Welcome back to your monthly report of game news, where I do my best to compile everything into one convenient ad-free place, so you don’t have to worry about the pesky cracks that info can fall through at other publications!
Thanks and credit for the banner image as always goes to the Avocado’s one and only Space Robot!
ABK Updates, now officially retired to become Xbox Updates
With the merger fully completed on October 13th 2023, Xbox and Activision Blizzard King had some things to say. Along with the usual ceremonial marketing jargle, it was almost immediately officially announced via internal email that the infamous Bobby Kotick’s 32 year reign as CEO of Activision will come to an end at the close of calendar 2023, departing January 1st 2024 after some weeks answering directly to Phil Spencer to aid with the process of corporate integration. It’s been understood since reporting after the buyout was first announced back in January 2022 that Kotick’s altogether exit from ABK was in the cards as a heavily golden-parachuted PR move on top of how much he’ll already profit from the acquisition’s completion itself. And the same thing we all said then definitely still applies now: good fucking riddance you vile piece of shit, no reason we can’t enjoy the moment, but this is no cure-all for the toxicity at every level within ABK.
It was also confirmed by Activision and Xbox alike that the publisher’s catalog will start arriving on Game Pass and xCloud as first party Xbox titles over the course of calendar 2024 and no sooner as existing agreements are navigated and fees to Ubisoft are paid off, nothing was cleared in advance due to how down to the wire this got. Once again, the Ubisoft arrangement that saved this deal doesn’t prevent ABK games on Game Pass outright, it was only about keeping ABK games from being exclusive, keeping them neutrally available in the streaming market by being on Ubisoft+ and wherever else Ubisoft distributes it such as established partners PS Plus and Amazon Luna. The greater details of the Ubisoft deal are well explained at the included links, straight from Ubisoft and the CMA themselves. Much of the Call of Duty series might be waiting the longest to be added due to being produced under the previous PlayStation marketing rights and timed exclusive content deal, which covers 2015’s Black Ops 3 through Modern Warfare III.
On October 10th, as first exclusively reported by Jez Corden of Windows Central, ABK held an all-hands internal ‘town hall’ meeting hosted by, of all people, former talk show host James Corden (no relation to Jez) as he interviewed Bobby Kotick about the impending merger completion, in a real all time low paycheck gig even for an entertainer so widely reviled by his colleagues. Kotick made someoff-putting comments as we’ve come to expect from him, such as declaring ABK’s infamously toxic workplace culture to be “magic”, or citing Elon Musk’s hazardous Neuralink technology as a future gaming interface. While discussing the various resources at hand from Microsoft, he used the phrase “the re-emergence of Guitar Hero” and praised the accessibility and development opportunities provided by tech like DLSS.
BlizzCon 2023 brought plentiful Overwatch 2, Diablo 4, and World of Warcraft update/DLC news.
October 6th:
As first reported at IGN by Rebekah Valentine, longstanding Swedish developer Avalanche Studios Group saw a large portion of its workers, over 100 out of roughly 500, successfully join the outside trade union Unionen, and have begun new contract negotiations. They’re also collaborating with coworkers who were already members of a different union, as they collective bargain on issues like a four-day work week. Avalanche Studios have developed the entire Just Cause series and are currently working on the Xbox exclusive Contraband, and successfully leveraged collective worker power last year by pressuring management out of employing a high level individual with a history of workplace misconduct.
Five months after launch, Arkane released the second patch for Redfall, a major update bringing the promised 60fps Performance Mode, new stealth takedowns, increased enemy population and new enemy encounters, accessibility features, controls and gameplay changes, etc.
October 16th: Bethesda’s head of publishing and senior VP Pete Hines, one of its most prominent public faces after Todd Howard, announced that he’s retiring from the company and the games industry to focus on his personal life now that Starfield has successfully launched. Then on October 26th, several more changes to Xbox and Microsoft leadership occurred: Xbox executives Sarah Bond and Matt Booty were both promoted in conjunction with Phil Spencer assuming extra duties as CEO of Xbox and ABK, while Microsoft chief marketing officer Chris Capossela departed after 32 years, replaced by Takeshi Numoto who has spearheaded the entire company’s cloud division for the past decade. Xbox VP Sarah Bond, a fixture of the annual main showcases, was promoted to overall President of Xbox, overseeing software and hardware platforms, while Matt Booty will oversee games and game studios more fully than ever with ZeniMax leadership answering directly to him due to Pete Hines leaving.
Additionally, “a number of ZeniMax leaders will now report to those Microsoft leaders with whom their work most closely aligns.” ZeniMax remains a limited integration entity with its own President and CEO unlike the incoming ABK, but it’s very clear that Xbox is getting much more hands-on with its subsidiaries after being hands-off has led to things like Redfall’s launch.
October 25th:
Xbox Partner Preview Event: Like a Dragon 8: Infinite Wealth opened the show, because Xbox is very very proud of its marketing deal with this series. This new trailer was entirely focused on the series tradition of a self-contained sim subgame, which has now expanded from business management to a full blown very deliberate Animal Crossing New Horizons riff on the neighboring Dondoko Resort Island. It really does have everything: customization of your home and the whole island, fishing, bug capture, and material harvesting, crafting furniture, and socializing with neighbors, plus the occasional intrusion of combat.
Powerwash Simulator developer FuturLab revealed their next game, currently only coming to PC and Xbox Series S|X console from publisher Thunderful: Ikaro Will Not Die, a third person melee action game and spiritual successor to FuturLab’s early Velocity series. RoboCop: Rogue City saw another new trailer. Two 2024 partner exclusives returned from this year’s main xbox Games Showcase, first person horror game Still Wakes the Deep and adventure game Dungeons of Hintenberg: Still Wakes the Deep had its gameplay reveal trailer, showing the player carefully navigating environmental perils while stealthing away from enemies in the guts of an oil rig, while Dungeons of Hintenberg dug specifically into the Persona style social mechanics that complement its dungeoneering. Indie developer Infuse Studio revealed their second game with out the gate gameplay, Spirit of the North 2 for PC, Xbox Series S|X, and PS5, a newly open world and Unreal 5 direct successor to their 2019 debut game.
Konami provided the gameplay reveal trailer for upcoming remake Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, showing off traversal and combat in lush Unreal 5 environments. Highly anticipated medieval sim game Manor Lords saw its launch date newly announced as April 26th 2024 and the game revealed as a Day One Game Pass title, for PC Game Pass in April and Xbox Game Pass when its console versions arrive. Embark Studios, an independent self-published team of ex-DICE devs, showed off their ftp multiplayer shooter The Finals and shadowdropped an open beta test on PC, Xbox Series S|X, and PS5. Studio Wildcard offered the gameplay reveal trailer and shadowdropped Early Access release on PC (PS5/Xbox in November) for their remake Ark: Survival Ascended. Lastly, Alan Wake 2 made its final appearance with an extended as good as ever launch trailer before it released October 27th.
Everything Else
October 2nd:
Major indie publisher Team17 announced layoffs alongside the departure of CEO Michael Pattison. Those firings occurred across the company at usability, marketing, and programming departments, and around 50 people at the internal QA team were fired in favor of largely outsourcing QA going forward.
October 3rd:
As first reported at Kotaku by Ethan Gach, at least 25 contractors at PlayStation’s Naughty Dog studio were laid off, most of which were in QA, with no severance and with these workers put under pressure to not publicize their layoffs while they work through the end of the October before the terminations actually kick in. This is understood to be in relation to multiplayer Last of Us project being either canceled outright or at least having development currently frozen with no further progress due to dissatisfaction with it. (Its director on November 4th said he is still working on it.) PlayStation has since also seen confirmed layoffs at the Visual Arts support dev, which was working on Last of Us Factions among other projects, the departure of veteran producer Connie Booth, and most recently on October 30th, widespread layoffs at the designated first party live service guru, Bungie.
Jason Schreier quickly reported that due to the layoffs’ impact, Destiny 2’s The Final Shape expansion has been delayed from February to June 2024, and the Marathon reboot was delayed from 2024 to 2025. Schreier later delivered more details in a formal article saying that ultimately 100 were fired out of Bungie’s 1000+ staff, and that executives say this was in response to a 45% decline in revenue for the increasingly long in the tooth shooter. Composer Michael Salvatori, who was with Bungie since the 1990s, was soon revealed to be among those fired. Paul Tassi at Forbes further investigated and issued a report on the 3rd, further elaborating on the 2023 economics of Destiny and Bungie as a whole. Despite the parent company’s own apparent turmoil, Sony is seen at Bungie as a safety net right now compared to the danger this year’s revenue decline would pose to an independent AAA live service dev.
Based on several other personal rumblings from within first party PlayStation, the publisher looks to be in the process of significantly downsizing its live service strategy, or at least hedging its bets a little after so many high profile failed live services and the departure of Jim Ryan who spearheaded the plans. Out of the massive original live service lineup, the majority of projects canceled so far have been at the established single player teams we all knew Sony for first, effectively letting them pivot back to stay exclusively single player and keeping the multiplayer live service projects relegated to the newer teams better meant for that style of project, many of which aren’t fully first party. This is obviously a good move on a lot of levels, one of the bigger problems within the live service trend is this constant square shape round hole project assignment for devs like Platinum, Arkane, or Crystal Dynamics. However, making the live service lineup rely even less on established IPs is an amusing side effect.
As first spied by Kotaku’s Ethan Gach, seven of those recently fired from Bioware are suing the developer for sufficient severance pay under Alberta law, which states that those fired without cause are owed one month’s severance, both pay and benefits, per year of service. EA and Bioware severely failed to meet this standard for this group of workers who average out to 14 years working at Bioware.
Two more developers announced that they were tragically closing up shop due to lack of funds, the 16 year old team Puny Human and the indie studio Bang! whose 2021 debut game Boomerang X saw acclaim. Dang! had tried and failed to secure outside support for their second game before they ran out of money. They promise that Boomerang X will remain available for sale. Puny Human’s story is even worse: after working hard an indie studio with its own IPs for about a decade, most recently Galacide, they branched out into support development for other developers to help pay the bills, working on such games as Squanch’s Trover Saves the Universe, Gearbox’s Tribes of Midgard, The Bard’s Tale 4, and The Callisto Protocol, only for their financial collapse to be triggered by one of those clients refusing agreed-upon compensation for their work. Based on the timing, this was most likely Krafton/Striking Distance and Callisto Protocol.
October 4th:
As first reported by the Libération newspaper, five former Ubisoft executives were arrested by French police in a yearlong ongoing sexual violence investigation, including Serge Hascoët and Tommy Francois, who were both prominently fired in 2020 once their crimes became infamous public knowledge.
After the claim of a new systems hack was first made in September, Sony has now publicly divulged further details of the incident. 3.14GB of data was stolen and 6791 current and former employees in the US saw their personal data compromised in two attacks in late May and late September. The vulnerability exploited has already been fixed and Sony is proceeding to inform and provide aid to those compromised.
Following from this year’s digital store closures, Nintendo announced that online services for the 3DS and Wii U will be closed in April 2024. Pokémon Bank will see support continue for now, but users are encouraged to transfer to Pokémon Home on Switch sooner than later. Here’s to the folks running those fan servers for Splatoon 1, Mario Maker 1, and Miiverse.
IO Interactive announced Hitman series 25th anniversary events occurring throughout October and announced that the series’ classic 2006 fourth entry will come to Switch and mobile this year as Hitman: Blood Money – Reprisal.
October 5th:
Rebekah Valentine reported for IGN that a former HR Manager for Bungie is in the process of suing the developer for retaliation and wrongful termination over the matter of racial discrimination. The plaintiff says that during her employment at Bungie in 2022, she dealt with a case of the only Black employee in a 50-person division feeling racially targeted by his supervisor. She says her superiors refused to discipline or apply diversity training to the supervisor in question, tried to get her to terminate the employee, gave her formal warning for speaking with Bungie’s DEI director about the issue, and ultimately, aggressively pushed her out of the company for these actions in support of a marginalized employee. A jury trial for thi case is currently set for January 22nd 2024.
Cinematic artist Jonah Huang, a veteran at both incarnations of Telltale Games, declared publicly that “Telltale laid most of us off in early September,” not long after the acclaimed launch of Telltale’s The Expanse. The next morning, Telltale confirmed what he said, that layoffs occurred at the Wolf Among Us 2 team and at new acquisition Flavourworks, while insisting that all projects will ensue as planned. It’s so tragic to see the same hard working developers go through the same poor treatment under the same banner five years apart. Huang rightfully called for more unions in gaming.
After a long wait, Spanish indie dev Out of the Blue set the launch date for their second game, American Arcadia, as November 15th 2023 for PC via Steam. Alas for this resident Call of the Sea superfan, console ports will still have to wait.
October 6th:
In conjunction with the previously reported layoffs as cost-cutting, Epic Games is amending its Unreal Engine licensing terms to increase pricing for only its secondary partners, like film/TV VFX crews and automotive design planners, not game developers.
October 9th:
After a decade at the company, Unity CEO John Riccitiello resigned effective immediately following the backfiring of the Unity install fee announcement, just as he exited EA in disgrace before.
Following multiple rounds of layoffs earlier this year affecting roughly 100 people at the company, developers at The Witcher and Cyberpunk’s CD Projekt Red have formed an attempted game developers’ union as part of Poland’s nationwide multi-trade union OZZ IP. CDPR management has yet to officially respond.
German publication Game Two released a 40 minute video reporting on the behind the scenes conditions of one of this year’s consensus worst games, LOTR: Gollum, from German studio Daedalic Entertainment. 32 separate developers of the game say that they experienced serious abuse through “an atmosphere of fear” and intimidation from violent leadership, along with pay below local minimum wage and consistently unpaid overtime. This kind of unacceptable mistreatment is never any solution and can only further exacerbate for what plagued the concept of Gollum as a project from the outset: that this was a desperate attempt to court AAA sized sales numbers without the scale, funding, or experience to deliver on a AAA promise. A 15 million euro budget for a tiny team who had only made point and click adventures and was increasingly relying on the freshest young employees and interns because longstanding abusive workplace culture had already chased away its vets.
October 10th:
Despite many more compelling opportunities to reveal the widely leaked console revision, Sony officially announced the PS5 Slim, which will fully replace the original console models once stock is gone, with a stand-alone trailer released that morning. The PS5 Slim launches in the US and Japan in November 2023 with a still $500 disc drive edition and a now $450 digital edition, packed with a horizontal stand while the vertical stand is now sold separately. The revision features an attachable external disc drive either packed in or available to be bought separately for $80, plus smaller, skinnier and lighter design, multiple smaller panels instead of a big one on each side, and now a full terabyte of storage instead of the 825GB of the original. Full internal physical media support/internal disc drives are rapidly already becoming a minority among the current generation’s console offerings, and while I was prepared for the eventuality, it is still very upsetting, especially with how early and how quick it is. Lower stakes, it’s very frustrating that mid-gen console revisions can’t even save us money anymore.
A larger Bloomberg feature on the state of Disney included the allegation that CEO Bob Iger is under pressure from senior leadership to expand its gaming investments, currently restricted to licensing partnerships, with a major acquisition for internal development.
October 11th:
Developer Harebrained Schemes’ new tactics game The Lamplighters League launched limply this month, leading to an immediate loss writedown of roughly $23 million USD by publisher and owner Paradox Interactive, followed by Paradox agreeing to divest from and release Harebrained Schemes on January 1st 2024, returning the studio to independence.
October 12th:
On social media, Resident Evil/The Evil Within creator Shinji Mikami said that he’s completed the time for a non-compete clause after his departure from Tango Gameworks and is now ready to return to game development somewhere new.
October 13th:
Another update from Dragami Games about their Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP project claimed that fan feedback has guided them towards the intention of a more faithful/preservational remaster rather a remake as originally announced. The veracity of this can only be determined once the game has actually been revealed and released.
October 15th:
An alleged leaked Sonic franchise release schedule for 2024 was posted online from a recent Sega meeting/presentation, outlining an extensive multimedia slate for the year and three major new game additions: DLC for the just-launched Sonic Superstars, a new mobile entry, and apparently a new mainline entry releasing Holiday 2024 after consecutive mainline 3D and 2D releases.
October 16th:
Embracer Group’s cruel bloodletting post failed Saudi deal continued, firing people at MMO developer Cryptic and Pinball FX’s Zen Studios while Chief Operating Officer Egil Strunke departed.
A Wall Street Journal article discussed Netflix’s current plans to expand its gaming library, with new details on the first party games based on, and the suggestion that Netflix will try to compete with Game Pass and PS Plus’ major third party offerings by pursuing licensing deals of its own, including Grand Theft Auto.
After the success of the Analogue Pocket, the retro hardware developer pushed their ambitions even farther for the latest product, newly revealed as the Analogue 3D, coming in 2024, which plays all original Nintendo 64 game cartridges region-free at 4K resolution in hardware-based emulation. It features all original accessory support like the rumble pak or expansion pak, save states, both native speed and overclocked FPS modes, CRT-based display modes, visual effect toggles, wireless bluetooth controller support, and 4 ports for classic controllers.
October 17th:
Major sim game developer Frontier, of Elite Dangerous, Planet Coaster/Planet Zoo, Jurassic World Evolution, etc., announced plans for a new wave of layoffs.
October 20th:
The latest in a long line of poorly received licensed shovelware out of the GameMill publishing house was Skull Island: Rise of Kong, which launched this month and quickly went viral for its quality. Ash Parrish proceeded to almost immediately deliver a report at The Verge speaking to the game’s developers, Chilean contract studio IguanaBee, to discuss what led to its sorry state. For starters, the game only had one year to be made, from June 2022 to this summer for a fall launch, which led directly to endless crunch/overtime for most of that time, from February 2023 through shipping the game. They were also given limited information on what the game was supposed to be. IguanaBee’s Kong team maxed out at 20 people but was as small as only 2 developers at some point in production due to how little funding was provided by publisher GameMill.
The developer testifies that what it went through as described here is known to be what other teams and games are subject to under GameMill management. GameMill preys on and exploits international indie devs in need of funding, like the Chilean IguanaBee, Peruvian kart racer team Bamtang, Brazilian Flux who made the two Cobra Kai games, or the Swedish fighting game team Ludosity of Nickelodeon All Star Brawl, knowing that it’s harder to speak out against GameMill when you’re not only financially reliant on them but also handling a language barrier.
Super Mario Bros Wonder officially launched for Switch, allowing fans to enjoy the 2D line’s strongest entry in ages and finally identify the newest voice actors cast for the Mario franchise. Retail demo kiosks of the game were datamined the week before launch to find previously unrevealed levels and the full voice cast list, from which the brand new voice of Mario and Luigi, Genshin Impact’s Kevin Afghani, was first discovered and then publicly announced after the dataminer incorrectly surmised the new Mario from the list.
Indie Horror Game Showcase 2023: Publisher DreadXP hosted this presentation and led it off with a project of their own, the first teaser trailer for Creepshow, a 2024 multiplatform video game adaptation of the ongoing horror-comedy anthology series inspired by 1950s comics, which started with the classic 1982 film and persists today as a Shudder-exclusive streaming series. In the style of its source material, it will be a true anthology, a compilation of several entirely separate horror games produced by different development teams (overseen by creative director Brian Clarke of The Mortuary Assistant) covering different gameplay styles and tones.
The rest of the Showcase featured many more horror game trailers, including but not limited to: vampire visual novel Cabernet coming Early 2024 with a stacked voice cast, the 1.0 launch trailer for long-awaited Junji Ito styled RPG World of Horror, Nightdive’s System Shock 2: Enhanced Edition coming soon to PC, PS5/ Xbox Series S|X, a free horde mode update for My Friendly Neighborhood, VR horror game Hello Cruel World, Amanda the Adventurer 2, and Sylvio 3: Black Waters.
October 23rd:
Devolver Digital and Dennaton Games delivered the Hotline Miami Collection to PS5 and Xbox Series|X, native current-gen ports of Hotline Miami and Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number available for digital purchase and as free upgrades for owners. The developer’s long in the works third game has yet to be revealed.
October 24th:
About three years after the infamous Capcom cyberattack which harmed many thousands of people and leaked years’ worth of software plans, as well as other hacks in Portugal and Israel, the ransomware group Ragnar Locker has now been successfully stopped by Interpol. A key leader was just arrested in Paris and the servers and website taken down in three separate countries. Ragnar Locker’s most infamous crime predates the founding of hacker group Lapsuss, which had many high profile cybercrime incidents before it too was successfully taken down last year and put on trial this year.
As they end support for the PS4 exclusive Dreams and move forward with the next project, developer Media Molecule announced that they were laying off around 20 of 135 total employees.
Nintendo instituted controversial strict new guidelines for competitive events. Already licensed for-profit tournaments will be unaffected, but new and smaller events face a lot of concerns, and the inclusion of controllers and accessories under the “only officially licensed products allowed” rule severely limits options for physically disabled players. For console players on the whole, Xbox has now joined them in blocking “unauthorized” controller use. GamesIndustry.biz Editor Brendan Sinclair just delivered a strong, incisive opinion piece examining this issue through the broader lens of terms of service abuse in the tech industry, which I highly recommend reading.
October 26th:
Ubisoft held its quarterly earnings report, at which it officially delayed Star Wars Outlaws out of Early 2024 into the next fiscal year of between April 2024 and March 2025, in order to make room for Skull and Bones which was newly assigned an Early 2024 launch as the latest in a very long line of delays and release windows. Star Wars Outlaws’ previous release window was never publicized and did see internal skepticism that it would last due to its proximity to the same developer’s own Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora launching this December.
October 27th:
The Games for Gaza fundraiser for medical relief efforts amid the ongoing conflict launched and reached its initial goal almost immediately, following from other recent games industry humanitarian aid by companies such as Sony, Devolver Digital, and Among Us dev Innersloth.
Remedy also spoke on their several future projects and confirmed extra details about Alan Wake 2 right after its launch. For AW2, New Game Plus mode with alternate narrative elements will release soon for free post-launch, and two paid expansions for the game will arrive in 2024. Night Springs is currently scheduled for Spring 2024 and focused on the titular Twilight Zone style TV show, while The Lakehouse is focused on a new Federal Bureau of Control facility. Meanwhile, Control 2 remains in pre-production, while the Max Payne Duology Remake and the multiplayer Control spinoff Project Condor have both advanced into active production. Control 2 will remain in proof of concept for “the next few quarters,” likely entering production in late 2024, so that its “ambitious” vision is fully fleshed out before scaling up its team.
Mario Party 3 for N64 released for NSO.
October 30th:
Toby Fox unexpectedly gave another Deltarune development update in time for Halloween, saying that with Chapter 3 all but finished and Chapter 4 well underway, he’s electing to start the game’s paid release cycle with Chapter 4 instead of Chapter 5 as originally announced, since it’s much further out than the other two entries. Most of the development team is focused on Chapter 4, and a new producer has been brought in to speed up the rest of development.
With FF7 Rebirth‘s launch all but in the can, Square Enix is returning to its next big title over at the Kingdom Hearts series, with a new trailer for the mobile game Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link announcing its next closed beta test and a 2024 launch.
Ubisoft announced the sunsetting of 10 more games’ online services across various platforms by January 2024: Assassin’s Creed 2 and Splinter Cell Conviction on Xbox 360, AC Brotherhood on Mac, AC Liberation HD on 360 and PS3, and for PC, AC Revelations, Ghost Recon Future Soldier, Heroes of Might and Magic 6, RUSE, Trials Evolution, and NCIS.
October 31st: Following from the purchase of NightDive earlier this year, Atari continued its investment in game development and retro specialty by announcing the $20 million acquisition of Digital Eclipse, who produced Atari50 for the publisher last year and has The Making of Karateka and Wizardry Remake on deck this year.
In a Halloween update for NSO, Nintendo released Castlevania Legends for Game Boy, plus Devil World and The Mysterious Murasame Castle for NES, delivering two more cult classic Japan-only first party retro games to the global Switch audience.
Private Division and developer Roll7 announced that their latest skating game, the 2022 shooter Rollerdrome, will arrive for Xbox Series S|X, Windows, and Game Pass on November 28th after a year-ish of PS4/5 exclusivity.
Only two years after its arrival, Amazon’s Twitch announced that it will be ending support for the app on the current Switch family of consoles, delisted from the eShop on November 6th and disabled entirely on January 31st 2024.
November 1st: Nintendo released the final full overview trailer for the Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Booster Course Pass DLC, announcing that Wave 6 will release November 9th with the following contents. Mario Kart 8’s near decade long legacy of excellence and overwhelmingsuccess will go out with a bang with several all time classic tracks, with Mario Kart Wii’s Rainbow Road and Daisy Circuit, Double Dash’s DK Mountain, Rosalina’s Ice World from Mario Kart 7, and Super Mario Kart’s Bowser Castle 3. There’s also Madrid, Rome, and Piranha Plant Cove from Tour. I currently project that Mario Kart 10 will launch in 2025.
Devolver Digital announced that it has acquired System Era Softworks, developer of Astroneer.
Predictably after the successful launch, hiring spree, and in-game teases, Round8 and NeoWiz officially announced that Lies of P DLC and Lies of P 2 are both in development.
Embattled, vaporware-y zombie shooter The Day Before saw a new trailer and accompanying press release, proclaiming victory in the legal battle for its title, subsequent relisting, and a new Steam Early Access launch date of December 7th 2023, with no timeframe for 1.0 and console ports.
November 2nd: Game Freak announced that the second half of the Pokémon Scarlet and Violet paid expansion, The Indigo Disk, will release December 14th 2023, thus after ten months finally ending a particularly long and frustrating phase in the series’ current generation.
Electronic Arts’ latest earnings call announced major success for the start of the Football Club relaunch of its previous FIFA series, with both the refreshed ongoing mobile game and the annual premium entry already outpacing 2023’s efforts.
November 6th: Despite all efforts to head it off over the past few years, and the outcome of the Apple trial two years ago, Epic Games and Google officially went to trial today.
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