Category: IGN

Microsoft shut down Redfall and Prey developer Arkane Austin in a sudden, devastating move earlier this year, and the studio founder has now called the move “stupid” and “not a good decision.”

In an interview with PC Gamer, Arkane Studios founder and current head of WolfEye Studios Raphaël Colantonio was asked about the move. Colantonio, who left Arkane in 2017 to found WolfEye, had some thoughts to share:

“I think if you look a little bit, it’s obvious that Arkane Austin was a very special group of people that have made some cool things and that could pull it off again,” he said “I think it was a decision that just came down to, ‘We need to cut something.’ Was it to please the investors, the stock market? They’re playing a different game.”

PC Gamer asked Colantonio if he knew why Microsoft had made the decision to shutter the Austin studio. Colantonio didn’t claim to know — he’s been gone from the company since well before Microsoft acquired it, after all. The most logical theory, people have speculated, is due to the struggles of Arkane Austin-developed Redfall, but Colantonio didn’t float that in the interview.

“The rules that they play, we might not understand them. It’s a different thing. It’s hard to know why they did what they did…The only thing that I stand by is saying that the specific choice of killing Arkane Austin, that was not a good decision.”

The interview continued with Colantonio expressing that recreating a similar team to Arkane Austin would be “impossible” or, at best, would “take forever.” “When you have that magic of Harvey [Smith] and Ricardo [Bare] etc that all come together, it’s a specific moment in time and space that just worked out this way, that took forever to reach. Those people together can really make magic. It’s not like, ‘Doesn’t matter, we’ll just rehire.’ No, try it. That’s what big groups do all the time. They try to just hire massively and overpay people to create those magic groups. It doesn’t work like this. So to me, that was stupid. But what do I know?”

Arkane Austin was closed alongside Tango Gameworks and Alpha Dog Games. Arkane Lyon remained intact, and Tango Gameworks was acquired a few months later by Krafton. In a letter to staff at the time, head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty said the cuts were due to a “reprioritization of titles and resources” at the company. Microsoft had previously announced plans to cull 1,900 staff from its gaming workforce. The company’s CEO, Satya Nadella, received a $30 million pay raise last year.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Baldur’s Gate 3 players have downloaded more than 50 million mods in less than two months, including 10,000 that renamed Withers “Bone Daddy.”

Developer Larian Studios shared the milestone in an X/Twitter post, saying the feat had been achieved in the time since official modding support arrived via Patch 7 on September 5. This means traditional mods created outside of the Patch 7 modding tool aren’t counted in the 50 million figure, so the actual number will be much, much higher.

“Together, you’ve downloaded more than 50 million mods since Patch 7 introduced modding support,” Larian said. “Apparently 10,000 of those downloads were you renaming Withers to Bone Daddy. So, uh, glad we could facilitate that.”

Modding the beloved Dungeons & Dragons based role-playing game appears to be snowballing in popularity, as only 15 million had been downloaded by October 1. More than double that amount has since been downloaded in basically the same amount of time.

Mods released so far include one that adds real-time combat to the otherwise turn-based RPG and another that brought entire new maps to Faerûn, including the highly requested Avernus.

Patch 7 otherwise added official content including an “absolutely metal” ending for Karlach and a hidden evil ending. Players will also be relieved to hear that it’s not the final major Baldur’s Gate 3 patch after all.

In our 10/10 review of Baldur’s Gate 3, IGN said: “With crunchy, tactical RPG combat, a memorable story with complex characters, highly polished cinematic presentation, and a world that always rewards exploration and creativity, Baldur’s Gate 3 is the new high-water mark for CRPGs.”

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

Marvel’s Wolverine on PS5 has a new leadership arrangement, according to a new report by Game File. Game File’s sources indicate that creative director Brian Horton has not been part of the project since mid-year, and that Wolverine’s game director Cameron Christian has since taken on a different role at Insomniac.

Wolverine’s new creative director is reportedly Marcus Smith, and its new game director is Mike Daly. Smith previously served as one of three creative directors on 2021’s Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, and Daly as one of its three game directors.

For his part, Horton has since jumped the first-party fence to Xbox as the new creative director for Perfect Dark, which is being co-developed by The Initiative and Crystal Dynamics. Horton previously served as a game director on 2015’s Rise of the Tomb Raider at Crystal Dynamics, before a brief stint at Infinity Ward and subsequently joining Insomniac.

There’s been little official word on Marvel’s Wolverine since its 2021 announcement, although cyber thieves leaked a variety of details on the project in December 2023.

Luke is a Senior Editor on the IGN reviews team. You can chat to him on Twitter @MrLukeReilly.

Ahead of Black Friday, Amazon and Best Buy have dropped the price on the new-for-2024 85″ Hisense QD7 4K Smart TV. Right now, you can get it for just $799.99 after a $400 instant discount. This is an excellent deal for a huge TV that can run games in 4K at up to 144Hz on your PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X console. It costs hundreds of dollars less than every TV in our roundup of the best TVs for PlayStation 5. For those of you who plan on picking up a PS5 Pro when it becomes available on November 7, perhaps this will help alleviate the sting of spending, at minumum, $700 on a console.

85″ Hisense QD7 4K 144Hz QLED Smart TV

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 was the biggest Call of Duty release ever, with sales on PlayStation and Steam up 60 percent compared to 2023’s Modern Warfare III. Game Pass also benefited from Call of Duty’s release, setting a new record for amount of new subscribers in a single day.

Nadella announced the results during today’s Microsoft earnings, which as usual focused heavily on the company’s AI and cloud-based initiatives. According to Microsoft, Activision Blizzard helped drive a 43 percent rise in gaming revenue while Xbox content and services grew 61 percent. Xbox hardware dropped 29 percent.

Call of Duty Black Ops 6 launch last week saw strong concurrents on Steam that outperformed Modern Warfare II and III. You can read our review of Black Ops 6’s multiplayer right here.

Developing…

Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.

After years of console domination, we’re starting to see cracks in the PlayStation brand as it tries to brute force its way towards live-service supremacy. There’s no clearer example of this than the high-profile failure of Concord and the closing of Firewalk Studio.

This week, PlayStation announced that it was shuttering Firewalk Studio, a developer founded in 2018 that Sony acquired just last year. The reason for the acquisition and the closure are the same: Concord, a live-service PvP hero shooter released on both PS5 and PC, developed by creatives who cut their teeth on games like Destiny and Call of Duty.

To be perfectly frank, Concord bombed. According to SteamDB data, player counts on PC never broke 1000, and estimated sales figures across both PS5 and Steam were abysmal. At the time of its disastrous launch, I laid out reasons why Concord failed to land, including the eight years it spent in development that caused it to completely miss the hero shooter trend that was kickstarted by Team Fortress 2 in 2007 and peaked with Overwatch in 2016:

“Knowing the cost and development time required for a AAA online games, studios have to assess, predict and/or simply guess as to what will be the next big hit. What games will succeed in four, five, six years time if we begin developing it right now? Will the audience still care for that kind of game when we’re finally ready to release it? It practically requires the services of a fortune-teller to get the answer right.”

Basically, if you start making a game based on what’s popular now, you’re probably already too late.

That quite straightforward mistake is compounded by Concord’s exorbitant development cost. The vast budget that allowed for PlayStation’s characteristic best-in-class visuals and a library of cinematic cutscenes we’ll never see meant that while rivals were released free-to-play, Sony chose to sell the game for $40. Combined with low consumer awareness and tons of quality, free alternatives, Concord’s price put it at a massive — and, as it turns out, fatal — disadvantage.

Content wise, it’s hard to say that Concord was fully baked when it launched. The character kits were awkward at best, the systems — which Firewalk said mixes elements of fighting games and card games — were mostly unclear, and the map designs had much to be desired. Parts of the internet will say that Concord’s characters also doomed the game. Though this is a hard argument to believe considering Valve’s own hero shooter, Deadlock, was released at around the same time to widespread excitement and an exploding player count. And Deadlock doesn’t even have a finalized character roster, though it is free-to-play.

But all this is to say that Concord is a black eye on the PlayStation brand, and not just because of its commercial failure. Sony’s handling the entire situation has been catastrophic. It’s one thing to release a flop, but pulling the game from stores and player accounts barely weeks after launch, and then shutting down the studio it just acquired and scattering its developers into the wilds of 2024’s already miserable games industry, are the panicked decisions of a company totally unsure of where to go next.

This kind of failure and subsequent panic is alien to modern Sony. Since the launch of the PlayStation 4, its gaming brand has been nearly unstoppable, releasing critically-acclaimed game after game and defeating its rivals in the console race. Nintendo has all but exited the console wars, choosing instead to be everyone’s second console of choice, while Xbox has spent years rebuilding itself in an attempt to get close to being second place again. But while games the platform’s signature single-player games like God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, Spider-Man, and The Last of Us racked up awards and sales, the game industry changed. Industry analysts like MIDiA may say that most gamers prefer single-player games, but the truth is that in 2023, 80% of game time was spent on just 66 games, most of which are online games such as Fortnite, Minecraft, Call of Duty, and League of Legends. Live-service is where the attention and dollars are at.

It’s not hard to see why Sony would be interested in pursuing an aggressive live-service games strategy, then, beyond just the potential profits. PlayStation’s first-party teams like Naughty Dog and Insomniac spend nearly half a decade developing their AAA single-player games before they’re released. So, if Sony has a few live-service games to keep players distracted in between major AAA releases, then suddenly it’s got a pretty healthy looking release calendar that alternates between single-player game releases and live-service content.

It was probably with this in mind that Sony acquired Destiny 2 developer Bungie in 2022, its most high-profile live-service studio acquisition to date. That wasn’t all; at the time Sony announced that it planned to have 10 live-service games running by the end of the 2025 fiscal year. Last year, seemingly in response to a behind-the-scenes realization of how difficult a goal that was to achieve, Sony revised that number down to just six. With the shuttering of Concord and numerous rounds of layoffs at Bungie, it’s clear that the PlayStation live-service era is off to a rocky start. So what can Sony do about it?

First, it’s important to understand the current state of play and where Sony’s at in its live-service goals. PlayStation has canceled numerous online games, some officially confirmed, others only known via rumors and reports. Among them are Naughty Dogs’ The Last of Us PvP project, an online Spider-Man game, a live-service Twisted Metal, and Payback, a third-person Destiny spinoff.

As for the projects still reportedly in development, there’s Bungie’s Marathon (which just received an official developer update and, for the moment, seems safe) as well as two rumored Horizon games – one a co-op experience, the other an MMO. Sony also acquired Haven Studios in 2023, a new game studio started by former Ubisoft veteran Jade Raymond. While Haven was purchased for its own upcoming AAA PvP project, Fairgames, Sony also planned for the studio to help bolster its other live-service efforts – until its closing, Haven aided Firewalk in development of Concord.

So far, Sony’s most successful contribution to the live-service genre is via a studio it doesn’t actually own. Arrowhead Studio’s massively successful Helldivers 2, may show the PlayStation Studios logo when it boots up, but it is only published by Sony. And, while it launched to great fanfare, Helldivers’ recent updates have been less well-received by the community, further indicating the long-term challenges PlayStation faces in the live-service arena.

The strategy here is muddled at best. The Last of Us and Spider-Man are both incredibly popular games for Sony, but to not even try to deliver on a multiplayer component when that’s such a big focus for PlayStation this generation feels like a missed opportunity. Meanwhile, Sony is also willing to release games from new studios like Firewalk for $40 in a genre dominated by premium, free-to-play experiences is a huge gamble, unless Sony believes that the PlayStation brand is strong enough to bolster the very first game from a relatively unknown studio. And without even giving Concord time at making any kind of meaningful change after the launch, Sony shutters the studio outright.

In its official statement, Sony says it will “take the lessons learned from Concord and continue to advance our live service capabilities to deliver future growth in this area.” But with so much having gone wrong for Concord, it feels like Sony should look at everything it did with Concord and do the opposite.

Maybe don’t be so arrogant as to believe that the PlayStation name alone is enough to prop up a game in an over-saturated genre. And if a live-service game fails to meet its targets a week after launch, maybe don’t immediately pull it from stores. And, for any prospective developer in talks to join the PlayStation family, maybe assure them that they won’t be shut down the moment after their first game isn’t a hit.

Matt Kim is IGN’s Senior Features Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.

Death Note: Killer Within is an Among Us-esque social deduction game based on the beloved anime, coming to PlayStation and PC on November 5.

Bandai Namco announced the game, which will be available to subscribers of the PlayStation Plus Essential tier at no additional cost, as a “social deduction game of life and death for up to 10 players.” Players split into two teams to deduce who is Kira, who is L, and who has the Death Note.

The game is presented in the style of the little figures used by Near towards the end of the anime and manga, with each player embodying one of the toys as they move around the map. “The Death Note is hidden among the players, leading to a thrilling game of cat and mouse until one team overpowers the other,” Bandai Namco said.

“Each role has its own characteristics, allowing you to master a deep sense of strategy and tactical play. Depending on your assigned role, a wide range of strategies can be formulated and each randomized scenario develops into a high-stakes game of tactics.”

Players collect clues and complete tasks in the Action Phase then meet to figure out who’s Kira in the Meeting Phase, according to further details shared on the PlayStation Blog. If Kira is eliminated then Team L wins, and if L is eliminated then Team Kira wins.

“If you are Kira you will start with the Death Note and use it to eliminate NPCs and other players,” it said. “However, to judge a player, you need an ID with the player’s real name. You can obtain this by staying close to a target for a short amount of time, but don’t act too suspicious or you will be questioned during the Meeting Phase.”

A trailer was released too, which fans can watch above, but it’s otherwise not long before players can jump in and try the game for themselves.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

Outlast is getting a film adaptation, and it’s in the hands of a studio well-versed in the horror genre.

Saw studio Lionsgate, which is also behind series like The Hunger Games and John Wick, announced on Wednesday a deal with developer Red Barrels to bring Outlast to the big screen. The adaptation (which was first revealed by Bloody Disgusting) is being led by horror producer Roy Lee (It, Barbarian, Late Night with the Devil).

JT Perry, who served as the primary writer on the Outlast games, is working on the screenplay. In a statement, Perry called the adaptation “an incredible opportunity to dive deeper into the characters and killers we love.”