Right, but that extra launcher causes problems, so I tend to avoid games that still have it. It’s why I still haven’t played A Way Out but played Split Fiction.

FF7 remake is cool for a lot of reasons, but we’ve got countless reasons to support the idea that turn-based combat isn’t the barrier to playing those old games.

They sold 1 million copies in a couple of days on top of a Game Pass deal, and their team is leaner than most. They’re surely financially successful.

League is too.

Not to be too much of a bummer, but the gaming industry seemingly grew too fast, and the end result is going to be that there just aren’t as many jobs in the industry to be filled by any team once the layoffs are done. Maybe a handful of the people laid off here go on to work together again.

Split Fiction is definitely a game people care about, and disappointing numbers for a Dragon Age title is still several million people.

In chasing infinite growth (of the same game), you have potentially infinite spend as well.

The decline of a live service game is so inevitable that it seems silly to me to ascribe a reason to it. Eventually, people just want something newer than regular content updates can provide.

Does BL3 still have respec stations like the earlier games?

From Jeff Grubb:

To clarify, I’ve been told the layoffs are more than just Respawn and are similar to last year’s February layoff where 670 people were cut. I don’t know the exact number.

But yeah, I’m sure continuing to chase live service as though you’ll ever get Apex Legends to be as successful as it once was will totally work out.

EDIT: furthermore, he says:

Apex Legends and EA Sports FC both missed harder than people realize. Dragon Age barely registers in this.

I believe it was added after launch. I distinctly remember trying to play this game on the Steam Deck on a train with no internet, and the EA app complained about it and wouldn’t let me launch the game. It’s quite possible that this can be sidestepped by specifically putting the Steam Deck in offline mode, rather than just severing the internet connection, but I didn’t know to try that at the time, and it’s definitely DRM.

Only the newest ones. They haven’t gone back to remove the requirement from their back catalog, but Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Split Fiction don’t require it now. Meanwhile, Madden 26 still requires it, so I guess it isn’t universal.

Jedi Fallen Order says right on the Steam page that it incorporates EA DRM.

It’s my thought as well, but Ghost of Yotei was scheduled for October already, and Sony would surely know when GTA comes out, so maybe it’s a November game? Borderlands will likely be enough of a time sink that you might want a few months after it before releasing a GTA.

And that trend will continue, which is why console sales are well behind where they were last generation, and it’s why the next Xbox will just run Windows.

Even when you buy their games on Steam, there’s an EA launcher there in addition to Steam. This is the case for It Takes Two, for instance, but not for Split Fiction. Split Fiction only uses Steam if you bought it on Steam.

They ought to patch out the need for Ubisoft’s launcher. Same goes for EA’s back catalog, for that matter. At least EA’s newest releases don’t come with the launcher.

This isn’t a “do you guys not have phones” moment. This is a “Diablo Immortal made a boatload of money” moment.

They have their own database. If there’s a release or a rumor they don’t know about, you can suggest one, but they ask you to cite your sources. If it’s got a Steam page and you provide that link, they’ll basically add it right away, which is what happened when I got Total Chaos added. Fantasy Critic also gives league commissioners a lot of power to house rule just about anything.

Correct, you don’t know that. You can speculate on releases, like I did with Pony Island 2, and get counter picked as a punishment for the risk. As long as it’s in the site’s database, it’s fair game. I drafted “Unannounced 3D Mario Game” this year, but then I picked up “Unannounced 3D Donkey Kong Game” after the draft for 1 in-game dollar (no one else put in a bid for it), as a hedge, since the rumor was that either a Mario or a Donkey Kong game would be made by the Mario Odyssey team for the Switch 2 launch. No one counter-picked Mario, so I’m allowed to drop it, and the Donkey Kong entry automatically updated to Bananza. The “season” is a calendar year. We do our draft early in January, and typically the first release of the year will be like halfway through the month, and the score that each game earns is whatever score it has at the stroke of midnight on January 1st.

Because we don’t know every release a year in advance, A) this game got a lot harder starting back in 2022, because that’s when game marketing cycles got way shorter, and B) some of the best reviewing games of 2025 probably won’t even be announced until this coming June.