Delays, Strikes and Vampire Survivors

This week in gaming news…

Studio infamous for delays; delays game.

Cloud Imperium Games, the developers behind the perpetually delayed Star Citizen have announced that its spin-off single player game Squadron 42 (which was announced to be apparently feature complete last year) has been delayed until 2026.  The game was originally announced as a part of Star Citizen but has since been turned into a standalone project.

The game’s prologue was demoed at CitizenCon in Manchester, England (which apparently suffered from an assortment of bugs, glitches and crashes).

Cloud Imperium Games has in the over 12 years since its initial crowdfunding campaign made over 729 million dollars with still no release in sight for Star Citizen.

Ubisoft France Staff Strike

The STJV (Syndicat des Travailleurs et Travailleuses du Jeu Vidéo), an independent union that defends the moral and economical interests of workers in the video games industry (as described by their website) called for a three day strike from October 15 to the 17th over Ubisoft’s home working policy and pay.  The STJV’s site says as follows:

“Management just announced its decision to impose a return to offices for 3 days per week for all employees. This announcement was made without any tangible justification or any consultation with the workers’ representatives.

…

This decision is announced immediately after the failure of the profit-sharing negotiations. Exactly like previous salary negociations: management’s proposals were innaceptable, the negociations’ timetable was appalling, and management was deaf to the proposals of the various Employee representatives.”

News Nibbles!

Telltale has come out to confirm that the Wolf Among Us 2 is not canceled after rumors that the game was on the chopping block circulated.

Netflix has shut down one of their AAA games studios, known as team Blue, which had some pretty big names attached to it such as former Overwatch executive producer Chacko Sonn, head of creative on Halo Infinite Joseph Staten and God of War’s art director Rafael Grassetti.

Vampire Survivors is getting some spooky Castlevania DLC for Halloween! Ode to Castlevania will add over 20 characters and weapons and at least 10 hours of gameplay to the already stuffed to the brim game.

Valve has said they won’t be releasing a new Steam Deck console every year just for a small improvement.  Instead, to be fair to their customers, they want to “wait for a generational leap in compute without sacrificing battery life before [they] ship the real second generation of Steam Deck.”

Game releases!

October 25

Sonic X Shadow Generations (Playstation, Xbox, PC & Switch

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 (Playstation, Xbox, PC)

October 29

Life is Strange: Double Exposure (PS5, Xbox, PC)

Red Dead Redemption (PC)

Monster High: Skulltimate Secrets (Playstation, Xbox, PC, Switch

And that’s it for the news this week!