Supermassive Games has announced that it will lay off 90 employees, representing approximately 30% of its current workforce. The studio, which has been at the forefront of the gaming industry for many years, has produced some of the most well-known titles in the industry, such as Until Dawn and The Quarry. It has also been involved in the development of the upcoming Anthology of Dark Pictures titles. In this article let’s take a look at some of the reasons for the following.

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Supermassive is Now the Latest Gaming Company to Layoff Employees in 2024

Supermassive Games and Behaviour Interactive are currently working together on a new Dead by Daylight-inspired game called The Casting of Frank Stone According to a new Bloomberg report, the studio behind The Quarry, Until Dawn, and other games informed 150 employees, or about 50% of its workforce, that they are “in danger of termination.” The announcement came Monday morning as employees began their work week.

In a statement on their X account, Supermassive Games stated the following in a post:

"It's no secret that the games industry is currently facing significant challenges, and unfortunately we aren't immune to this.

After much deliberation and with deep regret, we are therefore undertaking a reorganization of Supermassive Games. As a result, we are entering into a period of consultation, which we anticipate will result in the loss of some of our colleagues."

The statement also read the following:

“This is not a decision that's been taken lightly, with many efforts made to avoid this outcome.
We are all too aware of how unsettling and difficult this process is going to be for all our employees and will be working closely with all those involved to ensure the process is conducted as respectfully and compassionately as possible.
We're committed to focusing our efforts on our core strengths and upcoming titles to ensure the continued sustainability of the company.”

The tech industry and the gaming industry have both seen significant layoffs in both years. 2023 saw a record-breaking 260,000 tech company job losses, including giants such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft. The trend continued into 2024, with more than 30,000 laid off across various companies, including Microsoft’s acquisition of the gaming giant, Activision Blizzard.

The gaming industry has also seen significant layoffs, with more than 10,000 in 2023, and more than 5,600 in 2024, including companies like Twitch. While the future is still uncertain, both industries are currently facing a difficult economic environment, resulting in a worrying number of layoffs.

After a US court ruling earlier this week that Google must open its Play Store to enable third-party app stores and alternative payment options, Microsoft is moving swiftly to slide into this slightly open door.

Sarah Bond, president of Xbox, posted on X that the ruling will give more choices and flexibility to users. "Our mission is to allow more players to play on more devices so we are thrilled to share that starting in November, players will be able to play and purchase Xbox games directly from the Xbox App on Android," Bond wrote.

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Microsoft Aims To Offer Xbox Games Through Its App

Due to the court order requiring Google to stop forcing apps to use its own billing system and enable third-party app stores inside Google Play itself, Microsoft now aims to offer Xbox games directly through its app. Most games will likely not run directly on Android, but a revamped Xbox Android app could also directly stream bought or subscribed games to Android devices.

Until now, purchasing Xbox games on a mobile device has typically involved either navigating to a web-based store in a browser, or avoiding attempts by the phone to open a store’s official app.

The company has been quick to expand its Xbox brand’s availability outside its hardware. It made similar moves to capitalize on EU regulators’ attempts to disentangle Google’s and Apple’s app stores through its own planned app store in 2023.

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Call Of Duty Coming To Xbox Cloud Gaming On Game Pass Ultimate

Players won’t need a gaming console to play Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 when it comes out later this month. Recently, Microsoft announced that it will bring the latest Call of Duty game, as well as Modern Warfare 3 and Warzone, to Xbox Cloud Gaming on October 25.

On the same day, Black Ops 6 will launch and land on Game Pass Ultimate.  "This opens up even more ways to play Ops 6 starting on day one at launch," said Ashley McKissick, corporate vice president of gaming experiences and platforms for Xbox.

Xbox Cloud Gaming is a feature included in a Game Pass Ultimate subscription, which will set back users by $20 a month. The feature is still in development, but it enables subscribers to access and play certain games from the Game Pass library on other devices without an Xbox console.

"Game Pass Ultimate members will be able to enjoy Call of Duty in more places than ever before, including on their consoles, PCs, mobile devices, select Samsung TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Meta Quest devices," McKissick said.

Activision claims to have “disabled a workaround to a detection system” in Modern Warfare III and Call of Duty: Warzone which has led to legit players getting banned by Ricochet's anti-cheat system. The company says the problem “impacted a small number of legitimate player accounts,” and all accounts affected were restored.

However, zebleer, who runs the Phantom Overlay store selling cheats, claims the problem is much bigger than Activision’s post makes it seem. In a detailed post on X, they wrote when Ricochet scanned the memory of a player’s system to find known cheat software, one of the signatures it scanned for was a plaintext string reading: 54 72 69 67 67 65 72 20 42 6f 74 (Trigger Bot).

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How Many Players Were Affected By This Hack

Zebleer claims that “for quite some time,” it has been possible to get someone banned permanently just by sending them a friend request with a phrase or posting a message like “Nice Trigger Bot dude!” in the game’s chat since it would then show up in their memory and get recognized by Ricochet.

Despite Activision claiming that a “small number” of legit accounts were affected, zebleer claims that “several thousand random COD players were banned by this exploit” before anyone started targeting big streamers.

Zebleer points to BobbyPoff, a CoD streamer, as one of the players who got banned due to the person using the exploit since October 3 before his account was suddenly unbanned. Similar to other players and streamers caught up in the bans, there had been intense speculation and discussion over whether or not BobbyPoff was a cheater.

The Call of Duty Updates account suggested that the Ricochet team will share a blog post, though the account hasn’t specified if the post will discuss this exploit.

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Activision Finally Trimming Call Of Duty’s Huge Downloads

Call of Duty is infamous for its huge file sizes, but ahead of the October 25th launch of Black Ops 6, Activision will finally be making some changes so that Call of Duty games don’t eat up a lot of space on users’ hard drives — including separating Warzone from the default download for the annual games.

The default separation of Warzone is going to happen soon: on August 21, along with the launch of Season 5 Reloaded. As part of that, when users download an annual Call of Duty game, users will be able to choose Warzone if they want. And if users just wish to download Warzone, that will still be an option.

Horizon: Zero Dawn, created by Guerrilla Games, will soon be getting a remaster. Recently, the remaster’s co-developer Nixxes stepped into the spotlight on the PlayStation blog to highlight a number of improvements players will see in the remaster, including the addition of lots of new NPCs.

The post talks about a number of updates coming to the game, perhaps the most notable of which is that Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered will "significantly boost the number of non-player characters." This doesn’t mean more quests or stories, but it does mean that villages and camps will be populated with more NPCs.

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Remaster To Have More People Moving Around

Brian van Nunen, senior technical game designer at Nixxes, offered more details: “Building the game for PS5 allowed us to leverage the increased amount of memory available, enabling us to significantly boost the number of non-player characters," he said.

"We added many more places for NPCs to stand, sit, work, and fulfill their needs. We gave them more varied schedules to increase movement and liveliness in different areas. We also tried to make creative use of existing animations. For example, there is now a woman feeding geese at the well in Meridian, reusing an existing sowing animation. Additionally, on the bridge to Meridian, we’ve made significant strides in improving the atmosphere and sense of activity.”

This is not the only change coming to the game. The blog also talks about how the foliage is being overhauled to be more dense, realistic, and closer to the original concept art. Besides, the terrain is also being updated, including snow and sand that actually moves as it’s disturbed.

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Horizon: Zero Dawn Remaster Gets Better Lighting

Apart from these improvements, Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered benefits from 10 additional hours of motion capture data for various characters, which Nixxes says will make conversations seem livelier.

Mark Bazelmans, senior technical artist, said: “Horizon Zero Dawn has almost 300 conversations and well over 3100 dialog options, so we needed to find a way to easily integrate this huge number of updated animations into the conversations," he said. 

"We created a tool with Python to process the almost 2500 mocap files that Guerrilla provided to replace the original animation in the conversations, removing deprecated events and replacing those with the mocap and setup.”

The blog post also talks about how the lighting of the game has been improved, both world and cinematic, and how character models were updated to have more detail to hair, skin, and outfits.

IO Interactive, the studio that was behind the development of the popular Hitman series, hopes its upcoming James Bond origin story could start a trilogy. While speaking to IGN, IO boss Hakan Abrak said the team feels like it's had "20 plus years of training for the agent fantasy," courtesy of Hitman.

Indeed, Agent 47 is very Bond-like with his endless talents and ability to handle any weapon you can think of. "But obviously James Bond is a different IP. It's a huge IP. It's not our IP. It's actually the first IP that is not our original IP from the ground up," Abrak told the publication.

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IO Interactive To Bring James Bond’s Origin Story

"So it's not a gamification of a movie," Abrak continued. "It's completely beginning and becoming a story, hopefully for a big trilogy out there in the future. And equally important and exciting, it's a new Bond. It's a Bond we built from the ground up for gamers. It's extremely exciting with all the tradition and all the history there is... to work on this together with the family [and create] a Bond that the gamers can call their own and grow with."

"It's been, what, almost 15 years since the last game. So it's been a long time," Abrak added. "It definitely is something that is not overexposed in gaming. We actually see that as a strength... There are a lot of people out there who think about GoldenEye as the classic... I don't want to speak too big about it, but I just hope we'll do a thing that will define James Bond in gaming for years to come. And that is not only one game but that we create a universe for gamers to own for many years to come that we can grow with that next to the Bond on the movies."

Speaking of when fans will get to see the output of IO Interactive’s efforts, that’s still to be seen for now. It’s anyone's guess when the story of the decorated British spy will hit the consoles.

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James Bond Fans Will Have To Wait A Little Longer

"I don't have an update today, but believe me, it's itching here as well to be talking about it soon," Abrak admitted. "So we are following our plans. The production's going amazingly well and we will soon be talking more about it. I know it was a little teaser, not a lot of information, but there's a lot of cool stuff coming up."

IO first announced its James Bond title back in 2021. Very little has been given out about the game since, although some information has come out of the cracks.

But while fans will have to wait a little longer to hear anything more concrete on IO’s James Bond, the studio has also announced it’s taking on publishing duties for MindsEye, the expensive action adventure in development from former Rockstar executive Leslie Benzies.

If you are someone who loves the Call of Duty series so much that you wish to have it available on every surface, Microsoft has some good news for you. The company has brought its new Black Ops 6 Accessories Collection - featuring two customizable Call of Duty: Black Ops 6-themed controller variants, and a matching Xbox Series X wrap.

Speaking of the controllers, Microsoft’s Black Ops 6 Accessories Collection includes a themed Xbox Wireless Controller as well as a fancied-up Xbox Elite Wireless Controller Series 2.

Both, showcase the company’s overblown marketing strategy, designed to "capture the tension and intrigue of the '90s spy thriller theme" and bring visual elements that "immerse players deeper into the game's world."

The newly launched controllers are available through the company’s Xbox Design Labs website, which means they are fully considerable aside from the mandatory Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 skin.

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Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 Controllers Price And Features

The standard controller starts at £84.55 in the UK, while the Elite Series 2 starts at £124.99 for the base controller and Black Ops 6 skin. Both controllers can be bought right now, and a matching Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 wrap for Xbox Series X, costing £49.99, is currently available to pre-order ahead of its 23rd October release via the Microsoft Store.

Consumers who pre-order the controller before the end of 22nd October will get a token granting players one hour of double Black Ops 6 XP, but only “while supplies last.”

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will be released for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC next Friday, 25th October. It’s also available as part of a PC Game Pass or Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription, but there won’t be any signing up for a free one-month trial to try it out.

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Call of Duty Black Ops 6 Open Beta was the Biggest in Franchise History

Previously, Activision Blizzard confirmed that Call of Duty Black Ops 6 Open Beta was the biggest in the franchise's history through an official X post. The Black Ops 6 Open Beta ended with a massive positive response from gamers, as it showcased various new additions coming to the franchise, including the new movement and human shield features, which were used by players during the beta session.

According to the X post by Activision Blizzard, the Call of Duty Black Ops 6 Open Beta was on top in terms of total players compared to all the past Beta Sessions, alongside maintaining the same ranking in total hours played, playtime per player, and most matches played.