Tag Archives: Video Games

Steam defined the modern video game industry

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Gather ’round, children, and let me tell you a story about the old bugaboo we used to call DRM.

Digital Rights Management was the beast under every gamer’s bed in the mid-2000s, an invisible bit of software baked into game discs that dictated and tracked player behavior under the guise of preventing piracy. DRM software, like SecuROM, limited the times a game could be downloaded and forced players to regularly connect to the internet for authentication checks, at a time when less than half of American adults had reliable broadband connections. DRM features soured the releases of BioShock, Mass Effect and Spore, and by 2010, anti-piracy software had rendered Assassin’s Creed 2 and Splinter-Cell: Conviction unplayable. When Microsoft attempted to release the Xbox One with always-on DRM features in 2013, intense vitriol from fans forced the company to reverse its plans at the 11th hour. There were lawsuits. DRM was a curse word.

Meanwhile, Valve was building out Steam. When it landed in 2003, the digital PC storefront was designed to streamline the patch process for games like Counter-Strike and make it easier for Valve to implement anti-piracy and anti-cheat measures. Steam was made to be a DRM machine. In 2004, with the release of Half-Life 2, Valve made Steam a requirement for every player, and even those who’d purchased new, physical copies of the game had to boot up the launcher first. There was some low-level grumbling, but PC players were used to being lab rats, and Half-Life 2 was good enough to drown out the dissent. Steam adoption skyrocketed. So, naturally, Valve turned it into a store for third-party games.

While other publishers were fighting with players over DRM features in individual titles and consoles, Steam quietly added dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of games each year. Today, Steam has 132 million monthly active users and an estimated 103,000 games, more than any other mainstream distribution service. Nearly all of these titles are playable only while connected to Steam — even after paying full price, even after downloading, even in offline mode. This has done nothing to stop Steam from becoming more essential to more players each year.

“Competition is good, but the PC market has no competition,” Super Meat Boy co-creator Tommy Refenes told Engadget in 2018. “There is only Steam.”

The widespread adoption of anti-piracy software marked an era in video games where players felt like they didn’t really own the products they were buying. And then, this practice became normal. Broadband saturation continued to climb, the market for physical media dissolved into pixelated dust and streaming entertainment media found its foothold. Today, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, Epic Games and most major publishers have their own digital stores with proprietary DRM features. However, Steam is entrenched as the industry’s largest DRM machine because it’s the most popular digital games storefront, period. And if the last 20 years are any indication, that’s not going to change any time soon.

Did you hear that? That was the sound of our collective Steam libraries, representing trillions of dollars in purchased games, expelling a dusty sigh of relief. Because if Steam disappears, all of our games do too.

It’s a chilling thought — Steam’s demise would enact immediate, catastrophic chaos across the video game industry, gutting players’ libraries and cutting off one of the most direct points of sale for developers of all sizes. Steam feels too big to fail, and Valve operates it as such. Valve is a private company valued at $6.5 billion in 2021, and CEO Gabe Newell, himself, is a billionaire. The studio is similar to Nintendo in that it’s able to ignore gaming trends and carry on doing whatever it wants at any given time, while Steam prints money and its most ardent fans cheer the studio on with friendly memes. Hail, Gaben!

Steam popularized the 70/30 revenue split, giving developers on the platform 70 percent of the money their games generate and pocketing the rest. Apple and Google copied this formula with their mobile app stores. When it debuted in 2018, the Epic Games Store shaped its entire marketing campaign around taking on Steam and dismantling its rev-share ratio, claiming it was exploitative and unfair, especially to indies. Epic offered every developer an aggressive split of 88/12, and CEO Tim Sweeney literally dared Valve to match it.

Valve barely blinked. The studio shifted its Steam payout schedule slightly, offering a 75 percent cut on games that made more than $10 million, and 80 percent on anything that brought in more than $50 million. Epic eventually shifted its attention away from Valve and moved to a more vulnerable target in the rev-share space: Apple.

“If you were running a store without competition and you were making billions of dollars a year, how much time and energy would you dedicate to making it better?” Refenes asked in 2018, during the launch of the Epic Games Store. “How much money would you spend to improve the experience for everyone that uses it, if the end result is you would make the same or possibly less money? My answer is, The minimum amount of time, effort and money required.”

Valve has become more hands-off with Steam as it’s aged. In the platform’s early days, developers would pitch their games to actual people at Valve, who would launch a handful of projects on the storefront every week, ensuring plenty of attention for each title. For small studios, getting a game on Steam was like hitting the jackpot. This changed in 2012, when Valve implemented Greenlight, a process that allowed players to choose which games would make it to Steam (after developers submitted a $100 entry fee). Greenlight eventually evolved into Early Access — a system still around today and the standard on other platforms too — and the number of games on Steam rose astronomically in just a few years.

In 2013, Steam added 435 new games, according to Steamdb. In 2017, it added 6,947 games. This was a tumultuous period for developers, especially those who started production when Steam was a curated space, but ended up releasing their games into an unregulated and oversaturated marketplace.

Indie developers Ben Ruiz and Matthew Wegner began building the stylish brawler Aztez in 2010, and it received a ton of pre-release hype. Aztez finally went live on Steam on August 1, 2017, but was immediately lost in the crowd.

“There were 40 other games that launched on August 1,” Wegner told Engadget in October 2017.

Ruiz added, “If I was paying attention to Steam, maybe I wouldn’t be so blindsided by what happened, but I’m also not necessarily sure what I would’ve done differently. If I’d have known like, oh, it’s a saturated market now — what the fuck do you do? …There’s a billion indie games that come out on Steam every single day.”

Today, Steam is a self-sustained game-distributing machine with more than 100,000 titles and counting. Getting on Steam no longer equates instant success for any developer, but it’s a necessary aspect of most release plans. There are other options: GOG, operated by The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 publisher CD Projekt, is one of just a few digital distributors committed to DRM-free game purchases; large publishers like Ubisoft, EA and Microsoft all have Steam-like storefronts and the Epic Games Store has a superior revenue split for developers. Still, giants like Microsoft and EA find it necessary to simultaneously release their games on Steam, handing Valve a cut of each purchase in the process.

As a private company raking in endless piles of Steam cash, Valve has the freedom to operate on its own timeline. The company famously has a flat hierarchy with no strict management structure, and developers are encouraged to work on pet projects or just generally follow their hearts.

As a result, Valve is an incredibly rich company that doesn’t produce much. Its games are legendary, but there’s a running joke in the industry that Valve can’t count to three: Half-Life 2: Episode Two and Team Fortress 2 came out in 2007. Left 4 Dead 2 came out in 2009. Portal 2 came out in 2011. In 2020, the VR game Half-Life: Alyx landed as an entrée into Valve’s Index headset, which came out the previous year and cost $1,000. The studio is still ignoring an extremely disruptive bot invasion that began consuming TF2 in 2020, despite consistent pleas for support from dedicated players. In December 2023, Valve replaced Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with Counter-Strike 2, interrupting an ESL Pro League tournament in the process.

Meanwhile, many of the writers who helped create Valve’s most iconic franchises left the studio around 2017, after years of inactivity. In 2018, Valve hired all 12 developers at Firewatch studio Campo Santo, who were at the time working on a very-rad-looking new game, In the Valley of Gods. There have been no updates from that team since.

Steam’s unwavering success has helped turn Valve into a senior resort community for computer science nerds, where game developers go to live out their final years surrounded by fantastic amenities, tinkering and unsupervised. It’s a lovely scenario, really. It’s just not particularly productive.

Matt T. Wood worked at Valve for 17 years, helping to build Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, Portal 2, CS:GO and both episodes of Half-Life 2. He left in 2019 and is now preparing to release his first independent game, Little Kitty, Big City.

“Valve talks a lot about, like, you can do anything you want,” Wood told Engadget in 2023. “And it’s like, well — that’s never true. Valve has a direction, and they have a trajectory. And so, for me, it was realizing that the direction that Valve was going in was not a place that I wanted to be long-term. …They were sitting on their laurels a little bit, and it’s like they weren’t really challenging themselves, taking risks or doing anything. Steam’s making a lot of money so they don’t really have to.”

Little Kitty, Big City is coming to Steam, of course.

Valve is supremely skilled at making money off of other people’s work, and Steam epitomizes this trait. The company did the same thing with Steam Machines back in 2014 too: Valve created a Steam Controller, but it never actually built a Steam Machine. Instead, Valve licensed its name to PC manufacturers, and these companies built boxes to beam Steam into people’s living rooms. Valve offloaded manufacturing costs while collecting market data about actual demand for quasi-PC, quasi-console hardware. Valve never ended up making its own box (unless you view the Steam Deck as a Frankenstein hybrid of the Steam Controller and Steam Machines, which I do).

The Steam Deck is the most exciting thing to come out of Valve in decades, and that’s largely because the company actually seems dedicated to improving and supporting it. Valve seemingly gave up on VR hardware after the Index, but less than two years after the release of the Steam Deck, Valve dropped an OLED version featuring a gorgeous screen and other improvements.

The Steam Deck is, of course, all about Steam. Just like Half-Life 2 was a clever ruse to get more people registered on Steam back in 2004, the Steam Deck is positioned to dominate the handheld PC market in 2024, and it comes with Steam installed.

Today, digital distribution is the backbone of the industry (which I guess makes DRM the spinal fluid), and Steam is the undisputed leader in this space.

Steam’s legacy is a vast and varied landscape of games serving millions of individual libraries, some thousands of titles deep — all of which can disappear with a snap if Valve decides to stop, sell or pivot. It’s a storefront that set the standard and refused to stop growing. It’s entire studios of artists and writers devoured, and beloved franchises left to rot. It’s a stranglehold that allows Valve to ignore market pressure from consumers, creators and competitors.

Behind the curtain of the video game industry, there’s Steam, constantly churning, powering everything.

To celebrate Engadget's 20th anniversary, we're taking a look back at the products and services that have changed the industry since March 2, 2004.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/steam-defined-the-modern-video-game-industry-163021533.html?src=rss

Steam defined the modern video game industry

Posted on by

Gather ’round, children, and let me tell you a story about the old bugaboo we used to call DRM.

Digital Rights Management was the beast under every gamer’s bed in the mid-2000s, an invisible bit of software baked into game discs that dictated and tracked player behavior under the guise of preventing piracy. DRM software, like SecuROM, limited the times a game could be downloaded and forced players to regularly connect to the internet for authentication checks, at a time when less than half of American adults had reliable broadband connections. DRM features soured the releases of BioShock, Mass Effect and Spore, and by 2010, anti-piracy software had rendered Assassin’s Creed 2 and Splinter-Cell: Conviction unplayable. When Microsoft attempted to release the Xbox One with always-on DRM features in 2013, intense vitriol from fans forced the company to reverse its plans at the 11th hour. There were lawsuits. DRM was a curse word.

Meanwhile, Valve was building out Steam. When it landed in 2003, the digital PC storefront was designed to streamline the patch process for games like Counter-Strike and make it easier for Valve to implement anti-piracy and anti-cheat measures. Steam was made to be a DRM machine. In 2004, with the release of Half-Life 2, Valve made Steam a requirement for every player, and even those who’d purchased new, physical copies of the game had to boot up the launcher first. There was some low-level grumbling, but PC players were used to being lab rats, and Half-Life 2 was good enough to drown out the dissent. Steam adoption skyrocketed. So, naturally, Valve turned it into a store for third-party games.

While other publishers were fighting with players over DRM features in individual titles and consoles, Steam quietly added dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of games each year. Today, Steam has 132 million monthly active users and an estimated 103,000 games, more than any other mainstream distribution service. Nearly all of these titles are playable only while connected to Steam — even after paying full price, even after downloading, even in offline mode. This has done nothing to stop Steam from becoming more essential to more players each year.

“Competition is good, but the PC market has no competition,” Super Meat Boy co-creator Tommy Refenes told Engadget in 2018. “There is only Steam.”

The widespread adoption of anti-piracy software marked an era in video games where players felt like they didn’t really own the products they were buying. And then, this practice became normal. Broadband saturation continued to climb, the market for physical media dissolved into pixelated dust and streaming entertainment media found its foothold. Today, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, Epic Games and most major publishers have their own digital stores with proprietary DRM features. However, Steam is entrenched as the industry’s largest DRM machine because it’s the most popular digital games storefront, period. And if the last 20 years are any indication, that’s not going to change any time soon.

Did you hear that? That was the sound of our collective Steam libraries, representing trillions of dollars in purchased games, expelling a dusty sigh of relief. Because if Steam disappears, all of our games do too.

It’s a chilling thought — Steam’s demise would enact immediate, catastrophic chaos across the video game industry, gutting players’ libraries and cutting off one of the most direct points of sale for developers of all sizes. Steam feels too big to fail, and Valve operates it as such. Valve is a private company valued at $6.5 billion in 2021, and CEO Gabe Newell, himself, is a billionaire. The studio is similar to Nintendo in that it’s able to ignore gaming trends and carry on doing whatever it wants at any given time, while Steam prints money and its most ardent fans cheer the studio on with friendly memes. Hail, Gaben!

Steam popularized the 70/30 revenue split, giving developers on the platform 70 percent of the money their games generate and pocketing the rest. Apple and Google copied this formula with their mobile app stores. When it debuted in 2018, the Epic Games Store shaped its entire marketing campaign around taking on Steam and dismantling its rev-share ratio, claiming it was exploitative and unfair, especially to indies. Epic offered every developer an aggressive split of 88/12, and CEO Tim Sweeney literally dared Valve to match it.

Valve barely blinked. The studio shifted its Steam payout schedule slightly, offering a 75 percent cut on games that made more than $10 million, and 80 percent on anything that brought in more than $50 million. Epic eventually shifted its attention away from Valve and moved to a more vulnerable target in the rev-share space: Apple.

“If you were running a store without competition and you were making billions of dollars a year, how much time and energy would you dedicate to making it better?” Refenes asked in 2018, during the launch of the Epic Games Store. “How much money would you spend to improve the experience for everyone that uses it, if the end result is you would make the same or possibly less money? My answer is, The minimum amount of time, effort and money required.”

Valve has become more hands-off with Steam as it’s aged. In the platform’s early days, developers would pitch their games to actual people at Valve, who would launch a handful of projects on the storefront every week, ensuring plenty of attention for each title. For small studios, getting a game on Steam was like hitting the jackpot. This changed in 2012, when Valve implemented Greenlight, a process that allowed players to choose which games would make it to Steam (after developers submitted a $100 entry fee). Greenlight eventually evolved into Early Access — a system still around today and the standard on other platforms too — and the number of games on Steam rose astronomically in just a few years.

In 2013, Steam added 435 new games, according to Steamdb. In 2017, it added 6,947 games. This was a tumultuous period for developers, especially those who started production when Steam was a curated space, but ended up releasing their games into an unregulated and oversaturated marketplace.

Indie developers Ben Ruiz and Matthew Wegner began building the stylish brawler Aztez in 2010, and it received a ton of pre-release hype. Aztez finally went live on Steam on August 1, 2017, but was immediately lost in the crowd.

“There were 40 other games that launched on August 1,” Wegner told Engadget in October 2017.

Ruiz added, “If I was paying attention to Steam, maybe I wouldn’t be so blindsided by what happened, but I’m also not necessarily sure what I would’ve done differently. If I’d have known like, oh, it’s a saturated market now — what the fuck do you do? …There’s a billion indie games that come out on Steam every single day.”

Today, Steam is a self-sustained game-distributing machine with more than 100,000 titles and counting. Getting on Steam no longer equates instant success for any developer, but it’s a necessary aspect of most release plans. There are other options: GOG, operated by The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 publisher CD Projekt, is one of just a few digital distributors committed to DRM-free game purchases; large publishers like Ubisoft, EA and Microsoft all have Steam-like storefronts and the Epic Games Store has a superior revenue split for developers. Still, giants like Microsoft and EA find it necessary to simultaneously release their games on Steam, handing Valve a cut of each purchase in the process.

As a private company raking in endless piles of Steam cash, Valve has the freedom to operate on its own timeline. The company famously has a flat hierarchy with no strict management structure, and developers are encouraged to work on pet projects or just generally follow their hearts.

As a result, Valve is an incredibly rich company that doesn’t produce much. Its games are legendary, but there’s a running joke in the industry that Valve can’t count to three: Half-Life 2: Episode Two and Team Fortress 2 came out in 2007. Left 4 Dead 2 came out in 2009. Portal 2 came out in 2011. In 2020, the VR game Half-Life: Alyx landed as an entrée into Valve’s Index headset, which came out the previous year and cost $1,000. The studio is still ignoring an extremely disruptive bot invasion that began consuming TF2 in 2020, despite consistent pleas for support from dedicated players. In December 2023, Valve replaced Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with Counter-Strike 2, interrupting an ESL Pro League tournament in the process.

Meanwhile, many of the writers who helped create Valve’s most iconic franchises left the studio around 2017, after years of inactivity. In 2018, Valve hired all 12 developers at Firewatch studio Campo Santo, who were at the time working on a very-rad-looking new game, In the Valley of Gods. There have been no updates from that team since.

Steam’s unwavering success has helped turn Valve into a senior resort community for computer science nerds, where game developers go to live out their final years surrounded by fantastic amenities, tinkering and unsupervised. It’s a lovely scenario, really. It’s just not particularly productive.

Matt T. Wood worked at Valve for 17 years, helping to build Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, Portal 2, CS:GO and both episodes of Half-Life 2. He left in 2019 and is now preparing to release his first independent game, Little Kitty, Big City.

“Valve talks a lot about, like, you can do anything you want,” Wood told Engadget in 2023. “And it’s like, well — that’s never true. Valve has a direction, and they have a trajectory. And so, for me, it was realizing that the direction that Valve was going in was not a place that I wanted to be long-term. …They were sitting on their laurels a little bit, and it’s like they weren’t really challenging themselves, taking risks or doing anything. Steam’s making a lot of money so they don’t really have to.”

Little Kitty, Big City is coming to Steam, of course.

Valve is supremely skilled at making money off of other people’s work, and Steam epitomizes this trait. The company did the same thing with Steam Machines back in 2014 too: Valve created a Steam Controller, but it never actually built a Steam Machine. Instead, Valve licensed its name to PC manufacturers, and these companies built boxes to beam Steam into people’s living rooms. Valve offloaded manufacturing costs while collecting market data about actual demand for quasi-PC, quasi-console hardware. Valve never ended up making its own box (unless you view the Steam Deck as a Frankenstein hybrid of the Steam Controller and Steam Machines, which I do).

The Steam Deck is the most exciting thing to come out of Valve in decades, and that’s largely because the company actually seems dedicated to improving and supporting it. Valve seemingly gave up on VR hardware after the Index, but less than two years after the release of the Steam Deck, Valve dropped an OLED version featuring a gorgeous screen and other improvements.

The Steam Deck is, of course, all about Steam. Just like Half-Life 2 was a clever ruse to get more people registered on Steam back in 2004, the Steam Deck is positioned to dominate the handheld PC market in 2024, and it comes with Steam installed.

Today, digital distribution is the backbone of the industry (which I guess makes DRM the spinal fluid), and Steam is the undisputed leader in this space.

Steam’s legacy is a vast and varied landscape of games serving millions of individual libraries, some thousands of titles deep — all of which can disappear with a snap if Valve decides to stop, sell or pivot. It’s a storefront that set the standard and refused to stop growing. It’s entire studios of artists and writers devoured, and beloved franchises left to rot. It’s a stranglehold that allows Valve to ignore market pressure from consumers, creators and competitors.

Behind the curtain of the video game industry, there’s Steam, constantly churning, powering everything.

To celebrate Engadget's 20th anniversary, we're taking a look back at the products and services that have changed the industry since March 2, 2004.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/steam-defined-the-modern-video-game-industry-163021533.html?src=rss

The Morning After: Lenovo’s sci-fi see-through laptop, Nintendo versus emulators and more

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We're back, having had to say goodbye and part with some great coworkers friends here at Engadget last week. Since then, we've covered everything at note at MWC 2024, including some sci-fi-level concepts from Lenovo that may never make it to stores but can still, well, hold our desensitized tech journalist's attention. Meanwhile, Nintendo is, once again, taking emulators and pirates to task in the courts. But this time could prove crucial for the future of emulators. A reminder: Nintendo's new console is set to launch in 2025. Coming up next week, Engadget's 20th anniversary. We're older than YouTube!

This week:

💻🛸: Lenovo’s concept laptop looks like a Star Trek prop:

🏴‍☠️🎮: Nintendo steps up its fight against game piracy:

💃📞: The Barbie phone debuts at MWC 2024

Read this:

I write reviews too! Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth takes the characters and world reintroduced with Remake and does a better job at scaling it all up. Instead of playing in a single city, this time, it’s a world tour. There’s also an expanded roster of playable characters, almost doubling Remake’s total. But there's only one big question: Does Aerith survive?

Like email more than video? Subscribe right here for daily reports, direct to your inbox.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-lenovos-sci-fi-see-through-laptop-nintendo-versus-emulators-and-more-160031142.html?src=rss

The Morning After: Lenovo’s sci-fi see-through laptop, Nintendo versus emulators and more

Posted on by

We're back, having had to say goodbye and part with some great coworkers friends here at Engadget last week. Since then, we've covered everything at note at MWC 2024, including some sci-fi-level concepts from Lenovo that may never make it to stores but can still, well, hold our desensitized tech journalist's attention. Meanwhile, Nintendo is, once again, taking emulators and pirates to task in the courts. But this time could prove crucial for the future of emulators. A reminder: Nintendo's new console is set to launch in 2025. Coming up next week, Engadget's 20th anniversary. We're older than YouTube!

This week:

💻🛸: Lenovo’s concept laptop looks like a Star Trek prop:

🏴‍☠️🎮: Nintendo steps up its fight against game piracy:

💃📞: The Barbie phone debuts at MWC 2024

Read this:

I write reviews too! Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth takes the characters and world reintroduced with Remake and does a better job at scaling it all up. Instead of playing in a single city, this time, it’s a world tour. There’s also an expanded roster of playable characters, almost doubling Remake’s total. But there's only one big question: Does Aerith survive?

Like email more than video? Subscribe right here for daily reports, direct to your inbox.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-lenovos-sci-fi-see-through-laptop-nintendo-versus-emulators-and-more-160031142.html?src=rss

Activision studio Toys for Bob is going independent after sweeping Xbox layoffs

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Activision studio Toys for Bob has announced that it's leaving the corporate rat race and is spinning off as an independent developer. This comes just weeks after Activision Blizzard's parent company Microsoft instituted sweeping layoffs at Toys for Bob that impacted 86 employees. That’s more than half of the entire staff.

The developer said the choice to go indie will allow it to return to “being a small and nimble studio”, harkening back to its early days of the 1980s and 1990s when it made hit titles like Star Control. To that end, the company says it's already developing a new game, though there won’t be any official announcements for a while.

Additionally, there looks to be no hard feelings for former parent company Activision and, uh, grandparent company Microsoft. Toys for Bob said that both entities have “been extremely supportive of our new direction and we’re confident that we will continue to work closely together as part of our future.”

Toys for Bob is primarily known for the Skylanders franchise, but was also behind the well-reviewed Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time and the Spyro Reignited Trilogy. It’s also been involved with creating content for Call of Duty: Warzone.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/activision-studio-toys-for-bob-is-going-independent-after-sweeping-xbox-layoffs-201548396.html?src=rss

Activision studio Toys for Bob is going independent after sweeping Xbox layoffs

Posted on by

Activision studio Toys for Bob has announced that it's leaving the corporate rat race and is spinning off as an independent developer. This comes just weeks after Activision Blizzard's parent company Microsoft instituted sweeping layoffs at Toys for Bob that impacted 86 employees. That’s more than half of the entire staff.

The developer said the choice to go indie will allow it to return to “being a small and nimble studio”, harkening back to its early days of the 1980s and 1990s when it made hit titles like Star Control. To that end, the company says it's already developing a new game, though there won’t be any official announcements for a while.

Additionally, there looks to be no hard feelings for former parent company Activision and, uh, grandparent company Microsoft. Toys for Bob said that both entities have “been extremely supportive of our new direction and we’re confident that we will continue to work closely together as part of our future.”

Toys for Bob is primarily known for the Skylanders franchise, but was also behind the well-reviewed Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time and the Spyro Reignited Trilogy. It’s also been involved with creating content for Call of Duty: Warzone.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/activision-studio-toys-for-bob-is-going-independent-after-sweeping-xbox-layoffs-201548396.html?src=rss

Layoffs and weird PR emails | This week’s gaming news

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Let's all take a breath. Layoffs are still churning in the video game industry, even as the frigid winter air is beginning to thaw. Amid the turmoil of these past few months, there are still things to be excited about: new games and hardware, the evolution of established franchises, and plenty of small teams building surprises to shake up the status quo. Look at all of the rad things happening over at Playdate for just one example of positive momentum in video games (we'll talk more about this next week).

Breathe in, breathe out.

Now, let's dive back into the news cycle:

This week's stories

PlayStation layoffs

The layoffs crisis in video games isn’t slowing down, and the latest company to announce drastic staffing cuts is PlayStation. Sony on Tuesday fired roughly 900 people from its PlayStation division and fully shut down its London Studio, which had been building a co-op multiplayer game for PS5. Insomniac, Naughty Dog and Guerrilla all lost employees, despite being behind some of the platform’s most successful games in recent memory. First-party studio Firesprite was also hit by the layoffs, and it reportedly had to cancel a live-service Twisted Metal project. It’s barely March, but already more than 7,000 video game workers have been laid off in 2024; last year, more than 9,000 people in the industry lost their jobs to layoffs.

Happy Pokémon Day!

February 27 was Pokémon Day, and in celebration, Nintendo revealed two new games: Pokémon Legends Z-A and Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket. Pokémon Legends Z-A is set in Lumiose City, which you might remember from Pokémon X and Y on the 3DS, and it looks like it features Mega Evolutions. Pokémon Legends Z-A is due to hit Switch in 2025. The other title, Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket, is a mobile game that should land on Android and iOS devices by the end of the year. It’s exactly what it sounds like — Nintendo is putting the physical card-opening mechanic inside your phone, complete with flashy animations and addictive sound effects when you rip off the digital packaging. You’ll also be able to engage in quick battles. Nintendo has clarified that Pocket will not have NFTs, but it is described as “free to start,” so expect microtransactions.

Random PR roundup

It’s been a strange and slow week here in Engadget video game land, so I thought we’d have some fun this episode. As tech reporters, we receive ridiculous emails from startups and PR agencies literally every day, and even though we don’t end up covering many of the proposed products, some of the messages themselves deserve a moment in the spotlight. Many of the pitches we get are just silly or tone deaf, but some of them are outright dystopian. And honestly, I thought you all might enjoy seeing some of the weirdness that hits our inboxes.

This is all meant in good fun — I appreciate the communications teams who are just trying to sell their stuff in creative ways. The real enemy here, as always, is capitalism.

So, here are some emails that recently found their way into my inbox and made me go wut:

GameScent - New Groundbreaking Device Enhances Player Immersion by Releasing Gameplay Corresponding Scents

“As players dive into a game, GameScent’s patent-pending adaptor captures audio in real-time. These real-time audio cues are processed by GameScent's innovative AI to release scents that correspond with the on-screen action. Inhale the smoky aroma of battle, the exhilarating scent of speeding race cars, the calming fragrance of a forest, or the fresh smell of rain after a storm.”

Unsurprisingly, this little doodad comes with replaceable scent cartridges, though it's unclear how to actually buy those at the moment. Scents include gunfire, explosion, racing cars, blood, sports arena and other brotastic flavors.

Is this... cool? There's definitely a fun idea here about the future of immersion, right? Or I've completely lost the plot. Either could be true.

Seeking Products for Pickleball Stories? (Samples Available)

Ma'am, this is Engadget.

Deconstructeam Delivers a Valentine's Day Surprise of Cosmic Proportions

This was for the game The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, and the surprise was a huge dildo. I thought the whole email was cute, actually — it was tasteful and coyly advertised a giveaway in partnership with a well-known adult toy company. The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is a sexy game and it stars a muscular behemoth the size of a planet, so it all made sense. It just didn’t fit in our general news feed, ya know?

(Story Idea:) Here’s Doom Running On A Robotic Lawn Mower: Yes, A Robotic Lawn Mower! (You Have To See It To Believe It!) (Video Included)

"I am reaching out with a great story that is sure to go viral… This spring, Husqvarna will make the iconic 1993 video game DOOM, available to play on the company’s robotic lawn mowers."

I find this email charming because it’s just a traditional, infomercial-style email with lots of unnecessary exclamation points and parenthesis. I respect it. But seriously, are we still doing this Doom thing? Next you’ll be asking me if this lawn mower can run Crysis and making jokes about Leeroy Jenkins, and I’m just here in 2024, begging for some new references.

The best part of this one is the fact that, after I added it to my list of silly emails, we actually hit this as news on Engadget dot com. Who's the joke now? (It's me).

Meet My Regina | PC Preview – Dickhead-Destroying Extravaganza Cookie Cutter

“I’ve got something to show you, Jessica.

She’s one of the most incredible things I’ve ever held between my legs.

She’s small but tough and can take a beating.

And everyone knows she’s smart because she has a British accent.

She’ll giggle if you tickle her just right.

And she even glows in the dark!

Are you ready to meet her?

Well, are you?

Don’t be shy now.

Good. Well, here she is!”

I asked to be removed from this list.

Bonus Content

  • In more layoffs news, Until Dawn studio Supermassive Games fired about a third of its workforce, or roughly 90 employees, and the team is reorganizing. Also, indie studio Die Gut Fabrik, which created Sportsfriends, Johann Sebastian Joust and Saltsea Chronicles, has halted production amid funding issues and developers there are looking for other jobs.

  • Nintendo is suing Yuzu, a popular and long-running emulator that allows players to put their Switch games on other platforms. Nintendo argues that the app is "facilitating piracy at a colossal scale,” and says it illegally circumvents DMCA protections. Nintendo wants Yuzu shut down and the company is seeking damages.

  • Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth finally comes out on February 29 and our review from Mat Smith is live now. He’s a really big Final Fantasy nerd, and he really liked Rebirth.

Now Playing

Home Safety Hotline is the perfect game to play at your desk, on the PC, so you can let the mid-90s computer interface fully engulf your senses. In this game, you take calls from people complaining about pests and paranormal creatures invading their homes, and using a detailed reference guide, you identify what’s going on and help them sort it out. Or, you get it wrong and get fired while a family of three screams for their lives on the other end of the line. There’s also a broader meta-horror unfurling in the background, and I’m having a lovely, spooky time sorting through all of it. Home Safety Hotline is out now on Steam.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/layoffs-and-weird-pr-emails--this-weeks-gaming-news-173041054.html?src=rss

Layoffs and weird PR emails | This week’s gaming news

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Let's all take a breath. Layoffs are still churning in the video game industry, even as the frigid winter air is beginning to thaw. Amid the turmoil of these past few months, there are still things to be excited about: new games and hardware, the evolution of established franchises, and plenty of small teams building surprises to shake up the status quo. Look at all of the rad things happening over at Playdate for just one example of positive momentum in video games (we'll talk more about this next week).

Breathe in, breathe out.

Now, let's dive back into the news cycle:

This week's stories

PlayStation layoffs

The layoffs crisis in video games isn’t slowing down, and the latest company to announce drastic staffing cuts is PlayStation. Sony on Tuesday fired roughly 900 people from its PlayStation division and fully shut down its London Studio, which had been building a co-op multiplayer game for PS5. Insomniac, Naughty Dog and Guerrilla all lost employees, despite being behind some of the platform’s most successful games in recent memory. First-party studio Firesprite was also hit by the layoffs, and it reportedly had to cancel a live-service Twisted Metal project. It’s barely March, but already more than 7,000 video game workers have been laid off in 2024; last year, more than 9,000 people in the industry lost their jobs to layoffs.

Happy Pokémon Day!

February 27 was Pokémon Day, and in celebration, Nintendo revealed two new games: Pokémon Legends Z-A and Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket. Pokémon Legends Z-A is set in Lumiose City, which you might remember from Pokémon X and Y on the 3DS, and it looks like it features Mega Evolutions. Pokémon Legends Z-A is due to hit Switch in 2025. The other title, Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket, is a mobile game that should land on Android and iOS devices by the end of the year. It’s exactly what it sounds like — Nintendo is putting the physical card-opening mechanic inside your phone, complete with flashy animations and addictive sound effects when you rip off the digital packaging. You’ll also be able to engage in quick battles. Nintendo has clarified that Pocket will not have NFTs, but it is described as “free to start,” so expect microtransactions.

Random PR roundup

It’s been a strange and slow week here in Engadget video game land, so I thought we’d have some fun this episode. As tech reporters, we receive ridiculous emails from startups and PR agencies literally every day, and even though we don’t end up covering many of the proposed products, some of the messages themselves deserve a moment in the spotlight. Many of the pitches we get are just silly or tone deaf, but some of them are outright dystopian. And honestly, I thought you all might enjoy seeing some of the weirdness that hits our inboxes.

This is all meant in good fun — I appreciate the communications teams who are just trying to sell their stuff in creative ways. The real enemy here, as always, is capitalism.

So, here are some emails that recently found their way into my inbox and made me go wut:

GameScent - New Groundbreaking Device Enhances Player Immersion by Releasing Gameplay Corresponding Scents

“As players dive into a game, GameScent’s patent-pending adaptor captures audio in real-time. These real-time audio cues are processed by GameScent's innovative AI to release scents that correspond with the on-screen action. Inhale the smoky aroma of battle, the exhilarating scent of speeding race cars, the calming fragrance of a forest, or the fresh smell of rain after a storm.”

Unsurprisingly, this little doodad comes with replaceable scent cartridges, though it's unclear how to actually buy those at the moment. Scents include gunfire, explosion, racing cars, blood, sports arena and other brotastic flavors.

Is this... cool? There's definitely a fun idea here about the future of immersion, right? Or I've completely lost the plot. Either could be true.

Seeking Products for Pickleball Stories? (Samples Available)

Ma'am, this is Engadget.

Deconstructeam Delivers a Valentine's Day Surprise of Cosmic Proportions

This was for the game The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, and the surprise was a huge dildo. I thought the whole email was cute, actually — it was tasteful and coyly advertised a giveaway in partnership with a well-known adult toy company. The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is a sexy game and it stars a muscular behemoth the size of a planet, so it all made sense. It just didn’t fit in our general news feed, ya know?

(Story Idea:) Here’s Doom Running On A Robotic Lawn Mower: Yes, A Robotic Lawn Mower! (You Have To See It To Believe It!) (Video Included)

"I am reaching out with a great story that is sure to go viral… This spring, Husqvarna will make the iconic 1993 video game DOOM, available to play on the company’s robotic lawn mowers."

I find this email charming because it’s just a traditional, infomercial-style email with lots of unnecessary exclamation points and parenthesis. I respect it. But seriously, are we still doing this Doom thing? Next you’ll be asking me if this lawn mower can run Crysis and making jokes about Leeroy Jenkins, and I’m just here in 2024, begging for some new references.

The best part of this one is the fact that, after I added it to my list of silly emails, we actually hit this as news on Engadget dot com. Who's the joke now? (It's me).

Meet My Regina | PC Preview – Dickhead-Destroying Extravaganza Cookie Cutter

“I’ve got something to show you, Jessica.

She’s one of the most incredible things I’ve ever held between my legs.

She’s small but tough and can take a beating.

And everyone knows she’s smart because she has a British accent.

She’ll giggle if you tickle her just right.

And she even glows in the dark!

Are you ready to meet her?

Well, are you?

Don’t be shy now.

Good. Well, here she is!”

I asked to be removed from this list.

Bonus Content

  • In more layoffs news, Until Dawn studio Supermassive Games fired about a third of its workforce, or roughly 90 employees, and the team is reorganizing. Also, indie studio Die Gut Fabrik, which created Sportsfriends, Johann Sebastian Joust and Saltsea Chronicles, has halted production amid funding issues and developers there are looking for other jobs.

  • Nintendo is suing Yuzu, a popular and long-running emulator that allows players to put their Switch games on other platforms. Nintendo argues that the app is "facilitating piracy at a colossal scale,” and says it illegally circumvents DMCA protections. Nintendo wants Yuzu shut down and the company is seeking damages.

  • Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth finally comes out on February 29 and our review from Mat Smith is live now. He’s a really big Final Fantasy nerd, and he really liked Rebirth.

Now Playing

Home Safety Hotline is the perfect game to play at your desk, on the PC, so you can let the mid-90s computer interface fully engulf your senses. In this game, you take calls from people complaining about pests and paranormal creatures invading their homes, and using a detailed reference guide, you identify what’s going on and help them sort it out. Or, you get it wrong and get fired while a family of three screams for their lives on the other end of the line. There’s also a broader meta-horror unfurling in the background, and I’m having a lovely, spooky time sorting through all of it. Home Safety Hotline is out now on Steam.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/layoffs-and-weird-pr-emails--this-weeks-gaming-news-173041054.html?src=rss

EA is laying off over 650 employees

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Video game company Electronic Arts will lay off 5 precent of its workforce according to a report it filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday. More than 650 EA employees will lose their jobs as a result of the move, part of a broader restricting that will see the company cutting back on office space and ending work on some video games.

EA’s cuts are the latest in a long line of layoffs that have rocked the video game industry since last year. In 2023, more than 10,500 video game workers lost their jobs, and more than 6,000 people in the industry were cut in January 2024 alone. The video game companies that have laid off workers so far include Microsoft, Riot Games, and Unity among many others. On Tuesday, Sony announced that it was laying off 900 people from its PlayStation division, roughly 8 percent of its headcount.

In a memo sent to EA employees, CEO Andrew Wilson wrote that the company is “streamlining our company operations to deliver deeper, more connected experiences for fans everywhere.” EA expects to finish making the cuts by early next quarter, the memo says. The cuts, Wilson adds, will let EA focus more on its “biggest opportunities — including our owned IP, sports, and massive online communities.”

One of the games that the move will directly impact is a Star Wars first-person shooter being worked upon by Respawn, a game development studio that EA acquired in 2017, according to IGN. "It's always hard to walk away from a project, and this decision is not a reflection of the team's talent, tenacity, or passion they have for the game," EA Entertainment president Laura Miele reportedly told staff in a note. "Giving fans the next installments of the iconic franchises they want is the definition of blockbuster storytelling and the right place to focus."

Update, February 28 2024, 5:45 PM ET: This story has been updated with more details of the canceled Star Wars game.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ea-is-laying-off-over-650-employees-221221637.html?src=rss

EA is laying off over 650 employees

Posted on by

Video game company Electronic Arts will lay off 5 precent of its workforce according to a report it filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday. More than 650 EA employees will lose their jobs as a result of the move, part of a broader restricting that will see the company cutting back on office space and ending work on some video games.

EA’s cuts are the latest in a long line of layoffs that have rocked the video game industry since last year. In 2023, more than 10,500 video game workers lost their jobs, and more than 6,000 people in the industry were cut in January 2024 alone. The video game companies that have laid off workers so far include Microsoft, Riot Games, and Unity among many others. On Tuesday, Sony announced that it was laying off 900 people from its PlayStation division, roughly 8 percent of its headcount.

In a memo sent to EA employees, CEO Andrew Wilson wrote that the company is “streamlining our company operations to deliver deeper, more connected experiences for fans everywhere.” EA expects to finish making the cuts by early next quarter, the memo says. The cuts, Wilson adds, will let EA focus more on its “biggest opportunities — including our owned IP, sports, and massive online communities.”

One of the games that the move will directly impact is a Star Wars first-person shooter being worked upon by Respawn, a game development studio that EA acquired in 2017, according to IGN. "It's always hard to walk away from a project, and this decision is not a reflection of the team's talent, tenacity, or passion they have for the game," EA Entertainment president Laura Miele reportedly told staff in a note. "Giving fans the next installments of the iconic franchises they want is the definition of blockbuster storytelling and the right place to focus."

Update, February 28 2024, 5:45 PM ET: This story has been updated with more details of the canceled Star Wars game.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ea-is-laying-off-over-650-employees-221221637.html?src=rss