BioWare's closure and the cost of corporate ownership

On the Aftermath Hours podcast, Nathan Grayson, Riley and guest Chris Kerr, formerly of Game Developer and now running the new site Vertical Slice, take on recent profiles of Xbox head Asha Sharma in the Wall Street Journal, Entertainment Weekly, the New York Times and Fortune. They read the pieces as something close to a press tour. Grayson compares them to early glossy coverage of Elon Musk and says the harder story of workers being laid off is less appealing to write.

Kerr's argument is that Sharma should be given praise only once she has earned it. He notes that failure means a payout for her, but job losses or even a sale of Xbox for the people under her, so her employees have more riding on her success than she does. He adds that when journalists do get rare access to an executive, they should ask the difficult questions.

CounterpointEditors at the business and general-interest outlets would likely say that profiling a new head of a major Microsoft division is ordinary executive coverage, and that readers beyond the games trade want to know who is running it. Microsoft would presumably describe the restructuring as necessary to stabilise Xbox, which is the framing the profiles reflect.

Previously: Aftermath criticised mainstream profiles of Sharma and flagged a Fortune report of a possible $1,200-$1,800 next Xbox. — Saturday October 24 edition.

Lincoln Carpenter walks through the mechanics of a leveraged buyout, in which the target company's own balance sheet is the collateral for the debt used to buy it, as in the $20 billion JP Morgan loan behind EA's deal. He then lists the usual ways value gets extracted: workforce cuts, price rises, asset sales, sale-leasebacks and fees under the standard 2-and-20 structure. He cites a report that private-equity-backed companies made up over 10% of 2024 US corporate bankruptcies and more than half of those with over $500 million in liabilities.

He ties this to games, citing the BioWare closure with 400 EA layoffs, and layoffs at Scum developer Gamepires, acquired eight months ago by Emona Capital-backed Splash Damage Group. His view is that the outcome was predictable given the ownership model, and that BioWare would have been poorly placed with its new owners regardless.

CounterpointCarpenter's own source, Kiplinger's Karee Venema, points to Hilton and Dell as successful buyouts, and private equity firms generally argue they rescue underperforming businesses. Others would say BioWare's weak sales record and development troubles, which the article acknowledges, were reason enough for EA to act whoever owned it.

Previously: An earlier edition covered commentary framing BioWare's closure through private equity and studio-team economics. — Saturday October 24 edition.

Fahey places the closure within five years of studio closures, cancellations and restructures and tens of thousands of layoffs. He argues that the industry's accumulated thick skin has not made one more bad news story painless. His framing treats BioWare's fate as part of a repeating pattern, not a one-off.

CounterpointPC Gamer's Lincoln Carpenter, writing on the same closure, stresses factors specific to BioWare: a studio that had not turned development turmoil into sales and a new owner unlikely to favour its games. On that view this is a particular case, not only the latest in a pattern.

Previously: Commentary from GamesIndustry.biz and others framed BioWare's closure through studio-team economics. — Saturday October 24 edition.

Cooper Quintin sets out the timeline: a severe PHP flaw found in a 2024 audit was deprioritised because no exploit was known, then AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic led researchers to rediscover it and a second flaw in August 2026, this time with working exploits. Leaks began October 20, exploitation was reported from October 17, and Chainguard released a patch six hours before the planned embargo on October 21. Over 33 million sites were still on vulnerable versions at the time of writing.

He says cheap AI-driven discovery is flooding maintainers with reports: October alone brought 13,000 new CVEs, about 3% of everything in the National Vulnerability Database since 1988. Node.js and GitLab also had severe bugs this week. His conclusion is that corporations should contribute both money and engineers to the volunteer-run projects they depend on.

CounterpointSecurity vendors that favour rapid patching would argue that, with exploitation already reported, an early patch helped defenders. Some in the industry also hold that AI-assisted discovery will leave software safer once the backlog is cleared, a case the post does not weigh. EFF is an advocacy group and this is a funding appeal.

Previously: EFF explained the outage wave and argued for funding open source. — Saturday October 24 edition.

Joe Mullin lays out the two opinions from the same 11th Circuit panel. Florida's H.B. 3 bars under-14s from accounts even with parental permission and requires consent for 14- and 15-year-olds, and Georgia's S.B. 351 requires parental consent under 16 plus commercially reasonable age checks. EFF notes the Florida panel did recognise that H.B. 3 targets protected expression.

Its objection is that the court treated time online as a proxy for harm, and in Georgia faulted the plaintiffs for not proving invalid applications outweighed valid ones, which EFF calls a near-impossible standard. It argues the laws cut minors off from communities and information and put adults' privacy at risk through age verification, and it asks affected users to document harms at agegates@eff.org.

CounterpointState officials and child-safety advocates would argue that platform design features such as infinite scroll and push notifications do harm minors, and that the panel was right to let legislatures act. EFF is an advocacy group that opposed these laws in court.

Previously: The 11th Circuit let Florida and Georgia enforce under-14 and under-16 account restrictions, and EFF is collecting reports of harm. — Saturday October 24 edition.

Alex Donaldson concedes that GTA III was bettered in nearly every gameplay sense by Vice City a year later and is hard work to replay now. His argument is that its empty streets, looping NPC lines, litter blowing around and areas that appear to have no spawns make it feel eerie, like the liminal-space aesthetic that recently produced the Backrooms film. He says the game's logic is laid bare yet immersion deepens, and that this was not the developers' intent.

He compares its Liberty City to Silent Hill without the intended nightmare, and says its meaning has changed over time in a way later, more convincing GTA worlds cannot match.

CounterpointCritics wary of retrofitting meaning would say the emptiness is simply a technical limit of PS2-era hardware, and that reading it as art credits the game with an effect its makers did not design. Players who prefer the later, denser GTA worlds would hold that those are the more compelling places today.