BioWare Closes After Three Decades, Xbox Sells Streaming by the Hour, and Two Teams Reach the Worlds Quarterfinals

Industry

• EA is shutting down BioWare and cancelling the next Mass Effect, cutting about 400 jobs in the first major round since the $55 billion buyout that took it private. BioWare confirmed the closure on October 21 after more than three decades and games from Baldur's Gate to Dragon Age; the same staff email paused a Sims project called Lotus and kept a reported Star Wars Battlefront 3 in the pipeline. Read more →
• Arkane Lyon has until November 13 to find a buyer or be closed, with Marvel's Blade reportedly close to finished. French labour law gave Xbox's Dishonored studio three months to find one after it was marked for divestment in July, and union representatives told Le Monde the game is "nearing the end" of development. Read more →
• Xbox's first chief operating officer, Helen Chiang, is out three months after the job was created to make the division more stable. Chiang spent 21 years at Microsoft and ran Mojang before the July move, and Xbox says it will say more about a successor "as plans are finalized." Read more →
• Capcom says hackers reached account identifiers and email addresses for more than 11.7 million users, and that passwords were changed on roughly 196 accounts. The October 19 breach has gone to police, and in at least 43 cases date of birth, gender and location were also exposed; Square Enix separately confirmed that third parties had used passwords stolen from other companies to log into Final Fantasy XIV accounts. Read more →
• Xbox will sell cloud streaming by the hour to people who don't have, or don't want, a Game Pass subscription. Cloud Playtime packs run $4 for 10 hours, $8 for 25 and $12 for 50 — about 40 cents an hour — and go on general sale in November, against Game Pass Ultimate's $23 a month and its 15-hour streaming cap. Read more →

Releases and updates

• Game Pass's late-October batch adds Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade and The Séance of Blake Manor, and takes nine games away on October 31. Intergrade arrives October 29 and Blake Manor October 27, alongside day-one additions Scramble Knights Online on October 26 and Terrible Lizards on October 29; Deep Rock Galactic and Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga are among the departures. Read more →
• The Wolf Among Us Remastered brings Telltale's Fables noir back on October 29. It shares the day with Croc 2: Kingdom of the Gobbos, and Queen's Domain follows on October 30 at $16.99. Read more →
• Subnautica 2's Early Access 2.0 adds a five-biome region, a story expansion and a Tadpole chassis with arms and legs, with no date attached. Creative director Anthony Gallegos called it "the most substantial update we've done since release" and the new region one of the studio's scariest; the Steam page still describes a two-to-three-year early access run. Read more →
• Star Wars: Galactic Racer's first quality-of-life patch raises multiplayer parties from three players to six. The October 22 update also adds keyboard layout presets, lifts the mid-Tour credit reward from 4,000 to 6,000, and removes the "Exit the game" option from the PC multiplayer menu to stop accidental quits. Read more →
• Football Manager 27 will be free to play on PC and Mac from October 29 to November 3, ahead of its November 10 launch. Sega and Sports Interactive are replacing the usual beta with a full launch preview, with progress carrying over and 10 percent off pre-orders, after Football Manager 26 landed buggy and clunky enough to earn mostly negative Steam reviews. Read more →

Esports

• Gen.G and Dplus KIA are the first two teams into the Worlds 2026 quarterfinals, Gen.G coming from a game down to beat LYON 2–1 and Dplus KIA sweeping Movistar KOI 2–0. The Swiss Stage had opened with all four LPL seeds losing their first matches for the first time before Top Esports, Invictus Gaming and Bilibili Gaming won in round two, and T1 fell to Dplus KIA. Read more →
• Evil Geniuses, the organisation that won VALORANT Champions in 2023, will shut down competitive and day-to-day operations on November 2 after more than 25 years in esports. CEO Chris DeAppolonio cited limited sponsorship and the cost of competing at the top; every EG roster can talk to other organisations now, and the VALORANT players can sign from November 2. Read more →
• s0m, the 2025 VALORANT world champion, has built a streamer-heavy roster to chase a place at VCT Americas 2027 through the open qualifiers, with FNS coaching. The team — florescent, Marved, Shanks and Subroza alongside s0m — debuts November 5, competing for one of four open-qualifier spots in a league that otherwise keeps eight partner teams. Read more →
• Team Spirit ended a three-match losing run at PGL Masters Bucharest, beating TYLOO 2–0 as donk went from a 0.84 rating in the opener to 1.53. Spirit had lost to MOUZ and Aurora at ESL Pro League Season 24 and to BETBOOM in Bucharest, its first three-series streak since December 2023, and the win moved it to 1–1 in the Swiss stage. Read more →
• Dplus KIA's all-Brazilian Rainbow Six roster won APAC North and with it the region's only BLAST Major Osaka spot, leaving host nation Japan without a team. Dplus beat CAG by VARREL 2–0 — 7–3 on Chalet, 8–7 on Fortress — for $15,000 and 420 Six Invitational points, under rules that require players to reside in a region rather than hold its nationality. Read more →