You're forgiven if you'd forgotten about Star Wars: Eclipse. After being revealed with a flashy cinematic trailer in 2021, all we heard about Quantic Dreams' Star Wars game was the briefest of mentions in a blog post by studio founder and CEO David Cage last year, in which he said, "Of course, development of Star Wars: Eclipse continues, and we are eager to share more with you in the future."

Quantic Dream was also working on a live-service game at the same time, a MOBA called Spellcaster Chronicles, which suffered a fate all too common in the genre when the plug was pulled on it back in May. 115 staff who worked on it came in line for the inevitable layoffs.

As reported by French outlet Gamekult, Quantic Dream's employees say those staff are needed to help with a struggling Star Wars: Eclipse, and laying them off will hurt its chances of ever being finished. They went on strike during a studio visit by LucasFilm to get their point across.

"It's far from being an act of sabotage. On the contrary, we're trying to save Star Wars Eclipse," a developer identified as Jules said, via Google Translate. "We could manage to release it with 115 additional people, and that wouldn't be 'overstaffed': it's what's needed. We're understaffed, like in many other companies in the sector, because bosses know very well that passion will lead people to crunch time and that games will eventually be released. But it's impossible to run a sustainable industry like that. "

Things are complicated by the fact Quantic Dream is owned by NetEase, having bought the studio in 2022. "We've already indicated that we want to talk to NetEase," said an employee identified as Théo, "but Quantic Dream's management is preventing us. We've explicitly asked for them to be at the negotiating table, since we're often told: 'Oh no, that decision depends on NetEase, that's NetEase's budget…' Fine, then bring NetEase in!"

Employees claim that it was NetEase who made the call to end development of Spellcasters Chronicles, while Quantic Dream's management though it was a good idea to continue throwing time and money down the live-service hole. Which certainly makes it seem like NetEase is the organ grinder and management the monkey.

The initial strike is apparently step one in a series of protests planned to run until some time near September under the umbrella of the "Summer Strike Fest" with the aim of making management aware that Star Wars: Eclipse can't be completed without the additional staff who were working on Spellcasters Chronicles. "David Cage keeps saying that Star Wars Eclipse is a particularly ambitious project. So let him give us the means to achieve his ambitions," Theo said.

It's been a long time since we last saw an Elder Scrolls or Fallout game from Bethesda. Fallout 4 is now 11 years old, while it's been nearly 15 years since Skyrim—the same timeframe between that game and the release of Daggerfall in 1996. It's wild that two of gaming's most popular series have been left on the shelf for so long, and one of Microsoft's few understandable decisions lately is a resolution to make these games quicker.

But one former Bethesda designer urges caution on this front. Bruce Nesmith, Skyrim's lead designer who also worked on Oblivion and Starfield, thinks that going too hard could end up disappointing fans, as he explained to FRVR (via GamesRadar).

"There's an adage in software development about the process having three corners: resources, time and quality," Nesmith told the site. "The studio decides two of them, which determines the third. If you lock down the resources and the schedule, that decides the quality you will achieve. If you lock down the quality and the schedule, that determines the resources you will need to complete the project."

Further, Nesmith observes that "The three corners need to be roughly balanced. You can't ask the project to be done in a month by throwing a million people on it." Likewise, "allowing ten years for a project creates a cycle of endless reinvention and ultimate failure."

The problem faced by modern game developers—at least in the triple-A space—is that "resources in most big studios are already quite large". Modern game dev teams are typically in the hundreds, while budgets are in the hundreds of millions. Starfield, for example, had a core team of circa 500 and an estimated budget between $200-400 million. At that scale, pumping more money or people into the project is only likely to make it more unwieldy.

Consequently, in Nesmith's view, if you want Bethesda to make its games faster, the only solution is to cut resources. "In my opinion, the biggest risk of shortened schedules is quality, reduced features, polish or bugs," he explained. "The things that are done last end up getting set aside to complete the game on time. And, of course, faster dev times would result in faster sequels. But that's the wrong question. Those sequels risk disappointing fans."

The obvious solution would be to hand the various licenses to different developers. Microsoft, for example, owns both Bethesda and Obsidian—the developer of what most fans consider to be the best 3D Fallout game. Nesmith concedes that "if the right studio is available, it's a great solution". But that "you can't just hand it to anyone."

He also believes that it's good to let a series "lie fallow" for a while. "A franchise that releases too many titles too quickly risks fan fatigue. Of course, too much time between releases can also be a problem."

At present, I would say that neither Elder Scrolls nor Fallout is at risk of receiving new games too regularly. But I nonetheless appreciate Nesmith's points here. You can't make these games happen faster just by throwing more money and people at specific projects, which could well be viewed as the solution when you have the resources of a company like Microsoft. Managing a project like that is a huge challenge, and even if you had an entire team dedicated to each series, it would still probably take five years minimum between the start of the project and its end.

Games are likely to follow Mario Kart World and GTA 6's lead with an $80 base price tag, according to several analysts, but only the biggest of games will be able to pull it off unscathed.

Like Mario Kart World before it, GTA 6's price has raised big question marks over the heads of anyone worried about higher video game costs. Will $80 become the new standard? Not exactly, say some analysts we talked to, but they will become much more common in the months and years following GTA 6's November release date.

DFC Intelligence's David Cole explains to GamesRadar+ that "the industry has already been moving to this price point, led by Nintendo," a publisher that launches games with all sorts of price tags attached. "The issue is there are only a handful of premium games that command this price point."

Essentially, not every game will have the easiest time launching at $80. Grand Theft Auto and Super Mario can because they're, well, Grand Theft Auto and Super Mario. Cole adds that Rockstar Games is continuing a precedent "for only the most in-demand games with a built-in initial audience... It is the industry going towards a tiered pricing model where it is recognized that some games simply provide much more value than others and should be priced accordingly."

Joost van Dreunen echoes the point, saying the new $80 standard will be "reserved for only a select few titles and franchises" that can command it, and publishers that try to charge $80 on games that don't deliver "will likely come to regret that."

"Gaming is increasingly becoming a luxury category," van Dreunen continues. "Its economics have historically centered around a winner-takes-most model, and GTA 6 raises the bar again. Publishers who can clear it will pull further ahead, and those who cannot will have to compete on distribution instead, finding new channels, bundles, and pricing models to reach players the blockbusters don't."

Serkan Toto of Kantan Games notes that corporate owner Take-Two was already the first publisher to charge $70 back in 2020. That was an inflated price other companies very quickly adopted, "and I believe the rest of the industry will follow them this time as well - whenever it makes sense," Toto says.

Rockstar Games reportedly has no plans to print GTA 6 discs at launch or in the months after