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!
Xbox Updates
January 10th: Mojang announced it was fully ending support for multiplat action strategy spinoff Minecraft Legends only 9 months after launch.
January 15th: Several public sources independently reported that the Halo Battle Royale, AKA Project Tatanka, had been canceled at Xbox. The project was never officially announced but had been widely leaked by sources as big as Jason Schreier as a battle royale developed by Certain Affinity in Unreal 5 rather than 343’s problematic proprietary Slipspace engine with which Halo Infinite was made. This is occurring alongside Halo Infinite support downscaling from seasons to smaller updates as the overhauled 343 Industries team proceeds in early development on the next mainline Halo entry.
January 18th: Xbox Developer Direct
The presentation opened with Obsidian’s Avowed, the first person fantasy action RPG and Pillars of Eternity sequel first announced in 2020. The game’s launch window has been updated to Fall 2024. Gameplay director Gabe Paramo discussed combat, with dual wielding magic wands, fast-switching between melee, firearm, and magic styles in each independent hand. Magic will also be used for traversal outside of combat. Story elements were discussed both here and in an extra featurette that arrived a week later via the Xbox Podcast. Ninja Theory appeared to once again showcase their sequel that was announced straight out of greenlight, discussing its general production and finally announcing that Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 will launch on May 21st 2024 on PC and Xbox Series S|X for $50 as the latest digital only AAA game, with the budget pricing due to its runtime being in the same range as the original’s.
Square Enix brought Visions of Mana and updated it to a Summer 2024 launch, and Oxide’s RTS Ara: History Untold reappeared with a Fall window.
The event wrapped up with a very extended segment. Almost seven years after their last full game with Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, and three years after it was informally announced, MachineGames officially fully revealed Indiana Jones and the Great Circle complete with gameplay and set it for a 2024 launch on PC and Xbox Series S|X. Primarily playing in first person with occasional third person moments, the game features exploration, puzzles, stunt action and combat, everything you’d expect. It’s set between Raiders and Last Crusade in 1937, starring Troy Baker as the voice of Indy with Harrison Ford’s likeness, Tony Todd as one of the main villains, and featuring a second protagonist in investigative reporter Gina. Fellow Xbox subsidiaries 343 Industries, Tango Gameworks and id Software are all providing support teams on this project.
After the Developer Direct was a separate Elder Scrolls Online livestream announcing the new Gold Road expansion set in West Weald coming June 2024 to PC, Xbox, and PlayStation.
January 23rd: Blizzard’s official reveal of the relaunch for Overwatch esports has been predictably terrible: the international Overwatch Champions Series will begin in February operated in all territories but East Asia by a company belonging to the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund. Korean organizer WDG will handle the East Asia circuit. This new system will take Overwatch into a far more typical direction for esports and away from OWL’s city based sports league style which was hampered by losing live events due to COVID and losing advertisers due to ABK’s various public controversies.
January 25th: Tom Warren at The Verge reported and Phil Spencer confirmed that the Xbox division of Microsoft has announced 1900 layoffs, about 8% of Xbox’s previous 22K total. These layoffs are primarily within Activision Blizzard King at Blizzard, COD team Sledgehammer, and Toys For Bob, but do also affect Zenimax and the rest of Xbox as well. Blizzard is seeing a lot of other changes with this: Mike Ybarra is leaving after more than 20 years, replaced as President by previous Call of Duty leader Johanna Faries, cofounder Allan Adham is also leaving, and the major survival game Project Odyssey announced exactly two years ago has been canceled and its whole team canned after six years of development.
Jason Schreier quickly issued a Bloomberg report with further details about Project Odyssey, pointing to that old favorite engine troubles as the biggest hurdle the game faced. The game switched from Unreal to the new proprietary Synapse engine specifically to support 100-player maps, but Synapse was too dysfunctional and unfinished of a technology, slowing production to the point that even 2026 was an overly optimistic launch target. Microsoft chose to kill Synapse and Odyssey together rather than undergoing the arduous process of carrying everything back over to a new engine.
Independent of all our ABK coverage is the report that Xbox’s physical release/retail division has been shuttered as part of the current layoffs and a further extension of the digital-first strategy planned since the Xbox One launch. The tipping point unfortunately really is here with how the digital to physical sales ratio on consoles has changed in recent years, how digital-only AAA games and digital-only consoles are increasingly proliferating. This specific incident has multiple other symptoms, with Walmart withdrawing and destroying all unsold copies of Starfield and some European retailers closing their Xbox stock entirely.
February 4th: A new round of rumors quickly emerged at the beginning of January surrounding more Xbox titles going multiplat. The most concrete reporting ultimately didn’t come until Tom Warren at The Verge published a piece more than a month later, though Jez Corden at WindowsCentral, plus Jeff Grubb, Stephen Totilo, and Jon Clarke, were all doing good legwork along the way, and some direct evidence came in the form of PlayStation and Switch themed cosmetics found in a datamine of HiFi Rush’s Anniversary Update.
Tom Warren et al report that a selective multiplatform/timed exclusivity strategy for first party games is emerging within Microsoft leadership, with “intense debate internally” and “not everyone…happy” but fiscal needs prevailing from expensive software and hardware development; Xbox did just hit record revenue, but it was obviously thanks to consolidating ABK’s own multiplat revenue, not by sufficiently moving the needle on Game Pass or hardware sales.
HiFi Rush’s new ports look to be announced and launched by the end of this quarter (so we’ll see if all this has any merit soon enough), while Starfield and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle are both being assessed for PS5 releases. Indiana Jones‘ PS5 port will potentially arrive some few months after a tentative December 2024 launch on Xbox and PC, Starfield’s wouldn’t until after the Shattered Space expansion is finished. The multiplat slate being limited and exclusivity remaining a priority is consistently emphasized by these reporters’ sources, but if the early efforts pay off it’s easy to imagine that changing, this will only keep escalating. The last thing PlayStation needs right now is less serious competition, but maybe that cat was already well out of the bag off 2023’s performances.
Everything Else
Thousands more layoffs have hit tech and gaming in the first month of the new year, amounting to around 6000 more people fired just in January after 2023 was already a record breaking devastation on this front with more than 10,000 layoffs. Chris Dring at GamesIndustry.biz reports industry leaders saying we’re “looking at [at least] up to two more years of pain” into 2025, and 2024 will be a year of closures on top of layoffs. This is fundamentally rooted in the capitalist endless growth model, the cost of unregulated disproportionate executive salaries, and gutting of labor regulations.
January 4th: After breaking out as a viral hit a decade ago, mobile game Kim Kardashian: Hollywood was announced by publisher Glu to be fully shutting down on April 8th 2024, having already delisted from sale and deactivated in-app purchases.
January 7th: In the wake of the New Year’s Day earthquake in Japan, both The Pokémon Company and Nintendo donated 50 million yen each to the Japanese Red Cross Society to support relief efforts, and Nintendo began six months of universal free product repairs in the affected region.
January 8th: In the wake of the failed attempt to mass price gouge developers and subsequent controversy, Unity elected to fire 1800 more people as the largest in a series of its recent layoffs, roughly 25% of the previous total workforce.
Nvidia announced its next frontline graphics card products at CES2024, three RTX 40 Super GPUs, all launching by the end of January and replacing their RTX 40 predecessors. There were also more games newly added to the DLSS3 support list, including Horizon Forbidden West: Complete Edition, which releases for PC in March, plus Diablo 4 and Tekken 8.
Sony’s press conference for the 2024 Consumer Electronics Show gave several updates on PlayStation’s multimedia plans, with Netflix’s Horizon show and Amazon’s God of War show both confirmed to be currently in the writing phase of their first seasons, brief footage presented from the Gravity Rush movie, and the unexpected reveal of an undefined new Patapon project.
Variety published two separate major pieces by Jennifer Maas discussing WB Games’ success and current plans, including an interview with department president David Haddad. For upcoming projects, Wonder Woman and Multiversus’ 1.0 relaunch both briefly came up, and Haddad threatened eventual new projects building on the sigh massive success of Hogwarts Legacy.
January 9th: The SAG-AFTRA union signed a contract with AI-generated voice tech company Replica Studios, approving Replica for working with SAG for licensed use of recreations of their actors’ voices in video games. This ostensible effort at regulating AI voices and protecting performers has been widely criticized by SAG voice actors because it occurred without their knowledge or participation, many of them would prefer a outright ban out of pure artistic opposition on top of ethics, and at the very least they want actual access to the full terms and a guarantee that they can opt completely out of the agreement and the SAG org won’t license their voices on their behalf. SAG leadership’s claim that 80% of members approved the contract has been disputed. In a later response to the criticisms, SAG leadership insisted that the deal operates on individual opt-in.
TikTok parent company ByteDance confirmed previous reports that it’s in the process of selling its entire games division with Tencent among several buyers with no deal locked down yet. Marvel Snap developer Second Dinner successfully secured $100 million in new funding to go completely independent from ByteDance in partnership with investment firm Griffin Gaming Partners. Second Dinner will use this funding to sustain themselves, continue to support Snap, and begin incubation of their next games.
Amazon’s Twitch announced that it will be laying off over 500 people, 35% of its workforce, after previously firing 400 people just last year.
Sam Barlow and studio Half Mermaid announced that their latest game Immortality will be launching for PS5 on January 23rd 2024 after more than a year of availability on Xbox, PC, and mobile via etflix. At that time of release, Half Mermaid confirmed its next two projects: the former in the Her Story, Telling Lies, Immortality vein, but the latter is a third person survival horror game in tribute to Barlow’s history with the Silent Hill series.
January 10th: Beloved tabletop and video game designer Jennell Jaquays passed away at 67 years old, survived by her wife Rebecca. Jaquays was known for designing early major Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, working at idsoft as a level designer for Quake 2 and Quake 3, and acting not only as a famous openly trans game designer but a trans activist, leading anti conversion therapy campaigns and serving as the Transgender Human Rights Institute’s creative director. Her video game work continued on such titles as Halo Wars and Age of Empires 3, until Guillaine-Barré Syndrome sidelined her.
Shuji Utsumi was officially appointed as Sega of America and Europe’s new leader. Utsumi was a major part of both the original PlayStation and Dreamcast’s Western launches, left Sega for Disney where he was one of the people responsible for the creation of Kingdom Hearts, before returning to Sega in 2020.
Starting as a small story and quickly snowballing as both its contents and its coverage expanded until it reached the front page of Kotaku, physical copies of first party Nintendo Switch games seem to be disappearing from official retailers. Outside of my reporting, I’d complained before about games starting to go out of print before, games like Arms and Hyrule Warriors, which don’t even have a physical option on the revamped nintendo.com store. This goes further than that with a wide wide range of titles going out of stock at Amazon, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, and GameStop, even an evergreen like Super Mario Odyssey.
I’ve checked some of these disappeared games for physical copies through nintendo.com, and all of those are still available there. But it’s still a big enough scale issue to cause a lot of concerns about Nintendo’s handle on preservation and accessibility for its current generation of games going into the imminent next generation, especially in the wake of the broader landscape being increasingly digital-first and digital-only. The primary hope right now is that at least some of these disappearing games will be reissued with new “playable/enhanced on Switch 2” packaging, and while that’s certainly possible, being in this situation to begin with is yet another necessary reminder that Nintendo is not immune to the problems that plague the rest of the games industry and can’t be just trusted blindly.
January 11th: As first reported by The Verge, Discord joined the tech industry layoffs, firing 170 people, 17% of its total staff.
Konami announced two new retro game collections for Rocket Knight and Felix the Cat in collaboration with Limited Run.
Bandai Namco officially set the launch date of anime RPG Sand Land as April 26th 2024.
January 12th: Embracer Group continued to throw its numerous subsidiaries onto the infamous chopping block, starting with Gearbox support studio Lost Boys Interactive, which had grown to over 400 workers before these “sizeable” layoffs. RPG developer Piranha Bytes is facing outright closure. Piranha Bytes is a small German team known for Gothic, Risen, and ELEX, and it will be shut down imminently unless it can secure a new owner or publisher, in which case the studio would retain its name and the rights to ELEX. January 24th, Black Forest Games lost a whole half of its staff. Black Forest Games is known for the Destroy All Humans Remakes and is currently developing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin after that game was announced mere months ago.
Then on January 25th, Reikon Games, an independent Polish developer who’s making Final Form, a contractor game for Embracer Group through the Prime Matter label, was reported to have fired more than 60 people, almost 80% of its staff. Star Trek Infinite developer imble Giant Entertainment saw 28 workers lost. Most notably, as first reported at Bloomberg by Jason Schreier, on the 29th Eidos Montreal saw 97 employees fired and their Deus Ex sequel canceled two years into development o the cusp of starting full production, leaving the studio with the original IP project they started first after completing Guardians of the Galaxy.
During the annual world championship for hit MOBA Smite, developer Titan Forge surprise revealed Smite 2, coming to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series S|X starting with closed alpha tests this Spring, while its predecessor will still be supported for the time being. Smite 2 is built in Unreal 5, features full crossplay and cross-progression, will carry over all 130 existing characters “eventually” alongside new ones. The original Smite is a big hit on Switch, its sequel will not be coming to it due to its intensive Unreal 5 overhaul; in addressing this, Titan Forge all but admitted they plan to release for Switch 2.
January 15th: Just in time for the widely acclaimed launch of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Ubisoft significantly revamped its Ubisoft+ subscription service, turning its existing Ubisoft+ Classics into a basic $8 tier and increasing the price to access Day 1 new releases by creating the $18 Premium tier. The new Premium tier also includes the early access/beta tests we’ve seen for titles like Beyond Good & Evil 20th Anniversary Edition, simultaneous PC + console access, and most notably, will include the eventual incoming Activision Blizzard King catalog.
With Tekken 8 now launched, Bandai proceeded to begin detailing the fighter’s DLC plans, with a trailer announcing Eddy Gordo as the first Season 1 addition coming this Spring, with three more characters arriving throughout 2024.
January 16th: Square Enix announced that its PS4 and PS5 exclusive Splatoon-like multiplayer shooter Foamstars will launch on February 6th available for ‘free’ through PlayStation Plus for its first month, a la Fall Guys’ original 2020 launch. Square also confirmed that some of Foamstars’ in-game art was AI-generated using Midjourney, which is currently being sued for mass plagiarism.
11 bit Studios released the gameplay reveal trailer for Frostpunk 2 and announced that the wide scale survival sim sequel will arrive on PC and PC Game Pass in H1 2024 with PS5/Xbox Series S|X releases arriving later.
Due to a need for further polish, the launch of Stalker 2 has been delayed yet again, setting a new September 5th 2024 date.
January 17th: Indie game company Thunderful Group announced it would lay off one fifth of its staff, around 100 people. Thunderful formed via a merger between developers Zoink (Fe, Lost in Random) and Image & Form (Steamworld) just four years ago in December 2019, and since then has engaged in rapid over-expansion with various acquisitions and opening its publishing arm.
Bandai Namco announced a new Switch port arriving in July for the most recent entry in its flight sim series, 2019’s Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown.
The end of an era has tragically arrived: Harmonix and Epic Games officially announced that Rock Band 4’s continual DLC song packs would end on January 25th after more than 8 years of consistent weekly support. The game will remain supported at a basic server life and maintenance level, but “Fortnite Festival is the place to be” now for new Harmonix content, which will support Rock Band 4 instrument controllers in the future.
January 18th: Both Behaviour Interactive of Dead by Daylight, and CI Games of Lords of the Fallen, joined the tide of industry turmoil as two more independent publishers engaging in layoffs, with Behaviour firing around 45 people at its Montreal HQ and CI firing 10% of its total workforce, which is approximately 15-20 people, mostly in its marketing department but also affecting developers.
January 22nd: Riot Games announced that it will fire 530 people, 11% of total staff, and it will shut down the Riot Forge publishing arm after four years of operation and six League of Legends spinoffs released, most recently Bandle Tale. Those games reviewed very well but never sold well. This also cancels at least one game in development and leaves long in the works projects like the fighting game and the console ports of League in unstable positions. Like so much of our industry right now, Riot is severely contracting after unfettered expansion. Riot is providing six months of full salary and benefits to all those fired, which they’ll especially need since Riot’s return to office mandate will make finding new work that much harder.
January 23rd: As first reported in China and then by Reuters and BBC internationally, China’s regulators did indeed publicly remove the new rules on gaming monetization from the website, pending likely revisions, after serious pushback and share losses for China’s main gaming companies. Tencent and etEase’s share prices have already jumped back up as a result.
January 24th:
Working on another game with Square Enix after Outriders, developer People Can Fly fired 30 people from this project’s team and reassigned another 20 to one of their…checks notes 5 other games?!
Throughout late January, Nintendo began releasing several small standalone updates for its Early 2024 releases, some just days apart like a trailer revealing two more themes (ninja and cowgirl) for Princess Peach: Showtime!, a co op focused trailer for Mario vs Donkey Kong Remake, and the February 22nd launch date for the Splatoon 3 story DLC, Side Order. They sure are getting all their ducks in a row…
January 25th:
Mere months after a September 2023 free to play early access launch, Nexon’s Chivalry esque multiplayer game Warhaven was announced to be shutting down on April 5th 2024.
The idol anime franchise Love Live saw a new game announced to launch internationally after past delays, but announced its shutdown at the same time as its release date, with only three months between release and closure.
January 26th: A former employee of PUBG parent company Krafton is suing for wrongful termination as retaliation for reporting former Krafton executive Kevin Kimball of sexually assaulting her at a December 2022 office party at Callisto Protocol dev/Krafton subsidiary Striking Distance.
VR game Ultrawings 2 accidentally shadowdropped for PSVR2 after previously releasing on PCVR and Meta Quest; this build was unfinished and needed a patch that would’ve been in the game at launch had it launched as intended a week later.
Edgy Pokémon parody/survival game Palworld achieved massive success, reaching 19 million players across Steam and Xbox in its first two weeks, with 12 million copies sold on Steam and taking the crown of Game Pass’ biggest third party launch from High on Life. The Pokémon Company confirmed it will investigate the situation surrounding Palworld after concerns of outright plagiarism, asset theft, and AI generation have come up over the game’s creature designs.
January 29th: The infamous Spec Ops: The Line was unexpectedly delisted from Steam and other PC storefronts by publisher 2K/Take-Two with no warning. Only after the fact did the publisher explain that the game’s music licenses are expiring and it’s not pursuing paying for renewal, despite having all the money in the world already and much more coming in from GTA6 soon. It’s a travesty to let such an important game go to waste like this. The BC version on the Xbox store stayed up the longest, but it too disappeared by the 31st. Here’s to physical copies.
Many developers from the recently deceased Volition have newly reunited under the banner of Shapeshifter Games, which is now working on Xbox/inXile’s Clockwork Revolution, as a support/co-development studio based in Illinois led by Rob Loftus and Brian Traficante.
The developers of upcoming narrative adventure game Open Roads delayed its multiplat launch by a month to March 28th for further polish.
Supermassive Games announced that after 15 years of leading the studio since their previous employer Psygnosis shuttered, cofounders and brothers Pete and Joe Samuels are departing, Pete due to health reasons. Supermassive’s new CEO is Robert Henrysson of Just Cause/Contraband’s Avalanche Studios.
Extremely OK Games celebrated Celeste’s sixth anniversary with a free bonus mini game on PC, the 3D platformer Celeste 64, in the same vein as the game’s Pico-8 predecessor and successor.
Featured in the most recent Nintendo Direct, anime life sim Spy x Anya: Operation Memories will officially release internationally on June 28th after a December 2023 launch in Japan.
January 30th: In accordance with California’s advance notice or WARN law, Sega of America has alerted its employees that 61 of them, or roughly 13%, will be fired on March 8th, all making up slightly under half of last year’s AEGIS union.
Much Like Forspoken’s Luminous Productions last year, Square Enix has decided to dissolve and absorb subsidiary developer Tokyo RPG Factory after ten years.
Destiny 2 director Joe Blackburn announced that he will leave Bungie once The Final Shape ships later this year.
Frontier announced Planet Zoo: Console Edition, the first ever console release of their Zoo Tycoon spiritual successor, arriving March 26th for PS5 and Xbox Series S|X with four years’ worth of post-launch updates included.
Ever-decreasing morale and more layoffs expected are once again reported out of Ubisoft after unsatisfactory launches for its two most recent titles, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown reaching only 300,000 players and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora about 2 million. The more successful AC Mirage has hit 5 million. Tom Henderson also discussed other working conditions at the publisher and briefly mentioned internal optimism for 2024’s main titles, Star Wars: Outlaws and Assassins Creed Red.
January 31st: While the State of Play was of course the main event of the day, the 31st also had the new 30 minute gameplay reveal event for Paradox Interactive and The Chinese Room’s reboot of Vampire the Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 coming later this year. They showcased immersive sim influenced stealth combat as well as the character dialogue system. There were also more layoffs at GameSpot.
PlayStation State of Play
Xbox went first, PlayStation went second, Nintendo will probably go third soon enough. The first State of Play event of 2024 brought 16 primary first and third party games, plus the announcement of a dedicated presentation for Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth a week later on February 6th. A majority of this show’s contents leaked early to various extents, with the only notable absence being the upcoming shooter Concord, which was initially announced to release this year. Helldivers 2 opened with a quick launch trailer, joining Rise of the Ronin in PlayStation exclusives I keep underestimating for just how many trailers they can pump out. Korean developer ShiftUp and action game Stellar Blade returned from a September 2022 event to announce an April 26th launch date while explaining its sci fi story and systems starring groans Eve and Adam.
Sega revealed Sonic X Shadow Generations for a Fall 2024 launch on PC, PS4/5, Xbox One/Series, and Switch. This is a remaster of 2011’s Sonic Generations, expanded with new playable Shadow levels ahead of his cinematic debut later this year. This game already runs at 4K60 on PC and Xbox, so this remaster’s actual main contribution is bringing it to PlayStation and Switch, unless you’re a Shadow superfan like my girl Katie. Anyway, Hoyoverse confirmed a PS5 port for Zenless Zone Zero, and Foamstars appeared again, but Square had already announced the relevant info there. Nexon and Mintrocket announced PS4/5 ports for Dave the Diver releasing this April before its second crossover DLC starring Godzilla in May. Stunlock’s pen world survival hit V Rising will launch in 1.0 on PS5 later this year.
Konami offered a block of Silent Hill news to follow up on the 2022 announcement spree and last year’s disastrous webseries. The publisher debuted Silent Hill 2 Remake‘s second trailer, focused on its revamped combat, and shadowdropped a free, two hour standalone game, the first person Silent Hill: The Short Message codeveloped by Hexadrive. I was absolutely astonished to see Konami and Bloober bring back a remake after 15 months and only say it’s in development, no release date, not even the 2024 window Sony applied to it mere weeks earlier. Ken Levine and Ghost Story Games released a second/gameplay trailer for BioShock spiritual successor Judas, star of my single favorite Jason Schreier article, tentatively set for a March 2025 launch on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series S|X. Two PSVR2 titles were revealed, Metro Awakening from Embracer Group and Urban Wolf’s fantasy action RPG Legendary Tales, the latter of which will release February 8th.
Capcom brought Dragon’s Dogma 2 again, likewise with Koei Tecmo and Rise of the Ronin, both launching this March. There were the last two big first party reveals to close out, starting with Until Dawn Remake by Ballistic Moon, coming later this year to PS5, and PC for the first time 9 years after the long out of print original came solely to PS4. The horror narrative adventure is rebuilt in Unreal Engine 5 with extensive new story material and a new third person camera. Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding 2: On the Beach reappeared with an extensive showcase announcing a 2025 launch and featuring many new details both narrative and mechanical. There will be new vehicles and environments expanding the series’ signature traversal gameplay, returning characters like Fragile, GDT’s Deadman, and Troy Baker’s villain Higgs, and new characters like George Miller’s space captain with a catbat (batcat?) companion, and a living puppet with unique framerate animation. God bless. Oh wait! Hideo also appeared at Sony’s film production lot to announce his next game after DS2 and OD, presumable PS6 title Physint, which will further merge game and movie and be his true spiritual successor to MGS in action espionage.
February 1st: During its annual fiscal review, Devolver Digital had multiple announcements, including the reveal of a third person puzzle shooter coming to PC later this year, Children of the Sun by Rene Rother, and the unfortunate layoffs at Artificer studio, firing half the team at 25 people now and more leaving once the current project is completed. CEO Doug Morin also stepped down effective immediately, replaced by previous CEO and cofounder Harry Miller, as part of a larger executive shuffling. Devolver had a static 2023 with fewer new releases thanks mostly to delays, but is optimistic for 2024 with its larger, diverse slate of new games.
The same German outlets that exposed the company behind LOTR: Gollum last year have now reported on Fntastic and The Day Before. 24 separate sources from both development and publishing indicate that the game was repeatedly promised internally as a much smaller scale project before suddenly pivoting to the AAA MMO vision that marketing pitched and the game never lived up to. The game’s development suffered in the same vein as Ken Levine’s Judas, with leadership (founders and brothers Eduard and Aisen Gotovtsev) impulsively giving new orders inspired by various flavor of the month games and changing the game too extensively, resulting in “essentially three different versions” made.
The brothers Gotovstev were forcing relentless crunch upon their team in conjunction with the ridiculous demands and ridiculous deadlines, with one worker saying they never worked less than 16 hours a day and six days a week, and lost their weekends entirely in the months before launch. Workers were spontaneously fired as well as fined thousands of dollars as punishment for bugs and errors caused exactly by the crunch being forced. All of these sources also say that the Brothers Gotovtsev disappeared right after studio closure, suspecting that they started over at a mobile game studio but either way having no communication with them in months.
Sega and RGG announced that Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth had become the fastest selling LAD/Yakuza entry with more than one million copies sold in its first week.
Capcom announced the traditional Gold Edition for the Resident Evil 4 Remake, releasing February 9th on all existing platforms as a bundle of the base game and the Separate Ways DLC. This also shows Capcom becoming another participant in one of the most major, unfortunate current industry trends, as the 4make Gold Edition is confirmed to be digital-only for all regions but Europe.
February 2nd: Down for hours of its early access release on January 29th due to a bug that automatically gave campaign completion to some users, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League proceeded to officially launch four days later and saw only 40~% of Marvel’s Avengers’ launch Steam playerbase.
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