Galvanic Games, the independent Seattle-based developer behind video games such as Some Distant Memory, Rapture Rejects, and last fall’s Wizard With a Gun, is closing its doors.

Studio head and founder Patrick Morgan announced the shutdown in a statement Friday.

“Despite the promising start of Wizard With a Gun, sales are not strong enough to sustain our studio,” Morgan wrote. “The last year has been particularly tough for games.”

Morgan continued: “While we had numerous encouraging conversations at [the DICE Summit] and [the Game Developers Conference], the process of signing new projects … takes longer than the runway we had left.”

Ten employees are expected to lose their jobs in the closure. Galvanic Games has put up a thread on LinkedIn to celebrate their contributions and help affected workers secure new jobs.

Morgan founded Galvanic Games in 2015. Wizard With a Gun might’ve been its highest-profile game to date, made through a collaboration with indie publisher Devolver Digital.

It also toured the indie circuit in 2019 with its story/exploration game Some Distant Memory, and collaborated with Seattle’s tinyBuild and the authors of the webcomic “Cyanide & Happiness” to create the now-defunct satirical battle royale Rapture Rejects.

Galvanic’s shutdown adds to a long list of layoffs that have plagued the video game industry for the last year and a half. More than 10,000 developers have lost their jobs since January, already topping the previous record cuts from all of last year.

The dismissals aren’t coming from any one source, but factors are theorized to include the rising costs of modern “AAA” game development; a dramatic slowdown in available VC investment; a delayed correction after the post-pandemic gaming boom of 2020-2021; a consistently busy release schedule, which may have saturated the market; and the long-term impacts of the industry’s gradual embrace of “games as a service.”

A job posting by Wizards of the Coast went viral on social media over the weekend, highlighting some consumers’ lack of enthusiasm for generative artificial intelligence, as well as the continuing fallout from some of Wizards’ recent controversies.

At the end of May, Renton, Wash.-based Wizards placed a listing on LinkedIn for a principal AI engineer. The senior position is on a team that Wizards is building to “create high-value software and processes in direct support of our development teams,” the company wrote in the posting. The role will explore the use of AI programs in “game development, asset creation, and automated frameworks.”

The job post led to widespread speculation among fans of the Wizards games Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering that Wizards was about to revise its previously stated stance on AI-generated material for its card and board games.

“Our stance on AI hasn’t changed,” a Wizards of the Coast representative told GeekWire. “This job description is for a role for future video game projects.”

The same representative directed us to the Generative AI art FAQ on the official D&D website. According to it, artists, writers, and creatives are expected to refrain from using gen-AI programs to “create final Magic or D&D products.”

Wizards’ parent company Hasbro is currently investing heavily in internal video game development, following the successes of last year’s Baldur’s Gate 3 and Monopoly Go.

While AI has a bad reputation in many fields for enabling bad actors to create floods of zero-effort dross, game developers have found multiple applications for the technology that don’t replace creatives’ efforts. Against that backdrop, it’s not surprising that Hasbro would want an AI engineer on their core team.

The latest dustup highlights a simmering issue of trust between Wizards and its core audience. The company has gone through multiple AI-related controversies in the last couple of years, the most recent of which involved an AI-generated image that appeared in a social media campaign for Magic.

More importantly, Wizards is still suffering from the hit its reputation took in January 2023 when it briefly tried to deauthorize and replace its Open Game License (OGL), which is what allows third-party designers to create D&D content for profit.

The argument seems to be that if Wizards was willing to quietly overturn the OGL, which is the basis of a small industry, then anything else the company says is equally subject to change. That includes its gen-AI policies.

That was further inflamed by a March 1 interview with Hasbro CEO and former Wizards president Chris Cocks, where he discussed the potential use cases for generative AI trained on D&D and Magic’s decades of history. It’s led to a cynical sense among fans that it’s not a question of if we’ll see AI-generated D&D content, but when.

In other D&D news, Wizards is currently celebrating the game’s 50th anniversary with a lineup of new books and brand crossovers, which includes the appearance of longtime D&D archvillain Vecna as a killer in the asymmetrical horror game Dead by Daylight.

Vecna also returned to the game line in the recent release Vecna: Eve of Ruin, a crossover adventure that takes players across the D&D multiverse. It feels like a swan song for the current edition of the game, which will be effectively overhauled later this year with redesigned versions of the three core books.

The next major D&D release is a nonfiction book. The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons: 1970-1977 tracks the early days of American tabletop gaming, and the scene in Lake Geneva that led Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson to collaborate on what eventually became D&D. It’s planned for release on June 18.

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the new Call of Duty will launch on Xbox Game Pass, which marks a significant gamble for Xbox and the latest in a series of moves to determine the future of Microsoft’s gaming division.

Activision, now owned by Microsoft, releases a new Call of Duty every year, which is typically a best-seller. Even lesser-regarded franchise entries like 2023’s Modern Warfare III typically crack the top 3 list for the year, primarily driven by its best-in-class multiplayer modes. According to the WSJ, Microsoft plans to debut 2024’s new Call of Duty at next month’s Xbox Games Showcase, alongside the announcement that it will be available on Game Pass on its launch day.

Microsoft’s bet seems to be that Call of Duty on its Game Pass subscription service will spur a new wave of interest in both the service and in the Xbox as a platform.

That would be a good deal for consumers. While rumors persist that Microsoft will raise the price or add new tiers to Game Pass in the near future, it would still let a single person play the new CoD for a couple of months for less than the $70 cost of the base game.

That could cannibalize the game’s overall sales, however, particularly on the Xbox platform.

In theory, this could also authoritatively confirm or deny Microsoft’s portrayal of the Game Pass service as a “discovery engine,” where players frequently try games before they buy them. This could bring in a new wave of interest from people who might otherwise never have tried a new Call of Duty, or might give a few million casual players an excuse to not buy this year’s edition of the game.

As we learned last summer during Microsoft’s court battle with the FTC over its Activision acquisition, Call of Duty by itself makes up a non-trivial amount of the video game audience. If Microsoft had simply decided to make CoD a console exclusive on Xbox, it would’ve pulled roughly 7 million players away from Sony’s PlayStation 4 and 5 systems.

Instead, the reported plan is to let the game stay cross-platform, but to use it to drive Game Pass subscriptions.

It’s another example of how Microsoft’s recent console strategy has been to redefine the terms of its own success. The company doesn’t discuss how many Xbox devices it’s shipped or individual game sales. The only metric it really cares about, at least in public, is how many people are on Game Pass.

The Call of Duty gamble, if it happens, would be the latest in a series of recent Xbox controversies.

Microsoft’s gaming arm was in good shape at the start of the year. It completed the Activision acquisition, Xbox topped Windows in revenue for the first time, and its major competitors on console didn’t have much left in the tank. Nintendo appears to be winding down the Switch in favor of its as-yet-unannounced successor, while Sony is undergoing an internal reorganization that means it won’t have any new first-party offerings until next year.

Instead of simply relying on its new exclusives to drive sales, however, Xbox announced that it would bring several of its first-party games, such as Sea of Thieves and Grounded, to the PlayStation and Switch.

This seems to have worked out commercially, but did serious damage to the Xbox brand in the process. Microsoft’s earnings report from April showed that Xbox hardware sales had fallen off a cliff.

Microsoft then announced earlier this month that it would shutter several of its studios, all of which were subsidiaries of Bethesda Softworks. This included Tango Gameworks, the Japan-based creators of last year’s cult favorite Hi-Fi Rush; Arkane Austin, which made the much less successful Redfall; and mobile developer Alpha Dog Games.

This was the latest in a series of layoffs and shutdowns that has ravaged the international video game industry for the last 18 months, including 1,900 lost jobs at Xbox in January.

In a May 8 town hall meeting, Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty reportedly told employees that the department needs “smaller games that give us prestige and awards,” the day after his company had closed the studio behind the small, prestigious, award-winning Hi-Fi Rush.

At best, it makes Booty look like he’s out of touch; at worst, he threw all the fire extinguishers out the window, then complained that nobody had put out a fire.

That’s contributed to an increasing perception from outside Xbox that the company has lost track of what it’s doing. IGN’s Ryan McCaffrey made a compelling case in a May 9 editorial: between the Bethesda and Activision Blizzard acquisitions in 2021 and 2023, the Xbox Game Studios network grew by several orders of magnitude in just two years. As a result, it’s become too big for its own good, and higher-ups at Microsoft have noticed.

Xbox chief Phil Spencer has consistently relied on outside-the-box strategies, to varying degrees of success. Now he presides over one of the biggest gaming companies in the world, but one that needs a substantial reorganization.

It’s unlikely that next month’s Showcase and the attendant Call of Duty reveals are a make-or-break moment for the Xbox project overall. Xbox still makes money, even if it’s constantly stuck in third place behind Sony and Nintendo.

Instead, it’s more likely that Call of Duty on Game Pass will be a final test for Xbox’s current operational strategy. If this falls through, I’d imagine the next move is a big executive shakeup, followed by a series of new initiatives. The upcoming year will either vindicate or vilify Spencer’s time as head of Xbox, which could either take Call of Duty down a peg or lock it in place as the most valuable IP in the modern games industry.

In a surprise reveal, Microsoft said Thursday it plans to launch a mobile gaming store later this year.

The news came out during an on-stage interview with Xbox president Sarah Bond at a Bloomberg event.

According to Bond, the as-yet-unnamed store will launch in July on web browsers, rather than a designated app, with Microsoft’s recently-acquired Candy Crush Saga serving as a day-one tentpole franchise.

Microsoft’s entry into the mobile gaming market — the most lucrative arm of the games industry — has been anticipated, particularly since the company’s recent $69 billion acquisition of California-based mega-developer Activision Blizzard King.

In November, Xbox head Phil Spencer that the company was “talking to other partners” to potentially launch a mobile store.

The move sets the stage for a new competition between Microsoft and both Google and Apple, since most mobile games are sold and downloaded through their respective app stores.

Bond told Bloomberg that the new Microsoft mobile store “goes truly across devices – where who you are, your library, your identity, your rewards travel with you versus being locked to a single ecosystem.”

GeekWire reached out to Microsoft for further comment, and we’ll update this post if we hear back. Update, May 10: Microsoft shared this statement:

“We continue to focus on creating great content and finding ways to bring more value to developers. This year we will debut our first mobile offering where mobile players can find deals on their favorite in-game items and discover new games, starting on the web so players can access it anywhere. This web-based store is the first step in our journey to building a trusted app store with its roots in gaming.”

Xbox President Sarah Bond

With the Activision deal, Microsoft is now the owner of the Candy Crush series, one of the largest and most consistent moneymakers in mobile gaming. In September, Candy Crush developer King celebrated the latest installment Candy Crush Saga breaking $20 billion in revenue.

While it gets a fraction of the press coverage, the global mobile gaming market makes nearly as much money as the PC and console sectors put together. A recent report from Newzoo lists mobile gaming as making up $90.5 billion of the games industry’s revenue worldwide.

This is largely driven by emerging markets, where it might be rare for an average consumer to have a computer or gaming system, but most of them have a smartphone. As a result, some mobile games can boast a player population in the tens of millions, such as Tencent’s Honor of Kings.

Bond’s reveal comes two days after Microsoft announced a controversial decision to shutter several of the studios that operated under its subsidiary Bethesda Softworks, including Japan-based Tango Gameworks (Hi-Fi Rush). Reported reasons for the shutdowns included a reallocation of internal resources, as well as executives being reportedly unable to effectively manage the number of projects that were underway under Xbox Game Studios’ roof.

Microsoft’s new store also follows up on changes Apple was forced to make to its app-store policies in the wake of its highly publicized legal battle with Epic Games, which sued Apple in 2020 over the revenue-sharing policies in its app store. That suit ended in 2021 with a partial victory for both companies, which found that Apple’s “walled garden” policy was considered anti-competitive conduct.

Video game fans will be able to step inside the worlds of Super Mario and Donkey Kong in a new “Super Nintendo World” theme park experience opening in Orlando, Fla., next year.

The Nintendo experience is part of the planned Universal Epic Universe — the fourth theme park at Universal Orlando Resort. Details revealed Thursday included a splashy video and artist renderings of what to expect.

From “Super Mario Land” to “Donkey Kong Country” visitors will be able to interact with their favorite characters and take part in a number of challenges — to “meld the game world into the real world.”

In “Super Mario Land,” players can punch blocks, collect coins, find hidden elements and track their progress against other guests in the park.

“There’s so many places to look and get engaged, you just get engulfed in it,” Eric Parr, a senior VP with Universal Creative, said in the video below. “We really wanted to create iconic worlds that deeply connect with fans.”

Visitors to the lush jungle of “Donkey Kong Country” can board a “runaway” mine cart on a family coaster that appears to jump the track.

Along with Super Nintendo World, Universal plans “The Wizarding World of Harry Potter: Ministry of Magic,” “Dark Universe,” “Celestial Park,” and “How to Train Your Dragon: Isle of Berk” as part of the Epic Universe.

Nintendo of America, a subsidiary of the Japanese gaming giant, is based in Redmond, Wash.

LinkedIn — the place where you go to update your resume, network with other professionals and search for jobs — is now another place to play games.

Taking a cue from the very successful online puzzle and game integration at The New York Times, LinkedIn News launched a trio of thinking-oriented games on Wednesday, several weeks after the plan was first revealed.

The Microsoft-owned social platform views the once-per-day game play as another way to help people connect — and get them to spend more time on the website.

“We want to give people a way to exercise their brains while taking a quick break, but also give people a reason to connect with others,” Daniel Roth, editor in chief and VP at LinkedIn wrote in a post. “We hope that these games spark banter, conversations, and even a healthy bit of competition among professionals around the world.”

Games have become a crucial tool for growth for The New York Times, which told Axios earlier this year that its games — such as Wordle — were played more than 8 billion times in 2023. The newspaper now offers a $6/month games-only subscription, and subscription revenue increased nearly 10% to $418.6 million in the third quarter of 2023, Axios reported.

I paused my own attempts at Wordle and Connections this morning to launch LinkedIn and see how quickly three new games might attract my daily interest. Here are my quick thoughts on each (with GIFs via LinkedIn):

Pinpoint

• This word-association game reminds me the most of NYT’s Connections, which, as a word guy, I love playing. Much like that game’s grouping of words with a common theme, the objective in Pinpoint is to guess a common category that five words belong to. The words are hidden, and revealed one at a time, so the goal is to guess the category before all five reveals are up. This was the easiest of the three, at least on day one. “You’re crushing it!” LinkedIn told me, as it provided a link to send my score to my connections and set a notification for tomorrow’s game.

Crossclimb

• Another word game, this was a fun exercise that’s billed as a mix of trivia and word knowledge. You use clues to fill out words in a ladder and then you rearrange those words so that each one differs from the one above it by just one letter. Getting them in the right order unlocks two final clues to win the game. I shuffled a few times here trying to get the order right as my eyes seemed to play tricks on me and make letters blur together. But after that initial play, I think this one will be easier to master.

Queens

• The goal here is to fill a grid with queens (little crown emojis) so that there is one queen in each row, column and region. None of the queens can touch each other and there’s only one correct way to fill out the grid. This one might end up being the biggest time suck. I’ll admit that I had to close Queens without winning because I was about 6 minutes in and struggling — and I needed to quit playing around and get some work done!

Lakshman Somasundaram, a director of product management at LinkedIn, wrote in a post Wednesday that beyond the joy of taking a break and playing the games each day, users will get more out of the exercise after they play.

LinkedIn will show your connections who played, school leaderboards intended to reignite college rivalries, company leaderboards, and a broader community conversation to get tips and tricks, chat with creators, meet new connections, and so on.

Here’s a new LinkedIn video/ad hyping what your workday might look like going forward:

Microsoft posted its latest earnings report on Thursday, which was broadly speaking good news for the company. For its embattled Xbox department, however, there are mixed signals.

This is the second quarterly report from Microsoft that included the effects of its record-setting acquisition of the formerly independent game developer Activision Blizzard King.

• Xbox content and services revenue grew 62% and gaming revenue as a whole grow 51%, both of which were primarily credited to Activision.
• At the same time, Xbox hardware revenue declined by 31%, and the report notes that the overall impact of the Activision acquisition includes a $350 million loss in operating income.
• That loss includes a series of adjustments for the “movement of Activision content” across the ecosystem, as many of Activision’s current titles have needed updates to bring them into compliance with Xbox’s first-party practices.

It’s illustrative of what was actually at stake for Microsoft over the course of the last year, as it defended its Activision acquisition in courts in the U.S. and U.K. Without Activision’s software lineup on its side, the financial story might’ve been much worse for Xbox.

Two different stories

This is a useful example of the “yes, but” sorts of stories that have come out of Xbox so far this year. Overall Xbox revenue is up, but it’s due to having conveniently acquired the rights to several of the most popular franchises in the Western world. The news isn’t that bad, but there’s an asterisk on it.

Microsoft also had to deal with a consistent stream of bad publicity due to the consumer perception that Xbox, for all its efforts and successes, is permanently stuck in third place in the ongoing console market.

In 2024, Xbox’s reputation and its revenues are telling two different stories.

As I noted earlier this year, the announcement that Xbox would publish four of its console exclusives for competitors’ systems was met with a certain degree of horror by Xbox fans. Going cross-platform with system exclusives is traditionally seen as a sign of surrender in the video game market, with some analysts predicting this would mark the end, or at least the beginning of the end, of Microsoft’s Xbox project.

Instead, it seems to have paid off. Earlier this week, reporters noticed that Microsoft currently has more best-sellers on the PlayStation Network than Sony does.

Seven games from Xbox Game Studios broke into the PlayStation top 25 as of April 22, versus only five of Sony’s first-party projects. The Xbox best-sellers on PlayStation included the newly-released Sea of Thieves and Grounded; perennial hits like Minecraft; two games in the Fallout franchise, spurred by the hit live-action show Fallout on Amazon Prime; and Blizzard’s team-based shooter Overwatch 2.

The changes at Xbox are also coming at a point in time when both of its major competitors are hitting a significant lull in their release schedules. Both the PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch are primarily propelled by their first-party exclusives.

Nintendo appears to be quietly sunsetting the Switch, however, with no planned first-party releases on the system for the rest of the year at time of writing. The rumor is that the Switch’s follow-up is currently scheduled to premiere early next year, although Nintendo itself has yet to make any announcements on the subject.

Sony is currently in the process of transitioning many of its first-party efforts to “games as a service,” with the help of its new subsidiary Bungie. It confirmed in February that it wouldn’t release any big first-party PS5 exclusives for the rest of 2024. Sony is still publishing a number of games from other companies for the PS5, such as this week’s Stellar Blade, but its internal studios have been quiet since last year’s Spider-Man 2.

Xbox, by comparison, has a fairly packed schedule for the rest of 2024, with upcoming console exclusives like Hellblade 2 and a new Indiana Jones game. Activision Blizzard King also has a big year ahead, with expansions on the way for both Diablo IV and World of Warcraft, and Microsoft has confirmed that this holiday season will see the debut of another entry in the Call of Duty franchise.

It’s likely that Xbox, one way or another, will have a good 2024, if only because it’s stubbornly insisting on continuing to show up to the party. The ongoing issue, however, is convincing fans and analysts alike that there’s a method to its madness.

In the console gaming market, success is typically defined by selling a lot of games and consoles. Xbox’s move has been to throw out the old playbook and reclassify “success” in more nebulous terms like currently active Game Pass subscriptions. To go by its quarterly reports, that approach is working, but it’s low visibility, low yield.

Bellevue, Wash.-based game publisher tinyBuild has sold the rights to Totally Reliable Delivery Service to the French corporation Atari, which intends to use the acquisition to revive a legacy brand.

The game, which tinyBuild published for PC, console, and mobile in 2020, was developed by We’re Five Games in Minneapolis. It’s a deliberately chaotic party game for up to four players. tinyBuild subsequently acquired We’re Five Games in February 2021.

Now, in an unusual deal, tinyBuild has sold the trademark and rights for TRDS, but not We’re Five Games, to Atari. Neither Atari or tinyBuild have disclosed the financial terms of the acquisition.

Atari plans to use TRDS as the first game published under its new Infogrames imprint. The original Infogrames, founded in 1983, was famous in the early days of PC gaming as the publisher behind several cult-classic games, such as the original Alone in the Dark, 1999’s Outcast, and 2003’s Master of Orion III.

“For decades, Infogrames built a reputation as a publisher and developer of amazing and eclectic games, and we are excited to bring it back,” Atari CEO Wade Rosen said in a press release.

The current plan for the Infogrames label is to continue to build its portfolio via acquisitions, with the potential to eventually include some of the games that Infogrames published in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

It’s worth noting that in a ship-of-Theseus sense, Infogrames wasn’t actually gone. The company that currently calls itself Atari is the descendant of the original Infogrames, following over 20 years of acquisitions, reorganizations, and mergers. Following a series of financial setbacks, Infogrames officially rebranded itself to Atari, Inc., in May 2003.

In 2024, Atari is arguably best-known for its crowdfunded Atari VCS video game console, which uses a Linux-based OS to run a lineup of classic, reimagined, and reinvented Atari games. Its most recent release, Lunar Lander: Beyond, is a current-generation sequel to the 1979 arcade game, which launched on all modern platforms on Tuesday.

Atari previously acquired Vancouver, Wash.-based developer Nightdive Studios in May.

The new Infogrames label is intended to publish games that “fall outside the core portfolio of IP associated with the Atari brand,” including a focus on game preservation measures.

A new SEC filing reveals that Cynthia Williams plans to step down as president at Hasbro-owned game company Wizards of the Coast.

No specific reason has been publicly offered for Williams’ departure, which is effective April 26.

“We’re excited for Cynthia to take the next step in her career and grateful for the contributions she has made in her more than two years at Wizards and Hasbro,” a Hasbro representative told GeekWire. “We wish her the absolute best in her next endeavor. We have started the search for our next President of Wizards of the Coast and hope to have a successor in place soon.”

After stints with Microsoft’s Xbox team and Amazon’s finance and fulfillment departments, Williams took over from departing Wizards president Chris Cocks in February 2022.

In a little over two years, Williams oversaw a period in which Wizards’ flagship games, Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering, were both extraordinarily successful and frequently controversial.

During Williams’ time as president, Wizards released multiple major projects, such as the revivals of the fan-favorite settings Dragonlance and Planescape for D&D; the 100th expansion for Magic, the Western-themed Outlaws of Thunder Junction; the release of the major motion picture Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves; and the foundation of several new video game studios under the Wizards umbrella.

Most critically, Williams presided over the official release of the D&D video game adaptation Baldur’s Gate 3, which recently made video game history by sweeping the Game of the Year category at all five major award shows.

However, she was also president during several different incidents where Wizards ran up against the issues raised by generative-art AI programs, including the accidental inclusion of AI art in an official D&D sourcebook; multiple aborted video game projects; and maybe most famously, the furor that arose over D&D’s Open Gaming License in January 2023.

More recently, Williams’ Wizards underwent sudden layoffs just before Christmas which resulted in the dismissal of at least 20 employees.

Wizards of the Coast was prone to controversy well before Williams’ time as president, particularly in 2020. The TTRPG business has always seemed to invite drama, and as the industry leader, Wizards has a greater share of that than most companies in the space. However, during Williams’ time as president, Wizards of the Coast has seen some of the highest highs and lowest lows in its 34-year history.

At time of writing, Wizards has yet to officially announce Williams’ departure or establish who will be her successor.

SPOKANE, Wash. — “The House that Myst Built” could have been built anywhere.

The home of Cyan Worlds, on the northern outskirts of Spokane, was made possible by the success of the company’s iconic adventure video game, as indicated by the nickname that Cyan CEO and co-founder Rand Miller uses for it.

Miller and his brother, Cyan co-founder Robyn Miller, had been building the company in Spokane when Myst was released. After debuting for Macintosh in 1993, the blockbuster franchise would ultimately expand to basically every major game platform, on its way to lifetime sales of 15 million units across its different versions.

But before they started working on their next virtual world, Myst sequel Riven, the brothers put their imaginations into making a physical world of their own — dreaming up a new headquarters suitable to be the home of Myst.

One of their questions: was there someplace else they’d rather be?

“We looked at a lot of places, including Hawaii, and the usual fun places you can think of,” Rand Miller recalled.

But ultimately, they realized it would be hard to beat Spokane’s affordability, four distinct seasons, proximity to outdoor activities and the airport, and minimal traffic, among other benefits.

People they tried to recruit from larger cities quickly got over their skepticism about moving to Spokane, especially if they were at a stage in life where they were thinking about or already raising a family.

“They’d laugh at first, but they could afford a house here, and they never went away,” he said. “It’s a great place to raise a family. It’s a great place to get out of the rat race, if you’re so inclined.”

Rand and Robyn Miller moved around a few times as kids, living in places including New Mexico and Texas. As adults, they started the company from different areas, and ended up in Spokane after their parents moved there.

Over the years, Spokane has evolved significantly, with more entertainment options in the city, for example, including a reinvigorated downtown, Riverfront Park, Spokane Arena, the Spokane Symphony, and more.

Along the way, as the population has swelled, Spokane doesn’t have quite the same affordability advantage, particularly in the area of housing prices. Spokane County’s cost of living is 11% higher than the current U.S. average, according to the Spokane Workforce Council. As recently as 2020, it was less than 1 point above the nation.

Another big change, of course, has been the rise of remote work.

Prior to the pandemic, Miller said, Cyan primarily employed people in the Spokane area. Now, out of the company’s approximately 25 employees, about 25-30% of them are based elsewhere. Two of the most recent hires probably wouldn’t have joined the company if not for the fact that they could remain in the L.A. area.

“It really does change things,” he said.

These days, the Cyan team is at work on a modern version of the critically acclaimed Riven, which is billed as “a meticulous, from-the-ground-up remake of the historic puzzle adventure game.”

As for their headquarters, Miller jokes that he and his brother didn’t know that they were supposed to blow all the proceeds from Myst on fancy cars and other luxury items, so they decided to construct a building instead.

In all seriousness, he said, owning their own corporate home is one of the best decisions they’ve made.

“It’s one of the things I think that has kept us alive over the years through the ups and downs,” he said, displaying a pragmatism that’s characteristic of people in Spokane. “Having cheap or no rent really makes a difference when you’re in a downtime.”

Slay the Spire 2, a sequel to the hit 2019 video game, is planned for release next year via Steam Early Access.

Its developer, the Seattle-based studio Mega Crit, made the announcement during Wednesday’s Triple-i Initiative Showcase, a livestreamed event that highlighted multiple new and upcoming indie video game projects.

The original Slay the Spire has quietly become one of the most influential computer games of the last decade. It’s a clever fusion between collectible deck-building card games and a “roguelike” dungeon crawler, where players explore a randomized dungeon in a dark fantasy world.

Each battle is conducted by playing cards, and victory rewards you with more cards and relics. The challenge is to slap together a winning strategy on the fly from whatever you can find before the game’s dangers grind you down.

Slay the Spire first came out for PCs in 2017, and spent two years in Early Access on Steam before its full release in January 2019. Despite a slow initial start, it sold more than 1.5 million copies by the following March, according to co-creator Casey Yano, and has since been ported to mobile devices and every major console.

Yano is an ex-Amazon employee, while his co-founder at Mega Crit, Anthony Giovannetti, worked at Cequint and the now-defunct Ernie’s Games in Woodinville, Wash. Both are graduates from the University of Washington-Bothell who left their jobs in 2015 to begin work on the project that became Slay the Spire.

Since Slay the Spire’s release, CCG-based games like it have become one of the most consistently popular sub-genres in the indie-game scene, with other releases like Deck of Ashes, Monster Train, Griftlands, Throne of Bone, Rogue Lords, and Richard Garfield’s Roguebook following in its path. With a sequel, Mega Crit has a solid chance of continuing to push the envelope on a sub-genre that it more or less helped to define.

No further details about Slay the Spire 2 have been announced at time of writing, but Mega Crit promises that more is to come over the course of the year.

Other Pacific Northwest game news from the the Triple-i Initiative Showcase included:

• Red Hook Games’ Darkest Dungeon 2, which left Steam Early Access last May, will get a free content update later this year. This adds a new standalone campaign mode, Kingdoms, where players fight several new factions in defense of their turf.
• Vancouver, B.C.,-based Thorium Entertainment released its debut title, UnderMine, via Fandom in 2019 before moving into self-publishing. The sequel, UnderMine 2, adds 2-player co-op to its dungeon-delving roguelike formula.
• Bellevue, Wash.-based indie publisher tinyBuild released a new trailer for Streets of Rogue 2, a tongue-in-cheek open-world game about overthrowing a corrupt mayor.
• tinyBuild also promoted Broken Roads, an RPG set in post-apocalyptic Australia, which released today for PC, Xbox, and PlayStation platforms.

ProbablyMonsters, a game studio collective headquartered in Bellevue, Wash., announced Tuesday that it’s founded a new internal development team called Hidden Grove.

The team at Hidden Grove is headed by general manager Chris Opdahl and design directors Raylene Deck and Grant Mackay. All three are former developers on Bungie’s MMO shooter Destiny 2 who first landed at ProbablyMonsters in 2020.

Hidden Grove’s debut project is an “original multiplayer competitive adventure game” in Unreal Engine 5. According to a ProbablyMonsters representative, the project has been “in incubation” and is only now being announced.

Other members of the new team include executive producer Lori Ada Kilty, a former program manager at Xbox Game Studios; art director Jedd Chevrier, freelance illustrator and former creative lead at Microsoft Hololens; senior engineering director Dean Johnson, a former engineering manager at Microsoft and 343 Industries; and narrative director Kate Welch, former lead designer at Wizards of the Coast.

Founded in 2016 by former Bungie CEO Harold Ryan, ProbablyMonsters bills itself as “building a family of sustainable game studios through a people-first culture.” Ryan told GeekWire in 2019 that the role of ProbablyMonsters is to “manage the business side for [its studios] and help them to grow,” while maintaining a path for each studio to go independent.

The company went through a round of layoffs in September.

ProbablyMonsters also announced on Tuesday that it hired Adam Rymer as its new chief product officer. Rymer, the former CEO of e-sports firm OpTic Gaming and former president of Nerdist Industries, will report directly to Ryan.

Hidden Grove is the newest ProbablyMonsters team to go public, joining Battle Barge, which is in development on an unnamed “next-gen” cooperative RPG, and Cauldron, which halted development on its debut project in June.

Another team, Firewalk Studios, was acquired by Sony last year, which revealed Firewalk’s debut game Concord as a PlayStation exclusive last May.

Seattle-based game studio Reflection Games is raising investment to help support development of its debut project.

A new SEC filing reveals that the company has raised about $2 million in fresh cash.

A company representative declined to comment on the filing when contacted by GeekWire.

Founded in 2021, Reflection is a 16-person studio focused on mobile game development. Its first game, the free-to-play “strategy battler” Mutant Forge, is currently in play-testing on iOS and Android.

Reflection’s CEO, Paul Thelen, is the founder and former chairman at Seattle-based casual gaming giant Big Fish Games. Thelen left Big Fish in 2018, shortly after the compay was sold to Aristocrat Technologies in a nearly billion-dollar deal.

Other Big Fish veterans at Reflection include Patrick Wylie, chief operating officer; Christopher Warwick, senior backend engineer; and Michael Tapley, lead designer. They’re joined by a distributed team of experienced developers and newcomers from across the Pacific Northwest.

Reflection soft-launched Mutant Forge earlier this year. It’s a real-time strategy game with some elements taken from tower defense and “auto-battlers.”

In Mutant Forge, players are given an assortment of disposable monsters with which to attack enemies and dismantle fortifications. Each type of unit has particular strengths and weaknesses, but have a short recharge timer before they can be redeployed. You can’t simply flood the zone, but have to pick particular mutants based on the situation you’re in.

With each successful mission, you earn currency and items which you can use to improve your mutant monsters’ stats and abilities, or create entirely new units through weird science.

The final version of Mutant Forge will feature a single-player campaign mode, as well as player-vs.-player matches. It’s currently only available through a playtest build that can be downloaded on its official website, with more news reportedly coming soon.

Editor’s note: This story was updated to reflect that Thelen founded Big Fish Games. An earlier version of this article identified Thelen as having worked at PopCap.

Bellevue, Wash.-based Valve Software announced a new feature for its digital gaming storefront Steam, which allows small groups of Steam users to share access to the computer games in their libraries.

The new feature, Steam Families, debuted on Steam’s beta client on Monday. It’s intended to replace current features such as Steam Family Sharing and Steam Family View, in favor of a single menu that covers both game sharing and parental controls.

When users create a Steam Family, they can designate up to five other users as members, and manage their permissions from a web browser, the standalone Steam client, or the Steam mobile app. A member of a Steam Family has access to the games in all other family members’ libraries that are compatible with the program, which encompasses many but not all of the games on Steam.

A user who’s playing a game via a member of their Steam Family maintains local save files and achievement progress, and can play even if the game’s original owner is online at the time. However, in order for two users to play the same game simultaneously, you’d still need multiple copies of the game across various libraries.

For example, if I was playing Stardew Valley on Steam, a member of my Steam Family could log on and decide to install and play Pacific Drive from my library, even though I’m online and using my account. If that same user wanted to join me in Stardew Valley, they’d have to buy their own copy of the game, or at least borrow it from a third member of our Steam Family.

Steam recently passed a milestone by having over 100,000 individual games available on the platform, although a significant number of them at any time might be hidden due to a user’s content filters.

At time of writing, well over half of those games can be shared with other users via Steam Families, including recent hits such as Baldur’s Gate 3, Palworld, Enshrounded, and Helldivers 2. A game developer may choose to opt a title out from the Steam Families program, due to technical incompatibilities or other reasons.

Accounts in a Steam Family can be designated as an Adult or Child, where Adults can manage invitations and apply content restrictions to anyone with a Child role. This also allows an adult to set playtime limits, restrict access to the storefront, and recover a child’s password. Children can send in-app requests to adults in order to purchase new games, which saves a parent from having to dig out their credit card.

Currently, Steam Families can have up to six members. If someone leaves or gets kicked out, the slot must remain vacant for at least a year before another user can be invited aboard. The idea is that a Steam Family is meant as a labor-saving device for a household of gaming enthusiasts, rather than a way for several unrelated users to share their libraries with one another.

Even so, it’s reflective of Valve’s relatively hands-off process when it comes to account sharing on Steam. While a number of features do require additional security, such as access to the Steam Marketplace for auctioning in-game items, there’s not much in the client that would keep a group of people from having a communal Steam account.

Microsoft’s Xbox program maintains a similar, relatively hands-off approach to password sharing. This stands in stark contrast to other digital subscription services such as Netflix, which implemented new policies earlier this year aimed at cracking down on the practice.

LinkedIn wants to add a little more fun to its feed.

Posts on social media and a report from TechCrunch over the weekend revealed the Microsoft-owned platform may add several puzzle-based games to the overall LinkedIn experience, some of which are titled “Queens,” “Inference,” and “Crossclimb.”

“We’re playing with adding puzzle-based games within the LinkedIn experience to unlock a bit of fun, deepen relationships, and hopefully spark the opportunity for conversations,” a LinkedIn representative said in a statement.

It’s not hard to see why someone at LinkedIn might’ve hit upon offering a few unique gaming experiences as a way to draw in more users.

Casual games like Farmville are part of what put Facebook on the map back in the day, and millions of people visit the The New York Times website just to do the crossword or play Wordle. Casual games are a proven way to get people to spend more time on a given website.

There’s also an argument to be made that LinkedIn is in a unique position to capitalize on growth while X (formerly known as Twitter) is seeing lower user count numbers.

The barrier between LinkedIn and other social networks isn’t audience uptake; it’s the “social” part. Very few people seem to just hang out on LinkedIn unless they’re specifically discussing their jobs.

However, there’s a chance that could change.

As Slate’s Scott Nover pointed out last year, LinkedIn has become slightly more casual, and hasn’t adopted most of Facebook or X’s worst habits. For all its issues, LinkedIn is still very much a place where you go to talk directly to people, without any particular interference from bots, inscrutable algorithms, or random communities. In the great battle of 2020s social media, LinkedIn scored a lot of points by standing still.

It makes sense that LinkedIn would try to double down on that by providing more activities to get people to stop by LinkedIn for something besides work, and Microsoft has a long history of creating addictive casual games.

I have my doubts that LinkedIn will ever shake off its reputation for being slightly boring, but at a point in time when most other major social media platforms are actively infuriating, maybe “boring” has a role to play.

LinkedIn generated over $4 billion in Microsoft’s most recent quarter. Its revenue has steadily grown since Microsoft acquired it in late 2016 for $26 billion. The platform has more than 1 billion members across 200 countries and territories.

At this year’s Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle, one of the panel discussions brought together several working artists to discuss how the advent of generative AI tools have already changed the face of their profession, the other problems they see going forward, and what they’d like to see from tech firms and legislators.

Actor Julie Snyder hosted a group discussion that included Fabrice Sapolsky, CEO of indie publisher Fair Square Comics; painter and illustrator Kit Steele; Tony Moy, watercolorist, writer, and creator of the WWII webcomic 4Forty2nd – The Lost Battalion on Webtoon; and Melissa Capriglione, a writer, illustrator, and creator of the webcomic Falconhyrste, who recently published her debut graphic novel Basil & Oregano at Dark Horse.

All four artists shared stories of issues they’ve had with AI art, both in general and with other creators, along with several proposed solutions.

“To me, you can use AI for translation, to write marketing copy, to check your grammar, to do a lot of other things that aren’t necessarily evil,” said Sapolsky. “The main problem is moral. We live in an era where technology goes faster than law.”

Sapolsky added, “AI is not going to go away. We have to get used to it. Now, how do we tame it?”

AI vs. reality

All four artists on the panel had run into issues that arose directly from the use of generative AI, particularly how it had affected their own practices and client interactions.

“One of the things that [AI] does, in terms of stealing, is eyeballs,” Moy said. “We all have a finite amount of time to scroll on our phones, and for every AI account that comes across your feed, that’s eyeballs away from someone’s actual art.”

An artist using traditional tools, such as pen and ink or watercolors, might take hours to create a single piece, whereas AI can generate dozens or hundreds of images in the same period of time. Someone like Moy might only be able to post new art once a day or less via social media, while accounts that are devoted to AI art can drown him out by sheer volume.

“I’ve seen Tony [painting] in hotel lobbies at 4 a.m. because he had a commission to finish,” Sapolsky said. “He spends eight, 10 hours on a piece, while someone can spend 25 seconds aping Tony’s style through Midjourney or Leonardo. That’s a problem.”

That in turn can and has set up unrealistic expectations from clients, who end up with inflated ideas about what a human artist is actually capable of doing.

“There’s an element of the level of expectation [AI sets] for human ability,” Steele said. “We’ve all seen the photos that show up on Facebook, like [sculptures] that just physically aren’t possible, regardless of the skill or talent of the original sculptor. You’re getting people who have completely handed their level of critical thinking over to the internet, and trusting what they see is reality.”

Capriglione added, “It feeds into the expectation on social media of instant gratification: ’This person isn’t posting enough, so I’ll follow this AI artist who’s posting more.’ We’re expected to post every day, but I want to work. I want to draw. C’mon.”

The result, particularly for a working artist that makes some amount of their overall income through commissions, is an audience with a loosening grasp on how, and why, art is made.

Art is not a democracy

A common argument by proponents of AI art is often that these programs “democratize” the ability to create, by removing the need for someone to train, practice, or get educated before they can work on some art. It’s a relatively common topic on pro-AI corners of social media, and Hopkins brought it up to the panel to get their reaction.

“Nowadays, people say that learning art is inaccessible because you need to go to art school,” Capriglione said. “You can go on YouTube, type ‘how to draw’ or ‘how to watercolor,’ and watch somebody’s process for free in 10 minutes. You can create with a $10 box of terrible markers. We can create with anything.”

Steele added, “What is there to democratize? Can you pick up a pencil? Great. You’ve got a start. Can you draw a circle? Awesome. You’re an artist. Keep going.”

Moy took a different approach. “Art was always about the singular perspective of the artist,” he said. “As a critique, as a commentary, on society, on how the artist views the world. Art is about gaining an interesting perspective from the artist’s point of view. To consider art to be ‘democratized’ also speaks to what we want the state of art and creativity to be, as [AI] tools become more prevalent.”

Rules of law

While no one on the panel argued for an end to generative AI, particularly when it’s used for personal entertainment purposes, a frequent topic was what could be done to legally protect artists in this environment.

“France has a rule that if you use Photoshop for any photography for advertising, you have to notify [viewers] that hey, this model was digitally touched up,” Moy said. “There are going to have to be laws and regulations that say, if it is AI, there’s a statement that says it was created with AI. We can create some simple rules and regulations to help us navigate the new environment.”

This could include methods by which artists can deliberately opt out or into their work being used by machine learning models, with a payment program for artists who choose to participate. It’s not simply the use of art as training data, but rather, that so much of it has been used without permission or even notification.

Sapolsky drew a parallel here between AI companies’ unregulated use of artists’ work and the American recording industry, which routinely tracks down unlicensed use of clients’ music on YouTube or Twitch. It’s a useful model for potential enforcement, should a company be found to have stolen artists’ work.

Offenders could readily be punished through methods such as algorithm disgorgement, where a company that’s found to be using training data without creators’ permission is forced to delete both that data and the products made with it. The FTC has already used or proposed algorithm disgorgement in several settlements, including a case last summer that involved Amazon’s Ring.

However, no one on the panel was particularly optimistic about that kind of pro-artist legislation being enacted in the U.S. The European Union has several initiatives and boards dedicated to arts and culture, which have no American parallel. That leaves American artists, for the time being, forced to organize and work on a grass-roots level.

This includes the ongoing lawsuit against Stable Diffusion, which has several Pacific Northwest artists such as Sarah Anderson and Phil Foglio attached as plaintiffs.

At the end of the hour, the general impression I walked away with was that the issue here isn’t the existence of generative AI tools by themselves, but instead, how they’re used and often misused. This was particularly driven home by Sapolsky, who frequently spoke up to point out that AI in general is simply a machine. It’s not good or bad by itself.

However, it does represent a potential branch point in arts and culture, particularly in our relationship with what and how we choose to create.

“What do we want art to represent?” Moy asked at the panel. “Safe stuff? Clean stuff? Does it challenge our thoughts, how we think and how we perceive? That’s a question that we all have to think about and answer.”

A new wave of layoffs at video game mega-studio Electronic Arts has multiple impacts on the Pacific Northwest gaming industry, including the end of development on a Star Wars video game and the effective closure of a developer based in Seattle.

Electronic Arts (EA), based in Redwood City, Calif., is one of the largest independent game publishers in the modern industry, owing to the strength of franchises like Battlefield, Apex Legends, last year’s Dead Space remake, and its annually-released football simulator Madden.

In addition to affiliates around the world, EA started new investments in the Seattle area in the last few years. It opened Ridgeline Games in Seattle in 2021 under the leadership of Halo co-creator Marcus Lehto, in order to work on the Battlefield franchise. In 2023, EA announced the foundation of Cliffhanger Games in Seattle in 2023, which is working on a licensed video game that features the Marvel superhero Black Panther.

On Feb. 28, EA CEO Andrew Wilson announced that the company would reorganize its development efforts and lay off 5% of its overall workforce, due to what Wilson calls an “accelerating industry transformation.” Analysts expect that roughly 670 employees worldwide will lose their jobs in the process.

This came five days after news that EA had instituted layoffs at two studios, after the decision to sunset two of its mobile games.

Wilson didn’t say anything about the precise impacts of the Feb. 28 reorganization on EA’s current and upcoming projects, which created a flurry of rumors on social media. Many of these were subsequently addressed by a follow-up post by Laura Miele, EA’s president of entertainment and technology.

EA has officially halted work on an unnamed Star Wars game that was in development at Respawn Entertainment’s Vancouver, B.C., facility. The game in question was reportedly going to be a first-person shooter, but no other details were ever released to the public.

This may seem like a strange move from the outside, but EA has historically had a hard time with making Star Wars games. Last year’s Jedi: Survivor notwithstanding, EA has started and then stopped development on more Star Wars titles in the last five years than it’s actually released. It also lost the exclusivity rights to Star Wars in 2021, following Disney’s decision to reopen Lucasfilm Games.

Cliffhanger Games in Seattle is reportedly unaffected. However, Miele confirmed that EA would be “winding down Ridgeline as a standalone studio.” An unspecified number of team members at Ridgeline will be moved to Ripple Effect in Los Angeles, where they’ll continue to work on a future game in the Battlefield series.

This followed the Feb. 27 news that Lehto had left Ridgeline and EA, which Lehto confirmed via X (formerly Twitter) was his own decision.

EA’s two waves of layoffs in February are the latest in a series of dismissals, reorganizations, and closures that have eliminated thousands of games industry jobs over the course of the last 14 months. According to a running total maintained by Kotaku’s Zack Zweizen and Kenneth Shepard, at least 8,177 employees at game developers and related businesses such as Discord, Unity, and Twitch have been laid off in 2024.

The layoffs are generally blamed on a number of factors, including the rising costs of mainstream “AAA” games development; a market correction following the post-pandemic gaming boom in 2020-2021; dramatically slowed VC investment in 2023; persistent industry-wide labor issues that have been a problem for years; and video games in general hitting a saturation point, where there are more titles being released than the audience can keep up with.

Pacific Drive is a survival game where your car’s survival is more important than yours. You’ve ended up stuck in an isolated part of the Olympic Peninsula where reality’s coming apart at the seams, and you won’t get out of it alive without wheels. That requires you to scrounge through what’s left of the local towns for gas, scrap, and spare parts, all while the local fabric of space-time turns itself inside out to stop you.

I’m about 12 hours into Pacific Drive at time of writing, and what impresses me the most about it is what it doesn’t do. I’ve lost count of the survival games I’ve played in the last few years that took their inspiration from zombie movies or Mad Max, where you spend most of your time fighting people over limited resources. It’s not so much a survival game as a shooter where everyone’s in rags.

Pacific Drive, by comparison, has no combat to speak of. It’s just you, your station wagon, and a few voices on the radio, up against a hostile, unpredictable environment.

Initially announced in June 2022 at Sony’s State of Play, Pacific Drive is the debut project from Seattle-based game developer Ironwood Studios. Its team includes multiple long-time veterans of the U.S. games industry, with experience working at Oculus, Riot Games, Sucker Punch, Insomniac, and 343 Industries.

In Pacific Drive’s alternate reality, the Olympic Peninsula became a test site for a new type of technology in the 1940s. In 1955, after an unknown disaster, the U.S. government walled off the entire site and left it to rot. By 1998, the area is known as the Olympic Exclusion Zone.

You play Pacific Drive as a delivery driver who gets too close to the Zone’s wall and is pulled inside. Shortly afterward, you discover a station wagon that somehow still runs, and use it to get to relative safety. Now equipped with what might be the last working automobile in the Zone, you team up with a few surviving scientists to try to find a way back out.

Your headquarters is an auto shop in a relatively safe area, but it doesn’t have any spare parts to speak of. In order to fix up the car, and to get closer to finding an escape route, you have to drive out into more dangerous parts of the Zone. There, you’ll collect whatever raw materials you can find, navigate past the local hazards, and try to get both yourself and your station wagon back home in one piece.

Ironwood calls Pacific Drive a “driving roguelike,” where no two runs through the game will be exactly the same. Each specific location in the Zone has a consistent road map, but you won’t find the same resources or hazards on two consecutive trips.

Many of those hazards are what the game calls “anomalies”: bizarre events or objects that are scattered across the Zone. These can range from localized earthquakes to electrified fog to bizarre statues that explode if you touch them, and they can show up without warning at almost any time. I’ve had several easy runs turn into disasters, as the Zone coughed up a few lightning rods or tiny hurricanes just to keep me entertained. You’ll often have to stop during a run to figure out a way to defuse, destroy, or just get around a crowd of anomalies.

Your station wagon serves as both your means of transport and a way to protect yourself from the Zone’s less visible hazards. It’s a rusted-out wreck at the start of the game, but every time you survive a trip through the Zone, you can return to the auto shop with some spare parts, weird tech, and raw materials that you can use to gradually fix up your car. Before long, you can swap out its tires, install tougher panels, soup up the engine, and customize it into the post-apocalyptic disaster wagon of your dreams, courtesy of weird fringe science.

That sets up a simple loop: go out into the world, collect what you can, then come back to the shop and see what you can improve about your station wagon. Later in the game, you can build new workstations that let you upgrade your character’s clothes and tools, by using the Zone’s inherent weirdness to create new tech that would ordinarily be impossible. There’s nothing to stop you from rushing through Pacific Drive’s main storyline, but there’s a lot of incentive to simply explore the Zone, in order to collect the upgrades you’ll need to meet the game’s later challenges.

I’ve used the words “weird” or “weirdness” a lot in this article, which also illustrates a lot of what impresses me about Pacific Drive. Its creative director, Alexander Dracott, told me at PAX last year that much of the game is based on his old hobby of taking long road trips to nowhere, and a lot of that comes through in the final product. Pacific Drive feels personal, the same way that an independent movie or novel would, and that’s a rarer quality in modern video games than I’d like it to be.

That being said, I do have notes. I’ve run into a few bugs in my time with Pacific Drive, most of which involve its in-game physics. At one point, I got out of my car and got randomly teleported to the top of a nearby radio tower; at another, I tried to open the driver’s side door and the entire car was suddenly driven four feet straight down.

In fairness, there are a couple of mechanics built into Pacific Drive that make it easy to recover from unanticipated situations, including a system that lets you teleport your car to a safe location if it ends up on its side. As a result, I’ve hit some bugs, but I’ve yet to find one that actually stopped my progress.

Most of my other issues that I’d raise all come down to being a matter of personal taste. I don’t usually like driving in video games, because most of the time, they feel like they control markedly worse than a real car would in the same situation. Pacific Drive isn’t any exception to that, and in addition, often asks you to go off-road. While you can eventually install better tires, the first few hours of Pacific Drive give you a substantial handicap, since your car’s in such dire shape.

It’s a testament to the rest of the package that I stuck with the game despite that. Pacific Drive is a unique experience in a genre and medium that doesn’t have enough unique experiences. You’d probably get more out of it if you’re fond of real-life road trips, but it’s a trip worth taking for anyone who likes strange science fiction.

Pacific Drive is available now for PlayStation 5, Steam, and the Epic Games Store.

[Ironwood Studios provided a Steam code for Pacific Drive for the purpose of this review.]

Seattle police arrested a man who allegedly stole “about $40,000 worth” of collectible cards for Wizards of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering.

According to the SPD Blotter, the unidentified man worked as a temporary employee at a warehouse on Leary Ave. in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. He stole the cards from a business that was relocating operations from the warehouse, according to police.

The alleged thief was caught when the manager at the warehouse found cards similar to the missing inventory being sold on an unspecified online marketplace, and placed an order. When the package arrived, the return address matched the suspect’s, at which point police got involved, according to the SPD Blotter.

Seattle police subsequently recovered “a majority” of the stolen cards. The suspect has been booked into King County Jail for theft and trafficking in stolen property.

A manager at the nearby Mox Boarding House gaming store in Ballard told GeekWire he had no knowledge of the theft.

Magic: The Gathering, created by Richard Garfield, celebrated its 30th anniversary last year. Players compete against one another with custom decks of cards, in an intricate game that’s meant to reflect a duel between powerful wizards. In addition to making and selling physical cards, Wizards of the Coast also maintains several video games based on Magic, such as Magic: The Gathering – Arena.

Many of the best cards in Magic are also deliberately printed in lower quantities, which has resulted in a robust secondary market for buying and selling Magic cards. It’s not strange for individual cards to go for 2- and 3-digit sums on sites like eBay. Last year, rapper Post Malone set an all-time record for Magic collectors when he reportedly paid $2.64 million for a single, unique Magic card.

Further, Wizards of the Coast has recently made moves to deliberately appeal to the Magic collectors’ market with initiatives like its Secret Lair collections. These are limited-edition reprints and cards that often pursue a specific theme, such as crossovers with other intellectual properties. Some Secret Lair cards are produced in such limited supply that a relative handful of them could’ve been worth most of the $40,000 theft.

The most recent expansion for Magic, the mystery-themed Murders at Karlov Manor, debuted earlier this month. This is Magic’s 99th expansion, to be followed in April by the Wild West-themed Outlaws at Thunder Junction.

Coincidentally, Renton, Wash.-based Wizards of the Coast also unveiled a new Secret Lair “drop” on Tuesday, which is based upon the universe of the Fallout video games. Fallout, currently owned and published by Microsoft subsidiary Bethesda Softworks, is a black comedy/action series that’s set in the U.S. after a devastating nuclear war. An episodic live-action Fallout show is scheduled to premiere on Amazon Prime on April 12.

Errata, Feb. 22: Removed incorrect information about the next Magic expansion.

Grounded and Pentiment are coming to the Nintendo Switch later this year, as the first two former console exclusives that Xbox Game Studios plans to publish for competitors’ platforms.

The announcements were part of the latest Nintendo Direct broadcast on Wednesday morning that focused exclusively on games that other companies are publishing for the Switch in the next couple of months.

The Xbox team at Microsoft announced last week that they planned to publish four former Xbox console exclusives for competitors’ platforms, but didn’t specify titles.

The Direct opened with a trailer for Grounded, which spent two years in early access on Xbox and Windows before getting a full release in 2022. Grounded is a first-person survival game about a bunch of kids who’ve been shrunk to the size of insects, which traps them in the now-dangerous environment that used to be their own backyard. (Think Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, but with more improvised weaponry and base-building.) The Switch version of Grounded is scheduled for release on April 16.

Pentiment, which was announced in passing in a montage at the end of the Direct, is a little harder to explain. Directed and written by long-time game developer Josh Sawyer (Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity), Pentiment is an interactive murder mystery set in 16th-century Bavaria. It might be most notable for its graphics, which deliberately resemble illuminated manuscripts from the late medieval period. Pentiment debuted on Xbox, Game Pass, and PC in Nov. 2022, and is scheduled to launch tomorrow, Feb. 22, on Switch.

Both games were developed by Obsidian Entertainment, based in Irvine, Calif., which is known for making cult-favorite RPGs like The Outer Worlds and Alpha Protocol. Microsoft purchased Obsidian in Nov. 2018. Its next game, Avowed, is scheduled for release later this year on Xbox, PC, and Game Pass..

Other news out of today’s Direct included:

• Microsoft also technically released five games for Nintendo’s Switch Online, via its subsidiary Rare Ltd. As of today, Rare’s Snake Rattle ‘n’ Roll, Battletoads in Battlemaniacs, R.C. Pro-Am, Blast Corps, and the Super Nintendo version of Killer Instinct have all been released for Nintendo’s retro streaming library, which is available for Switch Online subscribers. Microsoft bought Rare in 2002.
• Seattle studio Aggro Crab will release its oceanic action game Another Crab’s Treasure on Switch on April 25. As seen at last year’s Penny Arcade Expo, ACT is about a hermit crab on a quest to reclaim his lost shell, which takes him on a trip across the heavily polluted ocean floor.
• European conglomerate THQ Nordic has revived the 2010 Wii exclusive Epic Mickey. A new version, Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed, is planned for release on Switch later this year.
• A new Star Wars retro compilation will arrive on Switch on March 14. The Battlefront Classic Collection includes the original 2004 Battlefront and its 2005 sequel, which offer massive multiplayer brawls as both heroes and villains from the Star Wars franchise.
• The Direct ended with the announcement of the first new Endless Ocean game in 14 years. Endless Ocean Luminous, by Nintendo and the Japanese studio Arika, is a non-violent game about scuba diving and undersea exploration.

Update, 10:00 AM: In a post on Xbox Wire, Xbox president Matt Booty announced that the other two games that will go cross-platform are Rare’s Sea of Thieves and Tango Gameworks’ Hi-Fi Rush.

Pentiment will arrive on PlayStation 4 & 5 on Feb. 22, at the same time as the Switch port, while Booty confirmed that Grounded will also appear on PS4 & 5 on April 16, with cross-play enabled across all platforms.

Hi-Fi Rush and Sea of Thieves will debut on PlayStation 5 on March 19 and April 30, respectively.

The console wars aren’t over, but they’ve mutated into a new phase.

That’s my takeaway after Microsoft revealed a new chapter for its Xbox business, where it both competes with and supports its biggest rivals.

A new episode of the Official Xbox Podcast dropped Thursday as a response to several rumors from last week.

According to anonymous leakers, Microsoft had explored the possibility of bringing several of its biggest first-party games, such as the forthcoming Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, to rival platforms such as the PlayStation 5. That, in turn, fueled rumors that Microsoft planned to turn Xbox into a third-party game publisher and sunset the Xbox console.

As per Xbox executives who appeared on the podcast, that explicitly isn’t happening. Instead, we got a rare look at the current usage numbers behind Xbox, as well as a glimpse at a new spin on an old strategy for Xbox’s publishing division. The PS5 or Switch aren’t straight-up competitors for Xbox anymore so much as they’re other spokes in its “play anywhere” plan.

Old fronts in new territory

Today’s podcast featured Xbox head Phil Spencer, Xbox president Sarah Bond, and head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty, with Xbox broadcast director Tina Amini as host. The 22-minute podcast wasn’t as seismic or revelatory as fans or analysts expected, but did offer some insights into exactly what Xbox has planned.

Specifically, it’s more of the same. Spencer said that while Xbox does plan to bring four unidentified first-party games to the PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch, it is “not a change to our fundamental strategy.” Instead, it’s an attempt to expand the overall Xbox audience by offering some of its games to users on other platforms.

“We’re always looking to learn as a leadership team, and to grow,” Spencer said. “This is an interesting point in time to use what the other platforms have right now to help grow our franchises, so we’re gonna do that.”

Under this strategy, these four game releases are explicitly meant as trial balloons. They can expand the games’ audiences in order to make more money for Xbox, which can then be reinvested in the platform. Ideally, as per Bond and Spencer, it might also attract users from other consoles into checking out Xbox, which doesn’t require those consumers to actually buy a physical Xbox due to Xbox Cloud Gaming.

Spencer deliberately didn’t name the Xbox games that are planned to go cross-platform. He did note that all four games were older releases. Analysts have suggested, based on data-mining and recent leaks, that the four games headed to PS5 and Switch might be Rare’s Sea of Thieves; Obsidian’s Grounded and Pentiment; and Tango Gameworks’ Hi-Fi Rush.

Spencer also explicitly denied the rumors that Xbox would publish last year’s Starfield and this year’s Indiana Jones for the PlayStation 5 later this year. For right now, the four mystery games are the only Xbox releases that are planned to go cross-platform.

Microsoft still plans on developing new physical units for the Xbox. Bond noted that there would be unspecified new Xbox hardware announced for the 2024 holiday season, and that the next Xbox would be the “largest technical leap you will have ever seen in a hardware generation.” Unsealed documents from last summer’s FTC trial suggest that the new Xbox is tentatively scheduled to reach the market in 2028.

Exclusives don’t stay that way anymore

“I do have a fundamental belief that over the next five or 10 years, games that are exclusive to one piece of hardware will be a smaller and smaller piece of the industry,” Spencer said.

On the one hand, Spencer’s conviction on this subject could be written off as simple sour grapes. The old console strategy, where exclusive games are meant to persuade consumers to buy one system over another, is working fine for both Sony and Nintendo. Xbox has historically had a hard time with it, but it visibly isn’t an invalid strategy.

On the other hand, Sony has recently released several of its older first-party games such as Uncharted and Days Gone for PC via Steam, Epic, and GOG, and Nintendo has made increasing inroads into mobile gaming after the success of Pokémon GO.

Various Xbox executives have argued for years that system exclusivity only limits your potential audience, and that’s leaving money on the table. Both Sony and Nintendo appear to have taken that to heart in the last few years.

Further, the biggest intended takeaway from Thursday’s podcast might’ve been that the Xbox platform is healthier than ever. Sarah Bond revealed that the Xbox Game Pass currently has 34 million subscribers, which is the first time in a while that Xbox has publicly disclosed that figure, and that Xbox currently has its highest-ever number of users on PC, cloud, and console.

This follows up on Microsoft’s earnings report from late January, which revealed that, for the first time, the company’s gaming division currently makes more money for Microsoft than Windows. While Sony is still way out in the lead on sales, the Xbox is only a failure in the sense that it’s in a distant third place in the console market.

Place your bets

Sony is also in an unusual position of vulnerability at the moment, which has nothing to do with Microsoft’s recent studio acquisitions. On Wednesday, IGN and others reported that Sony officially regards the PlayStation 5 as being in the second half of its life cycle, and that it has no planned major first-party releases before spring 2025. Sony has adjusted its sales expectations for the PS5 accordingly.

This matches reports from May 2022 that Sony had planned a major internal realignment after its acquisition of Bellevue, Wash.-based game developer Bungie. It previously focused its first-party development on elaborate single-player experiences, such as the Washington state-developed Ghost of Tsushima, but intends to switch much of its efforts to making PlayStation-exclusive live-service games by FY2025.

Live-service games, or “games as a service,” include Destiny 2, Sea of Thieves, Apex Legends, and World of Warcraft: games that have no fixed end point and receive consistent content updates. A successful GaaS is a license to print money, but the field became notoriously overcrowded last year, with several major projects like Rumbleverse blowing up on the runway. The market only appears to be able to support so many GaaS projects, and that limit might have already been reached.

That leaves Xbox in an odd position in 2024. Sony had a massive lead with the PlayStation 4, which translated directly into the PS5 shooting ahead by sheer brand momentum. Now the PS5 is in what could be a year-long content drought, and is placing a big bet on a volatile market sector.

Xbox already controls Call of Duty, which we know from last summer is one of the biggest games on PlayStation, and Minecraft, which is still the single biggest game in the world. It’s now officially the single most important game publisher while also making and marketing its own gaming ecosystem, which exists independently of the physical Xbox console.

In conjunction with today’s announcement, it doesn’t mean the console wars are necessarily over, but a significant and increasing amount of the conflict now boils down to a game that Microsoft is playing against itself.

Other notes from today’s podcast:

• According to Bond, Pocketpair’s Palworld, a dark open-world parody of Nintendo and Game Freak’s Pokémon series, was the largest third-party launch in the history of Xbox Game Pass when it came out on Jan. 19. Despite being in early access, accusations of plagiarism from Pokémon fans, and the threat of a lawsuit from Nintendo, Palworld is the first big indie hit of 2024, and pulled in nearly 20 million players between Steam and Xbox.
• Activision Blizzard is coming to Xbox Game Pass with Diablo 4, which will released on the service on March 28.
• Booty noted that there would be at least five more first-party games released on Xbox in 2024. Five were officially announced last month at the Xbox Developer Direct, including Obsidian’s Avowed, Hellblade II, and Indiana Jones. The other five will be revealed during the Xbox Showcase event in June.
• There will be a new Call of Duty this holiday season, which counters rumors that the series would take a break after the relative underperformance of 2023’s Modern Warfare III.

Seattle’s Threshold Games, a remote-first independent game developer, has shut down due to “extenuating circumstances.” The announcement was made via Threshold’s LinkedIn page on Feb. 9.

The 12-person company was founded in 2019 by Jessica Bean and June Saphry, and billed itself as an “indie, queer-led studio” that made games “that tell diverse stories set in helpful, defiant futures.” It included developers from Riot Games, Warner Bros. Games, and Bellevue, Wash.-based Sucker Punch.

GeekWire has reached out to the studio for comment. Threshold’s official X account has posted a thread that lists all the affected employees, in an attempt to get them new jobs as expediently as possible.

Threshold was headquartered in Seattle, but had members in Austin, Toronto, New York City, Boston, Los Angeles, and Florida.

Producer Astra Ebonwing described the circumstances on her own LinkedIn as a “very sudden and very unexpected turn of events.”

Threshold had previously planned to unveil its debut project at some point in March, according to Ebonwing. No details have been released regarding its now-canceled project.

Threshold Games is one of several indie game studios that have shut down in 2024, which has come alongside a flood of layoffs at larger companies. Other closures this year include Threaks (Battle Planet), Little Red Dog Games (Rogue State Revolution), and game recruitment agency One Player Mission.

Analysts credit the current state of the international games industry to high interest rates, lower outside investment, and market saturation following a boom period of 2021-2023.

Hidden Path Entertainment, an independent game studio based in Bellevue, Wash., has laid off 44 employees.

The layoffs were confirmed Wednesday afternoon in a post on LinkedIn by CEO Jeff Pobst.

“For over six months, our team… has been in numerous active discussions to find replacement funding for an exciting RPG project,” Pobst wrote. “…We now have no choice but to pause development on that project and reduce the company size until we have an opportunity to return to it.”

Hidden Path currently lists 79 total employees on LinkedIn.

Pobst posted a Google Sheet that lists the affected employees at Hidden Path, as an aid to helping them find more work elsewhere. The dismissals include several project leads, an HR director, and multiple artists, programmers, and designers.

Hidden Path was founded in 2006. It’s known for tower defense series Defense Grid and VR games Brass Tactics and Witchblood. Hidden Path also collaborated with Microsoft to release an updated edition of Age of Empires II in 2013, and contributed to the development of its neighbor Valve Software’s Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Left 4 Dead 2.

In 2022, Wizards of the Coast announced that it had partnered with Hidden Path, among several other internal and external studios, to make a new Dungeons & Dragons game. Wizards subsequently canceled production on many of its video game projects in early 2023, which was initially said to include whatever was underway at Hidden Path.

Later reports contradicted that, however, and at time of writing, Hidden Path’s website still lists its D&D game as being in development.

The layoffs at Hidden Path are the latest in a series of dismissals that has plagued every sector of the international video game industry since last year. Almost 6,400 employees at gaming companies have lost their jobs in 2024 to date. Forces such as more cautious investors, interest rates, and overall market saturation have led to this wave of layoffs.

Rumors have been in circulation for weeks that Microsoft might publish some of its exclusive games on competing consoles. Now a new report indicates that one of the most anticipated Xbox games of 2024 may also be a cross-platform release.

The Verge reported over the weekend that Microsoft is exploring the possibility of publishing a new game made by its Bethesda subsidiary, Indiana Jones and the Grand Circle, for Sony’s PlayStation 5, its primary competitor in the console market. We’ve reached out to Microsoft for comment.

This joins persistent rumors throughout January that Microsoft was already planning to bring a couple of its other console exclusives, such as Tango Gameworks’ Hi-Fi Rush, to the PS5 and Nintendo Switch.

Edit: Microsoft has neither publicly confirmed nor denied the report, but Xbox head Phil Spencer announced via X that it would offer a “business update” next week, as below.

Were this to go through, this would be approximately on par with the idea of Hulu licensing its original programming to Netflix or Disney+. There aren’t many precedents for this sort of move in the console gaming space.

That being said, this isn’t particularly strange for Microsoft, which has published Minecraft for every platform under the sun since it bought Mojang Studios in 2014. That includes its console rivals Nintendo and Sony, as well as iOS and Android. Minecraft is such a monolith in modern video games that it can be hard to remember that someone actually owns it — it just sort of exists, like mountains or the moon — but Microsoft has already been a cross-platform video game publisher for almost a decade.

It also matches the concessions Microsoft made to get the Activision Blizzard acquisition across the finish line, which involved agreements to continue to bring games like Call of Duty to the PlayStation for the foreseeable future. If Microsoft is already contractually bound to release some new games on rival consoles, then at least on paper, it makes sense to release a few others.

Even so, this is a big departure from what longtime fans and analysts have grown to expect out of the games industry. The last decision comparable to this was arguably when the Japanese company Sega ended production on the Dreamcast in 2000 in favor of becoming a third-party games publisher. It subsequently brought many of its exclusive franchises, such as Sonic the Hedgehog, to its former competitors’ consoles.

That’s led to a lot of fans wondering out loud if the Great Circle deal might also mark a “Sega moment” for Xbox. At time of writing, though, that question is premature.

For one thing, the finalized acquisition of Activision Blizzard means Xbox is now a bigger part of Microsoft’s bottom line than ever before. As per its Jan. 30 earnings report, Microsoft’s gaming sector exceeded Windows in revenue for the first time in company history. For all its drama in 2023, such as the underperformance of Redfall and Starfield’s mixed reception from fans, Xbox has never been bigger or more lucrative than it is right now.

If anything, this would follow up on a consistent topic that various Xbox insiders, executives, and creators have brought up for the last few years. Console exclusives, as per their argument, simply limit a game’s potential audience. While that exclusivity has traditionally been one of the major marketing points for buying one console over another, Microsoft has pivoted away from that strategy in the last decade.

Back in June, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified in court that he “would love to get rid of the entire exclusives on consoles, but that’s not for me to define, especially as a low-share player in the console market. The dominant player there [Sony] has defined market competition using exclusives, so that’s the world we live in. I have no love for that world.”

Against that backdrop, if Microsoft were to start publishing its Xbox exclusives for other platforms, it would suggest that it’s fully abandoned the previous concept of the “console war.” There are no reported plans on the horizon for Microsoft to stop producing physical Xboxes, but it suggests that in the future, it plans to continue to sell the Xbox as an ecosystem rather than a console. In so doing, it’s moving out into previously uncharted territory.

Xbox is bigger than Windows.

Revenue from Microsoft’s video-game business surpassed its Windows division for the first time in the December quarter, with a big boost from the company’s $69 billion acquisition of game publisher Activision Blizzard.

That’s one of the takeaways from numbers included in Microsoft’s 10-Q filing with the SEC in conjunction with its earnings report Tuesday afternoon for the second quarter of its 2024 fiscal year:

• Gaming revenue increased 50% to $7.1 billion, which included more than $2 billion in revenue from Activision Blizzard. It’s the first time that the Call of Duty publisher’s results have been included in Microsoft’s revenue.
• Windows revenue rose 9.5% to $5.3 billion for the quarter, boosted by an 11% increase in sales of Windows PCs, but that wasn’t enough to keep pace with the extra injection of revenue from the gaming acquisition.

The milestone is a jaw-dropper for those who have followed the company historically, given the ways that Windows defined Microsoft for decades, from the debut of Windows 1.0 in the mid-1980s through the heyday of the Windows 95 launch and the subsequent antitrust battles over Windows’ position as the dominant PC operating system.

But in reality, the Activision deal simply accelerated a trend that has been playing out for a while. Microsoft Games came within a mere $50 million of Windows in revenue in the same quarter a year ago, for example.

Bragging rights aside, business is about the bottom line, and from that point of view, Windows still has the profit advantage over games on the whole. As evidence, Activision’s $2.08 billion in revenue for the quarter would boil down to a slim $11 million profit after adjusting for $55 million in transition costs.

This helps to explain the recent job cuts in the games division.

Microsoft is looking to reinvigorate the Windows business with AI — including the introduction of neural processing units, integration of the company’s Copilot technology into Windows 11, and the advent of a new Windows key.

“In 2024, AI will become first class part of every PC,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on the company’s earnings conference call Tuesday afternoon.

In the meantime, in the ranking of Microsoft’s businesses, it’s possible that Windows will be passed by another franchise entirely. LinkedIn posted more than $4 billion in revenue for the quarter, and it’s climbing steadily.

Microsoft’s latest round of layoffs is just a symptom of a much larger issue concerning labor rights and abuses, which could and should change the direction of the international games industry.

These layoffs, announced Thursday morning, affect roughly 1,900 people or 9% of the Xbox company network. At time of writing, most of the cut positions appear to be at Microsoft’s newly-acquired subsidiary Activision Blizzard, although the core Xbox division and Zenimax Media have both absorbed some of the impact.

In addition, Blizzard president Mike Ybarra and original co-founder Allen Adham have both departed from the company, and Blizzard has ceased production on Odyssey, a survival game which had been in internal development at the company’s California headquarters for the last six years.

Some sources, such as Windows Central’s Jez Corden, indicate that Microsoft has dismissed the entirety of the internal customer support teams at Activision Blizzard, as well as sharply reduced the size of its teams that were dedicated to Xbox retail support.

Notably, the Communications Workers of America, the union that represents several of the quality-assurance departments under the Xbox Game Studios umbrella, has reported that none of its workers have been affected by Thursday’s layoffs.

The center cannot hold

The picture from outside of Microsoft at the moment is that today’s layoffs are part of a larger reorganization of the company network. Now that Activision Blizzard is officially an Xbox studio, Microsoft has taken steps to bring it more in line with Xbox best practices.

In an internal memo by Xbox head Phil Spencer that was obtained by The Verge, Spencer identifies today’s layoffs as part of a process by which “we’ve set priorities, identified areas of overlap, and ensured that we’re all aligned on the best opportunities for growth.”

This was to be expected. Activision Blizzard’s labor practices have been in question since the moment Microsoft announced the acquisition, so some form of major reorganization was always going to be on the cards.

Just the same, that’s still 1,900 lost jobs at a $3 trillion company, which fits into a broader pattern of layoffs from last year that’s continued into 2024. Microsoft/Xbox now joins a list of gaming companies that have implemented major cuts this month, which includes Twitch, Discord, Riot Games (League of Legends), Behaviour Interactive (Dead by Daylight), Thunderful, and Unity.

As per a roundup by Kotaku, Microsoft’s layoffs are the single largest contribution to a lineup of nearly 6,000 dismissals so far in 2024. If this trend continues, the games industry will match or exceed 2023’s record-setting layoffs by the middle of February.

This is all part of what’s argued to be an ongoing market correction. According to a Q3 report by Seattle-based analytics firm Pitchbook, overall VC investment in gaming has slowed by more than half. A Games Industry report by Christopher Dring argues that we hit an overall saturation point for video games in 2023, accompanied by high interest rates and lowered capital. We’ve been riding a wave of pandemic spending for the last three years, and now businesses in the gaming sphere are being forced to revert back to the old normal.

Even so, it’s hard to ignore the signs of stress fracture in the overall industry. Even under ideal circumstances, the video game industry is famous for churning through developers. Burnout, hire-and-fire cycles, and now the looming possibility of automation have contributed to a consistent, industry-wide talent shortage. Many of the developers who get laid off aren’t going to go get another gaming job; they’ll leave the business in favor of something less volatile.

Last year’s layoffs were already bad enough to generate a new wave of calls for and interest in efforts to unionize video game development. If publishers continue to dismiss workers at their current pace, expect to see a lot more union reps at this year’s Game Developers Conference in March. Sooner or later, something here has got to give.

The end of physical Xbox media?

As noted above, one of the confirmed impacts of Microsoft layoffs is a cutback in the number of employees devoted to Xbox retail relations. While this reportedly wasn’t a total elimination of the team, it does follow up on a number of rumors from earlier this month that many brick-and-mortar stores will cut back or eliminate their stocks of physical Xbox discs.

These rumors, to be fair, have been in circulation for the last few years. I’ve had a lot of conversations with industry insiders who predict that the next Xbox won’t have physical hardware at all. You’d do everything on your phone, tablet, or smart TV via Xbox Cloud Gaming. Microsoft famously wanted to abandon physical media entirely with the Xbox One in 2013, but abandoned the idea after substantial consumer backlash.

However, Microsoft inadvertently contradicted that back in June, during its court hearing against the Federal Trade Commission. The next Xbox is tentatively scheduled to arrive in 2028, and according to Xbox’s Sarah Bond, the Xbox Cloud Gaming project currently runs at a loss.

As a result, Microsoft seems to be exploring other options. It hasn’t abandoned the cloud, but according to the Xbox leaks from September, it’s currently researching a hybrid approach that would make use of similar technology to the 2021 Microsoft Flight Simulator. The 2028 Xbox wouldn’t be a cloud device or powered by AI, but instead, would use both at once.

Another leak from the same report suggested that Microsoft will release a new model of its Xbox Series X|S later this year. The new Series X, codenamed “Brooklin,” may ship without a disc drive, but would feature improved download speeds, power draw, and internal storage.

If Microsoft is phasing out physical media for the current Xbox, it would make sense to reorganize its team around the new needs of the overall project. It’s not a confirmation or a denial, but considering what we’ve heard so far, it’s in line with what’s rumored to be coming next.

The developers behind the popular digital gaming storefront Steam have implemented a new set of guidelines that govern the use of AI-powered development tools in new titles released on the storefront.

In a new post on the Steamworks development blog, Bellevue, Wash.-based Valve Software announced it had changed its policies on AI content for Steam. This will enable the company to release, in its own words, “the vast majority of games that use [AI].”

The plan is that it will update the submission process for new Steam games, where creators are required to disclose the role that AI software has played in “the development and execution of your game.”

As part of that process, Valve draws a distinction between two different kinds of AI use: pre-generated and live-generated. The former applies to any creative content, such as art, music, or code, that was created by generative programs, i.e. Midjourney, while the latter refers to any game that uses generative AI to develop assets or scenarios while the game is running.

Microsoft’s partnership with Onworld.AI, for example, includes the possibility of using AI-powered non-player characters in video games. These could be set up to react uniquely and in real time to the player’s actions, rather than choosing between several pre-programmed reactions. Under Steam’s new rules, an Onworld character would be considered a live-generated asset.

The disclosure process on Steam also now requires developers to state that their AI-powered games do not include “illegal or infringing” content, and that the live version of their game will match their marketing material. Further, any game that was made with or contains AI will be labeled as such on its Steam page, in order to effectively communicate that to consumers.

Valve’s new rules are a reversal of its previous policies on AI tools in game development, which became public knowledge in June. At that point, Valve simply prohibited any game that had been developed using AI from being released on Steam at all, citing the risk of copyright infringement.

GeekWire has reached out to Valve for comment.

Valve plans to double-check on its stated AI restrictions during its internal evaluation of any given game, and that it will require developers to tell Valve what “guardrails” have been implemented to guarantee their live-generated AI will not come up with illegal content.

The repeated emphasis on illegal content comes on the heels of a Stanford study from last month, which found that several generative machine learning models had picked up illegal material, such as CSAM images, over the course of scraping the broader internet for training data.

As a related result, Valve has released a new system on Steam where players can report any illegal material that they might encounter in live-generated AI content. This can be done via Steam’s built-in overlay, which is accessed by pressing Shift+Tab while in-game.

“Today’s changes are the result of us improving our understanding of the landscape and risks in this space, as well as talking to game developers using AI, and those building AI tools,” Valve wrote. “This will allow us to be much more open to releasing games using AI technology on Steam.”

The exception is any game that contains “Adult Only Sexual Content that is created with Live-Generated AI,” which is still prohibited on Steam. For example, this would include games that use AI models to create a virtual interactive partner.

Update, Feb. 6: A new filing with the Washington state employment security department shows an additional 70 workers cut from Unity’s workforce in Bellevue.

A fresh round of layoffs at gaming giant Unity Technologies has impacted its office in Bellevue, Wash., resulting in the dismissal of 50 employees in Washington state, according to a new filing.

Unity said Monday that it plans to eliminate 25% of its workforce, or approximately 1,800 jobs worldwide. Reuters reports that the dismissals will affect “all teams, regions, and areas of the business.”

Unity Technologies, based in San Francisco, is best known for its eponymous game engine Unity, which has been used to build hundreds of video games over the course of the last decade. Less famously, Unity has also seen use in making films, training artificial intelligence, worker training films, and model creation for automakers and architects.

Unity is particularly pervasive in the mobile gaming space, where roughly 80% of the games that have been placed on the market in the last decade were made on Unity. This includes billion-dollar titles like Pokemon GO and Call of Duty Mobile.

This week’s dismissals at Unity are the largest in the company’s 20-year history, and come after a November layoff that affected 265 employees. In addition to its offices in Bellevue and San Francisco, Unity maintains locations in Austin, Texas; Calgary; Montreal; Pittsburgh; Vancouver; Port Coquitiam, B.C.; and Pereira, Colombia.

It also comes in the wake of last year’s controversy, which saw much of the video game industry openly revolt against a planned change to Unity’s terms of service. In September, Unity announced it would alter the terms by which it licensed its engine to game developers. This included the introduction of a new monthly “Runtime Fee” that could’ve resulted in studios being charged a price for each time their Unity-created games were installed by a user.

Unity later rescinded many of those licensing changes, but much of the damage was already done. In the aftermath, Unity CEO John Riccitiello stepped down and was replaced by Jim Whitehurst. Both the November and January rounds of layoffs are reportedly part of a plan by Whitehurst that calls for a “company reset.”

Seattle-based Charmed plans to launch a new AI-powered game design tool this month, which allows for rapid generation of 3D character models from scratch.

It’s also raised over $500,000 in a new funding round, led by Tacoma Venture Fund.

Charmed’s overall goal, according to founder Jeremy Tryba, is to build “the first end-to-end 3D AI platform,” in order to allow game designers to quickly progress from an initial idea to a playable prototype.

“Charmed is building tools that help 3D artists work in parallel to dramatically shorten development times,” Tryba said in an email to GeekWire.

The new tool for Charmed is made up of three parts: a Geometry Generator, a Texture Generator, and a Character Animator. When used together, they allow a user to input prompts that will create a character model; a set of textures to clothe and detail the model; and equip the model with sample animations.

The generators are the latest tools in Charmed’s portfolio, alongside Dream Dungeon, which rapidly rolls up an isometric-view mazes with user-defined floor and wall textures; a quest generator for quickly coming up with jobs for a player to do; and an AI texture generator that provides colorful skins for 3D game objects.

Tryba, speaking to GeekWire in July, has been careful to describe Charmed as a toolbox for the rapid generation of concepts, blueprints, and prototypes. It’s not intended to be the entire ball of wax for no-code game design.

“If you’ve got a good idea and you do bring your own creativity to the table, these tools can help you create cooler things, faster and more complex than you could do on your own,” Tryba said. “But you know, garbage in, garbage out. If you shove a lot of garbage through these tools, you’ll get what you deserve.”

Tryba founded Charmed last year after spinning it out from Madrona Venture Labs, which also provided Charmed with its first round of funding that year.

Blaming an unspecified “vendor,” Wizards of the Coast has admitted that generative AI was used to create a marketing image it posted earlier this month. Now it’s offered a mea culpa, while also reasserting its stance against the use of AI art in its products.

The specific incident occurred on Jan. 4, in a now-deleted post on X from the official account for Magic: The Gathering. The post was meant to advertise the upcoming release of Ravnica Remastered, a new set that collects and reprints almost 300 cards that all have to do with one of Magic’s best-known settings, the world-city of Ravnica.

The promotion featured an image of several Magic cards, shown against the background of a sort of Victorian laboratory (below, via Ghost Archive). Fans immediately spotted several telltale inconsistencies in that background image that suggested it might’ve been made with generative AI, such as warped numbers on a pressure gauge.

While Wizards initially claimed the image had been made by a human, the company reversed course on Monday morning and offered an apology of sorts.

“As you, our diligent community, pointed out, it looks like some AI components that are now popping up in industry standard tools like Photoshop crept into our marketing creative,” a Wizards representative wrote on Twitter.

Wizards had previously established that it requires creative contributors to its other products, such as Dungeons & Dragons, to refrain from using generative AI to “create final products.” It alleges that the Jan. 4 image slipped through the cracks due to the art coming from an unnamed vendor, rather than its pool of contributing artists, and announced that the company plans to update its rules for marketing partners in order to prohibit the use of generative AI.

This is the latest AI-driven controversy for Wizards of the Coast, following several issues that arose with D&D over the course of 2023. This included the accidental inclusion of art that had been “polished” with AI in August 2023’s Glory of the Giants, and accusations from fans that newly revealed art from 2024’s reissued Player’s Handbook had been made with AI.

Video game companies are dipping their toes into the rapidly-evolving world of generative AI with behind-the-scenes development. It may soon be applied to actual gameplay.

A recent example came earlier this month from the Seattle-based creators of the popular social app Rec Room, which debuted Fractura, an in-game room created as a “research project” to demonstrate how players can use generative AI to create their own content for Rec Room.

The Seattle startup evaluated more than 20 different tools in the process of designing Fractura, such as ChatGPT to develop and iterate on their ideas, including the creation of a “bible” for Fractura’s backstory. It visualized ideas via Midjourney and DALL-E, and turned the resulting images into 3D assets with CSM and Shap-E. Finally, Fractura’s alien skies were built out with Skybox, an AI tool from Blockade Labs.

“Despite some challenges,” Rec Room wrote in a blog post, “the future for 3D GenAI looks bright, and the team looks forward to further explorations!”

Like anywhere else in tech, the debate over AI has been one of the running themes of 2023 in the games industry. Much of that debate, however, has been crowded out of the limelight by other concerns, such as a year-long wave of layoffs that has cost roughly 10,000 developers their jobs since January.

When work in the field is already unstable, no developer that I’ve spoken to has been enthusiastic about the advent of technology that could be (read: inevitably will be) used to automate and eliminate somebody’s position.

However, generative AI is already helping some studios behind the scenes.

By giving ChatGPT access to the code base for its free-to-play arena shooter RoboSquad Revolution, New York-based Zollpa has turned it into a useful assistant for playtesting, training, code analysis, and integrating new programs.

Zollpa also trained AI to go through its recorded gameplay footage and pick out particular clips based upon recognizable keywords, such as “bug” or “Steam Play.” The AI can then organize a list and assign the potential issue to the most relevant members of the team.

“It’s definitely helped with our productivity in general, so we don’t have to watch and rewatch our gameplay videos,” said Joey Thigpen, co-lead developer.

There is an important distinction to be made between using generative AI to accelerate development processes, and using the technology to make a game with content generated by AI, said David Ryan Hunt, CEO of Noodle Cat Games in Salt Lake City.

“We’ve put a lot of attention on, ‘Oh, I made a cool picture by typing a few words!’” said Hunt. “But the reality of game development is that the majority of the work that goes into making a product is unseen.”

As Hunt notes, AI art and prose are what get all the attention in this conversation, and they also carry legal and ethical challenges.

Plagiarism stew

Generative AI tools are trained on data, much of which is scraped from publicly available online sources, which can include identifiable snippets from copyrighted work. Despite how it looks, and how it’s sold, publicly available AI isn’t creating anything; it’s grabbing everything it can find and boiling it for soup.

Professional artists such as Greg Rutkowski have discovered their online portfolios have been “harvested” by AI tools, which has flooded the internet with artwork that vaguely resembles their own styles. Some have gone so far as to fight back with tools like Nightshade, which “poisons” online artwork in ways that disrupt AI models using it as training data.

Several companies have preemptively banned AI tools for use in related projects. Valve Software made a few headlines in June when it rejected a game that was submitted for publication via its online storefront Steam, on the basis that it had been made using AI.

The game developer took to Reddit to complain on the subject, which spurred a public statement from Valve in response. According to Valve, it wasn’t the AI tools themselves, but rather, the significant risk that material produced with those tools has likely violated someone’s copyright.

“The introduction of AI can sometimes make it harder to show a developer has sufficient rights in using AI to create assets, including images, text, and music,” a Valve representative told GeekWire in July.

Valve continued: “In particular, there is some legal uncertainty relating to data used to train AI models. It is the developer’s responsibility to make sure they have the appropriate rights to ship their game. …While developers can use these AI technologies in their work with appropriate commercial licenses, they can not infringe on existing copyrights.”

Bellevue, Wash.-based Valve has consistently taken a zero-tolerance stance on any new technologies that could cause legal issues. It previously banned “play-to-earn” games on Steam in 2021, in which users could generate small amounts of cryptocurrency or collect special NFT drops by playing games.

Meanwhile, one of Steam’s competitors, the Epic Games Store, has stepped in as a storefront that will take Web3 projects, and as of September, may also be open to hosting AI-developed games.

AI content generation

It’s worth restating: the problem with generative AI in video games, at least for the time being, isn’t inherent to the tools. It’s typically with the data that’s been used to train those tools, and how the tools regurgitate that data. An AI that’s simply trained using whatever data it can find can pose some serious risks, up to and including the possibility of having illegal material in its dataset.

If best practices are pursued, though, generative AI has a number of potential applications in game design, particularly in the field of content created by users.

Microsoft made headlines earlier this fall through its partnership with Inworld.AI, which promises to bring unspecified “AI-powered” upgrades to future Xbox games. In theory, AI could remove certain current limitations in game narrative, such as removing the need for generic NPC dialogue. Instead of having a few scripted lines and coded behaviors, AI-driven characters could react realistically to whatever happens to or around them.

For a more specific example, there’s Adventure Forge, scheduled for release on Steam Early Access in early 2024. It’s a no-code toolset by Seattle-area company Endless Adventures, which players can use to create their own original games, ranging from dungeon crawlers to visual novels.

This includes a built-in Stable Diffusion system by Scenario.GG that has only been trained on art assets that were created for the project by Endless Adventures. Everything that could be created for Adventure Forge with its built-in generative AI, such as new maps or in-game props, would thus fall under Endless Adventures’ copyright.

Adventure Forge will ship with over 1,500 environmental assets for players to use in their games, such as floors, walls, and furniture. In previous generations of homebrew software, those assets would be all users had to work with for the duration. With Scenario.GG’s system, though, players can simply create new Adventure Forge assets on the spot.

“This is not technology for technology’s sake,” Endless Adventures CEO Jordan Weisman told GeekWire. “This is from people whose whole lives have been about storytelling, and we want to empower storytelling, but we want to do it in a responsible way.”

Reality check

The advancements from generative AI for game studios, for now, may not be massive.

“A lot of the capabilities that we have now are not very far removed from procedural generation and various types of algorithms that we’ve been using in games for decades,” said Hunt.

You’ve likely played a video game that uses procedural generation. These are created with a number of handcrafted assets, which are assembled algorithmically into a randomized order. The most famous example may be the dungeons in Blizzard’s action-RPG series Diablo, which are different every time you play the game.

The distinction between procedural generation and generative AI may seem academic from a player’s perspective, but under the hood, they’re doing two very different things. If you picture game design as a set of building blocks, then procedural generation rearranges building blocks according to a pre-programmed algorithm. Generative AI tries to create new blocks there on the spot, based on the data it’s accumulated on how blocks are supposed to work.

“We automate all sorts of different pieces of development,” said Hunt, who previously worked on Fortnite at Epic Games. “It’s not specific to AI. It’s just how the industry works.”

Current generative AI, from Hunt’s perspective, is a more advanced version of automated technologies that have already been in use in game development. Under the hood, many of the use cases for AI in game development are a simple step up from understood best practices, he said.

“There’s a big gap to me,” Hunt said, “between the discourse around AI and the practical reality of what it’s likely to look like over time.”

Over the course of the last year, bad actors have used various AI/LLM tools to create everything from quick cash-grabs, such as churning out nonsensical children’s books or flooding a sci-fi magazine with submissions, to scams that involve cloning someone’s voice in order to extort money out of their relatives.

In the games industry, there are already stories of people using the same tools to turn out simple games in a week or less. The concern is that we’re on the verge of a dark age of auto-generated machine garbage, in a business where many open storefronts already have real issues with “troll games.”

It’s likely that as its usage increases, many of the problems with AI will get worse before they get better. In the meantime, that only makes it more important to find ways to filter the signal from the noise.

Valve Software dropped a surprise last month when it unveiled a new version of its handheld PC gaming device, the Steam Deck OLED.

After launching the original Steam Deck in February 2022, the team at Valve, based in Bellevue, Wash., had a running list of improvements it wanted to make, and it didn’t want customers to wait for a true second-generation Steam Deck.

That was a takeaway from a recent conversation GeekWire had with Lawrence Yang, a longtime designer and artist at Valve, who talked about the decision to launch a new version of the Steam Deck and lessons learned thus far from the company’s foray into handheld gaming.

“We knew that what we thought of as a true second-generation Steam Deck was years off, but as we looked at our wishlist and the technology available, we figured customers would appreciate these updates sooner rather than later,” Yang said.

The result is what Yang describes as “the definitive first-generation Steam Deck.”

I had a chance to test the 1TB model of the OLED Steam Deck ($549/659). When you put it head-to-head against the original, it’s a little better across the board. The most obvious upgrade for the OLED edition comes from its screen, which is bigger and significantly brighter.

The model is also a little lighter, with a better battery, a longer charging cable, and faster wireless connections. It’s a slight but noticeable improvement on the original in just about every category, from portability to charging time to its comfort factor. Using the Deck in close quarters like an airplane seat can still be a dubious proposition, and there are still a number of PC games that simply don’t work well on the tiny screen, but the OLED Deck does feel better to play.

The best thing about the Deck is and remains its price tag. It offers you a reasonably powerful gaming PC for a low cost up-front. I primarily use mine to bring multiplayer games with me to get-togethers, particularly head-to-head fighters.

If you’ve already got a Steam Deck, the OLED model isn’t worth trading in your current unit, but it’s a decent pickup if you’ve been waiting for an excuse.

The Steam Deck gives Valve a way to expand the audience for computer games, and runs the software for Valve’s digital gaming storefront Steam on a custom Linux-based OS. This lets you take the games in your Steam library on the road with you, playing them via the Deck’s built-in controls. Users can also use peripherals like USB hubs to connect their Decks to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard and use it like a Linux-based PC.

Failing all that, there’s nothing in place to keep tinkerers from wiping the default OS off of a new Steam Deck and installing their own software in its place.

Read more from our conversation with Yang, who joined Valve in 2015. The interview was edited for clarity.

GeekWire: What have you learned from the first year of the Steam Deck?

Yang: We’ve learned a bunch about how people have wanted to use their Steam Decks. Playing games, of course, but also doing homework, making music, and controlling robots. We’ve also seen how motivated players have been to mod their Steam Decks in both software and hardware to personalize their gaming experiences.

But most of all, we’ve heard how much people have loved their Steam Decks. The team is beyond excited to hear from happy Deck customers and we’re constantly working to make it a better experience.

We love hearing feedback, and this has helped us ship over 300 software updates specifically for Steam Deck, which include a combination of bug fixes and feature updates. This hasn’t stopped, and we have more software updates in the pipe for both Steam Deck LCD and Steam Deck OLED.

From a market perspective, the Deck has always struck me as an excellent “gateway product” for PC gaming and/or Linux. Was that a deliberate intention by the team at Valve?

One of the goals we set out to accomplish with Steam Deck was to make it as easy and comfortable to use as possible. This includes removing as many of the normal barriers to PC gaming as we could. So things like the user interface, software updates, driver updates… we didn’t want people to worry about [any of that] at all.

In a way, we wanted to take some of the best “pick up and play” aspects of consoles and implement them in a PC handheld device. We’ve seen in feedback that many view the user experience as one of the top features of Steam Deck.

And to your point, we’ve also heard that Steam Deck is the first PC for a bunch of players.

What were you hoping to accomplish with the Deck? When I attended the live preview back in 2021, there was a sort of freewheeling “why not” air in the room, but I’m curious if that’s still the case.

At a high level, we were looking for ways to make customers happy and provide more ways to play the games in their Steam libraries. Steam Deck allows you to play PC games without having to be tethered to the same PC you’ve been working at all day.

Are you still working on game compatibility on a case-by-case basis?

Yes, game compatibility testing is ongoing, with a mix of new titles, popular upcoming titles, and the rest of the Steam catalog.

[Errata: The OLED Steam Deck’s screen is 0.5″ larger than the original model’s.]

Veteran Seattle-area game designer Jordan Weisman might be most famous for co-creating the tabletop games BattleTech, Shadowrun, MechWarrior, and Earthdawn. In 2011, Weisman co-founded the Seattle game studio Harebrained Schemes, which was acquired by Swedish firm Paradox Interactive in 2018 before going independent earlier this year.

“I’m old,” Weisman says, “and I’ve been making a lot of trouble for a long time.”

Weisman’s latest attempt to make trouble is Adventure Forge, a no-code, AI-driven toolset for game development. Weisman’s new company Endless Adventures Inc. plans to publish Adventure Forge on Steam Early Access in 2024. The company raised $1.5 million to help fuel development.

Other employees include David Reid, a former NCSoft and Microsoft exec and the founder of the now-defunct MetaArcade; and Enrique Garcia, a former creative director at Microsoft Entertainment.

Weisman said his son had created a physical card role-playing game where the deck represented your character.

“We thought that was a little too random to have much narrative depth,” he said. “So I thought, well, why don’t I design an app that can be the game master [for you]?”

The card game was never released, but it got Weisman started on creating the authoring system that eventually became Adventure Forge. For a couple of years, he worked on the system as a side project alongside a couple of other engineers.

“Eventually what I arrived at was creating a series of highly contextual drop-down menus that automatically populate with everything you create,” Weisman said. “As you create characters and locations and all that stuff, eventually you can just mad-lib your way through it.”

This allows a user to make their own narrative games with Adventure Forge without having to know anything about programming or code. The sorts of games that can be made run along a spectrum, ranging from text-only adventures (Zork) and visual novels to isometric RPGs, such as the first Baldur’s Gate or Harebrained’s Shadowrun Returns.

In addition, Adventure Forge features a built-in generative AI, but one with a deliberately limited base of original material. That AI was created by a startup called Scenario.GG, which built it on top of a Stable Diffusion system that has only been trained on art provided to it by Endless Adventures. This allows any assets built by the AI to maintain a consistent visual style, as well as sidestepping issues of creative control that have arisen from other generative AIs.

EAI’s first original universe for Adventure Forge is called Tales of Fortunata. Set in a high-fantasy world that’s based on Renaissance-era Italy, Tales follows the exploits of Fortunata di Penna, a rising star in the thieves’ guild of the floating city of Venezia.

Users of Adventure Forge can use Tales as a preexisting setting for the games they create, in the same way that a tabletop gaming group might use an official sourcebook. In addition, EAI plans to make several of its own games in the Tales setting.

Toward that end, EAI’s internal artists have created 1,500 pieces of art that match Tales’ environment, such as wall textures and props. For anything else a particular creator might need, there’s Scenario.GG’s AI.

“I’m confident that we haven’t come up with everything that [players] will want,” Weisman said, “so we wanted to give them an easy mechanism to add things that are in the right style for whatever they might need in their level design. The hope is that creators find lots of interesting ways to mix all those tools together.”

Users can then share their games with one another privately, to groups, or in a number of other ways, including the possibility of sharing them with Adventure Forge’s overall community. A creator who decides they want to publish and monetize their work in Adventure Forge will have the option to do so, under a revenue-sharing option with Endless Adventures. This could include spinning a project out into a standalone game.

“This is coming from storytellers,” Weisman said. “This is not a technology for technology’s sake. This is from people whose whole lives have been about storytelling, and we want to empower storytelling, but we want to do it in a responsible way.”

In response to social media criticism, Wizards of the Coast has released a statement that further clarifies its stance on the use of generative AI in material for the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop game.

The statement, made via a post on the digital storefront D&D Beyond, indicates that all creative contributors to D&D will be required “to refrain from using AI generative tools to create final D&D products.”

This comes four months after an incident in August where an artist admitted he’d used AI tools to “polish” several illustrations that he’d contributed to a new D&D sourcebook. In response, Wizards pledged to amend its artistic guidelines to prohibit creators from using generative AI.

Today’s updated statement appears to come as a response to an online discussion. On Dec. 1, a piece of artwork appeared on the official Dungeons & Dragons X (formerly Twitter) account to tease the upcoming 2024 rules update for D&D, which will include brand-new editions of the game’s 3 core rulebooks.

The artwork in question, by Chilean illustrator Nestor Ossandón, depicts a dwarf warrior. It’s one of many new illustrations that are planned to run in the updated D&D Player’s Handbook, and made its public debut earlier this month at a panel at the Penny Arcade Expo Unplugged in Philadelphia.

In response to the teaser, many fans wondered if it had been created using AI tools, citing issues such as the seeming absence of the dwarf’s left arm. Wizards first responded on Dec. 18 via the official D&D Beyond X account, saying that it had checked with the original artist to ensure that no generative AI had been used.

Wizards further clarified its stance on Tuesday by announcing its blanket prohibition.

“We work with some of the most talented artists and creatives in the world,” according to the blog post, “and we believe those people are what makes D&D great.”

The response comes a week after reports that multiple workers at Renton, Wash.-based Wizards of the Coast had been impacted by a round of layoffs instituted by parent company Hasbro, including several senior employees who worked on both Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering.

A new round of layoffs at Hasbro has impacted its subsidiary Wizards of the Coast, despite Wizards’ strong recent performance and its status as a linchpin for Hasbro’s overall revenue stream. The result could spell trouble for both companies as they head into 2024.

Hasbro announced Monday that it would eliminate an additional 1,100 workers throughout its global operations, as part of what CEO Chris Cocks called a “strategic transformation.” This was on top of previously announced cuts in January.

It was initially unclear as to whether those layoffs would hit Renton, Wash.-based Wizards of the Coast, which seemed like it might’ve been protected given its value to Hasbro’s portfolio.

As has been the case for the last couple of years, Hasbro’s gaming endeavors, led by Wizards of the Coast, have been the only consistently profitable part of the company. In its most recent earnings report, Hasbro wrote that its toy and entertainment segments are both losing money, while its Gaming segment’s revenue grew by 40% in Q3 2023.

Despite that success, reports this week indicate that at least 20 employees of Wizards of the Coast and its own subsidiaries had been laid off.

Those affected, as per a list assembled by ComicBook.com’s Christian Hoffer, include Mike Mearls, Magic: The Gathering director and former Dungeons & Dragons creative director; Amy Dallen, D&D Beyond host and producer; Eytan Bernstein, D&D senior development editor; Larry Frum, senior communications manager; and Bree Heiss, D&D art director. Some employees also opted, according to an internal memo from Cocks, to voluntarily accept early retirement.

At time of writing, it’s unclear why Hasbro’s chosen to lay off employees at the single strongest company in its portfolio. This year, Wizards debuted a critically if not commercially successful major motion picture, earned a Game of the Year trophy at the 2023 Game Awards, and was consistently profitable, but Hasbro’s still sacking its employees. It’s the sort of math that only makes sense if you’ve got shareholders to placate.

The dismissals at Wizards play into a disturbing trend across game development and related fields throughout 2023. Over 9,000 developers worldwide have been dismissed over the course of the year, as per independent tracker VideoGameLayoffs. Since there are a couple of studio closures that aren’t yet on VGL’s list, that number could easily break the 10,000 mark by New Year’s Eve.

The traditional impact of these sorts of layoffs on video game studios has been to tank morale and destabilize the business. If overwhelming success can’t protect your company from cuts, then the smart response from workers is to take your talents elsewhere. We’ve seen that happen in the Pacific Northwest with companies like Bungie, 343 Industries, and Amazon.

On the other hand, Wizards of the Coast is in a unique position in its industry. While it does handle a lot of video game development right now — it just debuted the first project from its Texas studio Archetype at this year’s Game Awards — Wizards dominates both collectible card games and tabletop RPGs. It’s got competitors, but most of them have a fraction of the audience and visibility of Wizards’ core franchises. Dissatisfied employees would seem to have nowhere to go but down.

As of this year, however, that may be changing, due to ongoing fallout from a recent controversy at Wizards.

For those who are coming in late: a leaked report in January suggested that Wizards was looking into ways to abolish the Open Gaming License, a public copyright notice that it adopted in 2000 to allow third-party developers to make new material for Dungeons & Dragons. After a couple of weeks of controversy, Wizards reversed course on that decision, but not before it triggered a series of reactions from its competitors in the tabletop gaming space.

Most notably, Redmond, Wash.-based Paizo Publishing announced it was spearheading a coalition of companies that would create a new, independent licensing agreement. The result, the Open RPG Creative License (ORC), was finalized in June and published on the website of Seattle legal firm Azora Law.

Paizo is an independent shop that’s built its own tabletop business around the Pathfinder series, which itself began as a heavily modified version of an earlier version of D&D. While D&D has a massive lead in both player population and brand recognition, Pathfinder is one of several competing products that got a huge boost in visibility after Wizards’ short-lived attempt to revoke the OGL. Paizo’s workforce also unionized in June.

For the last year, Paizo has been going out of its way to make itself look like a preferable alternative to Wizards of the Coast, for both players and professionals. Its audience is growing rapidly, thanks to dissatisfied D&D fans switching systems, and now it’s a union shop in the same state as Wizards.

With Hasbro’s most recent round of layoffs, there’s a real possibility we could see a brain drain from Wizards to Paizo and other independent shops in the Washington area, such as Kobold Press.

Wizards already has a packed schedule for D&D’s 50th anniversary in 2024, with a big rules update and several new projects in the wings. It’s positioned to have a good year. If Hasbro continues to treat Wizards this carelessly, however, it could bring D&Ds (and Magic’s) current boom period to a sudden stop.