Welcome back to another quick roundup of MMO and MMO-adjacent industry news! Though this round of news is much more in the “MMO-adjacent’ bucket than not. Still, the business headlines do be a-flowin’.
Ubisoft executives face prison time: The trial in France for former chief creative officer Serge Hascoet, former VP of editorial and creative services Tommy Francois, and former game designer and director Guillaume Patrux that began this past March has now resulted in guilty verdicts for all three men, albeit with suspended sentences. According to reporting from Libération, Francois faces a three-year prison sentence and a €30,000 fine, Hascoet is jailed for 18 months and must pay €45,000, and Patrux will serve a 10-month prison sentence and face a €10,000 fine.
Stop Killing Games hits 1M signatures: It was looking like the Stop Killing Games initiative being spearheaded by YouTuber Ross Scott was going to fall well short of the 1M signatures it needed for an EU petition to get governments to act. Apparently that is no longer the case, as Scott confirmed it hit its target, although he’s suspicious that most of those aren’t all real people. He’s also directing those who aren’t sure if they signed the initiative to reach out to an official spokesperson. He also confirmed in a recent video that the UK government petition has cleared 100K signatures.
Battlefield’s development and gaming’s recession fears: Finally, we’ve got a couple of articles that cast some worrying light across modern AAA gaming. There’s a lengthy report from Ars Technica about the development for the next Battlefield game, which talks about ballooning production costs, work culture clashes between DICE Sweden and its American leadership, and sky-high expectations, all of which are framed as a microcosm of the wider problems with modern AAA games development, while an op-ed from GamesIndustry argues that a recession for games spending is possibly on the rise as sentiment among gamers that new titles, new PC components, and new consoles costing too much has reached what’s termed as a fever pitch.
