This week is made up of a series of nudges towards taking things back—and possibly, something even greater.
Rieko Kodama, producer of Skies of Arcadia and a core leader behind the original Phantasy Star games has passed away. Kodama’s career with Sega spanned over three decades, especially significant when she began her career in a time when women’s presence and contributions in games were largely overshadowed.
Takahiro Sakurai, the Japanese voice actor for Cloud Strife in the Final Fantasy franchise since 2002, has admitted that he has been in an extramarital affair with a work colleague for about ten years. The affair has forced the cancellation of his radio travel show, P.S. Genki Desu. Takahiro this past week. Sakurai’s marriage—and specifically a marriage to another industry professional—has been withheld from public information until now, and his talent management agency has acknowledged and published a statement apologizing to the impacted women, who both remain anonymous. Sakurai prominently works in anime, and has been recently performing as Giyū Tomioka in Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Reigen in Mob Psycho 100 III, and Tsubame Ozuno in the Urusei Yatsura 2022 remake. These roles and others currently have not been impacted.
Rocksteady Studios’ co-founders, Sefton Hill and Jamie Walker, are leaving the company by the end of this year. The news comes accompanied by the information that Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is almost finished with production.
Unable to meet the demands of the guidelines set by Japan’s CERO rating system for games, The Callisto Protocol will not release in Japan. The game’s marketing has made its excessive level of violence a point of highlight, and the game’s developer, Striking Distance Studios, does not want to make changes to said content to secure a CERO rating. The company has vowed that Japan pre-orders will be refunded. CERO’s standards have grown increasingly stricter over the years, impacting game releases in order to produce region-specific copies of titles like Cyberpunk 2077, The Last of Us, and Resident Evil.
After accusations against PQube for exploitative behavior, Toge Productions and Mojiken Studio’s A Space for the Unbound was successfully able to find a new publisher under amicable terms. The game’s developers accused their former publisher of withholding grant money to leverage and increase their own revenue.
Following the outcome of a a slow, internal takeover that pushed out the original core team behind Disco Elysium, Robert Kurvitz, one of the co-founders of the original ZA/UM collective, is attempting to file a lawsuit against ZA/UM the game studio. This information was discovered on public Estonian court records, accompanied with the scheduling of a hearing date in late November.
The Communications Workers of America have officially filed unfair labor practices charges against Activision Blizzard due to threatening, anti-union messages made by executive Lulu Cheng Meservey via Slack. Meservey was recently hired with a wave of new employees in attempts to bring more women onto executive positions into the company, but has been quickly critiqued based on her prior working for Substack.
Meta’s Reality Labs is steadily hemorrhaging billions of dollars. The company’s latest third quarter financial report show that profits are also continuing to shrink since their foray into exploring VR, while Horizon Worlds, their proprietary virtual space, is attracting less than 200 thousand monthly active users. Meta’s own stock shares has plummeted at its lowest in the last four years.
Capcom’s latest financial reports confirms that Street Fighter 6 will likely not see a release until 2023 next year. The Resident Evil 4 Remake is also slated to be released around that same time.
CD Projeckt Red will be remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5. It is confirmed that this is the same project that was publicly teased under the code name, “Canis Majoris”.
And the wait is over.
Blaseball is back.
