Following the Q3 2023 earnings release where Sony announced the latest PlayStation 5 sales figures, the earnings call provided interesting tidbits from Sony executives.
26.01.2024 - 15:01 / wccftech.com / Jason Schreier / Alessio Palumbo
Following the huge layoffs (over 1,900 employees) announced yesterday by Microsoft across teams at Blizzard and Xbox, it was also revealed that Blizzard's survival game Odyssey had been canceled.
Blizzard had first discussed the game around two years ago when they said they were working on a survival game set in a brand new fantasy universe. Shortly afterward, it was revealed that Odyssey included first-person view. The news ignited interest from the company's large fanbase; after all, Blizzard has always strived to take a new game concept or genre and make it more accessible and polished than ever before, as they did with World of Warcraft or, more recently, with Overwatch. On the other hand, survival games tend to be rather rough since they have been historically made by indie developers with little to no budget. Many players hoped Blizzard could fix that.
However, according to Jason Schreier, Odyssey encountered a lot of troubles during its development phase. The original pitch came from Craig Amai, former Lead Quest Designer on World of WarCraft: Warlords of Draenor, back in 2017. Prototyping started on the Unreal Engine, but Blizzard executives reportedly forced a switch to the company's in-house Synapse engine, which was originally created for mobile game development. The switch happened because the Odyssey team had trouble adapting the Unreal Engine to 'vast maps that supported up to 100 players at once'. This part is, however, a bit dubious, seeing as the signature Unreal Engine game (Fortnite) notoriously supports 100 players in its Battle Royale mode. Moreover, plenty of game developers have adapted the engine to even larger player counts and maps.
In any case, the Odyssey team struggled even more with Synapse. According to Schreier's sources, the developers were hoping Microsoft, the new owner of Activision Blizzard, would approve a return to Unreal Engine. Early playtests seemed to be successful, although the development would likely have taken until 2026, if not even longer. However, it was concluded that Synapse was not ready for production, which led to the cancellation of Odyssey.
It's not the first time Blizzard has canceled a game. The public already knows about Starcraft: Ghost, the console stealth action game that got indefinitely postponed in 2006, and Titan, the MMO shooter that was canceled in 2014. Some of Titan's assets and concepts eventually made it into Overwatch; it'll be interesting to see if the same happens with Odyssey.
Following the Q3 2023 earnings release where Sony announced the latest PlayStation 5 sales figures, the earnings call provided interesting tidbits from Sony executives.
Helldivers 2 continues to improve on its player figures. After easily topping God of War off the first spot when it comes to PlayStation launches on Steam, the cooperative sci-fi third-person shooter peaked at 155K concurrent users yesterday.
EXODUS was one of the most interesting game reveals at The Game Awards 2023. It is the debut project of Archetype Entertainment, an Austin-based studio helmed by former BioWare legend James Ohlen (who worked on classics like the first Baldur's Gate games, Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Dragon Age: Origins) and owned by Wizards of the Coast. Shortly after its foundation, the studio was joined by another ex BioWare veteran: writer Drew Karpyshyn, known mostly as the lead writer of the acclaimed first two Mass Effect games.
The previously announced D&D open world roleplaying game in development at Hidden Path Entertainment has now been officially paused by the studio based in Bellevue, Washington.
It's not even the end of January yet and the games industry has already announced layoffs for several thousand employees, showing that 2024 could be even more problematic than the already troublesome 2023 in this regard. We reached out to MIDiA Research Senior Analyst and Strategy Director Karol Severin to discuss the state of the games industry in this post-pandemic, high-inflation environment.
Square Enix is planning a major internal restructure of its game development system, as reported by Bloomberg Japan. The news came directly from Representative Director and President Takashi Kiryu, who spoke at the financial results briefing for analysts held on Monday.
Microsoft recently cut 1,900 jobs from its gaming division and among the layoffs were many at the recently acquired video game developer Activision Blizzard. Blizzard Entertainment's President Mike Ybarra and co-founder Allen Adham are both departing. The tech giant also announced the cancellation of a Blizzard game, called “Odyssey,” that was already six years in development. On Tuesday, Microsoft reported quarterly earnings, posting its strongest revenue growth since 2022.
Crash Bandicoot developer Toys for Bob and Call of Duty studio Sledgehammer Games have reportedly lost around 40 per cent and 30 per cent of their staff, respectively.
HITMAN maker IO Interactive has lofty aims when it comes to the quality of gameplay animation they want to achieve in Project 007. The game developer is hiring animators, and the studio's Twitter account has shared a few statements from members of the Animation team to intrigue would-be candidates. Joshua Andrew Gleaves, Senior Gameplay Animator, said:
Reports suggest that Toys for Bob has been hit hard by the Microsoft layoffs, with some sources saying that the developer has lost up to 40 percent of its staff. This comes just after Microsoft acquired Toys for Bob's parent company, Activision Blizzard, in a deal that cost almost $70 billion.
Following the most recent round of layoffs from Microsoft's Xbox division, details about Blizzard's in-development survival game, Odyssey, have now leaked online. Microsoft first announced the major layoffs earlier this week, reporting that 1,900 employees from the company had lost their jobs as a result. The layoffs reportedly saw particularly heavy impact on Microsoft's gaming division, with Activision Blizzard, Xbox, and ZeniMax reportedly seeing the brunt of the layoffs. Now, one of the casualties of the layoffs comes as an in-development survival game from Blizzard.
Microsoft recently announced widespread layoffs, confirming that it was cutting 1,900 jobs across its entire gaming division– which, following the company’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, also includes Blizzard Entertainment. The layoffs have also gone hand-in-hand with the cancellation of Blizzard’s long-in-development survival game, codenamed Odyssey, which was officially confirmed to be in development in 2022, and a new report published by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier has shed more light on what brought about the highly anticipated project’s cancellation.