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Montag, 6. April 2026

"Keeping teams together doesn't seem to matter to people, but for us it did": Star Wars Zero Company's director on what the industry can learn from XCOM 2

It seems that every week we're reporting on news of another wave of layoffs at a big game studio. In March alone, we saw 1000 staff let go at Epic Games, 124 at Eidos Montreal, and over 100 at Ubisoft's Red Storm Entertainment. And those are just the ones I can name without needing to rack my brain.

In some cases, these "reorganisations" are to keep investors happy, in others they're painted as necessary for a studio to keep the lights on until its next paycheck. But every time a team loses members, they lose something that can't be replaced if the money ever begins to flow again. The shorthand and trust that develops between staff who work together for a long time, the institutional knowledge of what's been tried in the past and worked (or didn't), these only come from teams that remain intact.

Many have sung the praises of institutional knowledge and holding a team together before, but in the wake of layoffs like we're seeing at the moment, it seems worth providing an example of why letting a team mature together makes for better games.

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The best videogame characters who came back from the dead

Greetings, loyal Treehouse tenders and Horace huggers! Today is a bank holiday in the UK, which means we are probably asleep, but we've scraped together a little themed conversation piece article to comfort you in our absence. Specifically, it is Easter Monday, which isn't a bad time to talk about resurrection - for 'twas on Easter that the worshippers rolled back the chocolate egg from the Cave of Character Creation and discovered that the Easter Bunny had started New Game Plus.

I hope the faithful among you will tolerate this attempt at humour and proceed immediately to discussing your favourite reborn, resurrected, or revived videogame character. No, you are not allowed to object that technically, every videogame character who isn't subject to permadeath counts as resurrected, providing the player fails at least once. Pac-Man is not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy!

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Sonntag, 5. April 2026

The Sunday Papers

Assuming I haven't gotten torn apart by wild boars, Sundays are for navigating the wooded valleys around Cadair Idris. I'm on a hiking holiday in Eryri till Tuesday 14th April, tramping up slopes and wading through lakes of heather without a care for the depressing world of 'high' technology. I am Going Primitive, living as my Celtic ancestors did, with naught but a smartphone and a Crunchyroll subscription to ward me against Nature's ravages. Still, I have a few moments to scurry under yon dripping crag, eat a squashed flapjack, and tell you about some things I've read this week.

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Samstag, 4. April 2026

Crimson Desert's latest update makes sure you can always look at Kliff's generic mug and makes running much less annoying

Crimson Desert appears to be changing quicker than a musical theatre actor that has 90 seconds to put on a new outfit before their next number is up. A new update arrived in the action RPG earlier today, bringing with it nothing particularly revolutionary, but several tweaks that'll probably make you say something to the effect of "oh nice, that'll be handy."

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Comedy games are alive and well in Horse Magnifier, a game where you do just that

I am not going to drudge up the half decomposed discourse around whether games are art or not. They most certainly offer up a huge range of experiences that other mediums do not. Experiences that wrench the heart, that cause tears of joy, that get you to rethink your very existence, that cover that period in time where developers started having kids and birthed the dad game. And then there is Horse Magnifier. A game where you magnify horses. A game that I like quite a lot!

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Grand Theft Auto 6 publisher Take-Two have seemingly laid off their head of AI and several of the department's staffers

Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two have seemingly held some layoffs this week. As spotted by Game Developer, the company's head of AI Luke Dicken shared a post on his personal LinkedIn page where he shared that both he and an unknown number of his team have been let go.

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As House Flipper Remastered Collection's playtest gets going, the original is free to pick up for the weekend

It isn't particularly difficult to find a simulation game of some kind that allows you to carry out the most mundane of tasks these days. Now you'll have no trouble finding domestic chore life sims like Lawn Mowing Simulator or Leaf Blower Co. But once upon a time, games like House Flipper were all in there lonesome, a niche of a niche. And if you fancy seeing what the game that made games like these catch on is like in action, good news! House Flipper is free for you to keep over the rest of this weekend.

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