Microsoft has begun carrying out yet another round of mass layoffs, as if the multiple rounds over the last few years hadn’t been enough. This latest round of firings will target as much as 4 percent of the company’s total staff, and has impacted its gaming division. Microsoft previously laid off more than 6,000 employees in May and June of this year, 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees in January 2024, and more a few months later, leading to the closures of Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks. Another 650 Xbox employees were cut in September 2024.
News of more layoffs will likely continue to emerge over the next few days, but we know that Rare’s Everwild and an MMO from ZeniMax online have been cancelled. The studio behind the now-cancelled Perfect Dark reboot, The Initiative, has been closed, and Blizzard and Forza developer Turn 10 have also been affected.
The most painful of these cancellations for me is the Perfect Dark reboot. Many of the cancelled games were unannounced or known to be struggling in the development process, but Perfect Dark seemed to be shaping up well in time for launch in the next few years. We even saw a gameplay trailer just last year. What happened?
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Gameplay Trailers Are Supposed To Show An Actual Game
It’s pretty easy to be cynical about game showcases nowadays. Short concept trailers for games are more to aid in recruiting developers to a new project – that’s why we haven’t seen anything from games like Quantic Dream’s Star Wars: Eclipse or Telltale’s The Wolf Among Us 2 since they were first announced. This is fairly common practice, if quite annoying, but gamers have come to understand that a concept trailer for a game is far from confirmation that the game will ever be launched, especially in an industry where cancellations are becoming increasingly common.
But gameplay trailers, usually, are solid indications that a game is far along enough in development that a studio believes it’ll impress players. In theory, they declare to players that a game is real and tangible, because it’s playable. Things are solidified enough that gameplay systems work, and work well. It’s definitive proof of life.
Perfect Dark didn’t just have a gameplay trailer, it had a damn good one. I wrote at the time that the gameplay looked so polished that it wouldn’t be too long before we had a chance to play it for ourselves. It was the standout of Xbox’s showcase, one of the few games that I saw for the first time and was immediately excited to play. It looks incredible, and we’ll never get to play it.
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If Gameplay Trailers Aren’t Real, What Is?
What’s especially perplexing about this trailer is that Kotaku reporter Ethan Gach was told that the gameplay trailer was “basically fake” when it was first showcased. I’m struggling to understand how this could be the case – a note in the trailer said that it was made of in-game cinematics and gameplay – but Gach is a reliable reporter, and I’m inclined to believe he wouldn’t have made this comment if his source wasn’t trustworthy. When asked to clarify, Gach said in a follow-up post that the trailer was “not indicative of the level of progress perceived to have been made on the game”.
Adam McDonald, a former level designer at The Initiative, has refuted that the whole trailer was fake. The demo was “actually in-engine”, and while “there’s some fake stuff in it”, “we were rapidly making real design decisions so as to not knowingly lie to players about what the game will be”.
According to McDonald, the gameplay systems worked “just enough” to look good in the trailer. The frenetic, butter smooth parkour was real, and the “hacking/deception is mostly real”. The combat was real in the sense that it was captured in-engine, but it only played well if done so in a specific way. It seems that while “basically fake” was likely an overstatement, Gach was still right in that the game was not as polished as its gameplay reveal made it look.
I understand that trailers are just marketing, made specifically for games to look good and fun. Though the circumstances were very different, famously, the Killzone 2 reveal trailer caused massive controversy because its trailer wasn’t actually filmed in-engine. Guerrilla game director Jan-Bart van Beek told the official UK PlayStation site that the trailer was “basically a representation of the look and feel of the game we’re trying to make”. We’ve seen cases like this throughout gaming history. There’s even a name for it: bullshots.
To be perfectly clear, this isn’t what happened with Perfect Dark. The trailer wasn’t fake, but its contents were futzed to project an ideal instead of the reality of the project’s completeness. All this begs the question: if after all this time, we still can’t trust gameplay trailers to be representative of the state a game is actually in, what can we trust?
What we saw seems to be what Perfect Dark was meant to be, not what it actually was. Is this, at its core, false advertising? And don’t studios have an ethical duty to consumers to advertise their games truthfully?
