Game Industry Weekly — August 5, 2026
Hey hey, game developers!
On Tuesday, August 4, Electronic Arts stopped being a publicly traded company after 37 years on the Nasdaq. It's the ending of a story I've been following here since the July 22 edition, and it's worth understanding what actually changes now that it's done.
EA now answers to whoever bought it, not whoever invested in it
The close went pretty much as expected. The consortium led by Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund PIF, alongside Silver Lake and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners, paid the agreed $55 billion, $210 a share, officially making it the largest leveraged buyout in history. Andrew Wilson stays on as CEO, headquarters stay in Redwood City, and most of the management structure doesn't change on paper. What changes is the nature of the pressure EA operates under. It no longer answers to quarterly shareholders on a public market, but it now carries roughly $20 billion in debt taken on just to get this deal done. Going private usually gets sold as relief from short-term pressure. Debt at that scale sets its own pace too, it's just a lot harder to see from the outside. Wilson himself isn't the one carrying any of that risk, meanwhile. He took home $38.6 million in total pay for the fiscal year EA laid off staff across DICE, Criterion, Ripple Effect, and Motive, months after Battlefield 6 became the best-selling game in the US, and he stands to collect more than $125 million in exit pay if he's pushed out without cause within the next 18 months.
Nobody keeps the knowledge of the person who gets let go
id Software laid off close to half its team this week, 136 people, one day before launching the Revelations expansion for DOOM: The Dark Ages. In the same round of cuts, Microsoft let go of Chris Munson, the original creator of Xbox FanFest, three months after announcing the return of the very event he invented. The event is still running without him. This isn't only about Microsoft. A piece published this week on Game Developer asks the right question about the industry as a whole. Why does so much accumulated knowledge, about how to keep a community running, about how to make one specific game actually work, just walk out the door with the person who got laid off, with no retention process at all? After more than twenty years watching this cycle repeat at studios big and small, I can tell you that the knowledge that leaves rarely gets replaced at the same speed the headcount disappears from the org chart.
Netflix called it a hit, the studio closed anyway
FIFA World Cup: Launch Edition premiered on Netflix on June 11, and Netflix itself called it one of the most successful launches in the platform's cloud gaming history, even as critics tore the game apart. Eight weeks later, Delphi Interactive, the studio's part-owner, pulled all of Refactor Games' funding without warning, and the entire team was laid off the same weekend the news broke, on August 3. Barclay Chantel, the studio's art director, summed up the moment in a LinkedIn post. "Delphi just pulled the plug on Refactor Studios right after we shipped the FIFA World Cup game for Netflix," he wrote. Refactor was staffed with people who'd come from EA Sports, 2K Sports, and OneTeam Partners, had a deal with one of the biggest streaming platforms on the planet, and had its own client calling the game a success. None of that kept the studio standing once whoever was funding it decided to walk.
A few smaller items
On the numbers side, PlayStation 5 crossed 95.3 million units sold for the fiscal quarter ending June 30, though quarterly shipments were down 36% year over year. Still a massive commercial success, just not growing at the pace it did earlier in the generation.
And if you're into fighting games, the open beta for Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls, Arc System Works' new tag-team fighter, ran badly enough on PC to trigger a public apology from the studio, with frame rate drops, stutter, and heavy CPU usage. The game launches August 6 on PS5 and PC, with fixes promised for launch day itself. Anyone who's shipped a game through an open beta knows that exact pressure, patching everything in the final stretch without being able to move an announced date.
One from Brazil
Gamepólitan returned to Salvador from July 31 to August 2, after six years off, and drew roughly 20,000 visitors to the city's exhibition park. There was a track for students and instructors to show off game projects (GP-Dev), an esports arena that included a game jam (GP-Cup), and a business track connecting startups with investors (GP-Business). This is the same event I mentioned last week, when AbleGamers Brasil was set to bring an assistive tech booth to the festival for the first time, and it's good to see Bahia get a gathering of this size back.
And the good, very personal news this week is about a Brazilian game...
Full disclosure first, as always. I'm an investor in Nuntius Games, so this recommendation is not remotely neutral, and I have zero interest in pretending otherwise. With that said, Shard Squad, made by Brazilian studio The Root Studios, launched on consoles this week: Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Switch, and Switch 2. It's an isometric pixel art bullet heaven with 28 playable Shards that evolve mid-run, 99 relics, and roughly 20 hours of campaign, published by Nuntius Games. The game first launched on Steam back in November 2025 and sits at 82% positive reviews across nearly 500 of them, well above what most debut studios can expect. Rennan Costa, the studio's director, talked about the Xbox launch calling it "the fulfillment of a dream," saying that having a game on Xbox felt "incredibly distant" when he was younger. This is The Root Studios' first released game, and watching a debut Brazilian team go from Steam to nearly every relevant console, with reviews to back it up, makes me genuinely proud to be part of it, well beyond the financial stake I've already disclosed here.
Out of everything this week, Shard Squad landing on consoles is honestly what got to me most, I saw the news and sat there grinning at my screen for a minute. But I'm curious whether something else, EA going private, Refactor Games shutting down, or Gamepólitan, hit differently for you. Drop a comment, and if there's someone in your circle who should be following this too, send it their way.
Take care and see you next Wednesday!
