The Main Events Over the Weekend (September 21-22)

MENACE

• Former IGN editor Colin Moriarty announced on the podcast Sacred Symbols: A PlayStation Podcast that the creation of the failed shooter Concord cost $400 million. According to him, Sony envisioned the game as the "future of PlayStation" with potential comparable to the "Star Wars" franchise. However, the development of Concord allegedly took place in an atmosphere of so-called toxic positivity, where criticism of the project was simply ignored. It's worth noting that several gaming journalists have urged skepticism towards Moriarty's claims about Concord's massive budget. In particular, Tom Warren from The Verge and Christopher Dring from GamesIndustry criticized his information.
• IGN spoke with its sources and published a detailed article attempting to answer why all employees recently left Annapurna Interactive. In short: the reason was disagreements with the management of the parent company, Annapurna Pictures. It's reported that the situation at the publishing house started to deteriorate in March 2024, triggered by the decision of Annapurna Pictures founder Megan Ellison to pay more attention to the business. At that time, the chief administrative manager James Masi was abruptly dismissed, and Nathan Gary, the president of Annapurna Pictures, was transferred to head Annapurna Interactive; Gary soon left the company as well. The dismissals of Masi and Gary caused employee dissatisfaction, so Ellison reinstated former workers and began negotiations with Gary about launching another gaming division. It was expected that in the coming months, Gary and his team would move to a new Annapurna Pictures-owned company called Verset, which would handle all of Annapurna Interactive's existing projects. Early in the summer, it was revealed that Hector Sanchez, a co-founder of the publishing house who left in 2019, had quietly returned to Annapurna Interactive — Ellison reportedly appointed him to lead games without the knowledge of other employees. He was responsible for a deal with Remedy Entertainment, which Annapurna Interactive staff learned about only on the day of the announcement. Over time, Sanchez was supposed to head work on AA and AAA games as well as transmedia projects, while Verset would focus on indie titles. In recent months, Ellison increasingly interfered with Annapurna Interactive's deals, projects, and budgets, which many on the publishing team disliked. In August, negotiations about creating Verset reached a dead end and were terminated, leading to the Annapurna Interactive team's departure from the company.
• In a conversation with the portal Game Developer, KRAFTON CEO Changhan Kim stated that The Callisto Protocol performed below expectations due to unoriginal gameplay. In his view, KRAFTON should have allowed the creators of The Callisto Protocol to experiment more at the early stages of development, and the result might have been very different. Regardless of how visually polished a project is, success is hard to achieve without innovation, Kim admitted.
• Steam continues to set records in online users. On the evening of September 22, the number of concurrent users reached 38.36 million for the first time in the platform's history, with 12.27 million people actively playing games at that moment.
• Publisher Hooded Horse announced that the futuristic turn-based tactic game MENACE was added to the wishlist by over 250,000 people. The game is being developed by Overhype Studios, known for Battle Brothers, and is set to release by the end of the year on PC.