Latest news with #gameindustry
Forbes
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Remember ‘Palworld'? It's Survived Meme-Hood, Nintendo And Is Still Big
Palworld One of the most surprising days I've had in the last few years of game coverage was watching Palworld absolutely blow up at launch, a game that came out of relative nowhere, combining survival aspects with Pokémon-like catching and battling. There were also guns. You could shoot the Pokémon with guns. It wasn't just a surprise hit; it was perhaps one of the most surprising rocketships in the last decade of the industry, rocketing to 2.1 million concurrent players on Steam close to launch as scores of big streamers logged on and millions of players tried it out, and liked it. Though you may think Palworld was a shooting star, the game has had a longer lifespan than you might imagine and has outlasted many other fad games that have come and gone. It's not a live service, as developer Pocketpair repeatedly points out, but it does release major updates, and those result in significant player surges. Right now, for example, the game has an 85,000 concurrent peak a year and a half after launch and is inside Steam's top 15 games, which is almost entirely full of classic titles that rarely leave these spots, from CS2 to Dota 2 to Apex Legends to GTA V. Palworld FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder Of course, Palworld is never going to get millions of concurrents again, but this baseline this far after launch of nearly 100,000 players remains impressive. While it felt like a meme, the playerbase has persisted. Its big updates spike its players anywhere from 140,000 to 212,000 this past December. Palworld has also engendered a lot of sympathy over the last year or so as they have been relentlessly targeted by lawsuits from Nintendo. Back at launch, there was an idea that Nintendo may sue for similar character designs, as there certainly were some similarities. But what's ended up happening is that Nintendo has made a bunch of game mechanic claims that have actually forced Palworld to remove aspects of its gameplay, everything from gliding on Pals to summoning them with balls. These are things Nintendo apparently exclusively owns, and in order to avoid protracted legal fights with the gaming giant, Palworld has to keep bending the knee and changing the game in awkward ways. Nintendo has not come out of this with the public on its side, with accusations that it's being a patent troll with these kinds of somewhat generic mechanics somehow in its pocket. Palworld Admittedly, I have not kept up with Palworld for a while now, but closer to launch, I easily sunk a few hundred hours into it, and I understood the appeal. In many ways, it felt like the kind of Pokémon game that Nintendo should have made half a decade ago, but never did. And still hasn't. Palworld's appeal is that it can operate as a survival game, a gotta-catch-em-all adventure, or in some ways, it's even a bit Breath of the Wild. And it not being 'live' means you're never really all that far behind and can jump back in whenever. And it's very clear that some people never left. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy
Forbes
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Some Developers Turn A Stern Eye Toward Xbox Game Pass After Layoffs
Xbox Game Pass Microsoft sparked about a dozen different headlines when 9,000 person layoffs at the company hit Xbox in part, causing job losses, entire studio closures and game cancellations. That's sparked many debates about the company, its future and its strategies, but it's rare to see the developers in the trenches speak all that openly about it. The ex-founder of the currently Microsoft-owned Arkane Studios and current President & Creative Director of WolfEye Studios, Raphael Colantonio, took to Twitter to point out the 'elephant in the room' when it comes to many issues at Xbox, Xbox Game Pass. Here's what he said about the subscription model, which offers a large number of 'free' games when players subscribe: The conversation drew in Larian (of Baldur's Gate 3 fame), Director of Publishing Michael Douse: Baldur's Gate FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder Douse and Colantonio then launched into a conversation about how Game Pass very much does hurt game sales despite Microsoft previously indicating the opposite. Douse says he prefers Sony's 'lifecycle management strategy.' The idea behind Xbox Game Pass is, at its core, the ability to give players the opportunity to play day one, first-party releases on Xbox if they subscribe. Even in an era of Xbox games moving to PlayStation, those are paid copies or on a time delay, so Microsoft thinks that still holds appeal. That gets more complicated when it's third party developers who are swept into the concept of Game Pass launches, a practice that feels like it's happening with less frequency in time. This is where the 'infinite money subsidization' Microsoft pays to offset lost sales comes in, but many view this as unsustainable, which is now coming up with these layoffs and closures. Microsoft has leaned hard into Xbox Game Pass subscriptions in recent years, pushing the concept harder than its hardware sales, which have declined precipitously. Game Pass experienced a huge surge of sign-ups during the COVID years, but growth has tapered, and a ceiling has to be in sight. Microsoft is still very much viewing Game Pass as its primary appeal, but as you can see, it is starting to get harder and harder to get non-first-party developers on board. We'll see if that can change or if the issues are set in stone. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy
Geek Culture
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Culture
EA's Failed Live-Service Shooter 'Anthem' To Shut Down Jan 2026
Electronic Arts (EA) has hammered in the final nail in Anthem's coffin, as BioWare's failed 2019 live-service looter shooter will officially shut down on 12 January 2026. Due to the title's online-only nature, this means that the game will be completely unplayable after its servers are taken offline, making it truly a dead game. Premium in-game currency has stopped being sold since 3 July, as though anyone is still buying those anyway, and the game will be removed from the EA Play library on 15 August this year, although it will still be available to download for those who already own the title, until its servers shut down next year. 'After careful consideration, we will be sunsetting Anthem on 12 January 2026,' wrote the BioWare team on a post announcing the game's shuttering. 'This means that the game will still be playable online for the next 180+ days. As of today, you can no longer purchase in-game premium currency, but you can still use your remaining balance until the servers go offline.' In a short Q&A accompanying the post, the team clarified that 'the sunsetting of Anthem has not led to any layoffs', which at least comes as a relief given that EA has gone through a series of massive layoffs over the past few years, including axing 50 jobs at BioWare in 2023, laying off around 670 staff and cancelling a Star Wars FPS title in 2024, and most recently, cutting around 400 positions an scrapping two more games in the works, including an extraction shooter set in the Titanfall universe. Anthem joins the long list of failed live-service titles over the past few years, such as Crystal Dynamics' 2020 action-adventure title Marvel's Avengers or PlatinumGames's 2022 RPG, Babylon's Fall , further cementing how blindly adopting the format, either due to greed or to chase industry trends, can and most likely will spell disaster for even the most respected game studios. Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise 'duds' like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3 . He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying. Anthem BioWare Electronic Arts Live Service Games
Bloomberg
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Bloomberg
Xbox Executives Were Blown Away by an Upcoming Game. Then They Canceled It.
Blackbird, a new game from ZeniMax Online Studios, impressed Xbox boss Phil Spencer earlier this year
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.
