After all the hype from the announcement, we've seen your questions—and we love the enthusiasm. We've put together this FAQ to answer some of the most common questions we've been getting about SAMSON. From pricing and platforms to gameplay and tone, this should give you a clearer picture of what kind of experience we're building.

How much will the game cost?
As an independently developed and published title, we don't have the overhead of a large organization—just the core development team. This gives us the freedom to set our own price. At $24.99, we hope players will be encouraged to give it a try and discover an experience that truly punches above its price point.

Following a prior announcement from Avalanche Studios that the company was considering layoffs and shuttering its Liverpool studio, Avalanche has done just that. In an announcement on the studio's website, it recently announced that it has closed its Liverpool studio, explaining that the closure has resulted in 31 layoffs. Avalanche says that the studio's priority is to "continue supporting Avalanchers through this transition and to carry on making great games for our player communities."

The announcement comes shortly after Avalanche's upcoming game, Contraband, was cancelled earlier this year. The layoffs and studio closure were justified by executives as a way to ensure the long-term success of the company. The future of Avalanche's Stockholm studio is unclear as well, since that location was also mentioned in the original layoff announcement, but the company was seemingly only going to conduct layoffs at that branch and not close the whole thing.

The latest round of layoffs and closures in the video game industry will apparently come out of Avalanche Studios Group, the company behind games like Just Cause, Mad Max, and partly Rage 2. Avalanche Game Studios just announced that it will be shuttering its Liverpool branch and reducing the workforce in and restructuring the teams at the Malmö and Stockholm branches. It's unclear how many staff members will lose their jobs and which teams will be hit the hardest, but the game studio is justifying the layoffs as necessary for the long-term success of the company.

The announcement comes hot on the heels of the effective cancellation of Contraband, the latest Xbox-exclusive being worked on by Avalanche Studios in conjunction with Xbox Game Studios Publishing. Contraband was originally meant to be "a co-op smuggler's paradise," but Avalanche announced in August that "active development has now stopped" while the studios involved evaluated the project's future. Given today's news of workforce reductions, it seems unlikely that the game will be released anytime soon. If it's any indication, the link from the Avalanche Studios site to the Contraband official site now just redirects to the Xbox US homepage.

EPIC has made available two more free games this week. One of them is the well-known, Bethesda-published and Avalanche Studios-developed Just Cause 4, which sees players diving (sometimes literally) into the open-world city of Solis. Featuring complete mayhem and a third-person gameplay perspective, the game was received to lukewarm reviews (currently stands at 68 Metacritic score) and even worse consumer reception (sitting at a not-so-pretty 4.8 user score).

The other entry is Wheels of Aurelia (developed by Santa Ragione srl), which is pitted as a "immersive road trip" through the 1970's Italian West Coast (in the coherently-named Via Aurelia). The soundtrack and experience, as well as the chance to learn some history and cultural context of 1970's Italy, should be your main expectations while diving into this game; as a gameplay experience, it seems to have left much to be desired, sitting with a Metascore of 63 and a 4.0 user score. You can grab these via the EPIC launcher, as always.