Rock, Paper, Shotgun
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Yesterday, a group of moneyfolk including private equity firm Silver Lake, Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, and Donald Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners unveiled plans to acquire Electronic Arts for an estimated $55 billion.
The buyers are committing $36 billion of their own equity (briefly and inexpertly, "equity" is the value of your assets after you deduct anything you owe), including the value of the PIF's existing investments in EA. They're making up the rest of the total thanks to a $20 billion loan from JPMorgan Chase Bank. How will they manage that massive debt? According to the Financial Times, who cite unnamed insiders, they're gambling on the deployment of generative AI tools as a gigantic cost-saving measure.
Update: It's now live, full notes here.
Original story continues below:
Civ 7 beefy update 1.2.5 arrives today, September 30th. Developers Firaxis have laid out its major tweaks and additions, which include new map types and city states, plus a revamp of the construction interface and a hefty helping of balancing.
The polarising 4X strategy nation-builder has gotten the likes of auto-explore and world wonder reworks in its last couple of monthly updates, with Firaxis having settled in for the long haul after an initial flurry of post-release tweaking. 1.2.5 is the first update the game's gotten since an undisclosed number of workers - "dozens of people", according to Game Developer sources - were laid off at Firaxis earlier this month, in what publishers 2K told RPS was a "staff reduction" as the studio "restructures and optimizes its development process for adaptability, collaboration, and creativity".
Your cuddly dinosaur aunties at Capcom have warned that they can't "guarantee" various Monster Hunter games will run on Windows 10 PCs after uncle Microsoft end support for the operating system on October 14th this year.
When that fateful day comes to pass, Capcom "will no longer guarantee that Monster Hunter: World, Monster Hunter Rise and Monster Hunter Wilds will run on Windows 10 systems." Which isn't to say that these games will immediately become unplayable, but "future system updates or game title updates may make the game incompatible on Windows 10 systems".
In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4's latest trailer, in which an entire nerd cave's worth of miniatures spanning all four in-game factions are gibbed, gutted and burned in about 90 seconds.
Somewhat to my surprise, this is the first time I've watched a Warhammer videogame and tried to calculate the bodycount in terms of tabletop figurine prices. My pen-and-paper estimates are profoundly upsetting, and that was before I looked at Games Workshop's current catalogue - I think for the first time since 1999 - and adjusted my figures for inflation. Do any of you play physical Warhammer tabletop games right now? How does that balance out, exactly? Do you just sort of... not buy food?
Based on time of day and year, global fertility rates, and our own secret, illegal research into RPS supporter breeding patterns, I calculate that there's a 12% chance you are reading this while carrying or cradling a small child. If that's the case, then: what on Earth are you doing here? We post all kinds of awful grown-up things on RPS. Mark is threatening to do another salacious mod article and just this very morning, I posted a picture of a xenomorph covered in blood.
This piece should be safe for kids, however, as long as you don't explain what a xenomorph is or what "salacious" means. It's about Messenger, a free browser-based game in which you run around a very small 3D watercolour planet, delivering post. I suspect you and your child will enjoy it, unless we've already corrupted them and you're now playing Aliens: Fireteam Elite.
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Remember when you were young, and had your first crush? All of a sudden your hormones are going nuts, and here's this person you can't think about without your face contorting into a goofy smile, or talk about without bashfully giggling. Well, it seems that's how part-time Gearbox exec and full-time social media poster Randall Steward Pitchford II feels about Borderlands 4's freshly revealed first DLC Vault Hunter.
It's understandable to be fair. Which of us hasn't found ourselves gazing longingly at a former casino robot dressed like a goth version of John Wayne, before volunteering to help animate its card-throwing? Sometimes, C4SH rules not just everything around you, but your very heart.
It's been over half a year since Fallout: London developers Team FOLON announced that it'd be getting three bits of DLC adding new quests to post-apocalyptic Blighty. The folks behind the massive mod have been relatively quiet in that time, but they've now confirmed that the first of these DLCs, Rabbit and Pork, will require you to start a fresh save game.
Also, one reason it hasn't arrived already is that the team have been working to ensure other quest add-ons won't force you to go back to square one, whenever they drop.
Update: Well, that escalated quickly. Following rumours over the weekend, EA have confirmed that an investor consortium consisting of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, equity firm Silver Lake, and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners have acquired the Battlefield 6 publisher in an all-cash transaction that values EA at around $55 billion. The consortium will buy 100% of EA and take it private, with the PIF rolling in their existing 9.9% stake in the publisher.
EA have put out a press release featuring various hyperbolic remarks from the likes of EA CEO Andrew Wilson, who will stay on in his position. EA will also continue to be based in Redwood City, California. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2027 - in other words, at some point between January and March, once it has been granted the usual regulatory approvals and voted through by EA's shareholders.
As has been the case with all of Hollow Knight: Silksong's sizeable updates this far, Team Cherry have put out some tweaks as a Steam beta shot to the upcoming patch three's chaser. As of now, opting into playtesting this "interim update" offers some extra controller support and fixes, but the devs say more'll be added before the full patch goes live to everyone.
In case you need a refesher, the metroidvania's first patch made a couple of its early bosses a bit easier. Meanwhile, its second patch didn't do any balancing, but did bring handy fixes to problems like the Savage Beastfly boss cheekily hiding below some lava.