilt Bioware from the ashes, which would be a disgusting and insulting thing to say to the people who were screwed over. But it's something, it's a success story and you get any mass effect out of it.

But they don't care. There's no forward thinking.

Nope. None whatsoever.

It is about maximizing the things that make money today and making like, look, it really is just looking at the chart. Show me the ones that are going up into the right. And we will assume that if we do more of that or whatever we've done so far, if we exacerbate that, that's the word for me, because obviously a lot of that isn't shitification. It is squeezing more blood from the stone, that stone being our wallets, keep doing more of that. And that's the business model.

And again, Good luck with that, EA. We know where that's going to lead for you. It is going to be running into a wall. And then suddenly the people that you were squeezing will turn away and find something new and exciting. And it won't be made by Electronic Arts. It will be made by someone else. And you have not worried about building any brand loyalty.

Of course you haven't.

That's been something that you gave up decades ago at this point. So you're the name, name that brand that you might like to sort of, you know, travel on that you might try to bring to the market and say, Hey, we're EA, we're making this.

Well, that's nothing. What you did have was Bioware. Well, now you don't have that anymore. And it's, it's clear. You're right. No future planning.

And to speak to that, they do have some other things that are, that are shaking loose from the story and basically, you know, a little salve for the wound that they're trying to provide and, So EA confirms DICE and Respawn are collaborating on a new project. Variety reports citing multiple sources. That is Star Wars Battlefront III. EA is not publicly named, excuse me, has not publicly confirmed that's what they're working on. Worth pointing out, and we'll get to like what the actual layoffs looked like here in a second. Actually, I put that way down there.

I'll kind of bring that back up here.

In a second. over the last several years.

They kind of need both DICE and Respawn to collaborate on this because there were a ton of layoffs at DICE and Criterion and a lot of the studios that worked on that very successful last Battlefield game. And so if they want to make a game like this in conjunction with whatever is happening with Battlefield next, they're going to need someone like Respawn to come in and help.

And what does that mean for Apex Legends? They do say they intend to keep making Apex Legends, but that game is sort of just you know, hobbling along a little bit. There's some other stuff here. Iron Man and the next Jedi games remain priorities. Those are the two things that are surviving all this, it seems like. Apparently some of the Bioware people that weren't laid off moved over to the Iron Man game. And then EA is prioritizing the Sims Project Evergreen, pausing Project Lotus. Looked into this, Project Evergreen is sort of a revamped, single-player focused Sims game that is about making sure that it's easier than ever to buy all the DLC and that the game runs great on handhelds like the Ally and even the

Steam Deck. And so they're kind of focusing on that because I think they believe a lot of their audience is showing up on those devices. And then Lotus was the mobile-focused one. They're sort of pulling back on that instead, probably because they have trained that audience to spend a lot of money on DLC in the other game, and they don't want to screw that up. They also disclosed Project Gridiron, a social open world American football experience. So if that sounds familiar, there's been a similar thing in like 2Ks sports games like NBA and wrestling where it's like this social hub and it leads to a lot of microtransaction spending. And EA is going to try to mimic that in both its soccer games and its American

football game here with Project Gridiron. good luck with that as well. And then let's see here. They also confirmed that, oh yeah, Fight Night. Fight Night is a game that they just confirmed as well. So these are the things that they're working on. Meanwhile, there were more layoffs at Full Circle, which makes Skate.

Let's see here.

They had, yeah, and then those 400 layoffs across the rest of the company, which is like another 3%, 4% cut in total jobs at that company. something that we've heard repeatedly since like 2023 from EA, them cutting 3% to 6% to 7% of jobs at any one time. Not a very inspiring outlook for EA when it comes to their future games. It's how I'm feeling about it.

How do you feel about it?

Yeah, I mean, exactly what you just said. I think EA has now got itself into the Xbox problem of even if you announce a game, I'm not going to believe that That actually is a priority. I will not believe that game exists until it's in my hands or not in my hands because we don't do physical games anymore.

Until it's on my screen and I am playing it. Because you can announce a game now and it's gone within a week. So I'm very, very worried for any single player games coming out of an EA studio. I'm even worried about the next Star Wars Jedi game because it's one of those things that does well, but I don't think especially the new owners, understand why it does well.

They're just going to think.

They've rushed out the last couple as well. And this is the last in the trilogy.

Yeah. Why wouldn't they just fart this one out? Yeah.

Yeah. Like I can imagine sort of less resources going to it. This is just me like hypothesizing, but I just don't think it's the kind of game that they see the value in. I maybe I'm wrong. I'd like to be wrong considering how great Zero Company and Galactic Races is doing.

But again, is that just.

Something is that something they don't understand they'll just go well maybe it would have done better if it was this you know so i think and the sims as well the sims fans are incredibly worried about the future i think the future is going to be not the you know the sims hasn't been about you know anything other than shaking people down for money but somehow it is going to get worse and i don't think we're going to see the innovation that fans have been asking for from the sims for years now, giving, you know, creating this demand for a Sims rival or Sims killer that we've seen with like Paralives. I just don't think this company understands what people are after. You know, Paralives is doing well in its own niche because of its

much more consumer friendly practices. And because, you know, the updates are free, the updates, yes, it's coming out in early access. It's being built with the community. The Sims isn't going to be that anymore. There are some great people still working on The Sims, but their hands will be tied by what management expects from them. And I think we've already had a taste of what is wanted from them. And it's going to be, yeah, ways to get The Sims 4 in more hands, the ways, you know, ways to get more value and money out of The Sims 4, I think, rather than really pushing the boat out much more.

Yeah, that just feels like you can apply the attitude at EA right now to everything we're looking at and sort of figure out what it looks like next.

And it's like, yeah, Sims. was one thing. It will be worse if you are someone.

Who actively engages with that because they think you are worth more money to them and they think they can get more from you. So, so what are some ways that like you could start to imagine as a player of the Sims that they could try to extract more value from you? That's probably going to happen. And it's going to happen across the board here with this like project gridiron as well, which. you know, I think a lot of people, I hear that as someone who has played Madden games in the past and played some sports games in the past.

I'm like, I don't, I don't want that. They're like, yeah, don't worry. We weren't trying to get you.

There are players who only play these games and, and we are going to target them as much as possible. And we believe that we can get them in the, in here and spend even more money and turn them into the next whale.

And, and that's the plan. I'm like, Oh, cool.

What about playing a fun video game? And they don't even know what that means. Um, All right, I did have this down here. Let me move this back up. EA's history of layoffs before this, this is since 2023. In March 2023, they cut 6% of their workforce, 775 jobs. Then in August 2023, they cut 50 jobs at BioWare.

February 2024, another 5% of their workforce, 670 jobs. In January 2025, there was two dozen layoffs at BioWare.

Some others were transferred.

In April 2025, 300 jobs were lost, including 100 at Respawn.

Then in May 2025, another 250.

This is when Black Panther was canceled and that cliffhanger studio was closed. In February 2026, Now we have an undisclosed number of cuts at SkateDev Full Circle, then an undisclosed number of cuts in March 2026 at the Battlefield Studios, DICE, Criterion, Ripple Effect, and Motive, although it sounded like those were pretty substantial. In June 2026, another undisclosed number of cuts to Recruitment, Customer Support, Trust.

And Safety, IT. This affected their Hyderabad studio and remote U.S. staff.

Um, this felt like obviously a run up into, Hey, we're going to get acquired and now go private. And so we're going to try to slim down even more. And now we have yesterday's cuts, which amount to about 3% of the workforce at EA. Um, kind of doing, doing a little bit of math. They were hiring up all throughout this time as well. So it's like they were replacing jobs, but it's like, where, where was that investment going? It, this always felt like take stuff away from specifically like BioWare, or studios that are just at a low point or just released a game and shift it back into more people working on FIFA or more people working on Battlefield until, of course, they released Battlefield and then cut those jobs as well. You know, just

going through that, it's like, man, how does this industry keep itself going when every year there are multiple hundreds of job cuts from EA? And it's hard for me to imagine this feeling like a healthy industry after all that.

I think what's shocking is that this is this is just the last three years of EA. They have been, you know, they were the big industry boogeyman before, you know, the rest of the industry decided to play catch up and try and outdo them. So this is just, I think the effect that EA has had on the gaming industry has cannot be overstated. It's just, I'm not saying they created this cause I'm sure PlayStation and Xbox are perfectly willing to do layoffs of their own for their own reasons. But, I cannot even fathom how you would go about being a developer when this is the layout of one of the, you know, what were they calling themselves in that internal email? Like the biggest publisher of Western games, you know?

Yes. Something along those lines, the biggest Western publisher, basically.

And this is what your trajectory looks like. Yeah. This is what your, you know, the job security at your company is like, like, how are we, how does anyone operate under this? How does anyone create art under these conditions? You can't, you know, it's, I think that, you know, games like, if I really do hope that last Star Wars Jedi game comes out, because that might be the last of its kind for, you know, from this version of EA, because they're just, there is no way they're going to green light stuff like that again.

Yep. Yeah.

If, you know, Battlefront, we can get excited about a new Star Wars Battlefront. I like Star Wars Battlefront. I like shooters from Respawn and from DICE. boy, Respawn working on a DICE game does sound like Respawn getting absorbed into DICE. And we know how that goes in this industry with a big shooter franchise and an established studio is now working on that. Yeah, they get absorbed into it and you never hear from them again. We're probably at the beginning of that process right now. And you're right, Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order 3 could very well be the last from Respawn and more broadly the last of its kind from EA for quite some time. All right.

Let's let's take a break when we come back. We did get the September Games report from Matt Piscitello. We'll talk about that for a little bit. Talk about how Gears of War E-Day is doing in the face of its cost. If you want to skip out on these ad messages, we're about to go to giantbomb.com slash join.

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Hit up our friends over at merchant.tech slash giant bomb. All right, it's Game Mess Mornings. That's Rhiannon Bevan. I'm Jeff Grubb. We're continuing on with the headlines now. Matt Piscitella at Cercana. He writes the September 2026 U.S. video game market highlights and points out that Marvel's Wolverine helped PlayStation Club big gains in September U.S. video game sales.

Overall video game sales were down just around 1%, basically flat from last year. The video game content down 2%, video game hardware up 12%. A lot of that is powered by Wolverine here. Turns out people were waiting for that game. You get a PlayStation, you show up for that. If you've been waiting on the sideline, Wolverine was apparently a good time to jump in in the lead up to Grand Theft Auto 6.

At least that's how I'm reading this.

The top 10 for new games sold, Rhiannon, in the United States.

A lot of new games on here.

In fact, eight of the 10 games on the top 10 are new this month, with Wolverine being number one. Apparently, I think Matt pointed out, it is number 11 for year-to-date sales. So just barely missing out on the top 10, which... You know, I think thinking back, Spider-Man, when it came out, just immediately to the top of the charts, very near the top of the charts for a year to date.

So that might be a little bit of an insight here of like, oh, yes, Spider-Man obviously probably did a little bit better. But Wolverine wasn't some snoozer either. Number two was NBA 2K27. That's its second month on the chart, I believe. It was number one last month. Then all of these are now new to the chart. EA Sports FC 27, Fire Emblem Fortunes Weave at number four. The Blood of Dawnwalker at number five. War Dogs at number six.

Number seven was Onimusha, Way of the Sword. Number eight, Halloween the Game. And number nine, Ace Combat 8, Wings of Thief.

Let's see.

I think Wings of Thief includes Digital Point of Sales Actuals. Okay, so they actually got that in there. And then number 10, it's second month, I believe, Madden NFL 27, although there's like three ways to buy that game. So it probably did a little bit better than that. they are attracted separately on these charts.

Yeah.

Despite all those new games coming out again, the software content was down 2% compared to last year, but people showing up for a variety of different games that month. And it's like, it doesn't seem like anything missed its audience. It seems like everyone, everyone that did show up to the party with a new game did pretty well.

What do you think?

No, I completely agree. And I'm, I'm like really pleasantly surprised by that. I think everyone who was saying, that everyone sort of, you know, being all Duma about this sort of pre GTA six rush was kind of talking nonsense because publishers.

Know what they're doing.

They, you, like you said, they're all going for a different audience. They're not fighting for the same crowd. Yeah.

This is just proof that that, that is true.

You don't, it doesn't matter if you're releasing in a similar window or like a week after another game, if you know, like fire emblem and the blood of Dawn Walker probably aren't, you know, there's a lot of crossover, but not massively, you know what I mean? For one, there are different platforms.

So that helps.

Yeah, I think this is a really good thing to see in the pre-GTA 6 rush, and I'm very glad it isn't just all going to be about 4SX. I mean, it will be in a few weeks' time with GTA 6 here.

Check my watch. Very briefly.

I am glad that we got this rush of some really solid games that, like you said, found their audience.

Yep.

When it comes to Wolverine specifically, Matt writes here that it was the best-selling game of September in full dollar sales, debuting as 26th number 11 best-selling game, as I mentioned. It was also, let's see, it generated the highest launch month full game dollar sales ever. raised Sony published title since February, 2024, which was the debut of hell divers too worth pointing out hell divers too, also on PC and did very well on PC. So Wolverine did its job.

Right. And I, I think, uh, you know, the.

Cool or reviews, it's hard to, it's like, cause I don't want to be like, people didn't say that game was bad for the most part disappointing, but, but how disappointing, I don't know, whatever the reviews were cooler than maybe expectations would have suggested.

Um, This game was never really going to pay that price.

I think it's like, oh, if the next game from Insomniac kind of has similar reviews, people might be a little bit more hesitant if some of the audience was unsatisfied. Wolverine is a big name that people have been waiting for. They did show up for it and it did its job of. selling PlayStations and giving people who already own PlayStations a big game to get excited about in the months leading up to GTA 6. And yeah, so it lived up to its side of the bargain. And now Sony can kind of shift everyone over to be like, and now here's the main event, the game you actually have been waiting for.

So it seems like that worked, right?

Yeah, no, exactly.

I think... It sounds weird to say I'm glad it succeeded. It's not a bloody indie game.

It's a bloody, you know, PlayStation first part.

But it's nice to see that it rose above the discourse, I guess. And when I say that, I purely mean the anti-woke bollocks. I don't mean the, you know, genuine critiques about the game.

It's, like you said, the reviews weren't even bad. Like, we're just.

In this era where I think in online discourse, there is a 10 out of 10 or there's a nothing, you know.

Right.

It's like, you know, a game that takes.

game that takes you know six seven years to make hundreds of million dollars you know you have a certain level of expectation and we build that into all this stuff and whether that's fair or unfair.

Yeah exactly um i think i'm i always knew it was going to do well despite everything being said about it it was always going to do well it's marvel it's wolverine people have wanted a wolverine game x-men fans are like really passionate i think people realize that like how much right now yeah like x-men fans will turn up they might not like it but they'll turn up Exactly.

Yes.

And yeah, we'll again, we'll see if like the next game pays the price or something like that. I would I would imagine the next game from them is going to be going back to something Spider-Man related.

So that probably doesn't pay the price at all.

Let's see here. Shifting over to hardware. September video game hardware spending grew 12 percent. That's that to three hundred and sixty two million dollars year to date spending trails. Twenty twenty five space by nine percent at two point nine billion dollars. That's totally to be expected with the price increases, which we'll get to the details of the price increases here in a second. PlayStation 5 hardware dollar sales grew 43% in September when compared to a year ago.

Spending fell year on year for both Xbox Series, minus 2%, and Nintendo Switch 2, down 12%. Nintendo Switch 2, that was its launch year. These comparisons are going to continue to be very difficult for the Switch 2 for quite some time. Also, I think the price increase went into effect. Again, we'll talk about that in a moment. Sony's dollar share of the video game market reached its highest point in a month since May 2025, which I think is right before the Switch 2 came out. PlayStation 5 led all hardware platforms in both unit and dollar sales in September.

Total video game unit or hardware unit sales fell 3% in September compared to a year ago. PlayStation 5 unit sales increased by 22% year on year, with the Switch 2 unit sales falling 14%. and Xbox Series dropping 27%. Xbox Ecosystem console unit sales fell to an all-time September low.

The previous record low was set a year ago.

So....

Every day I wake up, it was worse than yesterday. So that means technically every day is the worst day of my life, Rhiannon. And that's what Xbox is going through right now with this a little bit. This is, yeah, okay. Let's shift Xbox a little bit. They did just have Gears of War E-Day, which again, we'll talk about that in a moment. Do you expect like a game to come out that like does for Xbox what Wolverine has done for PlayStation? PlayStation already doing very well. And then Wolverine comes along and just... the bubble burst of excitement, and everyone's like, yes, let's go spend a bunch of money on PlayStation shit.

And that shows up in the accessories as well, where accessory sales.

Were up, and I guarantee that was all people buying controllers for their PlayStation, getting ready for GTA to play maybe GTA Online. They're getting headsets and stuff like that. Is there a game waiting in the wings to do that for Xbox?

No.

I really don't think there is. I mean, because... As people on this side of the industry where we actually keep track of it day in and day out, it can be baffling to try and figure out what Xbox's plan is from one day to the next. They had a very clear strategy, which could have worked well, but it didn't at the beginning of the generation. And then as they tried to reorientate themselves, they just couldn't. So if you're a consumer and you do not follow the news day in and day out, what is... What is Xbox trying to sell you? Are they trying to sell you Game Pass? Are they trying to sell you hardware?

Are they trying to sell you software?

You don't know, right?

You know what PlayStation is. You know what PlayStation is selling you. They're selling you the console that they say is going to be the best place to play GTA 6 on. I think as long as they've got stuff like that and they've got these first parties, Xbox, if they want a first party, they have to blatantly take a game that wasn't going to be a console exclusive and then make it a console exclusive, which they will deny.

But you know, we know for a fact that like, yeah, they, they absolutely did that with, with gears. So they're just going to, that's the only thing. So whereas with PlayStation, they can always sell their exclusives as we are giving you something for Xbox. It's always going to seem like we are, you know, in a really petty way, gatekeeping something and, because we want to look cool to people on Twitter, you know, that's what their exclusives look like.

They don't have the same pristine. And I'm not saying that's fair because an exclusive is an exclusive. You know, the effect is the same. It's exclusive to a particular console. Um, and in Xbox's case, it also comes to PC. So that's pretty good, but it's, it's just not the same. They, they can't, they can't come up. A game being an exclusive isn't, going to have the same effect that it does for PlayStation. It's just not like not reputationally and not in terms of the financials as we're seeing.

Yep.

And it's like, if we can imagine a world where that does one day happen, it is so far away from it.

So many things have to line up.

So many successes have to happen in a row, unbroken in that chain without some bad thing happening to break it up. And it just, it feels like, you know, you start talking about a parlay of, okay, I got to get this right, this right, this right, and this right.

And that's where Xbox is at.

And they, have this tendency to just shoot themselves in the foot repeatedly. So they have to still deal with that on top of everything else. Let's talk about the hardware price increases real quick. So Matt Piscitella did actually give some details here. The average sales price of the PS5 during the September month was $ 646. That's a 17% increase from a year ago when the average sales price for a PlayStation 5 was $ 551. Yeah, PlayStation 5. The Xbox Series console, the average sales price for that $ 663, so more than the average sales price of a PS5.

That's a 33% increase versus a year ago when it was $ 497. And then the Switch 2, the average sales price for this year's September was $ 498. That's only a 2% increase from a year ago when the average sales price was $ 486. Matt points out, it's like, oh yeah, PlayStation, Xbox had sales increases, but didn't Nintendo? And he writes something here, which I think we probably pointed out on this show way back in the day, everybody. Nintendo transitioned away from the Mario Kart World bundle last September to the standalone hardware skew this September.

So sure, while buyers.

Get less value in the box than they used to, the overall average price point has remained steady.

Pretty smart cookies over there at Nintendo. And that always felt like that's what that Mario car bundle was about to give them that wiggle room of shifting prices around in a very subtle way. And they kind of successfully pulled that off here. So yeah.

And he points out these are us average prices for the U S market only by the way.

Yeah. On top of everything we were just talking.

About of, of all the challenges that Xbox has, I don't think we mentioned that's like, and the prices are going up and that's going to be, even it's going to make everything else that much more challenging.

And I don't think they are up to that challenge in the first place.

Meanwhile, $ 646 for a PlayStation five compared to $ 551 last year, 17% increase. That's massive. That's a big increase in price. People showed up to pay it. They showed up to pay it for Wolverine and the promise of GTA six. And so, and they did it in the face of the announcement of, of fiscal discs going away. So yeah, Things are still working out for Sony for the most part is what it feels like here.

Maybe we're really seeing the effect of Sony realizing it doesn't have someone to sort of offer a meaningful alternative anymore. So it can get away with more if Xbox isn't hot on its heels. And I think you're seeing that the price like that's an absurd average price for an Xbox. I've really. would have expected more i know that the xbox series s is in a weird place because it's now the thing that kind of is holding xbox back but it's also something that could save it in some markets I'm surprised that there's not more being done to say, hey, we have the cheapest way, the most accessible way to play GTA 6 this year.

Yeah, you haven't heard that.

I guess probably because they're not allowed to say it because of the exclusivity deal with Take-Two, although it's just the truth. You're allowed to say the truth, but maybe Microsoft doesn't want to step on toes.

Yeah, you're right. Why haven't they said that?

They could say something. Even if they don't name drop, they could say we are the cheapest way to play the most exciting games from this holiday season, you know, something.

Yeah.

It's like they're embarrassed of the Series S, so they won't do anything with that anymore. And they're left with the Series X, which is the more expensive PS5 with fewer games on it. Few of the big pristine ones like Wolverine that people clearly are interested in, as opposed to Gears. And it's just like, what are we doing here, man?

How do you dig yourself out of this hole? Because whatever they're doing now isn't it.

In chat here, the Pie Piper says, the truth is they don't care about the console market anymore. Let's shift to our next story where we will kind of talk about that. Do they care about that? Don't they care about that? Gears of War E-Day had a development cost of over $ 500 million. This is from Ethan Gotch at Kotaku. Obviously, the cost of this game has been a source of a lot of speculation for a little bit. Now it's gone back and forth. There was some some talk a little bit ago that it's like, oh, it cost over $ 400 million, and there was some pushback against that. And now, Ethan Gotch has a source that says it cost over $ 500 million to create, and that's before you include marketing.

That would put it significantly above the reported budgets of other console-exclusive blockbusters this generation, like Marvel's Spider-Man 2, which I think we said was.

About $ 300 million.

E-Day would need to sell millions and millions of copies across all platforms to make up the difference. And then Microsoft did not respond to his request for a comment. Current forecasts, however, suggest E-Day is nowhere close to making up its costs or turning a profit.

Alenia Analytics, which again, that's Reese Elliott.

Everybody, Reese does a pretty good job, estimated the game sold 230,000 copies in its first week and generated just $ 37 million in revenue, a big chunk of which came from Game Pass subscribers paying $ 30 for the premium edition upgrade to unlock early access.

These numbers will have gone up.

In the two weeks since the launch, but the initial momentum points to a money hole too deep for any multi-platform frag grenade to close. According to the source, E-Day was unlikely to recoup its costs no matter which platforms it came to, but as a console exclusive, it could contribute to rebuilding user activity on Xbox in key areas.

Microsoft hasn't released official metrics for E-Day's performance yet, unlike it did shortly after Gears 5 released back in 2019. That entry brought in over 3 million players at launch. The performance easily doubled. The first week's debut of Gears of War 4 made Gears 5 the most played Xbox Game Studio title. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but that's from Xbox there.

It's possible that a well-reviewed entry would have made an even bigger splash on PlayStation. This is Ethan Gotch continuing here, though how much bigger is hard to tell. Reloaded was only $ 40, while E-Day is $ 70, Reloaded being the Gears of War game that did come to PlayStation. E-Day is estimated to have sold fewer than 100,000 copies on Steam so far. though it is also available through Game Pass on PC. But no matter how you slice it, the math will not get you anywhere close to $ 500 million.

Ide seems poised to be a catastrophic miss for Xbox Game Studios in that regard and an indictment of an Xbox business and game development strategy for an entire console generation.

Let's see here. And then.

He does shift into this idea of, okay, a big game, big expensive game, $ 500 million. They did make it exclusive. The idea being, let's give people a reason to get back on Xbox. How serious are they about that? If they are that serious, maybe this is a loss leader. Although this is a company that's had a lot of loss leaders. At a certain point, it's got to start working, but whatever. He points to a recently leaked Xbox Insider survey that suggested the company is looking at leaning even further into reversing course on the recent multi-platform pivot. It was aimed specifically at users with multiple devices and trying to gain insight into how their playing habits would change under different scenarios. Imagine it was announced that all future

titles released from every Xbox developed game franchise except for Call of Duty will be console exclusive to Xbox, the final survey question reads. For Minecraft only, the existing titles would no longer be available for purchase on PlayStation or Nintendo consoles and would not receive any new content updates. However, there is no impact to any of the existing titles or content you already own. Nothing changes on PC in this announcement. So this is just a survey question. We don't have the results of this survey question. We don't have any insight on how people answered this, although I think we can imagine how the people who would be willing to answer an Xbox survey might speak up. But they were even talking about Minecraft going exclusive in some ways.

So that's how far they're willing to take the hypothetical, which is, I think I, I assume they wouldn't ever do that. So the fact that they're even asking this question is, is notable in the face of this game coming out and seeming like, you know, E-Day it's well-reviewed people like it. It's not moving the needle in terms of selling super well, and maybe everyone's playing on game pass, but I don't, I'll say the conversation is not like lit up the world. I don't feel like people have all like got Gears fever now. If this is what a big, well-reviewed game can do right now, do they really buy into this concept that doing this for the rest of their games other than Call of Duty can have a different effect?

What do you think, Rhiannon?

I don't know.

Like, I guess the point being raised about this being more of an experiment than a real release is, There's perhaps some merit to that, but this is an experiment that cost, yeah, allegedly $ 500 million.

Half a billion. Exactly.

Like, that's not, I suppose this, that wouldn't have been the strategy for the game's entire development. You know, I mean, we know for a fact it was going to be multi-platform, then it wasn't. It could just be that the new guard get in charge and they look at this game with an absolutely monstrous budget. They know it's not going to make its money back even if they do put it on PlayStation.

Correct.

So that's why. they decide not because they think it had, you know, cause I thought it was a really bizarre choice to make exclusive, but I suppose the reason is, well, it's not going to make us money back anyway.

You might as well.

It's the most sane scenario. So I think we want to grasp it. That's maybe what they're doing, but who knows? But yes, I think you might be onto something.

But then Minecraft, I, like you said, it's a survey question. So taking that with a pinch of salt, but I think that would be.

A night.

That'd be a, well, for one, it'd be a PR nightmare because they say, oh, well, All of the content remained the same, but people don't get it just so it can stay static. They get it for the updates. They get it for the packs.

That get released. Part of the ongoing releases, yeah.

It's kind of like what I was saying about the difference in perception between a PlayStation exclusive and an Xbox exclusive. With an Xbox One, it feels like petty, like trying to catch up. With a PlayStation One, it feels like, yeah, they're PlayStation, they do that. And this would feel like, okay, to build up your prestige, which you sold, you're now going to take a product away that wasn't, you know, ever gate kept. Yeah. That's just like, if you were going to do Minecraft exclusivity, I think the time has passed for that. I think now it would just feel like a very strange time to be doing that. And also just kind of give the game away a bit of like, you don't really care about, you know, consumer satisfaction.

It is about building up your prestige again for the, for what, for what aim? Like you get the prestige, but like, what are you going to do with that prestige?

You know? Who knows?

And who knows?

Yeah.

That's the, it is hard to like begin building a narrative in my brain of like, okay, they've done this.

Therefore now they can do that. They've done this. And now.

Hmm.

I guess you have to try this again until it works.

How many times you're going to be willing to do that at, you know, let's just say $ 200 million.

Let's be a little bit more reasonable here. Not many times.

I thought they were already at the end of their leash. That's why they were making changes. And it feels like the changes they've made just exacerbate existing problems.

I don't know.

But yeah, them leaning further into exclusives would confuse me quite a lot because at the end of the day, we just talked about it. price increases the price for hardware has gone up so much that what you're doing here is kind of setting up expectations for uh xbox helix will be the only way to play these games and it's like that won't even be true you can still play on pc and steam likely um so get a helix and uh that's going to be a thousand dollars we just actually talked about it uh earlier this week it's going to be somewhere between 1200 and 1800 dollars So that's a non-starter. You're not going to be able to rebuild your reputation on that. And if that was the only problem, apart from people feel like they

don't trust that if they invest in your ecosystem that they're going to get the returns on that, which is going to be a problem at $ 500 for a console, let alone three times that price or more.

So it's just... baffling.

You said it early in the episode, Xbox's strategy is baffling, and I continue to feel that way. And then I'm baffled by the fanboys that believe any of it. They just have to be deluding themselves to a certain point. And that's kind of obvious at a certain point as well.

All right.

We got a couple more things to get into before we get out of here. Rockstar is turning pieces of Miami into Vice City. This is the big marketing thing they're doing. How do you feel about that? What do you think about this big marketing campaign that is like, oh, real life installations in the city of Miami?

Because that's where the game is set.

I wonder how the people of Miami feel out of curiosity.

Yeah, me too. I bet they're supposed to be like, oh, this is interesting.

Yeah, it's kind of neat.

It's kind of showing that, like, they don't view themselves, they don't view games as their peers. They view, like, TV shows as their peers. Because it's like, I can remember this being done for House of the Dragon in Ireland, you know? It's like, they're trying to go for that. They're like, yeah, we're bigger than, we're not a game. Well, we are a game, but we're bigger.

Than the rest.

Yeah.

But we, yeah, so the game is so big it is broken through to the real world. You can see the, you can like hear the marketing firm pitching these ideas to them and then Rockstar.

Going, that's right, we are bigger than everything.

Some retro news, Ace Driver Victory Lap is finally getting a home release. This is a old Namco arcade game that has never been on a home console before from 1995.

Yes, it is gonna.

Feature, if you get the Arcade Archives 2 version.

It'll have a time attack mode added as well.

I love them bringing back these old arcade games. I want them to do a lot more of it. So very cool that Hamster continues to kind of go to Namco and make these happen. Some updates to that Uma Musume Pretty Derby story. We talked about, oh, they were going to pay back people for their tickets. The devs now say they will pay for canceled flights in hotels.

So that's not their responsibility anymore. that is also a game that's made a lot of money. And I think they're like, we, we can handle this. Like we can sort of maintain that, that, that strong relationship that people have towards our game. And we feel bad that we weren't able to make this happen. Although it, there's no way this is that studio's fault that this concert fell apart.

It's obviously the fault of the Trump administration.

And yet they are side games stepping up to pay for this pretty impressive stuff.

I was happy to see that. What do you think?

Yeah, it is really impressive. I, I might be like, speculating too much here but i wonder of like uh you know the whole drama of love and deep space you know you've seen what happens when you make one mistake with that community you lose them forever they're like maybe they're like engaged yes yeah these sorts of games you've really got to cling on to them and this is something people remember it's it's a nice gesture like you said it shouldn't have happened this this shouldn't have even been a.

Thing yep yeah and that's uh so many bits and chances i think in this case you do gotta hand it to them and i do All right, some updates for this week. Today, Nintendo Switch Sports Resort, Final Fantasy Resonance, and Ace Driver Victory Lap that we just talked about are out. And then tomorrow, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 is out, including COD's return to Switch 2. And that does it for all the big headlines. Let's start wrapping this up. We have the poll question from yesterday.

Let me get the most recent results. I did see that get posted, so let's see here. Are you getting Nintendo Switch Sports Resort? Yes or no? 79% said no. 21% said yes. I'm going to go pick this up here today, everybody. I'm looking forward to trying this out. I saw some clips and like the table tennis looked really fun. And even if I play these games only a handful of times, I still feel like I get my money's worth because they're fun and different. You have any fondness for the Wii Sports games up through Nintendo Switch Sports?

I love them. Yeah.

Oh my God.

I was just like, That was, like, the game in my household growing up.

So, like, I'm really surprised by all the no's.

Like, I'm getting it because, you know, when I go home for the holidays, it's going to be, like, really fun to whip that out and, like, remind everyone about Wii Sports back in the day.

You know, I'm looking forward to it.

Yeah, I think that a lot of people in this audience are like, if I'm going to play a game like that, it'll be something like Jackbox.

Like, that fills in that for me. And I, yes, that's completely fair. I get that.

A bunch of adults sitting around after the holidays, full tummies. Maybe they don't want to get up and bowl. They want to just sit on their phone and make funny jokes. I can appreciate that, but I'll do both. And I'll be there for, for we are for switch sports resort, which I will keep calling we sports reserve.

For some reason. All right. New poll question.

We'll get to here in a second before we do that. Reanim one more time. Tell people where they can find you, what you have going on, all that good stuff.

Okay.

Yeah.

You can find me on blue sky, read the witch.

I post very rarely on the other site, re underscore Bevan, but not much. I should have some stuff going up at different various sites soon. I'm just sort of getting the ball moving on that. Right now, my only published post the game of pieces on start menu. And that was a review of cyberpunk edge runners season two, which I reviewed as which was, I really, I really bloody liked, I gave it a nine out of 10. Very, very good.

In my opinion. Um, I actually think it's bad in the first season, which I think I was in the minority for thinking. Um, yeah, that's where you can find me.

Excellent. Great work. Uh, all right. It's a new poll question. Let's see here. What is bio?

What is the Bioware game you think everyone should play? And look, I'm sorry, there's only four options here. So this is how I had to frame this mess effect trilogy. Star Wars, Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age Origin, or something else. I'll put it in the comments. I know a Baldur's Gate 2 should be in here.

I know that.

There's others that should be here, but they only give you four options on YouTube, everybody. Vote for that. We'll get the results and talk about it on tomorrow's show here.

On Giant Bomb.

Speaking of Giant Bomb, we're going to have Voicemail Dump Truck later today. Tomorrow we'll have UPF. We'll do a grab bag of a couple of games. And then also on this show, We'll end the week with the Bomb 12. The Bomb 12 has been going for like two weeks now because we had the Bombathon last week. So just get in there, add your game. Let's see what people have been playing for the last two weeks. The link for that is available on giantbomb.com. If you scroll down a little bit, you can see it there on the left-hand side.

All right.

I think that covers everything. Rhiannon, thank you so much for hanging out with me today and talking about video games. I really appreciate it.

Thank you for having me on.

Thank you all for watching and listening. You are the best audience in gaming. Until next time, have a good one. Take care of yourself and goodbye.

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