Here at Goonhammer, we know that it’s hard to keep track of all the news happening all the time in the games industry. So much is always going on with games of all sorts, and their related media, it can be a real blink-and-you’ll miss it situation.
That’s why every week, we round up five of the biggest stories in the gaming sphere from the past week in the Games Industry News Roundup. Our trusty news boy, Dan “Swiftblade” Richardson, is at the very real and cool Goonhammer newsdesk with the scoop.
Rooster Teeth Returns From Grave with Founding Member at the Helm
I hate to christen the “Well I didn’t have that on my 2025 bingo card” bit so early in the year, but, uh, I did not have Rooster Teeth returning from the dead on my 2025 bingo card.
Rooster Teeth was one of the many victims of 2024’s brutal year in the video game industry, with the once-titanic content company finally closing its doors after making online content for 21 years after parent company Warner Bros. failed to find a buyer for the platform. While the podcast network remained, and RWBY would find a new home, the rest of the company’s content and staff were shut down.
Until last week, when a surprise press release on the company website revealed that Rooster Teeth had found a new owner: company founder Bernie Burns and his new production company, Box Canyon Productions.
“I am excited at the challenge of bringing Rooster Teeth back to its roots,” said Burns in a press release on the Rooster Teeth website. “The heart of this brand has always been its fans, and I look forward to writing a new chapter together.”
Burns and Rooster Teeth have little in the way of concrete details about Rooster Teeth’s future, aside from likely being a much smaller operation than the multimedia giant it was before. For now, the biggest impact of Burn’s acquisition of his old company is that it very likely saves much of Rooster Teeth’s catalogue from becoming lost media. That being said, Rooster Teeth does plan on creating new content and continuing some of its old content, with more details on exactly what that will actually be to come.
Magic: The Gathering Working on Cinematic Universe
When The Avengers released in 2012 to wild box office success and popularized the concept of a “cinematic universe”, companies scrambled to release a cinematic universe of their own, only to realize that by the time they got to the station that the train had left long ago, leaving behind a wake of failed projects and dismal movies with setups destined to go nowhere. Hasbro has looked around at this graveyard of projects, read the epitaph about king of kings and despairing or whatever, and declared, “Nah, we’re different actually, when we show up to the station that train is totally gonna be there to take us to Scrooge McDuck’s oversized money pool!”
That is all to say that Wizards and parent company Hasbro announced last week that it will be collaborating with Legendary Pictures to create a Magic: The Gathering cinematic universe.
The upcoming universe will feature both television shows and movies, with a movie being the first focus.
This is not the first time Magic has made the attempt to jump to screens, nor is this Legendary’s first attempt at a cinematic universe. Wizards previously announced in 2019 that Netflix would be adapting the IP into an animated series, with a planned 2022 release date, but most assumed the project dead until Netflix teased a single image from the show in 2024 as a sign of life. Legendary Productions is in charge of the Monsterverse universe of TV and films, which includes the recent Godzilla and Kong movies, so at least Magic is in the hands of one of the few groups that could actually make a cinematic universe work, even if it’s a fairly modest one.
But hey, maybe Rob’s optimistic?
As of this writing, there’s no further details on what the new Magic movie will entail, or if the Netflix series will be related to this cinematic universe.
Wizards Hiring New Narrative Manager for Universes Beyond
Wizards of the Coast is in for a double whammy this week on the roundup for Magic: The Gathering. While this new potential cinematic universe looks within the Magic IP, Wizards also seems to be looking without by hiring on a Narrative Manager specifically for Universes Beyond projects.
At first glance, this is a real headscratcher, since the whole point of Universes Beyond is to focus on other IPs and the story those universes tell. While the story of a Magic set based on another creative work does have some wiggle room to perhaps tell a story of its own, there is a bit more to be gleaned from the role description. According to the job posting, a large focus of the position seems to be ensuring that new sets in Universes Beyond nails “The Vibe” of each IP it decides to cover, writing that one of the Narrative Manager’s primary responsibilities is “identifying the need for external subject matter experts and writing talent and partnering with the Resource Manager on recruiting, sourcing and outreach.”
It’s little surprise that Wizards is putting more focus on its UB team, since Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks plans to expand the line after its massive success with Universes Beyond: Lord of the Rings. While the new role likely won’t have much influence on the upcoming Final Fantasy UB set, it’s likely to have a big impact on the later Marvel themed sets.
As of this writing, the position is still open on Wizards LinkedIn for those with creative leadership experience to apply.
Fantasy Flight Games Plans to Create New Formats for LCGs
Fantasy Flight Games’ most recent fireside chat with its Living Card Game (LCG) leadership team, the company announced a major update. In order to make LCGs more accessible for new players without ostracising longtime fans, two new modes of play, called environments by FFG, are being debuted: Current environment and Legacy environment.
According to the fireside chat, as well as the blog post on the FFG website, the LCG team has recognized the bloat that many of these games have after years on the market and have decided to retire older expansions for these games, which takes them out of production. For LCG players, this allows FFG to establish a standard format consisting of a game’s core set, evergreen expansions, and newer expansions. These become the Current environment, and in contrast the Legacy environment allows for the use of any care ever produced for a game, even if it is no longer in production.
While this may not have the same effect as Standard does in M:tG, considering these LCGs are cooperative card games, FFG notes that this is still very important for the health of these games.
“The first and most significant of these opportunities is the ability to increase our focus on the Current Environment,” FFG LCG Design Lead Nate French writes in the announcement post. “Testing a new set of cards across a card pool with almost a hundred other products to establish the desired power level (for player cards) or difficulty (for each scenario) consumes a lot of bandwidth. Being able to sharpen the lens and really zoom in and emphasize the Current Environment throughout the development process will be invaluable for our designers as well as for our playtesters.”
Current and Legacy environments are scheduled to begin later this year, as the first wave of expansion retirings begin.
PlayStation Network Experiences Major Outage
It wasn’t easy being a Playstation player this past weekend, especially a Playstation player who likes to play online games with their pals. Over the past weekend, the online service for Playstation consoles, the Playstation Network (PSN), went down for over 24 hours from Friday into Sunday, making it one of the longest online service outages in years.
The outage affected all levels of online capability for Playstation consoles, and not just being able to play online games. Services like account management, social features, remote play, and the Playstation store were all taken down by the outage.
After going offline Friday evening, service returned a little over 24 hours later on Sunday after midnight. When reached for a statement on Polygon as to the reason for the extended outage, Sony officials were cagey, stating “Network services are fully recovered from an operational issue. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank the community for their patience.” and offering all PSN account holders 5 free days of the service.
This loss of service is the second longest in PSN’s history, with the longest being the major outage in 2011 which lasted for 23 days and exposed the account information of millions of Playstation owners.
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