They need to wait for that contract to expire.
ampersandrew
Because Sony had previously paid them not to.
This one in particular may not have been dumb considering the studio they closed wasn't the same one they built. Previous reporting said that they had about 70% turnover of employees due to Redfall not being the game that anyone wanted to make when they got a job at Arkane. So mandating Redfall in the first place was the dumb move.
You don't need to slash a AAA studio down to the size of an indie; you can just spin off a small team from your larger one and roll resources on and off of that project as needed.
BioShock 2 was interesting for improving the combat of the original (but not as much as Infinite did) and for what they did with the story, turning it into a parable with its ending. The story was pretty one-note in that regard, but they went for it, you know?
They bought Easy Anti-Cheat during the Fortnite boom.
Just checking, but you're aware this is GameSpot the video game website and not GameStop the brick and mortar retail establishment, right?
That's one way to do it, but I worry less about those things by not supporting them with my time and money.
And it's worth noting that trusting the game developer isn't really enough. Far too many of them have been hacked, so who's to say it's always your favorite game developer behind the wheel?
They can prevent you from running cheats that other anti-cheats can't detect. For instance, they could modify the value in memory so that your calculated hash always succeeds even when it's modified. This doesn't stop cheating though; it just means cheaters have to use cheat hardware that exists at a layer that even kernel anti-cheat can't detect.
You can co-op Vagante and Streets of Rogue as well. Both are fantastic in single player and multiplayer, and both allow offline local multiplayer; Streets of Rogue even has LAN.