Layoffs and resistance

This week, Letter to a Gamer returns to normal with an important announcement: together with colleagues Francesco Lombardo and Cecilia Ciocchetti, I've launched the [REDACTED] podcast (placeholder name), where each week we discuss the most important gaming and esports news. The format is relaxed, informative, and spontaneous, for those seeking a more entertainment-focused experience in gaming and sports journalism. You can find the first episode (we're still experimenting with the format and pacing, so please bear with us) below.

News index

+ Ubisoft lays off 105 people at Red Storm, the Rainbow Six studio
- Pearl Abyss loses 30% on the stock market because of Metacritic
+ An indie studio refuses Microsoft's money because it's joining the No Games for Genocide boycott
- VR gaming takes another blow from Metacritic
+ Niantic has put all of Pokémon GO's geolocation data to "good" use
- Arc Raiders' AI voices are being replaced with real actors

Ubisoft has laid off 105 employees from Red Storm Entertainment, the studio that created the video games based on Tom Clancy's universes - Now, the historic studio that created Rainbow Six Siege and Ghost Recon, will cease development of its own games to focus on technical support for the French studio's other productions. This is just the latest wave of layoffs to hit Red Storm: significant staff reductions occurred in both 2024 and 2025, and two of the projects the team was working on were canceled in 2022 and 2024, respectively.

Pearl Abyss's stock price dropped 30% because of Metacritic - Just hours after the release of the ratings for Crimson Desert, the massive open-world action RPG that's been in development for several years, some investors sold off their shares en masse. Pearl Abyss (famous for the MMO Black Desert Online) lost 30% on the Korean stock market because the game isn't a masterpiece: its Metacritic average sits at 8, a more than respectable score, but clearly not enough to guarantee a sufficient return for shareholders. This week's analysis is dedicated to this news.

An indie studio has refused Microsoft's money because it's joining the No Games for Genocide boycott - Independent studio Speculative Agency has terminated its contract with Xbox and Microsoft and returned all funding received from the company for its debut title, All Will Rise. The decision came after the studio joined the No Games for Genocide boycott, which targets Microsoft for providing cloud services to the Israeli military. "Companies like Microsoft may seem incredibly large and unmovable, but they're not. They depend on our work, our creativity, and our goodwill to continue operating". All Will Rise, as stated on its Kickstarter page, is set in an "alternate version of Kerala, India, and is a narrative adventure about a lawyer fighting for land rights as she and her team take a corrupt billionaire to court for the murder of a river".

VR gaming takes another blow from Meta - The virtual reality component of Horizon Worlds, Mark Zuckerberg's "metaverse," is about to shut down. The platform will continue to be available on mobile devices but will be removed from the Quest Store on March 31, 2026. VR Worlds, however, will be permanently deactivated in June. Meta's Reality Labs division reported a loss of $19.2 billion in 2025, with the layoff of over 1,000 employees in January. This is a devastating blow to the entire VR gaming industry, which can only hope for a renaissance thanks to Valve's new peripheral (the Steam Frame), currently in limbo due to the RAM apocalypse.

Niantic has put all of Pokémon GO's geolocation data to "good" use - Niantic Spatial has used a decade's worth of Pokémon Go images to develop a highly accurate GPS model. The Niantic spinoff is working on this project in collaboration with Coco Robots, a startup specializing in home delivery robots, to improve performance in areas with weak GPS signals. They don't even seem to try to avoid sounding extremely evil: "We know where you are to within a few centimeters, and most importantly, where you're looking." Am I the only one who thinks it's extremely unlikely that such a precise data set will be exploited "only" by a home delivery company?

Arc Raiders' AI voices are being replaced with real actors - Patrick Söderlund, CEO of Embark Studios, said in an interview that the development studio replaced some of Arc Raiders' controversial AI-generated voices with human ones after the game's launch. Although Arc Raiders was met with widespread critical acclaim, the use of AI-generated voices has been controversial among both critics and players. "We don't necessarily believe that it's always appropriate to replace humans with AI," Söderlund said. "There's a difference in quality. A real professional actor is better than an AI; that's just the way it is."

What to play this weekend

The answer is Marathon yet again

My obsession with Marathon continues: this week I've basically only played Bungie's new extraction shooter (and one other game I can't say anything about), and this weekend the full endgame is arriving in the form of a competitive mode and Cryo Archive, the Destiny-like raid map. To access them, you must be at least level 25, have a loadout worth at least 5,000 credits, have a pre-built team of three, and have unlocked all factions.

Marathon is unforgiving, and you'll die a lot in these activities, which is why they'll only be available on weekends (from Friday at 6 PM to Monday at 6 PM), and game director Joe Ziegler explains the reason in detail in a post on X. I'm leaving the full text below because this type of communication is a first for Bungie, which is receiving tons of praise and feedback from the community. This is how you run a live service video game in 2026.

Joe Ziegler wrote on X (il vecchio Twitter): "Cryo and Ranked are coming and wanted to take some time to explain some of the initial decisions we've made around Cryo and Ranked with regards to weekend scheduling. So without further ado, here's what we have been thinking:

We are of course always iterating and are open to looking at other options in the future, but the Ranked/Cryo Archive weekend decision is really built around three points:

- Preparing: We acknowledge that players will lose a lot of gear on Cryo and Ranked because it is intended to challenge you to your limits. As a result of that, it's important that Cryo and Ranked feel like an event you can schedule towards, grind gear up to do, etc. The loop of spend time grinding gear to spend it in Cryo or Ranked is reflected in this choice as a weekly cycle.
- Economy Talk: We have some great rewards on Cryo that kind of break the bank when it comes to economy and power gain. If we were to look at having it open all the time, we'd probably have to adjust how frequently you can earn these rewards so that we don't flood the game with amazing loot all of a sudden.
- Logistics Time: Cryo and Ranked both have entry requirements (gear ante) that are built around the idea of you matching with other players on an equal investment level. They also both have a high level requirement to ensure you've experienced enough of the game to understand the challenges inherent to the game. This inherently makes the amount of people in that queue at any time unpredictable. Both of these experiences also need a consistent flow of players in the queue to make sure matches are full to retain the challenge. To reduce the match times and allow players to find matches quicker, making it a scheduled event means more players will show up during that window and feed the queue pool better.

We also acknowledge that there are likely some who cannot participate on the weekend or are excited about the experience and want to no-life it for weeks, and we appreciate that. We'll be looking into what we can do to retain these considerations and potentially accommodate this in the future.

Marathon is an evolving game and part of evolving is seeing how this initial launch plays out and adjusting as we go. Thanks for the feedback, keep it coming and we'll update you when we figure out the next evolution".

World of Warcraft Midnight: review in progress

After testing a little of everything the game has to offer, here's a review in progress to see if it's worth your time.

Midnight is a point of no return for World of Warcraft. The second expansion in the World Soul cycle has housing (customizable homes for players) as its main selling point, that feature that every MMO except WoW has implemented.

Houses and neighborhoods have been available since February, and we've already seen a myriad of creations, extravagances, and a rush for the latest accessories. What was a game-changer for me was the way this feature managed to bring back to relevance many areas and activities that had completely lost their meaning and importance.

And I'm not alone; thousands of people are posting on various Discord servers eager to return to old raids, dungeons, and side quests to earn one of the many (over 2,000) new customizations for their homes. Then there are the neighborhood dynamics, the guild challenges, the community-created minigames, and that sense of vitality that the feature seems to have brought back to Blizzard's twenty-year-old MMO.

Like this very review, every discussion surrounding Midnight begins with housing, and when we will look back at the annals of this video game, it's almost a certainty that this expansion will be remembered as "the one that finally gave all of us a home". You may not know that, along with housing, a new story and a myriad of new things to do arrived in WoW.

If The War Within got off to a strong start but then stalled during its updates, Midnight has an even better initial momentum in the form of the charming but predictable Xal'atath the Harbinger. Only the coming months will tell us whether this momentum was enough to deliver a memorable adventure or whether we're instead facing another flash blaze destined to fizzle out.

The antagonist is accompanied by stories and locations from the Blood Elves, whose return gives Blizzard the impetus to continue delving into Azeroth's mythology and folklore to produce stories capable of surprising those who have been playing the same MMO for 20 years.

The main content (three story arcs, eight dungeons, and a raid) entertained me by being a slightly different take on doing almost the same things in previous years. Despite Blizzard's reworks of classes and balance changes, the formula remains unchanged, and I'm happy with that.

The developers have found a way for their MMO to be what works for both the industry and the players, who, especially since the post-pandemic boom, want a certain set of things from WoW that the developers can only twist and innovate to a certain extent.

There are MMOs that would do anything to finally have an answer to the question, "What do our players want?" Blizzard knows this and will continue to give its users what they ask for, with the occasional shuffle to avoid being accused of copying and pasting.

If an 8 isn't enough, we're screwed

An analysis of Pearl Abyss' 30% stock price loss after making a "good" rather than "extraordinary" play.

First the facts: Crimson Desert, Pearl Abyss's action RPG with a massive open world, has a Metacritic average of 78 as of this writing. This score is the average of 89 reviews collected by the aggregator, written by outlets the site considers authoritative.

Also at the time of writing, Pearl Abyss Corp.'s stock price has dropped by approximately 29.88%, from 65,600 KRW (South Korean won) to 46,000. The two events at the heart of this analysis occurred less than 12 hours apart.

It's logical to assume a correlation between the two, if not a contractual clause, and that's a great shame for the entirety of the video game industry.

Two related cases immediately caught my eye: Highguard and Splitgate 2. The former lost all its funding (and was forced to close) because Tencent, the Chinese gaming giant that paid for it, saw player numbers decline during the first week of its launch and decided to cut its losses after years of development.

The executives of the latter said they could "ignore short-term player numbers because they're funded venture capital-style". All these indicators lead me to hypothesize a gradual transformation of video games from cultural products (still designed to generate profit) to investment products.

Venture capital works like this: those with money to invest can afford to burn some of it on projects that are in their infancy or aren't entirely viable because they know that in their portfolio of 10 bets, at least one will return 100 times their investment, covering the losses of all the others.

Whoever manages to develop a game that sells millions of copies makes a lot of money, but since they're artistic products, it's difficult to create the perfect title on paper. Crimson Desert seems designed to be a must-have: it's the biggest, most comprehensive, and most technically advanced open world on the market, and given the years and tens of thousands of hours of work invested, it manages to be a good game, but not the must-play masterpiece its backers expected.

And now, promises weren't followed up with results, metrics weren't met, and the money is gone. All this, may I remind you, when the game has been out for less than a day and has already sold 2 million copies. Crimson Desert isn't a failure, it's not a bad game, and it will find its audience, but if failing to reach an 8 on Metacritic is enough to scare away investors, it means something in the critical and studio funding mechanisms is broken.

In the next letter, prepare for a new analysis that explains in detail why I think ratings are useless and harmful to the industry.

Thank you for reading the return of Letter to a Gamer. It's only thanks to your support that this newsletter can remain independent, free from advertising, sponsorship, and any other influence beyond the relationship between you and me. If you haven't already, you can join the Telegram group to ask questions, suggest titles for review, and discuss with other enthusiasts. If you love Letter to a Gamer and want to help, you can share this link with your friends and gaming buddies and follow the newsletter on social media (Instagram, Bluesky, TikTok).

See you at the next Letter
Riccardo "Tropic" Lichene