Marvel's Blade is reportedly being canceled. The Verge's Tom Warren reports the vampire-hunter game from Arkane Lyon has slipped to late 2027, is running over budget, and is now expected to be one of the casualties of Microsoft's Xbox layoffs, which are reportedly beginning TODAY.
It gets worse for the studio itself. According to GamesRadar's roundup of the reporting, Microsoft may be selling Arkane Lyon outright rather than closing it. Either way, the team behind Dishonored and Deathloop looks unlikely to stay an Xbox studio much longer.
Marvel's Blade was revealed at The Game Awards back in December 2023 with a moody animated trailer that set the hunt in Paris, with Deathloop director Dinga Bakaba attached to lead it. It promised a mature, single-player take on the Daywalker from one of the most stylish studios in the business. We never saw gameplay. Now it sounds like we never will.
In Marvel’s Blade, Eric Brooks is the legendary Daywalker, half-man, half-vampire torn between the warm society of the living and the rushing power of the undead. From Bethesda and Arkane Lyon, the studio that brought you Dishonored and “DEATHLOOP”, Marvel’s Blade is a mature, single-player, third-person game set in the heart of Paris, now in development in collaboration with Marvel Games.
The bigger backdrop is brutal. A leaked list corroborated by Bloomberg and The Verge names FIVE studios facing closure or sale as part of new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma's "Reset": Compulsion Games, Double Fine, Ninja Theory, Undead Labs, and Arkane, with roughly 435 jobs at risk across them. GeekWire reports the full round could reach some 5,000 roles across Microsoft. Bloomberg reported that the division has seen a $500 million revenue decline over the last five years, and unionized Xbox staff has held a press conference declaring they "will not be treated as disposable."
Microsoft hasn't confirmed any of it yet. But the sourcing was stacking up all weekend, and today is the day the reports have said the axe will fall.
Blade himself just can't seem to catch a break. The MCU movie was announced with Mahershala Ali at San Diego Comic-Con back in 2019, and it has been through years of well-documented development trouble since. The game was the OTHER Blade project, the one that looked like it might land first. If the cancellation reports are true, both versions of the character will be stuck in the same coffin.
This also lands on Marvel's games slate more broadly. Licensed Marvel titles live and die by publisher priorities, and a canceled Marvel's Blade would be the highest-profile Marvel game casualty since the layoff wave started rolling through the industry earlier this summer. Marvel Games has several other titles in the works, and studios working on them, but losing a developer with the pedigree of Arkane is a severe blow.
I broke down the full layoff picture, studio by studio, over on GameFragger, and I'll be keeping an eye out to see what comes out of Microsoft today (if anything).
What do you think? Is Blade cursed, or does the character just keep landing at the wrong companies at the wrong time? Sound off in the comments below!
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