Caves of Qud has already been through one public launch cycle. The roguelike RPG spent time in Steam Early Access before reaching its full release, a path that has become familiar for independent games built around complex, interlocking systems. Its next step is stranger. The expansion Diaspora will itself arrive in Early Access, rather than waiting until it is finished. That reversal is what makes the announcement notable. Expansions are usually treated as content-complete products: you buy them, you play them, and patches follow. Sending an add-on back into the same development model the base game has just left is being presented as a first for Steam, and it raises obvious questions about how players will judge something that is still being built in public. Early Access works best when the audience understands what it is signing up for. Players get earlier access, often at a lower price, and in return they accept rough...
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Ubisoft’s restructuring has claimed another pair of studios. RedLynx, the team most closely associated with the Trials series, is to close, while Ubisoft Singapore is being downsized. Between them, the decisions will affect more than 120 jobs. The two studios sit at very different points in Ubisoft’s history. One is tied to a long-running franchise with a distinctive identity; the other is part of a large international network. Losing one outright and shrinking the other removes capacity in two different areas at once, and neither loss is easy to replace. Both had a specific character, and that is the sort of thing a balance sheet cannot capture. The job numbers are the part that matters most. More than 120 people will be affected, and closures of this kind rarely stay contained. Contractors lose work, local businesses that depend on a studio lose clients, and expertise built up over years disperses. Studios are not only...
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Epic Games has put a beta version of a rebuilt launcher into testers’ hands, and the company is making a bold performance claim. According to Epic, the new client reaches the store page from a cold start 46 percent faster than Steam does. That is a specific, measurable boast, and it sets the terms of the comparison. A cold start is exactly what it sounds like: launching the application from a closed state, with nothing already loaded in memory. It is the slowest and most frustrating version of the experience, and it is the one users notice most, because it happens when they have decided to play something and want to get on with it. The project has been described as “vibe coded”, a label that suggests a fast, improvisational approach rather than a slow corporate rebuild. Whether that is an honest description or a piece of marketing framing, it signals that Epic wants...
Read MoreHouse House has decided not to bring Big Walk to Xbox. The Melbourne studio has linked the decision to its support for the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, known as BDS, which campaigns for economic and cultural pressure over Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Big Walk is a cooperative game, and the announcement concerns the Xbox version specifically. Choosing to skip a console is a significant step for an independent studio, because reach is usually the difference between a project finding an audience and struggling to. It is a decision that puts a political position ahead of a straightforward commercial one. BDS is a long-running campaign with several strands, including boycotts of companies and institutions it identifies as complicit. Artists and studios that align with it generally do so as a statement of principle rather than a calculation about sales, and the effects on their businesses can be mixed. Supporters see it as a moral...
Read MoreTomb Raider turns 30 this month, and the anniversary has produced a fittingly archival project. The Creation of Tomb Raider: 1997-2000, by Daryl Baxter, examines the years when the series moved from a debut phenomenon into a franchise with expectations attached. That period is often described as a peak, and not only because of sales or coverage. It was a stretch in which the games were being made quickly, by teams learning on the job, with technology changing under their feet. The book is presented as an oral history, which means the story is told largely through the recollections of the people who were there rather than through a single author’s argument. The subtitle’s years matter. By the late 1990s, Tomb Raider had become a global brand, and Lara Croft had crossed from games into the wider culture in a way few characters had managed. That visibility brought pressure. Each sequel had to be...
Read More4J Studios has given Reforj a date to aim at, at least on PC. The open-world survival sandbox will be playable on PC through an exclusive playtest beginning in the first quarter of 2027. The announcement was made at Game Republic New Horizons. A playtest is not a launch, and the distinction is worth keeping in mind. It is a chance for a studio to put an unfinished build in front of players, watch how they behave, and find the problems that internal testing misses. For a sandbox game, that feedback is especially valuable, because the whole point is that players will do things the designers never planned for. It also sets expectations: a test build is an invitation to comment, not a promise that everything shown will survive. Survival sandboxes are built on that idea. You gather, craft, build and explore, and the appeal comes from the freedom to set your own goals...
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