Month: September 2024

Embracer-owned studio Lost Boys Interactive is facing another round of layoffs.
Writing on LinkedIn, the studio said it had “made the very difficult decision to reduce our overall headcount in accordance with local laws and consultation processes”. It noted Lost Boys needed to “adapt to shifting market conditions” within the video game industry, which has seen multiple layoffs and studio closures in recent years.
Lost Boys said it is “committed to supporting our affected staff in finding new positions as quickly as possible”. Additionally, Lost Boys will “collaborate with other studios and recruiters to help connect them with job opportunities” (thanks, VGC).

Newscast PlayStation’s terrible, brilliant and leaky week

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Over 340,000 Team Fortress players have amassed as part of the ongoing #SaveTF2 campaign, lending their signatures to an anti-bot petition that has now been lovingly assembled into a hardback tome and hand-delivered to Valve’s offices in Washington.

#SaveTF2 was born in 2022, amid a bot situation so severe, it was threatening to make Valve’s classic team-based shooter literally unplayable. The community faced daily battle bots using game-ruining hacks, racist usernames, disruptive noises in voice chat, and worse – and with Valve doing little to help, players even took to fighting bots with bots of their own.

Happily, though, the community’s first orchestrated #SaveTF2 campaign was a success, drawing Valve’s attention and a pledge it was “working to improve th…

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 publisher Activision has made it clear that you cannot simply toggle off its upcoming game’s much-hyped new “omnimovement” feature, which lets you sprint and dive in any direction.

Speaking via the official Call of Duty podcast, Activision confirmed omnimovement was a permanent mechanic in the game and a “global system” across all of its modes – campaign, multiplayer and zombies. And no, there’s no option to switch it off.

“Can you toggle omnimovement on and off?” Activision senior director of studio communications Stephanie Snowden said. “The answer is no. Omnimovement is a core foundational mechanic of the game, you cannot turn it off. But I think where people maybe got that impression was, we have another new feature, a part of m…

A Microsoft team leader has emailed thousands of staff to protest the closure of a major internal group focused on promoting diversity, equity and inclusion within the company.

The outgoing staff member blasted Microsoft’s decision to cut their team amid a wider cooling in the corporate space to the need for diversity groups generally.

A quote from the email first published by Business Insider claims that the team had been told it was “eliminated due to ‘changing business needs'”.

In response, a Microsoft spokesperson told the publication in statement, also shared with Eurogamer, that its “D&I commitments remain unchanged. Our focus on diversity and inclusion is unwavering and we are holding firm on our expectations, prioritising accountability, and …

Nintendo’s mysterious horror game – glimpsed last week via a brief and bizarre teaser trailer – is in fact a new entry in the Famicom Detective Club series.

Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club will launch on 29th August, Nintendo confirmed today, showing off a first look at the game’s artwork, featuring its creepy paper bag-headed villain.

If you’re unfamiliar with the retro adventure series, this is a Nintendo-developed franchise originally released in the late 1980s. Two games were released, but only in Japan. And there they remained for more than 30 years, until a Nintendo Switch remake of the pair launched worldwide in 2021.

Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club – A chat with producer Yoshio Sakamoto

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