Why Disney Games Won’t Build or Acquire Studios, Even with Publishers Slowly Moving Away from Licensed IPs

Escape from Tarkov, arguably the game that popularized the extraction shooter genre, recently got itself embroiled in a huge controversy once again.

Martin Hultberg - once the director behind Ubisoft's looting, shooting The Division - now has his eyes on the fledgling get-in-and-go extraction shooter genre, which he reckons can still reach the "mass market."

2014’s The Crew was the first project for developer Ivory Tower, which was founded in Lyon, France, in 2007 and later acquired by Ubisoft in late 2015. While it may have been the debut game for the studio, a number of Ivory Tower’s staff formerly hailed from Lyon’s Eden Games (including Ivory Tower’s three founders) and had previous experience on the first three instalments of the V-Rally series, the PlayStation version of Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed, and the trendsetting Test Drive Unlimited. As such, there was a good deal of optimism around The Crew.

Following the official reveal of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, IGN was able to speak with Tobias Stolz-Zwilling (Warhorse Studios's PR Manager) to get some extra details about the newly announced action RPG sequel.

It's always sad to see a well-liked game completely shut down, especially when it was still being enjoyed by a handful of dedicated fans. That's exactly what happened with The Crew, an open world racing game that was released all the way back in 2015. Being a completely online title, once developer Ubisoft pulled the plug on the game's servers at the end of last month, it became completely unplayable for all owners.

Helldivers 2 is an extremely popular game, far more than probably either Arrowhead or Sony hoped for. That said, it isn't perfect, and the developers are well aware of that.

Hazelight Studios, the independent game developer based in Stockholm, Sweden, turns 10 this year. As part of the celebration for the upcoming tenth anniversary, the official Twitter account teased that they have 'new (real good) stuff cooking' that will be discussed later this year.

After shutting down The Crew's servers at the end of March, Ubisoft has reportedly started removing the open-world racer from owners' libraries and revoking their user license.

Ubisoft’s online-only racing game The Crew stopped being operable on April 1. Some users are reporting, however, that things have gone a bit further. They say that the company actually reached into Ubisoft Connect accounts and revoked the license to access the game, according to reports by Game Rant and others.

Some Ubisoft Connect users are reporting that The Crew has essentially been removed from their accounts and is no longer accessible. One noteworthy element of The Crew was that it was only playable online, which meant it was inaccessible without an internet connection.

Last year, it was announced that the open world racing title The Crew would be delisted from storefronts and have its servers shut down in 2024, as developer Ubisoft claimed it was necessary to do so due to "server infrastructure and licensing constraints." With The Crew being an online-only title, it meant that the game was made completely unplayable when the servers were eventually shut down on March 31.

Continuing our ongoing coverage of Yellow Brick Games’ debut action game, Eternal Strands, we sat down with some of the indie studios’ leadership team to discuss the origins of their scrappy studio, and learn more about the indie world they’re using their AAA backgrounds to create. First, we chatted with CEO Thomas Giroux and COO Jeff Skalski about the studio's origins, then we spoke to Chief Creative Officer Mike Laidlaw and Lead Writer Kate MacMullin about their journey to the indie scene, and the characters and story in Eternal Strands.