Month: February 2019

The news keeps getting worse for Overkill’s The Walking Dead. After Walking Dead rights-owner Skybound announced it would terminate its agreement with Starbreeze for the co-op shooter due to the poor quality of the game, Starbreeze has now confirmed the PC edition will be removed from sale while the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions are now in question.

In a news release, Starbreeze said it was in communication with Skybound to try to find “a solution.” In the meantime, Starbreeze said sales of the PC edition of Overkill’s The Walking Dead will “likely be disabled,” and should no agreement be met, the game would never return to Steam. Additionally, the PS4 and Xbox One versions “would not be released” if no new deal between Skybound and Starbreeze can be reached. It appears the game has already been removed from Steam.

Starbreeze added that Overkill’s The Walking Dead generated sales of 34.1 million Swedish Krona, which comes out to around $3.7 million USD. However, “costs related to development of Overkill’s The Walking Dead has so far exceeded revenue,” Starbreeze admitted.

505 Games was announced as the publisher of Overkill’s The Walking Dead for PS4 and Xbox One. Digital Bros, which owns 505 Games, said in a statement to GI.biz that it is “very sorry about the relationship between Skybound and Starbreeze.” The statement doesn’t outright confirm that the console editions have been canceled, however.

Skybound announced it would end its contract with Starbreeze because Overkill’s The Walking Dead “did not meet our standards nor is it the quality that we were promised.”

The statement added: “We are exceedingly sorry to our fans and share their disappointment in the game. We remain dedicated to providing our fans with the most premium quality content we can offer, and will continue to look for alternative video game options for the IP.”

Why wait for whatever Ridley Scott has planned next to dive back into the Alien franchise after 2017’s Alien: Covenant? A new digital series is is coming soon–very soon–and will take viewers into the world of the Alien: Isolation video game from 2014.

The new series, which will debut on IGN on February 28, will present the cut scenes from the game as “a new animation experience to add additional layers to the story of Ellen Ripley’s daughter.” To achieve that, Fox has partnered with Reverse Engineering Studios and DVgroup to develop new scenes that, when combined with newly shot-and-edited first-person footage from the game and existing cut scenes, will create a complete story.

The Isolation game is set between the original Alien film and its 1986 sequel Aliens. In it, Amanda Ripley–daughter of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen–searches for a hint of her mother’s whereabouts on a space station and comes face-to-face with the same kind of alien creature that plagues the rest of the franchise.

A description of the series reads, “Fifteen years have passed since the deep-space freighter Nostromo disappeared with all hands. And for fifteen years, Amanda Ripley has scoured the known universe for information about her mother, Ellen Ripley, the Nostromo’s warrant officer. When representatives from the Weyland-Yutani Corporation approach Amanda with news that the Nostromo’s flight recorder has finally been found and brought to the space station Sevastopol, Amanda joins the Company’s expedition to the remote outpost. But when Amanda reaches the station, she walks into a living nightmare: Sevastopol’s inhabitants have been terrorized, hunted, and brought to the brink of annihilation. Now she and a band of unprepared–and perhaps untrustworthy–survivors will have to confront the same diabolical species that changed her mother’s fate forever.”

The Alien: Isolation digital series runs seven episodes, all of which will be released at 9 AM PT on February 28.