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.
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Smaller subscription deals and the underperformance of certain titles have had a severe impact on Devolver and TinyBuild, says stockbroking firm Goodbody.
Both companies floated at the peak of the games business in 2021 and have seen their share prices plummet over the past two years. Devolver has seen its share price drop 92% since its peak in January 2022, while TinyBuild's has fallen 95%
A leaked press release says that the Lenovo Legion Go will cost $799/€799.
Per Windows Report, the handheld will be revealed on September 1 and will go on sale in October.
The competitor to Valve's Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally will run on Windows 11 and feature an AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme processor.
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Two Motorsport Games staffers have won their lawsuits for unpaid wages.
As reported by Insider Gamer, one ruling awarded an employee $14,600 and the other developer won $10,000 from another case, according to a source.
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A Starfield leaker is facing multiple charges days after sharing the opening 45 minutes of the Sci-Fi RPG.
As reported by Kotaku, the Tennessee man allegedly stole 67 copies of the game, which he claims to have purchased legally.
Imagendary Studios has "deeply restructured" with its future in significant question, according to a now-former employee posting on LinkedIn last week.
"This dream is done, Imagendary Studios has deeply restructured, and most of us were laid off," artist David Luong posted on LinkedIn. "I remained on as one of the last skeleton crew members to tidy some things up."
An inquiry to Imagendary parent company FunPlus was not returned as of the time of publication.
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Gamescom 2023 had 320,000 in-person visitors from over 100 countries last week, organizers announced.
By comparison, last year's attendance saw more than 265,000 people visiting the Germany-based event.
The decade has been a turbulent one for the US video game industry. It began with the surge in players, engagement and dollars from people wanting to stay connected to family and friends through the pandemic. This was followed by similar declines across all measures with the return to spending on experiences, which happened to come along with new hardware console supply constraints and numerous game delays thrown in for good measure.
Today, however, the supply of new generation hardware has improved and stabilized, blockbuster games are being released, and player engagement patterns have settled into a new normal. This has allowed the market to settle after months of wild swings - both higher and lower.
Below are just some of the factors that are influencing the market today and will be worth following closely moving forward. Circana (formally The NPD Group and IRI) expects the US video game market to finish 2023 having delivered 3% growth, reaching $58.3 billion.
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.
Between Gamescom, the latest dramatic twist in the Microsoft-Activision Blizzard acquisition story, and new hardware announcements from Sony and Atari, it was a really big week for games news.
Okay, the new hardware announcements is just me desperately trying to come up with a third thing to justify it being a really big week for news. We'll get to those briefly in a little bit, but to start with, we can mosey through those first two actually big bits of news we saw this week.
Riot Games' League of Legends esports division still hasn't turned a profit, the developer's senior director of esports operations stated this week.
Speaking to Axios at the League Championship Series Summer finals last weekend, Raul Fernandez said Riot Games were "trying to find their footing" and "a way to refresh our league" in light of declining viewership numbers.
The LCS Summer finals saw a 21.8% drop in peak viewership compared to the LCS Spring finals, according to esports statistics site Esports Charts.
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The GamesIndustry.biz team gather around their mics and discuss the biggest stories of the past week.
We start with a recap of Gamescom Opening Night Live before looking forward to the high-profile hits due for release in the run-up to Christmas - particularly the crowded October slate. Which titles do we expect to do well? Which ones face stiffer competition, and how will this affect their chances? And which titles are we particularly looking forward to?
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This week sees us at a philosophical crossroads for Microsoft’s Xbox division and its gaming ambitions more generally.
On one hand, the hotly anticipated Starfield – arguably the first truly notable fruit of the acquisition of ZeniMax two years ago, and Bethesda’s first major new IP in nearly three decades – is almost upon us, with hype for the game peaking as pre-loading becomes available ahead of the launch. It’s the most important software launch for the Xbox Series X/S consoles to date – there’s more on the line here than even with the launch of Halo Infinite, I’d argue – and Microsoft is hopeful that this will mark a turning point for a platform’s well-documented struggles with its first-party software pipeline.
For the first time since its introduction in 2014, the UK has experienced a drop in Video Games Tax Relief.
There were 350 claims made for VGTR in the 2021-22 financial year, totalling £189 million in relief.
According to data from the UK Government's Creative Industries Statistics Commentary, this marks a 6% decline year-on-year.
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Years ago, when discussing the surprise popularity of Nintendo Switch (it was a surprise once), Team17 CEO Debbie Bestwick called it 'a lifestyle device'.
I loved that term, because it epitomised what made the Switch so appealing to such a wide group of players. It is a games machine designed to fit around you, rather than a destination device you had to make time for. For me personally, sitting in front of the TV to play games is a luxury I rarely have these days and so the Swich has been a dream.
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Larian Studios has confirmed that Baldur's Gate 3 will be launching on Xbox Series X|S consoles this year.
Following a meeting with Xbox head Phil Spencer, Larian CEO Swen Vincke made the announcement on social media.
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Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) has entered a deal to purchase audio technology company Audeze.
Terms of the transaction, including the cost, were not disclosed.
Original story, August 25, 2023:Krafton has acquired the rights to the mobile version of Ironmace's Dark and Darker.
The PUBG publisher intends to use its expertise to bring the RPG to mobile game consumers.
"We've been watching Dark and Darker's potential and distinct creativity with great interest," said Krafton senior head of publishing Rafael Lim.
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Interactive drama developer Scriptic has raised a total $6.2 million in additional seed funding.
This includes $500,000 from the Sony Innovation Fund. The studio's total seed investments now sit at $8.7 million.
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Dominic Wheatley will be stepping down as CEO of the UK games firm Catalis Group.
He served in the role for 11 years and will be transitioning to the position of non-executive director at the company.
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In an industry like games, one that's always looking forward and eyeing up what the newest and most powerful tech in the world, it's not exactly common for a developer to pitch a project as being able to run on almost anything.
That's exactly what the team behind the indie smash hit BattleBit Remastered has done. The game takes the large-scale battles – up to 256 players – and destruction of a game like Battlefield and reduces the graphical fidelity considerably so that it doesn't explode lower-end PCs.
Elden Ring's success has paved the way for Armored Core 6 to launch on a "much bigger scale," Bandai Namco has told GamesIndustry.biz.
Talking to us at Gamescom, Bandai Namco Europe CEO Arnaud Muller mentioned the publisher's heightened ambition for Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon, releasing tomorrow.
He attributed this shift in expectations to a combination of FromSoftware's increased popularity following the incredible success of Elden Ring, and the developer's accumulated experience leading to "a new dimension" for Armored Core, ten years after the latest entry in the series.
Xbox's Phil Spencer has once again said that mobile is the key to growing both Microsoft's games business and the industry overall – and that includes bringing AAA titles like Starfield to smart devices.
Speaking to our sister publication Eurogamer at Gamescom, Spencer reiterated that the proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard will be key to Xbox establishing a foothold in mobile, thanks to the publisher's ownership of Candy Crush creator King.
In the full interview, he discussed how growing on mobile is not just about getting into the already dominant free-to-play space, but finding ways to bring more console-like experiences to smart devices which he says is "one of thing mobile players, in my opinion, are missing today."
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Denuvo has announced that its anti-piracy technology is now authorized as Nintendo Switch middleware.
The Nintendo Switch anti-emulator protection can be accessed via the Nintendo Developer Portal for game creators.
The Epic Games Store is taking another approach to combating Steam, as Epic today announced a new opt-in First Run Program that will trade the company's share of revenues for the first six months of release in exchange for exclusivity.
First Run appears specifically targeted to compete with Valve's marketplace, as the program's eligibility requirements allow for games releasing on consoles or mobile platforms, games to be sold by the developer through their own storefronts, and games to be sold through other third-party stores like Green Man Gaming or Humble Bundle, provided they use Epic Games Store's keyless distribution system.
After the end of the six months (or earlier if a developer chooses to leave the program), Epic will begin taking its standard cut of 12% of revenues.
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BioWare has announced that it will reduce its workforce by nearly 50 staffers.
The layoff decision was attributed to matching "the studio's changing needs."