🎮 EA rejects Dead Space 4, More Indiana Jones games and Arcane contribution to LoL...
EA rejects Dead Space 4, More Indiana Jones games are under development, Arcane contribution to LoL progress, Possible sequel of Metaphor and more!
Hello friends,
Today is January 2nd 2025 and I hope you’ve had a great New Year’s celebration 🙌
In today’s news:
🎮 EA rejects Dead Space 4
🎮 More Indiana Jones games are under development
🎮 Arcane contribution to LoL progress
🎮 Possible sequel of Metaphor
⚡ Lightning Round!
🫡 True Tribute!
😄 Personal Update
All of this is brought to you in a 5 min format ⏲️
Let’s dig in!
🎮 EA rejects Dead Space 4
Disappointing news for all the Dead Space fans was shared recently by IGN concerning the future of the franchise. The original creators of the first game recently pitched a new game to EA, but the publishing giant said that they weren’t interested.
Glen Schofield, Christopher Stone and Bret Robbins all joined together to pitch EA on Dead Space 4 and shared the results during an interview. Armed with reportedly a good pitch and projections for how well the game would’ve done after release they went in, but this is how it went according to Schofield:
We didn’t go too deep. They just said, “We're not interested right now. We appreciate it blah blah blah, and you know we know who to talk to.” So we didn't take it any further. And we respected their opinion. They know their numbers and what they have to ship and all that so yeah.
Christopher Stone added this:
The industry is in a weird place right now. People are really hesitant to take chances on things. So you have to take it with a grain of salt. Who knows, maybe one day. I think we'd all love to do it.
And this is quite a fair assessment. The industry is still going through hard times and nobody is ready to put up even with the smallest risks. The franchise is definitely not in the best of places right now and the fan base is probably already scattered so it will be hard to bring everyone back. I hope though that this year companies will start stabilizing and investing in some new ideas…
What do you think? Would you play a new Dead Space game?
🎮 More Indiana Jones games are under development
It’s been almost a month since the release of Indiana Jones and The Golden Circle and now according to Insider Gaming, a rumour surfaced that we are going to have more Indy games.
It’s a very thin rumour, to begin with, but a reputable movie insider who has been known to be right from time to time shared a short message on X saying that:
Looks like we’re getting more Indy games.
Yeah, that’s basically it 😅
It isn’t much of a speculation since we don’t even know the extent of either success or failure of The Golden Circle, but it’s definitely a good sign for the fans of the franchise. Even though it will take years to develop any potential sequels or spin-offs.
Personally, I haven’t played the game in question, but I’ve heard great things about the narrative and the gameplay. If you have, I’m eager to know more about it. My guess is that it was at least a solid launch since the rumours began about the new games and such. But I can’t find any proof of that since according to Steam Charts, the game’s all-time high concurrence was 8242 players and it is not a huge number for a triple-A game…
Are you a fan of Indy games? Are you looking forward to the new games?
🎮 Arcane contribution to LoL progress
Bloomberg recently reported that despite all the investment Riot Game put into the 2 seasons of Arcane (and it’s about $250 million), the series hasn’t managed to attract a lot of new players to the League of Legends.
According to Bloomberg, the first Arcane season didn't give Riot Games designers enough time to produce new content, such as items or characters. People created new accounts but left the game. Despite this, a Riot spokesperson said that “while the show itself wasn't profitable, it added to the business in other ways.”
My personal experience somehow contradicts this report. I’ve been playing this game on and off for the past 15 years and I’ve never seen anything like I’ve been seeing for the past several months since the Arcane season 2 released.
The amount of “new” accounts is astonishing. Every game I have a person doesn’t have a rank from the previous season and it means one of 2 things. Either it’s a very old account that hasn’t been used in a while or this is a new account. Regardless, it means that Arcane either brings people back or motivates them to sign up. I’m not kidding, every single game. And I play a lot.
But do you know how I’m making this connection? Every person with such an account plays Victor, Vi, Ekko, Jayce, Jinx, or Caitlyn. Regardless of their position on the map and regardless of their mastery level (shows how much you play on the champion). Almost every game for the past 3 months had at least one of the above heroes. And let me tell you, they are not meta right now, some of them are in terrible shape and have been repeatedly nerfed.
I know that it might seem like a stretch to draw this conclusion from my personal experience, but if it’s not that, then I completely lost my understanding of the game 😅
If you haven’t subscribed yet, this button is just for you ⤵️
🎮 Possible sequel of Metaphor
According to Game Rant, The Game Director Katsura Hashino recently shared some thoughts about the possibility of a sequel for the game that almost won the top prize on The Game Awards.
The Director says that there are no concrete plans to turn the game into a series, but he hopes that it can be some day. According to him, Metaphor started with the goal of creating a third JRPG series which would stand alongside Shin Megami Tensei and Persona. His personal hope is that someday, it will be the third flagship series of Atlus.
My personal hope on the other hand is that while the studio considers whether or not to make this game a series, they’d put some time into the next Persona entry. We’ve already heard some rumours about Persona 6, but the devs didn’t share anything concrete at this point. My guess is that after the success of the Metaphor, it’s going to be the same formula as with Bioware or CDPR, once one game of one series is done, they’ll start doing another one, which frankly is not a bad way to go. It’s just that we’ll have to wait a long time for the next mainline entry of the series… 🥲
⚡ Lightning Round!
1…2…3…Go!
🎮 Players cry about bans for Marvel Rivals
The fans of the game took to social media to urge NetEase to introduce hero bans to balance the experience in the competitive mode.
A recent Reddit post by AngryRaccoon44 called for a major change to the game's Competitive mode, asking NetEase Games to enable hero bans for all ranks of play. Currently, hero bans only become an option when players reach Diamond rank, which means the majority of the community is playing without it.
Personally, I think they should’ve done it from day one, but I have a somewhat controversial opinion of this game. I also think that they should’ve introduced role restrictions 😅 I tried playing the competitive mode as it’s quite a disgusting experience at the moment. The game is fun and all, but if you want to earn those sweet skins that come with obtaining certain ranks, it’s almost a full-time job at this point. Maybe bans will change something, but it’s unclear if NetEase will introduce them…
🎮 Valve insider shares interesting news about Half-Life
According to Game Rant, a reputable insider revealed that Valve might “quite possibly” reveal Half-Life 3 in 2025. To give more credibility to these rumours, the insider also claimed that, according to LinkedIn, Valve has recently recruited several new developers, including people who worked on the original Half-Life and Left 4 Dead.
Personally, I think it sounds good on paper, but we’ve all been here before and heard rumours and speculations about Half-Life 3 for over a decade. At this point, I’ve already given up. But it sure would be great.
🎮 Good news for PC fans of Final Fantasy
The FF fans who play on PC (such as myself) may rejoice. In a recent interview for IGN Brazil with Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth producer Yoshinori Kitase shared his opinion that future Final Fantasy entries “cannot be exclusive to a single platform”.
While we are confident and happy that we are reaching a certain level of [Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth] sales, it is clear that with the modernity of games, we cannot be exclusive to a single platform. I think we need to offer the game to as many players as possible.
Yay! 🥳
🫡 True Tribute!
Today I wanted to salute
with an amazing recap of 2024!
If you are not an avid reader of
as I am, you’ll find this post quite useful as it sums up all the best articles from 2024 and some of them are pretty amazing. My personal favourite is “The Gamers Are Locked In”, but there are a lot of gems that might be interesting for anyone who’s either working or curious about game development! Looking forward to seeing what 2025 will bring!😄 Personal Update
Well, my vacation is officially over and now it’s back to work time…Yay?
Seriously though, I’m glad to be back at work as this year is going to be pretty exciting for our studio and the company in general. Right now I’m mainly focused on our current project, so I can’t think about anything other than that.
My side project though is going along nicely and I already have a couple of things that I wanted to share, so stay tuned for Sunday posts soon!
This is all the news I have for you folks today.
Thanks for making it this far! 🙌
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Have a great week!
Alex from Gamedev Relay.
I miss the days when the video game industry was a place where creativity could flourish and chances could be taken without considering the almighty dollar. It's a similar situation in the film industry. Independent studios are making the interesting stuff while AAA studios release remasters and sequels.
Love seeing the impact of Arcane on the game - I really hope we'll see more projects like this in the future.