Deep Rock Galactic developer Ghost Ship Games is hard at work on its next game, Rogue Core, which is coming out next year. Based on the enduring popularity of Deep Rock, it'll probably be a hit—but that's not a guarantee in a multiplayer space increasingly squeezed between new games and perennial favorites that have managed to hold onto players for many years now.

"Competition is fierce," Ghost Ship Games director Mikkel Martin Pedersen says. "When we started out making Deep Rock Galactic, I think there were a handful of successful co-op focused games on Steam. Today there are a lot more games there. We definitely feel that there are some really, really good co-op games out there right now. Helldivers 2, obviously, and lately we've seen Arc Raiders do extremely well."

It's getting harder to predict what will pop off or stick around in the PC multiplayer space, which was much less crowded when Deep Rock entered early access in 2018. This year's unexpected smashes like Peak and RV There Yet? belong to a new crop of cheap, casual hangout games that became trendy in 2025. Heck, multimillion-selling Schedule 1 came out this year, too.

Meanwhile, live service games from well-known studios like Remedy's FBC: Firebreak seem more likely to sink without a trace. And while Arc Raiders has indeed hit some very impressive player numbers already, it seems increasingly unlikely that Bungie's Marathon will be able to achieve the same sort of success.

And that's just the high profile stuff. Did you know that a free-to-play Fall Guys-inspired Sonic the Hedgehog game came out on Steam last week? No? Neither did anyone else, it seems.

"There's fierce competition, but on the other hand, I think with the Deep Rock franchise we have our own niche and our own way of doing co-op," Pedersen said.

Ghost Ship's lead game designer Mikhail Akopyan sees that as a strength, too. "We have no plans to try to change up what Deep Rock Galactic is in response to the changing landscape," he said. "Stuff like that is reserved for our future games. Deep Rock is Deep Rock, and the point is to keep it Deep Rock. It's for people who like it, and maybe new people will also come in who will enjoy it. But I think it's very important that that game, it is what it is, and we want to keep it that way. We're proud of it."

For the third time this year, Tomb Raider studio Crystal Dynamics has laid off employees: The company announced today that it's making a "difficult but necessary" reorganization of its studios and team, and that as a result nearly 30 people will be put out of work.

The cuts will be made "across various departments and projects," Crystal Dynamics said on LinkedIn, "as we restructure the company and business for our next generation."

"To our players—as the realities of the industry continue to evolve, we've made these painful choices as a way to optimize the continued development of our flagship Tomb Raider game, as well as shaping the rest of the studio to make new games for the future. We appreciate the continued support of our players, our colleagues, and our partners during this transition and look forward to sharing the team's amazing new work with the world in the future."

This is, as noted, the third time Crystal Dynamics has laid off employees in 2025. The first round of cuts occurred in March, when the studio ditched 17 people—also a "difficult decision"—in order to "better align our current business needs and the studio's future success." Then in August, it terminated an undisclosed number of employees following Microsoft's cancellation of the Perfect Dark reboot, which it was co-developing alongside The Initiative.

And now this, nearly 30 more out the door—not a huge number compared to say, the 9,000 that Microsoft axed in July, but a not-insignificant portion of a studio that has to be working pretty close to the bone by now. And, I have to note, with nothing to show for it at this point: Crystal Dynamics announced the new Unreal Engine 5-powered Tomb Raider project in 2022, but all we've seen of it since was a single piece of utterly unremarkable concept art released in early 2024.