Games

Day of the Devs 2024 – some of our favourite games from the big indie showcase

Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest showcase might have all the glitz, glamour, and triple-A brand recognition, but you can always rely on Day of the Devs to follow things up with a cracking indie-focused showcase of its own. And its latest smorgasbord of fresh looks and reveals – which aired immediately after Geoff’s offering – was no exception, featuring everything from surreal Orwellian dystopias to adorable time loop adventures, as well as new games from the studios behind Haven, Grindstone, Cozy Grove, Road 96, and more. Oh, and Spelunky studio Mossmouth’s long-awaited UFO 50 got a release date too.

Day of the Devs managed to pack in a lot over its hour-long runtime, but to help ease you into the festivities we’ve pulled out some of our favourites from tonight’s show below. And if you want the full, unexpurgated experience – including a lot more developer insight on each game – just point your browser toward the complete stream.

The latest project from Haven and Furi studio The Game Bakers, Cairn is another entry in the burgeoning rock-climbing genre. Unlike the daffy physics-based flinging of Surmount or the streamlined fantasy of Jusant, however, Cairn – described as a “survival-climber” – is leaning harder on realism for a rather more terrifying ascent. Players, in the role of story protagonist Aava, can climb the mountain freely as they try and uncover its history and hidden treasures, reading the rock face to determine their route and using their pitons and equipment wisely. And as the altitude becomes more unforgiving, they’ll need to forage for food and water, or set up a bivouac. Cairn is due to launch for PC and consoles sometime next year.

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Xbox’s Phil Spencer Reflects On Recent Mass Layoffs

Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer has defended and explained Microsoft’s recent decision to lay off 1,900 people from the Xbox division. He told Polygon that Xbox is a business, and like many other businesses, Spencer’s job is to make profits. Sometimes that means laying people off now to grow in the future, he said.”I don’t get any luxury of not having to run a profitable growing business inside of Microsoft. And we are that today. But just across the industry… I reflect on friends of mine in the industry that have been displaced and lost their jobs and how just, I don’t want this industry to be a place where people can’t, with confidence, build a career,” he said.Spencer went on to say the video game industry is projected to be “smaller” in 2025 in terms of players and dollars spent. Big publicly traded companies need to make moves that give investors confidence that profits are coming, and that can mean cutting jobs to get there.”You get a lot of publicly traded companies that are in the industry that have to show their investors growth–because why else does somebody own a share of someone’s stock if it’s not going to grow?–the side of the business that then gets scrutinized is the cost side. Because if you’re not going to grow the revenue side, then the cost side becomes challenged,” he said.Layoffs at Xbox are “really an outcome of an industry that’s not growing,” Spencer said. He went on to say he sees better days ahead.”It can grow and it will grow again. But you see this time right now and the implications have human impact. And we should all reflect on that and think about it,” he said.The 1,900 layoffs at Xbox came not long after Microsoft and Activision Blizzard merged. Spencer previously said Xbox identified areas of “overlap” after the buyout.It’s not just Xbox that’s cutting jobs in the video game industry. 2024 has seen more than 8,000 video game industry layoffs by some accounting, including cuts at PlayStation and mass layoffs at Supermassive. Twitch, meanwhile, laid off 500 people, while Riot laid off around that number as well.For more, check out GameSpot’s feature, “Video Game Industry Layoffs Are Worse Than Ever. How Did We Get Here?”