The Perfect Dark developer is hemorrhaging staff and Disney employees are up in arms.
A new day, a new batch of news to bring to you, including the worrying story that Perfect Dark developer The Initiative has lost almost half of its entire staff over the past year. We’ve also got updates on Disney’s controversial backing of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, as well as some pretty impressive sales figures for the new Uncharted movie. That and more if you read on.
We don’t know much about Perfect Dark at the moment, but it turns out neither does the game’s developer either. A report today suggested that The Initiative is experiencing an extremely high turnover of staff as development on the title has allegedly hit more than a few bumps. This includes a large majority of the developer’s senior staff, and there are also reports that Crystal Dynamic’s involvement in the project resulted in a soft reboot, pushing the game back even more. Hopefully, the devs leaving the studio find a more stable project to work on.
Disney’s recent support of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill that will make it illegal for teachers to discuss gender identity and sexual orientation in classrooms has caused an uproar over the past few days. None are more appalled by Disney’s action than their own employees who are now planning several walkouts in Florida to protest the company’s actions. The group is demanding that Disney halts all donations to political figures that support the bill and want reassurance that it will prevent any more harmful legislation from affecting the lives of young gay people. Here’s hoping they get what they want.
In completely predictable but nevertheless depressing news, a new study revealed today that the majority of women disguise their gender online to avoid harassment. When 2,000 women were asked about their gaming habits, 73 percent revealed that they disguise their gender, with 93 percent of those explaining that the reason they do so is to avoid sexual harassment when playing online. The same research also showed that only one in five women feel comfortable using voice chat, while almost 20 percent admit they’ve had to stop playing specific games as a result of said harassment.
In much lighter news now, and the Uncharted movie starring Tom Holland has performed rather well for Sony, having now passed the $300 million mark. This now makes it one of the best performing video-game movie adaptations of all time and Uncharted is close to surpassing the first Sonic the Hedgehog movie which made $316 million globally. With this film’s success, it seems more likely that Sony will be looking to its cavernous vault of franchises to see what else could potentially make its debut on the silver screen.
Finally, we have the slightly unfortunate news that EA's traditional EA Play showcase has been canceled as games “aren’t lining up” for one big show. The publisher has several games rumored to be in development, but it likely won’t be awhile until we hear about them. We could see an EA title show up at Geoff Keighley’s Opening Night Live Event this summer, but the publisher has made it clear that it will only show off games when they’re ready. Fingers crossed we see a Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order sequel announced soon then.
NetEase called it a bug, but others called it a feature.
Joshua Robertson is a News Writer for TheGamer, based in Barnsley, England. When not playing or writing about Pokemon, Yakuza, or Fallout, he can usually be found spending too much time on Twitter @JoshRobertson97.
