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
March 6th: Xbox Partner Preview: The showcase opened with a gameplay reveal trailer for Unknown 9: Awakening, the debut game of developer Reflector Entertainment which was announced at the 2020 Gamescom as the center of a multimedia strategy. This narrative action game is sort of a more linear, more Indian take on your Infamous/Prototype/etc, starring The Witcher’s Anya Chalotra. The game is now published by Bandai Namco and scheduled to launch Summer 2024 for PC and cross-gen Xbox and PlayStation. New Zealand based studio RiffRaff Games and Joshua Boggs gave the cinematic reveal for Sleight of Hand, a noir third person stealth-action game scheduled to launch for PC and Xbox Series/Game Pass in 2025. This War of Mine developer 11 Bit Studios brought three total games, two in-house we’ll get to shortly and one publishing partnership for Inverge Studios: Creatures of Ava, a peaceful creature collecting game written by Rhianna Pratchett, coming to PC, Xbox Series S|X and Game Pass later in 2024.
These kinds of exciting new experiences were followed up with a Chucky game in Roblox, because this is still the video games industry. 11 Bit’s other games are the previously announced survival game The Alters and citybuilder Frostpunk 2. The Alters and Frostpunk 2 are both coming later this year as Day One Game Pass titles, the former saw its gameplay reveal and the latter its launch date announced as July 25th 2024. Frogwares officially revealed The Sinking City 2 as a full blown survival horror game scheduled to launch for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series S|X next year. Square set the full launch of FF14 on Xbox as March 21st. Tales of Kenzera: ZAU and The First Berserker: Khazan both reappeared. Monster truck game Monster Jam Showdown was revealed for a launch this year. And here’s the last few big announcements. GSC Game World surprise announced and shadowdropped a remastered collection bringing the original Stalker games to console for the very first time with Stalker: Legends of the Zone Trilogy for PS4 and Xbox One.
Sega and Atlus revealed the long-predicted Persona 3 Reload Expansion Pass featuring Episode AIGIS AKA The Answer, the acclaimed massive epilogue from later editions of P3; The Answer will launch in September 2024 exclusively behind the Expansion Pass, which costs $35 and only contains extra music and costumes otherwise, but is free to keep with a Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription until P3 Reload expires from the service in 2025. Between this and the expanded social links, the only content the remake is still ultimately missing is the female player character herself. Atlus insists that this wasn’t the plan all along, that The Answer almost didn’t happen and both it and FeMC were the victims of budgetary concerns.
Lastly, Capcom debuted the extended second trailer for the brand new IP coming later this year, Kunitsugami: Path of the Goddess, explaining the strategy in the game’s action-strategy descriptor: the game operates on a cycle of preparing your village during the day for defending it from monsters at night, managing other characters’ defensive positions against the monsters at the same time as fighting them yourself.
March 8th: With the transition under Microsoft complete and the labor neutrality contract in place, 600 QA workers at Activision Blizzard King officially and successfully unionized with voluntary recognition as Activision Quality Assurance United, topping their colleagues at ZeniMax to become the new biggest gaming union in North America.
Microsoft announced that it has been targeted by state-backed Russian hackers Midnight Blizzard since November, with some source code repositories and internal systems affected, but no customer-facing systems currently compromised.
March 18th: Right after Blizzard made a landmark change to Overwatch 2 by making all past and heroes fully, permanently free and decoupled from the Batttle Pass, the conditions leading to such a desperate move were made bare. Blizzard devs fired in the January ABK layoffs gave Kotaku the inside scoop on the troubled state of the Overwatch 2 story missions’ production, going back more than 5 years to the start of development and up to basically present day. Kenneth Shepard and sources report that poor management and poor executive support hampered development, redoing the same work over and over without finishing anything and losing resources to the PVP side.
The first story missions that released last year, unsurprisingly, severely underperformed. “If they’re gonna make more of that stuff, they just laid off all of the people who were working on it.” Jason Schreier at Bloomberg built off the piece with his own report on March 22nd, saying that due in large part to the failure of the first story missions, the Overwatch team was denied the same twice a year bonuses as Diablo 4 and WoW devs received and, as implied by Kotaku, Overwatch 2 PvE/Story Missions have been permanently canceled in favor of solely supporting PVP.
March 23rd: Jez Corden at Windows Central reported that Xbox and the newly independent Toys for Bob have finalized the contract they were previously confirmed to be negotiating, as confirmed by Matt Booty during a corporate town hall. The studio is in early development on what’s understood to be a brand new Spyro the Dragon sequel that they’d started before going independent; they needed permission to keep making it outside the first party structure, but the contract also provided an opportunity to secure more equal terms of partnership.
March 25th: A new podcast made waves as GamesIndustry.biz reporter Chris Dring discussed the state of Xbox as heard from third party companies spoken to at GDC2024. Publishers and developers are increasingly dissatisfied with their partnerships with Xbox as hardware sales continue to massively flatline, only a small fraction of software sales come from the platform compared to PC and PS5 due to a combination of install base size and Game Pass influencing player purchases, and development costs are higher due to separate Series S and X ports. “I don’t know why we bothered supporting it” is a direct quote from an unspecified company. The start of Microsoft’s pivot to ultimately ship a majority of first party games on rival consoles is only further depressing third party interest in continued support for Xbox. The stupid amounts of money Xbox is famously throwing at companies like Sega and Square are only going to get higher.
Everything Else
February: Partners of Square Enix and Telltale Games, makers of one of my favorite games in Life is Strange: True Colors, developers Deck Nine announced that 20% of their staff were fired, roughly between 20 and 30 people. According to now former narrative designer Elizabeth Ballou, everyone only receive two weeks severance.
Bandai Namco gave updates on the native current gen editions for both Dragon Ball FighterZ and Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2, the former shadowdropping February 29th as a free upgrade alongside rollback netcode, and the latter releasing May 24th with cross-save support. The PS5 and Series S|X editions of FighterZ also had their own physical release confirmed.
March 1st: One of the most notable Australian game developers, Torus, announced that it is shutting down after 30 years and over 140 games. Torus specialized in work for hire licensed fare and support development, but after failing to secure any partners over the past year, its founder Bill McIntosh began proceedings to move on, firing all eight staff.
March 4th: Just barely missing the cutoff of my last Roundup, emulator developers Tropic Haze immediately agreed to settle with Nintendo rather than face their infamous wrath, paying $2.4 million in damages and fully shutting down not only Switch emulator Yuzu but the same team’s 3DS emulator Citra.
After Epic Games stood firm against a ransomware data leak threat by a group calling itself Mogilevich, the individuals admitted that the hack was a lie and a scam.
March 5th: The previous Pokémon competitor before Palworld, Temtem, is officially ending development this year and removing all microtransactions, starting in June.
March 6th: PlayStation officially announced that Ghost of Tsushima: Director’s Cut will release for PC on May 16th, landing almost four years after the original launch. This timing is believed to be intentional synergy and leadup to the official reveal of the game’s sequel at a PlayStation Showcase later this year. Until notified otherwise, I will continue to call the new game Ghost of Twoshima and continue to report it as an online co op focused live service building off the original game’s Legends mode.
After previous raises in 2022, Capcom announced that it will raise both starting and current employee salaries at the end of March/start of the next fiscal year, increasing starting monthly pay by more than 25%, and providing a 5% raise and a “one-time special payment” to all other employees.
Due to financial difficulties, indie developer Spearhead Games announced that the majority of staff will be fired and support immediately ended for Unforetold: Witchstone, their latest game which just launched January 2024. The studio is attempting to not shut down completely.
March 7th: In a surprising spot of good news, Electronic Arts suddenly announced the relisting of many classic games to Steam after they’d spent many years locked behind the Origin store. Dungeon Keeper Gold, Dungeon Keeper 2, Populous, Populous: The Beginning, Populous II, SimCity 3000 Unlimited, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri Planetary Pack, Command & Conquer Ultimate Collection, and Pandemic’s legendary final game The Saboteur, were all immediately released on Steam and on sale.
Brazilian trans-led two person indie developer Studio Pixel Punk, makers of the acclaimed Metroidvania Unsighted, released the first trailer for their second game, the fully 3D Metroidvania Abyss X Zero.
March 8th: Troubled PlayStation-exclusive partner studio Deviation Games effectively joined in the previous mass-layoffs by shutting down after four years and canceling its debut game, another original IP live service. This marks the fifth game canceled out of the fleet of live service greenlights made by the newly retired Jim Ryan, and that’s just what’s current public knowledge. Out of all those greenlights, only Helldivers 2 has released and five other games survive for now, though they’re all MIA and some like Marathon are visibly struggling as we speak. So much money and manpower and time has been spent at the altar of Ryan going all in on live services with so little to show for it, and the thanks for so much of that human labor was a kick straight out the door while Ryan is safe and rich. Most of these cancelations have been in just these past few months even though Anthem’s death on arrival was a whole five years ago now, and Avengers is coming up on four years ago. This is the human cost of the reckless, greedy, irrational leadership of this industry.
WB Games and parent Warner Bros Discovery was revealed to be reaching out to developers who worked with Adult Swim Games and informing them of imminent plans to retire the publishing label and delist all games with it. Owen Reedy became the first canary in this particular coal mine, revealing that he was making his game Small Radios Big Televisions free shareware after he was alerted to the plan, followed by Soundodger+’s Michael Mollinari and Fist Puncher’s Team2bit, so far. Mollinari and Team2bit say that WB is explicitly refusing to directly transfer their games’ existing listings/pages to them despite both outright owning their respective IPs, they can only separately republish their games. Mollinari reports the self-republishing is only allowed by WB with the removal of all mentions and credits of Adult Swim Games, which Mollinari rightfully calls anti-worker and anti-preservation.
This is an inevitable next step in WB’s continued path started by CEO David Zaslav towards new extremes in mindless destructive greed, the same path that has permanently destroyed countless works of art and leads to a mindset like “Single player game Hogwarts Legacy is a hit, multiplayer live service Suicide Squad is a flop, we’re going to make more games like Suicide Squad and less games like Hogwarts, simply because of the maximum opportunities to charge money and corresponding highly theoretical maximum profit.”
March 9th: SAG-AFTRA national executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland issued the current latest update on the matter of a possible SAG voice and mocap actor strike against many major video game publishers, as negotiations continue without end in sight six months after strike authorization was first issued. If negotiations aren’t concluded in April, strike will likely ensue over the sticking point of using AI generation to steal from and exploit actors, not that SAG leadership is flawless on that issue.
March 10th: Artist Mutsumi Inomata, primarily known for her work as the character designer of 12 games in the Tales RPG series (though not the latest, Arise), has passed away at the age of 63.
In observance of Mario Day, Nintendo made several notable announcements in a single three minute video posted online: Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door Remake will launch May 23rd 2024, Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD will launch June 27th 2024, the second Illumination Mario movie will officially release in April 2026, and lastly, the arrival of three more Game Boy/Color Mario titles, Dr. Mario, Mario Golf, and Mario Tennis, for NSO on March 12th.
March 11th: WB Games officially announced the MultiVersus 1.0 relaunch that morning: it will arrive May 28th 2024 on all previous platforms, still free to play, and new characters, new stages, improved netcode, a new PvE mode, and additional new moves for each character were all promised to be there “day 1” without any current specifics. The game was also ported over to Unreal 5.
The Capcom Highlights presentation featured several smaller announcements, like the next season of Exoprimal and its Mega Man collaboration, the first trailer for Street Fighter 6’s Akuma and confirmation of Year 2 of DLC, and Monster Hunter Stories Remaster’s release date is June 14th 2024, alongside the unexpected PS4 port of Monster Hunter Stories 2.
March 12th: The System Shock Remake was confirmed to be releasing for cross-gen PlayStation and Xbox on May 21st 2024, one year after its PC release.
March 13th: Another day, another gaming acquisition: two of the biggest gaming accessory/peripheral producers are merging after Turtle Beach bought PDP for $118 million, the third such acquisition by Turtle Beach in recent years.
Developer Baby Robot Games announced that their ninja action platformer will launch for PC April 10th as a self-published title, after departing from publisher Raw Fury. Raw Fury had committed its own resources to a Day 1 Xbox/Game Pass launch that Baby Robot doesn’t have, so the game’s console debut has been delayed.
After a period of timed Xbox console exclusivity, fishing life sim Moonglow Bay will now release for PS4/5 and Switch on April 11th.
Stunlock officially announced that V Rising will launch in 1.0 on May 8th for PC and later this year for PS5.
Ubisoft confirmed several major free updates and a paid story DLC coming to Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown throughout this year.
March 14th: Embracer Group officially went public with the independence/sale of Saber Interactive to its own private investors and cofounder, revealing many complex details in the process. Saber keeps roughly 3000 workers and 38 projects across various teams, but is leaving behind 800 other people and 14 other in development projects, including actively sharing (co-owning and co-developing) two joint projects, one of which is the KOTOR Remake. Half of the $500 million figure initially reported was for Saber itself and several teams like Fractured Byte and 3D Realms, the other half allowed Saber to bring two extra along developers with them, Pinball FX’s Zen Studios and Metro 2033’s 4A Games, but Embracer Group is confirmed to retain full ownership and publishing of the Metro franchise. Many other developers that operated under Saber as a division of Embracer are staying with Embracer: Aspyr, Tripwire, Tuxedo Labs, Beamdog, etc.
Embracer/Aspyr’s launch of the Battlefront Collection on the same day was met with a poor reception due to massive technical issues from crashes and widespread bugs to extremely limited online servers. Aspyr is also in hot water for using modders’ work without credit in the game, work that was openly advertised in the game’s trailers with bringing exclusive DLC characters to all platforms.
After firing their entire union last September, support dev Keywords Studios revealed in its latest earnings report that it spent the past six months attempting and failing to create a game solely with generative AI, failing because it was, direct quote, “unable to replace talent.”
Now former employees confirmed that EA’s February mass layoffs affected 23 workers from crown jewel developer Respawn, mainly departments of the Apex Legends team including social media.
Developer MidBoss announced that their adventure game and 2064 sequel Read Only Memories: Neurodiver will launch May 16th 2024 for PC, PS5, Xbox Series, and Switch.
Grasshopper Manufacture released a new trailer for Shadows of the Damned Hella Remastered, confirming it’ll launch later this year and be appearing at PAX East. The game is coming to PC, Switch, and cross-gen PlayStation and Xbox.
March 17th: During the SNK World Championship event, the publisher premiered two new trailers for fighting game Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, AKA Fatal Fury 5 or Garou 2, announcing it will launch in Early 2025 for undisclosed platforms (ha!), announcing it will be playable at EVO Japan in April, and revealing Hotaru Futaba, Tizoc, and Preecha as playable characters (first two returning, Preecha is new) in addition to the previously confirmed Terry Bogard and Rock Howard.
Shared Memory and Bigmode’s Metroidvania Animal Well was officially announced to launch May 9th 2024 for PC, Switch, and PS5.
March 18th: Tech specs for the PS5 Pro hardware revision leaked directly from Sony’s Developer Network after a new round of third party devkit distribution and are confirmed to be real by multiple sources. The console is coming holiday 2024, it features: the same external disc drive and internal storage capacity as the PS5 Slim, a new High CPU Frequency Mode added to an otherwise identical CPU, an upgraded GPU which has seen some misinformation surrounding it. But most notably, as leaked by Jeff Grubb last year, it does feature a brand new proprietary AI upscaling solution powered by an AI accelerator and custom ML architecture, known as the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution Upscaler. As per Digital Foundry, PSSR is also designed for simple forward and backward compatibility, simple compared to the full native porting process required for adding PS5 features to PS4 games. PSSR will primarily target 4K60fps on PS5 Pro, with 8K60 and 4K120 targets tentatively planned for the PlayStation 6 successor console; it’s fundamentally clear that AI upscaling will be the primary method of performance enhancement for gaming consoles going forward.
March 19th: Rebekah Valentine at IGN reported on Bungie again with a focus on the development of the new Marathon. Marathon‘s creative leadership has been adjusted due to developmental difficulties, with Bungie vet director Christopher Barrett replaced by Joe Ziegler of Valorant, who joined Bungie two years. Ziegler actually replaced Barrett nine months ago in Summer 2023 ahead of both Marathon and The Final Shape’s delays, with it only being publicly confirmed by Ziegler after the report’s publication. Ziegler’s leadership has soft-rebooted the game to emphasize a pre-designed team of heroes a la Destiny’s classes or Overwatch instead of the original more customizable characters.
Bungie is “pouring resources into getting Marathon out the door”, spending so much between it and Destiny that more layoffs immediately following the expansion’s launch are likely unless The Final Shape overperforms. Marathon‘s launch target is also believed to be influenced by senior leadership’s suspected plan to bail in 2026 once Sony’s last payouts to them from the acquisition are made, once again hurting those under just like they did last year by leaving them stuck with whatever Marathon‘s post-launch troubles are.
IGN also unexpectedly saw its Creators Guild union affected by layoffs at the same time as the article went live, with three members (producers Francesca Rivera and Jesse Gill, and editor Joshua Yehl) all fired. The union is taking action against its parent company for this decision.
Workers on LinkedIn from indie developer Something Wicked began reporting that they were looking for new work and the studio “had to lay off most of their staff” in a 12 person team, including the lead narrative designer of their debut RPG Wyrdsong.
Krafton and Striking Distance announced the developer’s second game after The Callisto Protocol, roguelike spinoff Project Birdseye.
After ending a 20~ year tenure as a major software VP for PlayStation last year, Connie Booth was officially announced to be joining EA as the General Manager of its action RPG departments, covering Bioware and the Marvel projects among others.
Respawn postponed the finals for an Apex Legends competitive championship due to a hacking incident on Sunday that’s now being investigated.
March 20th: The 2024 Game Developers Conference brought news aplenty across its several days. And a developer attending GDC 2024 reported that she had been roofied during the event and received no cooperation from the event or SFPD.
Epic Games had a State of Unreal presentation, which most notably featured the story trailer reveal of Skydance and Amy Hennig’s Marvel game after its untitled teaser 3 two years ago: Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra is built in Unreal 5 with upcoming engine features and scheduled to launch in 2025. Larian’s panel surprised many by explicitly announcing that they are exiting Hasbro’s IP in favor of a brand new fully internal project (not Divinity 3), and will not develop any DLCs or sequels to Baldur’s Gate 3; development on a DLC began but was canceled at the start of 2024 due to creative dissatisfaction. General support is ongoing, and WOTC seems likely to try to find another way to continue the series after BG3’s massive success, but the epilogue was in fact the last narrative addition Larian will make. Four years after leaving Arkane, developers Raphael Colantonio and Julien Roby and WolfEye Studios informally revealed/pitched their next game at GDC, a sci fi first person RPG in pre-production after they launched Weird West in 2022.
A reputed member of the Street Fighter FGC, Michael BrolyLegs Begum lived with a disability called arthrogryposis, and has passed away at only 35 as announced by his family.
My beloved broken puppy from Obsidian and Sega, the “espionage RPG” Alpha Protocol, was relisted for the first time in five years, surprise releasing on GOG compatible with modern OS and with an intact licensed soundtrack after those licenses expired and caused its delisting. I hope this is a good sign for it on consoles as well.
March 21st: The US Justice Department officially filed a major antitrust lawsuit against Apple over its strategies to maintain its grip over the smartphone market and its digital ecosystem. Apple already saw recent legal defeats over in the European Union.
Kotaku lost its second editor in chief in six months as Jen Glennon announced her immediate resignation. As reported by independent ex-Kotaku writers at Aftermath, Glennon follows Patricia Hernandez in leaving due to conflict with parent company G/O Media over a new edict to focus Kotaku on game guides over news. Kotaku’s remaining staff are now expected to write a whopping 50 guides a week and its frontpage was redesigned that week to emphasize the tips and guides section. Glennon says that prioritizing guides over news is “directly contradicted by months of traffic data, and shows an astonishing disregard for the livelihoods of the remaining writers and editors who work here.” Well, there goes another long-term career goal for me.
AR game developer Velan Studios, of Mario Kart Live and Knockout City fame, announced that an external partner had suddenly pulled out and canceled their project together, abruptly inflicting financial straits and leading to 46 out of 121 employees being notified that they might be fired in 60 days. ““In the near term, we are doubling down on our current games, some of which are scheduled to release later this year, and securing new partnerships to minimize the impact. We hope to rescind as many [potential layoffs] as possible.
A Reuters report on Chinese game publishing giant Tencent explained that the company has begun pivoting away from AAA IP after struggles with partners like EA, Square Enix, Activision, and Ubisoft, but also the massive loss taken on a fully in house game launched last year that none of us here have heard of, Undawn. Undawn was a 2023 zombie survival game starring A-list actor Will Smith, made by over 300 people at a budget of roughly $140 million US, and it earned less than $300,000 in total revenue in its first month.
March 22nd: Zack Zweizen at Kotaku delivered a major report on the state of Rockstar and Grand Theft Auto 6, with developers concerned that the final stages of development are starting to fall behind and the return to office is more an emergency measure responding to that than anything else, despite its negative impact on them. The game is currently still targeting Spring 2025 but a delay to Fall or even 2026 are on the table as emergency options everyone wants to avoid if possible.
The second and final paid story DLC for Final Fantasy 16 was showcased and launched out of PAX East with an April 16th release date. The game’s PC port is nearing the end of development and further ports of the game seem to be in the works.
March 25th: Developer Crop Circle Games was fully shutdown.
Remedy more fully publicly explained their Control spinoff Project Condor ahead of it entering full development this year. The co op live service will be centered on surviving Federal Bureau of Control agents trapped within the Oldest House from the original game. It’s currently planned to be a low premium launch a la Helldivers 2’s $40 rather than free to play. It will be built in the same proprietary Northlight Engine as Quantum Break, Control and Alan Wake 2, developed for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series, and its initial development budget is under $30 million.
Another major mobile game from the Sonic franchise saw its full reveal trailer leak online, 32 player party game Sonic Toys Party set to launch this summer.
Obsidian announced Fully Yoked, the last major update for their survival game Grounded, in conjunction with opening digital preorders of the game on PlayStation and Switch and physical preorders on Limited Run Games.
March 26th: Marvel Games and NetEase revealed Marvel Rivals, a very Overwatch inspired free to play team shooter which will have a closed alpha test in May.
March 27th: Ethan Gach at Kotaku delivered a major new report on Nintendo of America, saying that the contractor driven Quality Assurance testing center at HQ in Washington has just seen a major restructuring in which 120 contractors were laid off with severance and others were given promotions to new full-time positions outside of testing. Three of Gach’s sources from the testing center report that it had fallen into a lull as “no new major first party games” had been given to them in sometime as the publisher transitioned fully over into next-gen development, giving no contractors work with Switch 2 hardware or software most likely for the sake of leak control. The testing center has been the subject of much controversy in recent years due to the revelation of poor working conditions and discriminatory treatment, and we should be skeptical about any notion that a major downsizing like this would improve working conditions or the state of QA itself.
After losing some members to layoffs and facing obstruction from on-high, the Sega of America AEGIS union successfully ratified a new contract which featured raises and layoff protections for all 150~ union members, formal commitment to not cut workers from credits, and more.
Korean publisher SmileGate closed down its Barcelona subsidiary developer and laid off everyone there, with the studio never shipping a title after its 2020 founding.
GameStop engaged in yet more layoffs.
Images of actual units for the previously covered digital-only Xbox Series X revision model leaked online alongside a report that the console is set to launch this summer. When it first leaked last year in official documents from the FTC trial, the design was a black cylinder, but the final design is the original form factor in white instead.
Sony won a half a billion patent infringement lawsuit over the console to controller signals of its DualShock and DualSense controllers.
March 28th: In what has been officially called the very last act of the extended bloodletting, Embracer Group announced its $460 million sale of Gearbox Entertainment and all subsidiaries to Take-Two Interactive, 15 years after Gearbox and Take-Two first partnered on Borderlands. Borderlands/Wonderlands, Homeworld, Risk of Rain, Brothers in Arms, and Duke Nukem are now all fully in-house Take-Two properties, joining the likes of GTA/Red Dead, BioShock, Mafia, and Words with Friends. Gearbox proceeded to layoff several non-game staff.
Sega announced that it is selling off RTS developer Relic Entertainment to investment company Emona Capital, and eliminating 240 positions across Sega Europe, Creative Assembly, and Sega Hardlight, after many previous layoffs at Relic and CA.
Major support developer Certain Affinity fired 25 employees in the first ever mass layoff in the prominent studio’s 17 year history.
Maddy Thorson’s Extremely OK Games announced that their upcoming game Earthblade had been delayed out of 2024, with Thorson saying that developer Kyle Pulver had joined the team to help it along since she’s struggled to balance life and work after travel and recovery for a gender-affirmation surgery.
Asymmetric horror developer IllFonic unexpectedly announced an effort to bring their failed game Predator: Hunting Grounds back to life four years after launch, taking over publishing from Sony with new updates and native PS5 and Xbox Series S|X ports releasing before the end of 2024.
March 29th: Eddy Gordo was announced as the first DLC character for Tekken 8 and launched in the first week of April.
F-Zero: Maximum Velocity became the latest Game Boy Advance title added to NSO.
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