Plus heaps of games cancelled thanks to Microsoft’s recent layoffs and Nintendo confirms Donkey Kong Bananza is made by the Mario Odyssey devs
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SIFTER is produced by Kyle Pauletto, Fiona Bartholomaeus, Courtney Smith, Adam Christou and Chris Button. Cat Jahne is Social Producer, Mitch Loh is Senior Producer and Gianni Di Giovanni is our Executive Producer. Thanks to Audio Technica Australia and Apple for their support of SIFTER.
KYLE: Hi I’m Kyle Pauletto
FIONA: and I’m Fiona Bartholomaeus
KYLE: Welcome to Walkthrough, SIFTER’s weekly recap on the biggest news in video games.
FIONA: This week, Microsoft lays off thousands and cancels Perfect Dark reboot, Nintendo confirms what we all suspected about DK Bananza, and indie darling Peak smashes sales expectations.
Here is the news for Sunday 6th of July. Let’s go!
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KYLE: Everwild, Perfect Dark and a bunch of other games have been cancelled this week thanks to Microsoft’s latest round of layoffs which has seen roughly 9,000 staff lose their jobs from the gaming division.
King, the developer of Candy Crush, Bethesda, Raven Software and Forza Team 10 were all hit hard. Team 10 lost almost half of their staff.
Xbox studio The Initiative was shut down, as well as their project Perfect Dark which was set to be a revival of the 2000 Rare IP from the Nintendo 64 era.
FIONA: Rare’s game called Everwild that has been in development since 2014 has been cancelled and was led by Donkey Kong Country and Banjo-Kazooie director Gregg Mayles.
Zenimax Online Studios’ new MMORPG code-named Blackbird was also cancelled as part of the layoffs and that’s been in development since 2018.
In a statement to staff, CEO of Microsoft Gaming Phil Spencer said that the changes come at a time to position the gaming division to ensure success and allow them to focus on strategic growth areas.
This is also the fourth round of layoffs since their acquisition of Activision Blizzard last year.
KYLE: Spencer also said he recognizes that the changes come at a time where they have more players, games, and that their platform, hardware and game roadmap have never looked stronger.
Which begs the question, why fire 9000 people if things are going so well?
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KYLE: Nintendo this week confirmed what we basically already knew to be true, that Donkey Kong Bananza was developed by the same team as Super Mario Odyssey.
Nintendo are notoriously cagey about their dev teams, which is rare in an industry that often puts their best and brightest out on show for the world to see.
But really, you only had to watch the DK Direct last month to see that it’s not just similar, Bananza looks like it could be straight up set in the same world as Odyssey.
FIONA: And that has some commentators speculating, could Bananza be an Odyssey prequel?
Same team, same style, and featuring a younger version of Pauline, who in the Odyssey universe has grown up and become mayor of New Donk City.
Of course it’s all speculation at this stage, and we’ll just have to wait for all to be revealed when Bananza releases later this month.
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FIONA: A new indie game called Peak has sold 2 million copies in 9 days and it all started from just a jam game.
It’s a co-op climbing game where the only hope of rescue from a mysterious island is to scale the mountain at its center.
Developed by Landfall and Aggro Crab, the teams behind Content Warning and Another Crab's Treasure, worked together on the game as part of jam game as a way to recover from burnout but it quickly blew up and sold 1 million copies in just six days.
The dev team definitely did not expect it and said in their blog that it has been a wild ride since launch.
KYLE: The first major update is on the way with developers noting down as many suggestions from the community as they can and they definitely have plans for new content, quality of life features and funny additions that they wanted to make at the beginning.
Landfall isn’t a stranger to their games blowing up, as their previous game Content Warning had millions of downloads in a short period of time.
Together the studios are a rather small team and since they’re working on their own individual projects, they’ve said it’s not going to be a live service studio so they’ll update fans as they go because the last thing they want to do is promise features they can’t make a reality.
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FIONA: And to end off the news segment there are a bunch of fun announcements for upcoming games.
Dredge developers Black Salt Games announced on Bluesky this week that they are officially in pre-production for their second game which won’t be Dredge 2 but sounds like it’ll be similar vibes.
They’ve said it’ll explore a brand new dark setting in an open-world RPG, and after the success of Dredge we can’t wait to see what they do next.
KYLE: Chicken Run is getting a game titled Chicken Run: Eggstraction and it’ll be an action stealth, top down heist game.
It’ll follow on from the end of Aardman’s 2023 film Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget and will see you infiltrating five farms to liberate captive chickens either by yourself or in local co-op.
So far Josie Sedgwick-Davies will reprise her roles from the movie but she’ll be joined by Bella Ramsey, who plays Ellie in HBO’s The Last of Us and Chicken Shop Date creator Amelia Dimoldenberg which is a welcome surprise.
FIONA: And Halo Studios, formally 343 Industries, have announced in a blog post that they’ll be showing more of what they’re working on at the upcoming Halo World Championship in October.
They said that speculation is always fun but they want to show the fans what is in store for them, especially as they’re developing with Unreal Engine 5, so for a scoop they said to come to the championships on October 24.
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FIONA: That’s it for the headlines, here are the games coming out this week.
KYLE: Out Tuesday is a brand new take on the Atari classic, Missile Command Delta. It’s a new and improved Missile Command mixed with some strategic turn based third person mystery. Grab it on all platforms on the 8th.
FIONA: Out on the 10th is Everdeep Aurora, an indie narrative platformer by Nautilus Games. You play as a cat in a post apocalyptic world tasked with digging deep to settle a new world underground. Out on PC and Switch this Thursday.
KYLE: Another new indie from a first time developer is Mycopunk, by Pigeons at Play and published by Devolver. It’s a super fast paced first person co-op shooter where you and your mates band together to fight fungus monsters on distant worlds. Out on PC on the 10th.
FIONA: And last but not least is the Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 + 4 Remake bundle. All your favourite skaters, levels, and hit songs from the early 2000’s in one neat revamped package. That’s coming to all platforms this Friday.
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FIONA: This has been Walkthrough by SIFTER, my name is Fiona Bartholomaeus.
KYLE: And my name is Kyle Pauletto, thank you so much for listening.
FIONA: Head to our website www.sifter.com.au
KYLE: SIFTER is produced by myself, Fiona Bartholomaeus, Cat Jahne, Adam Christou, Courtney Smith and Chris Button. Mitch Loh is Senior Producer and video editor, and Gianni Di Giovanni is SIFTER’s Executive Producer, and script editor.
FIONA: Thanks to Brian Fairbanks from Salty Dog Sounds for composing the Walkthrough theme tune, and Audio Technica Australia and Apple for their support of SIFTER’s podcasts.
KYLE: We’ll be back with more news next Sunday, see you then.
