D&D and Magic: The Gathering owner Hasbro lays off 1,100 staff as "a last resort"

PlayStation Plus' monthly free games for January 2024 — the new year — have been revealed. The month's offerings include narrative-focused period adventure title A Plague Tale: Requiem, top-down dungeon-crawling action RPG Nobody Saves the World, and third-person vampire-hunting shooterEvil West. The three titles will be available to members of PS Plus Essential, Extra, and Deluxe/ Premium plans, starting January 2. These games can be added to your PS4 and PS5 games library until February 5, after which you'll have to hold on to your PS Plus membership for continued access. If you enjoy any of these titles, you could purchase them for permanent access and continue from where you left off.

Greetings, Polygon readers!

2023 has not been a great year for the video game industry in terms of layoffs and studio closures, and as the year draws to a close, it’s been announced an entire publisher with dozens of games to its name is closing its doors. Versus Evil had become a bit of a rising star in the indie publishing sphere in recent years, publishing the likes of the Pillars of Eternity games, The Banner Saga, Tower of Guns, Faeria, and more. Unfortunately, that success was not enough to keep the publisher’s doors open.

TinyBuild, the games label behind the Hello Neighbor series, has laid off the entire staff of Versus Evil, an indie publisher under the TinyBuild umbrella, just days before the holidays. This news comes from various former Versus Evil employees on Twitter. 

Earlier this week, Hasbro announced that it would be laying off approximately 1,100 employees two weeks before Christmas, as per an internal memo. At the time, I pointed out that the memo announced «the majority of the notifications will happen over the next six months, with the balance occurring over the next year.» While it doesn't directly contradict this statement, many layoffs are happening right now.

Game and toy maker Hasbro announced it will cut roughly 1,100 jobs on Monday. When added to the 800 layoffs made earlier this year, the total amounts to just less than one-third of the company’s entire labor force. The news comes exactly two weeks ahead of Christmas, traditionally the biggest holiday of the year for game and toy sales.

Walt Disney Animation’s newest movie, Wish, is the culmination of the studio’s celebration of its own centennial. That project stretched throughout 2023, through projects like the short Once Upon a Studio, specialized merchandise drops centered around each decade the company has been around, and the rebrand of the iconic Disney castle logo. But Wish leans so hard on celebrating the better Disney films that came before it that it doesn’t have much identity of its own. It’s openly a nostalgia-fest, pretty much on par with the other ways the company celebrated its 100-year anniversary.

Hasbro, the parent company behind Wizards of the Coast, which itself is responsible for both Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering, is laying off 1100 employees, as reported by Dicebreaker and The Wall Street Journal. The company, which is also behind the Transformers franchise (toys and other media),  announced this decision yesterday, on December 11. 

Starting from tomorrow through January 5, 2024, we’re celebrating the holiday season with a month full of activities for our PlayStation community. As part of the PlayStation Plus Season of Play, PlayStation Plus members can redeem free avatars for PS5 and PS4 consoles, join eSports tournaments, earn points on PlayStation Stars and enter a competition for your chance to win amazing prizes. Activities for those who are not PlayStation Plus members are available as well.

Hasbro is laying off 1,100 employees, according to anSEC filing. The company behind franchises like Dungeons & Dragons and Transformers, Hasbro already laid off 800 employees in January. While some employees will find out about the fate of their jobs on Tuesday, others will be cut in the coming year. By 2025, Hasbro told shareholders, the company hopes to save about $350 million to $400 million in costs.

Gawd, it's like hyping yourself up before diving into a freezing cold ice lake. Okay, okay, okay. Brave face. Hey, it's time for The Game Awards 2023, everybody! Towards the end of every year, we all get to enjoy (or in our case, give up our evenings and ruin our fingers to the tune of) one of the gaming industry's biggest events. The Game Awards is not only an awards ceremony - it's a lavish smorgasbord of video game announcements, trailers, and news stretching into the early hours of the morning. At least for us Brits.

Prince of Persia’s long-awaited and long-overdue revival is just a few weeks away now, and as previously confirmed, the game received a new trailer at The Game Awards (which was leaked ahead of time), focusing on its central narrative premise and, more importantly, announcing a demo.