Anthem’s struggles are part of a much bigger problem at BioWare according to exposé posted on Tuesday, April 2, by Kotaku. Developers came forward to the publication under the promise of anonymity to detail the terrible work conditions that contributed to the issues behind the studio’s latest sci-fi shooter, as well as Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda.
It’s no secret that the launch of Anthem was rocky, with many reviewers and players citing that it felt like a game that was released way too soon. Tweets and blog posts from the developer’s upper management have been trying to dispel concerns and criticisms of the game, claiming that its issues are mostly a result of Anthem being such a massive online game, but some anonymous insight from developers who worked on the project suggest it’s much deeper than that.
From the use of EA’s controversial Frostbite engine to poor direction from upper management and understaffed teams, Anthem developers were subjected to work conditions that made them so miserable that many were forced to take doctor-mandated leave for months with some never returning. These conditions resulted in several of BioWare’s most experienced developers leaving as well.
And yet, this seems to be another case of crunch culture — the same issue we heard about leading up to the launch of Red Dead Redemption 2. According to the report, it became a sort of tradition for BioWare for its games to have a slow start in development and then rapidly accelerate near the end, resulting in laborious hours where everyone would hope it would all come together. But this approach is proving to be unsustainable.
BioWare quickly released a blog post titled Anthem Game Development where an anonymous author came to the studio’s defense and claimed that no complaints regarding the crunch culture were brought to their attention: “We put a lot of focus on better planning to avoid ‘crunch time,’ and it was not a major topic of feedback in our internal postmortems.”
The article ended by dismissing the report that included words and criticism from BioWare’s own employees: “We don’t see the value in tearing down one another, or one another’s work. We don’t believe articles that do that are making our industry and craft better.”
If you are a developer that struggles with crunch culture and poor compensation, we want to hear from you and can offer anonymity. Reach our Gaming Editor Felicia Miranda directly at [email protected].
Imagine tapping a Zelda icon on your iPhone and jumping straight into Hyrule. A new open-source project called nxnative makes that possible by repackaging Switch games you’ve bought into apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with no emulator in the middle.
Why does this run so well on Apple devices?
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”