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Cardy, Matt, and Emma have been playing Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Do they like it? Listen to find out. They’ve also been tinkering with the PS5 Pro, as well as watching the enjoyable Paddington in Peru and touching The Remarkable Life of Ibelin. There’s also time for a bit of Pokemon TCG Pocket, Black Ops 6, and Play-Doh chat. Lovely.
Remember to send us your thoughts about all the new games, TV shows, and films you’re enjoying or looking forward to: ign_ukfeedback@ign.com.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 launched day one on Game Pass — the first Call of Duty game to do so following Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
It was a big gamble for Microsoft, with some analysts predicting a significant decline in game sales, particularly on Xbox, as a result. But in its recent financial report, Microsoft sounded delighted with Black Ops 6’s early days performance, saying sales on PlayStation and PC were 60% higher compared to the 2023 release of Modern Warfare 3.
All eyes were on Black Ops 6’s impact on Game Pass, though. Growth in Microsoft’s subscription service has stalled in recent years, and the day one release of the latest entry in Activision’s phenomenally successful first-person shooter series was seen as a make or break moment for Game Pass.
Microsoft has yet to say exactly how many new subscribers Black Ops 6 brought through the door, although CEO Satya Nadella has confirmed that Game Pass set a record for new subs on launch day.
In an interview with the BBC, Treyarch associate creative director Miles Leslie, who has worked on Call of Duty for 16 years, said Black Ops 6’s release on Game Pass has helped convince players who were “on the fence” to give the game a shot.
“What we’ve seen is it’s allowed people that might have been on the fence, might have had some of that friction, might have been like, ‘I haven’t played in a while’ to actually come back and try the game,” he said.
That will be music to Microsoft’s ears, given it’s desperate to expand the Call of Duty audience in the long term. Analysts have suggested the company was willing to sacrifice Black Ops 6 launch sales on Xbox for a potential bigger overall player base, which it intends to monetize long-term with the release of battle passes and cosmetics.
“We’ve gotten to the point now where Black Ops and Call of Duty have been around so long – I’ve been working on it for 16 years,” Leslie added. “And really the challenge for us is how do you bring along the fans that love Call of Duty, but how do you create an environment where you can welcome new fans in?”
The trick now of course is to convince Game Pass players to stick around and keep paying that monthly subscription. To that end, Black Ops 6 Season 1 kicks off on November 14, and we’ve got all the details. Of course, this time next year fans will have another premium Call of Duty game to contend with, rumored to be a sequel to Black Ops 2.
Taking on Zombies mode? We’ve got Essential Zombies Tips and Tricks to help you get started, plus a guide on How to Exfil. Both Zombies maps are full of easter eggs and secrets; here’s everything we’ve found in both Terminus and Liberty Falls, including How to Pack-a-Punch in Liberty Falls and How to Get the Meteor Easter Egg in Terminus.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket has surpassed 30 million downloads in the nine days it’s been available, developer Creatures Inc. has announced.
Word of the milestone came via the Pokémon TCG Pocket X/Twitter, where the development team thanks players for their support. “Thirty million?! How many packs have been opened, then?,” it asked. “On behalf of everyone working on the game and me, thank you for all your support! Seriously.”
Pokémon TCG Pocket arrived October 30 as a streamlined, digital version of the beloved trading card game. It has players opening packs, collecting cards, building decks, and battling others; a simple formula that immediately proved popular given it made $12 million in four days.
Creatures Inc. is keeping busy since launch as it has already added three events to the game: one focused on collecting, one focused on solo battles, and one focuses on player versus player battles.
The first offers players a free Wonder Pick with the chance of pulling either a Meowth or Chansey alongside event tickets and Wonder Hourglasses, with its second part also released today and runs until November 15.
Next, the solo battle event let players take on a handful of water themed decks for the chance of winning new promo cards including Lapras ex. And a PVP event was later added too, putting badges on the line in true Pokémon fashion.
As you’d expect, players are looking to take the best decks into these events, and Mewtwo and Charizard are naturally dominating so far. One outlier comes via Misty though, whose heads or tails effect is driving many up the wall.
On the collecting front, some players are focused on a conspiracy theory about crinkled corners while most are swooning over mythical god packs that award five alternate art cards in one go. There’s also a secret Mew card hidden in the game that’s not super difficult to get.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket players can now participate in the Wonder Pick Event Part 2, which adds new rewards and missions to the game today, November 8.
This second half of the event, which offers players a free Wonder Pick with the chance of pulling either a Meowth or Chansey alongside event tickets and Wonder Hourglasses, runs until November 15. It’s unclear if there will be a Part 3 or if this will wrap up Pokémon TCG Pocket’s first Wonder Pick event.
The selection of missions is simpler than Part 1’s, with players not required to pull a certain number of Chansey or Meowth but instead just Wonder Pick a certain number of times and collect a certain number of Colorless cards.
As for the new goodies on offer, players can now use event tickets to unlock a variety of Meowth themed items including card sleeves, a playmat, coin, and icon. 50 Shinedust is also on offer, and event tickets from Part 1 can still be used.
Pokémon TCG Pocket arrived in October as a streamlined, digital version of the beloved trading card game. It has players opening packs, collecting cards, building decks, and battling others; a simple formula that’s already proved popular given it made $12 million in four days.
Developer Creatures Inc. is busy adding all sorts of events to the game, including not just this Wonder Pick continuation but a solo battle event focused on Lapras and a player versus player battle event too.
This isn’t quite a full competitive mode for Pokémon TCG Pocket but is certainly a step in that direction, and will be the first proper competitive test of which decks are best, with both Mewtwo ex and Charizard ex having dominated so far.
On the collecting front, some players are focused on a conspiracy theory about crinkled corners while most are swooning over mythical god packs that award five alternate art cards in one go. There’s also a secret Mew card hidden in the game that’s not super difficult to get.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
Astro Bot has sold 1.5 million copies so far, Sony has announced.
As part of its latest financial results, Sony revealed that the PlayStation 5 exclusive platformer sold 1.5 million as of November 3, just shy of two months after its September 6 release date.
Astro Bot, developed by Sony-owned Team Asobi and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment, is the sequel to 2020’s Astro’s Playroom and the third game in the Astro Bot series. It launched to critical acclaim, with IGN’s Astro Bot review returning a 9/10. We said: “A fantastically inventive platformer in its own right, Astro Bot is particularly special for anyone with a place in their heart for PlayStation.”
While Astro Bot’s sales aren’t up there with some of Sony’s big hitters (Helldivers 2 remains the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game of all time with an incredible 12 million sold in 12 weeks), it compares favorably to other recently released family friendly platforms. In Europe, launch sales of Astro Bot were 34% higher than those of 2022’s Sonic Frontiers and 52% bigger than those of 2020’s Crash Bandicoot 4.
To put Astro Bot’s sales success into more recent context, Sega’s Sonic x Shadow Generations hit the one million sold mark on its launch day of October 25, according to Sega. But that game launched across multiple platforms and generations, whereas Astro Bot is a PS5 exclusive. Astro Bot sales will surely continue to grow as we head into the crucial holiday shopping season and gamers look to buy a PS5 or the recently released PS5 Pro.
Team Asobi has continued to support the game since launch with a number of updates that have added speedrun challenge levels and new cameos to rescue. At launch, Astro Bot featured 173 bot cameos from PlayStation games past and present (check out IGN’s feature, Astro Bot: Every PlayStation Character – Easter Eggs, for more).
However, iconic Final Fantasy characters were conspicuous by their absence — an omission fans were quick to pick up on in the context of Final Fantasy’s long-standing association with PlayStation. That means no Cloud from Final Fantasy 7, or any other character from the famous role-playing franchise.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Empire of the Ants is striking to look at. For a moment, you might even believe it’s real macro-lens footage of ants in a nature documentary, and the level of detail on the textures of the forest floor is extremely impressive. It’s not really what it appears to be, though: this may be a real-time strategy game with swarms of insects on screen at once, but you’re never actually commanding more than seven units – and given the somewhat clumsy way its controls make you cycle through them to give orders, that’s a mercy. You may be capturing and building up nests, but there’s literally nothing beneath the surface. So while it appears vast, Empire of the Ants is actually a pretty small-scale strategy game in most other ways, and the lack of unit variety and multiplayer modes make it feel smaller still.
Multiplayer matches have a fair amount of nuance in how you use your small number of units and build out your nests to tech up, and there’s ample room for skilled players to turn a situation to their advantage with smart use of powers to boost their bugs’ damage output and debuff the enemy. It’s not unlike a slimmed-down version of Company of Heroes in the way you capture territory and generate the two resources – food and wood – and that’s a good starting point. Ant units get locked into melee combat and can’t disengage until one or the other loses, so you can learn to hold off a dangerous Warrior unit until reinforcements arrive or prevent a retreat while you finish off an enemy. And while you can quickly rebuild a lost unit if you have the food available, each ant legion has a home nest they’ll respawn from, which can mean there’s a long hike back to the front lines.
Each nest you capture has a set number of upgrade slots that can be filled by a building or spent to support a unit from that nest, so turtling up isn’t really an option – you won’t even have enough slots to tech up to tier 3, which means you’ll inevitably be overrun by ants with better stats. All the building is done from a radial menu that pops up when you interact with a nest and, cleverly, you use your ant as a cursor to select things. Crucially, taking out an enemy’s nest disables all the upgrades that were based there, up to and including turning off their minimap. (Fog of war is a thing on the minimap, but because you’re viewing the world in third person instead of a traditional RTS overhead view, it’s handy that you can spot a moving legion of ants from a long distance even if their icon hasn’t shown up on the map.)
However, Empire of the Ants feels thin relative to most real-time strategy games, in large part because there’s fundamentally only one faction to work with. Everyone always has the same set of workers, big-headed warriors, and “gunner” ants as their primary units, and they all counter each other in a straightforward rock-paper-scissors balance. (You can’t even play as the visually different termites you fight against in the campaign.) The only variety comes from the ability to customize your loadout by choosing four of eight available powers for your main ant to cast, swapping out your support unit between healing aphids, armoring snails, or troop-carrying beetles, as well as one of three “super predator” unit types. Those certainly enable different strategies, but I’m not a fan of the way locking those choices in before a match begins limits your ability to pivot to a different approach if your opponent throws you a curveball. I’d rather be able to switch from the flying wasps to the acid-resistant beetles as my choice of predator if my enemy goes heavy on gunner units, for instance, but that’s not an option.
Another major weakness of multiplayer is that there are only two modes: 1v1 or 1v1v1. That means there’s no option to play cooperatively against the AI (which is very weak even on the highest difficulties and doesn’t seem to know how to use powers, which are crucial) with a friend. It does have 21 maps, at least, and there’s a fair amount of diversity there in terms of how they’re laid out and the creeps that guard their resource caches, like huge spiders and praying mantises that are cool to watch your ants take down.
That’s good, because it soon becomes clear that there’s basically no variety to the bugs’ animations. At first, skittering around at high speeds can be entertaining, even when the controls freak out because you accidentally climb a small branch and start spinning around it like an actual confused ant. Watching a swarm flow over terrain is convincing and, since we’re up so close, dramatic. Warriors will pick up enemies in their big jaws and shake them around, and dead bodies are flung high in the air like mortarboards at a high school graduation ceremony (which I don’t think ants actually do?) and then roll down hills. But when you’ve seen one ant-vs-ant fight, you’ve seen them all. Beetles in particular get repetitive to watch very quickly because of their lunging attacks. Even so, there are good reasons to play the Empire of the Ants’s multiplayer, which cannot be said for the single-player campaign.
Listen closely: do you hear that sound? It’s the cry of hundreds of beleaguered Dino Crisis fans, mourning the revival that could’ve been.
Adi Shankar, the creator of Netflix’s upcoming Devil May Cry show and a filmmaker with a strong reputation for video game anime adaptations (Castlevania, Captain Laserhawk), revealed some interesting information in a recent X/Twitter post. Specifically, when he first started talking to Capcom years ago, his sights weren’t actually set on Devil May Cry.
He began by sharing some quick thoughts on each of the three Dino Crisis games, praising the first two while conceding that the third “lost that magic” as it headed off Earth.
“Why am I telling you this?” he continued. “Because when I first went to Capcom in 2017, my mission was clear: I wanted to bring Dino Crisis back. But in an awesome twist of fate, they sold me Devil May Cry instead! I didn’t think DMC would even be on the table.”
1. Dino Crisis 1 nailed the survival horror vibe, blending the tension of Resident Evil with the sheer terror of being hunted by dinosaurs—perfect.
2.Dino Crisis 2 took it up a notch with fast-paced action & incredible level design.
3.Sadly, Dino Crisis 3 lost that magic—it took… pic.twitter.com/0pOZReOdkf— Adi Shankar (@adishankarbrand) November 6, 2024
It’s an almost comically tragic twist of fate for Dino Crisis enthusiasts, who have long awaited another installment in the survival series created by Resident Evil’s Shinji Mikami. “Like it’s cool Devil May Cry fans can eat but god damn. Dino Crisis fans stay in sad I guess,” bemoaned one X/Twitter user.
The last mainline Dino Crisis game came out all the way back in 2003, and rumors have swirled for years about a potential fourth game. There are a few reasons not to hold your breath, though: for one, Mikami said earlier this year that the popularity of Monster Hunter doesn’t leave a lot of room for another Dino Crisis entry. Plus, Capcom recently tried its hand at another dinosaur-focused game, Exoprimal, a multiplayer title that stopped adding new content just a year after its launch.
Still, hope for a revival in anime form isn’t completely extinct just yet — even if it’s a little thin. While clarifying that he’s currently committed to a “very long-term plan” for Devil May Cry, Shankar added, “But yes, one day perhaps I usually use my powers to resurrect Dino Crisis.”
Devil May Cry, at least, is still set for an April 2025 release date. For more, check out my profile of Shankar last year, where we talked his Captain Laserhawk for Ubisoft and Netflix and much more.
Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she’s not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.
Gears of War voice acting veterans John DiMaggio and Carlos Ferro will officially reprise their roles as Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago for Gears of War: E-Day.
Developer The Coalition announced the news on Thursday, which also happens to be the 18th anniversary of the launch of the original Gears of War. It’s big news for longtime fans of the series, who will remember that DiMaggio and Ferro played the two leads in the franchise’s first three games. An image of the two stars standing together was shared to studio’s official X/Twitter account.
We are so back. 🤜🤛
On today’s 18th anniversary of Gears of War, we’re proud to share that John DiMaggio and @RealCarlosFerro are reprising their roles as the iconic voices of Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago in Gears of War: E-Day. pic.twitter.com/x9uaH9R0sR
— Gears of War (@GearsofWar) November 7, 2024
Gears of War: E-Day is a prequel that takes place awhile before the mainline Gears story got its start. Specifically, it’s set around Emergence Day, which is known as the day the Locust horde made its way to the surface of Sera to launch its attack on humanity. That means that we definitely won’t be seeing protagonists like JD Fenix and Kait Diaz from future Gears games, and more importantly, it means that Marcus and Dom get one more game to see how exactly their bond was strengthened.
It’s not much of a surprise to hear that DiMaggio and Ferro will re-team for E-Day – fans had guessed that the longtime Marcus Fenix voice actor would at least return following the reveal of an emotional announcement trailer earlier this year – but it’s still nice to hear that Dom’s voice will be returning as well. While Marcus lived on to fight in Gears 4 and 5, his partner’s journey ended with a heroic sacrifice in Gears of War 3. Many believe the duo’s relationship and the performances behind them are what helped propel the Gears of War series to success, and now, E-Day is attempting to recapture that gritty, gory magic.
The Coalition told us earlier this year that Gears of War: E-Day gives the team to return to the series’ roots in more ways than one. One element set to return in the prequel is the horror that the original trilogy is known for. Brand Director Nicole Fawcette and Creative Director Matt Searcy spoke to us about their goals in an interview that took place shortly after the game’s reveal.
“For us, it’s like a what-if story,” Searcy said. “What if the ground opened up and monsters came out? Yeah, it’s set on a fictional, other planet, but there are very human reactions and stories we get to tell. To do that, we need to be able to tell a story that feels like a horror story.”
Gears of War: E-Day is currently without a release date but is expected to come to PC and Xbox Series X | S sometime in the future. In the meantime, you can read about why the prequel doesn’t meant the end for the story that left off with Gears 5. You can also check out why we think E-Day needs to rediscover the franchise’s sense of fun.
Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He started writing in the industry in 2017 and is best known for his work at outlets such as The Pitch, The Escapist, OnlySP, and Gameranx.
Be sure to give him a follow on Twitter @MikeCripe.
With Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Season 1 now only one week away, Treyarch has taken the time to reveal a roadmap featuring the weapons, maps, and modes players can look forward to.
The team behind this year’s first-person shooter hit detailed their plans in a lengthy post on the Call of Duty website. There are a few highlights that we know about – the Warzone revamp and a fresh batch of new maps for Multiplayer and Zombies are the real draws – but there are plenty of other surprises hidden in today’s update that should get players excited. This includes a handful of new Operators, such as one based on the franchise’s long-running The Replacer character, and information about the launch of Ranked Play later this month.
Treyarch says Black Ops 6 Ranked is an experience it has been working toward since 2021’s Call of Duty: Vanguard. Expect to see it launch November 21 with what the team is calling “several streamlined features, innovations, and updates,” including changes to the ranking system to focus more on skill, a forfeit feature, and map/mode voting.
Warzone is another attractive feature coming with Season 1 and includes the previously revealed Area 99 Resurgence map. Every subsection of the map essentially works as its own smaller map to fight through, with the entire setting themed after an abandoned government testing site from the ‘50s that bears a striking resemblance to the fan-favorite Multiplayer map, Nuketown. Black Ops 6 Warzone Season 1 will also see the return of the Urzikstan and Rebirth Island maps as well as the Plunder game mode.
The standard Multiplayer game mode, meanwhile, is getting three new maps at launch: Hideout, Heirloom, and Extraction. Modes like Ransack and Prop Hunt are also coming with Season 1, as are new weapons like the Krig C assault rifle, Sirin 9mm special weapon, AMR Mod 4 sniper, and even a power drill melee tool. Zombies fans can also look forward to three new GobbleGums and a new map called Citadelle des Morts that looks like a dusty medieval castle.
Much of what is shown today will arrive when Black Ops 6 Season 1 drops November 14, but players will have to wait for the mid-season update to see everything the introductory season has to offer. This includes things like Warzone Ranked as well as new Multiplayer maps Hacienda and Racket. Nuketown will also get a holiday makeover around this time. While Zombies additions like the story-driven Directed mode will come with launch, that creepy castle is another Season 1 goodie that won’t arrive until the mid-season update.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Season 1 will continue Treyarch’s strong start following launch late last month. One recent update arrived earlier this week, bringing a crate full of weapon balancing changes, perk nerfs, and a tweak for the flashbang that makes it a bit less annoying. For more on this year’s Call of Duty installment, you can read our reviews for the Multiplayer and Zombies modes. You can also check out our list of essential tips and tricks for players who are just getting their boots on the ground.
Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He started writing in the industry in 2017 and is best known for his work at outlets such as The Pitch, The Escapist, OnlySP, and Gameranx.
Be sure to give him a follow on Twitter @MikeCripe.
The 15-person team behind Tales of Kenzera: ZAU was recently put on notice, following struggles to find funding for their next project. But Surgent Studios isn’t shutting down, its staff aren’t gone forever, and it’s not asleep at the wheel, according to its founder, Abubakar Salim.
They are, he says, “literally raring” to go the second money comes in, like a “cocked gun.”
“We still have so much more to say and so much more to build on,” Salim tells IGN. “And the audiences that we’ve already started to build as well, and the players and the people who want to champion us, they want to hear more…We are ready. We’re so ready. It is just about taking that leap of faith with us.”
So what’s the leap of faith? It’s called Project Uso, and it’s a single-player, isometric, Afro-gothic action RPG. You play as a vampiric android containing the spirit of Eshu, the Yoruba god of chaos. As Salim explains, the idea is to explore the idea of two minds in one body through the mechanics of tabletop RPGs. But rather than rolling against a dungeon master, in Project Uso, the player sometimes must roll against themselves.
Project Uso is about the concept of identity, with Uso meaning “face” in Swahili. It’s inspired by Salim’s exploration of his own dual nature in the wake of his daughter’s birth. While ZAU was about who he is without a parent, Salim says that Uso is about asking who he is as a parent.
“As a parent, I always used to find myself being like, I love my daughter, cleaning her dirty nappy. I also want to go see my mates to the cinema, go outside with my mates or whatever. You know what I mean? There’s a battle of freedoms here. And there’s that sense of, do I do this or do I do that? Or even when I’m talking to my daughter and I’m making choices, how do I make sure that she listens to me? Am I strict or am I soft? You are having this battle within you.”
Salim is candid that he’s relatively new to game development. Tales of Kenzera: ZAU was the first game he’s made, having come into the industry from acting. He’s best known in gaming spaces as Bayek in Assassin’s Creed: Origins, and has held a number of other gaming roles since then in addition to his numerous film and TV acting credits (including the most recent season of House of the Dragon). But the last four years of working on ZAU have been a learning experience for him, particularly in how games are typically funded.
“What I’ve learned is that mainly when you get funding for a game, that funding is really there to get you to launch and maybe just a bit more after,” he says. “Maybe. And you are supposed to have your next project turned up and done and signed either before you’ve even launched the first game or maybe just afterwards. That gap in between is frightening because you can see that coming like a train.”
The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated this, he explains. While gaming companies briefly poured funding into new projects, there’s been an industry-wide wake-up call in the last two years resultings in mass layoffs, financial struggles, and funding drying up. As a result, Salim explains that companies have become far more cautious in the bets they’re willing to make on new games. That includes EA, whose EA Originals label published Tales of Kenzera: ZAU but which hasn’t picked up Salim’s next project.
Salim says he understands, but doesn’t agree that it’s the best strategy. On the contrary, he thinks now is the time for companies to take risks.
“Why would I, as a player of Call of Duty or as Fortnite, want to leave that to go to something new when I’ve already established myself in this space?” he says. “I totally understand that. It’s like going to your favorite cafe or going to your favorite restaurant. The way that you entice people to go to somewhere different and somewhere new is by doing something different or something new, by being bold, by being creative.
“I think a great example of this is Animal Well. You look at Animal Well and it’s completely unexpected. You didn’t know what you were getting into. And that was a risk that was taken by a YouTuber. I think we need to see more of that from people in positions of power and in positions of stability.”
Surgent Studios and Salim have had a rough time finding funding for Project Uso, but there’s been another layer to their struggles: harassment. Tales of Kenzera: ZAU has found itself the target of ongoing, racist attacks online, largely targeting the game for its Black protagonist and its Bantu inspirations. But none of this has discouraged Salim from pitching Project Uso. On the contrary, he’s of the belief that it’s important to address such attacks directly.
“I think that the anti-diversity, equity, inclusion sort of movement, it’s about not having the right information,” he says. “I think we are seeing a lot of gaps being filled with conspiracy theories, like ticking boxes and all this sort of stuff, which isn’t actually true when you look into it. And that dialogue needs to happen.”
Salim acknowledges that directly speaking with harassers can be dangerous, and isn’t for everyone. Both parties, he says, have to come to the discussion in good faith, and harassers often don’t. But he believes such engagement can change hearts and minds, and is worth doing for those able. And on a higher level, he adds, companies have a responsibility to take even firmer action against harassment.
“There is definitely a fear of having a stance, I feel, when it comes to businesses. They kind of want to be neutral, which again, totally understand. But there is a level where it goes a bit too far…We’re in a time right now where someone can post a YouTube video and say my garb is like a Rafiki outfit and call my studio Spear-Chucker Studios, and I don’t know whether there’s going to be repercussions or not. I have to call them out on it. And it’s like, come on. It should be down to the [company], be it YouTube, or be it Twitch, or be it even Valve, for example, to be like, ‘Yeah, that’s not cool. Get out.’”
Though Surgent Studios is currently in a holding pattern with Project Uso, Salim has faith that the industry will bounce back from its rough patch, and he’ll bounce back with them. He believes that while video games are both art and business, they are art first and foremost, and “the arts always survive.”
“The beauty though, about games, I feel, is that the conversation and dialogue is a lot more open,” he says. “And so I feel that bouncing back can happen sooner and bolder and more brilliant than any other art form. And that’s what gets me, that’s what inspires me. That’s what kind of drives me to continue going on even after everything that’s happened. Because it’s a beautiful space to be in. It really is. And don’t get me wrong, the amount of times I’ve wanted to be like, ‘I should just stay as an actor, man. I’m in a big TV show. I should just be really comfortable here and just doing my thing here.’ But there is something inside me that just says, ‘Nah, man, I wouldn’t be happy. That’s just not enough.’”
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
