Weekend Highlights (October 4-5)

A critical vulnerability was found in the Unity engine, Bloomberg learned that Microsoft lost over 300 million dollars due to adding Call of Duty to Game Pass, and CloverPit sales exceeded 500,000 copies. Here are the main events in the gaming industry from the past weekend.

• The company Unity informed developers that it discovered a critical vulnerability in its engine. The issue affects all games and applications created on Unity 2017.1 and later versions of the engine—that is, all projects over the last eight years. According to Unity, the vulnerability allows malicious code to be uploaded and executed in projects, as well as data theft. The company emphasized that there is no evidence of the breach being exploited yet, but it recommends rebuilding games using the patched version of the engine.
• The Unity announcement did not go unnoticed by game companies. Specifically, Obsidian Entertainment decided to temporarily withdraw some of its titles from sale. Among them are Pentiment, both Pillars of Eternity, and certain editions of Grounded 2 and Avowed. The company explained that it took this precautionary measure and will return the games to stores after preparing patches.
• Bloomberg found out that a recent Game Pass price increase might be linked to Microsoft’s losses from including Call of Duty in the subscription. According to the agency’s sources, last year Microsoft missed out on over 300 million dollars from sales of the game on PC and consoles. Analysts speaking to Bloomberg also noted that the corporation expected a rapid subscription growth following the addition of Call of Duty and other Activision Blizzard games, but that did not happen, as infrastructure costs increased. Furthermore, within Microsoft, the current Game Pass model has long been criticized: not all employees agree that games should be added to the subscription on release day, as this contradicts the service's initial pricing and harms game sales.
• Insider SneakersSO claimed that Microsoft is considering abandoning the production of a new generation of consoles in favor of developing the Xbox Cloud Gaming cloud service and Game Pass, as well as releasing games on various third-party platforms. If his information is accurate, the corporation initially intended to release a new Xbox in 2026, but its plans "are now in limbo." Additionally, SneakersSO added that Microsoft plans to conduct another major round of layoffs at the beginning of next year, comparable in scale to the July round when 9,000 people were laid off. However, Microsoft itself denied at least the claim that they are refusing to develop consoles.
• The studio Panik Arcade shared a new achievement for their horror slot machine game, CloverPit. They announced that the game has been purchased half a million times. It took them eight days from the release to reach this milestone.