by SmashPad Staff
It’s been a year of great and bad moments, so let’s look back at what stood out the most for us.
2024 has been a hell of a year where many developers have managed to get a bunch of really cool games out while many others have lost their jobs in ways both shocking and awful. Every big company laid off some amount of its workforce from Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony to every major publisher down to many small independent developers having to make the toughest calls to either shut down in the face of lack of funding or lay off their friends and coworkers to try to save the rest of the team. Over 10,000 people lost their jobs this year and it’s been rough to make podcasts nearly ever week of the year and have so few that didn’t feature layoffs or studios being shut down. There is even a Wikipedia page about the trend of massive amounts of layoffs since 2023.
Even worse than the layoffs were the studio enclosures, so let’s give a shout out to the studios that left us this year. Die Gute Fabrik, an acclaimed indie studio that made Mutazione and Saltsea Chronicles, basically shut down after a lack of funding to continue production. Possibility Space was shut down by their CEO before they even released their first game. Take-Two shut down Kerbal Space Program 2 developer Intercept Games and acclaimed indie developer Roll7 that made the OlliOlli series and Rollerdrome. Xbox shut down HiFi Rush developer Tango Gameworks, Redfall developer Arkane Austin, and Activision mobile dev Alpha Dog Studios, though PUBG owner Krafton acquired Tango Gameworks and will hopefully have as many of the original team return as they can to make a new HiFi Rush game. Avalanche Studios shut down their New York and Montreal studios. Galvanic Games shut down after the awesome Wizard with a Gun did not sell well enough to keep them going. Gothic and Risen series developer Pirhana Bytes shut down after Embracer Group couldn’t find a new owner for them. Indie publisher Humble Games was shut down by its owner Ziff Davis, throwing many devs’ connections for pushing updates on their games into chaos for a while. Ready at Dawn was shut down by Meta after not having put out a VR game in a couple of years after making a name for themselves with a handful of Sony games that they made on the PSP, PS3, and PS4. NetEase Games closed Ouka Studios, the studio behind Visions of Mana, shortly after its launch, though the game’s director moved over to Square Enix so he can keep working on games with them. Surgent Studios, makers of Tales of Kenzera: ZAU, put their entire game dev team on hiatus due to a lack of funding with the hopes that they might return to game dev if they get funding for a new project. Netflix shut down their big budget game studio before it could finish the games they’d been working on for the past couple of years. Ubisoft shut down the team that made Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, though most of them likely moved over to other internal teams. Sony shut down Concord developer Firewalk Studios and mobile developer Neon Koi. Tequila Works, makers of Rime and Gylt, filed for insolvency and shut down. Mass Effect developer Casey Hudson’s new studio Humanoid Origins shut down due to a lack of funding. Worlds Untold, another studio lead by former Mass Effect devs, was shut down after NetEase dropped them. Hothead Games, makers of the Penny Arcade Adventures and Deathspank games, shut down after 18 years in the industry. These are just the shut down studios that we covered on Day 0 Update, so I’m sure many more either didn’t make the news or I missed them when making the outlines each week.
Let’s also talk about GameStop abruptly shutting down Game Informer in such a way that all of their great writing on their website no longer exists outside of what the Internet Archive was able to scrape beforehand. That leaves the industry with no more console-focused magazines in North America, though a few still exist for PC game coverage and Europe still has Edge and a few others to keep that tradition alive for the time being. We’ve also seen the media side of the industry also suffering massive layoffs with the way major companies own many of the biggest sites, who now value profitability instead of the prestige of the quality of work that these sites can offer as part of their portfolio. That ends up leaving the media side of the industry with so few jobs to aspire to fill and makes the publisher-run media arms more viable for those that used to right about games or hoped to do so one day. Now you might as well either become a content creator on YouTube, Twitch, Tiktok, etc or hope to run one of the newsletter blogs that gains some traction, which is harder to suceed at than ever. Basically, it’s a fun time to cover games with anything that requires more work than a podcast.
Luckily, there were plenty of amazing games to choose from for our Top 10 Games of 2024. Read on for Number 10!