"The closure of any team is hard obviously on the individuals there, hard on the team," Spencer said. "I haven't been talking publicly about this, because right now is the time for us to focus on the team and the individuals. It's obviously a decision that's very hard on them, and I want to make sure through severance and other things that we're doing the right thing for the individuals on the team. It's not about my PR, it's not about Xbox PR. It's about those teams.

"In the end, I've said over and over, I have to run a sustainable business inside the company and grow, and that means sometimes I have to make hard decisions that frankly are not decisions I love, but decisions that somebody needs to go make.

"We will continue to go forward. We will continue to invest in what we're trying to go do in Xbox and build the best business we can, which ensures we can continue to do shows like the one we just did."

If you're a developer working for Xbox, what can you do to secure your job?

The platform holder has repeated the same terrible mistakes for over a decade. The reason is simple: its priorities are back-to-front.

Xbox is offering voluntary severance agreements to producers, quality assurance testers and other staff at ZeniMax as part of a broader cost-cutting initiative

Microsoft has released its latest financial results, showing significant growth in gaming revenues — thanks in no small part to the acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

However, Xbox hardware sales continue to decline and saw the steepest drop since the Xbox Series X and S launched in 2020, down 31% year-on-year.

This is a fascinating deep dive into the development of the game, with many people involved giving interviews. Instead of being in a long development hell, Lionhead knocked out the game in a stunning 18 months - which made Microsoft happy, but resulted in the cutting of a ton of content.

> Crucially, the creator allows players to make modifications that aren't always possible in other RPGs, letting them modify a characters genitals (choosing between preset options), identity (male, female, non-binary/other), and voice. [Lead character artist Alena] Dubrovina says including those options was about giving players the ability to create characters that, while grounded in the lore of Dungeons & Dragons, are "relevant today."

> "Gender is not defined by your body, genitals or your voice in our game, we want everyone to be who they want to be and build their own unique identity. If you want to play as a bearded non-binary dwarf with a masculine voice and green hair, why not?

"What's more frustrating for those working on SCP, and the wider Starfield modding community, is how difficult it is to work with Starfield's code without official modding tools and support. This isn't helped by the delayed mod tools from Bethesda, which the company says are coming at some point next year."

The effort to squash unlicensed controllers hurts plenty of paying customers, and might not even achieve its goals

2.5m copies shifted on first day

"Assuming Arkane will continue development, clearly there are many areas for technical improvement, with some annoying visual glitches, oversights and outright bugs remaining in the updated code. I'm not sure that any amount of patching will make Redfall a truly good game, but Arkane has at least delivered the performance level it should have delivered at launch."

There are some great stories from legendary program Giles Goddard (Star Fox, 1080 Snowboarding) in this piece.

> He remembers one time that he blew up a power supply in a new development PC, because he plugged it in at the wrong voltage. And Miyamoto noticed. "And Miyamoto got really angry and said, 'You need to go and apologise to blah-blah-blah now.'" But Goddard had other ideas.

> Quick as a flash, he went to his desk and swapped the fried power supply for his computer's, and then - as if making a sudden, surprise discovery - announced, "Actually no it's fine - it's not broken." And it worked: Miyamoto was calmed. "But I did actually break it," Goddard tells me. "I just fixed it before he found out."

—-

> The SGI Indy had a bonus feature Goddard was excited about too: a webcam. I know that doesn't sound exciting now, but back then, webcams were new, so Goddard started experimenting with it. He put ping pong balls on his face, because the camera picked them up well, and ended up creating a mo-capped facial animation prototype. He was impressed. Miyamoto was impressed. So much so, Miyamoto announced, "Well let's try and get a Mario face into that."

> So, Nintendo did. Yoshiaki Koizumi took the prototype and added "bones and everything" for Goddard to use. "Then I just skinned all the polygons together - skinning was a new thing as well - and I got it all spongy, and then we just iterated on that to see what was fun." And that's how the famous N64 Mario face - the one you can pull around at the beginning of Mario 64 - came to be.

> While Elon's then-partner Grimes was recording her part in the game as cyborg popstar Lizzy Wizzy, the erratic tech billionaire turned up with an antique firearm to "insist" on being included in the game. "The studio guys were like sweating," Grimes is quoted as saying. Musk adds "I told them that I was armed but not dangerous".

> Apparently, the developers relented at the time, though it's unclear if Musk did actually get the cameo in the end.

> Starbreeze insists it is "working hard" to keep servers online after Payday 3 players endured a second consecutive evening of disruption.

> After a three-day early access period for some players, Payday 3 released on 21st September, but players have struggled to get online at peak times due to continuing server issues that have shutdown matchmaking, making it impossible to play the always-online heist shooter.