There was some somewhat bitter news this week for Microsoft fans. It was unveiled earlier this week that Microsoft was making some major rounds of layoffs, resulting in the exodus of 9,000 employees—among that group, included quite a few layoffs within the Xbox gaming division. Now, players are starting to wonder about the status of some of the games they’ve been waiting for from either Microsoft’s first-party studios or the games they are publishing. For instance, a notable game we’ve seen questions about is Hideo Kojima’s OD.
OD was a game that we saw unveiled a couple of years ago, with little to no information available as to what to expect. Regardless, Hideo Kojima is a big name in the industry with a massive fan base. We know that this game was designed to be a horror title, as evidenced by its bizarre teaser announcement. Despite having no information really to explain what players would be in store for, the hype quickly built up.
With Microsoft’s latest round of layoffs, we’ve seen the shuttering of The Initiative and the cancellation of Perfect Dark. Rare also announced that they had shut down their project, Everwild. Those were some of the first-party projects that saw an early demise. We also have John Romero’s upcoming AAA FPS title being dropped, with the studio essentially crumbling due to Microsoft’s Bethesda team pulling away from the project as its publisher.
Fortunately, it appears that Hideo Kojima’s OD is still in development for now. That’s coming from Windows Central, whose sources familiar with the project had noted that this game is still active right now. However, it’s uncertain if this will change anytime soon. We could see OD as another game that was unfortunately dropped due to the latest restructuring plans at Microsoft.
But as it stands, it looks like we can still expect OD to come out at some point. Of course, we’re all waiting for more marketing materials to be released so we can paint a better picture of what we’re getting with this game.