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Some of the biggest games of the year are getting new difficulty options. Some of the biggest companies would kindly like their workers to quietly leave. Welcome to another edition of Morning Checkpoint, Kotaku‘s daily round-up of gaming news and culture. This Lego arcade is one of my favorite new proposed fan sets. It would go perfectly in that giant Lego city I have no time or money for building in my attic.
Krafton will let developers voluntarily resign as it doubles down on AI
The PUBG and Subnautica 2 publisher will allow employees based in South Korea to be part of a new voluntary resignation program that gives anywhere from six months to three years of severance, Business Korea reports. Krafton says the plan isn’t aimed at sneaking through “soft” layoffs, but is “to support members in proactively designing their growth direction and embarking on new challenges both inside and outside the company amid the era of AI transformation,” according to a translation by Automaton.
The news comes after Krafton committed $70 million in investment for GPU clusters to drive its agentic AI transformation and as fellow South Korea publisher Nexon suggested adopting generative AI technology is a matter of survival.
220 GTA 6 devs signed a letter blasting the firing of 31 colleagues
The IGWB trade union group in the UK announced on Thursday that the letter was delivered to Rockstar management. It accused the company of union busting and demanded the reinstatement of the previously fired developers. French union STJV is planning a protest in front of Take-Two France on Friday.
“It’s heartwarming to see so many of our colleagues supporting us and holding management to account—during a period where Rockstar want us to feel scared, my brave former colleagues are marching straight up to our boss’s door and demanding our voices are heard and not backing down,” one of the fired employees said in a statement. “It’s clear to everyone close to this situation that this is a blatant, unapologetic act of vicious union busting. Rockstar employs so many talented game developers, all of whom are crucial to making the games we put out.”
Could GTA 6‘s delay also delay the launch of the PS6?
That’s the thought experiment one recently analyst proposed. “We are currently forecasting a next-gen PlayStation and Xbox to arrive in late 2027–but might the console companies be tempted to get more from the current console generation by riding the GTA 6 wave and waiting until 2028?” Ampere Analysis research director Piers Harding-Rolls posed the idea to GamesIndustry.biz. “The fact that games are now cross-gen makes this less of a factor, perhaps, but such is the size of the GTA franchise, the launch timing will get all areas of the games business thinking about their product strategies.”
The idea here is that GTA 6 will lead to a spike in new console sales that will dramatically increase the current-gen install base. If that peak doesn’t come until early 2027, console makers might have an incentive to wait a bit before pushing out their next hardware release. But as Harding-Rolls also points out, backwards compatibility makes that less of an issue these days.
Silent Hill f just got a new easy mode
Patch 1.10 added a “casual” difficulty for players who are tired of messing around with the Souls-y action combat and just want to experience the world and story. It also fixes bugs on PC and makes the New Game + experience much more brisk.
Steam hit Clover Pit, meanwhile, is getting a new hard mode
A new update celebrating 1 million sales adds a new difficulty that features double the deadline amount. These are the horror slot machine game‘s equivalent of Balatro‘s blinds. The full 1.2 patch notes list tons of other tweaks, balance changes, and bug fixes.
