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 here with the scoop.
…Except it’s not Dan here this week! Dan is out on paternity leave; congratulations to him and his, and curse his name forever for abandoning us. We’ll have a rotating crew covering duties for the next month or so, starting with the guy who edits this rag, Jonathan Bernhardt. Let’s get to it.
Court Filing Reveals Call of Duty Budgets Balloon to Over $700 Million
In a court filing that gaming news website Game File reviewed, an Activision executive revealed that budgets for the Call of Duty games released between 2015 and 2020 — Call of Duty Black Ops III (2015), Call of Duty Modern Warfare (2019) and Call of Duty Black OPs Cold War (2020) — each ran close to or well-above a half billion American dollars, with Black Ops III costing $450 million, Modern Warfare costing $640 million, and Cold War coming in at an astounding $700 million budget. While development costs rose, sales declined: Black Ops III sold 43 million copies; Modern Warfare (the heavily anticipated reboot of the game whose smash success made Call of Duty the industry juggernaut it is) only sold 41 million; and Cold War’s sales fell to 30 million copies sold.
The lawsuit in question was filed in response to the infamous school shooting in Uvalde, TX, and seeks to hold the gaming giant Activision (an independent company at the time of the massacre; now owned by Microsoft) partially responsible for the shooting, claiming that the company’s portrayal of the Daniel Defense firearm used in the crime in its video games and related advertising content influenced the perpetrator to kill nearly two dozen, the vast majority of them children, in May 2022. Activision denies any link between their games (or gaming in general) and gun violence.
While submitted in a written declaration as background material for the Uvalde lawsuit (and likely not directly relevant to the material facts or questions of that trial), these new data points are quite interesting for those who are tracking the astounding growth of AAA video game budgets and the correspondingly massive sales targets those games need to hit to be successful. These numbers are far bigger than the previously-known data points in recent history, $300 million for Spider-man 2 and The Last of Us Part 2 and Horizon Forbidden West both costing around $220 million.
New Gundam Miniatures Game “Gundam Assemble” Announced
Outside of the trailer above and a fancy new sub-site on Bandai-Hobby.net, not much is known about the latest foray into Gundam tabletop action. Here’s what the site has to say:
GUNDAM ASSEMBLE is a tabletop game that uses approximately 2 Inch-sized Gunpla to battles.
Each unit has abilities that reflect their unique characteristics, allowing players to enjoy scenarios that follow the original story, or diverge into situations that transcend the world of Mobile Suit Gundam series; thus providing both a sense of recreation and distinct battles.
Detailed rules and product specifications will be announced later.
While building these mechs (“gunpla”) is the cornerstone of both the Gundam business and the hobby surrounding it, they’re mostly for looking at and posing, not for playing tabletop games. That seems to be changing, at least with the tinier gunpla being designed for use with this ruleset. Stay tuned to their website and socials for more.
Half-Life 3 Speculation Heats Back Up
One of the most alluring white whales of gaming left now that Duke Nukem Forever is out and Square has remade Final Fantasy 7, Half-Life 3 is once again back in the news as internet sleuths put together clues real (but trollish) and maybe imagined to paint the picture of a Valve that’s finally willing to get on with the most obviously successful title they could possibly send to market.
Kyle Orland at Ars Technica has run down all the details, and you should go read it; we won’t reproduce his fine work here except to say that voice actor leaks are always real wild cards given how occluded those performers usually are from the actual meat and potatoes development of a game, and staffing up for a project called “White Sands” (the inverse of Half-Life’s Black Mesa) while working on something called “HLX” that’s referenced in a bunch of Source 2 engine datadump material — the digital equivalent of reading entrails, with a somewhat higher hit rate — could be meaningful or meaningless, but is definitely some form of intentional tweak to the YouTubers and Twitch streamers who make content out of this stuff.
With the story of the original games recently both complemented and recontextualized by the events of Valve’s VR game Half-Life Alyx and the franchise back in the news thanks to the 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2 and the related releases around that, including a self-published two hour documentary about the game (that often is actually about Valve itself, both then and now), it would seem to be the time to get going on the third installment, which has always been one of the biggest layups-in-waiting for sales success ever since production on Half-Life 2 Episode Three got muddled, cancelled, and turned into the Portal franchise. That’s quite aside from the game being any good, let alone living up to expectations — but if anyone can go home again 20 years later, it’d be Valve.
Magic: The Gathering Artist Proof Collection Goes on Sale for $2.2 Million
One of the rarest possible sets of Magic: The Gathering cards in existence is up for sale over on eBay: the full set of artist proofs (versions of the cards without the M:tG back branding given to the artists on a set’s completion to do with what they please) for all 302 cards in Unlimited, the second edition of Magic’s core set that was released in December 1993. Matt Bassil at Wargamer has the full rundown on the particulars of what that actually means, but the upshot is that you might be getting a bargain at twice that price given what this collector could make by splitting the collection into lots and auctioning them off separately. If you’ve got an extra $2.2 million lying around — maybe you skimmed it off the budget of the latest Call of Duty game and no one missed it — this is one hell of a nerd conversation piece.
Games Workshop Launches “New Year, New Challenge” Contest
Games Workshop has gotten their new promotional campaign/social media contest for 2025 off the ground with the New Year, New Challenge hobby goal bingo card, which you can both obtain and get stamped off at your local Games Workshop store. Filling a line in any direction earns a special in-store reward, and posting your hobby progress on X or Instagram with the hashtag #WarhammerChallengeCompetition enters you into a drawing to win one of six £100 virtual gift vouchers.
And that wraps it up for our Games Industry News Roundup this week! Join us again next week for more news about the tabletop games industry and related media.
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