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!
I can’t believe how long it took me to cover this. Several new independent game studios all emerged at virtually the same time, all promising to be the spiritual successor to Disco Elysium and the original version of ZA/UM. Wesley Yin-Poole investigated this situation for IGN, this story of Summer Eternal, and Dark Math, and Longdue, and to a lesser extent Red Info. (I’ve tried to simplify the story a tad.)
So Red Info was founded by the original Disco ousters, Robert Kurvitz and Alex Rostov, and just stayed out of this new in-fighting between all these other ex-Disco creatives. Another part of that original story was investor Kaur Kender, who tried and failed to buyout the Disco Elysium IP. Kender is the leader of the Dark Math studio, which has the most overtly Disco inspired project, detective RPG XXX NIGHTSHIFT. Dark Math employed both Argo Tuulik and Dora Klindzic after they left ZA/UM; Tuulik left ZA/UM because he was about to be fired for leaking the news of the February 2024 layoffs. Tuulik and Klindzic left Dark Math amicably and moved onto Longdue, which has provided the least info about its “psychological RPG” project. They in turn quickly resigned from Longdue to move onto their own studio Summer Eternal, followed by Longdue/its backing company CoGrammar hitting them with its own legal action.
CoGrammar successfully filed a breach of contract injunction against Tuulik and Klindzic for ignoring the noncompete clause in their original contract and not signing the release contract it offered after they tended their resignation in September. Due to the injunction and noncompete clause, Summer Eternal legally can’t begin work on its project until April 2025. The release contract would’ve confirmed that they didn’t own any of CoGrammar’s IP and that they wouldn’t talk about CoGrammar in the press, but allegedly would’ve canceled out the noncompete clause they ignored anyway when they announced Summer Eternal. Tuulik is also dealing with legal threats from ZA/UM for breach of confidentiality and, wildly, copyright infringement via taking a USB stick and showing a demo of the canceled Disco Elysium expansion on it to his colleagues at Longdue and Dark Math, which Tuulik denies.
However, it turns out there’s also more to the amicable Dark Math departures than meets the eye, as exclusively reported by IG: Argo Tuulik accuses Kaur Kender of committing revenge porn against his ex wife, showing pictures to employees and wanting to incorporate them into the game in some fashion. Despite the incendiary nature of the accusations, Dark Math and Summer Eternal are just ignoring each other instead of igniting yet another public legal bout. And that’s where we leave off on this endlessly bizarre story, for now at least.
Takashi Mochizuki and Debby Wu reported for Bloomberg that Sony has started development on the first new PlayStation handheld since the failed PS Vita, one that has been greenlit off both the outsized success of the PlayStation Portal since its late 2023 launch, and the desire to compete with Switch 2 and the Xbox handheld. This handheld would natively play PS5 games at base PS5 performance and likely launch after the PS6. Digital Foundry corroborated this off their own connections at the PS hardware division.
December 9th: At the same time as the announcement killing support for Suicide Squad, 99 employees at WB Games Montreal, QA contractors through Keywords, were laid off with eight weeks notice.
Pocket Pair updated Palworld to change the animations for Pal Sphere summons to no longer resemble throwing a Pokéball after the September lawsuit from The Pokémon Company. Only the animation for releasing a Pal was changed, not the one for capturing them.
Developer Croteam announced The Talos Principle: Reawakened, a “radically overhauled” remake of their original puzzle game built in Unreal 5, scheduled for a 2025 launch on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series S|X.
December 10th: So it turns out the two GI.biz exits I covered before were just a tip of a much worse and larger iceberg. Ziff Davis, the parent company for far too much of the surviving games press after the Gamer Network buyout earlier this year, is reported to have started engaging in “soft layoffs” as of late October 2024. That is, encouraging senior staff to “volunteer” for buyouts and exits instead of undergoing the different procedure and compensation of being directly laid off later. This has resulted in at least six people leaving IGN including Alex Stedman and news director Kat Bailey, all but one full-time employee (Sophoe McEvoy remains) leaving GamesIndustry.biz, an unknown number of anonymous Humble staff exiting, and the CEO of Gamer Network departing as well.
This very bleak time for the games press was punctuated with a perfect punchline in the form of a website launch occurring around the same time: Restart, your newest independent games coverage site? Oh wait, it’s owned by a marketing company and funded by Walmart in exchange for those ever pervasive affiliate links. Just what we needed. It’s a new source of income for freelancers like me, so it’s not completely worthless. Still, it only underscores the fact that we’re running out of options for both the kind of journalism we really need and the kind of backing that can produce it securely instead of coming with inevitable capitalist strings, strict overheads both financial and ideological.
December 11th: A new Day of the Devs presentation premiered with fresh indie reveals, including a sequel to Demon Turf.
Two indie sequels, Golf with Your Friends 2 and TOEM 2 were revealed by their respective developers Radical Forge and Something We Made. The multiplayer golf sim is scheduled for release in 2025 while the photography adventure is scheduled for 2026, both targeting PC and unspecified consoles. Crossplay for both multiplayer and level editing are both confirmed for the former.
December 12th: Chris Barrett has filed a $200+ million lawsuit against his former employers Sony and Bungie, accusing them of “deliberately destroying his reputation” with “false accusations” of sexual misconduct towards employees in order to deny him his contractual $45 million payout from the acquisition when he was fired in March. His lawsuit cites workplace misconduct that he witnessed at Bungie decades ago to frame his own more recent behavior as not that bad. I don’t want to get The Avocado in trouble again by running my mouth, but I simply have to point out that I personally experienced Barrett’s penchant for legal action. You might have read the article in question early enough that you missed the incident: Barrett and his legal/PR associates somehow found my August ’24 Roundup which discussed the Bloomberg report on what exactly got him fired from Bungie, and objected to my personal phrasing of the allegations.
The Game Awards 2024
The event opened with Koei Tecmo and retro publisher Dotemu revealing Ninja Gaiden Ragebound, a brand new mainline 2D revival developed by The Game Kitchen, the makers of Blasphemous, over ten years since Ninja Gaiden 3. It’s scheduled for a Summer 2025 launch on PC and all cross-gen consoles. We transitioned from brutal action to moody narrative with One Move Away by Ramage Games, a 3D first person narrative adventure about packing your belongings or leaving them behind, which takes place over a decade across multiple protagonists. It’s coming to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series. Slay the Spire 2‘s gameplay reveal trailer arrived to a predictably rapturous reception from everyone including myself.
A promotion for the Treesplease environmental initiative was included. A new major DLC was announced for Dave the Diver, Dave the Diver: In the Jungle coming late 2025 to all existing platforms. Warren Spector and OtherSide Entertainment unexpectedly revealed a competitive (PvPvE) first person multiplayer stealth game that Spector pitches as an immersive sim and “true successor” to Thief, Thick as Thieves, scheduled to launch in 2026 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series. Bandai Namco revealed an edgy Pac-Man Metroidvania called Shadow Labyrinth, coming 2025 to PC, Switch, PS5, and Xbox Series, with physical releases for Switch and PS5. Netflix and Shenmue creator Yu Suzuki announced their new game, Steel Paws.
Tales of the Shire made a quick appearance followed by the new Operations update for the MMO Stalcraft X. After abruptly losing a project from an external publisher earlier in 2024, Velan Studios revealed their next game Midnight Murder Club, shadowdropping an open beta and announcing an Early Access February 2025 release. Midnight Murder Club is a first person multiplayer hide and seek shooter for PC and PS5. Developer Pugstorm revealed a new game just months after successfully launching Core Keeper: Kyora, a 2D multiplayer open world survival game releasing in Steam Early Access in 2025. Sloclap announced a multiplayer soccer action game, Rematch, coming in Summer 2025 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series. To close out the Opening Act, D&D RPG Solasta 2 was announced for 2025 Early Access by Tactical Adventures.
The main show really came out the gate with heavy hitters, starting with six minute cinematic reveal trailer of none other than The Witcher IV, inevitably starring an older recast Ciri as the new player character and titular witcher, just like that one Witcher 3 ending. Actor Doug Cockle got in a little trouble for revealing this early, but Geralt is also confirmed to appear as an NPC. I’ve obviously been critical of CDPR in the past, my career here basically started off that, and I always remain skeptical at best towards corporations, but I want to also take this time to acknowledge the genuine growth it’s shown in producing Phantom Liberty under a healthier workplace and giving increased transparency on development. It’s beginning console testing on Witcher 4 now instead of right before launch and showing other specific improvements from Cyberpunk’s pre-launch cycle, and openly told us that Witcher 4 only just changed from pre-production to full production. They even made a point of labeling the trailer as “pre-rendered on an unannounced vidia GPU”, AKa the RTX 5090.
And then another huge surprise right away: FromSoftware’s Elden Ring: Nightreign, a standalone spinoff entry launching in 2025 on cross-gen PC and consoles at a midbudget price, finally delivering what I specifically have always wanted to see since I became a From fan, a full focus on their co op multiplayer mechanics. Directed by From vet Junya Ishizaki while Miyazaki is busy with something bigger, Nightreign sends teams of three (and solo players) into a new and regularly randomised version of Limgrave on strictly timed hunts for loot and combat. Among the enemies are crossover appearances from Dark Souls, such as the infamous Nameless King boss fight, and players choose from one of eight classes based on the main playstyles of From’s games, including direct transplants from Sekiro and Bloodborne. It’s confirmed to not have any seasons or battle passes or typical live service shit, it will be a generally finite multiplayer experience like we should have
Square Enix announced that the PC port for FF7 Rebirth will launch for both Steam and Epic on January 23rd 2025, and then there was the instantly controversial trailer for Catly. The trailer itself was widely accused of being AI-generated, the game’s webpage definitely used AI imagery, and there was a lot of evidence that developer SuperAuthenti has a strong background in blockchain, AI, metaverse, etc. technologies. The developer has haphazardly attempted to deny all of those allegations and posted a new gameplay trailer. Hilarious to put that nonsense right before a classically important gaming artist like Fumito Ueda, creator of Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and Last Guardian. Ueda’s post-Sony team is ready to give a very early cinematic look at their next game, Project Robot, which will feature a pilot and their creaky giant robot.
Microsoft/Xbox had only a single proper announcement, but it was a very unexpected and impressive one: the gameplay reveal trailer for Obsidian’s The Outer Worlds 2, announcing that it’s scheduled for a 2025 launch on PC, Xbox Series S|X, and yes, the PlayStation 5 day one. Meanwhile, EA, Josef Fares and Hazelight’s extensively leaked Split Fiction did officially announce its March 6th 2025 launch for PC PS5 and Xbox, and got to actually show what it’s about: two fantasy and sci fi authors working together to navigate simulations of their own worlds. Card based FTP FPS Fragpunk returned from June to announce a March 6th ’25 launch, followed by a March release date trailer for Killing Floor 3 as well. Wargaming had a cinematic reveal trailer for its multiplayer mecha shooter Steel Hunters, which immediately started its first closed beta test. Blackfrost: The Long Dark 2 was also revealed, a co op open world survival game which will release in early access in 2026, 12 years after its predecessor’s own early access started.
At this point Keighley stopped to indirectly address a criticism he received last year, openly saying that there’s no game without game devs and game devs are suffering through years’ worth of catastrophic layoffs and financial difficulties (and now, a month later, wildfires directly threatening LA-based games employees). Keighley gave a brand new award to Amir Satvat for making a free online resource to help those out of work in the games industry. I can’t really top what Merve already had to say about this, it’s a pleasant surprise and an improvement over last year to be sure, but it’s glaringly a feel-good individualist story about a systemic capitalism and executive driven problem.
Take-Two debuted the second trailers, the gameplay/in-game reveals, for both Borderlands 4 and Mafia: The Old Country, setting the latter for Summer 2025 and the former presumably for early Fall ahead of GTA6. Bandai Namco announced the first crossover DLC character for Tekken 8, which turned out to be Final Fantasy 16’s Clive instead of the FF character everyone apparently wanted, Tifa. Splitgate 2 and Mecha Break made new appearances with gameplay and a scheduled Spring 2025 launch for the latter. Sega and Ryu Ga Gotoku brought two major projects to briefly show which have just started development: Virtua Fighter 6, which Sega had informally announced a month earlier at its investors meeting, and Project Century, a real time brawler set in 1915 Japan which looks to be a brand new part of the Yakuza/Like a Dragon and Judgement universe. Both games are also understood to be the first projects built in the next generation of RGG’s Dragon Engine, after it was first introduced about a decade ago in Yakuza 6.
The Space Marine 2 team at Saber Interactive revealed their next game complete with gameplay, the third person co op Turok Origins coming to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series. Several major live service free updates were all announced and either fully shadowdropped or launched within the month of December, one for Warframe, the Feybreak update for Palworld which added another new island, and most notably the Omens of Tyranny update for Helldivers 2, which adds four-person vehicles and the long awaited third enemy faction returning from the original game. Gacha games Wuthering Waves and Dungeon & Fighter: ARAD both appeared, along with so much other mobile stuff, like Monster Hunter Now, multiple Hoyoverse projects as usual, and Game of Thrones: Kingsroad.
Capcom delivered its first of two delightful surprises by revealing Onimusha: Way of the Sword complete with gameplay, scheduled to launch in 2026 on PC/PS5/Xbox as the first new mainline Onimusha game in 20 years. Onimusha is a historical fantasy samurai action game series with Resident Evil style puzzles, and after a long wait it is part of a new initiative at Capcom to reinvest their horde of profits back into dormant IP. First Berserker Khazan showed up for the umpteenth time after that, announcing that it will launch March 27th 2025. Techland brought a new trailer for Dying Light: The Beast, which had new gameplay footage and scheduled a Summer 2025 release window. I’m double checking my notes here…yes, Post Malone did say “Welcome to my Murder Circus” to announce an in-game event for Hunt: Showdown 1896. Fortnite had a new season of Fortnite Festival featuring Snoop Dogg after his atrocious on-stage performance at this show, and also the shadowdrop of a new tactical first person shooting mode, Fortnite Ballistic.
But here’s something I do care about, Overcooked! creators Ghost Town Games revealed their first brand new title since Overcooked 2 six years ago: Stage Fright, a spooky narrative splitscreen game a la the Fares oeuvre. ArcSys Works and Yukes announced that their game Double Dragon Revive will launch October 23rd 2025. Milestone announced that they are rebooting their 90s arcade sci fi racer Screamer in a new story-driven game scheduled to launch in 2026 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series. A new trailer premiered for the multiplayer heist shooter and spiritual successor to the floundering Payday series, Den of Wolves. One of our last trailers was an incredibly brief cinematic reveal for Sonic Racing Crossworlds, the next Sonic kart racer after 2019’s lackluster entry. The game has a multiversal theme, is confirmed to be launching cross-gen in Holiday 2025 (hopefully trying to not repeat Sonic Superstars’ mistake and keep a good distance from the Switch 2 Mario Kart), and will feature the return of transforming vehicles. There was also Dispatch, a star-studded narrative adventure and superhero workplace comedy, the debut project by AdHoc Studio, AKA more former Telltale devs.
The final two reveals were really big deals in a show fairly packed with those, but this was inarguably the biggest deal, it was the impossible becoming real, and it rightfully got both me and Keighley incredibly, genuinely emotional. After all the grand buildup complete with a huge drum, two simple words hit the screen: OKAMI SEQUEL. One of the most acclaimed games of all time, one of the most acclaimed visual styles of all time, getting a big budget followup with Capcom’s support after almost 20 years since the ignominious death of Clover, directed by original creator Hideki Kamiya at the brand new Clovers studio, likely with Ikumi Nakamura also attached since she was part of Kamiya’s open campaign for Okami 2 a couple years earlier. And make no mistake, they will call it Okami 2, not even they care about Okamiden.
But there is a darker side to this incredibly surprising and joyous news: Platinum Games has been visibly gutted, losing four more directors after Kamiya with most following him to Clovers, and one going to Housemarque. It’s become apparent that Platinum is under poor leadership from CEO Atsushi Inaba, who wanted to keep making live services even after Babylon’s Fall’s…fall, and who Kamiya points to as the reason he left. Even so, I don’t want to see Platinum die, and I don’t want Kamiya’s toxic ass to be reframed as a hero of the people again.
After setting an April launch for the PC port of The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered, Naughty Dog also officially revealed Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, the next new first party PlayStation IP, a sci fi game which has been in development since 2020 with basically all the same team leads as The Last of Us Part 2, plus a score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. The trailer was primarily a cutscene from the beginning of the game, with the tiniest tease at the end of melee combat gameplay. The game stars Tati Gabrielle as a bounty hunter who crash lands on a cult-run jungle planet while chasing after the Five Aces, criminal leaders played by Kumail Nanjiani and Tony Dalton among others. The game has received a reactionary backlash for starring a Black-Korean woman with masculine features, and a non-reactionary backlash to the distractingly prominent product placement in the trailer.
December 13th: Another large division of Xbox has unionized, namely 461 developers for The Elder Scrolls Online.
December 16th: Bendy: Lone Wolf was announced for a 2025 launch on PC, PS4/5, Xbox One/Series, Switch, and mobile; this third entry in the series is a narrative roguelike survival horror by creators Joey Drew Studios.
December 17th: Writer Sylvia Feketekuty announced that she was departing Bioware after 15 years, having worked on Mass Effect 2 and 3, Dragon Age 3 and 4, and Anthem. Her most recent known credit is for writing Veilguard’s fan favorite Vincent Price homage companion Emmrich.
December 18th: The reported negotiations between Sony/PlayStation and Kadokawa came to a mercifully understated end, announcing that Sony would become Kadokawa’s largest shareholder at a 10% stake by buying 50 billion yen worth of stock, and the companies have signed a contract for new partnerships across multimedia including games, instead of acquiring Kadokawa’s holdings outright as had been threatened.
December 19th: Coming off the launch of Frostpunk 2, developer 11 Bit Studios laid off an unknown number of employees and canceled Project 8, their first “console centric” game which had spent 6 years in development and roughly $12 million in production costs.
Belgian game developers Unproductive Fun Time and publisher Fangamer unexpectedly announced that a remaster of their 2008 cult classic RPG OFF will arrive on Steam and Switch in 2025, including a physical Switch release. Despite being acclaimed and a major influence on later bigger indie RPGs like Undertale, the game has never been on a major storefront until now.
Under pressure from the outgoing Biden admin’s US Justice Department, two Tencent executives have exited Epic Games’ board of directors and thus somewhat reduced the publisher’s outsize influence on the Western games market.
December 20th: Canadian indie/mobile game developer Hothead Studios announced their bankruptcy and closure after 18 years due to failing to secure publishing deals for support.
Square Enix quietly began preparing a February 2025 reprint of the physical edition of Final Fantasy 7 Remake for PS5, almost four years after its rather limited initial print, and several months after the FF Pixel Remaster Collection’s physical editions also got reprinted.
December 23rd: WB Games was back at it again, abruptly delisting six of its games based on major Cartoon Network IPs across all digital storefronts from Steam to consoles to mobile: Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time, OK KO Let’s Play Heroes, Adventure Time: Finn and Jake’s Epic Quest, Adventure Time: Magic Man’s Head Games, Steven Universe: Save the Light, and Steven Universe: Unleash the Light. I want to make a point of shouting out the Steven Universe Light games, I played the whole three-game series and on top of fun writing from creator Rebecca Sugar, they made for engaging Paper Mario inspired lite-RPGs, a design direction which explicitly came from Sugar playing The Thousand Year Door as a teenager.
December 26th: After a 2021 reveal, Pixelnesia’s Afterlove EP is finally scheduled to launch February 14th 2025 for PC, PS5, Xbox, and Switch, as the final game the late Mohammad Fahmi worked on.
December 27th: In the mist of heavily promoting the “This is an Xbox” marketing campaign with its emphasis on using cloud streaming across a variety of devices, xCloud proceeded to have a two-day outage right after Christmas.
Rare’s Everwild got its first sign of life in three years with a new year’s concept art post on social media. Announced in 2019 when it was barely more than a concept, the game was at one point targeting a 2024 launch.
January 2nd: Just as we all here anticipated when I first covered this story in 2023 ahead of the device’s launch, Apple has reportedly discontinued its Vision Pro VR set over poor sales due to its appalling $3500 pricepoint, even actively struggling with the volume of unsold stock. The original report, which was actually published in October (by a tech site I don’t even slightly endorse) but due to a paywall didn’t get wider notice at first, also claims that Apple is developing a cheaper revision to continue pursuing the VR/AR market.
VentureBeat’s Imran Khan casually commented on ResetEra backing a suspicion a lot of us have had for a while now: As per a former employee, Nintendo and Next Level Games backed off the Punch Out series over concerns of cultural sensitivity after Next Level’s 2009 game got more criticism and sold worse than anticipated.
January 6th: During the 2025 Consumer Electronics Show, Nvidia officially revealed the RTX 50 graphics card line after months of leaks. The company claims that the “budget” ($550) 5070 model can “match” the previous premium 4090 card while using the new DLSS4, while the $2000 5090 card is twice as powerful as the 4090 “under certain circumstances,” such as boosting Cyberpunk 2077’s framerate to over 200FPS. The Nvidia presentation also featured a brief first look at very early in-game footage for Virtua Fighter 6. CES separately saw Sony announce a Helldivers movie, an animated Ghost of Tsushima series, and a Horizon movie after the Horizon TV series was canceled. A Helldivers movie is spectacularly redundant, that’s just legally distinct Starship Troopers.
January 7th: On November 6th, Take-Two Interactive sold off the remnants of the Private Division publishing label to private equity firm Haveli Investments, bequeathing all assets, from Kerbal Space Program to upcoming games like Game Freak’s Project Bloom, except for Moon Studios’ action RPG No Rest for the Wicked. Two months later, in a remarkable crossover episode, the team who left Annapurna Interactive last year has now bought out all of those same Private Division IPs from Haveli as part of successfully moving forward with their own new indie game publisher company. Unfortunately, Haveli will in turn be laying off some former Private Division staff that came over with the first buyout deal.
The latest major investigative reporting video from People Make Games dealt with severe workplace abuse at the now-closed Indonesian support developer Brandoville Studios, which contributed to major games like The Last of Us Part 2, Age of Empires 4, and Assassins’ Creed Shadows. Brandoville’s office was managed by Kwan Cherry Lai, who forced her employees to self-harm, deprived them of sleep, stole their wages, and more.
Tom Phillips reported for Eurogamer that Rocksteady suffered additional layoffs right at year’s end, with at least six people confirmed from across programming, art, and QA departments. Rocksteady is evidently developing the already infamous Hogwarts Legacy Director’s Cut and in pre-production on a new Batman: Arkham game.
Stephen Totilo reported on a court filing from Activision about total costs and sales, including post-launch support, for recent Call of Duty games, revealing that the games have astonishingly been each costing over half a billion dollars and rising for the past five years while selling progressively fewer copies. 2019’s Modern Warfare is revealed to have cost at least $640 million with 2020’s Black Ops Cold War costing over $700 million, but Cold War has sold 11 million fewer copies than Modern Warfare.
January 8th: Chinese gaming giants Tencent and NetEase both continued to bloodlet, with Tencent-owned shooter developer Splash Damage canceling their eagerly anticipated Transformers Reactivate game and putting employees on notice for layoffs, while NetEase halted development on the debut project of Jar of Sparks, a studio founded by a Halo vet. Jar of Sparks is “allowing employees to seek other employment” while seeking new outside funding.
January 9th: During the latest Ubisoft investors meeting, Ubisoft delayed the launch of AC Shadows a second time, from February to March 20th 2025, claiming that this will provide more player feedback incorporated into the game, and totally isn’t just because February is stacked and the game’s lunch was going to get eaten by Monster Hunter. Also during the meeting, most investors attempted to grill Yves Guillemot about the Tencent buyout rumors, and he offered only a lot of empty meaningless words in response.
A second trailer for Xenoblade Chronicles X Definitive Edition provided a closer look at some of the new story/world content and a thorough look at the overhaul to the game’s UI. Switch 2 rumors are at a truly stupid fever pitch, but I’m content to ignore them all until something actually happens. I mean, besides Nintendo saying that all of the CES stuff is “not official.”
Microsoft announced that the third annual Xbox Developer Direct will premiere on January 23rd featuring first party titles South of Midnight and Doom: The Dark Ages, third party Game Pass release Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and “a surprise appearance by a studio’s brand new game.” This news is consistent with strong rumors last year that South of Midnight and Doom are launching in the first half of 2025 ahead of the June Showcase. For the surprise game, a lot of people are guessing one of the leaked 360 era Bethesda remasters like Oblivion or Fallout 3, but personally I’m going with Double Fine. As far as Xbox rumors go, there’s also more heat around their multiplatform initiative, with Jez Corden at WindowsCentral reporting that Microsoft Flight Sim, the Master Chief Collection, Hellblade 2, Age of Mythology, and Gears of War Ultimate Edition are all in the works for PS5 and Switch 2 for the near future.
Former Eidos Montreal writer Mark Cecere publicly discussed the general plan concept for the conclusion of the Deus Ex prequel games before the third entry was offloaded by Square and canceled by Embracer Group. He suggests that Adam Jensen’s story was, like many prequels, supposed to end in tragic failure, his efforts to defeat the Illuminati ultimately creating the villain Bob Page that JC Denton faced in the original game.
January 10th: A new report emerged for Project Gummybears, the Bungie game that spun off into its own new first party studio in mid-2024 during the post Final Shape bloodletting. The game is now fully described to be a family friendly team based MOBA, with Smash Bros influences like percentage based damage that affects knockback and ringout based eliminations. At the end of the day, it’s still another live service, and one early in development.
Forever Entertainment officially revealed their House of the Dead 2 Remake that was first confirmed alongside its predecessor over three years ago. It’s scheduled to launch in Spring 2025 on all cross-gen platforms.
Marvel Rivals Season 1 officially launched, adding four new playable characters in the core Fantastic Four, in a new storyline with…Dracula?
January 11th: Stolen and leaked emails from Nintendo subsidiary iQue have delivered shock confirmations for two things long suspected in the Nintendo retro community: All of Nintendo’s usual emulator devs were working on a traditional Switch Virtual Console before it was canceled in 2017 in favor of the NSO subscription service, and Gamecube Virtual Console was in development for Wii U using the console’s native software support before being canceled over the Wii U’s failure.
…It was a weird year, 2024. It was difficult and magical all at once. I got married and bought a house! But I bought my house in a conservative area newly emboldened by the election. I had to finish this article while wildfires raged in my homestate around much of my extended family. Even with a paid-off house, money is a more delicate issue for us than ever, which puts me and my dinky Patreon under a microscope. I did apply to several games press jobs, some of which were blatantly shitty, but I applied anyway for the money, and then I didn’t get them anyway. Between stress making writing harder, the time it takes to do this, and a desperate desire for a bigger income, I’m just about ready to call it quits after all these years, right here, right now.
But…
You can’t get rid of Bones that easily!
Make no mistake, I got much closer to going through with it than I ever did previously, and 2023 was already hard. I had resigned myself to it, I had already warned Wolfman that I was about to quit. But when I look at the state of journalism right now, I realize we need what I bring more than ever, no matter how small my reach is. Treating entertainment journalism as seriously as it deserves. Independent to corporate and federal influence. A loud and proud marginalized and hard-left voice. I’m fucking proud of what I do here, even when it is hard, and my darling Mikayla still wants me to continue too. I can’t say no to her. My life is going to keep changing, but I’m going to keep this train going one way or another. Once again, thank you all so very much for your support, every view, every comment, every dollar on Patreon. I’m happy to keep going.
A whole lot of time and effort goes into making my work here possible. Please show your support however you can to help keep this going, whether that means sharing these articles wherever and to whomever there might be interest, or for those able to, donating to my Patreon dedicated specifically to these writings, which is linked here: https://www.patreon.com/lilytina