Nintendo broke months of silence on Wednesday morning with an hour-long pre-recorded livestream devoted to the upcoming Switch 2. It’s scheduled for release on June 5 for a starting MSRP of $449.99, with a library of launch titles that includes new entries in the Mario Kart, Metroid Prime, Kirby, and Hyrule Warriors franchises.

The most interesting thing about the Switch 2 is what Nintendo chose not to do with it.

It doesn’t innovate in some random mechanical direction, attempt to take over your living room, or leverage AI in some significant way. It is simply a better version of Nintendo’s current console. The end. It’s a unique decision in Nintendo’s history as a console maker.

As with the previous edition of the Switch, you can see the Switch 2’s release as a midpoint between console generations. There have been indications from both Sony and Microsoft that they don’t plan to release their next systems until at least 2028, which gives Nintendo a solid window in which to build up sales momentum.

It’s still an odd overall choice for Nintendo, which maintains an American headquarters in Redmond, Wash. It has historically used each new generation of its console hardware as an excuse to reinvent at least one wheel. If it isn’t some mechanical innovation like the Wii’s motion controls, it’s a first-party game that rewrites the rules of a popular genre, such as 2000’s Super Mario 64.

Instead, the Switch 2 simply builds on the Switch. The marquee feature for the Switch 2 is, once again, its ability to switch on the fly between a portable and desktop machine, with several quality-of-life improvements over the original model such as magnetic controller docks. It’s an unusually conservative move from a company that’s known for taking big, random swings.

It’s also uncommonly expensive for a Nintendo product at launch. The original Switch released at a standard price of $300, and many of the Switch 2’s new features like the Console Tour app are paid extras. Combined with several recent moves like the end of its Gold Points program, it suggests Nintendo has a new set of priorities.

This isn’t to say that Nintendo wasn’t motivated by profit before now. While it tends to portray itself as an organization of cheerful toymakers, Nintendo has always kept one eye on its bottom line. However, its previous console strategies revolved around slow and steady growth via expanding its audience. Now that it’s got one of its biggest installation bases it’s ever had, with over 150 million Switch units sold, it seems like Nintendo’s plan is to cash out.

That being said, analysts have already noticed that the Japanese version of the Switch 2 is both region-locked and significantly cheaper than the U.S. SKU. While nothing has been confirmed at time of writing, the higher buy-in for the Switch 2 may also reflect how tariffs and trade wars are already affecting the American games industry.

If that asking price doesn’t slow it down, the Switch 2 is already an early frontrunner in what may turn into a new console war. Several years ago, the accepted wisdom in the gaming space was that in the age of the smartphone, consumers weren’t interested in carrying around a second device that was just for video games.

However, Valve Software challenged that and won with the release of its portable Steam Deck gaming PC. That’s led several other companies such as Lenovo to put out their own competing products, and reignited rumors that Microsoft plans to enter the fray with a handheld edition of the Xbox.

If you were going to jump into portable gaming this June, the Steam Deck currently offers more games for a lower overall price, as well as a number of possibilities for dedicated tinkerers like doubling as a Linux-based desktop computer.

The Switch 2, conversely, features the same strategy that every other Nintendo system has always had: it’s the exclusive home of Nintendo’s first-party software. When a new Super Mario or Legend of Zelda comes out, it will only be on the Switch 2 and it will never be legally available for another platform. That’s been enough of an argument to keep Nintendo in business for 40 years, although not without ups and downs. It’s hard to imagine the Switch 2 will break that streak.

Reports spread on Tuesday via social media that Wizards of the Coast, the Renton, Wash.-based company that publishes Dungeons & Dragons, has dismissed most of the employees that were working on its virtual tabletop (VTT) project Sigil.

According to posts on LinkedIn, roughly 30 employees working on Sigil were dismissed on Tuesday, including senior writer Andy Collins, VFX artist Eben Bradstreet, and community manager Chung Ng.

GeekWire has reached out to Wizards for further comment.

Recently exhibited at a media summit at the end of January, Sigil was initially announced in 2022 as Wizards’ entry into the VTT space. It’s intended as a visual and coordination aid for anyone who’s playing D&D or other tabletop games online, with a number of creation tools built into the program to create dungeons, towns, and random encounters. It recently debuted to the public at the end of February as part of the online storefront D&D Beyond.

VTTs such as Foundry, Roll20, Game Master Engine, and TaleSpire have become a big part of the hobby in recent years. The COVID lockdowns in 2020 led many people to start playing tabletop role-playing games over chat programs such as Zoom and Discord.

However, for more tactical TTRPGs like D&D, it can be tricky to run the game without some kind of map in front of the players, since character placement and range can be big factors. In those cases, a VTT can vastly streamline the process of online play.

With that in mind, it was inevitable that Wizards would make its own entry into the VTT space. I’d initially seen an alpha version in 2023 that served as a straightforward virtual map and playset for running simple D&D adventures. It subsequently reappeared in January under the working title Project Sigil, and had evolved into more of a tool for virtually constructing online maps and playsets.

Grant Hinkson spent almost nine years at Amazon, leading design engineering within the company’s Devices and Services Design Group. He left a little over a year ago to launch his own game development project and pursue passions that do more to scratch a longtime creative itch.

The first upcoming release from Hinkson’s Parietal Lab is “Connectome,” a virtual reality, 3D connect-the-dots-style “art and game experience,” as he describes it. It’s available for pre-order on Meta Quest.

“There are elements of game play within the space, and there are elements of mystery, and you’re not immediately clear exactly what you’re supposed to do — and that’s kind of the game aspect,” Hinkson said.

Pinching, grabbing and connecting dots, players in “Connectome” find points within rooms that can be interacted with, and they create and reveal objects that open doors to other rooms as they move through the VR space.

The meditative experience is further enhanced by the ambient musical score, which was also created by Hinkson. Rather than farm out that aspect of building “Connectome,” he called writing the music one of the biggest joys of the past year.

“I’ve played the piano since I was in first grade, and I’ve pretty much always written,” Hinkson said. “As a musician, I know what the feeling is that I want to evoke in each of these spaces, and so I have been really hands on with it.”

Hinkson spent more than five years at Microsoft before his move to Amazon, where he worked on the Echo family of products, Fire TV, Fire tablets, and the Alexa mobile app. He led a team of design technologists within the design studio who did some prototyping work in VR, but he wasn’t the person who was hands on in Unity, so he wasn’t an expert in the space.

When asked whether leaving to build a trippy VR game was his answer to the intensity of working at a tech giant, Hinkson acknowledged there’s probably some psychology to it.

“I think I’m a creator at heart,” he said. “Building and making is what just lights me up. The most fun I had at Amazon was when we were inventing new things and creating experiences.”

He thinks VR is the best place right now to tell stories as an artist, where he has complete control of world building. The success of “Connectome” and whether he can get people to buy his experience will be a test, to prove whether he can keep creating in VR.

Hinkson has assembled the pieces that many creators chase — he left a successful career, he’s making art and music, he’s programming his own game, he’s working from home and calling all of his own shots. Can he make a living doing all the things that he loves?

“That is the final piece, right?” he said. “That I get to keep doing this, because it is so fulfilling and satisfying. These things that I loved 10, 15, 20 years ago are still in me. And they still mean a lot.”

In advance of this year’s Game Developers Conference, Microsoft revealed a new version of its AI-powered personal assistant Copilot that’s designed for the Xbox platform.

The new program, called Copilot for Gaming, is designed as a personal assistant for anyone playing video games on the Xbox platform. It can keep track of where you were in a game and provide a quick recap of where you were when you left off; provide information on related topics, such as the real-world history behind an Age of Empires map; provide tips or advice on gameplay; or keep a player advised on downloads or what their friends are doing.

Copilot for Gaming made its public debut Thursday on an episode of the Official Xbox Podcast, featuring Microsoft VPs Fatima Kardar and Jason Ronald. The day before, Microsoft hosted a media roundtable with Microsoft general manager of AI Gaming Innovation Haiyan Zhang and group product manager Sonali Yudav.

Zhang presented an example of Copilot for Gaming in use, where it provided an Overwatch 2 player with coaching, such as what character to use and why he died suddenly during gameplay.

Copilot was also shown giving a first-time Minecraft player step-by-step instructions on how to get started with the game, such as what materials to gather first and what to build with them.

According to Microsoft, Copilot for Gaming’s advice is derived from similar sources to other versions of Copilot.

“Copilot for Gaming accesses public sources of information from the web using the Bing search index and results,” a Microsoft spokesperson told GeekWire, “and provides tailored responses for the individual player based on its understanding of the players activity and the games they’re playing on the Xbox platform.”

The spokesperson continued, “Our goal is to have Copilot for Gaming source the most accurate game knowledge — so we are working with game studios to make sure the information Copilot surfaces reflects their vision, and Copilot will refer players back to the original source of the information.”

A preview of Copilot for Gaming is currently scheduled to become available on mobile devices in April, and will initially be limited to members of the Xbox Insider program. Users of the preview version will be able to decide how and when they want to interact with the Xbox’s Copilot, including whether or not it has access to their conversation histories on Xbox.

In a new blog post on Wednesday, Microsoft’s research department debuted a new generative AI model called Muse that it describes as a “breakthrough” for gameplay ideation.

Muse is a World and Human Action Model, or WHAM, built by the Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge in conjunction with the British game developer and Xbox subsidiary Ninja Theory.

For years, Microsoft Research has used Ninja Theory’s multiplayer shooter Bleeding Edge as a testbed for experiments in how to create more human-like CPU opponents: bots that act and perform more like humans would. With Muse, it’s used the equivalent of roughly seven years of continuous human gameplay as training data, in order to create a new type of model that possessed a detailed understanding of the 3D game world.

“The impressive abilities we first witnessed with ChatGPT and GPT-4 to learn human language are now being matched by AI’s abilities to learn the mechanics of how things work, in effect developing a practical understanding of interactions in the world,” wrote Peter Lee, Microsoft Research president, in a post on the official Microsoft blog.

This allows Muse to generate virtual gameplay sequences of up to two minutes based upon preprogrammed criteria such as controller actions. According to Fatima Kardar, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of gaming AI, Muse is already being used in-house to develop a “real-time playable AI model” using training data from other first-party games from Xbox Game Studios.

In addition, Kardar suggests that Muse could be used as a method of preserving and updating classic games.

“Today, countless classic games tied to aging hardware are no longer playable by most people,” Kardar wrote in a post on Xbox Wire. “Thanks to this breakthrough, we are exploring the potential for Muse to take older back catalog games from our studios and optimize them for any device.”

Kardar continued, “We believe this could radically change how we preserve and experience classic games in the future and make them accessible to more players.”

Lee also notes that Muse’s ability to visualize and navigate 3D spaces could lead to future breakthroughs in fields such as interior design or architectural modeling.

The details behind Muse are further explored in a post on the official Microsoft Research blog by senior principal research manager Katja Hoffman, as well as a new paper in Nature, “World and Human Action Models towards gameplay ideation.”

Hoffman further announced that the weights and sample data are being made open source. Interested researchers can test Microsoft Research’s WHAM model now on Azure AI Foundry.

A Seattle-based team that contributed to development on the popular online action game Marvel Rivals has reportedly been dismissed by its parent company.

Game director Thaddeus Sasser announced via LinkedIn on Tuesday that his team had been eliminated.

“This is such a weird industry,” Sasser wrote. “My stellar, talented team just helped deliver an incredibly successful new franchise in Marvel Rivals for NetEase Games… and were just laid off!”

Sasser is a veteran level designer and creative director that previously worked at Treyarch, Electronic Arts, Deep Silver, and Striking Distance. His past credits include Battlefield: Hardline, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon, and Agents of Mayhem.

According to NetEase, a total of six U.S. employees were dismissed, including level designer Garry McGee. Notably, this was not the entirety of the Rivals development team, the core of which is headquartered in Guangzhou, China.

“We recently made the difficult decision to adjust Marvel Rivals’ development team structure for organizational reasons and to optimize development efficiency for the game,” a NetEase spokesperson said in a statement to GeekWire. “This resulted in a reduction of a design team based in Seattle that is part of a larger global design function in support of Marvel Rivals. We appreciate the hard work and dedication of those affected and will be treating them confidentially and respectfully with recognition for their individual contributions.”

Marvel Rivals debuted Dec. 5 as a free-to-play action game for PC, PlayStation, and Xbox. Players take the role of various characters from the Marvel Universe, including Iron Man, Wolverine, Captain America, and Spider-Man, and fight one another in short, intense 5v5 team battles.

While it obviously has a lot going for it on sheer brand recognition, Rivals still qualifies as an unexpected success story. As both a game-as-a-service and a “hero shooter,” it faced heavy competition at launch from several of the most popular games on the modern market, including Overwatch 2 and Apex Legends.

Despite that, it’s managed to carve out an audience. Independent trackers such as Circana’s Mat Piscatella have noted that Rivals is currently in the top 10 most-played games on PlayStation, Steam, and Xbox.

NetEase has a separate studio co-headquartered in Seattle called Anchor Point Studios.

Story updated with comment from NetEase.

[Editor’s Note: Microsoft @ 50 is a year-long GeekWire project exploring the tech giant’s past, present, and future, recognizing its 50th anniversary in 2025.] 

Xbox was a product of Bill Gates’ paranoia. 

Back in the late 1990s, the Microsoft co-founder actually wasn’t very interested in getting into video game consoles. But he and Steve Ballmer, who would soon become Microsoft’s CEO, were worried enough about Sony’s Playstation to give the project the green light. 

“It was easy for Bill and Steve to imagine Sony moving from gaming on the TV to editing documents on the PC, which they saw as an existential threat to Microsoft,” write Dean Carignan and JoAnn Garbin in the new book, The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft.

After launching the original Xbox in 2001, the team innovated in cloud gaming and social networking with Xbox Live in 2002, expanded the console’s functionality and footprint with the Xbox 360 in 2005 — and faced a huge backlash against the Xbox One in 2013. 

Avid gamers rejected the concept of an entertainment-oriented, always-connected console with digital rights protections that would prevent them from playing used games. 

Meanwhile, the inclusion of a Kinect motion sensor boosted the price to nearly $500, about $100 more than the rival PS4 — which initially outsold the Xbox One by a ratio of nearly 2:1.

It was a classic example of misalignment in a framework that had been expressed by J Allard, one of the original Xbox leaders, as “BXT,” or “Business, eXperience, and Technology.” Xbox One focused too heavily on business and technology, to the detriment of user experience. 

Facing widespread backlash, Microsoft reversed course before launch, removing the always-online requirement and later unbundling Kinect to lower the price.

Two years later, in 2015, the company started to win back many of its loyal fans with backward compatibility, allowing the Xbox One to play many older Xbox 360 games. 

In the ensuing years, Xbox reinvented its business model with its Game Pass service, and Microsoft expanded its footprint again with its $68.7 billion Activision-Blizzard acquisition.

“It’s funny how clearly you can see it in retrospect,” said Carignan, who was on the Xbox team at the time, describing the “BXT” misalignment in the original vision for Xbox One. “To the organization’s credit, they pivoted back, and they really changed the product itself.”

That’s one of several case studies in the book that draw universal business lessons from inside Microsoft. The book identifies recurring patterns in the company’s successes and failures by looking at different Microsoft products and teams in various stages and scenarios.

The book was written by two Microsoft business strategists and innovation leaders: Carignan, who now focuses on AI in the company’s office of the chief scientist, and Garbin, who created and led Microsoft’s Regenerative Datacenter of the Future program as part of its sustainability initiatives.

It’s a testament to Microsoft’s famed “growth mindset” under CEO Satya Nadella, but the authors don’t shy away from the company’s missteps. Instead, they examine those struggles to understand and explain what the company learned.

“One of the limitations in writing on innovation these days is that we often only see the successes, and we see the stories compressed down into this very rarefied form where it looks like it was easy, fast and without struggle,” Carignan said. With that in mind, he explained, “We decided we would tell both sides of the story.”

The book coincides with Microsoft’s 50th anniversary, but the case studies focus mostly on the past 20 years, including sections on Visual Studio Code, Microsoft Office, Bing, Cognitive Services, Microsoft Research, and the company’s approach to responsible innovation.

Listen to a conversation with Carignan about the book on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, and continue reading for more highlights.

Microsoft’s Cognitive Services team, which helped the company gain early traction in artificial intelligence APIs, emerged from the failure of Windows Mobile and Windows Phone, the book explains.

When Microsoft realized it couldn’t win the mobile platform war, a small team decided to focus on serving mobile developers instead. The Cognitive Services team took existing AI models from Microsoft Research and made them available as cloud-based services that developers could easily integrate into their mobile apps.

They had senior-level sponsorship from Microsoft executive Harry Shum, which gave them the support and cover to focus on enabling others rather than building their own big organization.

“What I love about that case study is that they didn’t build a huge organization,” Carignan said. “They went out and they connected the teams that already had the bits and bytes to pull it together. And they were very, very purposeful about making sure their partner teams got all of the credit.”

Microsoft’s Bing team had to shift the company’s mindset from being the market leader to being the underdog challenger to go up against Google in internet search, as described in the book.

The Bing team developed very granular metrics to track small gains in market share, which allowed them to run experiments, make incremental improvements, and celebrate small wins.

They also got creative within tight financial constraints. Bing embraced new AI technologies like deep learning earlier than the broader search industry, because the constraints forced them to find more efficient ways to compete.

There is also a broader lesson for the company in this case study. “In the browser wars, the mid to late 90s, we were late, but we followed and we became dominant, and that did breed probably a certain amount of complacency, maybe even arrogance,” Carignan explained. “But what cured us of that was losing search.”

Seeing Google run away with the search market was “a real wake up call,” he said. “If a new business model and a new way of operating a company comes forward and gets enough momentum, you’ll never catch up.”

“And so I think that really cured the company of arrogance and complacency,” he said. “We would say things like, let’s not get Googled. Let’s not let that happen again. And I think it’s a characteristic of Microsoft to learn from those mistakes and to actually internalize and respond, and to not make the same mistake again.”

A few more takeaways from the book:

• Companies need to create an environment that encourages and rewards risk-taking and good decisions, creating an opportunity to learn even when the immediate outcome isn’t successful.
• Frequent, small-scale “flights,” rather than monumental releases, can reduce anxiety and encourage more experimentation and risk-taking. Microsoft Office, Bing, and others have adapted to this approach.
• Connecting different parts of the organization through “boundary crossers” — people inside the company who bridge different groups — helps drive innovation by bringing together diverse perspectives.

While the book was written to resonate broadly, part of the goal was to make sure that people inside Microsoft have a deep understanding of what the company has learned and overcome in its 50 years.

“Once a company has reinvented itself once, it becomes easier to do it again, because you have the model for doing it, and you have the experience,” Carignan said. “It’s kind of like corporate neuroplasticity — the way our own brain can actually repeat things and do them over and over.”

The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft is available now, published by Post Hill Press, with a foreword by Eric Horvitz, Microsoft chief scientific officer.

Listen to the full conversation above, or subscribe to the GeekWire Podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

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The future of Dungeons & Dragons was a secret inside a secret.

Wizards of the Coast hasn’t left Renton, Wash., but it did move out of its previous Landmark building space in July 2023. Its new location is close by, in an ordinary-looking office park with no branding at all. You have to take a secure elevator up to a particular floor, but then you’ll come face to face with “Mitzi,” Wizards’ famous lobby dragon, and her slightly more elaborate new digs.

During a recent tour of the new office, the Hasbro subsidiary unveiled its plans for the next year in the life of Dungeons & Dragons.

“We really see ourselves as stewards of this game,” said Jess Lanzillo, VP of franchise. “It’s a lifestyle and an institution … these are lifelong memories, milestones in people’s lives.”

Lanzillo was the first speaker in a presentation that took place in the “secret gaming lair” at Wizards’ headquarters. Next to one of the company’s kitchens, there’s a suspicious bookshelf that is in fact a door. Open it, and you walk into the one room at Wizards’ new office that actually looks like it belongs to a company that makes fantasy games.

The rest of the building is just an open-plan office. It’s got a great view of Lake Washington, but if you’ve seen one lakefront office in this region, you’ve seen them all.

The lair, on the other hand, features a full bar, a glass-fronted shelf of collectibles, dragon’s-head trophies on the walls, and a custom gaming table with a flatscreen monitor on its surface. A lot of work gets done here, as well as many of Wizards’ in-house games. Sometimes they’re the same thing.

We got to hang out in the lair for a couple of hours as several of D&D’s head writers walked us through the company’s plans for the rest of the year. This included head writer and systems architect Jeremy Crawford; principal game designer James Wyatt, who recently celebrated his 25th year at Wizards of the Coast; and principal D&D designer F. Wesley Schneider.

Bring on the bad guys

Dungeons & Dragons, the self-billed “World’s Greatest Roleplaying Game,” celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. The core of that celebration was the release of an updated and redesigned version of the game’s fifth edition rules.

According to Lanzillo, the response from fans has been incredible, with all of the 2024 books in reprints. The goal for 2025 is to keep that ball rolling, with a continued anniversary celebration that includes a return to the fan-favorite settings of Eberron and the Forgotten Realms.

However, as both Lanzillo and Crawford said, the plan for D&D isn’t to keep revisiting the past forever. Part of the point of 2025 is to, in Lanzillo’s words, “re-establish a world-building environment” — to rebuild D&D’s foundation in anticipation of doing new things with the game and its various settings.

The first step in that process is the release of 2024’s Monster Manual (Feb. 18), the final entry in D&D’s new core set of books. The Manual features over 500 monsters, which range from small fries like the traditional goblins and orcs to world-endangering threats like the classic tarrasque.

The big innovations for 2024’s Monster Manual largely have to do with ease of use. As Crawford has said in the past, the original 5th-edition books from 2014 were made on a relative shoestring, and as such, were more like warehouses full of ideas than any sort of actual guide.

2024’s Manual is better-organized, with multiple appendices, streamlined rules, and what Crawford referred to as “this amazing invention called ‘alphabetization.’” Every monster has been reshuffled so they’re easier to find in the book, there’s more useful information in each monster’s stat block to make it harder to miss, and there are new indexes in the back. Now you can search for enemies by their creature type or intended level of challenge.

If there’s a single marquee feature for the new Manual, it might be its art. Every monster has received its own unique full-color illustration. Past versions of the Manual have tended to depict the monsters standing at rest against plain white or transparent backgrounds, but the 2025 edition shows them all in their lairs or in action.

The goal is to make the Manual a “treasure trove of inspiration,” in Crawford’s words; each monster isn’t simply a static image and a bunch of math, but a living creature that could be the antagonist and/or focus of an entire adventure.

Going back to Faerun

The Forgotten Realms might be D&D’s most famous original setting at the moment, due to the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 and the 2023 live-action film Honor Among Thieves. As such, it’s not surprising that Wizards plans to wrap up its two-year anniversary celebration with a return to the Realms.

Two separate books, the Forgotten Realms Player’s Guide and Forgotten Realms Adventure Guide, are scheduled for a simultaneous release on Nov. 11. The former book is for players who want to create a new character who’s native to the Forgotten Realms, while the latter book is strictly for Dungeon Masters.

The Adventure Guide is intended as a deep dive into the length and breadth of the Forgotten Realms. According to Crawford, players’ reactions to Baldur’s Gate 3 were a big influence on the development of the Adventure Guide. That drove the decision to treat the Realms as what Crawford calls “micro-settings” — various disparate locations that are all still technically on the same world, but which are different enough to serve as the home for entirely different styles of D&D game.

For example, Icewind Dale is a solid background for a horror game; the Moonshaes would work for Celtic-inspired high fantasy; and the city of Baldur’s Gate is a natural place for any kind of heist, caper, or crime spree.

Meanwhile, the Player’s Guide provides eight new subclasses for player characters, such as a bard who uses the Moonshaes’ faerie-infused magic or a genie-themed paladin from Calimshan.

In addition, the Player’s Guide will feature a new mechanic called “circle casting,” where multiple characters can combine their magical abilities in a ritual to create a single powerful effect. This is meant to reflect several specific incidents that have taken place in the Realms’ backstory, but which have never been mechanically possible in-game until now.

Other upcoming projects for Dungeons & Dragons include:

• Dragon Delves (July 8) is an anthology that features 10 ready-to-run adventures, each one of which is themed around one of the 10 classic dragons of D&D: red, black, blue, white, green, gold, bronze, copper, silver, and brass. Delves is intended as a deliberate follow-up to the new editions of both the Monster Manual and the Dungeon Master’s Guide, as 10 examples of how to design and run a D&D adventure. It’s also planned to feature an art and history section that reviews 50 years of D&D’s dragons.
• Eberron: Forge of the Artificer (Aug. 19) is intended as a companion piece to 2019’s Rising From the Last War. It returns to Eberron, a world of pulp adventure and magical technologies, with a broad-focused sourcebook that Wyatt said is closer in tone to 2020’s Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything. In addition to chapters on new campaign ideas, revisiting playable species from Eberron like the warforged, and rules adjustments, Forge will contain a rules update for the artificer that’s intended to bring it up to rough parity with D&D’s other character classes. Wyatt made sure to note that he’d written Forge with consultation from Keith Baker, who created Eberron after winning Wizards of the Coast’s Fantasy Setting Search contest in 2002.
• Heroes of the Borderlands (Sept. 16) is a new starter set that revisits the setting of the classic 1979 D&D adventure The Keep on the Borderlands. In addition to providing an entry-level experience so new D&D players can learn how to play the game, Heroes features several new mechanical options, such as a unique, newcomer-friendly “tile-based” method of character generation. “Pre-generated characters don’t let you make the character your own,” Crawford said. “This solves for that.”

A final unannounced project is scheduled for an indeterminate point in October, though no one at Wizards was willing to so much as hint what it might be.

The single common thread that joins all of these disparate projects, according to Crawford, is that each one deliberately tries to do something that’s never been done before in D&D’s 50-year history, such as brand-new mechanics or never-before-seen types of material.

“For every one of these products,” Crawford said, “we’re innovating in some way. That’s going to continue.”

Project Sigil

Virtual tabletops, or VTTs, are a big part of the modern gaming scene. Apps like TaleSpire are used every day to play games online, which naturally includes D&D.

Wizards of the Coast announced 2 1/2 years ago, alongside the rules revamp that was then known as “One D&D,” that it had plans to get in on that action by building its own VTT in Unreal Engine.

I got a chance to check out a pre-alpha of Wizards’ then-unnamed VTT in May 2023, as part of a short adventure run by D&D designer Makenzie De Armas. (She proceeded to kill my character in one hit.) It was early days, but I thought there was potential in the system. Then I didn’t hear much of anything about it for 18 months, although that had as much to do with the rules update and the anniversary as anything else.

The VTT reappeared at this most recent media summit, now under the working title of Project Sigil. Now being built in version 5.4 of the Unreal Engine, Project Sigil is intended as many things — a world-building tool, a visual aid, a “hook for your imagination” — but according to D&D‘s director of digital game design Kale Stutzman, it isn’t necessarily a VTT.

Wizards quietly tested Project Sigil out at a recent PAX Unplugged conference, where it learned that the more it attempted to use Sigil to “automate” D&D, the less people seemed to like it. That influenced an evolution of the tool from a sort of virtual D&D companion into an easy-to-use 3D map builder.

We received a short demo of the current alpha version of Project Sigil from one of its lead programmers, who was able to create a fairly elaborate set for a graveyard in a couple of minutes. You can choose from a variety of pre-built options, such as trees, rocks, types of wall, and flooring, then drag and drop them into the scene. The focus of the app is creating “vignettes” — small rooms and short encounters, rather than something as complicated as a city block.

At time of writing, Sigil is intended to be connected directly to D&D Beyond for online play, which will allow you to import characters and monsters directly from Beyond to Sigil. This includes stats, hit points, and current spells. You’ll also be able to create and customize virtual miniatures for your player characters.

Notably, there are no plans at Wizards for Sigil to accept user-generated content such as new models, although many details about Sigil such as how and where players could share their maps are still in flux.

In response to questions about the potential for users’ maps and scenarios on Sigil being used to train an LLM, Wizards representatives were careful to say that “we have not changed stances or policy on AI.”

A short trailer is planned to debut from Wizards in the near future that will advertise the start of an open alpha for Project Sigil. Interested users should know that Sigil won’t necessarily be a low-demand program (“you’re gonna need a graphics card,” Stutzman said), but the team is currently aiming for Sigil to have roughly the same PC specs as Fortnite.

Other interesting reveals from Wizards’ media summit included:

• “We would be incredibly excited to have Baldur’s Gate 4,” Lanzillo said, “but it’s a scary assignment.” Larian Studios “reset the bar” for CRPGs with Baldur’s Gate 3, so Wizards feels fine taking their time with any potential follow-ups.
• The 2024 rules refresh put several other projects at Wizards on the back burner. This included further potential crossovers with Magic: The Gathering. Once 2025 is over, D&D will have a “new road map” and more interplay between the two franchises, such as more D&D adaptations of famous Magic locations, may be possible.
• Wizards subsidiary Archetype Entertainment revealed its science-fiction RPG Exodus at the 2023 Game Awards, but has gone dark since, except for Exodus‘ recent appearance on an episode of the Amazon Prime show Secret Level. However, that’s about it as far as news goes from Wizards’ internal video game developers, aside from the continued success of the mobile game Monopoly Go!
• One of Lanzillo’s dream collaborations would be to get the Japanese artist Junji Ito (Uzumaki, Spiral) to contribute to a D&D project.

[Errata, 1/29 – A Wizards of the Coast PR rep reached out to clarify details about Project Sigil. The article has been corrected.]

Canadian video game developer Phoenix Labs, creator of Dauntless and Fae Farm, announced Monday that it’s laying off a majority of its staff.

The news came via a post on Phoenix Labs’ official LinkedIn page, and was first spotted by Game Developer.

“We have made the tough decision to part ways with the majority of the studio as part of unfortunate but necessary changes to our operations,” the company wrote. “We will share more details in the coming weeks about what this means for Dauntless and Fae Farm.”

GeekWire reached out to Phoenix Labs for additional comment.

The company has around 90 employees, according to LinkedIn.

These layoffs are the latest in a long series of downsizings, reorganizations, and studio closures across the video game industry, and may potentially be the largest so far this year. Other affected companies in 2025 include the French conglomerate Ubisoft, which shuttered a studio in the UK on Monday, and a small number of dismissals at Seattle’s Highwire Games.

In Phoenix Labs’ case, however, these layoffs could be chalked up to the failure of Awakening, the most recent expansion for Phoenix Labs’ flagship project Dauntless, which received a chilly reception from players when it released on Dec. 5.

Debuting in 2018, Dauntless is a live service game that challenges players to hunt down enormous monsters called Behemoths, either alone or in small teams online. After a successful hunt, players can use parts of fallen Behemoths to create better weapons and armor, which allows them to take on more and bigger challenges.

Awakening was advertised as a big mechanical update for Dauntless, and came out alongside its long-awaited debut on Steam. On release, it quickly came under fire for a new, unannounced monetization strategy.

Players logged into Dauntless to discover Awakening had added a new series of aggressive microtransactions, and that much of players’ previously existing progress through the game had been reset. In short, Phoenix Labs had taken away players’ hard-earned in-game equipment, then offered to sell it back to them for real money.

This was an unusual move for Dauntless, which was not previously known for its predatory in-game purchases. Analysts and fans both attribute this sudden about-face to Phoenix Labs’ owner, blockchain gaming company Forte Labs, which acquired Phoenix Labs in 2023 under an unusual cloud of secrecy.

A previous round of layoffs at Phoenix Labs in May 2024 was reportedly ordered by Forte, including the cancellation of an unnamed major project.

It’s been a long, strange year for video games. We’ve seen some great releases, like Balatro, Astro Bot, and Pacific Drive, but the industry is riding a global downturn, multiple studio closures, two years of escalating layoffs, and several smaller controversies.

Much of 2025, at time of writing, is a question mark. We’re still waiting for firm release windows on several projects that’ll define the year, such as Grand Theft Auto VI or Nintendo’s new console, and no one seems to want to make a real plan until they know when one or both of those are coming out.

In the meantime, let’s focus on what we do know, about the year that’s passed and what’s coming next.

Microsoft: Playing its own game

While Microsoft’s gaming division still turns a profit, it’s spent the last two console generations seemingly hard-locked in third place behind Sony and Nintendo. The company’s reaction has been to attempt to redefine the video game console as a concept, with initiatives like its “This is an Xbox” PR campaign. Through this lens, what Microsoft is actually selling is an ecosystem, rather than a console, and that ecosystem can be reached through any internet-capable device.

Even so, the past year for Xbox has been marked by bold plays and occasional controversy. Arguably the biggest black eye for the company has been its waves of layoffs, both internally and at Activision Blizzard. In particular, Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty reportedly told employees in May 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. (Tango subsequently reincorporated as a subsidiary of the South Korean company Krafton.)

In addition, Microsoft defied industry convention by opting to publish several of its console exclusives like Grounded on the PlayStation and Switch. While this is technically nothing new for Microsoft, which has kept Minecraft platform-agnostic for years, this has historically been a move that’s only made by a game company that’s about to exit the hardware market, and was met with an outcry by Xbox loyalists.

Microsoft’s final gamble was to bring the latest Call of Duty game, Black Ops 6, to its Xbox Game Pass service at launch. The risk was that this might cannibalize Black Ops 6’s sales, which would boost Game Pass at Call of Duty’s expense.

These moves seem to have worked in Microsoft’s favor. While Microsoft didn’t release any specific numbers (so take this with a grain of salt), it announced on Oct. 30 that Black Ops 6 had the series’ biggest-ever launch weekend, while many of Xbox Game Studios’ releases have appeared on the PlayStation Network’s top 25 list. Independent analysis firm Circana pegged Black Ops 6 as the No. 2 best-seller for 2024 as of the end of November.

It’s an odd strategy, particularly in the limited history of console gaming, but so far it looks successful. Microsoft isn’t explicitly competing against Sony or Nintendo, but instead, is playing all sides against the middle.

In 2025, Microsoft should also revisit its plans to break into the mobile gaming market. This was supposed to launch last summer, but according to Xbox president Sarah Bond, the rollout was halted by a court order.

When and if that’s sorted out, a successful beachhead in the mobile market could be a major profit driver for Xbox in 2025, but it can expect serious pushback from competitors like Apple.

As a game publisher, Microsoft enters the new year on a high note, due to the critically and commercially successful release of MachineGames’ Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on Dec. 9. An interquel to the film franchise, Great Circle pits Indy against Italian fascists, a Nazi rival, and a secret society in the Vatican.

Xbox’s next major first-party game, Obsidian Entertainment’s action-RPG Avowed, is scheduled for Feb. 18. Other releases for the year potentially include the action prequel Doom: The Dark Age; the long-awaited revival of the Fable franchise; and original IP such as Replaced and South of Midnight. You can also expect another Call of Duty for the 2025 holidays, as usual, which is rumored to be another entry in the Black Ops subseries.

Amazon: Massively multiplayer

While Amazon’s gaming ambitions have yet to really pay off, it does have a few reasons to be cheerful.

Amazon scored a major hit last summer with its live-action adaptation of Bethesda Softworks’ Fallout for Amazon Prime, and its recent localization of NCSoft’s Throne and Liberty saw respectable numbers at launch.

Amazon also ported its original MMORPG New World to consoles this year, which came alongside a New World-themed episode of its video game show Secret Level. After a big launch in 2021, which was buoyed by cross-promotion via Amazon’s Twitch, New World appears to have stabilized at a regular population of roughly 19,700 daily players.

That’s enough to keep the game in the worldwide top 20, which arguably qualifies New World as a sleeper hit, but that seems to be its ceiling. Amazon’s got a respectable MMORPG on its hands, but not a blockbuster.

On the negative side, Bandai Namco announced it will sunset its MMORPG Blue Protocol on Jan. 18, which scuttled Amazon’s plan to release it in territories outside Japan.

Other than that, it’s hard to know what’s next for Amazon’s gaming arm. Its highest-profile projects include a Tomb Raider reboot, headed up by Crystal Dynamics, and an untitled Lord of the Rings MMORPG, but neither have a release date. Amazon’s stated plan has always been to make big, expensive “AAA” games, so many of its bets in the sector may not pay off for another couple of years. In the meantime, it’s demonstrated a knack for bringing big live-service games from overseas to the American market.

Valve: Signs of life

Valve Software’s sunny refusal to stick to any kind of schedule has been a running joke since the company was founded. In 2024, however, it had more going on than usual.

This year saw the official debut of Deadlock, a player-vs-player action game that’s currently in semi-open testing on Steam; you can’t sign up for it, but you can be invited to play Deadlock by people who are already in the beta. This is Valve’s first original IP in years (since Artifact was technically an adaptation of Dota 2), as well as its entry into the “hero shooter” genre. No official release date has been announced.

In a more surprising move, Valve released “The Days Have Worn Away,” the seventh and apparently final issue of the official Team Fortress 2 webcomic, on Dec. 20. The comic had been on an unannounced hiatus for almost eight years before that point, and issue No. 7 reads like an attempt to close out TF2. If this was coming from any other company, it’d suggest Team Fortress 3 is on the horizon, but this is Valve. There’s no way of knowing what’s next.

In hardware news, rumors persist that Valve plans to release a third iteration of its Steam Deck in 2025, either as another iteration on the hardware or as a console-styled living room option. Valve itself has made no announcements one way or the other, aside from regularly updating the Steam Deck’s OS.

The Deck’s success — Valve reported in 2023 that it had sold “multiple millions” of units — has ignited a growing competition, as other companies like Asus and MSI brought their own portable gaming PCs to market.

This has led to predictions that the next big “console war” will be fought in the handheld sector, between Valve, PC companies, and Nintendo’s next Switch. Sony has signaled that it’s ready to participate as well, with products like the PlayStation Portal, and rumors of a dedicated portable Xbox unit have been in circulation for years. Forget your living room; the next battle is for your lap.

The 2025 startup scene

The biggest issue confronting gaming startups in 2025 involves simple brand recognition.

Some analysts are more bullish than others on the scene going forward. PitchBook notes in its end-of-year report for 2024 that the gaming sector is currently underinvested, citing factors such as lengthy game development cycles proving “unpalatable” to funders, rising interest rates, and 2024 having a weak release calendar by comparison to the all-time high of 2023. This year’s gaming startups might initially face an uphill battle to find funding.

The real struggle may come from the audience. As PitchBook’s Eric Bellomo writes, “In the face of abundant content, consumers increasingly chose to play established ‘forever titles,’ leaving a shrinking pool of time for net-new releases.”

Other analysts, such as Circana’s Mat Piscatella, have sounded similar alarms. Essentially, the industry’s increasing focus on “games as a service” has begun to visibly pull oxygen away from everything else on the market. When faced with poor online discovery, a shrinking enthusiast press, and million-dollar PR campaigns, many fans will opt to spend their time on the games they already know.

A useful example here comes from Valve Software’s “Steam Replay” feature, which gives Steam users a series of at-a-glance infographics that summarize what they’ve been playing this year. When I checked my own numbers out, I was shocked to see that the median Steam user only played four games in 2024, out of the 200,000+ on the platform.

For another useful example, you could also point to a particular disclosure from 2023’s legal battle between the FTC and Microsoft, when Sony noted that approximately 8 million PlayStation owners put 70-to-100% of their gaming time into the Call of Duty franchise. For a substantial part of the PlayStation audience, their PS4 or PS5 is just the box that Call of Duty comes in. It’s a scary stat for anyone who doesn’t work on CoD.

Those two data points illustrate the biggest challenge for any video game startup in 2025. It’s arguably easier to make a video game than ever before, with a large and growing number of tools to help new creators and small studios with tasks like quality assurance, online safety, or zero-code engines. If you were ever going to work on that video game project in the back of your head, 2025 is a good time to start.

Much as with modern films or TV, however, the biggest challenge for new gaming IP in 2025 is simply getting noticed. The competition in the “attention economy” has never been higher, and smaller developers have worse and fewer ways to break through the noise.

AI in gaming: Facing the PR hurdle

Early in 2024, I attended a get-together for Seattle games industry professionals, where the mood was bleak. Many of the assembled developers were quietly convinced that it was only a matter of time until their employers let them go and replaced their role with an AI model.

Some of that cynicism can be chalked up to the environment. The games industry has always had more than its share of vulture capitalists in executive suites, and these have been good years for bad management. (More on that later.)

In practice, as we noted last year, many of the possible uses for AI in game development aren’t wildly dissimilar to mechanics and practices that were already in use. If your game randomly creates dungeons for the player, there isn’t much practical difference between using an LLM or procedural generation to do it.

One crucial, growing sector for AI in games is quality assurance. Companies like Live Aware use custom-trained AI models to help sort through hundreds of hours of testers’ gameplay footage. As founder Sean Vesce told me, it’s a question of training their LLM to look for certain specific phrases in what would otherwise be an inaccessibly vast pool of data. A human could never hope to get through it all, let alone extract any meaningful information, but an appropriately-equipped AI can.

The biggest hurdle for AI in game development in 2025 is still likely to be its massive PR problem. Generative AI programs have a reputation as being plagiarism machines, as well as providing easy ways for bad actors to flood open storefronts with zero-effort dreck.

That’s led to substantial audience backlash against any company that openly uses, or appears to be using, AI to create art or text. For example, Renton, Wash.-based Wizards of the Coast has dealt with several different AI-related controversies in the last year, such as advertising a position for an AI engineer or its parent company’s CEO’s continual flirtation with integrating AI into Dungeons & Dragons.

In its current state, AI has several applications in gaming, but the best are used behind the scenes, in vital fields like data analysis or rapid prototyping. Advocates still push dreams of a day when generative AI is good enough to allow a single person to quickly create the game of their dreams, but for the time being, only other AI advocates are buying what they’re selling. Everyone else’s mood could be described, at best, as “hostile disinterest.”

The (stock price) needle and the damage done

If there’s a single story that defines video games in 2024, however, it’s the layoffs.

Just over 25,000 game developers lost their jobs over the course of the last two years. January 2024 was particularly brutal, with almost 6,000 dismissals across companies like Riot Games, Unity, and Activision Blizzard.

Here in Washington state, we’ve seen big cuts this year at Microsoft, Bungie, Epic Games, and Hidden Path Entertainment, while local studios like Firewalk, Galvanic Games, and Ridgeline Games shut down.

While you can point to multiple factors behind the layoffs, analysts argue the single biggest culprit is a post-COVID market correction. The audience for video games hit new heights during the pandemic lockdowns, which led to a big influx of investment in 2021 and 2022. Would-be empire builders like Sweden’s Embracer Group went on an M&A spree, while existing entertainment companies like Amazon and Netflix spent heavily to break into the video game market.

Many of these newcomers were explicitly betting that the good times would last forever, and they didn’t. Subsequently, investors started backing off of the games business as early as Q4 2022, citing economic uncertainty, rising inflation, and after Microsoft’s battle with the FCC in 2023, the potential for increased regulatory scrutiny.

At the same time, once the lockdowns were lifted, the games industry faced renewed competition from every other hobby on Earth. That led to a slight but noticeable decline in overall revenue at the same time that the easy VC money dried up, with chaotic results.

The final, most important nail in the coffin mirrors that of the greater tech industry, which has had similar recent issues. Like tech companies, many larger game studios have stockholders to appease, and simply put, layoffs are good for stock prices.

That means even overwhelming success often isn’t enough to protect employees’ positions, as we saw with companies like Wizards of the Coast, which results in a constant drain of companies’ experience and talent. This pattern has repeated itself throughout the games industry for years, where overpaid executives freely trade short-term gains for long-term loss, but it’s rarely been as widespread as it was in 2024.

Whenever you have a conversation like this about the video game business, someone always asks if this is the start of the next big crash. Ever since 1983, when the American games industry fell apart almost overnight, fans and analysts have speculated about when and if history will repeat itself.

Those questions are premature, at least for now. Even after the recent revenue slump, analysts estimate that video games are a $72 billion global business driven by some of the biggest corporations on the planet, including all the FAANG companies. It’s hard to imagine another 1983-style crash unless it was a knock-on effect from a truly historic global recession.

What you can take away from this year, however, is that the games industry is (still) long overdue for serious internal reform. There are other conversations you can have about the current state of affairs, like how graphics have essentially plateaued, but the events of 2024 have shone a spotlight on how much of this business is built on exploitation of labor.

Before COVID, there were a number of serious conversations happening about game developer unionization, and several departments across the industry have successfully organized. Expect more of that to come.

This situation has been unsustainable for years, and something has to give. Maybe 2025 is the year when it happens.

Valve is making a notable shift with its portable gaming strategy as Lenovo debuted a new edition of its Legion Go gaming handheld that runs Valve’s custom operating system.

Valve, headquartered in Bellevue, Wash., built SteamOS to provide a gaming-focused, console-styled experience for PC gaming. This is the same Linux-based operating system that powers its Steam Deck, which means Valve is currently lending its OS to what’s ostensibly a competitor’s system.

Valve further announced via the official Steam blog that “the same work we are doing to support the Lenovo Legion Go S will improve compatibility with other handhelds.”

The Legion Go S is a slimmer, lighter edition of its 2023 model, which features up to 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a smaller 8-inch OLED screen. It also removes some of the 2023 Go’s features, like detachable controllers or the “kickstand,” to create an experience that’s much more in line with that of Valve’s Steam Deck.

The Go S is planned to release with two separate SKUs. The white Go S runs Windows 11, while the black edition runs Steam OS. The hardware is otherwise identical. No release date has been announced.

At first glance, this is a strange move for Valve. While it’s yet to really break out into the mainstream, the Deck sits at the center of a low-key platform war. Several other companies have brought portable gaming PCs to market in recent years, such as the Legion Go, ASUS’s ROG Ally, the GPD Win 4, and the Ayaneo Air.

Some of the Deck’s competitors have better performance or improved features like longer-lived batteries, but the Deck’s lower price tag and comparable horsepower keeps it in the conversation. Bringing SteamOS to rival hardware may seem counterintuitive.

It’s useful to remember here, however, that Valve controls the majority of the PC gaming market. Competitors like Epic’s Tim Sweeney have estimated that Steam generates at least 75% of modern PC gaming revenue, which is part of why Valve catches a new lawsuit every six months. Every other portable gaming PC on the market likely has Steam installed on it anyway, so there’s no reason for Valve to be precious about its OS. It’s too central to the overall scene.

Valve has also been on a quiet crusade for over a decade to break Windows’ effective hammerlock on PC gaming. CEO Gabe Newell has been openly critical of Microsoft and Windows since at least 2012, and many of Valve’s ventures into hardware (i.e. the late Steam Machine) have also been a deliberate attempt to chip away at Windows’ market share.

As such, bringing SteamOS to other portable systems can be seen as another step in Valve’s quiet struggle to revolutionize and/or normalize gaming on Linux. The Steam Deck was arguably its single most successful venture in that regard, and now it’s doubling down by bringing the SteamOS to other platforms.

With Windows 10 planned to sunset in October, and Windows 11 attracting heavy fire from users for intrusive ads and mandatory AI, this might be the best opportunity that Valve has had in years. The company doesn’t hype up its Linux evangelism, but it quietly drives much of what Valve does in the hardware space.

As 2024 draws to a close, one advisory firm predicts the video game industry will see a major rebound in 2025 following two years of declines.

San Diego-based DFC Intelligence released its 2024 Video Game Market Report and Forecast, which lays out a case that 2025 will bring a reversal of fortune for the industry as a whole. The report consciously focuses on the PC and console markets, while mostly omitting the much larger mobile sector.

The gaming business has recently been plagued by layoffs, studio closures, and canceled projects, with well over 24,000 dismissals worldwide in the last two years. Just in Washington state, we’ve seen cuts at Microsoft, Bungie, Epic Games, Hidden Path Entertainment, and Wizards of the Coast, while local studios like Firewalk, Galvanic Games, and Ridgeline Games have been shuttered.

This can be tied into an overall decline in gaming revenue that started in early 2023, despite a packed release calendar. DFC notes that this was only a 4% drop, but it was the first setback of its kind for “overall software revenue” since 2009.

The report blames multiple factors for the 2023-2024 slump, including an end to the artificial revenue inflation from the COVID lockdown years; multiple product delays as the industry adjusted to remote work; the pandemic’s attendant disruptions to the console market, as both Sony and Microsoft launched new systems in November 2020; and renewed competition from other hobbies, such as travel and outdoor entertainment.

In 2025, DFC forecasts multiple factors that will reverse those trends, and argues that the video game market will “start soaring.” These include:

• DFC notes that the game industry has stayed on an overall upward curve since roughly 1985. There have been downturns before, such as a slump in 2009 following the Great Recession, but they tend to be short and small. That suggests that the chaos of the last two years was a painful but temporary setback.
• Nintendo reportedly plans to launch a new console in 2025 as a successor to the Switch. Very little is known for sure about the “Switch 2” at time of writing, but multiple third-party product leaks suggest that it’s coming sooner than we might think. As the Switch is Nintendo’s most popular console in decades, its follow-up is expected to be a top seller on release.
• Rockstar Games’ hotly anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI has no firm release date, but could come out in Q4 2025. Its predecessor, 2013’s Grand Theft Auto V, is one of the best-selling games of all time and has stayed in the yearly top 20 for over a decade, primarily on the strength of its popular GTA Online multiplayer mode. It’s expected that GTA6 will be a comparatively seismic event, and may drive fence-sitters to pick up new consoles with which to play it.
• DFC argues that “inflation has created a more cost-conscious consumer.” Video games provide solid value for the money, particularly in an environment where a family outing to an amusement park, or two trips to a movie theater, can cost as much as a Switch. Much as in the years immediately following the Great Recession, video games simply make good financial sense for customers’ limited entertainment budgets.
• The various disruptive effects of post-COVID workflow and supply chains have settled down by this point. Some larger companies have experienced friction with remote work like any other industry, but in practice game development has become comfortable with widely distributed teams.

Console wars, 2025 edition

As a result, DFC anticipates the worldwide audience for video games will hit 4 billion by 2027, or nearly half the world population. However, this sets up an attendant challenge, as DFC finds that the top 10% of the gaming audience in 2024 accounts for 65% of overall industry revenue. The bottom 90% of the audience only averages roughly $20 in revenue per user.

This is similar to the issues that mobile and PC studios have reported with the free-to-play publishing model. In industry parlance, these are “whales” and “minnows”; minnows are determined to spend no real money on a game if it’s at all possible, while whales will make regular purchases in-app.

Some of this is anticipated to be counteracted by the aging of the average video game consumer. Generation X is the first demographic to have grown up playing video games on a regular basis, and as it gets older, it generally has more money to spend on expensive hobbies. That includes “increased sophistication around hardware purchases,” such as tricked-out gaming PCs.

That and other factors drive an expectation that the console war may heat up in 2025, as Nintendo’s new system goes head to head with the declining PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.

By 2028, when both Sony and Microsoft are expected to release new systems, that suggests that generation of consoles will repeat history: Nintendo will be deeply entrenched in the marketplace, which gives the new PlayStation and Xbox a steep hill to climb. The successes of both the Switch and Valve’s Steam Deck suggest that portability may be a new desired factor for gaming consoles going forward, although both Sony and Microsoft do currently have products intended to address that.

Technically, Nintendo has “won” the current console generation before it started, although it had a 3-year head start. The Switch came out in 2017 and has sold just over 146 million units, as per Nintendo’s own numbers. Sony’s most recent internal numbers estimate the PlayStation 5 has sold not even half of that, while Microsoft hasn’t disclosed its hardware sales for years but is generally understood to be in a distant third place. Nintendo also famously uses a different sales model for its hardware than its competitors, where it makes a small per-unit profit on every Switch sold.

DFC Intelligence argues that the next generation of consoles is likely to have a distinct loser, as the market sector cannot sustain three major players. It’s a bold statement, but isn’t entirely borne out by the market; Microsoft has sold considerably fewer consoles than Sony or Nintendo, but still makes a profit off its video game division and is moving into a position as a cross-platform game publisher.

The rising importance of distribution

The biggest point in DFC Intelligence’s report may be its focus on distribution channels.

At this point, DFC argues, one of the major drivers behind success in the games industry is a single company’s ability to get their games into players’ hands, whether that means a physical copy, a digital download, or an app on their mobile device.

Major current distributors include console manufacturers (Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, increasingly Valve), digital storefronts (Valve again, Epic, Google, Apple), and major retail chains (GameStop, Walmart). Each of these tend to represent their own sort of “walled garden,” where customers are enticed to shop there by convenience, exclusive benefits, or ubiquity; for example, it’s nearly impossible in 2024 to be a dedicated PC gamer without an account on Steam.

Back in 2018, it appeared that many of the major companies were warming up to establish their own exclusive distribution networks, such as Ubisoft’s uPlay, Electronic Arts’ EA Play, and Activision Blizzard’s Battle.net. While many of those services still exist in 2024, it’s rare for them to have any platform exclusives; nobody’s going to buy Assassin’s Creed on uPlay when all their friends are still on Steam/PlayStation/Xbox.

With the barriers between consoles and platforms getting increasingly softer, due to initiatives like Microsoft’s cross-platform publishing and Sony bringing many of its games to PC, DFC argues that the next major battle in the video game space will instead be over methods of distribution. It’s a potential trend to watch as the market continues to spin off into unanticipated directions.

Several other emergent factors were not factored into the report, such as the potential for rising import costs with the incoming presidential administration. However, DFC’s analysis does mesh with that of PitchBook, which recently noted in its Q3 report that investment in the gaming sector has modestly increased after virtually cratering late last year. It does seem like the games industry, after 24 months of bad news, may be back on the rise.

Quick, think of every five-letter word you can that has anything to do with Seattle. If several popped into your head right away, you should be entering the Wordy-verse from Flying Comet Games.

Seattle natives Calli Fuchigami and Eden Ghirmai are the co-founders of the relatively new company. Fuchigami worked in finance at a couple of game companies where she grew to love the creative environment. Ghirmai is an engineer who graduated from the University of Washington and has prior experience at Google and Slack.

“We both kind of got to a point in our careers where we wanted to do something for ourselves and start our own company/project/experiment,” Fuchigami said. “After trying a few different ideas, it just naturally landed upon games because that’s my background and he’s also a big gamer himself.”

They gravitated toward word games because they — like millions of others — are both fans of “Wordle” and other offerings from The New York Times. They thought creating custom categories under their Wordy-verse banner could be a unique way to attract players.

Beyond Seattle, the 13 categories include television shows such as “Friends” and “Survivor,” yoga, gymnastics, and the video game “Animal Crossing.” There’s a category for boba tea lovers and one for accounting geeks. There’s even a Y Combinator category that sometimes features three-letter puzzles (think tech and business-related acronyms).

Flying Comet is not alone in copying the “Wordle” concept. There are numerous takes on the popular game, including ones dedicated to Taylor Swift, sports, Star Wars and more. The New York Times has gone after some of these game makers for copyright infringement.

“We definitely avoid using the term ‘Wordle’ on our site,” Fuchigami said. “But it is the game mechanics and play of it.”

Beyond the Wordy-verse games, Flying Comet is experimenting with about eight other mini games. There’s one that is app-based, called “Keep Bufo Alive” — a “clicker game” that has attracted more than 600 players.

“It’s just a silly, casual way to pass the time at the bus stop or in the car that was a good primer on game mechanics,” Fuchigami said.

Flying Comet is just Fuchigami and Ghirmai right now, and they eventually hope to monetize their efforts by following The New York Times model and getting users to subscribe. They also hope to land deals with smaller publications and websites that could surface customizable games for readers.

The startup founders, who both graduated from Mount Rainier High School in Des Moines, Wash., recently relocated to the Bay Area, but their hearts are still in Seattle, thinking of five-letter words. It’s especially challenging because unlike “Wordle,” they allow proper nouns.

Think of the possibilities with street names, businesses and more. “Dicks” — as in the famed burger joint — was a recent puzzle answer. Fuchigami said it’s important to feel true to Seattle, and other cities will have to wait to enter the Wordy-verse.

“The fun of it is it’s almost like an inside joke, where you really you need to live there,” she said. “We’re really focusing on what we know — I spent most of my life in Seattle, worked most of my life in Seattle. It’s Seattle for now.”

SparkToro co-founder Rand Fishkin announced Monday that he raised $2.15 million for a new independent video game studio in Seattle.

In a post on the official SparkToro blog, Fishkin wrote that he co-founded Snackbar Studio with Geraldine DeRuiter, his wife and Snackbar’s head writer; game designer Nicolas Kraj; lead programmer Miriam Cabrera; and art director Francesco Mazza.

Snackbar Studio’s debut project, currently under the working title The Snackbar at the End of the World, is a top-down, “chill” action-RPG set in a magical alternate-reality 1960s Italy. Snackbar is building Snackbar in Unity, with plans to self-publish it for PC via Steam in the second half of 2026.

The cash was raised via a funding round that attracted 38 angel investors, including SearchPilot CEO Will Critchlow, UX designer Christine Ryu, and BigBox VR co-founder Gabe Brown. Snackbar’s round deliberately uses the same funding model that fueled SparkToro, which eschews VC money in favor of personal networking. Almost all of the investors in Snackbar are people who Fishkin and DeRuiter know personally, rather than big VC funds.

Fishkin made Snackbar’s pitch deck and incorporation and funding documents open-source, in hopes that other indie game companies can use the same model for their own companies.

The move into game development, according to Fishkin, arose as a result of the COVID lockdown. That winter, while stuck indoors, he and DeRuiter picked up gaming as a hobby. Fishkin became a big fan of the award-winning narrative detective RPG Disco Elysium, as well as a host of other recent indie hits.

“The more we played, the more I studied games like software products: analyzing what worked, why, how, and what made a game great vs. merely good,” Fishkin wrote. “It’s hard to turn the entrepreneur thing off.”

That led to Fishkin falling down a “research rabbit hole” about how to make video games, followed by a “long story of false starts” over the next two years. Finally, Fishkin and DeRuiter put their team together and officially founded the studio in 2023.

“During my investigations into the indie video game market, I found that some genres and tag combinations consistently outperformed what a statistical model suggested would be “average” for game performance,” Fishkin wrote. “Two of those in particular were: cooking and action roguelike.”

“In 2023, a game called Dave the Diver released to massive critical and sales success,” he continued. “It made me even more confident that the genre overlap was a perfect match for the market of gamers we intend to target, and for our passions, interests, and skillsets.”

The result is Snackbar at the End of the World, where you take over your family’s restaurant after your aunt is sent to prison. By day, you hunt and forage in the wilds outside town for new ingredients; by night, you cook food to earn money, spend that money on gear upgrades, and eventually find a way to save your family.

At time of writing, Fishkin does not intend to step away from SparkToro in order to focus on Snackbar.

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Seattle-based video game developer Starform raised $6 million in a new funding round to continue work on its air combat game Metalstorm.

The new round of funding was led by BITKRAFT Ventures, with additional participation from Dune Ventures. This brings Starform’s total funding to over $13 million, following previous rounds in 2019 and 2021.

The new funding will be used for player outreach, to get more people playing Metalstorm, as well as to expand Starform’s development team, Starform said in a press release.

Starform also announced that Metalstorm has reached an audience of 3 million players across mobile and PC since its public debut last year. Currently available on Google Play, the Apple App Store, and the Epic Games Store, Metalstorm is a team-based 5v5 game where players fly various historically-inspired combat planes against one another. Each plane has its own unique abilities inspired by its real-world capabilities.

Metalstorm is currently scheduled for release on additional platforms in 2025, though Starform has not specified which ones.

“We believe in crafting short-session experiences that unite players across platforms,” said Lou Fasulo, CEO and co-founder of Starform, in a press release. “Metalstorm is all about facilitating connections—whether among friends or new acquaintances—through shared, thrilling gameplay that fits seamlessly into busy schedules.”

Starform was founded in 2018 by Fasulo, Taylor Daynes, Josh Rosen, and Jason English, all of whom formerly worked at the Seattle-based mobile studio Z2 before its acquisition by King in 2015.

Starform’s latest round fits into what’s become a modest upswing in VC funding for the games industry. After a sustained lean period over the last two years, total deal value in the space has risen for four consecutive quarters, as tracked by PitchBook. It suggests that investors are slowly moving back into the industry after the post-COVID bust, which saw a plummet in deal value and a sustained period of contraction.

Sony on Tuesday announced the closure of Firewalk Studios, 18 months after acquiring the Bellevue, Wash.-based game developer.

Firewalk’s first and only project was Concord, a multiplayer action game for Windows and PlayStation 5 that released on Aug. 23. In a controversial move, Sony shut down Concord’s servers after only two weeks, citing poor sales and low player counts, and offered a refund to anyone who’d bought the game.

Sony announced Tuesday that it would “permanently sunset” Concord and shut down Firewalk Studios, as well as the German mobile developer Neon Koi.

“The PvP first person shooter genre is a competitive space that’s continuously evolving, and unfortunately, we did not hit our targets with [Concord],” wrote Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Hermen Hulst in a company-wide email. “We will take the lessons learned from Concord and continue to advance our live service capabilities to deliver future growth in this area.”

An unknown number of employees in Washington state will be laid off. GeekWire has reached out to Sony for more details, and we’ll update this story if we hear back. Update: A filing with the Washington state employment department reveals that 174 jobs were cut at Firewalk as part of the closure.

Firewalk was founded in 2018 as the first of several teams created by ProbablyMonsters, a Bellevue, Wash.-based studio collective that aims to build a “sustainable, people-first culture” for video game development.

ProbablyMonsters sold Firewalk to Sony in April 2023 for an undisclosed sum. A month later, Firewalk revealed its debut project Concord as part of a PlayStation Showcase livestream.

When Concord released in August, however, Sony didn’t publicize the launch in any significant way. It also shipped Concord at a starting MSRP of $39.99 in a genre where many of its established competitors, such as Valorant and Overwatch 2, use a free-to-play business model.

At the end of the day, Concord was a new project from a small team with minimal publisher support up against a couple of 800-pound gorillas. It was also a “game as a service,” which is a notoriously overcrowded segment of the market. It’s not surprising that Concord sold poorly, but Sony’s rapid abandonment of the project is nearly unprecedented, which has led to widespread speculation by fans and analysts about whatever else might have happened behind the scenes.

“…While many qualities of the experience resonated with players, we also recognize that other aspects of the game and our initial launch didn’t land the way we’d intended,” wrote Ryan Ellis, director at Firewalk, on the official PlayStation blog in September. “Therefore, at this time, we have decided to take the game offline… and explore options, including those that will better reach our players.”

Firewalk’s closure is the latest in a series of layoffs and shutdowns that have plagued the larger video game industry for the last two years, with well over 10,000 employees losing their jobs over the course of 2024. This is widely seen as a painful global reset after the industry’s sudden growth in 2020-2021, which was largely driven by consumers’ entertainment spending habits during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Seattle-based Loot Labs, which owns and operates the collectibles platform Boxed.gg, raised a $6 million seed round investment to expand its ongoing venture into digital collectibles.

Global venture capital firm BITKRAFT Ventures led the round, with participation from Sfermion, Fabric Ventures, and Everyrealm. The firm previously invested in a $1.5 million round last year.

Boxed.gg has staked out a territory as a gamified online marketplace for collectible cards. Fans of Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Magic: The Gathering can sign up for Boxed to digitally purchase, draw, and authenticate cards, then have physical merchandise shipped to their door from a fulfillment facility located in the U.S.

Users’ unwanted cards can be traded back to Boxed.gg for site credit, which is used to purchase more cards on the website’s marketplace.

With the newest funding round, Loot Labs intends to expand its business model to include tradable digital collectibles. This will begin with an Oct. 28 beta test that will expand Boxed.gg to allow users to trade for weapon skins in Valve Software’s online tactical shooter Counter-Strike 2. Interested users can sign up for the beta now.

“We are filling a valuable role in expanding and securing the collectibles market with a trusted platform,” said Loot Labs’ CEO Milan Harris in a press release. “The current black market of digital trade leaves money on the table for video game developers and exposes consumers to significant security risks.”

Harris continued, “We envision a future where studios can tap into the digital collectibles market, allowing their teams to benefit from secondary transactions while giving their fans a safe environment to freely collect and trade items in their favorite games.”

When Loot Labs announced its pre-seeding round in May 2023, it initially billed Boxed.gg as a platform for all-virtual “mystery boxes” that, when opened, would yield a variety of digital collectibles like NFTs or unique avatars. However, that focus on NFTs and other Web3 goods isn’t part of the site’s current mission, which is entirely focused on securing and trading physical merchandise.

“Our vision from the beginning for Boxed.gg was to create the ultimate collectibles experience,” Harris tells GeekWire via email. “Our first step was with NFTs and we saw them as the new frontier for collectible assets to be transacted digitally. That space remains nascent, but part of our vision, and we’re still hopeful this digital technology will back some of the next big collectible IPs of our time.”

Harris describes Boxed.gg’s current mission statement as “effectively beginning to bridge the physical and digital collectible markets,” with more to come after its venture into CS2.

In a surprise reveal, Microsoft announced a new direction for the Halo series, which includes switching out its engine and changing the name of its main development studio.

The news came right before the final match in this year’s Halo World Championship tournament, held at the Seattle Convention Center from Oct. 4 to 6. In a short prerecorded video titled “A New Dawn,” several of Halo’s lead developers discussed the new direction they plan to take.

The first step in this initiative is a new name. 343 Industries is now Halo Studios, with Pierre Hintze remaining in place as studio head.

“If you really break Halo down, there have been two very distinct chapters,” Hintze said in a Xbox blog post. “Chapter 1 – Bungie. Chapter 2 – 343 Industries.”

Hintze continued, “Now I think we have an audience which is hungry for more. So we’re not just going to try improve the efficiency of development, but change the recipe of how we make Halo games. So we start a new chapter today.”

As part of that new chapter, future Halo games will be made with Epic’s Unreal Engine 5, rather than 343 Industries’ proprietary Slipspace software engine.

“Respectfully, some components of Slipspace are almost 25 years old,” said Chris Matthews, studio art director at Halo Studios. “Although 343 were developing it continuously, there are aspects of Unreal that Epic has been developing for some time which are unavailable to us in Slipspace.”

In addition, the switch-up means that new employees at Halo Studios can bring previous Unreal experience with them to the company, instead of having to start the job by learning how to use Slipspace.

The gameplay footage shown in “A New Dawn” was made using Unreal, but studio executives were careful to say that the footage shouldn’t be taken as a game announcement. Instead, it’s the result of what was internally codenamed Project Foundry, where Halo Studios worked to explore what was possible with Unreal Engine 5.

“We’ve intentionally been really quiet up to this point,” said Halo Studios COO Elizabeth Van Wyck. “[Today] is about just sharing where we are, what our priorities are as a studio, and where the team is.”

While future Halo projects are reportedly in the works using Unreal, Halo Studios has been deliberately quiet about what those projects might be.

Halo Infinite will continue to be supported using the Slipspace engine, and has already announced the next season of its professional esports circuit. At time of writing, the winner of this year’s Halo World Championships had yet to be determined.

Today’s surprise announcement follows on news from last year that 343 Industries had been heavily impacted by Microsoft’s massive layoffs in January 2023, and faced a substantial internal reorganization as a result.

Halo is considered a tentpole franchise for Microsoft’s gaming arm. The first game in the series, 2001’s Halo: Combat Evolved, was a launch title for the original Xbox and is widely credited with being responsible for the console’s success.

343 Industries was founded in 2007 to take over development on the Halo series from Bungie, which announced its independence from Microsoft in the same year. However, 343’s time as the sole driving force behind Halo has been widely seen as a mixed bag, with particular criticism directed at the setting and story. Now, with the rebranding and new engine, Halo is officially starting over.

Mox Boarding House, the tabletop game store and dining experience that started in Seattle, is expanding to Arizona with a new location opening in the city of Chandler next week.

Started in 2011, Mox has locations in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, Bellevue, Wash., and Portland. Gaming enthusiasts of all skill levels can connect over board games and events, drinks and food, and a selection of titles available to play for free and/or purchase.

The location in Chandler, at 1371 N. Alma School Road, has been in the works since 2021 and will feature a restaurant with room for 86 guests and an event hall that accommodates up to 64 people.

Mox is planning a grand opening weekend celebration Sept. 20-22, with a ribbon cutting ceremony featuring Chandler’s mayor, games and activities, in-store promotions and discounts, and more. The event will also feature a pre-release for “Duskmourn,” a new “Magic: The Gathering” expansion.

This year’s Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle opened last week with a keynote presentation by Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer, which focused on five video games that had influenced him and his career. The gaming industry veteran also shed light on some behind-the-scenes details on decisions he made that could’ve changed the course of video game history.

The presentation was anchored by Andrea Rene, a producer, podcaster, and on-camera host who’s known Spencer for over a decade. The theme of the presentation was “The Games That Shaped My Journey”: several video games that had had a major impact on Spencer, professionally and/or personally.

“[Gaming]’s been part of my life since I was a young kid,” Spencer said. “As a kid who wasn’t a jock at school, who was kind of an introvert, I found my own space in the worlds of video games. Then, as the community grew, as I found other people who played through school, it has been a formative part of my life.”

Spencer’s list consisted of 1982’s Robotron 2084, 1983’s One-on-One: Dr. J vs. Larry Bird, 1997’s Ultima Online, 2006’s Gears of War, and 2014’s Destiny.

That carried the conversation through Spencer’s early years, when he was a regular at his local arcades in southern California, to his time working under Ed Fries at Microsoft, to his current position as the head of the Xbox division.

Spencer describes Robotron 2084 as “the greatest game of all time,” and “the beginning of my love for what games could be.” When he was a college student at the University of Washington, Spencer would frequently spend his nights at a 7-11 near campus playing its Robotron machine. In a real sense, the ’80s arcade scene was Spencer’s first experience with a community built around video games.

“When I think about where video games started for me, it was going into arcades, playing games, talking to the players there, and the anticipation of what new cabinet was going to come in,” Spencer said.

At home, Spencer regularly played the Commodore 64 basketball game One-on-One, picking Julius Erving to go up against his father’s Larry Bird. While Spencer himself wasn’t much of an NBA fan or basketball player at the time, it was his first time seeing a person from the real world reflected in a video game, as well as his first experience with gaming with a family member.

“It showed me that games weren’t just about my friends, but also something that we could do as a family,” Spencer said. “I do think watching children make choices in video games is a great learning experience. …It’s a safe way for kids to see what choices mean. My daughters are much older now, but we still play Sea of Thieves together.”

Spencer also played Dungeons & Dragons, which led him to the D&D-influenced PC RPGs of the ‘80s and ‘90s. That, in turn, got him to check out the beta test for Richard Garriott’s groundbreaking MMORPG Ultima Online in 1997, which was Spencer’s first exposure to the concept of massively multiplayer online games.

That led Spencer to participate in a different sort of community than his arcade days. While he never joined a guild or made any real-world connections with his fellow Ultima Online players, the knowledge that other players existed in the game’s world, and could change it, had a significant impact on Spencer.

A few years later, Spencer was on a team at Microsoft working on the Xbox 360 video game console. Around 2002, he first heard of a game that was under development at Epic under the codename “Warfare.” That project eventually became Gears of War, a “killer app” for the 360 that started one of the Xbox’s tentpole franchises.

“Gears is actually the first game that my team signed,” Spencer said. “I had inherited a lot of games coming in, like Fable, that I was in charge of seeing through, but Gears was really the first big decision.”

It wasn’t an easy call, however. Gears of War had a high budget for a video game production at that point in time, so signing it was seen as a significant risk. However, Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 software was rapidly gaining popularity with game developers, which made it crucial that games made with Unreal were seen to be successful on the Xbox platform.

That led to Microsoft collaborating directly with Epic on the 2005 Xbox exclusive Unreal Championship 2, which Spencer considered a stepping stone along the way to getting Gears of War.

“The thing is, when we actually got to the point of signing Gears, I remember going into Ed [Fries’] office,” Spencer said. “There were two games that we could sign, and I couldn’t afford to sign both of them. Ed just turned to me and said I should make a call.”

Spencer ended up going with Gears of War, due to its focus on cooperative play and the “passion” of its lead designer, Cliff Bleszinski. Due to its high-end graphics and its status as a system exclusive for the Xbox 360, that led Spencer to argue in favor of redesigning the console.

“This was actually a game that drove our memory decision for 360,” Spencer said. “The choice was going to be to have a smaller RAM footprint. We all got together – J. Allard, Ed, Peter [Moore], all of us in a room – and we brought in Gears to show what we could do with the extra RAM we could put in the 360.”

Spencer continued: “The cost was really significant. The bet was that you’re going to go sell tens of millions of these things, and every incremental dollar that this extra RAM [cost] better pay off. I think it did.”

Gears of War led to an ongoing collaboration between Microsoft and Epic that created three more games in the series. Subsequently, Microsoft bought the rights to Gears from Epic, which was moving its focus to the project that would become Fortnite, and turned Gears over to the studio that would become known as the Coalition.

The discussion of his history with Gears led into a story about another opportunity that Spencer had had. This time, however, he’d passed it up, and in the process, potentially changed the history of the American games industry.

Bungie, headquartered in Bellevue, Wash., had been acquired by Microsoft in 2001 before the launch of the original Xbox. It subsequently redefined the first-person shooter with Halo: Combat Evolved, and the Halo series became the cornerstone of the Xbox console.

After producing four games in the Halo series, Bungie subsequently bought itself back from Microsoft and became independent in 2010. A few years later, it went looking for a publishing partner for the launch of the original Destiny.

“There’s just so many mixed emotions for me around Destiny,” Spencer said. “Obviously, Bungie was part of Microsoft when I started at Xbox. I shared a floor with Alex Seropian and Jason Jones in the building we were in in Redmond. I learned a ton from just being around Bungie, about how to build games.”

The pitch for Destiny did come across Spencer’s desk, but he passed on it, noting that the combat in Destiny didn’t click with him right away. Bungie would subsequently partner with Activision to release Destiny in 2014, before moving to self-publishing the series in 2019.

Along a similar vein, Spencer got an early pitch from the Boston-based studio Harmonix, but rejected it, citing cynicism in the idea of a game that required special controllers. Harmonix would go on to create the popular cross-platform Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises.

Either of those series being Xbox exclusives could’ve been potentially seismic for the 7th generation of gaming consoles. Guitar Hero was a legitimate sensation despite requiring its own specialized controller, and its first installment in 2005 was a PlayStation 2 exclusive. Destiny and its sequel were both famously platform-agnostic, to the point where both games initially had exclusive content based upon what the user was playing them on.

While Xbox currently doesn’t subscribe to the system-exclusives model that’s defined the console market up to this date, it’s possible that exclusive versions of Destiny and Guitar Hero/Rock Band might’ve changed that. It might also have limited either franchise’s overall success. Either way, it could’ve changed the direction of the Xbox project over the course of the last decade.

At the close of the presentation, Rene asked Spencer to comment on his hopes for the next generation of video games.

“When I started playing video games like Robotron, I had no idea there was an industry I could work in. Now it’s an industry that employs hundreds of thousands of people and has huge conventions like PAX. You can actually build a livelihood,” Spencer said.

He continued: “As kids, you start to ask, ‘What does it take? What do I need to do?’ I get asked that all the time. The cool thing is now you can be a writer. You can be an artist, you can be a programmer … there are so many things to do. Games today are true forms of art with so many different disciplines that come together to make something special.”

Baseball fans looking to dive deeper into their favorite team or take on a diversion from the current state of play — oh, hey Mariners — have a new Seattle-made online trivia/puzzle game worth checking out.

“Daily Walkoff” launched last week and serves as a daily history and stats challenge for fans of all 30 Major League Baseball teams.

Each puzzle features the names of 12 players spread across four columns. Similar to The New York Times game “Connections,” you have to move players into the columns where they relate to one another. Get three players correct in one column, and you get a hit; get one wrong and it’s an out. The goal is to get all four columns correct before you get three outs, and “walk off” to win.

Creators Eric Parker and Jacob Cook are game and baseball geeks who met at the University of Washington 12 years ago. They’re squeezing in development of “Daily Walkoff” around their day jobs — Parker helps run his own business as a Tableau trainer and consultant, and Cook is a software engineer at Levanta.

The game has emerged just as the baseball season is winding down. In Seattle, the home team has lost four straight games as of Wednesday morning and is in danger of missing the playoffs.

“At the moment, it’s a fun distraction from how miserable the Mariners are,” Parker laughed.

There are plenty of other sports and baseball-related games out there, such as “MLB Pickle” and “Immaculate Grid.” Parker said “Daily Walkoff” is unique in its ability to allow players to select any team and take guesses at the “questions” related specifically to that team.

“Daily Walkoff” relies on a publicly available baseball data set, and the columns are generated nightly, quizzing players on MLB batting averages from a specific year, starting pitchers, wins and losses, home countries and much much more.

“No other game is attempting to do this because of the complexity in coding and modeling it requires,” Parker said.

Parker said Cook is a “pretty technical guy” who previously built a successful puzzle game in high school called “Squarescape.” The two both play daily games such as “Wordle” and figured a game catered to casual baseball fans could be another hit. “Daily Walkoff” attracted more than 1,300 unique users in the first couple days after going live.

Parker said he and Cook are learning as they go. There’s no real plan to make money off their creation, and if Big League Chew or somebody wanted to sponsor the game, that would be great. Or if someone else wants to pay them to make it, or buy it, even better.

“We’re nerds,” Parker said. “We enjoy the challenge and the fun of the creation of it. But also we’re realists, in the sense that our wives and kids probably want more of us back at some point.”

The original creators of the Risk of Rain video game series are sunsetting both their current project and their studio, in order to go work for Bellevue, Wash.-based Valve Software.

Hopoo Games, headquartered in Seattle, revealed on Monday that its original founders and “many other” members of its team will now go full-time on internal game projects at Valve.

As a result, Hopoo has ceased production on its current internal project, codenamed “Snail,” and has shut its doors for the time being.

“We love making games – and will continue to do so, for years to come,” the company said on X. “We’re excited to be working side-by-side with the talented people at Valve. But for now – sleep tight, Hopoo Games.”

Hopoo was founded in 2012 by Duncan Drummond and Paul Morse, who were then students at the University of Washington. Their debut project, Risk of Rain, is an action game that challenges players to find a way off of a hostile alien world before they’re overwhelmed by waves of monsters. If the player’s character dies, they must start the game over.

Risk of Rain was crowdfunded via Kickstarter, created with the GameMaker engine, and debuted on Steam in 2013. It quickly became a sales success, with over three million copies sold by 2019. A remake, Risk of Rain Returns, was released for PC and Nintendo Switch in 2023.

Hopoo went on to create a 2019 sequel, Risk of Rain 2, with the Unity game engine. It subsequently sold the rights to that game to its publishing partner Gearbox Entertainment (Borderlands) in November 2022, while Hopoo Games retained its independence. Gearbox has since continued development on Risk of Rain 2 with multiple expansions, such as the recent Seekers of the Storm.

Neither Valve nor Hopoo Games have revealed what Hopoo is working on at Valve. Right now, Valve’s highest-profile internal project is Deadlock, which pits two teams of six against each other in gameplay that takes elements from both “hero shooters” (i.e. Overwatch) and online battle arenas like Dota 2.

At first glance, Deepwell DTX’s Zengence (pronounced like “vengeance”) is what video game fans might call a rail shooter. At the start of the game, you’re sent down a one-way path that’s lined with hostile “Wraiths,” but they’re initially invisible.

To reveal the Wraiths, you use your VR headset’s microphone to conduct what’s essentially a rhythmic breathing exercise with an audible hum, in time with Zengence’s music. When you do so on the beat, you send out a magical orb that breaks the Wraiths’ concealment. That’s when you can start a fight, using the crystalline pistols your avatar holds in either hand.

Zengence is, according to its developer, the first virtual reality therapeutic app on the Meta Quest store.

It’s an odd combination of a guided meditation and a PG-rated action game. It features a lo-fi soundtrack, mildly surreal but colorful environments, and most crucially, no failure states. If you take a hit from the Wraiths, it simply reduces your final score. The challenge is in finding ways to earn as many points as possible, not simple survival.

After playing it, I could see how Zengence would be relaxing, but it wasn’t immediately obvious why it qualifies as being therapeutic. I brought that question to Ryan Douglas, the chairman and founder of Seattle-based Deepwell DTX.

“In general, when we design a therapy for stress, we have this order of operations that we have to go through,” Douglas said. “The first thing is that we need a distraction state. Right away, we have to stop the rumination, shut down the worry and the self-talk. We can’t do anything to settle you down if you’re continuing to rev yourself up.”

Douglas is a Washington-based technologist who specializes in designing medical devices, and previously worked as the founder and CEO of the Minnesota-based firm Nextern. His patents and designs include AI-driven treatment systems, surgical robotics, and wearables.

The idea behind Zengence’s central model is that it engages the player in a focused state, or “flow activity.” This has been widely nicknamed the “Tetris effect,” after studies of how players’ brains reacted to playing the puzzle game Tetris for long periods of time.

If you’ve ever spent a few hours playing Tetris and subsequently started to see falling blocks in your sleep, or found yourself noticing similar shapes in the real world, that’s the Tetris effect; you focused so intently on the game that you’ve temporarily realigned your brain. You can get into the same cognitive state with many other games, such as Beat Saber or Call of Duty, but researchers first noticed it with Tetris.

That same flow state is what Zengence’s “rhythm on rails” approach is supposed to trigger. The game is designed to take the player out of their own head for a while, in a simulated set of voluntary circumstances.

“We need to put agency in your hands,” Douglas said. “A lot of stress, worry, and anxieties come from the idea that we don’t have a lot of day-to-day control. That’s where games become really powerful. You can put a lot of agency in people’s hands very quickly.”

Hence, Zengence is built to shape itself around the player. The Wraiths don’t show up unless you force them to appear. Your level of participation in the game is entirely up to you. A high score does depend upon you revealing and fighting as many Wraiths as possible, but it’s not treated as mandatory.

When you do start a fight, every element of the game is built around “microtransactions” (Douglas’ word) of success: you stayed on beat, you dodged an attack, you revealed an enemy.

That in turn triggers little dopamine reactions in your brain, in a way that Douglas compares to classic video games like Super Mario Bros. The idea is to put the player in a sweet spot where the game is consistently just challenging enough to keep their attention.

“Once you’ve got someone in a flow state, where they’re losing track of time and effort,” Douglas said, “now the brain is in this state that we’ve been studying where you’re very neuroplastic.”

He continued: “We think you may be learning up to 40 times faster than you would be outside the flow state. The things you do next start to rewrite neural pathways… Something that’s in this game starts to look or feel to your subconscious self like things that you’ve done before that are relevant. It opens you up to learn on a limbic level, subconsciously.”

At this point, a player is in a simulation of a stressful situation that they nonetheless fully control. It opens the door to quickly internalize lessons like coping skills that simple talk therapy might struggle to convey, because the player’s subconscious mind theoretically recognizes parallels between Zengence and the real world.

Zengence is the first project from Deepwell, which Douglas founded in 2022 alongside former Devolver Digital executive Mike Wilson (who has since departed) and Dr. Sam Browd, professor of neurological surgery at the University of Washington who previously co-founded Seattle startups including Vicis and Proprio.

According to Douglas, the budget on Zengence to date is under $4 million, but it would’ve cost a lot more to develop if it weren’t for multiple professionals from several different fields who were willing to donate their expertise to the project.

This includes neuroscientists, inventors, and video game developers, such as Lorne Lanning, creator of the Oddworld series, and Che-Yuan Wang, programmer and director on PC games such as Descent, Grim Fandango, and Diablo III.

Deepwell currently has a team of 50 employees working on Zengence and other projects, including upcoming patches that will broaden Zengence’s overall approach.

“Everybody thinks we launched a game,” Douglas said. “We didn’t launch a game. We launched a lab.”

In Zengence’s current state, at time of writing, it’s designed to deal with stress. In future updates, using data and feedback from Zengence’s players, Douglas hopes to expand the game’s reach and mechanics to help the player with other mental health issues, such as anxiety and hypertension.

“We’re not neurologically wired to do things that are good for us,” Douglas said. ”The most wildly therapeutic games so far that have treated mental health have done it completely accidentally. It’s not the serious games, it’s not the brain teasers. It’s a bunch of games that were created by the masters [i.e. Call of Duty, Super Mario Bros.] with no intent to ever have therapeutic value.”

“You’re going to see us evolve this until you’re hardly going to be able to tell what part of the game is treating you,” Douglas continued. “We really feel like the therapy here is not, ‘Let’s make something therapeutic fun.’ It’s ‘let’s break into the intrinsic therapeutic nature of fun,’ which we have a lot of data about.”

Mudstack is adding a veteran Seattle-based gaming exec as its new leader and raising capital from top venture capitalists as it looks to supercharge its content management software built for game studios.

The company on Monday announced a $4 million round led by Anthos Capital, with participation from Khosla Ventures, a16z Games, Seattle’s Pioneer Square Labs, and Hyperplane.

James Gwertzman, who sold gaming infrastructure startup PlayFab to Microsoft in 2018 and was most recently a general partner at a16z, is joining Mudstack as its new CEO. He’ll take over from Jordan Stevens, who founded Mudstack in 2019 in Atlanta. Stevens will remain with the company as head of product.

The 5-person company provides cloud storage systems for asset management, designed specifically for game studios and artists. Customers include Metacore and Paradox Studios.

“It’s crazy to me that our industry is so mature, yet basic tools for managing content and production pipelines are still lacking,” Gwertzman said in a press release. “I’ve wanted to build an ‘operating system for game studios’ for a long time, and am thrilled to be working with this talented team to deliver on that vision.”

Gwertzman got his career started at Microsoft before getting into the gaming industry more than two decades ago. He co-founded Sprout Games, which was acquired by PopCap Games in 2005, and later founded and led PlayFab, which spun out from Uber Entertainment, another Seattle games company.

GeekWire profiled Gwertzman two years ago, highlighting one of his side projects that was staged at the Burning Man festival.

Gwertzman said Mudstack considers itself a remote company with no office. He’ll be hiring in the Seattle region, among other locations.

The company is not profitable and declined to share revenue metrics.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I attended a preview event on Wednesday for Mirra, a new virtual reality entertainment center opening later this month in Bellevue, Wash.

Based on my earlier coverage, I figured there were two ways this could go: full arcade, or full cyberpunk. Instead, Mirra looks more like an upscale gastropub, with a full bar near the entrance and booths lining the walls.

It’s impossible to mistake it for anything other than a VR venue, however, as the focus is squarely on Mirra’s central screen from the moment you walk in. It takes up most of the back wall, and when games aren’t in session, displays a broad assortment of peaceful vistas.

That screen is the centerpiece of what Mirra calls an “immersive party game experience.” The center of the venue is a single large boundary zone for virtual reality gaming, where teams of players can compete in 2-by-2 rounds of casual challenges. As they play, their actions are rebroadcast to the central screen, so teammates and other attendees can watch the action unfold.

Mirra offers a rotating assortment of its own original virtual reality games that are designed to be played by up to 32 people in four teams of 2 to 8.

The four games on offer for Mirra’s preview event were Hyper Rhythm, Bubble Boom, Laser Room, and Hockey Smash, all of which were built in Unreal Engine. Other games from Mirra include Jackpot in Pairs, a memory-matching card game, and Treasure Dash, where players compete to race past a virtual dragon.

During the preview event, we played a random round of four games, where each team nominated two players to represent them in each round. Once they registered for the game, via tablets that are kept at each table, each player was equipped by Mirra staffers with a Meta Quest 3 headset.

If you’ve never played anything on a Meta Quest, Mirra makes it simple. As long as you’re standing in the right place, motion trackers built into the center of the venue do the rest. Mirra’s systems can track your hand and body motions, so all you need is the headset.

For each individual game, competitors were awarded points based upon their final ranking, with the 1st-place contender getting 10 points. At the end of the night, whoever had the most points would be the first champion at Mirra.

Both Hyper Rhythm and Laser Room were themed around avoiding incoming obstacles in VR by moving out of their way in real space, while Hockey Smash is a virtual air hockey table, redesigned for a high-speed 2-on-2 match.

I volunteered to play Bubble Boom on my team’s behalf, a game in which you use virtual balls to break colored bubbles. It’s a lot like the arcade classic Bust A Move, where you need to match your ball’s color to the bubbles to successfully knock them off the board.

You can get a massive score multiplier if you break a chain of identically-colored bubbles at once, which my teammate and I picked up on before our opponents did. I wasn’t above feeling a little smug when my teammate and I scored nearly 2,000 points in the first 30 seconds of the match, at a point when our closest competitor had just over 100.

They caught on quickly, however, and we only came in second for Bubble Boom. The competition was fierce from that point forward, and it all eventually came down to a round of Hockey Smash. At this point, one of my teammates revealed a previously-concealed gift for air hockey. By the time the clock ran out, she’d managed to double the other team’s score.

That put us in first place for Hockey Smash, which got us enough points in the overall competition to tie for first place for the night. Sam Wang, Mirra’s founder and owner, proceeded to apologize, as they hadn’t anticipated the first-ever competition in Mirra to end in a draw, so they’d only brought one trophy.

(Also, we didn’t get to keep the trophy, but it was full of truffle fries when Wang brought it out. Call it a draw.)

Wang is an entrepreneur with a background in the Chinese film industry, as the former general manager at the Beijing-based visual effects studio Phenom Films. He also co-founded the VR startup Skylimit Entertainment Group.

“I’ve tried a lot of different things,” Wang said, in a speech addressing the preview event attendees. “Me, personally, I’ve worked in the film industry, and was involved with VR 10 years ago. Now it’s VR, AR, XR… the world’s changing a lot. Now we can use all this knowledge to do something I always wanted to do.”

That something is Mirra, which Wang calls “the most immersive VR ever created.”

In passing, Wang told me that Mirra’s first location is in Bellevue due to his co-founders being local to the area, as well as Wang liking Washington state when he’d had the chance to stop by. As a result, Bellevue beat out Mirra’s other candidates, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco.

After our VR tournament, Mirra’s team brought out a representative assortment of the sorts of dishes it plans to offer for the venue’s full launch. The idea behind the menu, according to events organizer Chanelle Christenhausen, is that Mirra can theoretically let you be anywhere. Therefore, the menu is a mixture of fusion cuisine from around the world.

For the preview event, this included beef sliders, vegetarian flatbread pizza, and a mixed platter of corn on the cob, jumbo shrimp, steamed chicken dumplings, lamb skewers, and pita bread. The final version of the menu will feature more vegetarian, gluten-free, and vegan options.

The overall cost of a night at Mirra had yet to be determined at the preview event, according to organizers. They did emphasize that Mirra is meant to be a group activity, so pricing is built around that expectation. Update: Typical pricing is $50 per person, for one hour of gameplay.

Christenhausen told me that there’s already been interest in booking the venue for multimedia presentations or conferences, as well as a potential event where attendees use tablet computers with the central screen for interactive art. For now, the venue’s focus is still squarely on VR gaming, with Christenhausen describing the central “game show” as Mirra’s “child.”

A new class action lawsuit alleges that Valve Software is a “platform monopolist” that has kept game prices artificially high and prevented other companies from gaining a foothold in the digital distribution market for PC gaming.

Bellevue, Wash.-based Valve operates the online storefront Steam, which sells all-digital video games to users on PC, Mac, and Linux. Steam started this year with more than 33 million concurrent users worldwide and an estimated 120 million regular users. At time of writing, there are little over 191,000 games available on the app.

The Aug. 9 lawsuit, filed in federal court in Seattle by four individuals, alleges Steam has built its market dominance off the back of anticompetitive practices.

This includes “strangling competition with nakedly anticompetitive pricing restraints,” which include an alleged 30% “tax” on publishers that results in higher prices being passed on to consumers, and a “platform most-favored-nations” (PMFN) clause that allegedly prevents competing platforms from offering the same games at lower prices or with additional elements compared to what’s sold on Steam.

According to the lawsuit, “Time and time again, well-resourced platforms have tried to compete with Valve in the sale of PC games and in-game products—including Electronic Arts (“EA”), Microsoft, Amazon, and Epic—but the PMFN has prevented them all from gaining meaningful traction.”

While it’s difficult to find reliable current data on Steam’s actual market share in 2024, competitors such as Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney have estimated that Steam accounts for approximately 75% to 85% of modern PC gaming by revenue.

The plaintiffs — John Elliott, Ricardo Camargo, Javier Rovira, and Bradly Smith — are identified in the suit as American citizens who have bought PC games via Steam at “supracompetitive prices.” They allege that Valve’s practices keep the cost of PC gaming high for consumers by virtue of price fixing and drowning out potential competitors.

They are represented by Seattle law firm Hagens Berman, which has been involved in other class action suits related to Amazon, NCAA athletes, and others. Update: Here’s a statement from the firm:

“We represent consumers who challenged the enforceability of Valve’s arbitration provision, and won those challenges. The basic claim in the lawsuit is that Valve has maintained an unlawful monopoly in the PC gaming market by restricting price competition, and we intend to fight for consumers’ rights against Valve. We believe Valve has prevented game developers from discounting the prices they charge for games and in-game products distributed through other PC gaming stores.”

We reached out to a Valve spokesperson for comment and we’ll update this story if we hear back.

As the suit itself notes, this is the latest in a series of antitrust suits that have been filed against Valve Software, many of which feature similar allegations of anticompetitive practices.

The highest-profile recent suit against Valve and Steam was filed by San Francisco-based Wolfire Games. According to Wolfire CEO David Rosen, he’d planned to offer Wolfire’s 2017 game Overgrowth for sale on an unnamed smaller storefront at a lower price. Upon learning that, an unnamed Valve representative allegedly told Rosen that selling Overgrowth anywhere else for a lower price would be grounds for Valve to pull Overgrowth off of Steam. Wolfire subsequently filed suit against Valve, and the trial is currently ongoing.

It’s worth noting that the suit from Elliott, Camargo, Rovira, and Smith identifies Valve’s 30% share of sales made on Steam as a tax on publishers when this is in fact a revenue split. Publishers on Steam set the price for their products, then split the revenue 70-30 with Valve.

That 70-30 split has always been controversial, especially back in 2018. That was when Valve modified its terms to encourage larger studios to keep their games on Steam.

Subsequently, several other companies used developer revenue as a point of attack against Steam, in what initially looked like it would become a new “console war” in PC gaming. Multiple major players such as Microsoft, Epic, EA, Ubisoft, and the then-independent Activision Blizzard all put out their own digital storefronts to promote their own games and/or compete with Steam. Epic and Microsoft in particular have both made an effort to court indie game developers with more favorable revenue splits for their respective apps.

But as we noted back in 2022, most of the companies that positioned themselves as Steam’s competitors have since opted to quietly return to the platform. That in turn has arguably contributed to Steam’s continued growth since then, as it’s repeatedly broken several of its records for concurrent usage in the last few years.

Gaming giant Valve hit with another antitrust lawsuit alleging anticompetitive practices by GeekWire on Scribd

Virtual reality entertainment startup Mirra plans to open its first location in Bellevue, Wash. in August.

Mirra is a “social entertainment venue” that offers an assortment of unique VR games that attendees can play for an hour at a time. It’s moving into a third-floor, 10,700 square-foot space at Lincoln Square South as part of the Bellevue Collection development.

“Our venue takes the party game concept to new heights,” Mirra founder Sam Wang said in a press release. “We’re merging VR technology with a vibrant social scene to create unforgettable events.”

Wang founded Mirra in 2020 in Bellevue. His previous positions include a stint as a general manager at the visual effects studio Phenom Films and co-founding the VR startup Skylimit Entertainment Group, both located in Beijing.

At Mirra, attendees can play multiple VR games that the company has developed in-house, with a focus on party games for a variety of skill levels. The games are intended for adults, but can be played by families with children.

An individual player at Mirra uses a VR headset to participate in any given game. As they play, their actions are broadcast via a holographic avatar to a nearby giant 8K LED screen wall.

The idea is that each game is immersive for its participants, while also being fun to watch on the big screen for attendees who are still in actual reality. Mirra’s launch lineup includes dancing, treasure hunts, hockey, and a variety of other activities presented in a game show format.

In addition to its VR games, Mirra features a full kitchen and bar, interactive technologies for attendees, and 8K LED screens throughout the venue that display multiple different environments.

The current plan is that Mirra will be an all-ages venue until 6 p.m. After that, it shifts to become a 21-and-over nightclub until it closes at midnight.

GeekWire has reached out to Mirra to get more details about the venue, and we’ll update when we hear back.

Microsoft and Amazon announced Thursday that they are partnering to bring the Xbox gaming app to two models of Fire TV devices in July.

This allows Xbox Game Pass subscribers on the Ultimate tier to play Xbox games on their TVs via cloud streaming, with no console required.

At time of writing, the Xbox app will only be compatible with two specific models of the Fire TV Stick: last year’s 4K and the 4K Max. Users will also need a Bluetooth-compatible controller, such as Amazon’s Luna gamepad.

The compatible Fire sticks start at $49.99, while the right kind of gamepads start around $30 and a month of Game Pass Ultimate is $16.99. It’s not inexpensive, but that’s still significantly less money than simply buying an Xbox.

It’s worth noting that not everything on Game Pass is accessible via the cloud. Many of the most popular titles on the service can be played via streaming, such as Starfield, Sea of Thieves, Palworld, and the campaign mode for Halo Infinite, but you don’t get access to the full library.

The initial announcement makes sure to emphasize that several games in the Fallout series – Fallout 3, 4, New Vegas, and 76 – are available for cloud streaming via Game Pass. This ties into a recent groundswell of interest in the franchise, which was spurred by the success of the live-action “Fallout” series that aired in April on Amazon Prime.

“Fallout’s” popularity seems to have taken both Amazon and Microsoft by surprise, as there wasn’t much in the way of cross-promotion ready to go at the series’ launch. It did lead to a funny moment in mid-April, however, when transmedia synergy put both 2015’s Fallout 4 and the ongoing game-as-a-service Fallout 76 into the top 25 best-sellers list on the PlayStation store. At that point, journalists noted that, technically, Microsoft had more first-party games in the PlayStation Store’s top 25 than Sony.

That illustrates how, in 2024, Microsoft and Xbox don’t have any traditional competitors. Instead, it’s redefined rival companies’ platforms, such as the PlayStation 5 and now Amazon’s media ecosystem, as opportunities. If there’s a console war to speak of right now, much of it is shadowboxing.

k-ID, a startup headquartered in Singapore and Seattle that’s building tools for online youth safety, announced Tuesday that it raised a $45 million Series A funding round.

Billed as a “global compliance engine,” the k-ID suite is designed to help game developers comply with age-related regulations. It also lets parents customize their children’s online experience, both on the internet and in participating networks like online gaming.

k-ID aims to address a developing issue in international media markets. In several countries, such as the U.K. and Australia, government regulators have started methods of “age assurance,” in attempts to keep children and teenagers away from inappropriate material.

“The types of international regulation that our technology touches is largely focused on age-appropriate experience and features,” said Aakash Mandhar, k-ID’s Seattle-based CTO.

Mandhar continued: “As an example, in Belgium loot boxes in games are prohibited … while in Australia, there are rules about how the loot box is displayed, i.e. to avoid slots or gambling-like animations. That’s where k-ID can take the complexity out for the game developer: our technology sends the signals to adjust the game to reflect those rules.”

The k-ID process is intended to be transparent, so users know it’s happening, and the data generated in the process isn’t distributed across the entire platform. It’s also intended to be restricted to specific markets where age assurance is legally required for online services.

k-ID is designed to be integrated into any game or online platform. The first game developer to publicly announce k-ID integration is Another Axiom, the studio behind the popular VR monkey simulator Gorilla Tag.

Parents, meanwhile, can use k-ID to automatically adjust what children can and cannot interact with online, such as private text chats, paid loot boxes, target advertising, or location sharing. The long-term goal is to replace current age-gating systems with a flexible k-ID account that can travel with a child as they grow and explore online.

Mandhar previously worked at Hewlett Packard, Yahoo, and Immutable. He originally came to Seattle via Microsoft, which led to a position at Xbox subsidiary 343 Industries.

After Halo 5: Guardians shipped, Mandhar went to Electronic Arts. While there, he was one of the architects of the virtual economy that underpins the hit battle royale game Apex Legends, as well as many of EA’s other games. After leaving Immutable in 2023, Mandhar’s work with startups eventually led him to k-ID.

Mandhar is one of two Seattle-based k-ID employees, with plans to hire more in the near future. The rest of the company’s 40-person team is headquartered in Singapore. This includes its co-founders Kieran Donovan, Timothy Ma, Jeff Wu, and Julian Corbett.

The $45 million funding round comes from Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners, along with Konvoy, TIRTA, Okta, and Z Venture Capital. This comes after a $5.4 million round from last year, bringing the total money raised by k-ID to $51 million.

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: