Arkane revealed Blade at The Game Awards 2023, PC Gamer associate editor Ted Litchfield lost his gourd, and not a whole lot has happened since then. The silence has gone on long enough to make PCG’s Fraser Brown nervous: Its no-show at Xbox Games Showcase this summer “makes me wonder if there have been some major road bumps,” he wrote earlier this year, noting that troubled development would be particularly bad news for a studio that’s already very clearly under the gun.
With Blade also failing to put in an appearance at the recently-passed Game Awards 2025, some folks are getting antsy. The plaintive pleading of one such fan led Arkane co-creative director Dinga Bakaba to pop in on X with some soothing reassurance.
“The team is hard at work, everyone is super proud and outdoing themselves,” Bakaba wrote. “Please be patient, it will be a special game and we all hope it will be meeting the high standards that we set for ourselves and for you all.”
Unlike some of my PC Gamer compadres, I’m not super enthusiastic about the studio that gave us Dishonored, Prey, and other brilliant games being switched over to a licensed Marvel project. But I’m also confident that if any studio can make a licensed Marvel game genuinely deep and interesting, it’s Arkane—and especially with a character like Blade, who doesn’t really have to fit into the standard superhero mold: In Arkane’s hands, Blade could effectively be the Bloodlines 3 we’re not going to get in this lifetime.
But the challenges facing Arkane are well known. Prey, despite being one of the best immersive sims ever made, was not a big sales success, and Redfall bombed badly; Microsoft closed Arkane Austin in 2024, leaving only its Lyon still operating.
Also concerning is Microsoft’s almost fanatical commitment to AI above all, which may have contributed to this year’s gaming division layoffs: It said at the start of 2025 that it was spending $80 billion on the technology this year. PC Gamer senior editor Wes Fenlon doesn’t have an optimistic view of the future in that regard, writing in his look back at Microsoft’s “year of shame” that he expects it “to lay off more game developers and cancel more games as it tries to pump AI bubble profits out of entertainment.”
It’s a tough spot, and I have a hard time imagining a good outcome for Arkane if Blade is anything less than a hit—so I sure hope Bakaba is right.
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