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
May 7th: In a devastating loss achieved with a single email with no forewarning to those affected, Microsoft and Xbox shut down or dissolved four principal first party studios from ZeniMax: Tango Gameworks, Arkane Austin, Roundhouse Games, and Alpha Dog Studios, firing hundreds of people, canceling their hard work, and eliminating many of the freshest games and series Xbox or anywhere in AAA development had for the past decade.
The developers of Evil Within, Hi-Fi Rush, Mighty Doom, Prey 2017 and Prey 2006 as Roundhouse was an acquired Human Head in all but name, all are gone in the wind at the whim of this trillion dollar company. Three developers were closed outright while Roundhouse got the Vicarious Visions special of being dissolved and absorbed into a bigger sister studio, in this case MMO developer ZeniMax Online. Some Arkane Austin developers are being reassigned to other Zenimax projects, and Roundhouse is as I just said, but everyone else has been laid off. Roundhouse existed for five years and never shipped a game of their own, they had a project but it’s gone now.
Right at the first anniversary of its launch, Redfall’s development has abruptly ended without the release of previously announced DLC characters which were sold for $30, but who were still being produced right up until this announcement with a release target of Halloween 2024. Microsoft is offering a limp store credit “refund” to people who bought the Hero Pass/Bite Back Edition. Both Tango and Arkane were able to deliver one final patch to their respective games, and Redfall’s is especially essential as it delivered an Offline Mode to keep the game alive longer term. Tango confirmed its Limited Run physical release is still happening, but neither of Tango’s pitches for Ghostwire 2 and Hi-Fi Rush 2 will ever come to fruition, and Arkane’s chances of ever returning to Dishonored or brand new original single player immersive sims are looking slim. The remaining Arkane office is going to be making a Marvel superhero game for the rest of the decade, much like how Isomiac is seemigly stuck there as well.
It’s come to my attention from the initial response to this news that the collective memory fog we’ve all experienced post-COVID has obscured a timeline of events, so just to be clear: Microsoft’s finalized purchase of Zenimax was in March 2021. It was only three years ago. That fact changes some assumptions that have been made, but it certainly doesn’t leave Xbox with any less a tarnished legacy. Look at the damage that has been done in only three years. Look at what corporate greed and consolidation has once again wrought.
Game Pass was exciting for a while, but it bought into a market model Hollywood has already shown the limits of, it further eroded the system economy by devaluing games and disincentivising direct game purchases, and its best days as a library are behind it, leaving it with subscriber growth even Peacock would recoil at. First party Xbox was an ecosystem for “rescuing vulnerable small developers” and welcoming smaller riskier games like Pentiment and Hi-Fi Rush…for a couple years, and now we’re right back to pivoting to the center, to unsustainable “high impact” AAA funded by gutting the little guys. Hi-Fi Rush did everything right and that wasn’t enough. Matt Booty said this is reallocating resources, yeah, reallocating them away from the industry’s artistic lifeblood into things that can’t possibly get cuts instead like executive salaries or paying the bill for a second huge publisher Microsoft didn’t need, bought anyway, and will assuredly carve up too. There will be more studios and workers lost in the months and years to come, of that there is no doubt.
We saw last month that ABK is a cash injunction keeping Xbox afloat, but it’s also clearly an albatross around the company neck between the upfront $70 billion pricetag and the longterm costs of maintaining an extra corporate apparatus with almost as many employees as Ubisoft. This doesn’t absolve the Xbox leadership for getting us here, but it’s clear that the cost of ABK has severely increased overhead scrutiny from Microsoft which in turn partly informs the strategy changes we’ve been seeing since February.
The Game Pass problem and the Activision problem immediately collided after the acquisition was finalized as seen in reporting from The Verge’s Tom Warren and Wall Street Journal’s Sarah E. Needleman. They both said that making brand new Call of Duty entries Day 1 Game Pass releases was internally debated for months because it will obviously reduce the series’ profit margins, but ultimately the plan will move forward starting with this year’s entry Black Ops 6, which is unexpectedly still cross-gen with PS4 and Xbox One versions. The game and its Game Pass release were officially announced after the leaks; its Game Pass release was reported to be accompanied by price hikes and potential changes to the service’s tier structure, which would only exacerbate the service’s problem of consumer satisfaction and subscriber growth. Microsoft did not deny price hikes but did say that Black Ops 6 will be available on the existing three of four tiers, Game Pass for Console, PC Game Pass, and Game Pass Ultimate.
In the midst of all this sound and fury, this tragedy and nonsense, plenty of other Xbox news happened, some of which only exemplify these problems. The Microsoft/Xbox mobile game store will officially launch worldwide in July 2024, starting exclusively with first party games like Candy Crush and COD before opening to third parties later on. A US jury ruled that Activision owes $23.4 million to tech firm Acceleration Bay due to copyright infringement in both COD and WOW, yet another costly poison pill Microsoft swallowed just for the sake of owning this publisher. Xbox and Activision Blizzard King established an entirely new development studio based in Poland. First party team Elsewhere Entertainment will be dedicated to a AAA narrative-driven new IP, with leadership from CDPR, Naughty Dog, Bungie, and Ubisoft. Does anyone think this game will actually get finished?
Toms Warren and Henderson reaffirmed that idSoft’s next Doom game will be revealed shortly, previously leaked as Doom: Year Zero, now known as Doom: The Dark Ages, and that it will most likely launch for PS5 alongside PC and Xbox. Oh, and there was a customizable accessibility controller announced called Proteus; it will launch this fall with Xbox One, Series, and PC support, and cost a whopping $300.
Ending on a rare bit of definitely good news: The Communication Workers of America completed negotiations to expand Microsoft’s labor neutrality agreement to cover all staff at ZeniMax for future unionization efforts. Activision and ZeniMax’s existing QA team unions have repeatedly testified that they have gone unaffected by Microsoft’s mass layoffs thanks to union protections.
Everything Else
May 6th: Hades 2‘s Early Access build surprise released this day right after the technical test ended, and immediately outperformed its predecessor on Steam. The Rogue Prince of Persia saw its own early access release delayed to late May to avoid being overshadowed.
May 7th: Remedy officially canceled one of their four current projects, the new multiplayer IP with Tencent, because it wasn’t coming along nearly as well as their other games after one reboot last year. They will save money and improve development without laying anyone off as all developers will be reassigned to the other teams on Control 2, Max Payne 1&2 Remake, and Control’s multiplayer spinoff. Later, on May 16th, Remedy’s Chief Financial Officer departed the developer.
One year after launching solely for Switch, Spike Chunsoft and Too Kyo Games announced rerelease Master Detective Archives: Rain Code + for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series S|X, which will arrive July 18th in Japan and October 1st internationally.
Electronic Arts committed to launching two more games this fiscal year, an EA Original in Q1 2025 and none other than Dragon Age Dreadwolf somewhere between October ’24 and March 25. The game’s full reveal is imminent for sometime during “Summer Game Fest season”, and its PS5 and Xbox store listings went up early, giving an extremely generic description which essentially confirms another redux of the classic Bioware world spanning plot formula like Inquisition rather than anything resembling the game’s original dynamic espionage pitch. But the devil was in the details for Inquisition, with a lot of strong series highlights like Iron fucking Bull hidden beneath the cruft of the basic open world and plot structure.
Ubisoft’s subscription service Rocksmith+ had a Steam and PlayStation release announced for Early June.
The latest Nintendo earnings report, a full review of the previous fiscal year, was both a typical late-gen quiet one in some ways, and a monumental one in others. The publisher did officially announce its next gen console, the Switch’s successor, what we’ve been covering as Switch 2 for some time, saying that it will be revealed later in this new fiscal year. It also announced the next Nintendo Direct presentation will premiere in June 2024, confirming it much further in advance than usual in order to clarify that it will only cover current gen/Switch 1 software and not Switch 2 hardware or software. The same public listings of factory shipments I’ve discussed previously, which plainly state that they are for new hardware from Nintendo, have seen new updates which back what I’ve previously reported about the successor’s technical specifications, with 12GB RAM, 256GB internal storage, vastly faster transfer and read speeds, larger magnetic Joy-cons, and a major new tidbit, an internal microphone on the console.
And there’s other stuff: the Switch’s seventh full year of life did manage to sell almost 16 million more consoles, beating the forecast, and the publisher projects 13.5 million more for this year, which would allow its total to officially surpass the DS and be within spitting distance of the PS2’s 160 million record. The 13.5 million projection is officially only for Switch 1 consoles, we don’t yet know for sure if the successor is launching this fiscal year and there won’t be official figures until after the date is announced. Mario vs. Donkey Kong Remake and Princess Peach Showtime! both became million sellers in their debut quarter, Peach achieving that in less than two weeks. In a staggering figure, the Switch generation’s total profits for Nintendo have surpassed not only every individual hardware generation previous, but all of them combined. The publisher also newly nominated three women to its Board of Directors, all as the latest Outside Directors: Miyoko Demay, Eiko Osawa, and Keiko Akashi.
May 8th: The first new first party Nintendo game revealed in some time, Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition was officially announced to launch for Switch on July 18th with a standalone trailer, after previously leaking via ratings boards. This is a competitive multiplayer reimagining of the original limited edition 1990 cartridge for the eponymous esports event, in the style of the previous NES Remix games. It’s primarily an eShop release but there is a limited physical edition.
May 9th: The Adult Swim Games mass delisting has been called off after two months thanks to sufficient public pressure. Multiple developers who previously spoke out about Warner Bros delisting the Adult Swim Games catalog, arbitrarily refusing to return games to their creators instead, and forcing them to expend their own resources to ensure the games remain available, have now said that WB is fully returning the projects and Steam pages to them.
Frontier Developments officially announced Jurassic World Evolution 3, the next entry in their licensed theme park management sim series, which is scheduled to launch between 2025 and 2026 in conjunction with the next franchise film.
May 10th: Publisher CI Games engaged in further layoffs of 30 people, none of whom were in the Lords of the Fallen team.
May 13th: Sony officially announced that Hermen Hulst and Hideaki Nishino will be the new permanent co-CEOs of SIE/PlayStation as of June 1st, replacing Jim Ryan and answering directly to Hiroki Totoki, who was interim PS CEO and is President of Sony as a whole. Hulst, who originated at Horizon developer Guerrilla Games and had already been in charge of first party games for five years, will now oversee all PlayStation software and multimedia adaptation, while Nishino will oversee hardware and third party partnership.
Square Enix announced additional layoffs, mainly in departments like publishing, IT, ‘indie’ label Square Enix Collective, and US and Europe offices. Square also more explicitly outlined a business strategy going forward which emphasizes internal development over external (good), multiplatform release across all consoles and PC (good), along with the obviously bad but industrywide emphasis on AAA development. That $140 million loss in canceled projects were, officially, all games that didn’t fit into this new strategy.
Sega and Atlus announced that the original Shin Megami Tensei V and its individual DLCs will be delisted on Switch the day before the expanded rerelease edition Vengeance launches.
May 14th: The latest PlayStation earnings call had several important pieces of news. Helldivers 2 was revealed to officially be the fastest selling first party game ever, selling over 12 million copies across PS5 and PC in its first three months, while the PS5 reached 59 million consoles sold, which actually misses what was an already reduced projection for the previous fiscal year. The publisher still has low expectations for this new fiscal year, but it was able to reconfirm that the second first party live service Concord will launch in 2024, ahead of its appearance at the PlayStation State of Play presentation late in the month.
The original developer of the Prison Architect management sim series, Double Eleven, is unexpectedly being replaced by publisher Paradox Interactive for the launch of the sequel, after it’s already passed all platform certifications, due to no successful commercial agreement, which is to say Paradox doesn’t want to give them enough money.
Escapees from the failure of Marvel’s Midnight Suns at Firaxis have announced their new developer Midsummer Studios whose debut game will be a life sim to “revitalize” the genre.
Behavior Interactive’s 8th anniversary livestream for Dead by Daylight featured many announcements. A major new large-scale mode, one widely requested, was officially announced for the main game, with two Killers versus eight victims on larger maps. Two new licensed Chapters for the main game were revealed, a Dungeons and Dragons update featuring the lich Vecna as a new Killer, which just launched on June 3rd, and a Castlevania update with no further details until August. Supermassive’s latest narrative horror adventure The Casting of Frank Stone saw a new trailer with in-game footage and new story details, and a recommitted 2024 release. The co op shooter spinoff Project T saw new closed playtests announced. And a brand new spinoff game was revealed and shadowdropped on PC: What the Fog, a 3D roguelike co op action game, which gave its first two million copies away for free for registered Behavior accounts.
May 15th: Indie developer Fighting Chance Games announced that they are disbanding the team and cancelling their anticipated game Drag Her! due to being unable to secure more necessary funding after three years of development. A free demo build of the game is releasing on Steam.
The UK government has given an official and unfortunate response to the Stop Killing Games campaign, saying that a legal requirement for continual support and availability of older software has no precedent. With enough signatures the petition could still be brought before Parliament.
Two years after it was first announced, Ubisoft premiered the cinematic first trailer for Assassins’ Creed: Shadows, the Japan-set continuation and supposed finale of the huge open world format from Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla, starring both a shinobi ninja and the Black samurai Yasuke as player characters/protagonists. The game will launch November 15th 2024 for PC/Mac, PS5, and Xbox Series S|X, and its gameplay reveal will be at the Ubisoft Forward event in June. The game’s creative director Jonathan Dumont is known to have committed numerous acts of sexual harassment and bullying while working for the publisher, to the extent that workers avoided the project specifically to avoid him, and he was never removed from the company or the position of power. Ubisoft also announced that, three years after it was announced, the free to play spinoff shooter The Division: Heartland was canceled, shifting its funds over to existing live services like Rainbow Six Siege or XDefiant, and the recently greenlit Division 3.
May 16th: After two previous rounds of layoffs last year, developer Phoenix Labs has fired over 100 employees and canceled all new projects, including a game that was “weeks away” from being revealed and launching in Early Access, and will only support existing games Dauntless and Fae Farm going forward. Former employees report that the studio was quietly acquired last year by blockchain company Forte and we’re seeing the consequences of that.
After a rough year since launching Immortals of Aveum, developer Ascendant Studios announced some good news, a new agreement with publisher EA that will provide the independent developer with 100% of sales revenue going forward.
Take-Two’s latest financial report officially updated the release window of Grand Theft Auto 6 to Fall 2025.
May 17th: Unannounced Valve game Deadlock has mass-leaked online during private playtests with countless screenshots and footage; the six years in the making project is a team-based hero shooter with tower defense elements and is potentially another DOTA spinoff.
Palia developer Singularity 6 has reportedly fired 36 more people on top of the 49 employees fired just last month.
Games event organizer Player1 laid off a large number of staff and seem to have permanently canceled their longrunning UK event the Insomnia Gaming Festival.
DualShockers claims that, after the controversial Total War: Pharaoh last year, developer Creative Assembly has picked up the Star Wars license for one of the three Total War RTS games currently in development.
May 20th: Always finding new ways to surprise us, Nintendo has announced a new first party developer acquisition, fully buying small US-based port and support developer Shiver Entertainment from Embracer Group, assuredly rescuing the studio from liquidation. Shiver had worked with WB Games on several Switch ports, from the Scribblenauts and Mortal Kombat series to most recently sighs Hogwarts Legacy, the latter of which received rave reviews for its technical quality and was a topseller last year. There are plenty of other, bigger porthouses, but those generally have parent companies who aren’t selling. Shiver will allow Nintendo to have a go to in-house port studio to offer when negotiating with third parties, and will provide support development for other projects. Here‘s an excellent further in-depth exploration of the publisher’s relationship with Shiver and its leadership.
May 21st: IGN Entertainment and parent company Ziff Davis acquired the UK based publication company Gamer Network from ReedPop, putting several major games press sites that were already under one roof under a much bigger and historically problematic roof, including Eurogamer, GamesIndustry.Biz, Rock Paper Shotgun, VG247, and Dicebreaker. Gamer Network also has some shares and partnerships in places like Outside Xbox, Digital Foundry, VGC, and Hookshot, parent company of intendoLife and its sister sites, but this is confirmed to not affect those. Ziff Davis confirmed “redundancies across the board” would occur, but we only have specifics on that thanks to the good folks at Aftermath. Layoffs abruptly occurred that day across all departments at GN, affecting veteran writers and editors like Alice Bell (leaving RPS without a lead editor), Jeffrey Rousseau, Brendan Sinclair, and Stephany Nunnely-Jackson, and specifically eliminating all non-UK employees.
May 23rd: In news that probably means a lot to those who gamed back in the 70s and 80s, Atari has acquired Intellivision, their original rival. Well, sort of. These are both completely separate companies using those names for their brand recognition, which is especially notable with how Tommy Tallarico’s attempts to operate Intellevision and launch a console have utterly failed. And Atari didn’t buy the company outright and absorb said doomed Amico, it bought the name Intellivision and more than 200 existing Intellivision games. Tallarico’s company will continue on its own with the Amico console under a new name.
May 27th: After a whopping three year wait as other HD2D games came and went, Square Enix has finally started marketing Dragon Quest 3 HD2D Remake again, releasing a small teaser trailer pointing to more news soon and announcing its platforms as PC, Switch, PS5, and Xbox Series. The game is rumored to now be a remake of the entire original Erdrick Trilogy, Dragons Quest 1-3, with this project expansion being one of the reasons for its launch delays.
May 28th: Game press site eXputer published a report claiming that Xbox has secured a first party financing and publishing deal for the next game by Rocksteady’s cofounders since they left the Batman Arkham/Suicide Squad studio and their legacy of leading a toxic workplace culture there. The project from their new studio Hundred Star Games is allegedly a AAA single player action game built in Unreal 5, very much the same vein as their Arkham games.
WB and Player First Games officially relaunched MultiVersus into 1.0, seeing good press from exciting new fighters at launch Jason Voorhees and Agent Smith, and seeing a whole lot of other bad press. Thanks to the UE4 to UE5 upgrade, the game is more poorly optimized than it was in beta, with widespread frame drops, lag, and online match crashes across all platforms, even current-gen, and it’s currently missing a lot of beta features because the UE5 coding isn’t finished yet. Those absences, along with some design changes from beta that aren’t being blamed on just needing more time to implement have been very poorly received and further damage the user experience for an already quite flawed game, despite a lot of PR promises.
After leaking more than a year ago, Nintendo officially expanded its licensed Lego offerings again by announcing the Great Deku Tree, a premium Legend of Zelda set releasing this September after first being reported on in February 2023.
May 29th: The epidemic of indie game makers’ financial struggles has claimed a new, great victim: Worldwalker Games, creators of the massively acclaimed 2021 RPG Wildermyth, announced that they are ending support for the game after this month’s DLC, dropping many employees, and entering a “hibernation” until/unless they can secure a new project with support. Console ports are said to still be in development and some other minor commitments aren’t canceled either.
The strained Amazon Games publishing division announced a new project, a multiplatform story-driven open world driving game by former Forza Horizon lead developers at their new studio Maverick Games.
Circana’s April 2024 report on US game sales, combined with comments from developer Shift Up, are indicating that PS5 exclusive Stellar Blade is a success.
May 30th:
PlayStation State of Play: The presentation opened with the return of Concord, the debut game of new first party team Firewalk, showcased with both a cinematic trailer with a lot more detail than last year’s teaser, revealing a team of misfit mercenary heroes, and then a proper gameplay reveal trailer for the first person team based live service shooter which will launch August 23rd 2024 for PS5 and PC. The PC port of God of War: Ragnarok was officially confirmed with a September 19th release date. Koei Tecmo and Omega Force revealed Dynasty Warriors Origins, the longrunning series’ next mainline entry which will come in 2025 on PlayStation 5, PC, and Xbox Series S|X. Open world Chinese RPG Infinity Nikki had a new gameplay trailer and will see public testing later this year on mobile and PlayStation.
Chinese developer TipsWorks revealed their second game, action RPG Ballad of Antara coming 2025 to “multiple platforms including PS5”. Behemoth, Skydance Media’s new PSVR project after its Walking Dead games, returned from the Game Awards with a gameplay reveal trailer announcing a Fall 2024 launch. Another PSVR2 game, Alien: Rogue Incursion, had gameplay and a Holiday 2024 launch shown. Marvel Rivals by NetEease was officially confirmed for current-gen consoles in a new trailer. Chinese developer Everstone and publisher NetEease announced that the open world action RPG will come to PS5 on top of PC. The second trailer for Until Dawn Remake premiered ahead of a Fall release. A new trailer for Path of Exile 2 announced local co op, console crossplay, and an early access release scheduled before the end of this year.
Konami finally announced that Silent Hill 2 Remake will launch October 8th 2024 for PS5 and PC, right before the game got shown more extensively at the dedicated Silent Hill event which had no exclusive game news of its own. Tremendous programming there Konami. Capcom offered three straight minutes of gameplay from next year’s Monster Hunter Wilds, showcasing a newfound emphasis on storytelling and voice acting. Wilds is still a multiplatform day 1 launch, not a PS5 timed exclusive as some speculated, and it will appear again at Summer Game Fest. Lastly, first party developer Asobi Studio officially revealed the next game in their increasingly beloved series, a full scale 3D platformer unbound from VR or being a free demo, simply titled Astro Bot and launching September 6th 2024 for PS5.
Developer Mad Fellows, consisting of two former DJ Hero creators, announced that their rhythm shootemup Aaero 2 will launch this September on Xbox S|X followed by Steam/PC.
May 31st: Rebekah Valentine’s latest report at IGN concerned the fate of Take-Two’s Private Division publishing label, saying that Take-Two has decided to completely offload the department, selling it off if possible but more likely completely closing it and killing all of its current projects. Layoffs began at Private Division at the start of May when we learned that the OlliOlli developer and Kerbal Space Program 2 developer were both being gutted, and individual project partnerships also started imploding with studios like Yellow Brick Games and most recently Silent Hill 2 Remake dev Bloober Team, who just confirmed that Take-Two ended their deal and they will be seeking a new publisher. Valentine newly revealed that another deal has been terminated with Ghostrunner developer One More Level, and that the only remaining Private Division staff are those attached to one of three surviving partnerships: Moon Studios’ new game which is currently in early access, Tales of the Shire with Weta, and Game Freak’s mystery game Project Bloom.
Valentine also reported on the option of selling Private Division as a whole or in parts, saying that the Kerbal Space Program IP has been considered for sale on its own with Paradox Interactive as a buyer who fell through, and that a private equity firm, already bad, with connections to Moon Studios’ infamously toxic leadership, even worse, is the leading candidate for buying Private Division outright. Current and former Private Division employees serving as Valentine’s sources are proud of what they were able to accomplish in aiding smaller developers, and called out Take-Two’s mismanagement of the label with unrealistic sales targets and rushed developments like Kerbal Space Program 2’s.
Marvelous Game Showcase: The Japanese publisher featured several major upcoming titles largely in early development, starting with the original IP RPG Farmagia which will launch this year. The next brand new/mainline Story of Seasons game made its second appearance with new graphical and gameplay features discussed, like a glider for more fully exploring the world and enhanced lighting. Some new indie games were announced as publisher partnerships: Death of the Guitar coming next year, supernatural farm sim Moonlight Peaks coming 2026, and Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus, which will currently only launch in Japan this July. Rune Factory: Project Dragon made another appearance, and the show closed with the first look trailer for Daemon X Machina 2: Titanic Scion.
Limited Run Games announced that their internally developed Tomba! Special Edition will launch for PC, Switch, and PS5 on August 1st 2024 with a PS4 version down the line, and detailed plenty of new features.
Bandai Namco and Supermassive delayed the launch of Little Nightmares 3 to 2025 for further polish.
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