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Glenn Schofield, the creator of Dead Space and The Callisto Protocol, has announced his retirement after 35 years in the industry. In a LinkedIn video post, Schofield thanked his family, Electronic Arts and Activision, and "the people who supported us in videogames".

"The past couple of decades have been some of the greatest times in videogames," Schofield said. "Some of the best games have come out over these times, [from] some of the greatest talent in the world I've been able to work with. I thank you all. I had a front row seat to one of the greatest creative explosions in history, I think." noplasticplease.life

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Schofield has been candid about the difficulties of securing funding, and getting games greenlit by publishers, amid the industry's post-COVID malaise. Following the release of 2022's The Callisto Protocol and his subsequent departure from Krafton's Striking Distance Studios, Schofield tried and failed to raise funding for "a new sub-genre of horror".

"People loved the concept," he wrote on LinkedIn in 2025. "We got a lot of second and third meetings. But early feedback was 'get [the budget] to $10M.' Lately, that number’s dropped to $2–5M." At the time, he said he may have directed his last game, and the industry has only become more ravaged since then, with huge layoffs at Xbox, Bungie, and Ubisoft in 2026.

Since shipping The Callisto Protocol and ultimately failing to make a new horror game, Schofield's focus has shifted to his visual art and AI. While he's no AI naysayer— he spent the bulk of his 2025 Gamescom Asia keynote praising generative AI as a creative tool—he was dismissive of Elon Musk's claims that xAI could generate a whole game from scratch ("he's full of crap", Schofield said.)

While Schofield is best known for Dead Space and three Sledgehammer Call of Duty games (Modern Warfare 3, Advanced Warfare, and WWII), his credits list is long and reaches as far back as 1991. As art director, he's worked on titles as varied as The Ren and Stimpy Show: Buckeroo$! And Barbie: Game Girl. As a director, he worked on Blood Omen 2: Legacy of Kain and two Gex games.

Still, it's difficult not to associate Schofield with a period of big blockbuster primacy that kicked into gear with the seventh generation of consoles. For most of Schofield's career, every year's release calendar was reliably dotted by at least a half-dozen triple A behemoths. Evidence suggests those days are not coming back, at least not for western studios: tens of thousands of development roles have been shed since 2022, as the industry is eroded by the popping of the COVID bubble, ballooning development costs, lengthening production cycles, and the delusional goals of executives.

Factor in unprecedented hardware cost increases thanks to the AI industry's leeching of RAM and storage, and you can probably imagine how difficult it must be to stay optimistic as a game developer in 2026: especially if you were commandeering multimillion sellers 10 years ago, and still can't get a project greenlit.

Still, despite all available evidence, Schofield says the future is bright.

"This is an amazing industry with so many talented people," he said. "And I know times are tough right now, but man, the future ahead is really, really bright. And I wish you all the next generation of game makers the best of luck. Explore, experiment, enjoy. And don't forget that the most important thing is the idea."

In 2023, I reported that the development team of then-upcoming fighting game Diesel Legacy included Mike Zaimont, previously a developer on Skullgirls and Indivisible who had been accused of sexual misconduct at Lab Zero, the indie studio behind those games. Diesel Legacy released to little fanfare more than a year later, but the next fighting game from the team behind it, Gameplay Group International, has accumulated significantly more buzz. That game is Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game, due out on July 23.

After a viral media post brought Zaimont's likely involvement in Avatar Legends' development to light, the game's publisher has confirmed his role on the game.

"Mike Zaimont holds a position as an individual contributor at the developer Gameplay Group International working specifically on backend programming, engine architecture and netcode," a PR representative for publisher Paramount Game Studios wrote in a statement to PC Gamer.

When I reported on Diesel Legacy's development in 2023, the publisher's then-CEO Christina Seelye said that she hired Zaimont because "you have to create a way for [people] to show the world that they've changed and decided to do better," and that she believed he "was committed to it and that he didn't want everything that went down to be the end of his story. He wanted the opportunity to have the redemptive arc that's in so many stories that we all love."

Zaimont's former colleagues from Lab Zero who I spoke with disagreed with that framing. When the company fell apart, two of its former developers, creative director Mariel Cartwright and CEO Francesca Esquenazi, sued Zaimont over wrongful termination and retaliation. He counter-sued, which the employees I spoke with pointed to as one indication Zaimont hadn't actually made up for his past behavior, which included making a joke about the death of George Floyd in 2020 and an accusation of "frequently mentioning his genitals, forcing unwanted physical contact, making sexual comments about himself or about employee's bodies, insulting coworkers privately or openly in front of other coworkers, or using very personal details to threaten or demean coworkers when they didn't go along with what he wanted" at Lab Zero.

The lawsuit wasn't settled until April 2026, at which point a joint statement between Cartwright, Esquenazi and Zaimont "agreed to resolve" the lawsuit. Terms of the settlement were not made public.

Zaimont remains a controversial figure in the fighting game community, with Legend of Korra comic book artist Irene Koh raising his involvement with Avatar in a viral Bluesky thread last week.

Hey y'all, I wanted give people a heads-up that Mike Z is still working on the Avatar Legends dev team, for anyone who wanted to know before deciding whether to buy/support the game. (If you don't know who that is or need a refresher, here's the Kotaku article: kotaku.com/workers-leav...)

— @koh.money (@koh.money.bsky.social) 2026-07-15T00:54:40.994Z

"As an Avatar + fighting game fan, I was extremely disappointed to hear that he's involved. I'm proud of my work on the Korra comics & contributions to the IP over the last decade," Koh wrote, after publisher Paramount seemingly went radio silent after being asked about his involvement.

Paramount has now disclosed Zaimont's role in development, but he hasn't returned to having a public presence online since 2020.