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Episode 668

Mass Effect 5 Cancelled, Epic Goes AI-First, and Why You Don't Really Own Your Games

01:05:45

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Mass Effect 5 Cancelled, Epic Goes AI-First, and Why You Don't Really Own Your Games

A leaked trailer has made Mass Effect fans angrier than anything BioWare has done recently. With the studio shut down and Mass Effect 5 cancelled, a petition is circulating to force EA to sell the franchise. Luke and Matt go through the whole sad run from Andromeda to Anthem to the purple Dragon Age game, and they ask whether EA might still have plans for the IP (probably involving microtransactions).

From there the show gets bigger. Anthropic reportedly lost $80.7 billion in the first half of this year. Matt is paying $20 a month for something that costs far more to run, and Nvidia is pre-selling RAM to companies that haven’t got anywhere to put it. Epic Games has gone AI-first on its Disney shooter after laying off 1,000 people. Matt, a senior developer, asks how anyone becomes a senior developer when there are no junior jobs. Luke’s answer is that people will be paid to play games again, and he says it with a straight face. We also try to work out whether Star Trek is a realistic model for universal basic income.

There’s a Congressional bill that would let you actually own the games you buy, and Luke’s plan for Microsoft to get rich by bringing back a feature it scrapped on the Xbox One. A Valve developer said ‘HLX’ out loud and got teased for it afterwards. Luke says Half-Life 2 was repetitive and will defend that position. Matt has been playing Little Kitty, Big City for his daughter, and he keeps putting off the chainsaw ladies in Resident Evil 4. Luke reviews Street Fighter and Other Mummy after two “private screenings”, there are rumours about the next James Bond, and Taika Waititi’s Star Wars movie has been shelved.

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