Weekly Roundup: Silent Hill Goes to Scotland, Riot Games Knock-Out Staff, AYANEO Charge $4,000 for a Brick, and More
It’s Friday the 13th, and the video game industry has seen its fair share of bad luck, and good, this week. Here’s what you may have missed.
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2XKO KOs Staff
Riot Games released its new League of Legends tag-team beat ‘em up, 2XKO, across all major platforms on Jan. 20 after a few months in Early Access. However, despite decent critic and player reviews, and it being less than a month after full release, Riot Games has admitted that the game performed below expectations. This in turn is leading to staff getting laid off.
“As we expanded from PC to console, we saw consistent trends in how players were engaging with 2XKO. The game has resonated with a passionate core audience, but overall momentum hasn’t reached the level needed to support a team of this size long term,” said Tom Cannon, Executive Producer for 2XKO, in an official news post.
“The people who helped ship 2XKO poured years of creativity, care, and belief into this game. Taking creative risks like this is hard, and the work they did is real and meaningful,” he added, alongside news that, at least in this case, impacted staff will get help trying to find work elsewhere within Riot Games, or a minimum of six months pay if this isn’t possible.
Meanwhile, Riot Games advertised open positions just a few days ago, with listings related to VALORANT, LoL, and Riftbound. Players have been quick to call out Riot for fumbling 2XKO’s launch just as it fumbled Riftbound’s, as well as for expensive 2XKO game skins (some sets retail for $100), plus its focus on a niche gaming trend and LoL offshoot (the characters are closer to those seen in Arcane than the game that spawned it).
Remedy Finds Cure for Leadership Woes
CONTROL and Alan Wake studio Remedy is getting a new boss in March this year as its current CEO, and studio co-founder, Markus Mäki, steps back. Mäki was operating as an interim CEO after his predecessor, Tero Virtala, left the company in October following poor response to FBC: Firebreak.
The new boss is Jean-Charles Gaudechon, a former executive from EA who, among other things, worked at EA’s free-to-play studio in Stockholm. Gaudechon also oversaw live-service titles including FIFA Mobile and Battlefield Heroes, which should serve him well with regards to reinvigorating Firebreak.
“I’m excited and honored to join Remedy at a pivotal time,” said Gaudechon in an investment report released by Remedy this week. “The studio has a unique creative identity and a strong pipeline. My commitment is to protect what makes it special, deliver exceptional games, and scale Remedy in a way that builds lasting value.”
“Remedy has the voice and the ambition to be a pillar of the industry’s future,” he added. “We will stay close to players, earn their time and trust, and strengthen our independence in how we build and publish our games, while continuing to work closely with the partners who have supported us along the way.”
A companion report also highlighted that Remedy intends to release CONTROL 2 this year, with its official title now being CONTROL Resonant. This report also notes that “We have two established own franchises, CONTROL and Alan Wake, which are linked through the Remedy Connected Universe.”
“Remedy will self-publish upcoming games, in which Remedy owns the IP. Growing and expanding the two franchises will be a key part of our future. In addition, we work with a partner franchise Max Payne, originally created by Remedy.”
AYANEO’s Next Handheld
Fans of modern handhelds will already be familiar with AYANEO, a company renowned for its high-class production values as much as its premium prices. Its latest handheld gaming PC, the Next 2, is now available to order via Indiegogo, but anyone who wants the ultimate version of it will have to fork out $4,299 (although there’s an early bird discount right now that knocks this down to $3,499).
It’s also a chunky 341.69mm in length and 146.24mm in width, with a suitably large 9.06-inch 2,400 x 1,504 high-refresh-rate OLED native landscape display. It runs on Windows and comes with either an AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 or MAX385 CPU, RAM of either 32GB, 64GB, or a whopping 128GB, and storage of either 1TB or 2TB. There’s also an integrated Radeon 8060S GPU based on RDNA 3.5 architecture.
It comes with all the control bells and whistles seen on similar handhelds, including Hall Effect sticks, linear triggers, and more buttons than a person has fingers. The Next 2 is available in stylish black or white, although the cheapest possible configuration is still $1,799. Every version has a 116Wh battery, too, which people have been quick to point out (on AYANEO’s X account) is too large to take on a plane.
Highguard May Be on Life Support
2XKO isn’t the only recently released live service game that’s landed with more of a whimper than a bang, as Highguard developers Wildlight Entertainment announced via X recently that it’s cutting a bunch of staff loose: “Today we made an incredibly difficult decision to part ways with a number of our team members while keeping a core group of developers to continue innovating on and supporting the game.”
Although the studio hasn’t admitted as such, it’s evidently a knock-on effect of a bungled launch that saw next to no marketing, coupled with poor player and critic reviews. Early reports suggest that the majority of the studio has been let go, which is in direct contrast to Wildlight’s optimistic post a month ago on LinkedIn that said the company would be hiring soon this year.
Josh Sobel, one of the now-former Wildlight employees, posted a lengthy article on X yesterday, where he highlighted that all initial game feedback was stellar (“This is lightning in a bottle.” / “This has mainstream hit written all over it.”). People were quick to note that this is toxic positivity; if no one testing the game had genuine negative feedback, then this was also clearly part of the reason Highguard came out of the gate at a disadvantage. Many also said that this sort of feedback shows why it’s important to run public betas, which Highguard skipped.
Sobel’s main point was that a lot of the public discourse around Highguard has been unfairly biased based on preconceptions – which Wildlight partly encouraged via its Game Show trailer reveal – and that many Wildlight staff had good intentions but will now have to find work in places they hoped to escape.
“Many of Wildlight’s former devs will now be forced to assimilate back into the actual corporate industry many gamers accused Wildlight of being a part of,” Sobel said. “Now, every time someone thinks about leaving the golden handcuffs behind in favor of making a new multiplayer game the indie way, they’ll say ‘but remember how gamers didn’t even give Wildlight a chance.’ Soon, if this pattern continues, all that will be left are corporations, at least in the multiplayer space. Innovation is on life support.”
New Trailers and Games
Meanwhile, as one X commentator put it, “All of the hate Highguard received should be reappropriated to this” accompanied the news that Last Flag, a 5v5 online game developed by Imagine Dragon’s lead singer and his brother, now has a demo out on Steam. Other gamers have been more accepting of the game, noting that it has “Team Fortress 2 vibes.”
In other new game news: Edmund McMillen, the original creator of Super Meat Boy, and co-developer Tyler Glaiel (who worked on The Binding of Isaac with McMillen) have finally released their next game, Mewgenics. This was first announced in 2012 but suffered multiple restarts over the next few years, raising the question of whether it’d ever leave development hell.
Well, now it has, and it sold over 250,000 copies within its first few hours. The game has players breed an army of super cats, then send them out on tactical, turn-based adventures. The only trouble is, the more genetic engineering a player does, the more likely they are to end up with super freaks instead. It’s available on PC.
Also released this week was a new trailer for, of all things, a Hellraiser game. Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival is being developed by Boss Team Games (Evil Dead: The Game, Cobra Kai: Card Fighter) and published by Saber Interactive (Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando), and follows a chap called Aiden as he travels into the underworld to rescue his love from the Cenobites.
Horror fans will be pleased to hear Doug Bradley reprises his role as Pinhead, who has such sights to show you. Although how well the rest of Clive Barker’s hellish world and characters will translate into the world of survival horror remains to be seen. It’s slated for release later this year on all major platforms.
Finally, Silent Hill: Townfall now has a trailer, which highlights both the series’ first ever POC protagonist, and Konami’s belief that Silent Hill isn’t just one specific place (as Silent Hill f also demonstrates). Set on a remote Scottish island, St. Amelia, in 1996, Townfall follows Simon Ordell, an American who’s called back to the island to “‘put things right.”
The main developer this time around is Scotland-based Screen Burn Interactive, formerly No Code, who were responsible for Stories Untold and Observation. Townfall is being published by Annapurna Interactive and Konami, on PS5 and PC, later this year.
