Daily Briefing: Wednesday 18th August

Fortnite's new LTM looks very like Among Us, and a lot of people have noticed

Epic Games this week unveiled a new LTM for Fortnite named Impostors, which sees eight agents trying to complete tasks on a submarine while dealing with sabotage efforts from two impostors. The mode takes place in a large, multi-room environment called The Bridge and players are able to call discussions in order to vote out who they believe to be the offending party. It sure sounds like Among Us, doesn't it?

• A lot of people certainly think so, including developers InnerSloth who took to Twitter to voice their disappointment at Epic's actions. Many, including the datamining community, even believed it was an official collaboration but that sadly isn't the case, even though InnerSloth co-founder Marcus Bromander confirmed that the studio had been "actively trying" to collab with Epic Games. Social deduction games are nothing new of course, but Epic's actions against a small indie studio like InnerSloth are just grim.

Aeon Must Die suddenly reappears after a year in limbo

The game was originally shown off during a PlayStation State of Play presentation back in August 2020, and was quickly followed by allegations that the game "was created with abuse, manipulation, [and] theft." The commenter detailing the allegations also linked to a Dropbox folder containing a large amount of "evidence" against developer Limestone Games, including a statement that eight members of staff had decided to leave the studio due to “unbearable work conditions with endless crunch, harassment, abuse, corruption, and manipulation”.

• It was claimed that “the company and the entire IP was covertly taken from the founder” and that the trailer show during Sony's presentation infringed on the IP rights of the people who originally worked on it. At the time, publisher Focus Home Interactive released a statement confirming that they were investigating the allegations, and the game was believed to be in a sort of limbo ever since. Well, this week Focus Home reuploaded that original trailer to their YouTube channel, so is the game back? Watch this space.

Biomutant has sold over a million copies

That news comes courtesy of Embracer Group's interim Q1 financial results published earlier this week. The report outlines that Biomutant's release represented the quarter's "main revenue driver" as it exceeded one million sales. It also confirms that “the full investment into development and marketing as well as the acquisition cost for Experiment 101 and the IP, was recouped within a week after launch.”

• This is a pretty notable sales performance because, despite a solid marketing campaign and a decent bit of hype, Biomutant received a pretty middle-of-the-road reception when it released back at the end of May. It was a completely fine game by all accounts - it didn't exactly set the world on fire but it's not like every game has to. It very much seemed like the product of a team being given adequate time to work on their vision, and that vision just sold a million copies. Good show.