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!
August 25th: The developers of Fe and Lost in Random announced that they’re releasing a new roguelike sequel to the latter, Lost in Random: The Eternal Die, scheduled for a 2025 launch on PC, Switch, PS5, and Xbox Series.
September 9th: Embracer Group fired yet more workers at support studio Lost Boys Interactive.
Mojang and 4J Studios announced an overhaul to Minecraft’s support going forward, ending the “mob vote” and committing to more consistent content updates.
Platinum Games recently successfully and fully secured ownership of The Wonderful 101 IP from Nintendo, as discovered by documents publicly registered with the US Patent and Trademark Office in August and taking effect on September 9th. The game originally launched as a first party title and Wii U exclusive in 2013 before Platinum produced and publish a multiplatform remaster of the game with Nintendo’s permission/license.
Sega launched the new Sonic Legacy Bundle on PC and Xbox in conjunction with delisting the original 2011 Sonic Generations at the same time on the same platforms. They want the remaster Sonic X Shadow Generations to be the main form of the game going forward, but the original will remain accessible via this bundle which also includes Adventure 1 and 2, both episodes of 4, 3D Blast, and Spinball.
September 10th: After 2014’s The Crew became fully unplayable and unavailable earlier this year, Ubisoft has finally responded to criticism by announcing offline modes which will allow long term access for both The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorfest.
The developers of Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist announced that their Metroidvania sequel will have its 1.0 launch on January 22nd 2025.
A 9 minute livestream presentation by PlayStation hardware architect Mark Cerny served as the official reveal of the PS5 Pro console, which will launch November 7th for an eye watering $700 USD retail as a solely digital-only SKU, no built in disc drive whatsoever. You’d have to spend almost another $100 for an external disc drive, which also has its own firmware and mandatory online synching for it to actually work. And they didn’t even bundle in the stand or a second controller or something!
Information about this console has extensively leaked over the past year, including its full technical specifications back in April, and today all of those leaks have proved accurate. Its GPU is a moderate improvement over the original PS5’s with improved ray tracing, but the CPU is identical with only a 10% increase to clock settings. The biggest difference, the main feature, is PlayStation Super Spectral Resolution or PSSR, a brand new proprietary AI-based upscaler to replace AMD FSR, the worst image upscaler on the market. Every game that runs on a PS5 console gets the kind of low level passive improvements you see in back compat titles already, but so far over 50 games have been confirmed for major PS5 Pro Enhanced upgrades, most of which are just from tags on the store.
Game hardware has seen criticisms of diminishing returns/incrementalism since at least the 360 era, and this feels like it should be a parody of that issue, not an actual retail product. A lot of that is unavoidable of course, especially after the massive ramifications of COVID which, yes, are still ongoing. But Sony is definitely making some unforced errors of its own here, from the selling to the actual design. Leading with any PS4/cross-gen games like they did with Last of Us 2, Horizon 2, Gran Turismo 7, it just brings out the unnecessary of it all, the niche of a niche product TM of it all, even further. From Digital Foundry, FF7 Rebirth is known to have a comparatively more pronounced improvement, but its presence was limited to the briefest snippets of cinematics. Editing was one of the main issues here, undercutting the comparisons by moving much too fast. The PS5 Pro section of the later State of Play repeated both these issues with its lightning fast montage and inclusion of cross-gen games which are already perfect on base PS5 to basically everyone, like Resident Evil titles.
And as for the actual internals design and the kind of upgrades it facilitates, the priorities just seem to be really misplaced. This is an oversimplification, someone techier than I am should feel free to correct me, but an identical CPU means that framerate improvements from this thing are very minimal. It will mostly just be refining existing Performance modes rather than adding or increasing at all, which is where those comments about GTA 6 come from, if it doesn’t ship with a 60fps mode, this won’t magically add one. I certainly see the value in reducing the graphical cutbacks of Performance modes, but you’d think that “3 out of 4 players use Performance mode” would motivate actually prioritizing framerate?
This product was in motion long before the realities of our current economy and extremely messy, empty-feeling current gaming generation had set in. considering the price of an equivalent PC graphics card, and that they built brand new upscaling software from scratch, and that hardware components just aren’t dropping in cost over time like they used to, which is why base PS5 has seen one or more price increases internationally instead pf a permanent price drop… This thing is probably still selling at a loss at $700. A hauntingly impractical thought, but most likely true. I am sympathetic to all that, and also think that this billion dollar corporation should have, you know, read the room a little more. Seriously consider audience accessibility and cost of living, even for a product that’s always niche by design. Launch this alongside a game like Ghost of Yotei or GTA6, instead of…Lego Horizon Adventure, which is on Switch. Extend the generation, release new hardware later than you originally wanted, because we sure don’t need it right now, and we aren’t getting our money’s worth yet out of what we already have.
September 11th: Nexon has significantly increased support to Dave the Diver dev Mintrocket by expanding it into its own distinct corporation after the game’s success, though it is still a fully owned subsidiary and not legally independent whatsoever.
After a very first troubled first year for Payday 3, that saw more success its decade old predecessor, Payday 3 director Miodrag Kovacevic has been demoted to senior designer with two other development leads taking charge for the game’s second year of support.
September 12th: As first reported by Jason Schreier at Bloomberg, the entire staff at Annapurna Interactive are gone. All 25 people, including Annapurna President Nathan Gary, mass resigned and walked out during negotiations with CEO Megan Ellison after she played hardball on their plan to spin off the games publishing division into its own company, Verset. Though Annapurna’s reputation has taken a turn for the worse in recent years after multiple reports on enabling toxic workplaces at development partners like Mountains, Funomena, and Fullbright, this is still another huge blow to the already troubled state of available support and resources for smaller devs and arthouse games. A contractor company, Popagenda, has been brought in to handle publishing responsibilities for the meantime, and Annapurna will attempt to recruit new staff, but some of their 40-odd developer partnerships have already suffered from these events.
IGN’s Rebekah Valentine delivered much greater detail on this story just days later, and Jason Schreier followed up again on September 27th. The following coverage will flow between details from both of their stories. Nathan Gary was a founding member of Annapurna Interactive in 2016, recruited straight from the division at PlayStation that helped bring Journey to the world. He was popular with his team and his leadership proved successful as Annapurna kept racking up critically adored profitable games throughout the late 2010s. However, after being promoted to president of all of Annapurna in 2021, he heavily favored the gaming division at the film and TV divisions’ expense, redirecting their resources and pushing out their leadership. But Annapurna Pictures was always the first priority for billionaire heiress CEO Megan Ellison.
After a largely hands-off tenure punctuated by violent outbursts towards employees, this mishandling of Pictures prompted Ellison in 2023 to start taking a much larger role in operations at all divisions, including Interactive. Having to report directly to Ellison slowed progress at Interactive to a crawl because she was consistently unresponsive and unavailable. She was also trying to redirect their games towards licensed IP and synergy with their films, hence the Blade Runner game and the Remedy deal, and even wanted to start making AAA games, completely and utterly going against the original mission statement of Annapurna Interactive, a vision which of course proved unpopular with Gary and the rest of staff. That Remedy deal was spearheaded by one Hector Sanchez, which only upset Gary and his team even more.
Hector Sanchez was another founding member of Annapurna Interactive, who left for Epic Games in 2019 directly due to a contentious relationship with Nathan Gary that had escalated over their years working together. Sanchez is accused of taking credit for others’ work, making unwanted advances towards female employees, and brown nosing Megan Ellison, all of which drove Gary to ultimately block him from a promotion to heading the company’s internship program. Sanchez left right after, but he stayed close with Ellison, leading to her quietly rehiring him in early 2024 to help force her new initiative for Annapurna Interactive. She fired both Gary and James Masi, prompting other Interactive team members to quit in protest, until a new deal was reached to satisfy and retain everyone, which brings us back to Verset.
Nathan Gary and his team could spinoff into their own company, Verset, to continue the original vision for supporting arthouse games completely separate from Sanchez in his own department doing Ellison’s thing. But negotiations did ultimately breakdown, Gary and co. walked away, and they now plan to establish indie games publishing company Verset on their own entirely away from Annapurna, but they will have to build it from scratch. Among Annapurna partners, games close to release like Davey Wreden’s Wanderstop or Mixtape are what’s generally most safe.
Microsoft announced another 650 layoffs at Xbox in its second major round this year, as first reported by Stephen Totilo at Game File. Just under 400 of those fired were from Activision Blizzard King, being “mostly corporate and support roles,” and also two mobile development teams behind Warcraft Rumble and Call of Duty Mobile. In a desperate bid for any good PR, Phil Spencer made a point of saying that no games were canceled or studios closed this time. But Microsoft also announced new expensive shareholder appeasements, both a $60 million stock buyback scheme and a straight increase to shareholder payout.
Almost a year after revising away its most harmful elements, Unity has announced that it will cancel the Runtime Fee plan entirely in favor of just increasing the price of Unity subscriptions. It clearly thinks this is effective PR, but the damage is already done after several major developers have already stopped using the Unity engine since last year.
September 13th: After launching Penny’s Big Breakaway earlier this year and failing to immediately secure a new project, developer Evening Star has sadly laid off six employees out of only 19 total.
Saber Interactive and Embracer Group announced that Saber will no longer be purchasing two additional subsidiary studios, Metro 2033 creators 4A Games and Pinball FX creators Zen Studios, as part of its departure from Embracer. Alongside successfully launching Space Marine and not making that acquisition, Saber had a third financial win, announcing that it has now cleared out its debts to Embracer with new funding from private equity firms Aleph Capital and Crestview, which are also appointing representatives to Saber’s board of directors.
Sophie McEvoy at GI.biz reported about events in the past year at Joydrop, a small game support developer based in Ontario. The company successfully unionized its 17 employees at the end of 2023 before a majority of staff were laid off only a week later on January 8th 2024, all 14 of whom had voted for the union. Former employee Stephen Reilly accuses Joydrop’s parent company Mikutech of union-busting, saying that any claim of cost-cutting as an alternate motivation is suspect because he was contacted by someone who had been immediately offered his former position and they had a lot of grant money coming in for their first original IP. Mikutech is currently facing an unfair labor practice charge at the Ontario Labor Board.
Around 20 core staff who departed from Immortals of Aveum creators Ascendant Studios, including founder/director Bret Robbins, have announced that they are establishing a new subsidiary developer at Dan Houser’s Absurd Ventures. Absurd Marin will be working on an original story driven adventure game.
September 15th: Microsoft officially launched the new Game Pass Standard subscription tier, revealing the full scope of its content and value reduction, its taking away games from people who had access right before, its bandaid on the wound that is how Game Pass devalued Xbox games. It’s not just future Day 1 and first party games: 44 Day 1 games from 2024 and 2023 were all removed from the library, both small indies like Another Crab’s Treasure and major first party blockbusters like Forza Motorsport, Diablo 4, Modern Warfare III, Starfield, and Hellblade 2.
The Grand Festival Splatfest concluded in Splatoon 3 with Team Past defeating Team Present and Team Future, which is expected to have some bearing on the story of Splatoon 4 much like the previous Callie vs Marie and Order vs. Chaos Splatfests. This is now officially confirmed to mark the last new Splatfest and last regular/major update for Splatoon 3.
A trademark renewal lapse has allowed the infamous delisted mobile game Flappy Bird to be scooped up by crypto firm 1208 Productions and the “Flappy Bird Foundation,” which plans to relaunch the game in 2025 and has seen criticism from original creator Dong Nguyen.
September 16th: We only just saw the PS5 Pro, and now we’re already learning about PS6 Max Cherney at Reuters exclusively reported on early developments for the PlayStation 6 just after the PS5 Pro’s reveal, citing three sources saying that Broadcom, Intel, and AMD were all competing to be the designer for the PS6 system-on-chip until the severe bidding war ended in mid-2022 with a victory for the same architects as the PS4 and PS5, AMD. Intel was competitive with AMD until it faltered in two critical areas: it contentiously tried to negotiate for a bigger profit margin from each chip sold to Sony, and it failed to make a convincing argument for ensuring backwards compatibility, in which AMD has an obvious advantage. This deal is worth many billions of dollars and keeps a manufacturing pipeline busy for the better part of a decade, both of which Intel could sorely use now. Intel is seeing huge losses and cost-cutting this year as it falls behind AMD and Nvidia and struggles to attract any more major manufacturing clients after losing Sony.
A new nine minute video was released to further detail the since-launched first story expansion to Starfield, Shattered Space, which takes place entirely on one new planet and has horror elements.
IBM won its patent infringement lawsuit against Zynga for underlying communications technology used in Farmville and other games. A jury ruled in IBM’s favor to be paid $45 million in damages.
September 17th: EA Investors Day: The annual Electronic Arts Investors Day offered a number of major announcements from across their slate of games. Perhaps most importantly, they announced that there will be no Sims 5, they will just keep updating The Sims 4 for an entire second decade since its 2014 launch. Project Rene will continue as a spinoff project, which I’ll discuss more in a moment, as part of a larger initiative to expand the Sims franchise including the now confirmed movie. The free to play Skate 4 will release in Early Access in 2025. Respawn reconfirmed that the Star Wars Jedi series will conclude with its currently in development third installment. DICE and Vince Zampella extensively discussed the next Battlefield game which has entered full production: the game is ditching the future setting and specialists system of 2042, invoking the ‘golden age’ of Battlefield 3 and 4 by returning to a contemporary setting, the original class system, and 64 player battle maps.
Leaks from playtests which occurred at the end of September have gone to show exactly how Project Rene differs from the usual Sims game: it’s focused on multiplayer and on individual life sim elements instead of the larger god game-y aspect of mainline Sims. Contrasting the leaked images with the game’s 2022 reveal shows a clear drastic transformation from next-gen with graphical and mechanical advancements to something much simpler, more friendly to lower end hardware.
Ubisoft issued a three days a week return to office mandate across its entire global network of offices, affecting more than 10,000 employees that weren’t already under such policies. Employees in France will potentially go on strike over this.
Mobile-focused games journalism website TouchArcade announced that they were closing after 16 years due to financial difficulties. Their closing statement took a firm stance much like my own against advertising and clickbait writing.
Behaviour Interactive announced that they were canceling a multiplayer Dead by Daylight spinoff and shutting down its subsidiary developer Midwinter just four months after the game was revealed. And just one week later they acquired the Darkest Dungeon creators Red Hook Studios, retaining all 29 workers.
Bandai Namco and developer Dimps revealed Freedom Wars Remastered, which is launching January 10th 2025 for PC, PS4 and PS5, and Switch. This is the first ever rerelease of a decade old multiplayer cult classic originally exclusive to the PS Vita and originally developed by Sony’s Japan Studio before they were shuttered.
Developer Pathea Games revealed My Time at Evershine, the third entry in their life sim series following My Time at Portia and My Time at Sandrock, the latter of which launched in 2023. The game is targeting PC, PS5, Xbox Series S|X, and Switch 2 as launch platforms, and is planned to expand on the multiplayer introduced in the second game. A Kickstarter campaign has been launched to support the game’s development.
4J Studios announced that they’re developing a brand new multiplayer open world survival game titled Reforj for PC and current-gen consoles. 4J is best known as the console developer for Minecraft, so I guess they think they can make their own now.
Embracer Group announced that they’re shipping a native current-gen console port to Darksiders 2: Deathinitive Edition in October, which be a free upgrade for existing owners.
September 18th: Eight months after the game’s January 2024 launch and a formal investigation was opened, The Pokémon Company and Nintendo have officially filed a lawsuit in Japan against Palworld creators Pocketpair for multiple counts of patent infringement. The lawsuit being based on mechanical patents rather than copyright of actual Pokémon designs was a surprise to many. Palworld is mainly focused on survival and Minecraft esque resource harvesting mechanics, but Pals are captured with and summoned by “Pal Spheres”, what are essentially Pokéballs, and the Pokéball mechanic is patented. It was filed in December 2021 after Palworld was first revealed that June, approved in 2023 in Japan, still pending in the US.
The riding of Pokémon is another patented mechanic suspected to be of concern here. Some patent filings didn’t occur until after the game had already launched. Games that are overall closer in being Pokémon alikes, like Temtem and Cassette Beasts, have used different shaped objects instead and avoided this issue, but there’s still a fair case to be made that this is directly anti-competitive behavior against a game of far greater success than those two. This lawsuit will inevitably drag on for years, receive little public attention just like other aggressive intendo legal activity, and conclude long after anyone is still paying attention or even playing the game. It is unfortunate, though I have few tears to shed for this particular game.
Kingdom Hearts creator Tetsuya Nomura offered some surprising news in an interview with Young Jump. “I only have a few years left until I retire, I have to decide whether to retire first or finish the series first,” and saying that he wants to be there for the completion of Kingdom Hearts 4 to finish the story. His time at Square Enix and his personal vision of this series’ long, convoluted story will both be over by the end of this decade after the game launches, even as he originally planned nine total number entries, and Square will likely continue the franchise in other forms.
Forbes’ Paul Tassi continued his coverage of developments at Bungie with a big piece on the state of Marathon with multiple major new details. The game won’t be ready to be publicly shown in any significant capacity until Spring 2025 at the very earliest, but its team seems to want its marketing cycle to start sooner in some capacity so that they can try to communicate past all of its rumors and uncertainties. Its current 2025 launch window is predictably contentious, as Sony is putting a lot of pressure to meet the deadline but also to ensure a launch that can avoid the usual content and polish problems service games face. After starting as an F2P game, the team has currently committed to launching at a $40 price point with supplemental battle pass and cosmetic microtransactions, and nothing short of an emergency would lead them back to a full restructuring around F2P this far into development. Under its new direction the past two years, the game has scaled down its lore and world, while leaning further into the first trailer’s striking art direction.
And speaking of Bungie, during the tenth anniversary of Destiny on September 9th, they announced a new direction moving forward for Destiny 2. Instead of a single annual paid expansion that is quite large, expensive, and narratively linear, they will try to get out two “medium” expansions per year, starting in the summer and winter of next year, that will be much more nonlinear, character-focused, essentially removed from the existing formula to be more accessible to newcomers. They also plan to supplement these with a larger number of notable free content updates per year.
Sega and Two Point Studios announced that their game Two Point Museum will launch on March 4th 2025 as a current-gen exclusive. It also has preorder-exclusive Sonic items.
September 19th: The failed launch of PlayStation and Firewalk Studio’s Concord has continued to unfold in upsetting and bizarre ways, starting with another chilling reminder of just how fragile the digital-first gaming ecosystem really is. It was discovered within days of the game’s delisting and shutdown that Sony had also forcibly removed any access to the game from PS5 owners’ accounts, taking it a step father than how delistings usually function and showing that digital ownership really is an arbitrary illusion dependent on the goodwill of corporations. Aptly, California just signed into law requiring digital storefronts to warn users that they are not truly buying digital games, they are buying a revokable license.
Later, Ethan Gach reported for Kotaku that Firewalk’s staff is simply stuck waiting for a definitive decision from Sony executives about the future of the studio and game, and that director Ryan Ellis has already stepped down into a smaller role at the developer. Unfortunately, there’s also now widely spread misinformation about Concord’s development thanks to a notorious reactionary asshole getting uncritically reposted on social media and games press, despite vastly more reporters and sources contradicting his claims.
September 20th: Ryu Ga Gotoku Studios revealed the next game in their signature Like a Dragon franchise in a pre-TGS livestream. With the delightful and aggressively straightforward title Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, the game is set to launch February 28th 2025 for PC, PS4/5, and Xbox One/Series. It’s another real time action spinoff entry in the vein of last year’s Kiryu-focused game, this time exclusively focused on everyone’s favorite weirdo Goro Majima, who has inexplicably become a pirate in the Hawaiian archipelago.
September 22nd: Eric Barone announced that Stardew Valley patch 1.6 will finally release on consoles and mobile on November 4th.
September 23rd: The latest installment in Nintendo’s Ask the Developer interview series revealed many interesting details on the development of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. Nintendo
September 24th: Developer Airship Syndicate announced their second set of layoffs this year shortly after they launched Wayfinder, firing 16 people.
More layoffs came for subsidies of Gamurs Group after the last round two months ago and the Escapist resignations last year. Destructoid, PC Invasion, Twinfinite, and Dot Esports all have known affected staff.
As part of their newest fiscal briefing, developer Don’t Nod confirmed that both Jusant and Banishers, their most recent games, did not sell sufficiently, and this will affect the rest of their production plans. Two projects in early development are being temporarily paused in order to put everything into the upcoming Lost Records and generally emphasize what they consider their most mainstream/highest potential offerings.
Level-5 Vision: The latest livestream by the Japanese developer offered several new trailers, mostly updates on their existing slate of upcoming games but also officially revealing the brand new Yo-Kai Watch game Holy Horror Mansion, an RPG taking place in a haunted mansion and surrounding city, with the series’ signature ghost-capturing and battle mechanics, but also a new camera used to find ghosts hidden in plain sight. It will be the company’s “largest cross-media project yet” with its multimedia and merch showcase coming in April 2025. The trailer ended with the sign off “Supported Platforms: Secret. Release date: Who knows? Price: Fair!” There are allegations that the trailer contains extensive use of AI image generation.
Fantasy Life i scheduled a new April 2025 launch. A major post-launch update for Megaton Musashi will come before the end of this year. Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road was delayed to June 2025 while a 2026 remake of the original Inazuma Eleven was revealed for PC and cross-gen Switch/PlayStation. DecaPolice was delayed to 2026 and added a PC port. The new Professor Layton trailer promised “the most puzzles in series history” and smooth development progress towards a previously scheduled 2025 launch on Switch(es).
PlayStation State of Play: After Concord imploded and Astro Bot successfully launched on the exact same day, it felt only right that this presentation opened with more Astro Bot, even if we did already know these free DLCs were on the way, the first now known to be releasing before 2024 ends. It will feature new challenge levels and new cameo-bots to rescue, including those representing Helldivers 2 and Stellar Blade. Meanwhile, the first third party reveal was The Midnight Walk, a horror game and 3D platformer made by scanning real claymation, a debut title by developer Moonhood, some of the creators of Lost in Random who didn’t stay at Thunderful for that game’s aforementioned sequel. It’s scheduled to launch in 2025 for PC, PS5, and PSVR2. More than two years after its initial announcement, Hell is Us by Rogue Factor returned with a gameplay reveal trailer for its moody sci fi action, announcing a 2025 launch window for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series S|X.
The Metro 2033 PSVR2 game revealed earlier this year saw its release date scheduled as November 7th. Developer XLGames and publisher Kakao newly revealed the MMORPG ArcheAge Chronicles, a decade in the making sequel to 2013’s ArcheAge, which will launch for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series S|X. As had been recently leaked, Palworld was shadowdropped onto PS5, although this Japanese developer’s game for a Japanese console could not actually launch in Japan due to the aforementioned lawsuit. Developer Game Arts, better known today for Grandia, surprise revealed remasters of their first cult classic JRPGs from the 90s, Lunar Remastered Collection featuring the Sega CD games Lunar: The Silver Star and Lunar: Eternal Blue. It’s scheduled for a Spring 2025 launch on PC, PS4/5, Switch, and Xbox One. A new Shredder’s Revenge DLC was revealed and shadowdropped on all platforms: Radical Reptiles features two new player characters and new music. Sega announced that a DLC in December will provide Keanu Reeves’ voice for Shadow in Sonic X Shadow Generations.
Hironobu Sakaguchi appeared to announce Fantasian’s launch date for all platforms as December 5th. Dragon Age: The Veilguard made another appearance, showcasing a major boss fight and cutscene. Alan Wake 2’s second and final expansion The Lake House was fully unveiled with an October release window alongside its physical release. Hitman VR was announced for PSVR2 with a December release, on the heels of its widely derided PCVR and Meta Quest 3 versions. It turns out that Embracer Group’s Crystal Dynamics and Aspyr did have actual Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 1&2 Remasters to announce, not just the Evercade thing I covered as basically a joke. They’ll release on December 10th for PC, Switch, PS4/5, and Xbox One/Series, but keep in mind how bad Aspyr’s Battlefront remasters this year were. Blumhouse Games and Cozy Game pals announced an October 22nd launch date for their horror adventure Fear the Spotlight. After first appearing at last year’s PlayStation Showcase, Dreamlit’s open world fantasy sim game Towers of Aghasba was announced to be releasing in early access on PC and PS5 this November.
Stellar Blade saw a photo mode update and crossover DLC with Nier Automata announced. Two big games finally got their launch dates: Dynasty Warriors Origins will release January 17th 2025, and Monster Hunter Wilds will release February 28th 2025. Also Lego Fortnite has a splitscreen update. And now for the first party section. Lego Horizon Adventures saw its leaked November 14th launch date confirmed and Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered was revealed a whopping two whole years after it first leaked, still just as pointless, with a Halloween release date for PC and PS5. This a $10 upgrade for existing owners, but on its own it’s $50, and it came with outright skullduggery: Sony immediately raised the base price of HZD: Complete Edition from $20 back to $40, and delisted the original PC port on both Steam and Epic while adding the infamous PSN requirement to the remaster. The next PlayStation Plus update was announced to feature Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen and Dino Crisis as two huge PS1 gets, and Last of Us Part 1. A new set of controller and console plate colors were shown. I already described the PS5 Pro section earlier.
And finally, Sony offered a legitimately impressive One More Thing and their biggest new announcement in quite some time as Sucker Punch finally unveiled what I’ve been reporting on for months as Ghost of Two-shima, which is actually titled Ghost of Yotei, and it’s coming in 2025. The trailer mainly used cinematics before offering some traversal gameplay, and gave no indication of the multiplayer focus that’s been previously rumored. The game takes a big leap away from the Mongol invasion to Mount Yotei and Hokkaido in 1603, which is being explored by the dual wielding fugitive Atsu (played by Erika Ishii) and her wolf companion.
September 25th: In an unexpectedly sudden and drastic response to the poor launch sales of Star Wars Outlaws and the anti-Black backlash against Assassins Creed Shadows, Ubisoft announced that it was pulling out of TGS, delaying the latter’s launch to February 14th 2025 as part of an extra polish initiative for both games, fast-tracking a return to Steam for both games, refunding existing preorders for AC Shadows and packaging the first paid story DLC into future preorders for free, and killing the season pass for AC Shadows.
Tom Henderson gave further insight into these events with a September 30th report. Having started development in 2021 with its holiday deadline already set and historical consultants brought on later than usual, the developers of Shadows had already been begging for a delay for months before executives finally took notice when Outlaws sold only one million copies in a month off its visibly unpolished launch. Besides general technical improvement, the team wants to implement substantial adjustments to mechanics and historical accuracy. A post-launch co op mode update was already in development but will naturally have more production time now. The reactionary fanfiction of a claim that Yasuke is being removed altogether is obviously not true.
Further reports by Tom Henderson on October 2nd and October 4th elaborated more on the state of the larger AC franchise. The first time an Assassins’ Creed entry has ever been delayed out of a holiday launch is having immediate impact on successive entries in both release strategy and development pipeline. As per an internal email by franchise executive producer Marc-Alexis Côté, this delay is directly affecting the entire roadmap one after another. That’s starting chiefly with the Black Flag Remake, which was initially targeting Holiday 2025. Two other side entries were also originally scheduled for 2025: the mobile game Codename Jade and a stand-alone multiplayer game Codename Invictus.
Sumo Digital and Focus Entertainment announced that their multiplayer Robin Hood game Hood: Outlaws & Legends will be delisted from sale in October and fully shut down on February 18th 2025, less than four years after launch.
September 26th: Indie publisher Merge Games is sadly closing after 15 years supporting titles like Dead Cells, Darkest Dungeon, and Streets of Rage 4, laying off 22 employees. Parent company Maximum Entertainment tried to use the same PR tactic as Ziff Davis with Humble Games, framing it as corporate integration despite the total layoffs.
EA and Disney are sunsetting one of the biggest mobile games of all time after 12 years: The Simpsons: Tapped Out will be fully shut down in January 2025.
Vampire Survivors developer Poncle is joining many indie devs by announcing a publishing division, one which like Outersloth is meant to fund and support games without controlling and owning them outright. Poncle is explicitly banning any AI/blockchain or FTP games from consideration, as well as clones of VS.
Guess which scam ass motherfuckers are trying to scam again. That’s right, The Day Before developers Fntastic have opened a Kickstarter campaign to allegedly relaunch the studio and produce a new multiplayer game, Escape Factory.
Tokyo Games Show: This year’s Tokyo Games Show opened as usual with an Xbox livestream event happening at a civil time for Japan but 3 AM in America. This presentation most notably revealed that Starcraft 1 and 2 are coming to PC Game Pass in November, and Square Enix was shadowdropping eight games for Xbox Series S|X: the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters Collection (which leaked just hours earlier), Trials of Mana Remake, and Legend of Mana Remastered, with the two Mana games coming to Game Pass Ultimate. Game Pass also immediately received We Love Katamari Reroll and the co op puzzle game All You need is Help by Q-Games. Xbox announced that multiplayer mecha game Synduality: Echo of Ada is launching on January 24th 2025 for PC, PS5, and newly Xbox Series S|X, after the game was first revealed as a PlayStation exclusive back in 2022.
Two indies, time travel JRPG Threads of Time, and cute adventure game Tanuki: Pon’s Summer from the creators of Cursed to Golf, were both newly revealed. Immortal Pillars, an ancient China themed paid expansion for Age of Mythology: Retold, was revealed. Overwatch 2 event featuring My Hero Academia was revealed for October. An update adding pets to Fallout 76 was announced to be arriving this year. The demo for Metaphor Re:Fantazio was announced and released on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox. Metal Gear Solid Delta, Dragon Quest 3 Remake, Slitterhead, Suikoden Remasters, Atelier Yumia, Bleach: Rebirth of Souls, and Indiana Jones (complete with Japanese localization) all made fresh but modest appearances.
Also announced at TGS were Street Fighter’s Ken and Chun Li as DLC fighters for Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, and Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero‘s launch date, January 30th 2025.
September 27th: Asshole Jason Schreier’s new book about the history of Blizzard dropped one big new headline, which he proceeded to discuss further on an IGN podcast: after the infamous Starcraft Ghost and Project Ares, Blizzard is once again attempting to make a Starcraft shooter game. It’s in extremely early development from those few from the development team for survival game Odyssey who survived their mass layoffs at the start of this year, including Dan Hay who previously oversaw the Far Cry series. I bid them good luck.
Valve has removed the binding arbitration clause from Steam’s user agreement policy.
Remedy is fundamentally unaffected by the Annapurna incident, but they did go ahead and secure more new funding for their self-publishing plans via a 15 million euro loan and increased minority stake from Tencent.
October 1st: Matt Poskitt of GI.biz interviewed Krafton executive Maria Park, revealing more details about the state of Tango Gameworks and its acquisition process. Krafton intervened when the shutdown was first announced in May, at which point Hi-Fi Rush 2 had already been in early development for six months, and the development won’t restart until the acquisition negotiations and asset transfers with Microsoft are completed, which were still ongoing at least at the end of August.
ArtPlay’s Shutaro Iida announced that he is stepping down as the director of Bloodstained 2 because he has just been diagnosed with cancer and needs to focus on his recovery. Iida, AKA Curry boy, had consistently worked on the Castlevania series since 2003’s Aria of Sorrow and was the director for Bloodstained 1 and 2.
In the wake of a struggling Early Access release for Smite 2, Hi-Rez Studios announced a new round of layoffs after last year’s.
Just seven months after Yuzu got taken down, the other major Switch emulator has sunk as well. Ryujinx abruptly and comprehensively disappeared online with clear explanations offered from team members on Discord and Twitter: the lead developer was directly contacted by Nintendo representation, allegedly at his front door, offering the “choice” between an upfront deal and the usual expensive lawsuit that Yuzu suffered. While it’s clear now that Nintendo is getting even more legally aggressive in general, the specific strategy behind shanking Switch emulators at this of all times after so many years is equally apparent: disincentivizing the creation of any future emulation of Switch 2 and any other form of direct competition with it.
Nintendo also announced multiple new Nintendo Switch Online updates, with the significant 1.5 update to F-Zero 99, two F-Zero Game Boy Advance games (GP Legend and the previously Japan-exclusive F-Zero: Climax), and four SNES games, Battletoads/Double Dragons, Kunio-Kun/River City Dodgeball, Cosmo Gang The Puzzle, and Big Run.
11 Bit Studios delayed the launch of their game The Alters into Early 2025.
October 2nd: French indie developer Black Flag has shut down and declared bankruptcy following a dispute with their publisher and running out of funds.
October 3rd: Davide Soliani and various other former Mario+Rabbids/Ubi Milan team members have officially staked out their next venture: independent studio Day 4 Night, creating an original IP game with funding from Krafton and 1Up Ventures.
The launch of the Until Dawn Remake has unexpectedly revealed new decade-late sequel hook endings for Rami Malek and Hayden Panettiere’s characters, and Polygon’s Mike McWhertor has convincingly theorycrafted that an Until Dawn 2 could already be in development at first party Sony team Firesprite, who made last year’s Horizon PSVR2 game.
After hyping up that crappy Quest for Balance game last year, I learned my lesson, but that’s separate from how newsworthy something is: Saber Interactive has added a AAA Avatar: The Last Airbender action RPG to its slate of games, one set at a unique time early in the history of Avatar cycle.
October 4th: A new Bloomberg report by Benoit Berthelot, Dong Cao, and Vinicy Chan suggested that emergency options are newwlly being explored by Ubisoft’s founders the Guillemot family and their partners in Tencent, in the wake of its perpetual losses, share drops, and most recently the Assassins’ Creed Shadows delay. The foremost option on the table appears to be the two parties buying every share in Ubisoft in order to take it completely private for the first time in 28 years. A third party sale is also being considered but will never be too likely with Ubisoft’s levels of debt.
October 6th: During the Halo World Championship event, a third person mode for Halo Infinite was revealed to be releasing later this year, and years after it was first reported, a trailer announced that the series’ future will be built in Unreal Engine 5, and lead developer 343 Industries also officially rebranded as Halo Studios.
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