GTA 5 Michael Actor Gets "Garbage" AI Voice Chatbot Shut Down

Nexon is ending online services for its free-to-play fantasy PvP game Warhaven, just months after its early-access launch on Steam.

The first month of 2024 isn’t over yet, but it’s already been a brutal year for the games industry, with thousands of people having lost their jobs in a barrage of industry-wide layoffs. Microsoft recently added a significant chunk to that number when it announced that it would be cutting 1,900 jobs across its entire gaming division, and it seems those layoffs are also going to come at the cost of the company’s physical distribution.

Zombie survival game The Day Before went offline for good on Monday, just 45 days after the game launched to infamy on Steam. It was an ignominious end for the game, which went from one of the most wishlisted games on Valve’s storefront to financial disaster for developer Fntastic.

Riot Games have announced that they will shortly lay off "about 530" people, or 11 per cent of their global workforce, so as to "create focus and move us towards a more sustainable future", in the words of CEO Dylan Jadeja. The "biggest impact" will be felt outside of core development, though they'll affect at least one major internal team - the developers of Legends Of Runeterra. Riot are also binning off the Riot Forge publishing label, under which third-party developers create smaller-scale games based on Riot's own intellectual properties.

Fntastic’s The Day Before is finally dead. After a controversial launch and being pulled from sale (publisher MyTona worked with Steam to offer full refunds), the servers have officially shut down as of January 22nd. Shout out to the one person who kept logging in daily since December 28th, per SteamDB.

The Day Before servers have official been shut down, putting an end to Fntastic's zombie survival title. After a highly controversial launch, it was announced last month that The Day Before would be shutting down its servers on January 22, 2024.

The Dial of Destiny was one of 2023’s biggest flops but, as many soon-to-be-dead Nazis have discovered, just because you knock Indiana Jones down doesn’t mean he’s out of the count. Wolfenstein developer MachineGames has now unveiled Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which allow players to don that fedora and crack that whip.

Piranha Bytes is on the verge of closure, several industry sources have said. Currently owned by the Embracer Group subsidiary THQ Nordic, the celebrated RPG developer has been in business for nearly three decades.

Rockstar has announced that it will be shutting down the Rockstar Editor in the last-gen versions of Grand Theft Auto 5.

Italian game studio LKA, UK publisher Wired Productions, and Swedish film-production company Studios Extraordinaires have announced an exclusive partnership for a feature film adaptation of the video game .

Square Enix's upcoming team shooter Foamstars will have a small amount of AI art, the developer has said.

Ned Luke, the actor behind Grand Theft Auto 5’s bank robber-turned-criminal mentor Michael De Santa, recently spoke out against an AI program copying his voice without his knowledge or approval. AI-generated content has grown more prevalent in recent years, with computer programs capable of making images and even replicating famous voices with increasingly uncanny accuracy. This in turn has ignited plenty of controversy over the prospect of AI replacing human artists, with gaming companies like Wizards of Coast coming under fire for using it in official projects.