Author: Zach Barbieri

Square Enix has announced they will be ending seasonal support for their live service title Foamstars a little less than a year after launch. The Japanese developer has explained that the next seasonal update, the ironically named ‘The Party Goes On!’, will in fact bring an end to the party once and for all. The Party Goes On! will begin on December 13th, 2024, and run until January 17th, 2025. After that, no additional content will be released. In a notice to players Square Enix wrote: In this concluding update, expansions will be introduced to enhance gameplay, such as the…

Deck Nine Games, the developer best known for several games in the Life is Strange series, including Life is Strange: True Colors and the recently released Life is Strange: Double Exposure, has announced layoffs as the year comes to a close. This is the second round of layoffs the studio has undergone this year, having previously let 20% of the studio go in February. The studio released an official statement today via twitter, announcing the news that people would be layed off, without any concrete numbers as to how many will be let go. This release, penned by Cheif officier…

Back in January of this year, the Technical Director of Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Yukata Ito shared a photo of source code from the then-upcoming mainline entry of the long-running series. It was an uncommon move among major developers to share such integral parts of their development process. In an interview in late November with Automaton Media, Ito addressed this, with the goal of offering encouragement to coding hopefuls and future developers in the industry. Ito Told Automaton that programming can be “surprisingly simple” He went on to say: I created an X account in the first place because…

Fans of Capcom classic Fighting games might have forgotten, given that Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection was only recently released, Capcom has another Fighting Collection coming soon that they should be excited for. Announced during a Nintendo Direct in August the Capcom Fighting Collection 2 is set to release next year, and is now available to preorder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bkLKebJ2so While the collection still has no concrete release date beyond 2025, it hopefully will not be too long before fighting fans and classic game enthusiasts can get their games on this one. It will be $39.99 at launch, slightly cheaper than Marvel…

Steam Concurrent Player numbers for the newly released Marvel Rivals show a large number of players on Steam alone, hitting over 440,000 in concurrent users. This is assumably reflective of a far higher number, given the game saw simoultanious release on PlayStation 5, and the Xbox Series as well with both platforms not making their player counts public. The free-to-play hero shooter developed by NetEase saw a total player count on Steam of 444,286. The reviews for the game are far smaller, featuring about 7,870 reviews at the time of writing this but give the game a mostly positive review…

Ubisoft has announced they will be ending support for the free-to-play fps title XDefiant and shutting it down a little over a year after the title had gone live. In the process of doing so, production studios in both San Francisco and Osaka are set to be closed, with an additional studio in Sydney expected to be “ramped down”. In a note to investors, it was stated that the game was being shuttered after a “thorough review of the game’s performance, profitability, and market conditions.” Ubisoft also stated their intention to be more selective with R&D Investments in the future. This…

Sony is reportedly looking to develop a new handheld device meant to run PlayStation 5 games natively. This news comes according to Bloomberg and makes sense given the reinvested interest console manufacturers have showcased in handheld gaming. People close to the development have stated that the handheld is early in its development and is meant to compete with the Nintendo Switch, which to date has sold 146 million units so far. Sony will most almost assuredly not see the release of the handheld prior to the release of the Switch’s successor, but there is little reason to suspect the Switch…

Nintendo Switch was in a sort of limbo going into next year. Long-awaited games like Xenoblade Chronicles X or Rune Factory to name a few are scheduled to be released up to March 2025 for the platform but the shadow of its successor looms over every announcement. There is some debate if we will get an official showcase before the year-end (it is November after all) but Nintendo still says it plans to announce something soon. Despite this, we do know it will be released next year though it is unclear. This means that every game Nintendo showcased, especially games…

In an Interview with 4gamer regarding FANTASIAN Neo Dimension, Naoki Yoshida, who is known by fans affectionately as Yoshi-P, claimed that multiplatform releases are planned to happen “more and more.” He stated that: Of course, we want you to play it a lot on other platforms as well. This time, we will also release the Xbox Series X/S version at the same time. In the future, Square Enix titles will be released simultaneously on each platform more and more, but since this is close to the first release, we would like Xbox users to play it as well.p This news follows a…

This year has been dominated by talk of the Chinese gaming industry expanding beyond MOBA and Gatcha-style games into the single-player space. Black Myth Wukong is an obvious force but Sony also made headlines with their China Hero’s project backing multiple upcoming games out of the region. This dominating conversation has unfortunately drowned out a bigger dialog worth having, that this is shaping up to be a flagship year for a multitude of countries, including Italy. Earlier this year we saw the release of Enotria: The Last Song, Souls-like made by Italian developer Jymma Games released to mixed reviews overall…