Weekly Roundup: Xbox and Ubisoft Restructure, New Vampire: The Masquerade RPG, New Games from Mouthwashing and Citizen Sleeper Devs
- Xbox has launched a 100-day restructuring plan aimed at improving profitability and long-term sustainability.
- Ubisoft is cutting around 380 jobs and closing or restructuring several studios worldwide.
- Vampire: The Masquerade – Eternal Whispers promises a choice-driven CRPG experience with meaningful consequences.
- Nightdive Studios has announced Thief: The Dark Project Remastered, rebuilding the classic stealth game in its KEX Engine.
- New projects from the creators of Citizen Sleeper and Mouthwashing introduce fresh RPG and co-op horror concepts.
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Xbox Gears up for a Reset
New Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty released a joint statement on Wednesday about the future of Xbox, saying it’s “important to have both optimism and realism as we work to reset the business,” over the “next 100 days.”
The statement, which was sent out globally to all Team XBOX employees, follows a report from Bloomberg that Sharma plans to lay-off a bunch of staff soon. The timing also coincides with a recent interview Xbox’s newly-appointed Chief Strategy Officer Matthew Ball gave to The Game Business, in which Ball said Sharma asked him, regarding the current state of Xbox as a business, “Is it fixable?”
Ball is well-known within the industry for his analytical skills, ties to investment firms, and annual State of Video Gaming reports. Now, as an official Xbox employee, he said “it’s important for us as a company – especially during this hardship, especially as we turn the company around – that we communicate what we’re doing [and] why in some instances. It’s about revealing some of the details that you usually don’t disclose. We’re going to start doing that more and more.”
Sharma grabbed attention earlier this week through the Xbox Showcase that ran as part of the Summer Game Fest, where she revealed that (like Sony with its upcoming PS5 exclusives) the upcoming Gears of War E-Day, and anticipated RPG Clockwork Revolution, would both be console exclusives (that will also, somewhat confusingly, appear on PC). The joint statement also promised that “Players can continue to expect signature exclusives from us every year.”
Sharma and Booty also highlighted how, despite Xbox doing well in terms of having over 1 billion players worldwide, it wasn’t financially stable. “We will end this fiscal year at about a 3% accountability margin, down year-over-year. Excluding Activision Blizzard King, over the past five years, we have spent over $20 billion on ongoing investments in our content, platform, and hardware subsidy, but our annual revenue has declined nearly half a billion during that time. Going forward, this cannot continue.”
“Our current platform infrastructure is not built for the battle ahead,” they added. “We’ve become too reliant on vendors to operate our systems and must become more self-reliant as an engineering culture to build for the future. We must increase the value we ship to players while decreasing the time it takes to do so.”
“Going forward, we’ll evolve and rebuild our stack and look at capabilities across all of XBOX and potential M&A [Mergers and Acquisitions] to help us win in hardware, PC, mobile, and streaming.” In other words: Xbox will be going through a restructure over the next 100 days as Sharma works to get a better handle on the company so that it can break out of its annual revenue loss.
Ubisoft Shuts Down More Studios
It looks like Ubisoft realised it’s been a minute since it fired a bunch of people, because it’s now been reported that it’s set to lose around 380 employees. In an internal memo circulated this week, the French developer/publisher said: “In Production, difficult decisions were made to close our studios in Winnipeg and Belgrade, and we have initiated consultations regarding a proposed restructuring of our Barcelona studio with a refocus of activities on Rainbow Six subject to employee representative consultations.”
“Changes are also underway across the global Publishing organization, to adapt how teams are structured and deployed, while maintaining a strong presence in key markets.”
Other than the above named branches of Ubisoft, the San Francisco office is also believed to have lost a chunk of staff. This branch had already technically ceased operations as a game development studio, but continued to house employees working mainly in IT and marketing, so it appears that Ubisoft has decided to nail the lid on its coffin once and for all.
All of this is unfortunate news but not surprising, as Ubisoft is still deep in its restructuring phase: it started this year by laying out plans to form “Houses” of studios that specialise in specific games. The Winnipeg branch acted as a cornerstone for Ubisoft’s internal engine development, whereas the Belgrade team contributed to the likes of Black Flag Resynced. While the Barcelona location (so far) avoids closure, staff will focus exclusively on Rainbow Six Siege.
New Vampire: The Masquerade RPG Bares Its Fangs
The much-anticipated Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2, released last year, was met with less-than-stellar reviews due to being a lot less of an RPG than players expected. Enter: Vampire: The Masquerade – ETERNAL WHISPERS. This is a new CRPG by Flyos (Vampire: The Masquerade – CHAPTERS, Werewolf: The Apocalypse – RETALIATION) and published by Kwalee (Grime 2, Call of the Elder Gods).
Set in Montreal, players take on the role of Gabe, an ancient fledgling emerging from a lengthy slumber. With Sam, a hesitant Thin-Blood, acting as a guide, an initial pursuit of a renegade ghoul soon unravels into a conspiracy involving the Temple of Eternal Whispers, a sprawling subterranean sanctuary dedicated to an outlawed religion with ties to the game’s infamous Sabbat (a monstrous clan of vampires).
“I’ve been playing Vampire: The Masquerade ttrpg for more than 25 years,” said Gary Paitre, Co-Founder and Creative Director at Flyos. “With Eternal Whispers, our ambition is to deliver a mature and atmospheric CRPG that sits at the crossroads of classic role-playing games and modern narrative experiences such as Disco Elysium. We want to create a game where personal horror, exploration, and meaningful choices are just as important as atmosphere and storytelling.”
Part of this is what the studio calls a “Fail Forward design” – if players fail a skill check, lose a fight or make a mess of a negotiation, the game adapts and reveals new consequences and paths. However, to balance this out, the game will ship with what Flyos calls a Final Death mode: actions you take in-game have permanent consequences, which should please gamers who like to take their roleplaying seriously.
Vampire: The Masquerade – ETERNAL WHISPERS doesn’t have a set release date yet, with Flyos and Kwalee simply promising that it’s “coming soon.”
Thief: The Dark Project Remastered Coming from Nightdive Studios
After receiving critical and player acclaim for its System Shock remasters and remakes, Nightdive Studios has rolled out several other remasters of classic games in the meantime, such as Blood and Outlaws. Now, though, it’s revealed something that a lot of gamers have wanted for a long time. Thief: The Dark Project was originally released in 1998 by Looking Glass Studios and was praised for its immersive sim gameplay. It was followed by several sequels and, in 2014, a modern reboot, although this failed commercially.
The original Thief was the first game to feature light and sound as game mechanics, and Nightdive’s remaster honours this. With Thief: The Dark Project Remastered, Nightdive Studios is rebuilding the game in its proprietary KEX Engine and bundling in expanded missions and updates found in the 1999 Thief Gold release.
Players can navigate labyrinthine, unscripted environments populated by sophisticated NPCs capable of detecting noise and triggering alarms at the slightest misstep. Each heist offers three distinct difficulty tiers with varied objectives, ensuring significant replay value for those who master the art of the steal.
You step into the boots of Garrett, a street urchin recruited and mentored by the Keepers (a clandestine order focused on global equilibrium) to become a Master Thief. Equipped with a limited arsenal, you must rely on silence to strip the City of its riches while keeping the body count low. A release date is TBA.
New Games Announced by Citizen Sleeper and Mouthwashing Devs
This week has been chock-a-block with new game releases and announcements, so it’s easy to lose track of everything in all the noise. Two notable new titles worth reminding gamers about are coming soon from, respectively, the Citizen Sleeper devs (Jump Over The Age) and Mouthwashing team (Wrong Organ).
The first is Signet City, a first-person RPG portraying a seaside metropolis in decay, where biological computing has surpassed the silicon chip. Fusing first-person discovery with narrative systems inspired by tabletop gaming, Signet City presents a dense, original setting where players take on the role of a (checks notes) fungal parasite to inhabit the minds of characters, influencing and consuming their personal journeys.
Drawing from 1980s British post-punk and weird fiction, solo dev Gareth Damian has promised a strikingly different perspective on the narrative RPG format. While the title maintains the emotional weight and authored narrative style seen in Citizen Sleeper, it marks a significant shift for the studio by incorporating “fungalpunk” concepts and a more volatile socio-political backdrop.
And then there’s Carcass Clad. A surreal two to three person co-op PVE tank horror, the next game from Wrong Organ takes place in the Soviet-coded city of Vhorgorod. As either the Commander, Driver or Gunner of a Finnish tank, players will have to navigate the war-torn city and its “divine livestock” – these are the squealing guts and remains of various beasts used by the game’s main enemy, the Green Lion cult, as squishy armour for its weapons and vehicles.
Each of the three main roles has distinct abilities and responsibilities, so the emphasis is on real teamwork to succeed. “Our mechanics are all designed to create an oppressively brutal experience instead of a free-form social one,” said Gameplay Lead, Jeffrey Tomec. “The team really has to exist as one unit and work together to make any progress. One of the developers of Peak actually described our game as FriendSweat, which is perfect I think.”
