Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the gaming industry’s top leaders? Learn more about GamesBeat Summit sponsorship opportunities here. Electronic Arts has announced a new round of layoffs cutting 5% of the company’s workforce or roughly 670 roles. As a part of this reorg, EA is cancelling upcoming projects and sunsetting […]
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A Halo co-creator who was working on the next Battlefield has seemingly left the franchise and EA
As reported by Insider Gaming and first spotted by Battlefield YouTuber DannyonPC, FPS veteran and Halo co-creator Marcus Lehto appears to have left his director position at Ridgeline Games, an EA subsidiary, where he was working on the next Battlefield game. As art director on the first three Halo games, Lehto had a massive impact […]
Read MoreEA reportedly invested $125 million making a new singleplayer IP with zero microtransactions, no grind, a shorter running time, and guess what: ‘No one bought it’
A new report by IGN into the wider topic of industry layoffs, which are worse than they’ve ever been, contains a fascinating insight about one of last year’s less-successful AAA titles. Immortals of Aveum was the debut title from Ascendant Studios, released on Steam and consoles in August 2022, came out to mixed reviews and […]
Read MoreEA and a studio reportedly invested $125 million making a new singleplayer IP with zero microtransactions, no grind, a shorter running time, and guess what: ‘No one bought it’
A new report by IGN into the wider topic of industry layoffs, which are worse than they’ve ever been, contains a fascinating insight about one of last year’s less-successful AAA titles. Immortals of Aveum was the debut title from Ascendant Studios, released on Steam and consoles in August 2022, came out to mixed reviews and […]
Read MoreApex Legends is making its biggest change since launch: an upgrade tree for every legend that adds 120 new variables to every match
The eras of Apex Legends can be mapped out by a handful of milestone patches: the arrival of Evo Shields, the introduction of the map rotation, the first objective mode that’d eventually become Mixtape, and more recently the new iteration of Ranked. Experimentation is baked into Apex’s identity. Respawn has never shied away from making […]
Read MoreApex Legends is getting rid of some of the ‘randomness’ in battle royale, starting with a massive shields overhaul
Apex Legends is growing up. The hit battle royale celebrates its fifth anniversary this month, but instead of basking in the past with an Apex OG party, Respawn is squarely focused on the future. Season 20 is nigh, and it’s bringing a handful of major changes that aim to reduce complexity and eliminate some of […]
Read MoreStar Wars Jedi: Survivor force pulls the grammy for best video game soundtrack
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor has scooped this year’s Grammy for best video game soundtrack making it the second game to receive the award since its inauguration last year. Specifically given for “Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive media”, the award was won by Stephen Barton and Gordy Haab, for their work writing […]
Read MoreEA earnings call show EA Sports FC was a game of two halves, as it fails to out-sell the last FIFA but still makes more money
Last year saw one of the biggest re-branding exercises in our industry’s history as EA, which over decades had built the FIFA series into a juggernaut that saw off all competition, ended its relationship with football’s world governing body. FIFA 23 (released in 2022) was the last in that series and 2023 saw the release […]
Read MoreWhat games did everyone play over the holidays?
Happy New Year folk, welcome to 2024! Hopefully your holiday season was filled with plenty of good food, festivities, and just the right amount of mandatory family interactions. Is it me, or did 2023 somehow fly by and also feel like the longest year ever? Regardless, we successfully battled our way through the months and […]
Read MoreAll the big games that shut down in 2023
Several games had to call 2023 their final year as they shut down for good. Some games survived a few years, while others didn’t even make it to one. It’s already hard enough to release a game and now many are expected to be sustainable for several years. But online games don’t last forever, and […]
Read MoreAnthem sold 5 million copies, which sounds good until you compare it to Star Wars: Battlefront
It’s generally understood that Anthem was a failure for developer BioWare. It was a developmental nightmare. It reviewed poorly. It fell short of its sales target of 6 million copies by the end of March 2019. And EA ultimately decided to pull the plug on the live-service game two years after launch. But the specifics […]
Read MoreEA rebrands Frostbite with a cuddly new hand as it says its studios are now ‘free to develop on any engine they choose’
Publisher Electronic Arts has rebranded its Frostbite engine, with the aim of better reflecting the tech as a “platform for collaborative innovation”. In an announcement on the publisher’s website, EA introduced a new brand direction for the engine, saying the it “signals not just a visual shift for Frostbite, but a philosophical one, with a […]
Read MoreSony applies to patent dynamic difficulty settings that respond to your performance, one year after EA did the same thing with controller settings
Sony has applied to patent systems that automatically fiddle with “parameters that change the difficulty of the game” based on your performance, a patent on the World Intellectual Property Organization‘s website reveals. (Actually, the patent reads “difficultly” at the time of writing, so Sony may in fact be referring to the implementation of dynamic cults. […]
Read MoreEA reveals the billions of things that happen in its games
Do you want to get the latest gaming industry news straight to your inbox? Sign up for our daily and weekly newsletters here. Electronic Arts revealed the billions of things that happen in its games — like 1.8 billion hours played in The Sims 4 — in its annual report on gameplay. In EA’s 2023: […]
Read MoreHow EA is tapping into the power of generative AI to accelerate the creative process
This year GamesBeat was part of the 2023 Game Awards in L.A., as part of a mini GB event, “Pixels to Pop Culture,” exploring the intersection of game industry creatives, Hollywood and a growing audience’s hunger for new IP. Jeff Skelton, head of technology partnerships at Electronic Arts joined Meg Tucker, director of games at […]
Read MoreEA open sources 5 new accessibility tools, including 4 patents
Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship. Learn more. Electronic Arts announced that it would make five of its proprietary accessibility tools free to use by other game developers. In recent years, EA (and the wider gaming industry) have […]
Read MoreNo Starfield? No problem! Turn Mass Effect into the first-person space RPG of your dreams with this mod
Mass Effect, as we all know, has always hungered in its secret heart to become a twitchy first-person shooter. To cast aside the aged moniker of “RPG”, whatever that means, and to transform into the helter-skelter, thrill-a-minute Call of Duty-like it was always meant to be. Well, some dreams cannot be denied. Thanks to the […]
Read MoreEA might not care about Dungeon Keeper anymore, but this open-source 4K remake spent 15 years in the making to reach version 1.0
Dungeon Keeper is one of my all-time favourite games, tied with Theme Hospital as Bullfrog’s most fondly remembered management sim. Yet whereas Bullfrog’s isometric cure ’em up is still fairly playable today, returning to Dungeon Keeper in 2023 is hard going. Its visuals are incredibly bleary on a modern machine, while it’s also finicky to […]
Read MoreAmerican McGee says the Alice series is dead, finished, kaput, and people need to stop ‘continually asking me questions to which I do not have answers’
American McGee’s Alice is a series that saw two games released roughly a decade apart: the eponymous original came out in 2000 on PC, and Alice: Madness Returns followed in 2011. The games were published by Electronic Arts and, over the last few years, McGee has been trying to drum up interest from both EA […]
Read MoreBattlefield 2042 Season 6: Dark Creations launches on October 10
GamesBeat Next unites gaming industry leaders for exceptional content, networking, and deal-making opportunities. Join us on Oct 23-24 in San Francisco. Register Now Electronic Arts announced that Battlefield 2042 Season 6: Dark Creations will debut on October 10 on the PC and consoles. The latest update for Battlefield 2042 — from developers Dice and Ripple […]
Read MoreTitanfall community predicts the future, reckons Titanfall 3 is a dead cert based on patch note hints and a Red Hot Chili Peppers song from 1999
There must be something in the water. A few days ago, we covered the GTA fans that are looking to the moon for answers about the next big GTA 6 announcement, and now it’s Titanfall players’ turn. What are they doing? Convincing themselves that a playlist update is actually a reference to a Red Hot […]
Read MoreAs PC gaming’s war on cheating rages, EA explains why it’s making its own anticheat: ‘Cheat developers have increasingly moved into the kernel, so we need to have kernel-mode protections’
EA is moving away from its longtime anticheat partner Easy Anti-Cheat in favor of an internally developed kernel-level anticheat software. The software, which the company is simply calling “EA anticheat,” will be implemented first in Battlefield 2042 when Season 6 arrives in October. The decision follows in the footsteps of other major game studios that […]
Read MoreEA Sports FC, soccer leagues partner for global esports ecosystem
We’re thrilled to announce the return of GamesBeat Next, hosted in San Francisco this October, where we will explore the theme of “Playing the Edge.” Apply to speak here and learn more about sponsorship opportunities here. At the event, we will also announce 25 top game startups as the 2024 Game Changers. Apply or nominate today! Alongside its […]
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