Just yesterday, Grand Theft Auto 6 developer Rockstar Games informed its employees they would be returning to the office full-time and scrapping remote work. Those employees have responded to the mandate, and they’re not happy. Some GTA 6 devs are even stating they fear a return to the “toxic ‘crunch’ practices” for which Rockstar was known during the development of games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and GTA V.

GTA 6 devs accuse Rockstar of broken promises

Rockstar has been trying to encourage its employees to return to the office since last year. When the developer tried to enforce a transition to a three-day office week in 2023, Rockstar claimed “this isn’t our first step to 5 days a week. No one wants to go back to the old way of working.” Now the GTA 6 devs are accusing Rockstar of breaking their promises following yesterday’s mandate that employees return to office full-time.

An anonymous employee told VGC that Rockstar is removing a remote working lifeline that allowed them to “balance care responsibilities, manage disabilities, and relocate as we need.” They continued:

Rockstar is snatching away that lifeline without a second thought for the workers who’ll be impacted most. After so many broken promises we now fear management may even be paving the way for a return to toxic ‘crunch’ practices. Senior leadership need to rethink their reckless decision making and engage with their staff to find an arrangement that works for everyone.

Rockstar had gained quite a reputation for its “toxic crunch practices” during previous games. Many of the accusations against the company involved 100-hour weeks, mandatory overtime, and fear tactics. As such, previous reports had claimed GTA 6 would be delayed until 2025 to avoid those crunch conditions.

However, mandatory overtime was a concern for another anonymous employee who said “just one of my concerns is being forced to work late hours in the office to maintain contact with global teams when before we could log on from home to attend late meetings.” The concerns have meant that the IWGB Game Workers Union has also issued a statement condemning Rockstar’s actions:

The workers in the IWGB Game Workers Union at Rockstar are pushing for transparency over pay and promotions, a healthy and inclusive workplace culture, and work life balance centred around what each worker needs. It is unacceptable that Rockstar leadership have gone back on their word time and time again and have ignored the workers’ requests for basic working conditions.

Workers across the industry are done with letting executives make reckless and harmful decisions and the Rockstar workers are showing us the start of what’s to come if they’re continually ignored. There’s no better time than now to join our union and push for this to be the healthy and sustainable games industry we know it can be.

IWGB Game Workers Union chairman Austin Kelmore

Rockstar is yet to comment.

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Development on the troubled Star Wars: KOTOR Remake looks set to continue soon after reports claimed that developer Saber Interactive will split from Embracer Group. The developer will become a privately owned company and plans to continue the game’s development once the deal is complete.

Saber Interactive may get help from other studios on Star Wars: KOTOR Remake

Saber Interactive is set to be sold to a group of private investors in a deal worth up to $500 million according to sources who spoke to Bloomberg. This figure would also allow Saber Interactive to take multiple Embracer subsidiaries alongside them to help with the development of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Remake.

While part of Embracer Group, several other companies have already been merged into Saber Interactive; these include Demiurge Studios and New World Interactive. However, the sources did not specify which companies could be leaving Embracer alongside Saber.

The deal will be part of cost-cutting measures at Embracer Group following a failed $2 billion investment from a gaming group associated with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. This triggered a spate of layoffs and game cancelations.

Star Wars: KOTOR Remake was rumored to be one of those canceled games. Originally in development at Aspyr Media, development seemed steady until a vertical slice demo of the game was shown to Lucasfilm and Sony. Initial reports suggested both companies were happy with the game’s progress, but then Aspyr’s design director and art director were fired shortly after.

The game was delayed indefinitely before development was transferred to Saber Interactive, who had been assisting Aspyr Media with the remake. Rumors suggested development had ceased completely, although Embracer has always refused to confirm whether these rumors were true. The split from Embracer means Star Wars: KOTOR Remake development finally gets a chance to be completed.

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Despite being a live-service multiplayer game, Skull & Bones will be priced at $70 when it is released next week and will not be a free-to-play game. In its latest financial earnings call, Ubisoft has explained why the game has adopted a premium rather than a free-to-play model.

Skull & Bones is a “quadruple-A game”

During the financial earnings call, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot was asked why Skull & Bones would be a $70 game, potentially limiting the size of its player base as opposed to if the game had adopted a free-to-play model. Guillemot replied that Skull & Bones is a “quadruple-A game” whose scale is big enough to justify the price tag:

You will see that Skull and Bones is a fully-fledged game. It’s a very big game, and we feel that people will really see how vast and complete that game is. It’s a really full, triple… quadruple-A game, that will deliver in the long run.

Ubisoft’s post-launch plans for the first year of release include four seasons of content that pit players against Legendary Pirate Lords like Philippe La Peste and the Hubac Twins. Other challenges include Merchant Convoys, Elite Warships, and other predators, with the bigger challenges leading to greater rewards. There will also be free time-limited events with more loot on offer.

The publisher expects Skull & Bones to be one of the reasons for record annual net bookings during the next financial quarter. Ubisoft also remains confident in the performance of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown while upcoming free-to-play multiplayer shooter XDefiant is expected to make a limited contribution after its release this year.

The Skull & Bones open beta begins today, February 8, and it’s the only time players are going to get to try the game for free before its release. Until February 11, players on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC can earn five exclusive rewards like unique ship cosmetics, an emote, a weapon, and a Pandal Lemur pet. Progression is capped at Infamy Tier 6, but this can be carried over to the full game when it is released on February 16.

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Blizzard Entertainment’s survival game, which was codenamed Odyssey, has been canceled following a large number of layoffs at Microsoft. While the Xbox and Zenimax teams have been impacted by the layoffs, the majority of the 1,900 roles lost fall within the Activision Blizzard teams.

Odyssey spent six years in development

Odyssey was to be a survival adventure game set in a brand-new universe. The game was revealed through a job listing in 2022 but had been in development for over six years. Thanks to issues with the game’s Synapse engine, the game was still several years away from completion and was targeting a 2026 release date.

Ultimately, Blizzard decided that Odyssey wasn’t worth pursuing and Blizzard spokesman Andrew Reynolds told Bloomberg that the game was canceled “as part of a focus on projects that hold the most promise for future growth.” Blizzard will “move some of the people on the team to one of several exciting new projects Blizzard has in the early stages of development.”

The majority of the people working on Odyssey have been made redundant today. Windows Central’s Jez Corden also reported the layoffs also include the vast majority of Activision’s internal customer support teams, which will now be outsourced to external companies. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s departments dedicated to bringing Xbox games to physical retail have reportedly been shut down too, fuelling rumors of the digital-only Xbox console that is supposedly in development.

Microsoft previously had a team of 22,000 employees between its many studios. According to a memo from Phil Spencer, seen by IGN, the layoffs have been made across Activision Blizzard, ZeniMax, and the Xbox teams and represent approximately 8% of the workforce. As a result of the decision, Blizzard Entertainment President Mike Ybarra announced that he was also leaving the company, as is Blizzard’s chief design officer and co-founder Allen Adham.

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Bungie has written a new blog post addressing player feedback and outlining its path forward for Destiny 2 following what has been a turbulent few months at the storied studio. The post comes just days after massive layoffs at Bungie left numerous employees from across the company scrambling to find new work.

Bungie says it’s lost the trust of Destiny 2 players

In a new blog post on Bungie’s website, the Destiny 2 development team has shared its sadness at the departure of so many colleagues, though the recent layoffs aren’t directly mentioned, and outlined a new vision for the game moving forward. Acknowledging the concerns many players have expressed about Destiny 2’s seasonal content and the game’s Lightfall expansion, the development team states, “We know we have lost a lot of your trust.” The post goes on to claim that Bungie hasn’t done enough in recent times to “surprise and delight” fans of the game, with the Destiny 2 team promising to rectify that before the release of The Final Shape in June 2024.

Vowing to make The Final Shape into one of the studio’s best games to date, the post notes that there are currently over 650 people working on the recently delayed expansion. Though the post presents a positive picture of the future of Destiny 2, little was revealed about how exactly Bungie plans to revitalize the underperforming looter shooter. More details about the studio’s “bigger, bolder, and brighter vision for The Final Shape” will reportedly be revealed following the launch of the next Season in November. Destiny 2 is losing players, according to current and former employees, and the recent round of layoffs could potentially spell trouble for The Final Shape despite the developers’ optimism.

Between mass layoffs at the company and a lukewarm reaction by players to recent content added to Destiny 2, 2023 has proven to be a tough year for Bungie. Like its acknowledgment from earlier this year that Destiny 2’s approach to PvP maps isn’t working, this new blog post shows that Bungie is aware of its shortcomings and is working to fix them. Whether the studio can make the needed changes and get back on track before the reported release of Bungie’s new IP in 2025, though, is still unclear.

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Microsoft and Activision Blizzard have finally closed a takeover deal after months of delays. As such, current Activision CEO Bobby Kotick will leave the company at the end of 2023. His plans for the future have not been disclosed.

Bobby Kotick reports to Phil Spencer until the end of 2023

Kotick has been asked to remain as Activision CEO while the company fully transitions to Microsoft ownership following the conclusion of the takeover deal earlier today. While Kotick remains in his position, he will be reporting to Xbox CEO Phil Spencer. In an email to Activision employees, Kotick stated he would stay at Activision “through the end of 2023” and his plans after that are not currently known.

The departure of Kotick doesn’t come as a surprise. People with knowledge of the negotiations between Microsoft and Activision had claimed back at the start of 2022 that Kotick would step down from his role if the deal went through. If the deal had been blocked, Kotick would have been expected to stay in his role indefinitely.

Bobby Kotick has been a key part of Activision since he bought a 25% stake in the company, known then as Mediagenic, alongside partner Brian Kelly to save it from bankruptcy. Following a name change, Activision then focused on gaming and released a string of hits that included online multiplayer games like MechWarrior, Warcraft, and StarCraft. Call of Duty made its debut in 2003, while other renowned franchises include Spyro The Dragon, Crash Bandicoot, Tony Hawk’s skateboarding games, Candy Crush Saga, Diablo, Overwatch, and Guitar Hero. A revival of Guitar Hero has even been hinted at recently by Kotick himself.

The immediate future for Activision will see “more games available in more places“, enabled by deals like Ubisoft handling the cloud streaming of Activision games. Activision, Blizzard, and King games will also be added to Xbox Game Pass in the future.

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British developer Team17 could soon find itself shockingly short-staffed as a looming round of layoffs could reportedly see the company losing roughly one-third of its employees. Known to gamers worldwide for its work on the long-running Worms series, Team17’s most recent release was the 1980s-themed horror-adventure game Killer Frequency.

Team17 could lose up to 91 employees, roughly one-third of its staff, as part of recent cuts at the company

As initially reported by Eurogamer, planned layoffs at Team17 could soon see up to 91 employees from across the company out of work. Like countless other companies across the gaming industry, Team17 has been eyeing layoffs as one way to drastically decrease its operating costs in an uncertain economic environment.

The cuts at Team17 were initially targeted at the developer’s QA teams, with plans to outsource much of their work to other companies, but have now expanded to cover departments ranging from marketing to IT and HR. While titles like the Team17-published Dredge: The Pale Reach DLC, set to release in November, should be unaffected by the layoffs, the same can’t be said for other projects currently in development at the company.  

Eurogamer reports that it was contacted by multiple developers who expressed concerns that work on their upcoming games, set to be published by Team17, could be disrupted by the sweeping layoffs. Team17’s development partners were apparently left in the dark about the cuts, with one developer stating that they only found out about the layoffs when they noticed team members they’d previously been working with suddenly posting on LinkedIn trying to find new jobs. The layoffs are reportedly in response to “the release calendar this year being particularly competitive” according to some staff members, but Team17 has yet to issue an official statement on the cuts.

News of the shakeup at the Worms developer comes as companies across the gaming industry continue to downsize, with Telltale Games laying off most of its staff last week. The layoffs sweeping across the industry haven’t been limited solely to smaller studios, though.

Fortnite developer Epic Games is laying off nearly 900 employees across the organization, and both Ubisoft and Blizzard saw a similar slashing of their workforce in late September. Ostensibly a response to an uncertain economic environment that’s left developers and publishers scrambling to remain profitable, these sorts of mass layoffs could potentially have long-lasting, negative repercussions for the gaming industry as a whole that could endure for years to come.

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In the latest instance of a high-profile gaming studio being accused of creating a hostile working environment for employees, Bungie is now being sued for wrongful termination by a former HR manager after allegations of racial bias at the company. News of the allegations against the Destiny 2 developer comes just months after Bungie won a landmark lawsuit against a racist Destiny player who harassed the company’s employees and their families.

Bungie’s former HR manager alleges she was wrongfully terminated after reporting racial bias at the developer

As initially reported by IGN, Bungie is being sued by a former HR manager over charges of retaliation and wrongful termination.

Ingrid Alm, who was hired by Bungie as an HR manager in 2022, is accusing the company of terminating her employment after she recommended a supervisor receive diversity training. Alm’s recommendation came after the one black employee on the supervisor’s 50-person team, referred to as “James Smith” in the lawsuit, expressed concerns that he was being racially targeted.

Alm claims that she faced “hostility and denial” from her managers at the Destiny 2 developer after issuing the recommendation.   

Already facing pushback for her recommendation, Alm’s lawsuit alleges that she was subject to further hostility after reaching out to Bungie’s director of equity and inclusion, Dr. Courtney Benjamin.

Alm’s lawsuit states that her supervisor retaliated against her for reaching out to Benjamin, giving Alm a written warning and moving her to the “needs improvement” category on her next performance review. After a supervisor suggested she should leave the company, Alm’s access to her work e-mail and Bungie’s internal network was cut off. She was eventually told that her resignation, which Alm claims she never submitted, had been accepted.

According to the IGN report, Bungie’s response to the lawsuit “denies almost every part of Alm’s narrative without further context.” A jury trial is set for January 22, 2024 to determine whether Alm is owed the lost wages, emotional distress damages, and attorney fees she is seeking in the case.

Bungie is far from the only developer to be accused of creating a hostile work environment in recent years. News of the allegations against Bungie comes the same week as five former Ubisoft executives were arrested on charges of harassment and sexual assault.

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Earlier today, Epic Games laid off around 16% of its employees, and rumors had started that this meant Fall Guys developer Mediatonic had been completely closed down. Epic has now released a statement that those rumors were “false”, but it is clear the developer has been hit heavily by today’s move.

Mediatonic was “decimated” by today’s layoffs but not closed down

Many employees who were affected by today’s layoffs have taken to social media to vent their frustration and look for further employment. Murder By Numbers game director Ed Fear was “one of the people affected by the layoffs today at Epic” and said he was “absolutely devastated to leave behind so many amazing Mediatonic colleagues who I loved.” He later posted the above image that was created by an anonymous colleague. Other roles lost during the layoffs include Fall Guys level designers, video editors, video producers, and artists.

Despite the numerous posts on social media, earlier reports that all Mediatonic employees had been laid off appear to have been incorrect. In a statement to Kotaku, an Epic Games spokesperson called these reports “false” and pointed to an earlier email from Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney that promised the company would continue to invest in Fall Guys. Fortnite and Rocket League will also continue to receive support.

Mediatonic became an Epic Games developer back in March 2021. The agreement meant that while console versions of the game were unaffected, Fall Guys was eventually removed from Steam to become exclusive to the Epic Games Store. A year later in June 2022, the game took on its current free-to-play model akin to that sported by Epic’s runaway success Fortnite.

The layoffs come just a day after Fall Guys received its latest Fall Force update, with more features added for Fall Guys Creative and a handful of brand new Rounds that were due to be released over the next couple of weeks. There is no word on whether these rounds will continue to be released as scheduled.

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In a statement that may draw ire from gamers who’ve been feeling burned by the rising price of video games in recent years, Capcom president Haruhiro Tsujimoto has said that the price of new games should go up. Under Tsujimoto, the company has seen sales successes with new entries in its Monster Hunter and Resident Evil franchises, with the sales of Capcom games on PC helping to fuel that growth.

Capcom president Haruhiro Tsujimoto says the price of games doesn’t reflect increased development costs

According to a report by Japanese financial outlet Nikkei, Capcom’s president made remarks during the recent Tokyo Game Show suggesting that the price of video games should increase to reflect the rising cost of development. As noted in coverage of the remarks by VGC, Tsujimoto is reported to have said that while “development costs are around 100 times higher” than during the NES era, the price of software has failed to follow suit. In order to continue attracting the sorts of talented developers Capcom relies on to the company, Tsujimoto believes that the option of raising the price of games to offset increased salaries “is a healthy form of business.”

While obviously not what most gamers want to hear, the remarks from Tsujimoto echo similar statements made by other executives in the gaming industry in recent years. In 2020, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick faced backlash from many in the gaming community after stating that “consumers were ready” for the $70 price point for games to become the standard. Despite causing controversy at the time, Zelnick’s statement proved to be prophetic, as both Sony and Microsoft raised the price of first-party games in the years that followed. In both instances, the companies used similar reasoning as Tsujimoto, citing the increased cost of developing the types of AAA titles gamers demanded as the cause for the increase.

With development costs for AAA games now regularly reaching hundreds of millions of dollars, it’s hard to dismiss the financial logic behind Tsujimoto’s proposed price increase for new titles. And although Capcom hasn’t announced any official plans to raise prices on its games, given Tsujimoto’s statements and similar moves throughout the industry, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the iconic publisher follow suit down the line. It would almost certainly not be popular with players, but such a price increase could also help the company stave off the potential of a Capcom acquisition. In an industry that’s become increasingly consolidated, that sort of independence may prove to be worth the extra cost in the eyes of some gamers.

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