45 employees have been let go by Ubisoft, according to Bloomberg. The outlet reports the reductions were spread across US offices located in Cary, North Carolina and San Francisco, CA. A Ubisoft spokesperson said the cuts were made to “align [their] organizations with future business and development objectives.” Ubisoft’s Cary team (typically known as Red Storm Entertainment) was the lead developer on several Tom Clancy titles over the years. More recently, it released Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR and canceled The Division Heartland.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’s release is bringing change to the larger franchise by letting players dictate what they download from the games. In a new blog on the series’ website, the developers revealed players will be able to remove Call of Duty: Warzone from the download of yearly entries. This change will go into effect next Wednesday, August 21. Previous Call of Duty games have become infamous for their large file sizes at launch, which grow further during their individual lifecycles.

Mad Crusader will spend the next two years investing $30 million in double-A games, the transmedia company revealed. Spread across four investment rounds, the money will go specifically toward concepts made by the first 10 graduates from its World Builders incubation program. The funding will help those concepts grow into “commercial products with franchise potential.” In other words, if a developer thinks its project has what it takes to grow beyond games, as so many others have done recently, Mad Crusader wants to help get it off the ground.

Newsletter platform and indie advocate Pantaloon is paying it forward to other indie studios with a free platform to help those interested in self-publishing. The titular hub includes brand plans and guidelines, templates for press releases and pitch decks, and a campaign roadmap. Per Pantaloon, the hub will be updated with new resources on a monthly basis. Indie teams have been no stranger to helping each other, but that typically takes the form of a publishing label for teams in a similar position.

Hybrid developer/publisher Reforged Studios has acquired UK studios Ground Shatter and Extra Mile (or EM Studios) for an undisclosed fee. Reforged, which started up in 2023, touts itself as a studio that acquires other teams to assist them with their games. Per the website, this “helps grow their success in a sustainable way that avoids the ‘boom & bust’ cycles devs often face on their own.” Ground Shatter is best known for Fights in Tight Spaces, and Extra Mile as the co-developer on Revolution Software’s Broken Sword series.

Music by Mike Meehan. Produced by Jordan Mallory. It may only take a week to hold the annual Game Developer Conference in San Francisco every spring, but the actual work of planning, orchestrating, and marketing the convention is a year-round process. It’s a job performed by far fewer people than you might think, and is one that requires a lot of spreadsheets, even more Post-It notes, and as many hours as it takes to sort through literally hundreds of panel submissions.