The cosmic ballet continues: just as MOBAs replaced MMOs in the popular consciousness, now battle royale games are flavour of the year, and sadly that, together with general multiplayer market saturation, means casualties.

Not even a week ago, Epic’s MOBA/shooter hybrid Paragon faced the axe, and now that same is true of Gigantic. Motiga’s monstery multiplayer game was another lane-runner/face-shooter combo, and one whose development was lead by ex-StarCraft lead designer James Phinney. If you want to have a ball with it, you’ve got until July, when it’s walked off into a shady place forever. (more…)

The owners of Torchlight developers Runic Games, the Chinese free-to-play-focused publisher Perfect World Entertainment, confirmed today that it has shut down Runic’s Seattle studio. Seeing as that’s Runic’s only studio, er, that’s them basically gone – though their games will live on. This comes barely one month after Runic released Hob.

Perfect World have also laid off most the team at Motiga, the studio behind Gigantic – which only launched in July. Perfect World say these are unconnected but sheesh, not a good week to be owned by Perfect World. (more…)

Five-on-five third-person brawler Gigantic [official site] will launch in full on 20 July, developers Motiga have announced.

We first caught wind of the free-to-play game way back in 2014, and since then it’s been chugging along under the watchful eye of James Phinney, the lead designer of both StarCraft and Guild Wars. So far the ongoing open beta has only been available on Windows 10, but it’s now broadened its horizons onto the Arc Games platform, so you can play it before release on Windows 7 and 8 too. The final version will also be available through Steam.

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