Month: August 2019

Enlarge / Over two years after EA said it was "bullish" on Switch, FIFA remains company's only major franchise on the system.

Shortly after the Nintendo Switch's 2017 launch, we started to wonder why more games weren't being ported to the hot-selling system. Two years later, those concerns have grown largely moot as major titles from Doom (2016) and Diablo 3, to Dark Souls and Fortnite, to Stardew Valley and Minecraft, and many, many more have found a happy home on Nintendo's hybrid system.

One of the biggest exceptions to this trend, though, has been mega-publisher Electronic Arts. Of its many classic and continuing franchises, only FIFA has been made available on the Switch thus far (alongside two indie games published under the EA Partners label). Classic and ongoing franchises like Need for Speed, Mass Effect, Dead Space, Dragon Age, Battlefield, Madden, and more have remained stubbornly inaccessible to Switch owners. That's especially surprising when you consider that EA CEO Andrew Wilson said shortly after the Switch's launch that the company "continue[s] to be bullish on it and [is] looking at other titles that we might bring to the Switch."

At least one analyst noticed this inconsistency and used an earnings call this week to point out specifically that he thought EA's Sims franchise would be a natural fit for the Switch. "I'm curious how you guys determine which platforms to bring the game to or games to. And is there any reason why you wouldn't want to bring that one on there?" he asked.

Enlarge / This is going to go down on your permanent record. (credit: McMillan Publishers)

Edward Snowden, the former CIA employee and National Security Agency contractor who spilled some of the deepest secrets of the US government's electronic surveillance operations, has written a memoir. Permanent Record, published by MacMillan Publishers' imprint Metropolitan Books, will go on sale on September 17, and it's now available for pre-orders—as Snowden himself announced via his Twitter account today.

Snowden's memoir will be released simultaneously in more than 20 countries, and pre-orders are available in the US, the United Kingdom, and Germany. According to a Metropolitan spokesperson, "In Permanent Record, [Snowden] tells his story for the very first time, bringing the reader along as he helps to create [NSA's] system of mass surveillance, and then experiences the crisis of conscience that led him to try to bring it down."

In a statement on the book, MacMillan CEO John Sargent said: