Microsoft has laid off 1,900 staff across its gaming division, reportedly gutting entire departments across the company. Among them was the team behind Odyssey, the little-known Blizzard survival game that would have occupied the studio's first new IP since 2014's Overwatch, that has now been canceled. In development for six years and officially announced in 2022, Odyssey represents decades of lost person-hours. But more than that, it's a sign of Blizzard, Microsoft, and perhaps the AAA industry as a whole, utterly failing to adapt to one of the greatest genre successes of the last 20 years.
Palworld is currently the biggest game on Steam, a somewhat janky, arguably derivative early access release from a studio with a handful of under-the-radar games to its name. It followed a trajectory similar to Valheim's in 2021, another janky early access survival game from a debut studio. The list of the top 50 games on Steam by current players is filled with these games: Rust, Unturned, Enshrouded, Don't Starve Together, DayZ, Terraria, Ark. A full 20% of the most-played games on Steam are survival games, some of which I've never even heard of yet are pulling in tens of thousands of players on a weekday morning.
