Weekend Highlights (October 31 - November 1)

Anthropic confirmed a ban in Claude on copying other people's games, Jason Schreier found out why EA shut down BioWare, and the creators of Lords of the Fallen II took out a loan to complete the game — here’s a rundown of the main events in the gaming industry over the past weekend.

• A few days ago, users of Claude Opus 5.5 noticed that the neural network began refusing tasks related to reverse engineering games. Shortly thereafter, Anthropic publicly confirmed the change in service rules. The company stated that it indeed updated the system prompt of Claude Opus 5.5 by adding two sentences to prevent the recreation of other people's games. According to Anthropic, this step was necessary to protect the intellectual property rights of the original project's authors.
• Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier explored the reasons behind BioWare's closure. According to his sources, one reason was Electronic Arts’ (EA) desire to cut costs amid financial issues triggered by the company’s recent sale to an investor consortium. After auditing the internal studios' pipeline for the upcoming years, EA discovered two sci-fi action games with production budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars: the new Mass Effect from BioWare and Star Wars Battlefront III. Consequently, EA decided to bet on Star Wars Battlefront III, seeing it as a less risky and more predictable option. However, according to Schreier's sources, the development of the Star Wars game hasn’t even started. Other potential reasons for BioWare's closure mentioned by Schreier include the failure of the studio’s latest games and leadership changes at EA.
• The Polish company CI Games received a €28.6 million loan from Erste Bank Polska and Bank Ochrony Środowiska. The company plans to spend the money on settling existing obligations to the banks and funding its own operations. This includes allocating funds to complete the development and release of the soulslike Lords of the Fallen II. No new details regarding the game’s release have been provided by the company, but it's expected to occur sometime during the first quarter of 2027.
• Raw Power Games faces the risk of closure. The studio announced on social media that the reason is a loss of funding, without which it cannot continue developing Chronicles: Medieval — a medieval action game in the spirit of Mount & Blade. Currently, Raw Power Games is in talks with potential new partners and hopes for a positive resolution, but there are no guarantees of a favorable outcome.
• Publisher tinyBuild and studio Questing Goose reported a rapid sales growth of the cyberpunk store owner simulator, Probably Stolen. According to their calculations, the game was purchased more than 500,000 times worldwide within the first two days of its release. Furthermore, on the evening of November 1, Probably Stolen set a new record for peak concurrent players on Steam, which reached 152,036 people.