Latest news with #SummerGamesFest
Metro
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
Xbox boss Phil Spencer keeps his job as fans call for him to resign
Microsoft has denied rumours of Xbox boss Phil Spencer's retirement, although plenty wish it were true. Per the words of Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer himself, the Xbox brand has 'never looked stronger,' with 'more players, games, and gaming hours than ever before.' And yet this hasn't protected a significant number of Xbox staff from losing their jobs as part of sweeping layoffs throughout the entirety of Microsoft. An exact figure isn't known, but it does include staff from Bethesda, Activision Blizzard, and the entirety of Perfect Dark developer The Initiative. As news of the layoffs emerged yesterday evening, a rumour began to spread of Spencer himself retiring from his position in the near future, but Microsoft has since firmly denied that. The rumour originated from respected Call Of Duty leaker TheGhostOfHope on X, who claimed Spencer was planning to leave after the launch of the next generation of Xbox consoles and pass his position onto Sarah Bond, the current president of Xbox. Insider Gaming's Tom Henderson added that he had heard similar rumblings while at this year's Summer Games Fest, only to be accused of making things up by Microsoft's own chief communications officer Frank X. Shaw. A more formal statement by Kari Perez, head of Xbox communications, was later shared with The Verge, though all it says is, 'Phil is not retiring anytime soon.' Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. While the insinuation is that Spencer will stick around even after the launch of new hardware (which is expected to happen in the next year or two), you'll find no shortage of people on social media demanding he leave now – and for the record, the examples we're about to share are the more polite ones. 'How does Phil Spencer still have a job?' asks Will Dobbs on Bluesky. 'Like genuine question. So many closures, layoffs, and commercial failures under his leadership.' 'It's genuinely crazy how every single decision Phil Spencer has made in the decade he has run Xbox has been incorrect and financially disastrous yet he gets to remain in his position,' adds Kris Wolfheart. Brendon Bigley writes, 'That Phil Spencer could make multiple billion dollar bets, fail all of them repeatedly and publicly, and not only keep his job but continue being 'the face' of the Xbox brand is astonishing.' As a reminder, following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard, more than 2,500 employees across Xbox were let go and though no hard figures have been shared, Game File reports that less than half of the 9,000 redundancies throughout all of Microsoft were within the Xbox division. This puts the total figure of redundancies post-Activision buyout to somewhere in the region of 6,000. We reached out to Microsoft for clarification, but were told merely: 'The overall impact represents less than 4% of Microsoft's global workforce' – as if that wasn't a large figure. More Trending With so much talent no longer with the company, it's easy to be sceptical of the future of Xbox's upcoming games. A few projects have already been scrapped, namely the Perfect Dark reboot, Rare's Everwild, and an unannounced MMO from The Elder Scrolls Online team. Variety reports that every Xbox published game shown at last month's showcase is 'safe', and also shared an internal memo sent to the remaining staff by Xbox Game Studios chief Matt Booty. 'Our overall portfolio strategy is unchanged: build games that excite our players, continue to grow our biggest franchises, and create new stories, worlds, and characters,' it reads. 'We have more than 40 projects in active development, continued momentum on titles shipping this fall, and a strong slate headed into 2026.' Email gamecentral@ leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader's Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. MORE: Xbox hardware 'is dead' says former Microsoft exec in scathing YouTube video MORE: Halo team promises 'official scoop' on series' future later this year MORE: Xbox aggregated game library coming to PC with hints of Steam support
The Guardian
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Maga-flavoured faux pas that shook the games industry
One thing most game developers can agree on in the modern industry is that it's hard to drum up any awareness for your latest project without a mammoth marketing budget. Last year, almost 20,000 new titles were released on the PC gaming platform Steam alone, the majority disappearing into the content blackhole that is the internet. So when a smaller studio is offered the chance to get on the stage at the Summer Games Fest, an event streamed live to a global audience of around 50 million people, it's a big deal. Not something that you want to spectacularly misjudge. Enter Ian Proulx, cofounder of 1047 Games. His short slot at the event earlier this month had him walking on stage with a baseball bat to promote the online shooter Splitgate 2 by announcing that he was 'tired of playing the same Call of Duty every year', while wearing a cap bearing the slogan 'Make FPS great again'. It did not go well. Gamers and fellow developers criticised his decision to diss another studio's game as well as his politically charged use of a Maga/Trump meme, especially with anti-ICE protesters being beaten and arrested just across town. Proulx defended his actions, denying that his use of the cap slogan was political, but four days later he made an apology via X explaining: 'We needed something to grab attention, and the honest truth is, we tried to think of something and this is what we came up with.' What Proulx failed to anticipate is that in the fast-paced meme culture of 2025, context, nuance and sociopolitical intricacy are vital and constantly changing. You can't simply put on a cheeky grin and appropriate whatever signs and symbols are floating around 4Chan – look at Elon Musk and how embarrassingly dated his mid-2000s edgelord shtick has become. You can't deploy the Maga anthem without contextualising it; and you definitely can't claim to be the cutting edge saviour of the FPS while promoting not only a sequel but a battle royale mode of all things. In 2025 – are you kidding? I don't know the exact situation at 1047 Games, but I've visited hundreds of game development studios all over the world. No matter how progressive they want to appear, there is often, at the very top, a familiar monoculture of middle-class men of a certain age, with certain tastes, who can sometimes overlook the fact that their experiences and views might not reflect those of everybody else. Proulx said something telling: 'We tried to think of something and this is what we came up with.' In the boardroom, surrounded by likeminded pals, it probably seemed like a laugh, but perhaps they should have checked with someone else first. Splitgate 2 is now in the unfortunate position where a portion of its potential customers were turned off by this ill-judged Maga bit, and an entirely separate portion hate that Proulx apologised for it, thereby capitulating to the woke mind virus. Multiplayer games rely on an engaged community to spread the word about them, so this is very much not ideal. There are smarter things Proulx could have done on that stage with his 30 seconds of fame. When you look back at greatest E3 moments of years gone by, the memorable spectacles have been positive: former Xbox chief Peter Moore and his Halo 2 tattoo; game artist and director Ikumi Nakamura charming the whole world with her unguarded enthusiasm for Ghostwire: Protocol; actor Keanu Reeves shouting, 'You're breathtaking!' at an audience member during the Cyberpunk 2077 stage show; Swedish developer Martin Sahlin tearing up talking about the platform game Unravel. In a culture heavy with faux machismo and attitude, these charming, funny, daft moments broke through like shards of sunlight. You don't need to take to the stage with a slogan or a baseball bat. The greatest asset you can wield in this highly digital, massively anonymised creative industry is humanity. There are a few eye-catching games our this week, including Date Everything, a game in which you can flirt with your toaster; Tron: Catalyst, a novel take on Disney's cyber-universe from Bithell Games of Subsurface Circular fame; and FBC: Firebreak, a three-player co-op spin-off from cult studio Remedy's oeuvre. I'm personally most interested in Rematch, however, an arcade-y 5-v-5 football game whose developers have clearly played a lot of Rocket League. Unlike EA Sports FC, you inhabit just the one player rather than the whole team, and all those players have the same flashy skills, so there's none of the stats and strategy of EA Sports FC. In other words, this is a football game that you can enjoy without knowing much about football. Available on: PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Estimated playtime: whatever you want to put into it As part of the Guardian's Pride month series about unexpected queer icons, Keza MacDonald wrote about the Zelda series' Link as a non-binary icon; Jason Okundaye wrote about the divas of the fighting game genre; and Jordan Page wrote about the gender-playfulness of Pokémon. (Another, non-games-related favourite from this series: Lucy Knight on the perfect lesbian cookbook.) While we're on the subject, Guardian Games contributor Sarah Maria Griffin's new novel Eat the Ones You Love, a wild queer romance about a cannibalistic plant, is out now. The Nintendo Switch 2 sold 3.5m units in its first week, making it the fastest-selling Nintendo console and the biggest console launch of all time in the US and Japan. Keza and I have chosen the best video games of 2025 so far, several of which we've rhapsodised about in issues of Pushing Buttons. Have you got a favourite that didn't make the list? We're collecting readers' picks, too. Sign up to Pushing Buttons Keza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gaming after newsletter promotion Pragmata, the quirky science-fiction game that's back from the dead Beyond Mario Kart World: what else is worth playing on Nintendo Switch 2? 'Addictive fear': my goosebump-inducing first encounter with Resident Evil Requiem Hong Kong police tell people not to download 'secessionist' mobile game MindsEye – a dystopian future that plays like it's from 2012 | ★★☆☆☆ Reader Adam asks this week's question: 'As an English literature student I very much enjoyed this week's Pushing Buttons newsletter on the intersection of video games and Shakespeare, and it got me thinking - what other classic works of literature could be adapted well as video games, or what other classic authors could have written video games and in what genres? I've always thought Edmund Spenser's 16th-century epic The Faerie Queene would make a great open-world game.' Conveniently, as an English literature graduate myself, this is something to which I have given a lot of thought. In terms of classic works that would make great games, I'd play The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as a dark, rogue-like take on The Oregon Trail with the visual style of The Return of the Obra Din; I'd play Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a Silent Hill-style psychological horror; or Pride and Prejudice as rules-heavy dating sim (we came enticingly close to this with the now sadly defunct multiplayer online game, Ever, Jane); both Tom Jones and Middlemarch would make incredible open-world adventures. In the category of 'historical writers who would now be game designers', I would put two obvious candidates: Mary Shelley and HG Wells, writers who were interested in and profoundly inspired by science and technology. I'd also say Bertolt Brecht, a dramatist who used various technologies to capture the interest of popular audiences, and August Strindberg, who wrote plays, but also took photographs and dabbled in the occult. I could see him presenting some wild, densely symbolic role-playing adventure at the Summer Games Fest – and he wouldn't need a baseball bat or a cap with a dumb slogan. If you've got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – email us on pushingbuttons@
Yahoo
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Questions linger regarding MindsEye's rushed release
The big Summer Games Fest weekend of live showcases and game previews is over, and here's what to expect in this week's game news recap. The big picture 'A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad' – a quote that still resonates in the games industry. Nowhere is that more evident than in the release of action-adventure open-world title MindsEye. This highly touted game from ex-Rockstar Games producer Leslie Benzies's studio, Build A Rocket, promised a rich single-player narrative and ongoing user-generated content post-launch. It was released on June 10, with not a single reviewer in the world receiving an early copy before launch – usually a red flag. Sure enough, both early and late impressions from reviewers and content creators were largely negative. The game was buggy, unstable, and riddled with technical issues involving performance and artificial intelligence (AI). Its story also ended abruptly. A large number of PlayStation owners refunded the game en masse – the last time this happened on such a scale was during Cyberpunk 2077's troubled PlayStation 4 launch in 2020. The developers are now scrambling to patch the title, likely over the next several weeks, as it is – to quote the community – 'a car on fire'. It simply should not have been released in its current state, even with this relatively quiet sales window before the second half of 2025. This raises a few lingering questions: Who exactly was asking for another open-world action-adventure title that isn't Grand Theft Auto? Did the ex-Rockstar producer contribute meaningfully to the earlier GTA titles? A seasoned veteran wouldn't have allowed a game to launch in such a state. Short beats ASUS Republic of Gamers is teaming up with Xbox to produce the ROG Xbox Ally (standard and X versions), a portable PC launching this holiday season. The Outer Worlds 2 will be released on Oct 30 and will cost US$80 – part of the ongoing trend of triple-A titles surpassing the US$60 mark. The animated superhero series Invincible is getting its own fighting game in 2026, developed by the same team behind the acclaimed Killer Instinct reboot (2013). Resident Evil Requiem (aka Resident Evil 9) is Capcom's next survival horror entry, launching Feb 26, 2026 for PC and consoles. Nintendo Switch 2 has outsold the original Switch by 3-to-1 during its launch in Japan. No Straight Roads 2, from Malaysian studio Metronomik, will be published in 2026 in collaboration with Shueisha Games. Upin & Ipin, the beloved Malaysian children's show, is getting an action-adventure game adaptation due later this year. Marvel Mystic Mayhem, a mobile strategy game, is coming to iOS and Android on June 25. Konami is remaking the original Silent Hill with Bloober Team, which also handled the Silent Hill 2 remake. Games out this week Berserk Or Die is a 2D indie action game where you control a berserker slaying Roman legionnaires from both flanks using keyboard-based combo inputs. MindsEye is an open-world action-adventure game by Build A Rocket, led by former GTA producer Leslie Benzies. Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine – Master Crafted Edition is a remaster of the 2011 sci-fi action title. Wizard of Legend 2 is a roguelite sequel featuring 3D visuals and new combinable magic spells. Recommended viewing Here's a funny comparison between Mindseye and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004). Watch this insightful interview with RPG composer Yasunori Nishiki on crafting great game music.
Top Gear
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Top Gear
Summer Games Fest 2025: not enough racing games, but some reveals turned our heads
When you post something on social media, you don't tell everyone about all the holidays, nice dinners and weddings you'll be attending for the next two years. The trailers you see in the cinema are generally for a handful of upcoming movies you might want to watch in the next month. Meanwhile, over in the games industry, in the last three days we've been shown every game in existence from now until the heat death of the universe. But aside from that opening salvo, we're not here to question the wisdom of an annual event which blurts out more titles than anyone could possibly pay attention to or remember. No, instead we're going to sift out the good stuff. If you missed our roundup of PlayStation's State of Play showcase, you can find that here. Sadly it wasn't a big one for racing games. In fact we counted a grand total of one to add to our radar, but the other genres fared better, so these are the titles that caught our eye during Summer Games Fest 2025. That means there are approximately 3,000 games that won't be mentioned here, but it doesn't mean that they won't be good games or that we think you're wrong if you liked them. It's just that this is the year 2025, and ruthless economy of attention is required in order to survive and go about our lives.
Engadget
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Engadget
Mini Motorways is getting a creative mode
During a showcase at Summer Games Fest, developer Dinosaur Polo Club announced that it will be adding a creative mode to Mini Motorways . The new mode will be available in a free game update coming to Apple Arcade, Steam, and Nintendo Switch on August 26, so you can get imaginative on whatever platform you've been playing this excellent strategy game. Like its predecessor Mini Metro , the core gameplay of Mini Motorways has a lot of calm, meditative elements in the experience of placing those first few roads. But as your city grows and the street network gets more convoluted, things can turn hectic real quick. And if you're like me, you've definitely run out of road tiles because you just couldn't stand making painfully illogical city plans. Creative Mode offers the welcome option to focus on aesthetics, letting players recolor, move and pivot houses and destinations to develop a city with more order. Or with more chaos, you do you!
