Blizzard’s Hearthstone team has been hit with layoffs

We’re in the spooky season right now, and chances are you’re spending this month dwelling in the horror genre. Whether it’s thriller television series, movies, or games, now is the perfect time to spend some time getting scared. Unfortunately, if you were hopeful to get your hands on Phasmophobia on console, then you’re of luck. This month, the game was slated to be released for consoles, but it has since been delayed. Here is what the developers had to say about the recent release pushback. 

Frontier, the developer behind the likes of F1 Manager, Planet Zoo, and other management games, has announced layoffs as part of an organisational review of the business.

Old School Runescape player and streamer BTCs, known as the wealthiest player in the game with more than one trillion gold to his name, has been permanently banned from Runescape over allegations of real-world trading—that is, trading items in the game for anything outside of it, typically real money. It's a stunningly expensive ban: Even though OSRS gold has no official real-world value according to the terms of service (because you're not allowed to trade it for real money), the price of that much gold on grey-market gold selling sites would be in excess of $160,000.

As we creak ever closer to spooky season and a possible second Silent Hill Transmission – the last was just before Halloween 2022 – it seems Bloober Team has quietly been updating the backend of Silent Hill 2 Remake's Steam page.

Twitch has seen another round of layoffs, though full details are unknown.

In the latest in a string of whirlwind layoffs in the games-and-games-adjacent industry, it appears there has been another round of layoffs at Twitch, according to Today Off Stream’s Zach Bussey via Twitter. 

Blizzard Entertainment has dated Warcraft Rumble.

Seven years ago, the internet's collective mind was blown by a Super Mario 64 speedrunning video which proposed a method to collect one particular star without ever pressing the A button - or rather, only half-pressing A. Now, the creator of that video has put together a new method that cuts out the half-press and saves a whopping 14 hours from the original version.

Sources have told Kotaku that developer Naughty Dog has laid off at least 25 contractor positions. Naughty Dog is responsible for Uncharted and The Last of Us series.

2023 has sadly been a year that has seen consistent widespread layoffs in the games industry, and recent days and weeks have seen another flurry of those, with the likes of Creative Assembly, Epic Games, and others having been hit with layoffs. Another company has, unfortunately, now joined that list.

Team17, the publisher of works such as Blasphemous 2, Gord, and Moving Out 2 has entered “a period of consultation,” meaning the company will seek to identify potential redundancies in the organization.

Last week ended with a dire flood of layoffs in the games industry, including Sega, Ubisoft, Blizzard, and Epic games. Unfortunately, this week seems to be following the trend – Team17, developer of the Worms series, and publisher of games like Blasphemous, Dredge, and more, has announced layoffs as well, according to Eurogamer.