While we have to wait until May for a full reveal of College Football 25, EA Sports shared some new details, including how much players will get compensated, what will and won’t be included in the game, and more.

In an article by ESPN, EA Sports revealed how much it will pay players opting to use their name, image, and likeness (NIL) in College Football 25. The article notes that over 11,000 college football players can opt-in to be featured in College Football 25.

Players who opt into College Football 25 will receive $600 and a copy of the game. The game itself is valued at $70, according to ESPN. ESPN further notes that student-athletes will remain in the game for all their collegiate football careers but can opt out of future installments.

Yet, the $600 and a copy of the game is not the only form of compensation players will receive; should a player remain in the game for multiple years, they will be compensated annually, even if they transfer with the only requirement for transfer students be that they remain on a roster for that school’s football program.

EA Sports VP of business development Sean O’Brien told ESPN that the studio looked at deals they completed for other sports video games, such as the Madden NFL series, and that the deal made for the college football series “comes with no expected services by the athlete and will be guaranteed no matter the game’s success.”

In a separate article, EA Sports confirmed to ESPN several things that will and will not be included in College Football 25. Reiterating once again, Dynasty Mode and Road to Glory will return in the next college football game. In addition to returning game modes, College Football 25 will run on the same engine as Madden (currently, the Madden series runs on the Frostbite engine), include every bowl game, and incorporate a 12-team College Football playoff system. NIL, the transfer portal, and some of the newer inclusions in collegiate sports will also be featured, though EA Sports did not go into detail as to how both will be implemented.

Although all 134 FBS schools have agreed to participate in College Football 25, with up to 85 players on each team, EA Sports revealed that real-life coaches, such as University of Georgia head coach Kirby Smart, won’t be featured. However, O’Brien did not rule out the inclusion of coaches in the future and said that EA Sports is exploring ways to “offer coaches the opportunity to opt in beyond Year 1.”

EA Sports College Football will get a full reveal sometime in May, with a release window set for this summer.

Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.

Helldivers 2’s latest patch has caused a “nasty” PlayStation 5 login bug that’s currently preventing people from playing the game.

Helldivers 2 patch 1.000.11 launched across PS5 and Steam today, February 22, and promised to kick AFK players and fix the defrosting bug.

But it appears to have caused a PS5 specific issue that is now making Helldivers 2 unplayable on Sony’s console. IGN has received multiple reports from players unable to login, and have verified the dreaded “servers at capacity” message is present on PS5.

Elden Ring sales have grown to hit 23 million, publisher Bandai Namco has announced.

As part of the reveal of the hotly anticipated Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, due out this June, Bandai Namco issued a sales update for the base game, which, last we heard, had sold 20 million a year after launch.

This new 23 million sold figure is made up of shipped copies of the physical version as well as download sales, including those on Steam. So it provides a solid picture of Elden Ring’s breakout success. To put that into context, Hogwarts Legacy, 2023’s best-selling video game, has sold 24 million copies, generating well over $1 billion in sales.

Elden Ring is easily FromSoftware’s most successful game, with critical acclaim to go alongside its enormous sales success. It outsold each of the Dark Souls games, Demon’s Souls, Sekiro, as well as Bloodborne (don’t mention a remake!).

Will FromSoftware release Elden Ring 2 or more DLC for Elden Ring following the release of the Shadow of the Erdtree? In an exclusive interview with IGN, chief developer Hidetaka Miyazaki said both are possible, although he stopped short of making an announcement.

Earlier this month, a Genshin Impact-inspired Elden Ring mobile game was reported to be in development, but progress was described as “slow”.

The base version of Elden Ring returned a 10/10 in IGN’s review. “Elden Ring is a massive iteration on what FromSoftware began with the Souls series, bringing its relentlessly challenging combat to an incredible open world that gives us the freedom to choose our own path,” we said.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

“Most companies die with a bad launch, this one actually came out stronger.”

That’s a line from New York University’s Stern School of Business professor Joost van Dreunen, quoted in The Wall Street Journal earlier this year. He was describing the transformation undergone by developer CD Projekt Red from the rocky launch of Cyberpunk 2077 in 2020 to the triumphant release of major DLC Phantom Liberty late last year. And it was with understandable pride that Phantom Liberty game director Gabe Amatangelo opened his talk at the 2024 DICE Summit, quoting that exact line.

Amatangelo went on to describe to DICE attendees just how CD Projekt had accomplished such a monumental task, focusing on the most difficult part: rallying a discouraged and frustrated team around a belief that such a thing could be done. When Cyberpunk 2077 launched, he said, it seemed everyone around them knew that something had gone wrong at his company. The woman who worked at the local coffee shop. His landlord. Everyone. The perceived failure was almost inescapable.

That left Amatangelo with the critical job of rebuilding internal morale. He led by focusing on positives, encouraging the team to celebrate the elements of the launch that had gone well. He worked to build trust, so that developers who needed help felt they could ask for it. And he worked with the team to come up with a handful of key drivers that would enable the production of the DLC to be a success. These included distributing ownership over decision-making and other checks so that the game director role wouldn’t be a bottleneck on production, integrating and empowering QA closely with the rest of the team even in early development, and just…setting aside time for developers to actually play the game. A lot.

To the Stars

After Amatangelo’s talk, I spoke with him about how the team is carrying these lessons forward into its next Cyberpunk project, currently dubbed Project Orion. In addition to what he shared in his DICE talk, Amatangelo expanded on a number of learnings he’s carrying forward into the new game. He emphasizes the importance of contingency planning and the need to share backup plans both up and down the chain of command – and to have multiple backup plans, just in case. He tells me about the importance of putting oneself in the player’s shoes when establishing a new story or world, and imagining what they might hope to see or do in that space so that you don’t let them down.

And he reiterates the importance of making sure studio environments are environments of trust. “One technique, and a lot of the guys and gals that work for me know that whenever I put an idea forward, because of my position, sometimes people might not want to challenge it. So if I see that vibe, I’ll then just play devil’s advocate and I’ll start to break apart my idea. Sometimes they’ll be like, ‘Wait, so do you want to do this or not want to do this?’ I’m like, ‘I’m not sure. Let’s talk about it.’ We established a good chemistry and trust in my circle, my direct report circle, and I think that was replicated a lot as well.”

I was especially curious about Amatangelo’s plans in light of the announcement that he’s heading up a new CD Projekt studio in Boston. Announced earlier this year, the Boston studio is CD Projekt’s first studio in the United States, and will primarily be focused on Project Orion.

I ask Amatangelo what it’s like starting a new studio at such a challenging time for the industry as a whole. Amatangelo isn’t responsible for the cuts last summer to 10% of CD Projekt Group’s workforce based largely in Poland, but he does now find himself in the position of trying to build up a new studio in North America at a time when a lot of developers are looking for work. Over 10,000 developers worldwide lost their jobs last year, and roughly 6000 have been impacted thus far in 2024. Amatangelo calls it “one of the most difficult things going on right now,” but he’s hopeful the industry will bounce back… and maybe learn some important lessons about planning in the process.

“I think maybe there’ll be a maturing of structuring of certain facilities and aspects,” he says. “We’re seeing that with the rumors around consoles and stuff. I think we’re trying to figure out how to restructure things in a meta sense a little bit. But the bottom line is that the bottom line isn’t going away. That’s not decreasing. More people are interested in being immersed and taking a breather from day to day, so to speak, and having an opportunity to expand their minds or blow off some steam, stuff like that. It’s not going away. So I think it’ll sort itself out, but, obviously, some turbulent times.”

Speaking of maturing and restructuring, I ask Amatangelo specifically how, as studio head, he plans to work to mitigate crunch at the new studio he’s leading, especially given the company’s history with the practice.

“Similar to the techniques used throughout Phantom Liberty, you plan as best you can,” he said. “It’s all about getting ahead of seeing what might come up in the future and scoping accordingly, resourcing accordingly, and also being flexible. If you put in some extra hours this week, take some hours off next week. Because, admittedly, even at a certain point, there was where [responsibility] landed on me and I was like a bottleneck, and I’m like, ‘All right, I’m going to have to do some double time this week. Otherwise, too many people are pulled out, and then next week I’m taking some time off.’ You do the best you can to mitigate that, but as long as there’s that kind of climate and understanding of helping each other. Then when I took some time off, some of my reports rise to the occasion and fill in the gaps while I’m out, and you just do that at all levels.”

The Fun Phase

That’s how Amatangelo is thinking about it now in the early stages of the studio. The real test, the months leading up to launch, is still several years off. Project Orion is still in its early stages. Amatangelo points out that there really aren’t clear lines determining when a game enters different phases of production, but Project Orion is currently in what he calls the “fun phase” of game development.

“In the perfect world, when you’re making a game, it’s all ideation and concepts and putting stuff in concept art and then moving to the next stage once you’re feeling solid about your ideas or maybe your story outline, and then you start prototyping things,” he says. “We’re in that stage, but it’s kind of blurred, like prototyping some things as well as concepting some stuff and working on the story. So, yeah, we got some prototypes going on. We’ve got some exploration, some pipeline setup, some story ideas being thrown at the wall, back and forth, concept art, that kind of phase, the fun phase.”

Amatangelo isn’t sharing much more about what Project Orion is at for now. I did ask him if game console tech is where he wants it to be to meet his ambitions for the game, especially given recent online discussions about new generations of Xbox and PlayStation consoles. And sure, Amatangelo wishes tech was further along… but he admits he might always be wishing for that. “I wish there were Holodecks, you know what I mean?”

One relevant example is AI, which Amatangelo himself brought up to me when he asked if I had stayed to listen to a later DICE talk between Xbox’s Haiyan Zhang and the ESA’s Stanley Pierre-Louis on video games and AI. Amatangelo tells me he himself had been listening to an AI expert talk about large language models and generative AI recently, when they expressed how it would always be “unknowable” how these models arrive at their conclusions. While their comment was intended to be a positive one, Amatangelo says he finds that idea terrifying. He’d rather keep AI busy with menial tasks rather than content creation.

“My gut tells me that AI for pipelines, for tools for helping with, let’s call it, the busy work that no one really likes to do a lot of times, I think there’s a lot of promising stuff on that front,” he says. “It allows developers to have more satisfying jobs overall because they could spend more time on the creative elements. So that’s my optimistic take with AI and stuff like that.”

But as the game director of the next Cyberpunk, he admits the worst case scenarios, even if they terrify him, are useful fodder for storytelling at least. “On the other end, I got science fiction,” he says.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.