Tis the season, as the old song goes, and we hope that you had a great holiday period and that you’re looking forward to the beginning of a new year. Hopefully, this one will carry some slightly gladder tidings.
Of course, the march of gaming news continues, and while this week has naturally been a lot quieter than most, there’s still a fair amount to discuss and remember from the week that’s been.
Without further ado, then, let’s talk about the holiday week in gaming news, and thus proceed with our final news roundup of 2024!
Another War Thunder leak has happened
If you know anything about War Thunder, then you’ll know the multiplayer military action game is no stranger to actual, real-life military secrets being leaked on its forums.
Well, that very thing happened again this week, this time for the Eurofighter Typhoon, a NATO aircraft that was originally “launched”, as it were, in 2003.
The incident prompted a community manager representing developer Gaijin to implore players to stop leaking classified military intelligence on the forums, suggesting that no good will come from doing so either “for you or the vehicle you are trying to post for”.
EA apparently rejected a Dead Space 4 proposal this year
If you’re a fan of the classic survival horror series Dead Space, then this one’s probably going to sting a little. Reportedly, EA shut down a proposal to create a fourth Dead Space game earlier this year.
According to original Dead Space director and The Callisto Protocol co-creator Glen Schofield, he and his former Dead Space alumni attempted to pitch Dead Space 4 to EA this year, but the studio wasn’t “interested”.
Evidently, whatever kind of numbers the Dead Space remake did, they weren’t enough to cause EA to consider reviving the franchise as a whole. It’s not like The Callisto Protocol did a superb job of tiding us over, either, so let’s hope we get another great survival horror game to fill that gap soon.
Fortnite gets a Cyberpunk 2077 crossover
This week, Epic Games’ Fortnite continued its quest to amalgamate every game ever into a massive and slightly homogenous mass with a Cyberpunk 2077 crossover.
The crossover will see characters like Johnny Silverhand and V making their way into the world of Fortnite, as well as various other accoutrements related to the cyberpunk RPG.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, this will be Keanu Reeves’ second appearance in Fortnite after he made the transition to the game as John Wick a while back. Perhaps now we can look forward to Shadow the Hedgehog?
Naughty Dog co-founder talks sale and more
On LinkedIn this week, Naughty Dog co-founder Andrew Gavin explained why he and his fellow execs decided to sell the company to Sony, citing “skyrocketing” budgets.
According to Gavin, Naughty Dog’s games cost “less than $50,000 each” to make in the 80s, but by the time Crash Bandicoot rolled around, budgets had ballooned to over $1m, with PS2 platformer Jak and Daxter costing somewhere in the region of $15m.
Gavin says that “today’s big budget games can easily cost $300, $400, or even $500 million to develop”, which probably explains why so many studios are taking so few risks these days.
Charlie the Unicorn creator says Warner Bros used his work without permission
Remember Charlie the Unicorn? If you don’t, it was a seminal short video from the (relatively) early days of the internet, combining twee and cutesy visuals with Charlie’s gruff voice and decidedly adult humour.
Well, this week, the fighting game MultiVersus found itself in Charlie creator Jason Steele’s crosshairs after he alleged that the game’s publisher Warner Bros. used his work in an ad for the game without his permission.
The offending ad has now been taken down, but Steele says that a “billion dollar company” advertising an “intellectual property horde game” should really get permission to use others’ work. We can’t argue with that.
Big the Cat was, at one point, going to appear in the second Sonic movie
Look away now if you’re a fan of Big the Cat. According to a new IGN interview, Sonic the Hedgehog movie writers Pat Casey and Josh Miller were originally going to include a cameo for the feline in the second movie, but it might not have been what you wanted.
Casey and Miller say that the original plan was to have a skeleton pop out and scare the viewer a la Indiana Jones, but that the skeleton would closely resemble that of Big the Cat. Yikes.
Obviously, the scene was cut, although Casey says that’s because it “didn’t make any sense” and not because it would traumatise young (and adult!) viewers.
Infinity Nikki’s first update arrives today
This week, we learned that Infold Games’ cutesy open-world game Infinity Nikki is getting its first major update, and that update will bring lots of new stuff along with it.
Version 1.1 will also be known as Shooting Star Season, and it’ll come complete with lots of new outfits for Nikki to wear, as well as new minigames to enjoy and new story content to work through.
If you’re enjoying the free-to-play gacha game, then you’ll almost certainly appreciate what Infold has in store for it this week.
State of Decay 3 may have been delayed by quite some time
According to industry figure Jez Corden, the upcoming third State of Decay game may take quite some time to come out. Corden says that the game has been delayed from 2025 to early 2026.
Corden says that while State of Decay 3 is “closer to being finished than you would think”, he believes that Microsoft will “let that one slip”, i.e. release it later down the line rather than committing to the previously-assumed 2025 release window.
It’s worth saying here that Microsoft hasn’t actually revealed any kind of release window for State of Decay 3 yet; we don’t know when the game is coming out, so 2026 wouldn’t technically constitute a delay. Still, it’s later than many will have hoped for.
