It’s a new month, and it’s also officially T-minus five days until that big game everyone’s gonna be playing comes out (see what I did there?). With Bethesda’s latest mega-game looming in the very near future, why not take advantage of this weekend to get some time in with a few other games of note?
For one thing, it’s not a lockpick — it’s a digipick
To get that extra jump, you’ll need to level up a specific skill
The Disney TCG is now available from your game stores and online retailers
The next wave of games, movies, and TV is here
An onslaught of long-awaited sequels, colorful indies, and promising spinoffs
This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check back every Friday for a new entry.
Starfield launches today for those who paid extra for the Premium edition, so in the grand tradition of Bethesda games, we're going to talk about how broken stuff is.
No, not Starfield stuff. For all I know, the game has been polished to a shine with nary a glitch in sight.
Mena Sato Kato has joined Microsoft to lead Japanese partnership operations at Xbox.
As Windows Central reported, Kato will oversee global partnerships for Japanese companies at Xbox, in her new role that she began in July.
Kato previously worked for Sony Interactive Entertainment as vice president of business development for eight years. She became vice president of mobile business in 2020 before leaving the position a year later.
It's been a little while since we saw a glimpse of the Bad Old Sony – the company that priced the PS3 at $200 above its closest competitor and retorted to criticism by saying that consumers would get a second job to be able to afford the console. Remember those guys?
Subsequently playing catch-up to Microsoft for most of that generation injected a much-needed dose of humility into the company's thinking, while the discovery that the PlayStation brand didn't carry remotely enough consumer kudos to shift Nintendo from the top spot in the handheld market also helped to ground Sony's ideas a bit more firmly in reality.
In the generations that followed, Sony has generally kept its head down, focused on its game pipeline, and avoided annoying consumers too badly. The PS4 side-stepped the DRM bear-trap that the Xbox One tumbled into, for example, and the PS5 pleasantly surprised us all by allowing storage expansion with an industry standard M.2 SSD, bucking Sony's grim history with exorbitantly priced proprietary storage formats.
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Starfield is not technically out until next week, yet it is already dominating conversations in many ways across the games space – and inevitably bugs are a factor.
While multiple reviews from the initial wave of critique for Bethesda's latest blockbuster refer to Starfield as the company's most polished game to date, this comes with the slight caveat that it's not completely polished. Indeed, thanks to those with early access or review code, images of in-game bugs such as floating heads are already doing the rounds on social media - although these seem to be rarer than in Skyrim or Fallout.
A series of layoffs have reportedly been conducted by Embracer at subsidiary Gearbox Publishing.
The wave of layoffs at the publisher started as early as June, Game Developer reported, with localisation specialist Allan Jacquemart for instance posting about it on LinkedIn at the time.
"Unfortunately, no one saw it coming, but my contract and those of my colleagues who started in June had to be terminated on the last day of our probation month (which also happened to be my birthday, yay). We were simply victims of the group's restructuring."
Polish game developer Black Eye Games has announced that it's shutting down.
The news was shared in the final season announcement for its title Gloria Victis, and it attributed to the financial costs of operating and developing the MMO.
It said in part, "Nothing can last forever, and after thinking it through for countless times, we have to make the toughest decision ever.
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Developer Volition Games has announced its complete and immediate closure.
The decision to close the studio was attributed to an evaluation by Embracer Group as a part of its ongoing restructuring program.
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Nintendo has announced that it will release a Mario red edition Nintendo Switch OLED on October 6.
The hardware will launch two weeks before Super Mario Bros. Wonder and cost $349.99 / ¥37,980.
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Arctic7 has announced that it will be opening a new Barcelona in early 2024.
The facility will provide game development support and co-development services for clients.
In some quarters of the industry, it's become popular to say that big game companies no longer need large events to showcase their titles. Inspired by the likes of Nintendo, which has been running its own Direct online broadcasts since 2011, many of the biggest developers and publishers in the world have started to question whether it is worth taking part in these showcases and instead would prefer to control their own narrative with trailers and marketing beats.
There's some question about correlation and causation here, as games appearing in ONL are more likely to be backed by larger marketing budgets anyway, and were significantly outperforming non-ONL games even before the show. Likewise, the post-ONL levels would reflect both the impact of the show as well as the impact of many of those big games having a presence at Gamescom and its 320,000 attendees.
But data from Fancensus suggests that it is worth being involved in these showcases. Looking at the games taking part in Gamescom's Opening Night Live event, titles that were on stage at the Geoff Keighley-hosted showcase dominated 61 per cent of total press coverage surrounding the event.
CD Projekt experienced a decrease in its overall sales revenue and net profit during the first half of 2023, its latest earnings report showed.
The Polish games firm reported sales revenue of 325.2 million PLN ($79.5 million), down 14% year-on-year compared to 377.9 million PLN ($82.2 million) made in the first half of 2022.
Its net profit was 91.3 million PLN ($22.1 million), a decrease of 20% year-on-year compared to 113.7 million PLN ($27.6 million) produced in the same period last year.
Xbox attended Gamescom all guns blazing last week. The intent felt clear from the start: Microsoft wanted to make a statement.
Following a strong showing at Gamecom Opening Night Live, the platform holder had its biggest booth ever at the event, 50,000 square feet built by 500 people over two weeks, with 30 playable games. And it was showcasing the much anticipated Starfield on the very first day, in a theatre seating 300 people, with the unexpected company of Xbox boss Phil Spencer and Bethesda director Todd Howard.
This feels like a pivotal moment for Microsoft, with Starfield in a unique position (and a lot of pressure) to deliver as an Xbox exclusive. A few days from the game's launch, there's a trepidation that can be felt across the industry.
Vancouver-based studio Blackbird Interactive has laid off 41 employees.
The Minecraft Legends co-developer confirmed the information in a statement to IGN, after it was announced on LinkedIn by staff.
Blackbird was employing around 300 people according to its LinkedIn page, with the layoffs representing roughly 13% of its workforce.
Gamescom may have only just finished, but there’s another tentpole developer event that’s fast approaching.
Unite, an annual celebration of Unity’s game developer community, returns to Amsterdam this November, taking place as a physical event for the first time since 2019.
“We're just really excited to get everybody back together,” says the president of Unity’s Create division Marc Whitten. “Unite is always this incredible opportunity to get some of our best and most passionate developers together with our teams… It's a jam-packed event with really great talks exploring what’s coming down our pipeline.”
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Activision Blizzard has announced that it will be rolling out new in-game voice chat moderation, which will be implemented in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.
The games firm has partnered with machine learning and AI software developer Modulate in the effort.
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Sony has announced it will be increasing the costs of its 12-month subscriptions for PlayStation Plus.
The change will be effective on September 6 across multiple regions.
Awesomenauts developer Ronimo Games has reportedly filed for bankruptcy.
As reported by Game Developer, quoting Dutch outlet Emerce, the Utrecht-based studio reportedly filed for bankruptcy on August 22 at the Central Netherlands Court.
An employee confirmed the bankruptcy on the developer's Discord server.
Konami has moved the launch window of Suikoden 1 & 2 HD Remaster: Gate Rune and Dunan Unification Wars past 2023.
The publisher attributed the decision to the PlayStation 1 re-releases' performance.
Konami said in the announcement, "We have reached the conclusion that despite the very best efforts of our dedicated development staff to release the remasters in 2023, additional time is needed to ensure the quality performance and gameplay experience our users deserve."
Generative AI is the speculatively disruptive trend of the moment, inheriting the title from the metaverse and blockchain gaming before it. And while narrative gaming start-up Hidden Door just surfaced last year with a pre-seed funding round, CEO Hilary Mason had years of experience working in machine learning and AI beforehand.
And while she clearly believes in the technology's potential – as evidenced by co-founding Hidden Door in the first place – she finds some of the hype around the field of late overblown.
"I'm a bit of a pragmatist in this space," she tells GamesIndustry.biz. "I do believe the technology can be incredibly useful as a tool, and a lot of the applications I see being developed right now are essentially productivity tools around, 'Can we more efficiently do the things around games and entertainment that we're already paying somebody to do?'"
Employment in the UK games development industry rose 15.2% between December 2021 and April 2023, a new report from trade body TIGA revealed.
According to TIGA's Making Games in the UK 2023 report, the number of full-time employees went from 20,975 to 24,155 during that period, representing an annualised rise of 11.4%.
New figures published today by TIGA also found that 51.9% of full-time staff are employed by foreign-owned studios, up from 40% in 2017.
Technology start-up NPCx raised $3 million in a funding round led by Kakao Investment.
As reported by Venture Beat, money raised from this round will fund development for NPCx's latest product, BehaviourX. This processing tool will capture real-time data from players to create immersive NPCs by analysing their inputs.
NPCx launched its motion capture processing tool TrackerX earlier this year, which aims to streamline the process of tracking motion capture data and applying it directly to a character skeleton.
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A new report estimates that mobile gaming revenue will reach $108 billion in 2023.
Data.ai's (in partnership with IDC) Gaming Spotlight 2023 report says that the console market is poised to hit $43 billion, up 3% year-over-year.
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The full schedule for this year's Game Devs of Color Expo Online is now live.
From September 27 until September 30, the conference will include talks, interviews, and panels.
Mimimi Games is calling it quits after 15 years. The studio today announced that the recently released Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew will be its final game.
"Dedicating the past decade and a half of our lives working on increasingly ambitious games took a heavy personal toll on us and our families," Mimimi co-founders Dominik Abé and Johannes Roth said.
"After the release of Shadow Gambit we decided it was the right time to prioritize our well-being and to pull the brakes instead of signing up for another multi-year production cycle."
Nintendo dominated this year's Gamescom Awards thanks to The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom's ongoing success.
The Japanese firm won five categories, four of which went to Zelda including Best Nintendo Switch Game, Best Gameplay, Best Audio, and Most Epic. Pikmin 4 took home the award for the Most Wholesome game.
Bandai Namco won three categories, including Best Sony PlayStation Game for Tekken 8, Best Announcement for Little Nightmares 3, and Best of Show Floor.
It's often hard to track the success of VR in part because it straddles the line between ubiquity and obsolescence. You'll find VR experiences in shopping centers and event spaces around the world, yet the market beyond one-off experiences showcasing the worth of the tech as a viable medium for long-form experience and interaction remains low.
Internal Meta figures place sales of the device at 20 million across all SKUs since 2019, with the original PSVR sales topping at five million units as of 2020 alongside the estimated 600,000 units sold to date as of May for PSVR 2.
These aren't bad numbers, yet it should also be noted that this places VR's market penetration far below that of the broader games industry, with just 1.3% market penetration in 2023 versus 45% for the broader industry, expected to rise just 0.4% in the next four years.
Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon has taken the top spot of the UK boxed charts this week.
Released on August 25, the FromSoftware title sold the most on PS5 (64% of all copies sold). Publisher Bandai Namco told GamesIndustry.biz at Gamescom that Armored Core 6 is a "big step up in the franchise" and hoped it would surpass previous Armored Core games following the increased popularity of FromSoftware titles after Elden Ring's success.
Armored Core 6's debut pushed Mario Kart 8 Deluxe down to No.2, which rocketed to the top of the charts last week due to a price promotion. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom moved back into the Top Three with a 6% increase in sales, while FIFA 23 was at No.4 following a 9% drop in sales week-on-week.
