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.
In this very special edition of the Roundup, we’re going to do something a little different here at the very real Goonhammer Newsroom. Instead of looking back at the last week in review, we’re looking at all of the past weeks of 2024 and reflecting on the biggest stories and trends of the year.
Mass Layoffs and Rising Union Presence Shape the Landscape of Gaming
After the gaming world was dominated by layoffs in 2023, there was some hope that maybe, just maybe, if we were lucky, 2024 would cool its engines on the whole “folks getting laid off from their jobs en masse” thing. Unfortunately, this was always going to be a vain hope. The gaming news press was just as dominated by layoff news in 2024 as it was in 2023.
In raw numbers, 2024 was a far worse year for layoffs than 2023, with an estimated 14,600 workers let go from positions at video game companies versus 10,500 in 2023. These are largely still the result of mismanagement during the pandemic, where increased interest in gaming during lockdowns prompted companies to grow faster than they could reasonably sustain once lockdown restrictions began to ease.
However, not all of these layoffs were due to post-COVID blues. Notably, Activision-Blizzard laid off over 1900 employees following the company’s merger with Microsoft, and multiple studios owned by entertainment conglomerate Embracer Group faced either layoffs or complete closures following the collapse of a billion dollar deal with Saudi Arabian investors. Asmodee, one of the largest companies controlled by Embracer group, was able to stay largely profitable enough to avoid the worst of the fallout of this deal, but was not spared being saddled with nearly $1.4 billion of Embracer Groups debt when Asmodee was broken off from Embracer as part of its corporate restructuring. Even financial and critical success doesn’t seem to stay the hand of industry shrinkage, as the creators of the popular rhythm action game Hi-Fi Rush, Tango Gameworks, was closed down by Microsoft before being revived by South Korean publisher Krafton.
Troublingly, closures and layoffs weren’t contained to just video game development, but other spheres such as gaming journalism and tabletop gaming as well. The long running publication Game Informer shut its doors in August after three decades of publication, and popular tabletop news website Dicebreaker had its entire staff made redundant following Dicebreaker’s parent company’s acquisition in June by IGN. Tabletop gaming titan Wizards of the Coast also shed numerous employees in 2024, following parent company Hasbro’s financial woes at the end of 2023, with notable company figures like Creator Relations Manager Dixon Dubrow included in those let go from their position.
With these massive layoffs looming, it’s little wonder that 2024 also saw a rise in unionization at major gaming companies. One of the first of these major unions formed this year was the World of Warcraft Gamemakers Guild, which unionized 500 members of the World of Warcraft development team inside of Activision-Blizzard. Following this, Microsoft owned gaming companies formed several major unions, such as the 300 workers at Bethesda Game Studios who unionized in July, and with another 461 unionizing at Zenimax Online in December. In the tabletop gaming world, the United Paizo Workers Union organized inside of TTRPG company Paizo, and its members won the 2024 Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming.
With the new year now upon us, it’s hard to put on our wishful thinking hats and pretend that these large scale layoffs will stop anytime soon. While we will likely need to brace ourselves for more rounds of mass firing in gaming, hopefully the momentum started by these worker organization movements will continue to grow in 2025 and beyond.
Games Workshop Continues to Thrive in 2024, Launches New Editions for Several Games and Finalizes Amazon Deal
Many companies in the greater sphere of gaming suffered major financial setbacks this year, but Games Workshop certainly was not one of them.
Games Workshop had an extremely strong 2024 for multiple games systems. Age of Sigmar released its fourth edition this past summer with the Skaventide box set, pitting the Stormcast Eternals against a tide Skaven, with the latter getting its first wide-scale model line release and refresh in many years. A flagship feature of this new edition of AoS is the introduction of Spearhead, a smaller scale way to play the game that uses the models found in the various Spearhead/Vanguard sets for each of Age of Sigmar’s factions.
Specialist games also got major updates this year. Kill Team released its third edition this past October with the Hivestorm box set, pitting Tempestus Aquilons against updated plastic Vespids and streamlining Kill Team’s gameplay. Warhammer Underworlds new edition, launched with the Embergard set, shifted to a new model of deck building from a seasonal pool of cards, rather than needing to collect every release to stay relevant in order to appeal to a wider audience.
Games Workshop also finalized its deal with Amazon for the creation of Warhammer shows and movies on Amazon Prime. Negotiations between Amazon and Games Workshop began at the end of next year to come to an agreement on the content to be produced for Amazon Prime, with Henry Cavil set to be executive producer. Very little was heard about these negotiations until this December, when Games Workshop announced a deal had been struck between the two companies. Production on the first Amazon Warhammer show is set to begin in 2025, with a wider release some years off and no additional details available at this time.
These releases and announcements, as well as the surge in sales from the release of Warhammer 40,000’s tenth edition last year, formed what was overall an extremely strong FY 2024 for GW, and a solid start to FY 2025. Supporting this is Games Workshops financial report for FY 2024, which reported the company increased its revenue from the previous fiscal year by nearly £50 million.
While Games Workshop expects to have a smaller year in FY 2025, the company is still planning to grow and expand in the next year. According to the annual report, Games Workshop intends to focus on updating its IT infrastructure and warehouse systems to improve its consumer supply chain, which the company identifies as a major weakness. It also shared plans to expand to a third factory in Nottingham in the future, with the possibility of working on a North American factory as well. All and all, an impressive year and promising future for the miniatures giant.
A Strange Year for Magic: The Gathering
It may have been an unambiguously great year for Warhammer, but it’s hard to say the same for Magic: The Gathering.
On the release side, Magic had some substantial successes in 2024. Sets like the Fallout: Universes Beyond, Bloomburrow, and Foundations were critical and commercial successes for Wizards of the Coast. Wizards also announced several exciting new sets, with big collaborations like Final Fantasy and Marvel included in the list of releases. Even Hatsune Miku came to Magic in the form of a Secret Lair run. How could anyone be upset by more Miku?
But Magic also found itself frequently in the center of controversy this year. Some were smaller, such as Secret Lair’s transition from a print on demand to a limited print run in the name of speeding up shipping, or Magic’s accidental use of AI art in its promotional art despite releasing a statement in 2023 condemning the use of AI generated artwork in Magic.
Two major stories stand tall in Magic 2024: the upcoming plans for Universes beyond, and the dissolution of the Commander Rules Committee.
For those unfamiliar, Universes Beyond is the label that crossover IP sets are classified as, such as the Warhammer 40,000 Commander decks that released in 2023. Following the massive success of the Universes Beyond: Lord of the Rings set, Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks told investors that the company intends to release two large Universe Beyond sets annually, starting with a Final Fantasy themed set and a Marvel themed set in 2025. Wizards pushed its plans for Universes Beyond even further at MagicCon Las Vegas this year, where the company announced that it would make future UB releases tournament legal across all formats. While Universes Beyond clearly makes bank for Wizards and Hasbro, longtime fans of the story set within the universe of Magic became worried that this push for more UB content will dilute Magic’s own setting and characters.
Perhaps one of the biggest gaming stories this year, which drastically changed the course of Magic’s most popular multiplayer format, was the dissolution of the Commander Rules Committee, or Commander RC. The RC was a council of volunteer players not associated with Wizards of the Coast who made the rules and rulings for the Commander format and its organized play. Following the vitriolic backlash from its September ban list, which included multiple death threats on the members of the group, the RC announced that it would be disbanding and handing over control of Commander to Wizards of the Coast.
Wizards elaborated on its plan for Commander, saying that the company intends to implement a bracket system for cards and decks based on their power level in Commander, which hopes to allow Commander players to find more balanced games. Wizards also formed its own Commander Format Panel of seventeen members, who have all signed on to the panel for at least a year and will be the new arbiters of the format.
While Magic released multiple successful sets this year, as well as popular Secret Lair Drops, the decisions to aggressively expand UB and the disbanding of the RC, as well as the other minor controversies this year, made 2024 a strange year for the games. 2025 promises the first major decisions of the new Commander Format Panel, as well as the first of the new UB sets, so we will have to wait and see if the fears of the community were well founded, or if the sky isn’t falling after all.
Crowdfunding Wins Big in the Tabletop World
Crowdfunding websites have been a popular way to get independent projects off the ground since their explosion of popularity in the 2010s, and tabletop gaming is no exception.
Crowdfunding has been mostly dominated by the website Kickstarter, to the point where the term “Kickstarter” is common shorthand for crowdfunding online. But 2024 saw the rise in popularity for a competitor platform to kickstarter, Gamefound. The platform launched in a beta form in 2022, with a focus on hosting tabletop related crowdfunding campaigns. The platform grew in popularity, becoming a favorite crowdfunding destination for companies like CMON games, who announced an exclusive crowdfunding pact with Gamefound in February.
In 2023, Gamefound hosted the Nemesis: Retaliation campaign, which raised over $12.1 million and became the third largest board game campaign of all time. 2024 was no slouch for massive campaigns either, with the Cyberpunk 2077 campaign raising $7.6 million on the platform, prompting the game’s developer Go On Board to commit its future crowdfunding campaigns to Gamefound.
While Gamefound’s star continued to rise in 2024, Kickstarter was the home for the biggest crowdfunding success of the wargaming world: Trench Crusade.
Created by Factory Fortress Inc, whose members include seasoned industry artists and ex-GW designers, Trench Crusade opened a kickstarter in 2024 for a fully playable ruleset and miniatures line for Trench Crusade, which had previously existed as concept art, lore, and a small range of models from a previous kickstarter.
The initial campaign for Trench Crusade asked for the very fun goal of $66,666. It would end up raising over 2 million in its initial campaign, with post campaign pledges pushing it over the 3 million mark. The unexpected breakout success of Trench Crusade even caused minor logistical problems for the team, who experienced delays in their pledge manager rollout for campaign backers when the team had to switch from Gamefound to Backerkit for the pledge manager due to Gamefound’s inability to handle sales taxes from multiple regions. Factory Fortress has already began the process of sending out digital STL files for fans to print, with physical models and books arriving in 2025.
Halo Comes to Tabletop, Warmachine Re-Returns, and Other Big Stories
Alot happened in 2024, and some of the biggest stories don’t quite fit into a larger category like the other ones we’ve shared today. So, let’s go through a lightning round roundup (hah!) of some of 2024’s other biggest games industry news.
- Mantic Games announced in January that it was partnering with 343 Studios to launch Halo: Firefight, a new tabletop game set to reimagine the frantic multiplayer battles of Halo on the tabletop. Mantic revealed the models for the game in March and released the game to wider audiences in November 2024.
- Warmachine and its tertiary IPs, as well as the P3 paint line, was sold by Privateer Press to Steamforged Games. Steamforged promised to increase the availability of Warmachine to retailers and players, as well as continue to develop on the roadmaps and release plans set by Privateer Press. Following some production delays after the purchase that seem to haunt Warmachine’s recent history, Steamforged released a new two player starter box for Warmachine this November, which hailed the skirmish game’s return to hard plastic models.
Credit: Steamforged Games - In December 2024, the Vallejo factory workers launched a work strike, demanding better wages, benefits, and working conditions. The workers eventually came to an agreement with Vallejo management after 26 days on strike that saw them winning on almost all of their demands.
- Dissatisfied with last year’s resolution to the SAG-AFTRA actors strike, which failed to put in enough protections against AI, voice actors launched a work strike against multiple notable video game companies. This strike is still ongoing as of this writing.
- Nintendo filed a lawsuit against Palworld developers Pocketpair games in September, citing copyright infringement, after spending the months following Palworlds release being very coy about any plans for legal action.
Credit: Paul Sawyer via Facebook - Warlord Games Co-Founder and former White Dwarf editor Paul Sawyer announced to the world that he has been battling with terminal brain cancer, and Warlord Games released a limited edition model of Sawyer to raise money for The Brain Tumor Charity.
- Concord, a multiplayer shooter developed by Firewalk Studios and published by Sony Entertainment, was shut down days after its servers went live following its almost complete absence of players. After a few weeks of uncertainty, Firewalk was closed by Sony, with Sony stating it would make efforts to rehome the Firewalk team at other Sony owned studios.
Credit: UK Games Expo - Multiple gaming conventions are undergoing change and expansion Following record breaking attendance in 2024 of over 39,000, the UK Games Expo reserved roughly 16,000 sqm of additional space for its 2025 event. Adepticon announced that it’s changing its venue to Milwaukee for its 2025 event, leaving the suburbs of Chicago after being held in the area for over twenty years.
- Atomic Mass Games announced that it is sunsetting support for Star Wars: X-Wing and Star Wars: Armada. Models for these games will no longer be produced, though tournament and organized play support will be continued until March of 2025.
- After 21 years of operation, Rooster Teeth closed its doors in 2024, with its parent company Warner Bros- Discovery citing “Fundamental shifts in consumer behavior”.
Credit: Getty Images/JIJI Press - Legendary Dragonball creator Akira Toriyama passed away in March at the age of 68, his artwork and stories leaving an indelible mark on international pop culture.
- Charming platformer and love letter to Sony games, Astro Bot, wins Game of the Year at the Game Awards 2024, hosted annually by Geoff Keighley.
- On one last note, speaking of Keighley, remember when on the day the news broke about mass layoffs at Sony Entertainment earlier this year, Keighey, the master and commander of all gamers, tweeted about taking big, eager sniffs of AI human sweat instead? The Goonhammer Newsroom hopes you remember.
And that’s all for our look back at the news in 2024! With 2025 still fresh, we look forward to bringing you another year of gaming’s biggest stories, all wrapped up in a digestible and rounded up format. Good night and good luck, friends.
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.
Have any questions or feedback? Think we missed an important story from 2024? Have an interesting tabletop news story we should be including in our round-up? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. And if you want regular updates in your inbox, subscribe to our newsletter.
