EA lays off Codemasters staff

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.

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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. 

Facebook-owner Meta and China's TikTok restricted a record number of social media posts and accounts in Malaysia in the first six months of 2023, data published by the firms showed, amid a jump in government requests to remove content.

Intel has taken the wraps off its new Meteor Lake-based Core Ultra laptop CPUs, and it's aiming these low-power chips squarely at my favourite AMD chip of all time—the Ryzen 7 7840U. That's the similarly low-power Zen 4 processor at the heart of the latest Framework 13 mainboard, but also every single non-Valve handheld gaming PC that was released this year.

Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering owner Hasbro is laying off 1,100 employees.

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. 

One of the biggest criticisms of The Game Awards last night was that winners were played off the stage, and showrunner Geoff Keighley agrees that this is "something to address."

G7 leaders forge historic international rules for generative AI; Tech giants fail to deliver on ethical AI promises, according to a Stanford report; Amazon CEO foresees transformative impact of generative AI on customer experiences; New York partners with intuition robotics to combat senior loneliness with AI companions- this and more in our daily roundup. Let us take a look.

One more grim notch for the 2023 games industry meat grinder. Australian indie studio League of Geeks is laying off over half its staff and pausing development «indefinitely» on early access starship management game Jumplight Odyssey.

Insurgency developer New World Interactive are the latest Embracer Group-owned studio to lay off staff, as part of the Swedish conglomerate's efforts to reduce their debts after a series of reckless studio acquisitions. It's not clear how many people have been affected, but New World Interactive's direct corporate parent Saber Interactive have revealed that one unannounced project has been cancelled.