Welcome back to yet another roundup of MMO and MMO-adjacent industry news! Today’s collection features another gathering of news bits that fall within our broader sphere, but we’ll begin with the one that’s the closest to our orbit and kind of spin out from there. Yeah, that’s right, we got centrifugal jokes.
Twitch CEO Dan Clancy says Grand Theft Auto VI multiplayer is coming next year evidently. That’s according to a casual bean drop provided during an interview with Bloomberg as part of a discussion about the game’s release and its impact on the streaming platform.”You are going to see this big bump with GTA 6, but then an even bigger one next year when they launch multiplayer,” Clancy is quoted as saying. “We spent a lot of time talking with Rockstar about their plans, and also helping them think about how they can engage our creators.”
Microsoft has responded to rumors about Xbox Game Pass changes… kind of. According to an unsourced rumor posted to ResetEra, several changes to the service were on the way, including a new tier with ads and plans to stop day-one releases sometime between next February and April. While this might have been pretty easy to dismiss initially, it got a bit more credibility after a Microsoft statement shared by Forbes writer Paul Tassi, which said that changes are tested regularly, but also that “no plans have been finalized” and that the service would receive “no changes to previously announced games coming to Game Pass Ultimate on day one.” So, that’s not a no?
Finally, unionized Swedish employees at mobile game dev King are planning a strike on Friday, September 25th. The strike notice provided to the company earlier this week comes as a result of studio execs rejecting a bargaining collective agreement filed by unions Unionen and Sveriges Ingenjörer last month, though mediation is still ongoing in the meantime. King chief operating officer Ulrika Höjgård claims in a statement that the benefits offered by the studio are already better than what collective bargaining seeks, while a representative for Unionen says that an agreement “covers pensions, insurance, working hours, and the ability to influence conditions at work.”
