Auto Added by WPeMatico
Right, here’s your prescribed dose of actual nice news in the games industry for the week. Hytale is back from the dead! Despite a decade’s worth of development, the game was canned with Hypixel Studios forced to completely shutter. Hypixel founder Simon Collins-Laflamme did say he wanted to talk to previous owner Riot about re-acquiring Hytale, and as it turns out, that’s exactly what he did!
It’s been a while since Yoko Taro has made a game, hasn’t it? That last public (key word here) thing he worked on was a mobile game about how Sega controls pretty much everything called 404 Game Re:set in 2023 (it shut down in 2024). Before that was a trio of Voice of Cards games in 2021/22, and before that the Nier Replicant not-quite-a-remake and also now defunct mobile game Nier Reincarnation. In terms of the big thing that everyone wants, a non-gacha Nier game, things have been very quiet, but that can be said of Taro’s work as a whole. Apparently, though, that’s not for lack of trying.
Prologue: Go Wayback is due out in early access later this week, and ahead of that developer PlayerUnknown Productions laid out a little roadmap of updates you can expect in the coming… months? They didn’t specify, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing – I think setting expectations of when certain features may arrive encourages a more demanding audience – but they did give a good overview of what’s to come.
Is this what life is now? Witnessing massive, incredibly successful companies turning to AI to get advice on legal proceedings? You don’t need to pinch me, I’ve already done it, and this world is real. The company in question here is Subnautica 2 publisher Krafton, who you might remember are being sued by three ex-leads of the game; developer of the game Unknown Worlds are (technically) also suing this trio of developers in kind. This all came about because Krafton delayed Subnautica 2, a decision that meant Unknown Worlds wouldn’t get a $250 million bonus. And it seems that the publisher even asked ever-reliable ChatGPT for advice on how they could avoid doing just that.
Last week saw Valve reveal three pieces of hardware. The Steam Machine, a console-like mini PC you plug into your TV. A newly updated Steam Controller, which combines the original’s trackpad-style thumbpads with the double thumbsticks of a regular gamepad. And also the Steam Frame, a new virtual reality headset that streams games from your PC and opens up your whole game library to be played in the privacy of your own goggles.
While I have a default thrill setting that engages whenever Valve announces new hardware, it’s been interesting to see the variety of responses to the hardware reveals. I was surprised, in particular, by the muted response to the Steam Machine in our comments.
November digs in. The conveyor belt of crowns, clowns and clones that is Videogaming rattles onward through the midnight forest. The rains swept past over the weekend and now the mud is waist-deep, worryingly responsive, and rank with the stench of neglected deckbuilders. Several sedan chairs carrying former BioWare creative leads are caught in a wave of slop, becoming a disorderly barricade of people crying out for Femshep to come save them from the GAAS. Tencent executives rush over with handfuls of rope, but whether they mean to drag the afflicted free or bind their limbs is unclear.
Ubisoft’s UK publishing arm have filed a strategic report for the year ending March 2025 in which they warn that they expect yearly revenue to fall in the current fiscal year, ending March 2026. They attribute this partly to slumping sales of physical copies of games, and more broadly to the fact that people are fixating on a fistful of mega-popular games at the expense of all others, with subscription and streaming services like Microsoft’s Game Pass making us all feel less inclined to buy individual new games. Plus ça change.
How do you Monday, babe? By getting a good night’s sleep, rising with the sparrows, eating a wholesome meal, and settling down at your desk with an airy mind and a glad heart? Or do you fester aimlessly till 5 in the morning then immediately watch 30 minutes of neck-sucking, dismemberment and plague because it speaks to your sorely disquieted soul?
There is no time to answer, for I have already embedded the latest talkthrough video for Rebel Wolves and Bandai Namco’s medieval fantasy action RPG The Blood Of Dawnwalker, which still looks like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt plus vampires.
I’m not sure I’ve ever been so quickly transported back in time than I have in I Write Games Not Tragedies. It’s not that I completely relate to what takes place in the game, but its sense of place, of atmosphere and feeling, is one I understand in my soul. The emo amongst you have probably already caught on to the vibe with its title, and for those of you that haven’t, the game’s aesthetics, writing, and soundscape certainly will.
I think Horizon Zero Dawn was much more of a turning point for Sony than most people really discuss. The argument for PlayStation used to be its exclusives, those tentpole games like Uncharted, Ratchet and Clank, LittleBigPlanet, the list does go on but you get the point. On the PS5, completely original first-party games feel few and far between, as Sony has joined in on the whole intellectual property above all else train that every other company has hopped aboard. So hearing Guerilla Games’ studio director Jan-Bart van Beek say the Horizon series was always thought about as a multiplayer game feels like the last piece of the puzzle has been inserted.
