Gaming

The Week Power Moved From Boardrooms to Builders

By Crypt0 · Oct 22, 2026

This was the week the games industry showed where its power really sits, far from the boardroom. Electronic Arts closed BioWare, the 31 year old studio behind Mass Effect and Dragon Age, and cut about 400 jobs across the company. A day later, a single independent researcher used artificial intelligence tools to jailbreak the Nintendo Switch 2, the first public software crack of the console. And the same week, the modest hardware of the Switch 2 forced one of the industry's biggest publishers to make its games run better on every platform it ships to. Consolidation took a studio. Builders and players kept moving anyway.

The BioWare news landed on Wednesday. EA told employees it would close the Edmonton studio, end early development on the next Mass Effect game, and eliminate roughly 400 roles, about 3 percent of its workforce, with around 50 of those at BioWare itself. The cuts are the first major round since a $55 billion privatization deal led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners closed in August, a deal Bloomberg reported loaded about $18 billion of debt onto EA's books. EA said it will concentrate on large scale action adventure games, naming Marvel's Iron Man and the next Star Wars Jedi title, alongside its sports franchises, Apex Legends, and Battlefield. The Sims project codenamed Lotus is pausing while the franchise refocuses on a project called Evergreen, and the team behind skate. is getting smaller. For BioWare, a studio founded in 1995 and acquired by EA in 2007, the run ends after more than three decades that included Baldur's Gate, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age, and Mass Effect.

The tributes carried a story the closure headlines missed. CD Projekt Red executive Michal Nowakowski wrote that BioWare lent the young Polish team its Aurora engine for the first Witcher, shared its development wisdom, and gave the studio a spot at its E3 booth, help he credited with bringing CD Projekt Red to an international level. Former BioWare project director Michael Gamble, 17 years at the studio, thanked the community for its words of support for the studio's legacy and impact. BioWare's own farewell note called the studio a home for storytellers, developers, and players across more than three decades of shared adventures. The through line in every tribute was the same. The games were made by people, and the people are what players remember. Studios can close. The craft moves on through everyone it touched.

While the industry mourned a studio, one researcher opened a console. Sammy Hajhamid, known online as pepsipu, released ns2jb on Thursday, the first public software jailbreak for the Nintendo Switch 2, achieved with help from OpenAI's Codex. The exploit targets firmware 23.0.1 and delivers arbitrary code execution entirely through software, leaving the hardware exactly as it shipped. It works through a backward compatible Switch 1 application called SmileBASIC 4, a $25 coding tool on the eShop, and it clears itself every time the console powers down, so the process must be repeated after each reboot. Hajhamid demonstrated it with a modded Mario Kart World featuring characters like Peter Griffin and Hatsune Miku, and the release supports homebrew software, game modding, and save file backups. The jailbreak arrives about a year and a half after the console's launch, and it continues a pattern TechSpot flagged this month. AI coding tools are now doing real parts of the reverse engineering work, with a human still steering, and consoles are among the hardest consumer devices to crack.

The same console is quietly improving games far beyond its own library. Capcom's work bringing its demanding RE Engine titles to the Switch 2 has forced real optimization across the board. A free update for Dragon's Dogma 2 delivered significant frame rate improvements on all platforms, and demo tests of Monster Hunter Wilds showed the game running at 45 frames per second on Switch 2 against 25 on the Xbox Series S, with producer Genki Sunano confirming that optimization for the new console should also lift performance on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox. Monster Hunter Wilds arrives on Switch 2 on December 4. The logic is straightforward. The Switch 2 ships in a single hardware tier, so publishers have to do the engineering work, and every player benefits when they do. In a year of steep component prices, that discipline matters more than raw power.

Put the three stories side by side and the week's lesson is a hopeful one for anyone who loves this medium. A publisher can close a studio, but the craft those developers practiced is already spreading through tributes, through the engine knowledge they shared, and through the players who grew up on their worlds. A platform holder can lock down its hardware, and a curious mind with modern tools will still find the door. A modest handheld can drag a giant publisher into doing better engineering for everyone. The money moves in boardrooms. The medium moves in workshops, modding scenes, and optimization passes, and this week the workshops won. That is worth remembering the next time a headline tells you the industry is only about consolidation. The people who build and the people who play have always found their own way forward, and they showed it again this week.

Sources

• Reuters, EA to shutter BioWare studio, cut jobs
• iXBT Games, CD Projekt Red head reacts to BioWare closure
• TechSpot, Nintendo Switch 2 jailbreaking is here
• iXBT Games, Nintendo Switch 2 forces Capcom to improve PC and PS5 games

New to crypto? Read the crypto glossary, browse frequent questions, read our story, or explore the story archive.