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
July 16th: A DEI leader at Microsoft was reported to have issued an internal email criticizing corporate leadership after they and their entire team were fired. They praise their colleagues in the DEI department for “moving impossible mountains” in the face of obstruction and “evidenced discrimination, harassment, and toxicity” from executive leadership. They also accuse Microsoft and other corporations of designing their initial DEI commitments with the ability to scrap them in time for the potential return of conservative political leadership and its impact on their government contracts.
July 19th: It’s very jarring to continually have some feel good stories out of Microsoft considering the circumstances that surround them, but here they are. Within one week of each other, Bethesda Game Studios and Blizzard’s World of Warcraft team officially became the first two wall to wall fully unionized Microsoft Game Studios, encompassing 241 Bethesda workers and over 500 Blizzard workers.
July 22nd: Jez Corden at Windows Central reported on even more potential changes to the Game Pass subscription service, saying that a cheaper xCloud Streaming only plan is being seriously explored, the return of a family plan option after it was briefly tested before is being lightly explored, and that the long rumored Game Pass with Ads is not currently on the table.
July 24th: Last year’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III officially became the first COD on Game Pass and the second ABK catalog title on Game Pass after Diablo 4, and momentum looks likely to pick up from there with several more titles rumored to join in August.
July 25th: The launch of Stalker 2 was delayed for polish yet again, this time from September to November 20th. A week later, Obsidian officially delayed the RPG Avowed from its internal November date to February 18th 2025, but actually less for polish than to avoid risk of it being overshadowed by the rest of the holiday slate between Stalker, COD, Flight Sim 2024, and ostensibly Indiana Jones. This news was first leaked a day earlier in a report by Microsoft coverage mainstay Tom Warren.
July 29th: Digital Foundry covered a technical problem in which some 2013 Xbox One units, having gone un-updated for many years after factory resetting or simple lack of use, had started to brick themselves because their older firmware wasn’t compatible with taking a 2024 firmware update all at once. Upon the issue getting this larger coverage, Microsoft immediately fixed it.
August 2nd: Jez Corden reported that a new internal development team has been officially formed within Blizzard by diverting employees from other departments into the new team, especially but not exclusively from mobile giant King. This new team will be devoted to budget projects based on existing IP in order to expand support for classic series, especially Blizzard’s. These games are likely to be on mobile, PC, and consoles. o
Everything Else
June 2024: Here we go. Cody Conners, a former Twitch employee, revealed that the real reason for the company’s infamous abrupt permaban of hugely popular and hugely controversial streamer Dr. Disrespect in 2020. He’d already had scandals, from livestreaming in an E3 bathroom to cheating on his wife to COVID trutherism. But Twitch dropped him right after signing a $10+ million contract with him because he got caught sexting a minor using Twitch DMs and trying to meet up with her in person. Days after Cody Conners made his statement, Disrespect’s video game studio Midnight Society fired him before a June 25th Bloomberg report (Cecilia D’Anastasio, aggravatingly) officially backed the allegations.
It was at that point that he confessed it was all true while still defending himself as having not done even worse things, and from there all professional associations obviously dropped him. It also quickly became apparent that this grooming scandal was a fairly open secret within the streaming community and games press. Aftermath has since done a very thoughtful piece about responsible journalism, about how many reporters had been trying to publish the official piece on this story for the past four years, but they were never able to get enough strong enough detail and sourcing for it to be considered publishable. I have a tiny fraction of the connections of these people and I have been in a similar boat, there are many things I have and consciously don’t publish because it doesn’t meet my standards of rigor or because it would put a source at risk.
July 9th: After several years of fans complaining that Team Fortress 2 is nigh unplayable due to cheaters and bots, Valve finally properly responded in the first week of July, issuing a tidal wave of bans for cheating players and strict permaban policies for cheaters. Bots and cheaters for matches on PC have been entirely absent since then, improving player activity and reviews. But fans worry that cheating and administrative neglect will creep back in eventually.
July 16th: Behaviour Interactive made new release date announcements for its signature Dead by Daylight franchise, announcing that Supermassive’s game The Casting of Frank Stone will launch September 3rd, while the main game received a Tomb Raider DLC on July 16th, cross progression on July 22nd, and its new 2v8 mode on July 25th.
The creators of the infamous Dead Island reveal trailer, Scotland’s biggest animation/vfx studio Axis has closed, leaving 162 people out of work. Axis worked on cinematics and trailers for many major games like Halo Infinite, Destiny 2, League of Legends, and Diablo 2 Resurrected, among others.
July 17th: Just one week later, Nintendo fully unveiled the “Emio” mystery game, putting surprise on top of surprise: Emio The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club, digitally launching August 29th, is a brand new sequel to the cult classic visual novel series arriving 35 years after the original entries and three years after their remakes by Mages. Here I was imagining a whole lot of different things because of that teaser, but this is still cool.
After a brief ill-fortuned foray into Google Stadia exclusivity, Orcs Must Die series developer Robot Entertainment revealed their next game, a third person shooter spinoff, announcing it will launch in early 2025 for PC and Xbox Series S|X.
July 18th: Warner Bros Games and NetherRealm laid off the latter’s entire mobile team, firing at least 50 people and immediately delisting the game Mortal Kombat Onslaught which only released last year. This came alongside WB spending money and asking for your money elsewhere, from the outright acquisition of MultiVersus’ developer for an unknown sum, to the Comic-Con announcement of another paid expansion for Mortal Kombat, the $60 Khaos Reigns DLC coming September 24th featuring new story content and 6 more fighters, the previously leaked set of Ghostface, Conan the Barbarian, Terminator 2’s liquid metal Terminator AKA the T-1000, Sektor, Cyrax, and Noob Saibot. Both Sektor and Cyrax have been rebooted as women for the new MK1 canon. Animalities are also returning for the first time since their original appearance in 1995’s MK3.
Developer 1047 officially revealed their shooter Splitgate 2 for a 2025 launch with a cinematic trailer, after first ending development on its surprise hit predecessor two years ago.
July 19th-21st: EVO 2024: Although not as momentous as 2022 or 2023’s reveals, the EVO tournament still brought plenty of major news to fighting game fans this year. On top of adding new characters to King of Fighters 15 and Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, SK also announced and shadowdropped a remaster of the 2003 crossover fighter SnK vs. Capcom: SVC Chaos, and confirmed very early development on two more projects, a new Art of Fighting and an action RPG entry in the Samurai Showdown series. WB revealed that Season 2 of MultiVersus would deliver Samurai Jack and Beetlejuice as the next new fighters, the Animaniacs Water Tower as a new stage, and the long awaited arrival of Ranked Mode, along with a lot of general tweaks and improvements since the May relaunch.
Guilty Gear Strive revealed all four of its Season 4 characters at once, most notably original character Unika, who will star in the upcoming spinoff anime, and Lucy from the TV series Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. Capcom offered the gameplay reveal trailer for Terry Bogard in Street Fighter 6. And lastly…I am once again Charlie Brown failing to kick the football, as Heihachi Mishima’s resurrection for Tekken 8 as its third DLC character was officially announced, not long after M Bison was also resurrected again. Why do I keep falling for these death fakeouts. Heihachi will release in Fall 2024 alongside a more unique surprise, the Tekken franchise’s first ever story expansion which will detail his return and the continued villainy of his daughter Reina.
koROBO, a 3D platformer and spiritual successor to the first party Nintendo series Chibi Robo, was officially announced with a Kickstarter campaign by returning Skip Ltd. developers including both directors of the series debut. The developers also openly called for an official rerelease of said 2006 Gamecube original.
July 22nd: Mobile developer Rumble Games was reported to have been abruptly shut down after 13 years of operation, laying off 36 people in the process. This closure came from parent Forte, the blockchain company that also killed Phoenix Labs earlier this year, just as workers were mourning the passing of their CEO. Rumble had made several games starting with Towers & Titans.
Paul Tassi issued a strong post-mortem of Concord‘s beta for Forbes, using his own personal playing experience and Steam data since PS5 data isn’t public. The game does actually meet baseline mechanical competence, but just isn’t being received well and really fails to stand out for its very crowded and struggling market. Early playercount bears that out: multiplayer games usually peak right before a weekend ends, but Concord on Steam peaked right as it went live on Thursday with roughly 2400 current players and declined throughout the weekend even while free, and the final game isn’t free, it’s $40 like Helldivers. This game looks more and more doomed.
July 23rd: In another huge blow to the troubled indie games market, Humble Bundle and parent company Ziff Davis have completely shuttered the Humble Games publishing label, firing 36 people. This first came to light how it usually does, with former employees personally disclosing online, but the company’s official statement was visibly AI generated, just to really salt the wound. Humble Games had a strong track record in its five years of operation, with six upcoming games previously signed to it and such notable previous titles as A Hat in Time, Wandersong, Slay the Spire, Ikenfell, Unpacking, Unsighted, Signalis and Stray Gods. Several developers have now publicly testified that all console development for their games was handled by Humble as their publisher, and this abrupt closure has put them in limbo with no communication and no access to console backend. Stairway Games of life sim Coral Valley, Meowza of Mineko’s ight Market, and Squid Shock of Metroidvania Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus have all been affected. Other Humble partners are speaking out in solidarity for those affected.
Physical indie publisher Red Art Games was struck by a cyberattack and data breach affecting customers.
July 25th: Video game voice actors are officially going on strike again. Although SAG-AFTRA’s relations with indie game developers improved with a new deal back in June, negotiations between the actors’ union and the biggest AAA game publishers around finally fell through after 18 long months without a deal. The sole point of contention is the use of generative AI, which SAG is already too soft on by permitting on at all, but video game publishers didn’t even want to meet their baseline of actors needing to consent for their faces or voices to be used by AI, and game publishers are specifically trying not have to cover physical motion capture performances in protections.
Games that have been in advance production for long enough, since before an August 2023 cutoff point, are officially exempt from the strike, including the likes of Grand Theft Auto 6. Any work on games such as these will not be disciplined, but acts of solidarity, like not signing any new contracts for games from struck companies, are encouraged. PlayStation, Xbox, Activision, EA, Disney, Take-Two, WB, and Epic are all officially struck either as a whole, through subsidiary developers, or through mocap contractors. The last strike lasted 11 months between 2016 and 2017, and this one began July 26th, with an exemption for promotional appearances at San Diego Comic-Con since it had already begun.
July 26th: Indie developer The Behemoth made several announcements in a ‘roadmap’ livestream presentation, providing updates on every existing game in their catalog and teasing their next brand new game in very early development. Last year’s twin Alien Hominid games, the remaster and the sequel, will both now be coming to PS4 and PS5. BattleBlock Theater and Pit People will both be receiving new quality of life updates, with the former also being newly natively ported to Xbox Series S|X. Lastly, Castle Crashers is receiving a new DLC, the currently Steam-only Painter Boss Paradise, which will add another new player character, a new artstyle to the game, and a Steam workshop based custom character creator.
July 29th: Actor Tony Pankhurst sadly passed away at age 67, having become recognized by horror gamers as the face model (though not the voice or mocap performer) of the Curator, the host character for Supermassive Games’ Dark Pictures Anthology series.
Skydance Media and its main game studio has formally entered a worldwide publishing contract with Embracer Group/Plaion, announcing that Embracer will publish Amy Hennig’s Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra, and probably her Star Wars game as well.
Major support developer Keywords made a “small” number of layoffs at subsidiary Lively Studio.
Acclaimed indie game Omori and developer Omocat saw another complication after the previous unexpected delisting of the Xbox Series port, with the game’s European physical release now also being abruptly canceled.
July 30th: As the Summer Olympics began in Paris, it suddenly dawned on a few gaming enthusiasts that there wasn’t another Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games party game to coincide with the event, after Tokyo 2020 got its game out ahead of the pandemic. Inquiry quickly led to Lee Cocker, who was a member of Sega’s development team on all six entries in this game series since the Beijing 2008 original, who said bluntly on social media that the franchise is finished. Eurogamer backed this up, reporting that the International Olympic Committee killed its partnership with Nintendo and Sega in favor of flimsier and griftier digital enterprises, much like FIFA did to EA.
As promised by Worldwalker Games before their production hiatus began, the console ports of their acclaimed RPG Wildermyth have proceeded as planned, now announced to be launching October 22nd 2024 for Switch, PS4/PS5, and Xbox One/Series S|X, with a physical release for Switch and PlayStation.
Developer Fat Bomb Studios announced that they were delisting their debut game Quantum Lock due to a devastating technical error: they had lost the source code and thus will henceforth be unable to make any more updates, whether to address bugs or worse, security vulnerabilities.
July 31st: Despite the seemingly successful launch of Destiny 2: The Final Shape, Bungie is going forward with drastic action of firing 220 more employees after last year’s layoffs, including most executive and senior leader roles, and directly integrating another huge portion of workers into Sony, 155 that are still officially in Bungie and also around 40 people founding a brand new PlayStation Studio which will inherit and continue one of the incubation projects Bungie had elected to shed in order to exclusively work on Destiny support, which has already been massively reduced, and Marathon. Bungie explicitly said that this second group of roughly 200 were nearly outright fired as well. The new studio’s game is Project Gummybears, which “has MOBA and Smash Bros elements.”
Those that have been fired, those still at Bungie, and others have all rightly called out the cruel action, and directly called for CEO Pete Parsons to step down. It quickly got even uglier when Stephen Totilo reported citing three separate sources that Bungie leadership finalized its plan for these layoffs in early 2024 well before The Final Shape ever launched, so it was never actually going to make a difference either way, and that despite its better critical reception, The Final Shape has actually sold worse than the previous Lightfall expansion, which was what put Bungie into the red.
Sony overpaid for Bungie, Bungie leadership made promises it couldn’t keep, and they’re both all too willing to let employees, customers, and their products’ quality all suffer for it. With Destiny support downscaled and side projects canceled or spun off, at this point all eggs are just in the Marathon basket, and Marathon succeeding seems like a long shot to begin with.
Elsewhere, the latest update on Deltarune development marked a major milestone with Chapter 4 of 7 now content complete, leaving polish and launch prep left to go and development beginning to transition over to focusing on Chapter 5. As a fan, it’s stirring to see just how much faster and smoother its production is now from where it started.
August 1st: Armor Games has fired its entire publishing team. The company started as a host for Flash browser games before branching out into indie game publishing, and had some of its upcoming titles featured in prominent presentations, like Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge in the Wholesome Direct. The status of the various upcoming and current games signed to Armor is not yet known.
Nintendo’s latest earnings update was published between August 1st and 2nd covering the April to June 2024 quarter. A minor one, it further emphasized how Switch business is slowing, especially without Tears of the Kingdom and the Mario movie to bolster the already usually slow Spring. Switch consoles sold two million more units to reach 143.4 million, with the majority continuing to be OLEDs. Paper Mario TTYD Remake and Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD had their respective first month and week of sales officially announced, both breaking a million copies immediately with Paper Mario almost hitting 2 mill.
Perhaps the actual most notable figure is that Switch games are for the first time ever firmly selling a majority of games digitally over physically, 59% digital. I could put more and more money on a digital-only edition of Switch 2 coming sooner than later. The current system has a promising enough holiday slate but one wonders if that’s still enough to reach the ambitious, unchanged projection of outselling the DS by fiscal year’s end, and further still we’re all wondering when we’ll finally see Switch 2.
August 2nd: After writing had been on the wall for years, parent company GameStop officially killed Game Informer magazine, closing and laying all staff off immediately that Friday morning with no warning for most employees. Game Informer had a significant tenure as the longest running video game magazine in the world with 367 total issues and 33 years in print and 28 online. It was at one point the third largest magazine in the US with 8 million subscribers. Staffers attest that issue 368 was 70% finished when the news hit them, after the final issue’s extensive Dragon Age cover story was one of the only times GI really caught my attention since Imran Khan was fired. The website archiving decades of history and hard work has already been completely deleted, replaced with a redirect link to GameStop’s closure statement.
Much like what happened to Life by You before its cancellation, Paradox has now indefinitely delayed another title, Prison Architect 2, and refunded all preorders.
Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team was announced for GBA NSO, the most notable Pokémon get for the service so far as the spinoff series is a cult classic with several entries, most recently a Switch remake of this first game.
Lastly, Embracer Group’s latest THQ ordic Digital Showcase featured some notable announcements, from Titan Quest 2‘s and Gothic Remake‘s gameplay reveal trailer to the full reveal of 2D platformer The Eternal Life of Goldman coming to all current gen consoles and PC, and lastly a reveal teaser for the next Darksiders game, the first in five years.
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