Mass Effect 今后何去何从？兼谈 Ken Kutaragi 的主机担忧与 Poki 的崛起

In This Edition,

BioWare’s shock closure
Ken Kutaragi’s console fears
The rise of Poki
Price confusion
Plus! We’re launching an awards

Hello there!

We’ve got a busy week this week. We’re launching our first awards (more on that below), plus we’re rushing around Comic-Con in London talking to big name game developers, including the legendary John Romero. We’re recording that one, and we’ll share that with you in the coming weeks.

It’s a jam-packed edition once again. On the Show, we’re joined by Poki’s Romy Halfweeg to discuss the rapid rise of web-based game platforms, and consultant Cassia Curran comes on to chat video game pricing.

Plus, we discuss the shock closure of BioWare, and tease a bit of our upcoming interview with ‘father of PlayStation’ Ken Kutaragi.

Here we go.

Where now for Mass Effect and Dragon Age?

It was a shock to hear that BioWare is closing.

The EA studio is an icon behind the likes of Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age and Mass Effect.

But the last ten years has been tough for the studio. Games like Mass Effect Andromeda (2017), Anthem (2019) and Dragon Age: The Veilguard (2024) didn’t live up to the studio’s reputation, despite their best efforts.

It’s tempting to point fingers. Is this EA’s fault? Is this the result of that huge leveraged buy-out that put the company around $18 billion in debt? Is this because of the Saudis? Is this a failure of leadership? But it’s difficult to pinpoint one thing. There’s been significant staff departures, creative differences, a changing industry landscape, and an increasingly competitive marketplace. Surviving 30 years, as BioWare had, is remarkable in itself.

Some of BioWare’s most famous children are now building on that legacy elsewhere. A number of the studio’s veterans are working on the Mass Effect-like Exodus at Wizards of the Coast (due early next year). Meanwhile, Casey Hudson – the game director behind some of BioWare’s biggest hits – is building a new Star Wars RPG at his new Studios. BioWare’s legacy doesn’t end today.

So, the news was a shock, but wasn’t exactly shocking. The focus now should be on finding new homes for the 50 people who were working on that now cancelled Mass Effect game.

This was the headline part of the EA news, but BioWare only represented 12.5% of what the company is cutting. And these cuts are all around this idea of focus, which is something most major publishers are doing today.

The cost of building a hit single-player RPG is high, and the potential upside is comparatively low. EA Sports FC would struggle to get out of bed for the profit a Mass Effect might make. In a modern industry where attention is scarce and competition is high, EA is best served focusing on its big titles: Battlefield, Apex Legends, its sports portfolio, and The Sims.

Even these areas need to focus. In its note to staff, EA said its pausing one of its The Sims projects and is also cutting back its Skate team, too. Yes, it will save money (and it’s looking to save $700 million) but it also means putting the focus where it matters most.

EA also talked about its upcoming Iron Man and Star Wars action-adventure games, and said that in the future they’ll do fewer simultaneous large-scale projects so it doesn’t get distracted. Probably the most telling part of the email read: “This is where we’ve had to make our hardest choices. Saying no to some things we’re passionate about.”

But this is a potential opportunity for the wider industry. EA, Microsoft, Sony, Take-Two, Ubisoft (to a degree), Activision (for a long time now) are all doing this. They’re focusing on the big bets. So what does that mean for Dragon Age? And Mass Effect? And Command and Conquer? Are they to be resigned to the freezer, only to get defrosted every few years for a quick remaster job?

The Game Business needs your help. We are a reader-supported publication. And if you like what you read, why not consider becoming a paid-subscriber?

There is another option. We’ve just seen it with the two Star Wars games this year - Galactic Racer and Zero company (the latter EA published). These games were made by independent teams staffed by veteran devs, which delivered strong results on a tight budget.

In a congested marketplace, a brand like Dead Space or Mass Effect will get noticed. There are studios out there that would happily license those, and even get the funding (or some of the funding) themselves. We know that retired Dead Space veteran Glen Schofield wanted to make another one. Why not give him the chance to find the money? These games may not make sense for an EA consider what it generates from Ultimate Team, but not everyone needs EA’s profit margin.

EA might argue that it’d still need to have some oversight on these projects, which would impact that all-important focus. Lucasfilm doesn’t just let people run amok with Star Wars. But that’s the privilege of being a global entertainment giant. And if there’s talent out there willing to keep your brand alive, why not?

Introducing… The Game Business Marketing Awards

This December, The Game Business will highlight the best, most impactful and inventive video game marketing campaigns of 2026.

The awards are for games released this year (or games that received new content), and includes the entire campaign, even if some of it happened in previous years.

We’re looking for campaigns that are coherent, delivered effective cut-through and ROI, and with innovative elements that helped it stand out in a competitive attention economy.

We’re also looking to celebrate the teams, individuals and agencies who helped put these campaigns together.

You can enter right here. The deadline for entries is Thursday, November 12. We’ll reveal the winners on Thursday, December 10.

Good luck!

Ken Kutaragi: The age may be coming where we don’t need the console

Ken Kutaragi says there’s a “very real danger” that the age of game consoles are coming to an end.

The ‘father of PlayStation’ was speaking as part of a wide-ranging interview with The Game Business at the Game Republic New Horizon’s conference last week. As the conversation came to a close, we asked him how he felt about the current situation facing PlayStation and Xbox.

“When we released PlayStation 2, we would get asked: “What’s next?” At that time, I’d say, merging into the network. That was my answer. When I released PS1, I’d get asked ‘What would be the next PlayStation?’ I replied the same thing. Everything merging into the network. And right now, AI is melding into the network.

“But currently the machines are super expensive. It’s not a healthy situation. One of the intentions behind why the PS4 architecture changed from console-based to PC-based was to make it easier to create for the platform. It worked. But right now, PC is so expensive. It’s the price of car. Why do we continue to head in this direction? Google Gemini, and many AI platforms, do not run edge side, but server side, network side. Those could be evolving to allow for much more elegant things. The age may be coming where we don’t need any console. It’s a very real danger.”

Kutaragi stressed that this is his views, and not that of Sony.

We’ll have the full interview with Ken Kutaragi in the coming weeks.

The explosion of web-based video games: “It’s pretty easy to get 1m players”

Game developers on Poki can earn over $1m a year, said business development manager Romy Halfweeg.

The web-based games platform now boasts over 100 million monthly active users, a huge rise on the 10 million it was attracting just five years ago.

“The audience on web is pretty young,” Halfweeg told us. “They’re the same players that you can expect on Minecraft and Roblox. They are very used to short-form content. And you can almost say that web games are the short-form content of video games.

“You know how you’re scrolling on TikTok and you just scroll, scroll, scroll, then you pause because it looks interesting. Players interact with web games in a similar way, where they are hopping very quickly through 20 games or so, and maybe out of those 20 they play a couple for a few minutes, and play one for 10 minutes.”

Poki is a curated platform, but there are others. Competitor CrazyGames now boasts 50 million monthly active users. And these platforms all adopt their own monetization strategies, with Poki being entirely ad-based.

But are they a viable platform from a business point-of-view?

“You can make €1 million a year, or you can make €10 a year,” Halfweeg answered.

“The top performers on Poki, the very best games, can earn up to a €1 million a year. That’s the upper range. And then for a lot of devs that just have a successful game, where it’s not a viral hit, it’s anywhere between €1,000 to €15,000 a month. And that can be pretty good if you consider the scope. We’re talking about really small games that should cost you $10k to develop.”

She added: “We have multiple developers that make games for Poki full-time, and that makes them a living, or much better even than a living in some cases

“Usually what we see is that you build it up over the years. I would not go all-in on web games as a solo dev or as a small team from the start. I would start one day a week, try out different things, see how it works, release two or three games, build a steady passive income stream, and then scale up.”

Halfweeg added that it’s “pretty easy to get a million players” on Poki. Out of between 1,500 and 1,900 games that are on the platform at any one time, over a thousand saw more than a million sessions last year.

Check out today’s The Game Business Show for our full Poki interview, where we also discuss AI, the ad market, discoverability, and more.

“Hollow Knight’s pricing annoyed me”

Our final chat on The Game Business Show focused on the complicated world of video game pricing.

In recent weeks, we’ve had publishers including Valor Mortis publisher Lyrical Games and Star Wars developer Fuse Games explain their slightly lower price points. Meanwhile, Nintendo has adopted a variable pricing strategy that can seem confusing from the outside.

We invited consultant Cassia Curran onto the Show, who has developed a tool for developers to analyse Steam pricing and see what competitors are doing. And although titles like GTA are able to justify higher price tags, smaller developers are being forced lower, she said.

Curran pointed out how the $20 price for last year’s Hollow Knight: Silksong has made it hard for any developer looking to go above that.

“Hollow Knight kind of annoyed me,” Curran said. “I was like, “Oh, guys, please price it higher. $24.99 would have made like a big difference to a lot of studios that have similar games’.”

“There is actually quite a lot of downward pricing pressure.”

You can hear the full conversation on today’s The Game Business Show.

Meanwhile….

European games ratings body PEGI has started increasing the age ratings of games that feature loot boxes to PEGI 16, including EA Sports FC and Pokémon Go.
GDC Festival of Gaming will shift to a four-day format for its 2027 edition, taking place Monday through Thursday, March 1 to March 4. The goal is to deliver ‘a higher quality, more focused and valuable experience,’ the organizers said.
Liquid Swords has filed for bankruptcy, as revealed by CEO Christofer Sundberg. He said on LinkedIn the studio struggled due to bad business decisions and tough market conditions.
Wizards of the Coast is refusing to grant voluntary recognition to a union drive by its Dungeons & Dragons and Studio X teams. Staff will instead vote on joining in a secret-ballot election overseen by the National Labor Relations Board.
Developer Funcom is restructuring and cutting staff to focus on live support for Conan Exiles and Dune: Awakening. Meanwhile, CEO Rui Casais will step down at the end of the year. Funcom was acquired by Tencent in 2020.
Melbourne-based developer House House will not release its co-op title Big Walk on Xbox, citing alignment with the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign, which has called for a boycott of Microsoft.
Amazon Prime members in Canada, France, Italy, and Spain can access Luna games via Prime Video on Fire TV at no additional cost, with Austria, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and Sweden to follow in November. This service was rolled out to US and UK subscribers in July.
US retail giant Best Buy has launched Best Buy Gamers has bestbuy.com/gamers, a gaming hub that will feature reviews, features, and more. The content is supplied by IGN.
PR platform Press Engine has announced a new physical event called The Pre-Show. The London event will feature games due for release over the next 12 months.

That’s it for today. Join us next week for more big interviews and analysis, including a chat with Meta about its new prompt-based games platform.