This October id Software co-founder John Romero will take a break from developing a new shooter and correcting Sandy Petersen to headline the 2026 Gamescom Asia x Thailand Game Show. The convention will return to Bangkok's Queen Sirikit National Convention Centre for the second year running, and is set to be "20% bigger" than the 2025 event.

Romero will present a keynote titled 'Why We Still Make Games' during the business component of the event. According to the announcement, Romero will "reflect on a lifetime of building games, overcoming setbacks and navigating decades of industry change".

It'll be an interesting opportunity to hear Romero talk about the industry's ongoing woes. Last year Romero Games had an in-progress project canceled by its publisher, leaving the team with "$50 million worth of a game" it will now "take pieces out of" to use on a smaller scale project.

"We survived the cancellation of our huge game," Romero said at the time, noting that the studio had 110 staff working on the project at the time.

In addition to Romero, speakers representing AdHoc Studio (Dispatch), Roblox, Tencent and Godot will speak at the show, with exhibitors ranging Nintendo, Bandai Namco, Capcom, Sega, The Pokemon Company and many more.

"Last year we proved that Bangkok is ready to host a world-class gaming event at scale," said Koelnmesse Asia-Pacific general manager Prakash Ramajillu. "This year we are raising that bar in every direction—more space, more brands, more experiences, and one of the most iconic figures in gaming history taking the stage. The response from the industry has been extraordinary, and we are only just getting started."

Gamescom Asia x Thailand Game Show runs from October 29 to November 1. More details and tickets here.

In June, Sjoerd De Jong—an Unreal Engine modder and map creator turned full-time specialist at Epic Games—announced that he was leaving the company after 12 years as a senior director and Unreal Engine "lead evangelist." In a cryptic departure message, he said the games industry was at a "pivotal point," and he's aiming to "work out how to adapt and excel" at addressing the changing needs of videogame development.

We now have a clearer idea of De Jong's plans for navigating the games industry's future. In an interview with This Week in Videogames, De Jong revealed what he's tackling next: He's building a game engine of his own.

De Jong's nascent game engine competitor is called the Immens Engine, and he's building it alongside a small team of co-founders that includes former Epic technical director Arjan Brussee.

De Jong intends for Immens to serve as an alternative to the dominance of Unreal and Unity, whose market influence he said has led to a "stagnation" in game development for which challengers like Godot have only just recently started to emerge.

"[Unreal and Unity] get bigger and bigger, [and there's] more and more baggage that builds over time," De Jong said. "So you wonder if there's got to be something here where we can [have] a clean, modern engine built from the ground up."

Rather than retrofitting features onto a ballooning toolset, De Jong said he hopes Immens can enable devs to create a "more bespoke" toolset of their own, while also being designed from day one to accommodate the "external tools, services, and libraries" that developers rely on.

De Jong said agentic AI is one of the external tools Immens is being built to enable—something he acknowledges is a "hot topic."

Shortly before De Jong left the company, Epic revealed its focus for Unreal Engine's future, envisioning a "central role" for "LLMs, generative AI models, and tools like Claude and Codex." De Jong is skeptical that "those existing engines or existing [development] tools, that were made for humans over the years, are able to really serve [agentic AI]."

While Immens is being built to offer a more accommodating development platform for agentic AI to interface with, De Jong said "it's not an 'AI engine'"—it's a "proper game engine that happens to be friendly to an AI architecture."

Developers, he said, are still going to have to do the developing: "We don't want [users to] press a button and generate a game, and then release it alongside the other five million games people have made that way."

The flood of retail simulators on Steam is nothing new: the trend seemed to land with torrential force in late 2024. But it's fascinating, to me at least, how many of these things are still being released every week, and how many of them seem to actually reach an audience despite their rudimentary appearance.

Last week, 14 retail sims were released on Steam. I'm being pretty picky with what I class a "retail sim" too. If it's an idle game with a retail or service industry theme, it's not included. If it's a horror game with a retail setting—and there are tons of these, including this week's Shift at Midnight—they're not included either. If it's a puzzle game with retail or service industry themes, like Nothing To Declare, I'm not including it.

No, I'm talking about those unfailingly first-person retail sims that extremely prolific Polish publisher PlayWay seemed to spawn into existence, and which have been copied relentlessly since (including by PlayWay itself). You probably know what I'm talking about: you unpack boxes, operate checkouts, purchase and receive stock. They all kinda look the same. Many are seemingly set on the same eerily quiet street. There is ostensibly a strategic "tycoon" element to most of them, but their focus on menial activities is part of their unusual appeal.

Here's what released last week, with the record concurrent player number listed for each game, just to get a vague sense of how popular it's been.

Of those, Boba Cafe Simulator is overwhelmingly the most popular with over 754 "overwhelmingly positive" reviews. Few professional reviews of Boba Cafe Simulator exist, though I can confirm a PR company has been distributing code. While reviews are scarce, plenty of streamers and YouTubers have played it, and the free demo launched in September has been marginally popular.

Meanwhile, Bookshop Simulator, which launched into 1.0 last week after a stint in early access, definitely looks like the most distinctive of the batch: it has a slightly more stylised presentation compared to the others. It also benefits from not having AI-generated capsule art, which is rife in this genre.

The only other entry to break the 1,000 concurrents mark was Mall Together, whose appeal seems to be the prospect of building a whole mall rather than a single outlet. It's the only "successful" shop sim from last week to bear an AI disclosure (for capsule art, of course).

What do all three of these more successful sims share at a glance? Not a great deal, aside from support for online cooperative play. I don't think that's necessarily the golden ticket: TCG Card Shop Simulator, which is probably among the most popular retail sims on Steam, is singleplayer only, as is Retro Rewind - Video Store Simulator.

If you feel like these things are being doled at on an industrial scale you're on the right track. Two of the retail sims released last week—Model Kit Shop Simulator and Wild West Miner Simulator: First Gun—were published by the aforementioned PlayWay, which published four games between July 20 and now.

PlayWay is a curious beast. According to SteamDB the publisher has 474 products on Steam, but well over 100 of those haven't been released yet: there's lots of TBAs and Soons among the Q1 2027s and vague 2026s. Some of these yet-to-release games don't seem likely to ever materialise. I mean, unless Train Mechanic Simulator 2025 gets a name change.

This could actually be a tactic, according to industry analyst Simon Carless in his great GameDiscoverCo newsletter. In a 2021 post he theorised that PlayWay announces loads of games but only bothers to actually make them if they amass enough wishlists. Wishlists aren't public, so it's hard to tell which of PlayWay's "announced" games have a high chance of actually releasing, but Low-Budget Repairs and Car Mechanic Simulator 2026 are both listed among Steam's most wishlisted, so you can probably count on those. PlayWay has announced that the former has passed a million wishlists.

According to Carless, "there is a centralized ideas machine at PlayWay and associated companies. It generates, vets and commissions a large amount of ideas for games, and then works with newer Polish game devs to put them into action."

I think that's what most people would call shovelware, and there's no doubt the majority of the retail sims on Steam are exactly that. But PlayWay does release decent, effortful games like House Flipper 2, Mr Prepper and the Thief Simulator games, and of course, they're far from the only publisher trading in rapidly turned out retail sims.

It seems like a gamble, albeit a low stakes one: If a publisher or studio announces a retail sim focusing on a yet-to-be-explored specialist niche, maybe it'll be a winner, maybe it won't be. If Lava Lamp Shop Simulator fails, maybe Tupperware Shop Simulator won't. Either way, it's not like a huge amount of time is put into their development.

That's likely the tact taken by "Business Tycoon", the studio responsible for Mall Together, Sporting Goods Shop, Tobacco Shop Simulator and Retail Company Simulator. Good luck finding any information about this so-called "Business Tycoon" studio, but all of their games are published by the ultra-prolific Chinese company Gamersky Games.

There are plenty of small studios not taking the scorched earth approach, such as the creators of Retro Rewind, Blood Pact Studios, and Boba Cafe Simulator's Caikemi. There is genuine demand for games like this, and evidence of studios putting a lot of love and effort in. But as has always been true in games, where there's high demand, you can bet on a deluge of rubbish clones.

Top Steam games by revenue (July 14 - 21)

Steam releases its top sellers charts on Wednesdays. Not much of note released late this week, save potentially a spike in pre-orders thanks to the Halo: Campaign Evolved embargo lifting.

It was pretty obvious that Palworld's 1.0 launch would catapult it up the top sellers chart but I'm surprised Counter-Strike 2 held out. I'm also surprised the Black Flag remake is still up there. It's a pretty conservative glow up for a game that's been super, super cheap for over a decade, but it's easy to underestimate the continued popularity of Assassin's Creed games.

The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu's appearance seems to suggest it's been a pretty quiet week on Steam overall. It released on July 15 and only as a bit less than 1,500 "mostly positive" reviews right now.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Steam review of the week

"10/10. Would sledge hammer a rat to throw its meat at someone drinking gas out of the pump to then 360 a doppleganger before restocking the ramen."

John Tesco, proving that Shift At Midnight contains multitudes.

First reported by Tom's Hardware, it's come to light that, not only are the four "Backward Compatibility on PC" original Xbox games released last week running on a double layer of Xbox console emulation, but savvy independent developers have already used those emulators to run other Xbox games on PC.

Developer Nathan on X, "The Everything App," has a succinct topline explanation: "The new OG Xbox Backwards Compatibility layer released by Microsoft for the PC is actually an Xbox 360 emulator running XeFu (the OG Xbox emu for the 360)," he wrote, pointing to telltale indicators visible in a dump of XeFu (the Xeon Fusion Emulator) pulled from the Fuzion Frenzy PC re-release.

For an even more in-depth explanation, developer Milenko has an article on the subject, also on X. The big takeaway? It's a "Beautiful piece of engineering. Also: Emulators, all the way down."

Rewind all the way back to 2005: The very first instance of Xbox backwards compatibility on the 360 was XeFu emulation, as outlined in this 2018 video from Modern Vintage Gamer. When you popped your old Halo 2 or KotOR disk into a 360 back in the day, they weren't running natively on the console. The 360 emulated the original Xbox to run those games.

This tech is the basis of Microsoft's later backwards compatibility efforts on Xbox Series consoles as well. So instead of building a new Xbox emulator from scratch to run these games on PC, the company ported its in-house Xbox 360 emulator to PC, then ran XeFu through that. Pretty neat.

Meanwhile, the devs of the XWine1 project, an Xbox One translation layer for PC, shared that it's possible to use the in-development XWine1 with the dumped official emulator to get other OG Xbox and 360 games running on PC, though with "varying degrees of success."

As for how this will affect game preservation and end-user emulation quality in the long term, that remains to be seen. The xemu OG Xbox and Xenia 360 emulators have been in development and available for use for some time, but better public understanding of Microsoft's internal emulation methods can only be a good thing.

Raphaël Colantonio became a PC gamer for a very specific reason—he was a huge Ultima fan and wanted to play Ultima 7. "Number six did not come out on Apple. It was so painful to me, the idea I could not play Ultima, that I bought a PC," says the co-founder of Arkane Studios. "It ended up being exactly what I wanted, because it [had] way more possibilities than any of the Ultimas until then."

After working at companies like EA and Infogrames, in 1999 Colantonio co-founded Arkane Studios. The studio's debut game was Arx Fatalis, a first-person RPG inspired by Looking Glass' genre-redefining Ultima Underworld. Over the next two decades, Arkane established itself as the modern successor to Looking Glass, developing some of the PC's best games, such as 2012's Dishonored and 2017's Prey.

Following Prey's release, Colantonio left Arkane to establish WolfEye studios, which published its first game—Weird West—in 2022. WolfEye is currently working on an unnamed first-person RPG—though it may actually have a name now, at least internally. "I think we have it," Colantonio says.

Colantonio took a break from WolfEye's next project for a rooftop reconnaissance of his Steam library. We discussed tactical cats, dystopian decision-making, and ripping off the tech behind the world's greatest stealth game.

What game are you currently playing?

The one that I'm playing right now is Mewgenics.

I played Mewgenics because I was a big fan of The Binding of Isaac, and I just bought it with eyes closed, not knowing what I was getting into, and initially I was disappointed because it felt like a very different game than what I was expecting. I thought it would be action, and instead it was more like a turn-based combat game.

They have this metagame that I don't think works super well. I'm not exactly sure what I'm doing with my cats, like, how can I actually benefit from their legacies to create better cats? To me, so far, this part is very blurry. I'm just waiting day-by-day [for] the new cats [to] come in and then some of them die.

But then it kind of grew on me over time, and I think some of it was, [it] kept me in by the rage in some ways, and by the fun in some other ways, because it had to be fun enough that I wanted to see more, and [it has] some really cool combo[s] because it is a little bit in the style of The Binding of Isaac … it's almost like it relies on not being tuned. So you can have an absolutely shitty run, or you can have this incredibly OP run, which feels super satisfying until you die or make a mistake.

I was thinking, what other [tactics] games did I play that I put a lot of hours in? Into the Breach was one of them, which is definitely on the tactics side. I would say XCOM also was a big one for me. Those are not games that I would be good at designing, but I enjoy playing them.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

I played Cyberpunk for the first time. And I finished it.

I probably sound like an asshole all the time when I speak about games, because I sound very extreme. There are things that I absolutely love, that is the best thing in the world, and then I can be picky and complain about the things people don't notice.

I wouldn't say Cyberpunk grabbed me. I saw the strings. There were so many strings to me in the game that bothered me. But it grabbed me for its production … it's a pretty smooth ride. It's good direction, looks incredible, very good cinematics. Story was interesting. But my choices—it took me a while to realise that actually there were choices. After maybe four or five hours, I was convinced that this game only had fake choices and no consequences whatsoever, because they do so much of the thing where 'Are you going to this or are you going to do that?' And no matter what you do, it's more to give you a little bit of attention rather than anything that happens after that.

At the same time, what they do, they do so well. Like the size of the city, the driving, the feeling of a living city. It's a big game, and then there are choices that open [up] at some point. Some of the powers and some of the synergy between the[m]—you can definitely see some of the Deus Ex love that is behind it. But I think it's such a big game that they had to sacrifice some of what made Deus Ex so cool.

No doubt, it's a great experience. It's just that because I'm such an old gamer and so picky, that it's very hard for me to like everything about a game. I would say the last time I liked everything about a game was probably Baldur's Gate 3. There's just nothing I can say here. Like, just nothing.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

I played Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. The question is why did I play it? Could have been for research purposes. No, I think I played it because, first of all, I'm a fan of Lovecraft. But the game I don't think was super well received.

I remember Todd Vaugn, a guy at Bethesda, had worked on it … he told me I should play it, because there's some things I would probably like about it. And it's true, there was something about the atmosphere that they managed to do very well. And then the game was probably too brutal at times, so it eventually became frustrating.

Making a game is so hard, because some games have fantastic qualities, but then still fail to connect at the end, which is unfair of course because it's brutal. People ship the game and either it works or it doesn't. But the amount of work is the same. I think that's one of those that could have been really cool.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

According to Steam, it would be Wasteland 2. It says 649 hours, which is funny because it's more than I spent apparently on Weird West.

But anyway, yeah, it grabbed me. It was a really cool game. For good reasons, it's very Fallout-ish. And also … I think I was [playing Wasteland 2] during Prey at the time. I was working on Prey, so it was probably somewhere around, yeah, that's right, it says 2015. So I was developing Prey back then.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

It depends what the question is. If it's like 'What is a game that will always stay in my heart?' There are a few of those. Never uninstalled? I think Steam gives me the comfort and confidence that I can uninstall something and then reinstall it later. So in that sense I could uninstall anything.

I definitely love Thief, Fallout, Deus Ex. When Thief came out, I was a developer already. I hadn't [started] Arx Fatalis yet. I was a big fan of Underworld. Underworld was Looking Glass, and I knew there was this new game coming out from the Looking Glass guys.

So I was extremely excited about it, and it came out and everybody else was playing Metal Gear Solid, and I was playing [Thief] instead. This one was super analogue in the way the stealth worked, and the feedback was more immersive. They were very different things, and [Thief] was not very pretty, but incredibly atmospheric, and it grabbed me because you could feel some of the design philosophy from that Looking Glass thing that I could not yet really well analyse. I could sense there was something there that was feeling like home.

The first time I saw the rope arrow was 'Oh wow, I can dynamically create vertical paths anywhere.' And even though I did not necessarily have those words or this analysis in my head as I was playing it, I realised there was something analogue about it as opposed to, say, Zelda, where they would say "Here is the hook, and you have a grappling hook, now you can grapple the grappling hook." Whereas here it was like "Anywhere there was wood."

There were moments in the game where I was playing with the four-speaker system. I can't remember the name of their audio protocol back then, I think it was EAX or whatever. And wow, the quality of the sound made up for [the graphics] and the spatialisation and the fact that the sounds were travelling through portals.

So Dishonored was very much our own expression of a Thief game, right? … We entirely ripped off their portals and propagation system for Dishonored. They had made a paper about it, and so they were begging to be ripped off, frankly, and we shamelessly took it and used it, which worked really well, and it's a very brilliant idea. The idea being, you place portals, and the sound travels through those portals, so that really helps you locate where sound comes from.

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

I am using DaVinci Resolve whenever I want to do mockups of something either for the game, or for my band. So I do a little bit of video editing. And there is one [other] thing I have to tell you. It is called DiskState. It's something that shows you in a visual form where your hard drive [space] is. It's funny because this one, it's been with me since maybe the '90s, and every time I have a new PC, the first thing I do is I install DiskState.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

It's not bad. Frankly, I'm pretty proud. I'm trying to recall now because I'm not in front of my PC, but it's pretty clean. I've seen some super messy desktops. I've seen some with nothing [on them], which I don't understand either. But maybe I have four or five folders, and then five, six icons, and that's it.

They say money can't buy happiness, so I guess Meccha Chameleon creators lemorion_1224 and Haganeiro will have to get a yacht instead. Much has been said about the ludicrous success of the hide-and-seek game, but a recent figure from Newzoo (shared by GamesIndustry.biz) further puts things into perspective: for June revenue on PC in a handful of western countries, it came second only to Fortnite.

Newzoo analyst Mert Şahin told GamesIndustry.biz that the game's sudden and huge success "shows that lower-budget, socially driven multiplayer experiences can achieve significant commercial results." The game's low barrier to entry, both price and spec-wise, alongside all the viral popularity it experienced on social media sites like YouTube, certainly helped it along.

The full list offers the top 20 games by revenue in the US, UK, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy, and after Meccha Chameleon comes Counter-Strike 2, Valorant, and League of Legends. There's a list for console games as well that looks quite different, though Fortnite is the uncontested king of both rings. Other common threads include usual suspects like Minecraft and Marvel Rivals.

Whether you have any interest in these sorts of low-budget party games or not, there's no denying their broad appeal. It's hard not to think of the sudden ubiquity of Among Us in 2020, which just got a TV show and continues to enjoy collab after collab six years later, as Meccha Chameleon puts up such astonishing numbers and teases its own first collaboration.

It might have to deal with cheating problems and sloppy AI ripoffs, but ignore the noise and there's a genuinely great game waiting for you. In his review, PC Gamer's Lincoln Carpenter called it "a delightfully elevated take on hide-and-seek … Meccha Chameleon's game of competitive camouflage is a multiplayer experience that exceeds its friendslop trappings."

While Nintendo has a long and infamous history of petty litigiousness, its recent efforts to secure a series of Pokémon-related patents have been particularly obnoxious—obnoxious enough that even the Japan Patent Office seems like its patience for the publisher's quibbling is wearing thin.

Earlier this month, Japanese patent examiners issued a rebuke of Nintendo's objections to a Patent Office's prior rejections of one of the publisher's Pokémon patent applications. In its refusal of the publisher's arguments, the JPO's examiner was so atypically blunt that Japanese patent attorney Kiyoshi Kurihara described the exchange as containing "things rarely seen in standard patent practice" (via Automaton).

At the heart of this particular squabble is Nintendo's Patent Application 2026-019762, one of a number of patent applications the company has submitted in an attempt to secure ownership over systems related to Pokémon catching, battling, and riding. While the publisher has successfully been granted some of those patents—like those cited in its ongoing legal dispute with Palworld developer Pocketpair—the JPO sent a notice of refusal for the 2026-019762 patent application in April 2026.

Something can't be patented if it doesn't demonstrate "an inventive step" indicating it wouldn't be obvious for other practitioners in the relevant field, and the JPO examiner found that the Pokémon mechanics that the 2026-019762 application described were too similar to "prior art," or preexisting works.

In particular, the rejection referenced a 13-year-old gameplay video of an unofficial, fan-made Pokémon game, which resembled many of the systems Nintendo claimed in its application over a decade later.

As you might expect, Nintendo didn't like that.

In June, as patent procedure allows, Nintendo submitted a written opinion contesting the application's refusal. First of all, Nintendo wrote—presumably while pushing up its glasses—the examiner didn't reference a fan game, but "merely a video" of a fan game; videos can't be considered disqualifying prior art for a videogame patent, it said, because videos aren't videogames. Worse, as an unlicensed work using Pokémon designs and characters, it's a video of copyright infringement. Something can't be considered obvious for practitioners in the field, Nintendo insists, if it's illegal.

Not only that, Nintendo said, but the examiner—despite the alleged copyright infringement on display—called the Pokémon shown in the video by their official, god-given Christian names like "Bulbasaur" and "Pikachu." It would have been more fitting, it said, to use language like "a character that infringes on Pikachu" or "a character that infringes on Bulbasaur."

"It is extremely inappropriate for the examiner to deliberately misidentify the infringing product as if it were a genuine product," Nintendo wrote.

Unfortunately for Nintendo, that's not how anything works, and the JPO said as much in its decision of refusal sent earlier this month.

Nintendo's assertion of copyright infringement, the JPO examiner notes, has no bearing on considerations of patentability, because Japanese patent law "contains no provision excluding inventions that infringe upon the copyright of others." Whether or not a cited work infringes on copyright, the examiner continues, "is irrelevant to the inventive step judgment, and this view is considered standard among patent practitioners."

Further, the JPO said that it would be "an absurd misunderstanding" to think that its examiners misidentified the fan game as an authentic Pokémon product, and even if there were "the possibility that the reasons for refusal could be subject to such an absurd misunderstanding," it would still have "no bearing on the inventive step judgment."

Even the JPO examiner seems baffled by why Nintendo objected to using a gameplay video as evidence, writing that they're unclear whether Nintendo thinks a video of gameplay can't sufficiently demonstrate the relevant software concepts, or that Nintendo thinks it could be a video animation meant to look like a videogame and narrated as such by the uploader. The former, the examiner says, is more than sufficient evidence for refusal, while the latter is "too ridiculous" to consider.

The best bit, however, is where the examiner addresses Nintendo's complaints about misusing official Pokémon terminology by deploying Advanced Pedantry:

"If it's impermissible to refer to the character name in the reasons for refusal, then—accepting some redundancy in favor of precision—the elements should have been identified as follows: 'an object in the form of a small animal' instead of 'Pokémon'; 'an object in the form of a boy wearing a red hat' instead of 'Ash'; 'an object in the form of a small yellow animal' instead of 'Pikachu'; 'an object in the form of a small green animal' instead of 'Bulbasaur'; and 'a spherical object with a red upper half and a white lower half' instead of 'Poké Ball.'"

But, the examiner says, even if those terms were used, it wouldn't make the application's claims any more inventive, so the JPO's judgment remains unchanged. Oh well.

Despite how thoroughly the refusal reads like a proverbial newspaper swat on the nose, GamesFray notes that Nintendo has three months to petition for an appeal trial before JPO judges, and could still file further divisional patent applications with more carefully-crafted claims. And since this application is unrelated to the Palworld dispute, it won't have any bearing there either way.

Still, it's nice to know we're not the only ones who find this whole thing exhausting.

Saudi Arabia's proposed $55 billion acquisition of Electronic Arts has cleared one potentially significant hurdle, as the European Commission says it will not oppose the buyout.

"The European Commission has approved, under the EU Merger Regulation, the acquisition of sole control of Electronic Arts Inc. of the US by the Public Investment Fund ('PIF') of Saudi Arabia," the ruling states (via RPS).

"The Commission concluded that the notified transaction would not raise competition concerns, given its limited impact on competition in the markets where the companies are active. The notified transaction was examined under the normal merger review procedure."

The European Commission's approval of this deal came much more easily than its thumbs-up of Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard a few years ago, which spawned an in-depth investigation and specific commitments from Microsoft before the green light was given.

But the EA deal is also quite a bit different: Not a merger, but a transfer of ownership that will see the company taken private. That carries significant risks of its own, including the $20 billion in debt EA will take on to finance the deal, but those factors don't enter into this ruling, which is based solely on its impact on competition within the EU.

There are still obstacles ahead, at least nominally. Game developers and US lawmakers alike have expressed "profound concern" about the deal and called on the US Federal Trade Commission to "carefully scrutinize" the proposed takeover.

That doesn't seem likely to go anywhere, though. FTC chair Andrew Ferguson is a stalwart supporter of US president Donald Trump, Trump is tight with Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman, bin Salman is chair of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund—which will own more than 93% of EA if the deal is approved—and the whole thing is being backed by an investment firm founded by Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.

The RAMpocalypse, and more specifically the obscene price inflation it's driven, sucks for just about everyone with an interest in gaming. But one person it maybe doesn't suck for is Amazon Gaming boss Jeffrey Gattis, who said in a recent interview with The Game Business that high hardware prices could be good for Luna, the company's cloud gaming business.

Gattis said cloud gaming has historically "been a little bit of a solution in search of a problem," thanks primarily to the relatively low cost of consoles. Because of that, Amazon's goal with Luna hasn't been to supplant consoles, but rather to expand gaming to players who for one reason or another aren't interested in buying the requisite hardware.

Given the way prices have gone (and will likely continue to go), Gattis thinks, probably not incorrectly, that demographic is probably going to grow—and therein lies the opportunity.

"We saw the Steam Machine opening at $1,000," Gattis said. "We hear rumors about consoles, because of the RAM crisis, pushing up over $1,000 in Gen 10. So, I do think you get to a point at which more people will be in the consideration set for a cloud gaming solution, just because of the sheer cost of buying dedicated hardware."

The rising cost of games is also a consideration: "Games can be big investments, to go buy a $70 game, to go through the download experience, to pair a controller, and then spend hundreds of hours, in some cases, to complete them. So, we see an opportunity to serve a group of people who haven't really been well served because the console and PC companies are mostly focused on those hardcore players."

Amazon jumped into mainstream gaming with both feet several years ago, but despite having limitless money to throw at the problem it was never able to make serious inroads: Its biggest success was the MMO New World, and that one wasn't big enough to dodge the bullet when Amazon decided it was time to take the whole enterprise out behind the woodshed.

But now, according to Gattis, Amazon knows exactly what it's doing. "For the first time in a long time, I feel like we have a single gaming strategy. We understand what we're doing, we understand what we're not doing, and we're executing against it. And time will tell how well we can execute and how right we are about our thesis."

One of the challenges facing Luna is the selection of games it offers: Leading with AI-powered Judge Snoop Dogg is not the sort of thing that gives me high hopes for a platform. It does, however, afford me the opportunity to run the trailer!

Gattis said Amazon is trying to encourage a wider range of publishers to put their games on Luna, a process that includes convincing them won't cannibalize conventional sales—and ties into his belief that high hardware prices could be a boost for the platform.

"The reality is, at least the pitch that we keep making—and it is the truth—is that this is about reaching players that a lot of those games are never going to be able to reach," Gattis said. "Particularly in a world of $1,000 consoles."

I'm personally dubious about cloud gaming in general: That arises in part from personal bias—I live in a rural area with internet access that would never support serious cloud gaming—but even so, infrastructure concerns are real.

Despite that, I think Gattis is probably correct: Skyrocketing hardware prices are going to force some people away from conventional PC and console-based gaming, and to some extent—based largely on how effectively it's able to fill the gap—that's going to be a boost for Luna.

OtherSide Entertainment's stealth game Thick As Thieves launched in May of this year, but felt like it should have been in early access. It only had two maps, and though its campaign changed the objectives as it bounced you back and forth between them in either co-op or solo play, it felt thin. Frustrations like the specifics of how its time-limit system worked and the absence of options like rebindable keys at launch didn't help.

While the first post-launch content update did give us rebindable keys at least, it wasn't enough to fully turn around the fortunes of Thick as Thieves. Which was a problem, because the other game OtherSide was working on was cancelled, and now it's had two rounds of layoffs leaving fewer than 10 employees remaining.

"Working in the gaming industry is at times delightful and at other times heartbreaking", says a message posted by game director Jeff Hickman, and ain't that the truth. Hickman goes on to confirm that "only a very small team remains" and therefore Thick as Thieves won't be receiving any further content updates. "To be frank," he writes, "this is not the outcome that any of us want, but we're facing the reality that ongoing development of extra content, modes and systems is not a viable path."

However, OtherSide and publisher Megabit are working together to ensure Thick as Thieves remains playable. "This mainly involves putting together a new version of the game that uses Peer to Peer servers for co-op play", Hickman continues. "The gameplay and flow of your experience will remain virtually identical, but will not need the use of dedicated servers in the cloud. This will allow you to continue playing with your friends when you desire and importantly, solo play will be completely unaffected. Once this work is complete, Megabit will take over the care of the game and respond to bugs and other issues as needed."

With hindsight, I wonder how much launching at a price of only $5 hurt Thick as Thieves. It created an impression of desperation and cheapness that even a slightly higher price would have mitigated, and the idea that it was thrown out half-baked as a fundraiser rather than being a game worth buying on its own merits dogged it from the moment of release.

But it's entirely likely that Thick as Thieves was a game that would always have a small audience no matter what its price tag, and whether or not it had stuck to its guns and stayed the PvPvE game it was initially billed as.

Sony's decision to stop producing game discs in 2028 has caused a real uproar. Some PlayStation owners see a dire future as they become dependent on digital services and lose the ability to trade old games in for new ones, while at least one analyst says we'll all get used to it quickly enough anyway. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has now weighed into the debate, and he's clearly in the "no big deal" camp.

Guillemot was asked during today's quarterly investors call if Sony's decision might create "a demand headwind," because of the loss of the secondary market for PlayStation games.

"What we saw on the PC is that it helped to grow the market," Guillemot said, presumably a reference to the explosive growth of Steam that drove a stake through the heart of physical PC game releases.

"There's also some pressure for the future on the cost of machines, and being able to be only digital will help to have more accessible machines, I would say. There are pluses and minuses, but we think it will not disturb the industry too much."

The impact of Steam on the evolution of PC gaming is obvious and undeniable, and while you might argue that it's not entirely a good thing (I certainly would), PC gamers are absolutely eating well these days—at least as long as you don't need to upgrade your rig. Sure, we can't take our old stuff down to GameStop and trade them in for new releases, but we do get regular, ridiculous deep discounts on Steam (and GOG, Humble, Epic, and numerous others) that pretty nicely balance the scales.

But the implied comparison strikes me as flawed. Consoles are walled gardens, and the PlayStation Store is very tightly controlled in ways that Steam never has been, even before it decided that (just about) anything goes. The likelihood of Sony loosening its grip in the all-digital future does not strike me as particularly good, and without that I think outcomes will also be different.

Expectations are different, too: The end of physical releases on PC was never mandated by any central authority, and the wheels started turning on the process well before gaming became the mainstream at-home entertainment it is now. How much impact will the absence of an optical drive have on costs? I do not know. It will presumably give Sony a little extra flexibility on pricing, but I wouldn't expect it to surrender any more of its bottom line than it has to.

Despite all of that, Guillemot is probably correct. If Sony sticks to its guns—and it surely will—then the only options we have are to either roll with it or go outside and find something else to do. Whether or not it's a good thing for gamers is a whole different question, and maybe it'll be a bumpier ride than I (and Yves) expect—on that one, we'll just have to wait and see.

Less than six months after the release of the survival horror shooter Crisol: Theater of Idols, developer Vermila Studios appears to be in trouble. The studio has not officially closed, as one former employee had claimed, but CEO David Carrasco confirmed that employees have been let go and that a full shutdown "is a feasible possibility."

Vermila's reported closure was initially shared on X by game designer Raúl Pernía Alejandro, who said (via auto-translation) that "Vermila Studios has initiated a redundancy procedure that has ultimately led to the studio's closure and the departure of the entire team." Several hours after that message was posted, however, it was deleted and replaced with one stating that while the "entire team" has left, "for now the company remains active." Alejandro acknowledged the mistake in a subsequent apology.

Still, it was clear that layoffs had taken place, as numerous employees on X and LinkedIn, some of them in senior positions and with long tenures and Vermila, reported that they'd been let go on July 22.

Carrasco subsequently confirmed the cuts in a statement provided to Game Developer, saying that Vermila had not closed but that its future was uncertain.

"Unfortunately, due to financial reasons, we've had to dispense with the staff at Vermila Studios," Carrasco told the site. "We're going to try to pull through for the time being without shutting down, but the circumstances are quite difficult and it is a feasible possibility in the upcoming months."

Crisol wasn't a huge hit by any measure, but it was a reasonably well-received game, if somewhat niche. It's eurojank in all the right ways: more weird than horror, rife with underdeveloped ideas, a silly story, and bad voice acting, but also powerfully atmospheric and unexpectedly compelling.

I don't even think of it as survival horror, really—it's just an FPS with some weird mechanics. But I liked it well enough to play from start to finish, and even though I ran into various frustrations and annoyances along the way, I never seriously considered quitting.

As we've noted previously, though, making a good game is no guarantee of a secure future in the videogame industry—nor is making one that's a big hit. That likely comes as little consolation to former Vermila employees.

Hideo Kojima sure has been thinking about death a lot lately. Though he's a pretty spritely 62 years old, the Metal Gear and Death Stranding creator has made our pages recently for things like: talking about deciding to make Physint after a brush with death in 2020, making a game where you get old and die, and how he has a USB stick full of ideas that he will one day leave to his staff that is "kind of like a will".

Well, here's one more for the pile: Kojima knows how he wants to die. In a post on X (translated by Genki_JPN), Kojima said that—when the time comes—he wants to kick the popcorn bucket. No, really, he wants to die in a cinema: "I'm someone who's always thought when I die, I want to die in a movie theater."

Like a man who's spent most of his life directing videogames down to their last detail, Kojima's got the whole thing mapped out in his mind. "I like the time before the movie starts the best," he says. "Enter the movie theater, the lights turn off, the commercials and trailers play, then just before the movie starts is when I want to pass away." Probably not a fun time for the guy who comes in to clean up the seats and finds him, but there's nothing to be done about that.

You've gotta admit, it'd be a fitting end. If you know anything about anything about Kojima, then you know the man is absolutely film-obsessed. He tries to watch a film every day, and his (English-language) bio on social media has been "70% of my body is made of movies" for as long as I can remember.

It's his bio in his own games, too. You can recruit Kojima as a soldier in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. His description? "70% of my existence is made of movies. It's up to you to decide what to do with the remaining 30%."

And if you're thinking, 'You should go make a movie yourself, Kojima,' then good news, he is. Kojima Productions is collaborating with A24 on a Death Stranding movie, which Kojima says intends to "present a new dimension of cinematic adaptation that goes beyond merely turning a game into a live-action movie". Well, that'll be good. Someone should keep an eye on him at the premiere, though.

The Bethesda Game Studios Union says it is filing a legal complaint against Bethesda for "continuing to violate labor laws in Canada" by prematurely terminating Canadian employees on July 17—the same day it dropped a huge announcement about the future of Fallout and other games.

The timing of the Bethesda infodump was suspect, to put it politely. Less than two weeks after Xbox announced that it is laying off 3,200 people and dumping four studios, Microsoft-owned Bethesda suddenly decided that it was time to confirm that Fallout 3 and New Vegas are both being remastered, that Obsidian is working on a Fallout game of its own, and on top of all that, that Fallout 5 is in early development too.

Good news as far as it goes, although as I noted at the time, the obvious intent was to reassure (or convince) followers that the loss of hundreds of employees wasn't all that big a deal, and so maybe just don't think about it so much.

The OneBGS union implied that the announcement was a more purposeful smokescreen, however, saying that Bethesda "flooded news sites announcing every expansion, remake, and sequel they could" while simultaneously blindsiding employees at its Montreal office by terminating them months ahead of a previously promised date, and with no negotiated severance.

"Previously, on Monday, July 6th, dozens of employees from Bethesda Game Studios across the US and Canada were told via video call that they were being laid off," the union said in a message on Bluesky. "They were told they would remain employed until September while the company negotiated severance with our union; this at least provided some solace and breathing room.

"However, at the end of the day on Friday July 17th the affected Canadian employees (part of the Fallout and Elder Scrolls teams) received termination letters via email. This was contrary to what they had been told in the Monday calls. These letters stated that the Canadians are to receive the bare legal minimum in terms of severance: eight weeks of pay in lieu of the minimum legal notice, any outstanding vacation pay, etc. They were to also immediately lose their group benefits health insurance."

CWA Canada president Carmel Smyth confirmed with PC Gamer that the termination letters took effect that day: "Those laid off were told in writing their employment ended effective July 17 (which was also the date of the letter that told them)."

Bethesda Games Studios’ Montreal workers are being treated especially poorly by XBOX and we won’t stand for it. Here are the details.If this upsets you let Microsoft know: feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/ide...

— @bethesdaunion.bsky.social (@bethesdaunion.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-07-23T13:29:26.941Z

The Communications Workers of America and CWA Canada unions, of which the Bethesda union is a part, had already filed a joint complaint against Microsoft prior to July 17: Smyth told Game Developer last week that Microsoft had "unlawfully fired people without giving notice to or discussing it with the union as the employer is legally obliged to do when we are in the middle of ongoing bargaining a collective agreement."

Smyth added that the union would continue to file legal challenges against Microsoft as necessary, and the OneBGS union said in today's message that it has done just that.

"Bethesda and Xbox leadership depend on our labor to make them millions, and yet when we do, we are disposed of," the union said in today's message. "The cycle of workers paying for the mistakes of management ends here."

Earlier this month, indie political satirist game dev Molleindustria—pseudonym of Paolo Pedercini, who created games like Democratic Socialism Simulator and New York Times Simulator—announced that he was moving up the release of his latest game. Despite having previously promised to launch the game on the same day as GTA 6 "in order to humiliate Rockstar in the open-world genre and deliver the killing blow to the Western game industry," Future? No Thanks!, would instead launch today, on July 22.

Now that the day has arrived, Molleindustria's launch plans have changed once again. The developer announced a last minute delay for Future? No Thanks! on Bluesky, saying that the game has been the subject of an unexpectedly lengthy Steam review process due to the presence of nudity during one of the game's sequences.

Some sad news regarding today’s release:

— @molleindustria.org (@molleindustria.org.bsky.social) 2026-07-22T19:08:49.374Z

Using a sarcastic tone characteristic of Pedercini's previous work, Molleindustria said that its launch timeline estimates "were foolish to disregard the only authority on the matter: Steam, which has kept our game under review for more than three weeks in order to properly assess the scale and scope of the nudity contained within it."

The scale of that nudity, the developer says, consists of "dozens of untextured polygons depicting ass and boobs," which "appear statically on screen for several seconds." There are approximately 25 million polygons rendered during the opening scene of Death Stranding 2, to give you an idea of the relative levels of graphical fidelity we're working with here.

In its store listing, Molleindustria lists the following in the Future? No Thanks! mature content description:

• Suggestion of cartoon sexual activity.
• Depiction of legalized and ethical prostitution.
• Depiction of euthanasia.

"We are thankful to Valve's review team for its thorough work in keeping Steam free from obscene and horny content," Molleindustria said. "The game will be released whenever their assessment is complete."

In significantly less tongue-in-cheek replies, Pedercini explained that he didn't predict that the build review would take longer than the expected two week estimate offered in Valve's documentation—particularly because, he said, "the demo is identical and passed the review months ago."

Pedercini says he believes the delay is due to Valve deliberating about whether Future? No Thanks!'s nudity is graphic enough to warrant an age verification. That deliberation is complicated in this case, because he says the sequence in question "is not immediately accessible in the game," and Steam doesn't accept video documentation when assessing game content.

Ultimately, Pedercini said he "literally had to submit a special build with a 'watch the sex scene' button."

While SteamDB shows that Molleindustria labelled Future? No Thanks! as containing "some nudity and sexual content" 12 months ago, the prolonged build review seems to suggest that Valve isn't fully convinced that the game's adult content is "appropriately labeled and age-gated" as required by Steam's onboarding documentation. Its build review guidelines do specify that games with "Adult Content store pages and builds can take longer than the typical 3-5 business days to review," but this isn't the first time that the ambiguity of when and how Steam applies its mature content standards has disrupted a developer's launch plans.

In July 2025, Steam confirmed that it had delisted games based on a new, conspicuously vague rule added to its content guidelines forbidding "content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam's payment processors"—"in particular, certain kinds of adult only content"—after receiving pressure from those payment processors. Concerns about censorship on Steam further intensified in November 2025 when transgressive horror game Horses was banned from the platform without appeal.

The subjectivity of adult content labelling remains an unsolved problem. We can only assume the other games that launched on Steam this week, like—let me just check here—Hentai Tales: Shrine Maiden's Juicy Fruits, were an easier call for Valve's reviewers to make.

Not to fully transform into the Pepe Silvia meme pointing at a wall of "evidence" but I'm convinced Blizzard is gearing up to announce something StarCraft-related at BlizzCon this year.

The first reliable clue came from Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier's 2024 book on Blizzard's history where he said the studio was "incubating" a StarCraft shooter (not that one) under the helm of former Far Cry producer Dan Hay.

A couple of years passed with no news on that StarCraft project. But in April of this year, Blizzard was looking to hire a lead designer of innovation for an "AAA open-world shooter" using Unreal Engine—a game engine that it's never used before. Blizzard game designer Jeff Hamilton said on Bluesky that the person who got the job would have a "fairly unique design role" as part of the team.

While that was the last direct evidence for a new StarCraft game, Blizzard recently surprised-dropped a massive patch for StarCraft 2, which feels like the kind of thing you'd do to remind people you still care about the series. The update wasn't just a bunch of bug fixes and minor tweaks either. Blizzard said the focus was to spice it up with meta-changing tweaks to early- and mid-game build variety. The people still playing StarCraft 2 seemed to love it.

That brings us to today where Blizzard has just announced some free rewards to celebrate BlizzCon this year. Its popular games, like World of Warcraft and Diablo 4, will get cosmetic packs you can buy, but the Heroes of the Storm and StarCraft 2 items won't cost a dime. Specifically, StarCraft 2 will get a 15-day co-op XP boost for Commander progression. It's small, but could be another wink to fans that Blizzard hasn't forgotten about its sci-fi universe.

A new StarCraft shooter may not be what the RTS fans want, but anything new in the series will still get people's attention. Blizzard has already set a precedent for going back to its older games and releasing new stuff for them: Look at how successful that Diablo 2: Resurrected warlock expansion was.

If I'm connecting the wrong dots here, we'll find out when BlizzCon kicks off on September 12. Blizzard said the opening ceremony (where all the big announcements happen), and the major panels where developers go into more detail about the new stuff, will be available to watch via streaming for free.

Here are all the BlizzCon cosmetic packs that will be available starting today:

• World of Warcraft BlizzCon Bundle ($29.99): Rabbit’ath Flying Mount, Garb of the Dawnfire Phoenix Transmog Ensemble, and the Perch of the Dawnfire Phoenix Decor.
• Overwatch BlizzCon Bundle ($29.99): Lich Queen Mei Legendary Skin, Frostmourne Ana Weapon Skin, Lichimari King Weapon Charm, and Lich Queen Mei Spray.
• Diablo 4 BlizzCon Bundle ($29.99): Streamsnout Pet, Indigo Cat Mount, and Escapeproof Armor Mount Armor.
• Diablo Immortal BlizzCon Bundle ($24.99). Rimedarter Familiar Transmog, Seekers of Riddergrove (Violet) Portal, 20 Legendary Crests, 10 Telluric Pearls, and a Mother’s Lament 2-Star Legendary Gem.  
• Hearthstone BlizzCon Bundle ($24.99). Bloodmage Thalnos Signature Legendary Card, Blade of the Black Empire Card Back, and 5 Standard Card Packs.
• BlizzCon Ultimate Collection Bundle ($49.99). Everything from the five individual digital bundles, plus a World of Warcraft Murk’atath Pet, an Overwatch Lich Queen Mei Player Icon and Name Card, Diablo 4 Indigo’s Light Trophy and Indigo’s Master Trophy, a Diablo Immortal Astral Celebration Portrait Frame, and five additional Hearthstone Standard Packs.
• Free Player Rewards: In addition to the BlizzCon Digital Bundles, players can claim two free rewards in the Battle.net Shop for a limited time, all in celebration of BlizzCon 2026. 
  • For StarCraft 2, gain a 15-day co-op XP boost to accelerate Commander progression.
  • In Heroes of the Storm, charge into the Nexus as Fix It Gear Head Thrall. 

Just two months after he was appointed the new vice president of engineering at Xbox and technical advisor to CEO Asha Sharma, Jared Palmer is now the former vice president of engineering at Xbox and technical advisor to CEO Asha Sharma. In an update to his LinkedIn profile, Palmer said he's joined AI company Cognition to serve as its vice president of engineering instead.

"I’m grateful to Asha and everyone at Microsoft and Xbox for an amazing year," Palmer wrote in a very to-the-point missive. "Excited for this next chapter."

"Cognition operates Devin, the first autonomous software engineer," the company's website says, in case you were wondering what it actually does. "Devin plans, writes, tests, and ships production code on its own, working inside your codebase and the tools your team already uses."

AI is definitely Palmer's thing: Prior to his brief tenure at Xbox, he was vice president of product at Microsoft's CoreAI division, which Sharma headed up before taking the reins at Xbox. That was a fairly short spin too, lasting just eight months; before that he spent roughly four years as the vice president of AI at AI infrastructure company Vercel.

Sharma said when Palmer was appointed that he would work directly with her "on our most complex product and engineering problems, with a focus on developer tooling, taste, and infrastructure."

That's a pretty big mandate, and I have to assume that at least some of those complex problems remain unsolved. You never want to read too much into these things, and the great likelihood is that Cognition is more up his alley than a struggling videogame platform, and also that it offered him tons of money. But even so, the optics of losing a guy who was hand-picked for such a vital role just two months into the job aren't great.

Thus far, Sharma hasn't publicly acknowledged Palmer's departure. I've reached out to Microsoft for comment and will update if anyone gets back to me to wish him well, or otherwise.

Two years after boasting about how hard it was going on videogames, Hasbro has recorded a "$56 million non-cash impairment" in its second-quarter financial report, arising from the cancellation of several games in development that were expected to release "in 2028 and beyond."

First things first: As PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens explained when Sony took a staggering $766 million impairment against Bungie, that $56 million figure isn't a direct loss. Rather, it's an unexpected decrease in value of an asset compared to its book value, separate from standard depreciation.

Just a few years ago, inspired by the massive success of Baldur's Gate 3, Hasbro was going hard on videogames. In 2022 it had a half-dozen game studios working on different projects in its stable; two years later Dan Ayoub, head of digital product development at Hasbro-owned Wizards of the Coast, put a number on that effort, saying "we've got over $1 billion in games right now being developed," and adding that "videogames are an integral part of Hasbro's strategy going into the next 100 years."

But it hasn't gone especially smoothly since then. A big-budget GI Joe game announced in 2021 is in trouble, and the deal for a new D&D game from Stig Asmussen's Giant Skull studio was cancelled earlier this year. Hanging over all of it is the ghost of Baldur's Gate 3: Three years after the game's 1.0 release, with tens of thousands of people still playing, Hasbro has yet to announce any kind of follow-up—a whiff that PC Gamer's Harvey Randall says is emblematic of deeper-seated problems at the company.

Hasbro didn't specify which game cancellations resulted in the $56 million impairment. Exodus, the Mass Effect-alike that until recently was headed up by BioWare veteran James Ohlen, is still ticking over, but the fate of that GI Joe game is less clear: Hasbro told Wccftech in February that it had not been cancelled, despite reports to the contrary, but the dev team was "taking time to evaluate the path forward for the game."

Speaking in an investors call, Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks said only that "over the last several quarters, we have reviewed our portfolio and updated our plans for Hasbro's digital future. That work included cancelling several games scheduled for release in 2028 and beyond and recording a $56M non-cash write down this quarter for related capitalized costs."

Loosely echoing the new approach adopted by Xbox, which recently put thousands of people out of work and dumped four studios to shift focus to its biggest-name franchises, Cocks said Hasbro is "focusing our digital investment behind the franchises, platforms, and partners where we see the clearest upside and where Hasbro has the strongest right to win." That strategy will be focused on trading card games and RPGs, where Hasbro already holds "strong proof points" in the form of Magic: The Gathering and Baldur's Gate 3, which Cocks reminded everyone "is one of the biggest and most awarded role-playing games of the last decade."

Cocks also said that 2026 should be the company's "peak year for digital investment," driven by Exodus and Warlock, and that it aims to reduce its "total digital spend" by at least 25% per year by 2028. This will be accomplished by moving development to lower-cost regions, and through the use of "more mature tools, teams, and production processes." AI was not specifically mentioned, but Cocks has previously expressed real enthusiasm for generative AI, and the company recently caught heat for reportedly trying to get child actors from Peppa Pig to agree to have their voices used for AI development.

"So the digital strategy is straightforward," Cocks said. "We are taking lower conviction projects out of the portfolio, reducing our annual spend base and concentrating investment behind the places where Hasbro has the best chance to build durable digital franchises: Magic, D&D, owned platforms, partner led economics and a concentrated number of high-conviction owned titles."

Unity has demonstrated a Unity Engine game running inside of an Unreal Engine game, marking a step in the direction of Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney's vision for an interconnected gaming ecosystem.

The demonstration took place this week at the Unite Seoul keynote, where Unity also announced the next version of its game engine. Unity's goal with the project, in partnership with Epic, is to allow Unity developers to publish their games in Fortnite.

"You will see, for the first time, a Unity game rendering natively inside Unreal Engine," said Unity senior director of technical product management James Stone as he launched the demo. "Now this is not live in Fortnite yet, but it shows what's possible for a shared foundation.

"What you're seeing here is a game simulated in Unity, rendered with Unreal. Now, that's not video streamed, there's no smoke and mirrors. This is all real time. But it's not just rendering. Watch the avatar. That's an Unreal character running through a Unity world. That's physics, lighting, input: all of it synchronized between engines."

"Connect ALL the engines!" Sweeney exclaimed on social media in response to the demo.

The Unity partnership represents one of many avenues through which Sweeney and Epic are pursuing a future that connects content, economies, and social features across platforms and games—"the metaverse," for short. Sweeney discussed the effort in a recent conversation with PC Gamer, saying that the industry "should come to the realization that the value of connecting is higher for everybody than remaining separate."

Unity's new Fortnite integration will be available in early access in 2027. Unity 7, the next version of the engine, is also coming next year. Unity 7 promises new rendering, monetization, and collaboration features, as well as a protocol for connecting generative AI coding agents.

Yesterday I learnt about Jimothy, an adorably round raccoon (possibly with a spine condition) scuttling around Seattle that's gone viral thanks to his unique appearance. It was only a matter of time then before all the brand accounts joined in on the raccoon's newfound celebrity status. He's already crossing over with a bunch of your favourite games.

I first saw World of Warcraft share a picture of what lil' Jimothy would look like in the MMO and, frankly, I'd very much like him as a pet in-game. RuneScape followed up with a very similar render of Jimothy in the old school style, and Dead by Daylight gave him glowing eyes and chest, and bloody tentacles for some reason.

Mouse: P.I. For Hire tastefully drew Jimothy in its 1930s rubber hose, film noir style. Jack Pepper could have a new sidekick, and he probably likes cheese too—raccoons don't tend to be picky.

And then, at the mercy of social media's algorithms, I unfortunately saw The Sims chime in with a rather terrifying depiction of Jimothy. I'm convinced that's not an animal but a human in a creepy raccoon suit.

I'm oddly less disturbed by Halo's Spartan armour-clad Jimothy shared by senior community manager John Junyszek, which is literally a human crumpled onto all fours with elongated feet and neck.

Halo has actually double-dipped, placing Jimothy on Master Chief's crashed pod in the original Combat Evolved, and in the surrounding field in the Campaign Evolved remake.

I fear it's only a matter of time until we get a Jimothy skin in Fortnite, where the poor raccoon is awkwardly crammed into a mech suit to adhere to its hitbox requirements. But in the meantime, these crossovers are pretty sweet.

The FBI has arrested a 21-year-old Florida resident, identified as Zyaire Dontaevious Zamarion Wilkins, for allegedly distributing malware embedded in a series of Steam games to approximately 8,000 PCs. Arrested last week, Wilkins—alongside two unnamed co-conspirators—is accused of using the private information stolen from those infected computers to steal over $200,000 in cryptocurrency.

According to a criminal complaint filed by the FBI (via Techspot), Wilkins and his associates encouraged social media users to download their malware-laden games on Discord, Telegram, X, and LinkedIn, while also employing chatbots to identify and prioritize "individuals with large cryptocurrency holdings."

The FBI doesn't name Steam in the document, but refers to the weaponized games as being "available for download on a popular digital distribution software company for videogames located in the Western District of Washington," and the games it says were used for distributing malware—Dashverse (2024), Lunara (2024), PirateFi (2025), Blockblasters (2025), and Lampy (2026)—had all been previously named in its March 2026 call for information from users who had downloaded malicious software through Steam.

According to the FBI, it was able to identify Wilkins when Google cookie records indicated that the email address tied to one of the co-conspirators' Steam developer accounts was accessed through the same devices and web browsers used by a cluster of other Google addresses, which were themselves associated with Apple and T-Mobile accounts.

After obtaining a search warrant for the address associated with those Apple and T-Mobile accounts, the FBI seized a number of devices from the premises in February 2026, one of which allegedly contained records of messages coordinating the Steam malware scheme and Bitcoin payments sent from the co-conspirator to a Signal user named "Sibel.eth."

Sibel.eth was identified as Wilkins when investigators found that the Bitcoin wallet which received those payments was used to purchase over 150 gift cards, some of which were used for UberEats orders allegedly linked to Wilkins' University of West Florida student email address.

The FBI doesn't identify the co-conspirator, who allegedly wrote the malware embedded within the weaponized Steam games. During the two years in which the co-conspirators distributed malware on the platform, the FBI says they gained access to roughly 80 cryptocurrency wallets, from which they stole at least $220,000—an amount which includes $35,000 stolen from streamer RastalandTV that he'd raised to pay for his stage 4 cancer treatments.

When Valve launched Steam Direct in June 2017 it marked a huge shift in the storefront's identity. Before Direct, Valve manually decided what did and did not release on Steam, or else it used initiatives like Steam Greenlight to have users decide what games would or would not enjoy placement.

Before June 2017, the amount of games that shipped on Steam per month had only once exceeded 500 (518, in December 2016). Since February 2025, the amount of games shipping on Steam per month has never dropped beneath 1500.

Forgive me the onslaught of numbers, but just one more: The total amount of games shipped on Steam in 2025 was 21,382. In mid-July 2026, just a little over halfway through the year, there's already been 13,359 new titles launched.

I think Steam's history can be carved up into three distinct eras:

• February 2006 - August 2012 (rarely more than 30 new games a week)
• August 2012 - June 2017, the Greenlight years (growth from ~20 new games to ~350 games per month)
• June 2017 - onwards, the Steam Direct years (from ~650 new games a month to ~1500)

Within that third era, growth has spiked since roughly the beginning of 2025. You have three guesses why. (And if you need a second guess, which secluded island paradise do you live on and how do I get there?)

I was prompted to look up these numbers on SteamDB after reading a recent article by Sulka Haro, co-founder of the Finnish studio behind early access MMO Pax Dei (he's also worked on Habbo Hotel and a couple of The Walking Dead games). Haro has run a census on the roughly 53,600 Steam games released between mid-2023 and mid-2026 to determine how many come bearing an AI disclosure, keeping in mind that the disclosure box only rolled out in January 2024.

In 2024, 10.9% of games had an AI disclosure. In 2025, it was 19.9%. From the vantage point of July 2026, 30.8% of the games released on Steam this year so far have an AI disclosure (which corresponds with the much narrower "study" I conducted last month). According to Haro, the continuing growth of Steam's "release volume" is hugely influenced by AI.

"Steam’s release volume has grown a lot—but the growth isn’t evenly spread," Haro writes. "Non-AI launches have risen only modestly (~1,030 → ~1,320 per month), while AI-flagged launches went from a rounding error (~13/month pre-mandate) to ~530/month."

If the amount of AI-flagged games continues to rise at the current trajectory, around half of all games on Steam will be AI-flagged at some point between 2027-2028. Still, as Haro discovers, basically none of them will make any money, and few of them are reviewed well by users, if they're reviewed at all.

There are a huge amount of fascinating insights in Haro's article and I highly recommend you check it out. Also don't miss this follow-up which dives into, among other things, the genres that lean most heavily on generative AI (unsurprisingly: management sims are right at the top).

This growing tidal wave of AI-flagged content demonstrates that it's only going to get harder for smaller devs, especially those without the support of a publisher, to stand out on Steam. Why would anyone bother looking for deep cuts when there are thousands of entirely AI-built visual novels to wade through, each more soulless and uncanny than the previous?

With the sludge rapidly rising from our throats to our nose, a Steam filter cannot come quickly enough.

Top Steam games by revenue (July 7 - 14)

Steam releases its top sellers charts on Wednesdays, so the below chart doesn't factor in some late-week releases. That said, aside from Palworld's 1.0 launch, there wasn't much of note released last week.

An extremely sleepy week for new releases means there's basically no surprises here. Mecca Chameleon is still going gangbusters, to the extent that it's now spawning a pestilence of AI ripoffs. 2025's Granblue Fantasy: Relink just got a hefty expansion, hence its return to the chart. Palworld got its 1.0 release, and people continue to play the usual live service candidates.

The lull is likely to continue. While Halo: Campaign Evolved hits next week (July 28), it'll also be available on PC Game Pass, so Steam's numbers won't paint the full picture. After that, the next game most likely to make a splash is Star Wars Zero Company, which hits on August 27.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Steam review of the week

"It's okay to kill people and throw them into an eldritch flesh-pit as long as they deserve it.

Is it a game about materialism? Is it about found family?

All I know is, it feels super cathartic to finally tackle and stab someone 58 times after being chased by a giant tree."

Failgirl69, ruminating rather disturbingly on Feed the Pit.

David Szymanski, creator of Dusk and one of the chief architects of the retro FPS revival, grew up playing games like Lemmings and Oil's Well on the family PC. Among these family favourites was a formative first-person game. But it probably isn't the one you'd expect: "The most foundational one I can remember is playing Myst for the first time," says the New Blood designer. "That was the first game I remember really getting super into—being able to enter another world and explore it in first-person."

Initially a designer of short horror games, Szymanski's breakout came in 2018 with Dusk, an homage to classic '90s shooters like Doom and Quake. Following Dusk's success, Szymanski returned to developing shorter games, including the hit submarine horror game Iron Lung, which was adapted into a movie by YouTuber Markiplier earlier this year.

Szymanski's current project is different from everything else he's made, an isometric game called B.U.G.B.I.T.E which is still in its early stages and is yet to be formally announced: "The only consistency I have is that I keep changing what I'm doing", he says. "I haven't figured out a good, succinct way to pitch it to people because it's not a very complicated game, but it also kind of is at the same time."

Szymanski took a break from blasting bugs as we delved into the fathomless blood ocean of his Steam library, a journey that took us from the apex of survival games to the most obscure corners of the FPS.

What game are you currently playing?

I am playing an old FPS called Instinct from 2007. It's one of those slavjank games. I got it in the Ultimate Slavjank Collection Bundle on Steam, and I just happened to see a video about it the other day, and was like "Oh, that seems up my alley". It's [on] the same engine as You Are Empty.

It's a pretty simple, barebones FPS, very much like You Are Empty. I don't think it's the same developer, but it's the same engine, so it has the same very hard to explain feel. The way the weapons recoil, the way enemies ragdoll and everything … you don't even have a run button.

You just kind of walk through these very linear Russian science facility hallways. Is it Russian? I don't even know where it's set because half the cutscenes don't work for me. I only have the most tentative grasp on the story … but it's not a very complicated story. There's a facility. There's zombies. You go in and shoot the zombies, and there's also evil guys with guns who you also shoot.

There's something very approachable about it. We have a huge variety of different kinds of FPS right now, but it's a bit of a novelty to have a FPS that's simple and slow and not highly technical …. Although I'm very much a boomer-shooter fan, and of course am known for Dusk, I would say that the mid-2000s was the golden era of first-person shooters, just in terms of the sheer number and variety that we had. It was after all games were Doom clones, but it was before all games were Call of Duty 4 clones.

There wasn't really this codified—or COD-ified—design for what a shooter was supposed to look like … you had Serious Sam a few years earlier, Painkiller a few years earlier. You had Halo doing its own thing. You had Half-Life 2 doing its own thing. You had Doom 3 and Far Cry, just this huge variety of different things that had all sorts of different mechanics and ways of interacting with it.

I've always considered, like, the '90s, maybe you would call it the silver age. And then I think late '90s early to mid-2000s is your golden age of FPSs. And then we enter the brown age.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

The previous games that I was mainlining was The Forest, which I never played when it came out because I didn't consider myself a big survival crafting person. Now I'm wondering if maybe I do like survival crafting games when they have goals, because I loved Subnautica and I love The Forest.

However, I haven't finished either of them, not because either of them are bad, but because I have—how many hours do I have in the Forest? 20 exactly. That's about my cutoff point attention-wise. That's the time where I go "I'd really like to finish this, but boy am I feeling like I want to do something new and different." So, it's sitting there waiting for me to go back and finish it. I have failed to finish games that I would consider some of the best things I've ever played. It sucks because that keeps me from being able to enjoy most CRPGs, even though I always enjoy them.

What game did I finish last? Oh, Pragmata! Which I also loved. That one is still installed because haven't 100%-ed it yet. That was great. I think that's my game of the year so far. It's not a wildly revolutionary thing. It's just crazy to play a AAA game in 2026 that is a short, singleplayer, campaign-driven game with some innovation in the mechanics.

And wouldn't you look at my playtime? Almost exactly 20 hours.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

It's got to be Doom. Technically what's installed is the most recent port, but it's still Doom.

I consider Doom to be nearly, objectively, the best FPS ever made. And that's from a combination of historical importance—obviously it's extremely important—and relevance today. You can still go back and play Doom and almost everyone is going to have a good time.

Even if you compare it to Wolfenstein 3D, which is fun in its own way, it has not aged as well as Doom has. And Quake has a lot of improvements, but in some ways does not have the same life to it that Doom does.

I think chaos in vision and game design can actually be a very good thing.

It's a little bit similar to why I think Resident Evil is such an enduring franchise … where it's goofy, it's horror, but it's also action, and it's all of these different things, and as a result you can't really ruin it. And I think it's similar with Doom. In the past, Doom 3 got flak, and Doom 64 got flak. But you can make Doom a little more horror and it still pretty much works. You can make Doom goofier and it still pretty much works. It's such a chaotic mixture of things that it's very hard to actually ruin it.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

My play time in games is low compared to most people. The most number of hours I have in anything on Steam is Counter-Strike 2, because it was formerly Global Offensive, for a whopping 324 hours. But we go down the list … number four is the first singleplayer one, and I wanted to bring this up because it's Elden Ring for 186 hours.

That is exponentially the most time I've ever spent playing through a game, and funnily enough, I love Elden Ring, but I wouldn't say it's necessarily on my top 10 list. It'd be on my top 20, but I would say Dark Souls I like more than that. But for whatever reason, that was just one of the most gripping things I've ever played.

It turns out I do really like soulslikes … and some of it might just be that Elden Ring is a greatest hits collection of the series of games it turns out I really like. It's sort of this massive buffet of new things I had an experience with that I was resonating with.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

The boring answer [is] Doom, Quake … the one I have that's a little more unique is Infra, because that is a game I have a looping playthrough going on at any time. I always have a playthrough going of Infra, and when I finish it, I just start back over because it's my comfort game.

It's a 30-hour game in a genre of two-hour games. It's so incredibly long. I remember my first time through, I thought I was approaching the end after maybe five hours, and I was maybe approaching the end of chapter 1. But that's part of what makes it so compelling, there's always something you don't remember about it, because it's a 30-hour game of tunnels. There's always some puzzle or some area where you're like 'Oh man, I forgot about this'.

It's one of the most detailed Source engine games and might be one of the most detailed first-person games ever made … there's a whole lot of hand-placed detail that stands out to me, that you don't necessarily see even in real big AAA games.

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

I was trying to think if there's anything I could come up with that didn't have to do with making games, and I couldn't really come up with anything. Let's say GIMP, because I've been using GIMP from even before I was a developer.

I've never used Photoshop, so I have no idea what—that's why I never recommend [GIMP] to people because I don’t actually know what the software is like if you're coming from Photoshop or something. I just know this is the one I've used and it's free, so I just kept using it.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

It's pretty tidy right now, because of a recent Linux install. But it's slowly becoming less tidy. I started out saying that I wouldn't have any icons on it. And now I'm up to nine icons.

Usually what ends up happening is I have some sort of, not New Year's resolution, but random date resolution that I'm gonna keep my desktop completely clean, just have it be a wallpaper, all aesthetically pleasing. And then it turns into an absolute dumpster fire of text documents and who knows what.

Eight years after leaving the games industry, Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski is considering a full-time return to game development.

Bleszinski left the games industry in 2018 after the closure of his studio Boss Key Productions, caused by the commercial failure of its two games—the multiplayer arena shooter LawBreakers, and the '80s-themed Battle Royale game Radical Heights. At the time, Bleszinski swore off making games forever.

Yet now, in a wide-ranging interview with 80 Level, Bleszinski explained that's considering coming back. In the chat, Bleszinski discussed the events of his life since leaving the games industry, during which he wrote an autobiography, produced a Tony award-winning musical, and faced up to a long struggle with alcoholism.

The latter resulted in Bleszinski being hospitalised in March this year, in the aftermath of which he gave up drinking. It's been during his sobriety that Bleszinski says he rediscovered his love for games—and the desire to make them:

"At the end of the day, I want to create characters and worlds," Bleszinski explained to journalist Brian Crecente. "I want to make stuff that people will cosplay and get tattooed on their bodies."

Bleszinski has already returned to game development in an advisory role—having consulted on a horror game called Soul Walker. This experience appears to have been positive for him, as he's now pondering a full-time comeback. "So maybe I'll eventually get my full foot back in the business and hopefully not get pushed into the pool."

Bleszinski didn't go into detail about what kind of game he wants to make during the interview. But he did discuss what he won't be making, namely PvP multiplayer games like those created by Boss Key:

"Good luck to anyone in that space," he said. "I'm more of a fan of PvE these days. Horde mode saved Gears 2, and I believe that space is evergreen because players just want to hop online with friends and shoot some stuff, no frills, no questions asked."

Nonetheless, it seems like Bleszinski has an idea he wants to pursue, even if he didn't vocalise it. "I'm nowhere near sharing anything specific (about a new game), beyond that, I can't walk into a Home Depot without seeing a full arsenal at every turn," he said, adding that "There's so much more than just chainsaws."

PvP or not, I'd certainly be up for playing a new Bleszinski-led game. While LawBreakers failed to find an audience, as a multiplayer shooter it was thoroughly entertaining. Radical Heights had promise too, though it never got a chance to develop into something substantial.

Of course, I'd be most interested in a spiritual successor to Gears. That space has been left fallow for a long time, and Pragmata recently showed there's a big appetite for that style of game. But all of this is contingent on whether Bleszinski actually comes back, which isn't guaranteed. In 2020, Bleszinski said he felt an urge to make "a little game". But for whatever reason that didn't transpire, at least not publicly.

I was born in the early '90s, and thanks to a life marked by periodic socioeconomic turmoil, I've come to accept—as any reasonable person would—that blatant dysfunction is the hallmark of a healthy and developed economy. The free market doesn't have seatbelts or brakes, and that's why it works. If there's any wreckage that might say otherwise, we're driving too fast to see it.

But even though I've learned that business success looks indistinguishable from a runaway vehicle, the games industry's current course feels like it's careening so close to a cliff's edge that I can't help but wonder: Are we sure anyone actually remembers how to drive this thing? Are we sure anyone remembers how to drive anything?

I know it's impertinent of me to question those most devoted to their civic duty of delivering shareholder value, but I mean, can you blame me? Being engaged in videogames over the last decade has meant watching a cohort of publisher executives inherit an industry of products, professionals, and consumers they seem to actively resent for failing to produce instant, infinite profits—profits they only ever had a vague notion how to create.

Faulty service

Take Sony, for example. It committed years to abortive attempts at bottling live-service lightning: Concord burnt hundreds of millions of dollars just to suffer a launch-week euthanization. Blue Point, a studio that built its reputation on remasters, was placed on a live-service God of War spinoff project—a notion that should have been declared doomed before it left the board room, but instead dragged the developer into a February 2026 shuttering once Sony lost patience with its own plans.

And yet, even after cancelling eight of the 12 live-service projects it said it would launch by 2025, Sony's spectacular streak of misguided endeavors somehow hasn't dimmed its live-service ambitions. Last month, Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO and president Hideaki Nishino said the publisher wants to "continue to take on" live-service projects.

That commitment that would have been baffling enough to hear on its own, but it was made farcical by the fact that just days earlier, Sony laid off almost the entirety of Bungie's Destiny 2 team after pulling the plug on its ongoing content development. Yes, years of studio mismanagement had taken a toll on Destiny 2's output. But even though it was well past its peak, Destiny's rank-and-file developers had just drawn in a massive surge of returning players for a final update, closing out almost a decade as one of the longest-running games in a market where most competitors, including Sony's, suffer near-instant collapses.

If I wanted to give my next live-service swings the best chance of survival, having access to the Bungie engineers, designers, and artists who maintained one of the most successful games in the field seems like it would be a blessing. Instead, Sony culled that collective expertise to save on costs, investing Bungie's remaining staff on Marathon, which—though it brings me no joy to say so—doesn't seem to be thriving. (Its game director just quit.)

Meanwhile, Sony has announced the approaching end of its physical disc production, marking 2028 as the year it'll start releasing new PlayStation games exclusively through digital distribution. And while that undoubtedly looks good on its quarterly balance sheet, it's a decision that could quietly damage its future prospects: While the percentage of players buying discs has steadily decreased, ending their production means strangling whatever viability remains for reselling used games. Even among PC users who haven't handled a game disc in years, some of us—myself included—would never have maintained the gaming hobby if reselling pieces of our used console libraries hadn't been an option.

Maybe that won't be an issue. But if Sony ever decides it's dealt lasting harm to its user base—well, who knows whether the leadership responsible will still be around? That's a problem for whoever happens to be answering the investor questions at the earnings call.

Bad reset

And then, of course, there's Microsoft. In an industry that's seemingly lost its ability to place any bets but bad ones, Xbox has spent the 2020s making the worst. With Phil Spencer at the helm, Microsoft's gaming division sank tens of billions of dollars on an acquisition spree that put a sizable portion of the games industry under the Xbox umbrella, staking the futures of those studios as collateral for its all-in gamble on Game Pass.

That gamble failed. Hard. With Game Pass attracting tens of millions fewer subscribers than it needed to sustain itself, Microsoft floundered through misguided marketing campaigns, mismanaged release strategies, and recurring mass layoffs, studio closures, and project cancellations.

The developers it had diligently collected were tossed, even as the company boasted about their work: Tango Gameworks was axed during a mass downsizing in 2024, a year after Microsoft said the studio's Hi-Fi Rush had exceeded "all key measurements and expectations." In 2025, Spencer insisted that Xbox's "platform, hardware, and game roadmap have never looked stronger" in the same memo that informed employees of another wave of Microsoft layoffs and closures. Those cuts included a ZeniMax team that spent seven years developing an MMO which Spencer reportedly enjoyed so much that the controller had to be physically removed from his hands during an internal demo.

Given Xbox leadership's bold strategy of achieving very little as expensively as possible, some amount of continuing fallout seemed inevitable even after Spencer's departure in February. The havoc unleashed this month under the regime of new CEO Asha Sharma, however, is an abandonment of any pretense of good-faith stewardship over the fiefdom Microsoft claimed within the industry.

On July 6, 1,600 Xbox employees were put out of work, with the axe still looming over another 1,600 workers set to lose their jobs before the end of Microsoft's 2027 fiscal year. The cuts are borderline nonsensical in scope and intent, hitting Bethesda, ZeniMax, Blizzard, King, Mojang, and Xbox Game Studios alike, with King and Mojang now reporting directly to Sharma as part of an organizational restructuring meant to help Xbox become "one of the few companies that entertains more than a billion people each day."

Any number of self-assured finance guys will happily tell you that all Xbox did was cut unprofitable employees from its payroll, but it isn't obvious that these cuts are cunning and calculated to any greater degree than the acquisitions that led to them. ZeniMax Online Studios has been gutted of 213 employees, calling into question its ability to maintain The Elder Scrolls Online—a game which, as of 2024, had generated $2 billion in revenue across its lifetime, and had just been gaining promising momentum in the months leading up to the layoffs as it transitioned to a seasonal model.

Maybe most galling are the heavy cuts to id Software, which slashed 136 employees from a studio with one of the most storied legacies in the history of videogames that had just delivered a record-breaking launch last year. Despite assurances to the contrary from Microsoft and id Software's Hugo Martin, some of its laid off staff insist that even the studio's proprietary id Tech engine—a technical achievement that powers not only id's own games but also its sister studio's projects at MachineGames—has been left with an uncertain future.

If Microsoft does have a coherent vision for its bloodletting beyond, potentially, improving Xbox's books in advance of a spin-off or sale, I doubt it's one we'll like. Its new chief strategist, Matthew Ball, is a true believer in the metaverse and the co-founder of a "UGC game studio." The company clearly has Roblox on its mind.

ZeniMax Online Studios founder Matt Firor, who left the company after Microsoft cancelled the studio's upcoming MMO, said this year that "a giant successful videogame" is "not that stimulating" to Microsoft, which seeks a greater scale of profit. What it saw in the project, he reckons, was cost and risk: "We're a number on a ledger, and if that number is large, it is ripe for analysis, shall we say."

For now, Microsoft is making a show of doubling down on big series like Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, even as it lays off many of the veteran developers making them. The confirmation that there's a new Fallout in the works is slim consolation when it's in the hands of an executive culture that's so clearly disinterested in properly supporting the studios making its games and willing to toss out years of work when it decides to change course.

Deep cuts

Launching a successful game isn't as simple as providing game developers with job security; I won't dispute that. But it's been made abundantly, repeatedly clear that layoffs and employment uncertainty during a game's development don't help.

Whatever short-term gains those layoffs provide only intensify the long-standing difficulties driving the industry towards an existential crisis. Overlong production cycles and exponential budget increases are worsened every time a studio is forced to reassemble its detonated workflow to account for the institutional knowledge lost whenever a dev is cut loose. Even if a replacement is eventually hired, proficiency with studio-specific tools, conventions, and workplace dynamics doesn't come immediately—and that lost time isn't free.

The trend isn't hard to identify: Destiny 2's downward slide of expansion delays and disappointing launches followed back-to-back waves of layoffs as Bungie, under its new Sony ownership, tried to stem the bleeding of its leadership's overexpansion. The prolonged and turbulent development of Dragon Age: Veilguard included a layoff of roughly 50 BioWare employees in 2023. In 2024, Ubisoft launched the infamously troubled Skull and Bones, the ill-fated XDefiant, and the underperforming Star Wars: Outlaws—three games whose development cycles coincided with company-wide cost-cutting measures the publisher initiated in 2022, which let it shed 2,000 jobs over the next two years through hiring freezes, redundancies, and studio closures.

Life is Strange: Double Exposure—multiple layoffs before launch. Civilization 7—30 layoffs in 2023 as part of a wider 2K restructuring. Name a game that didn't have a stellar launch, and there's a good chance there were layoffs at its studio or publisher that left its developers with damage to rebuild or doubts about their livelihoods.

Is it any surprise, then, that Capcom's currently enjoying a multi-year hit streak after avoiding mass layoffs since 2018? Or that Larian, a studio with a strong history of employee retention, pulled off a generational breakout hit like Baldur's Gate 3?

Crash course

Acknowledging the long-term damage that layoffs are causing, however, would mean returning to a framework the industry's current leadership has largely abandoned since the ascent of games as services, as platforms, as forever games. Cost-cutting has been the primary economic activity of the games industry for years.

The industry's giants perform so many layoffs for short-term gains that the success of any traditional game launch feels like an oversight. And I'll admit it's not without reason: Data reported by analyst firms like Newzoo indicates that gamers are spending as much as two thirds of their collective playtime on games more than six years old, with a concentration on platforms like Roblox and Fortnite.

But sales successes like Helldivers 2, Arc Raiders, Meccha Chameleon, and Resident Evil Requiem are proof that there remains a lasting hunger for quality, novelty, and variety in traditional, purchasable games. How many more games like those might players have enjoyed had industry giants not maintained a myopic obsession with creating an ex nihilo Roblox of their own? Why would you stop playing Fortnite when it's felt like all anyone's done in the last six years is try to gouge you for the privilege of playing Worse Fortnite?

Roblox and Fortnite didn't become Roblox and Fortnite by choosing to become Roblox and Fortnite. Roblox and Fortnite happened. Neither was an overnight juggernaut: Roblox's original launch was in 2006, almost three years earlier than the first public alpha release of Minecraft in 2009, and it steadily ballooned over two decades. Fortnite as we know it today was cobbled together in 2017 from the six-year-old bones of an entirely different product concept to offer a free-to-play alternative that could capitalize on the ascendant PUBG zeitgeist.

The Roblox and Fortnite we recognize today were created through the years-long accretion of strategic decisions unique to their time-and-date contexts. A major game publisher can't simply choose to make their own Roblox because it's not possible to choose to become a phenomenon.

But these attempts to conjure perpetual revenue platforms continue as companies seek to make more money with fewer employees, build new gig economies, and lobby the public to please, please just accept AI-generated art already. Just making good games isn't an exponential growth opportunity—and those are the only growth opportunities we're meant to care about.

And maybe they're right. Maybe we can finally believe that something can be made without its makers. Maybe you can give the keys to someone who knows they won't be harmed either way, no matter how close they get to the cliff. Maybe the line can keep going up.

Or maybe we could put someone else back in the driver's seat before there's a crash.

Programmer Christopher Green has had a long career in the games industry, with a development history that included Amiga's Flight Simulators, Ultima Underworld, and Magic: The Gathering Online before ultimately working at and retiring from Valve—twice. Green had previously made a six-year attempt at retirement starting in 2017, but returned to Valve for another go in 2023.

Earlier this week, Green announced on his blog that he's once again had the "epiphany" that he "might actually enjoy some of those things that I hear retired people do," and is giving the whole end-of-career thing another go—for keeps this time. To mark the occasion, Green hosted a pair of AMAs on Reddit to share some of his thoughts on 45 years in game dev and a Valve tenure stretching all the way back to Half-Life 2.

Answering one redditor's question about what it was like to witness some of Valve's earliest years, Green said leaving his previous job in 2004 "was a huge transition"—particularly because Valve's finances were looking somewhat grim at the time. Previously, he'd worked at independent developer Leaping Lizard Software, where he did the initial rules and card coding for Magic The Gathering Online—something he elsewhere called his dream project, as he remains an MTG fan to this day.

"I had some misgivings at first as Valve was losing money finishing HL2 while my company that I left was profitable and MTGO was generating more revenue than Valve," Green said. "But things got better really quickly."

On his blog, Green says he worked on "a lot of things" during his combined 16 years at Valve: Both Source engines, Day of Defeat: Source, The Orange Box, both Portals, and more. And yes, that entailed "hundreds" of encounters with Valve co-founder and president Gabe Newell, who Green described as "a little inscrutable honestly."

Evidently, however, Valve's mythical self-directed work structure—in which its employees are ostensibly free to pursue projects according to their own interests and discretion—might not be quite as self-directed as even Valve's own employee handbook would indicate. Asked whether Valve staff are really free to work on their own projects until it aligns with other work at the studio, Green said that's only "sort of" true.

"Especially if you are new, you'll encounter a lot of pushback if what you think you should work on is too far off in the weeds," Green said. "At least one successful loved game mode was made semi-undercover by a single programmer who was the only one who believed in it."

That game mode, he revealed, was the beloved HL2DM. How different—and devoid of sawblade kills—the world could have been had things gone otherwise.

PC Gamer's Chris Livingston called Half-Life 2 Deathmatch "the best multiplayer mode ever" in a 2024 retrospective, though he admitted "There wasn't anything particularly special about Half-Life 2: Deathmatch: it was just a bunch of arenas built from hunks of Half-Life 2 campaign maps with a few weapons scattered around them." (Chris also admitted he mostly loved it because he won a lot). All HL2DM needed was the gravity gun to stand out from everything else at the time.

It's not the first time we've heard that Valve's flat work structure can present some issues. In 2023, People Make Games released a report including interviews with current and former studio employees, who claimed that the organizational structure can warp workplace dynamics and reinforce Valve's lack of diversity.

Green's second retirement from Valve means he's once again relinquishing his employee privilege of full access to every game on Steam. Still, from his description, it sounds like he'll be computing in comfort:

"My home office has a 100GB ethernet cluster with >512 cores, a bunch of GPUs, a large format fine-art printer, and a serious set of electronic and mechanical tools," said in his retirement announcement. "So I do have plenty of ideas for things I want to work on, and people to collaborate with, but they are more likely to show up on github, or one-off personal projects than commercial games."

Would that we could all be so lucky. And here I'm hoping I get to have even the one retirement.

What's the name for that phenomenon when you learn about something for the first time and then start seeing it everywhere? Ah, the frequency illusion! I was frequently illused while scanning through these July 1996, 2006 and 2016 issues of PC Gamer magazine, because they just keep talking about RAM. And given our current RAMpocalypse, well, it all just seems very timely.

I guess the other explanation is that PC gamers are always talking about RAM.

It's wild in hindsight that a photograph of a beige desktop would take priority over a review of Civilization 2 as the cover of the July 1996 issue. Was that really moving copies on the newsstand!? The 2006 and 2016 issues are a lot more striking. Pour one out for LawBreakers, which current PC Gamer US Editor-in-Chief Tyler Wilde previewed at the time and liked. "Whenever it's out, I'm confident LawBreakers can challenge all its cute and colorful competition. Not so much with blood or cursing, but with grappling hooks, afterburners, and zero-g no-look behind-the-back headshots," he wrote.

LawBreakers! Was!! Good!!! But the tone was just all wrong for the time it came out, and as we've seen from a number of failed attempts to launch a new multiplayer FPS since, it's incredibly hard to get people to latch onto a game in that more arena shooter style.

What was on the cover?

July 1996: The Ultimate Gaming Machine (US, issue #26)

Cover story: "The Ultimate Gaming Machine" by Dan Bennett

There's no magazine feature destined to age more poorly than one highlighting the very best in computer hardware at that very moment. Then again, in this era of AI-driven pricing madness, a great PC from a few years ago (at the prices of a few years ago, too) actually does look mighty compelling today. As for a $3000 PC in 1996? Well, nostalgia's got to do a bit more heavy lifting here.

For the money, the July 1996 PC Gamer cover feature was recommending a 166 MHz Pentium with 16 whole megabytes of RAM, a 1GB HDD, a Super VGA card with 2-4 MB of VRAM, the ever-reliable SoundBlaster 16, and a 17-inch CRT monitor. The screen is probably the bit we'd still get some use out of today.

The other hotness in the ultimate rig included an 8x CD-ROM drive (we weren't even talkin' burners, at this point) and a 28.8 kbps modem; I guess 56k wasn't an option just yet. "Even at 28.8k, some of the fancier web pages will take a minute or more to download," Bennett warned.

Cover hits:

• Duke Nukem 3D, Civilization 2, and Zork Nemesis reviewed
• Flight sims scrutinized
• On CD: The Pandora Directive

July 2006: 150th issue (US, issue #150)

Cover story: "The 150 best moments from PC Gamer history"

This tour down memory lane focuses on the US issue of the magazine, naturally, as the UK and US productions were split back in those days. It leads off with a look back at the US mag's very first cover feature, for Origin's BioForge, and goes on to mention some other key moments: The mag's 15% review of Battlecruiser 3000 A.D., Daikatana's infamous ad, a compliment from South Park co-creator (and PCG reader) Trey Parker, and some wise called shots, including this one:

"Baldur's Gate is the next step in the roleplaying revolution."

Some notable milestones: Announcing Star Wars: Dark Forces, a world-exclusive first look at Quake 2, and December 1997's 456-page issue. The Game Gods and The Next Game Gods issues get quite a bit of attention.

Cover hits: Nada

• On DVD: Auto Assault free trial, Hereos of Might & Magic 5

July 2016: Dishonored 2 (UK, issue #293)

Cover story: Dishonored 2 "Long Shadows" by Chris Thursten

Did Chris Thursten know he was playing one of the best PC games of the decade when he got his hands on an early build of Dishonored 2?

C'mon, you know he did.

"Dishonored has helped establish a new future for the immersive sim, one where it can enjoy commercial success and critical acclaim and expand the industry’s sense of who games might be for. Heir to a rich legacy, Dishonored 2 finds itself in a good position to exceed its ancestors later this year," he wrote.

It's a great feature, full of designer Harvey Smith and art director Sébastien Mitton saying smart things.

Cover hits:

• Battlefield 1, Lawbreakers, Mafia 3 previews
• Oculus Rift vs. HTC Vive VR headset verdict
• 10 games that changed PC gaming

In the news

July 1996

• A CyberAuthor Speaks: "Stephenson himself is certainly no stranger to computer games. 'The two computer games I've spent a lot of time with have been Myst and Marathon,' he says."
• "The PC is starting to invade the living room, and one of hte first of the new wave of family PCs is the Gateway Destination 2000"
• BeBox highlighted as a "new rival to the PC"
• DreamWorks Interactive, a "joint venture between Microsoft and Steven Spielberg's company" is making The Neverhood Chronicles
• Online RPG Merdian 59 launches. It's still alive today.

July 2006

• Ubisoft ditches anti-piracy tech StarForce after a class action lawsuit
• Viacom buys XFire chat program for $102 million
• The writer behind famous "EA Spouse" blog is revealed
• Cult classic Another World gets an XP-friendly re-release for its 15th anniversary

July 2016

• Respawn, Dice, and Visceral are all making new Star Wars games
• Lionhead shuttered
• Eric Barone talks Stardew Valley: "My wildest dreams have come true and I'm in this whole new world."

The hottest hardware

July 1996

In addition to the "ultimate" rig featured on the cover, in this issue's "Tim's Tech Shop" column we learn that RAM prices have "finally started dropping." Ahh... a better time, huh?

The whole feature is dedicated to the ins and outs of the memory industry and the misleading promise of programs like RAM Doubler and SoftRAM that people turned to when they couldn't afford more physical RAM. Maybe we're destined to see a repeat, there...

July 2006

PC Gamer's Logan Decker reviews a desktop PC by defunct system builder Vigor Gaming, the Force Recon Axe. $3300 in 2006 got you a 78%-scoring system using thermo-electric cooling to chill an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ and dual GeForce 7900 GTX graphics cards. Plus two whole gigs of DDR RAM.

Also featured in this issue: Configuration tips for the then-new Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. Bethesda itself provided tips to increasing the amount of blood or grass, upping shadow resolution, and skipping the intro cutscenes.

July 2016

Nvidia revealed the GTX 1000 series, hyping up the new GTX 1080 and 1070. The 1080, especially, would prove to be a monster hit with its 8GB GDDR5X VRAM.

Yours truly also reviewed both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive VR headsets, after testing both across several industry events in the two years prior. I scored the Vive higher, 85 vs. 76, for its better tracking and specialized controllers, which the Rift didn't have at launch.

This was the peak of VR excitement. While some great games have been released in the years since, the technology has never come close to supplanting our day-to-day gaming or general computer use.

Our highest and lowest review scores

July 1996

• Civilization 2 - 97% - "An immensely addictive and playable strategy game that's the rightful heir to the Civilization crown."
• Duke Nukem 3D - 93% - "There's no subtle way to put it—Duke kicks ass."
• AH-64D Longbow - 94% - "AH-64D Longbow isn't just the best chopper sim ever—it's one of the best flight sims, period."
• TacOps - 90% - "All the detail and authenticity you could ask for, plus tremendous replayability."
• Zork Nemesis - 89% - "It's pretty, it's spooky, and it's immensely entertaining."
• CrossWorld - 30% - "There's nothing new here; for crossword fanatics and cheaters only."
• Star Trek: Klingon - 35% - "Even die-hard Trekkers will find their faith tested by this sorry cash-in."

July 2006

• Tomb Raider: Legend - 90% - "Luscious to look at and a thrill to play, Tomb Raider: Legend is a welcome comeback."
• Space Rangers 2: Rise of the Dominators - 92% - "Space Rangers 2 is an endlessly replayable, always thrilling romp through space."
• Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends - 89% - "One of the year's stand-outs in what is an increasingly crowded and competitive genre."
• RF Online - 35% - "RF Online fails as a PvE game, and its PvP gameplay isn't engaging enough to make up for that fatal flaw."
• American Conquest: Divided Nation - 40% - "Recommended only for history buffs on a budget."

July 2016

• Total War: Warhammer - 86% - "If you find real history a bit bland compared to glorious nonsense made up by British people, this is the Total War for you."
• Offworld Trading Company - 88% - "Master its complex systems and Offworld Trading Company is ruthless, immediate and thoroughly rewarding."
• The Banner Saga 2 - 86% - "A handsome and brutal strategy sequel that benefits from a range of intelligent improvements to the game."
• Democracy 3: Africa - 65% - "New setting, same old intrigues. Democracy 3: Africa is a clever simulation but plays it far too safe."

The back page

July 1996: The Fall preview with Into the Shadows and Star Trek: Generations

July 2006: Gary Whitta's Pride Parade

July 2016: Battlefield 1

One of the biggest questions left in the aftermath of the Xbox layoffs earlier this month is the state of legendary Doom and Quake studio id Software. Some have claimed the cuts ran so deep that the studio's ability to make new games and support its proprietary idTech engine are in question, while id Software itself published a statement, later echoed using almost identical language by TESO studio ZeniMax Online, that it's merely been reduced to a headcount comparable to what it had a decade ago, when it developed the 2016 Doom reboot—so, basically, everything's fine.

Now studio director Hugo Martin has weighed in, and unsurprisingly he's in the 'all is well' camp. Speaking in a new Slayers Club Live stream, Martin said "reports that we've been nerfed into the ground and gutted and we have 50 people [remaining]" are not true.

"We're the size we were when we made Doom 2016, and idTech is very much alive and well. You have to understand, we have idTech engineers both in Frankfurt and at MachineGames. We collaborate quite a bit. So the idTech is there, the Doom team is here, and we're excited to share with you guys more of what we're working on in the future when it is appropriate and approved."

According to an Aftermath report, id's office in Frankfurt—quite small to begin with—was also cut in half by the Xbox layoffs, being reduced from 12 employees to six.

That statement from Martin was fairly safe and anodyne, obviously intended to calm the nervous crowds without committing to anything specific, and I think the truth is that we're not going to know the true impact of the cuts until we know what id Software gets up to next.

But he had more to say, and Martin's subsequent comments struck me as considerably more tone deaf. "The fact that we made a game that people like and is critically and commercially successful ... that's good for everyone. For the people at the studio, for the people who unfortunately we had to say goodbye to, I think that helps everyone, and we really appreciate your support.

"What matters the most is that the games are good, and I'm so happy that people—it's just a good thing for everybody."

As someone who likes and appreciates it when the games are good, I have to say that I'm not sure that's really the most important thing at all, at least not compared to the long-term health of the industry that makes them—which of course means the people who make them. Technology advances at a sometimes alarming pace, it's true, but the headlong rush to embrace those advances, heedless of any consideration beyond the bottom line, is not going to lead us to a better place—or to better games. Pretending that everything is fine as long as the games are good is a quick way to end up in our list of "25 foolproof ways to get laid off in the videogame industry"—which, yes, includes making an acclaimed and commercially successful game.

Martin isn't the only one looking to reassure gamers that everything is a-okay. Earlier today Bethesda dropped a massive infodump on its plans for the future, including confirmation of a new Fallout game being made by Obsidian, remasters of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, and word that Fallout 5 is in pre-production.

EA announced it'd be creating a whole new platform for advertising last month, something I'm sure has you so excited you're jumping out of your seat and clicking your heels. You might be potentially doing a little dance and saying 'yipee!' Personally speaking, the very thought exhausts me, though Alexander Dao, EA's vice president of advertising and sponsorship, at least has somewhat of a measured stance towards it.

That's via an interview with The Game Business. In it, Dao says that ads in games are "a huge opportunity, not just for EA but broadly, because most of the games that have been around for a while, building the advertising experience is really retrofitting it in."

He uses the example of the most recent Skate, a game that hit the industry like a corporate brick and, as our own Kara Phillips said, feels like it was made by people in suits. Still, Dao maintains that if "you actually design them with the right advertising and brand experience in there from the get-go, it just makes it easier. It makes it feel more native and it creates more flexibility in the types of brands that can come in and out."

As for what the new platform means for videogames, Dao says that they're trying to "standardize some of this." Mainly in terms of viewability standards and the ability to share reports back to the company they're advertising for, so they're "seeing consistency." Basically, justifying the obscene amount of cash that gets spent in routine advertisements each year.

But that standardization presents a problem, because "it has to make sense for the game" says Dao. A statement that both gives me some relief, and a little bit of anxiety—like watching a vampire figure out that it needs to be polite in order to get invited in. Not that I'm comparing advertising executives to vampires. I would never do that.

"It’s easier to imagine what that looks like with sports because what you’re really trying to do is mirror the real-world experience. But if we pull on the thread of… how do we actually understand what the players want? The progression? And can brands be a part of that experience?"

The example Dao uses is in The Sims, which had a collaboration with Coach that involved nine free items with Coach branding on them: "We did some surveys to understand what type of brands they would actually want to see in the game. Where is there good overlap in audience? And if a brand were to come in, what’s the right way for them to do it? And what we did with Coach was democratize access to their products to The Sims community."

And, listen. I am dangerously close to giving Dao kudos here, because in the interest of fairness—if I were a Sims player that was into fashion, I'd probably be pretty happy to be given free clothes and accessories in exchange for the understanding I was being advertised to. Is it worse than, say, being asked to shell out money for a collab between games? I dunno, man.

But when Dao says eminently reasonable things like "it is a bit nuanced title-by-title to make sure that you’re getting it right and it doesn’t feel random", I do still feel like a frog being boiled in a pot. Mostly because advertising—as shown by, say, subscription-based streaming services having the gall to put ads in when you're already paying a sub—has a way of escalating things.

Xbox's 1,600 layoffs last week were brutal on the developers impacted, and will have uncertain ripples on the industry for years to come—however, a recent report from Game Developer states that the "reset" itself was chaotically implemented.

Speaking with multiple sources, the report shares that employees across Xbox were "informed their jobs were being eliminated during a fleeting video call with management at their respective studios … Chat was disabled. Microphones were permanently muted. In one instance, cameras were automatically turned off—meaning those delivering the news couldn't even see their colleagues' faces."

One source told Game Developer that the call regarding id Software, where over 130 people were laid off, "lasted under 60 seconds," with an additional ask for ousted developers not to come into the office despite the fact that many had already begun commuting.

"Once the news had been delivered, Slack and internal email access was reportedly pulled within 48 hours," Game Developer states. "It left colleagues scrambling to make sense of the situation using unofficial channels—many of which are overseen by union members and organizers."

"Many of us did not know what was happening for weeks," one developer told the site. "Higher ups didn't know or did not say. It was left to all of us to speculate and spiral and worry." Another source from id Software added: "Does Microsoft care? Absolutely not. And they seem to actually put some level of effort and care into making it as painful as possible."

There's also the hanging sword of Damocles that is the additional 1,600 layoffs, which Xbox CEO Asha Sharma said would be happening before 2027. This looming aftershock has understandably been disastrous for morale. Another developer tells Game Developer that they "don’t know how anyone remaining at Xbox studios can feel safe knowing another 1600 cuts are coming.

"And even then, what happens after June 2027? Will we get layoffs in July for the third year in a row?"

I'd honestly be asking myself the same thing—mind, I'm not a CEO responsible for 'returning to growth' or what-have-you, but given the year of shame Microsoft had in 2025, I can't help but ponder if it was the best thing for morale to promise that another 1600 jobs would be lost at some point by 2027.

Point being, people who are waiting for the other shoe to drop aren't usually able to do good work, or might reasonably be looking for new work (not that that's easy, right now). That doesn't, to me, seem like a helpful environment in which to get 1 billion daily players.

One of the major victims of Xbox's "reset" is id Software, which suffered a whopping 136 layoffs—a move one artist likened to reducing it to a "support studio". This is a line that Microsoft itself has tried to counter, both via official studio channels and a statement given to Windows Central last week. More on that in a moment.

One primary concern was that the studio's engine, id Tech, would be scuppered in favour of Unreal Engine. This would be a huge loss. As my fellow PC Gamer writer Wes Fenlon described it, id Tech "runs like a greased-up bat hurtling out of hell at a time when its competition is leaning on AI upscalers to crack 30 frames per second."

Windows Central spoke to Microsoft about that concern, and the site was told "There are dozens of people working on id Tech across multiple locations. Reports that there’s only one person left in Texas are inaccurate."

But now, a comprehensive Game Developer report, speaking to an id Software worker who was laid off, seems to contradict that statement: "They've just gotten rid of all the people who could ever fix, maintain, or change [id Tech], so it's most likely going to end up in the trash can. That's where I just come back to: It completely feels like success is detached from your ability to keep a job, and I think that's basically provable."

They continue: "There were five members of the VFX team, including the lead [that were laid off]. Our technical art and design part department now only has its lead. That's it. All other four of the members of the team were let go. The institutional knowledge [that has been lost] on the id Tech side is immense. [...] I cannot imagine a path forward where they make another game in id Tech."

At the moment, it's Microsoft's word against the laid-off staff's—and to be clear, I am neither surprised nor judgemental that there are developers at id Software who are currently toeing the company line. This is a historically terrible time in the industry to be looking for work, given the sheer volume of talent that has been sloughed out of mainstream studios over the past few years.

If (and I am speaking in hypotheticals, here) Microsoft has ordered these studios to broadcast the message that everything is pretty much fine, I don't resent those studios for doing so. It's not the fault of these studios or their developers to be put in a position where dissent might lose them their work.

But I think it's a little telling that, when a source is allowed to speak anonymously and has nothing left to lose, the picture painted is far more pessimistic. Whether id Software is able to make another game in id Tech will be proven in the years to come—but it's clear there is a stark difference in optimism between the company message and the experiences of those laid off in last week's massacre.

ZeniMax Online head Joseph Burba is among over 200 staff laid off at the Elder Scrolls Online studio last week as part of Xbox's recent round of mass layoffs. Burba has been with the studio for 14 years, and has worked on The Elder Scrolls Online since its 2014 launch. He was promoted to studio lead in July last year.

The news comes via Game File, who obtained a list of roles impacted by Microsoft's recent purge from the state of Maryland, where both ZeniMax Online Studios and its parent company, ZeniMax Media Inc, are based. In addition to Burba, ESO executive producer Susan Kath, game director Rich Lambert, and production director Ala Diaz have all lost their roles.

According to documents seen by Game File, all four will remain at the studio for "the next few months" to help transition a new leadership team, which will consist of ESO game lead Nick Giacomini, and business operations lead Josh Henderson.

"We have tremendous confidence in Josh and Nick, the future of this studio, and the continued growth of ESO," an internal memo penned by the outgoing leadership read. "With exciting experiences still ahead for our players as we wrap up work for Update 51 and beyond, we believe that your passion, creativity, and commitment to each other and the community will continue serving as the heartbeat of ESO."

ZeniMax Online has shrunk considerably since late 2024, when its headcount was roughly 461 if union membership is any indication. After layoffs in 2025 and 2026 the studio has lost at least 40% of its workforce. Lopping off executive staff is probably a quick and easy way to save money, but it also means destroying—especially in the case of Burba—decades worth of institutional knowledge.

It's unclear how "growth" will be achieved for ESO in light of how severely the studio's head count has contracted, but according to ESO community manager Kevin Gbolie, writing after news of the layoffs, "the plan is still to deliver great content, and we will hopefully have an update soon."

Last week's seismic Microsoft layoffs also impacted ZeniMax Media: of the 379 in total, 213 were from ZeniMax Online Studios, and 166 from ZeniMax Media, the latter including Bethesda Game Studios and Bethesda's publishing concerns.

AI is controversial for… well, any number of reasons—but particularly in game development, with studios even as beloved as Larian having to carefully walk back casual experimentations with the technology, and many developers turning their noses squarely up.

I'm not exactly a fan myself, but I'll cop that there are some mundane, often-times very boring uses where its use makes some degree of sense. I'm not about to get up in-arms about the valuable labour of resizing shoulder-pads in World of Warcraft.

Worrying my ability to ignore casual, mundane uses though is a recent report from Japan’s Online Game Association (JOGA) and Kadokawa ASCII Laboratories, as shared by Famitsu (thanks, Automaton). The poll found that 100% of Japanese developers—specifically those making online games—are using generative AI in some shape or form.

There's a bit of a silver lining, though. The poll found that most of these studios were using AI for "user preference analysis" and "user behavior prediction", rather than art, music, or voice acting. And while there are plenty of sound arguments you can make against AI adoption full stop, the use-cases here seem fairly benign as far as their impact on the creative industries go.

Most doesn't mean "all", however, and I'd be deeply naive if I didn't assume plenty of these companies are using AI in ways I wouldn't approve of.

Besides, that's just from a creative, industry-impacting point of view. Am I a fan of gluts of datacenters devouring power while inflicting unsafe levels of noise pollution on residents close to where they're built? Obviously not, and I'm not entirely thrilled about industry practices that justify these things becoming standard, either.

The study found that Google Gemini had a 94% use rate, with silver and bronze medals going to Claude (84%) and GitHub Copilot (76%).

While you might assume this paints a picture of a user base that is completely ambivalent to AI, there were concerns from the players that JOGA and Kadokawa ASCII Laboratories polled, too—namely about "all games starting to look alike", so the review-tanking resistance we see on English-speaking platforms isn't happening in cultural isolation.

You can read the full statement in the link above, but this reads as a desire to cut down on the financial strain of legal work. As an extra wrinkle, Paizo says: "We offered a marketing agreement to [Archives of Nethys to] make the change less impactful, but those conversations were not concluded before they chose to publish their notice."

Original story: Pathfinder 2e's developer, Paizo, gets a lot of slack from me—because all told, Paizo is incredibly generous. As a system, PF2e costs basically nothing to play. Every rule, additional class, extra monster, etcetera is available online for free, either through platforms like Demiplane or via its very good Foundry integration.

The only thing Paizo tends to charge for are pre-written adventures and, naturally, the beneficial formatting that comes with having a book with an index, rather than trying to search things on a volunteer-made pseudo-wiki.

That relationship goes on, but diminished, as one of the largest such sites—Archives of Nethys—has announced Paizo is terminating its partnership with it effective July 24. A post to the site goes into more detail:

"We have been told the reason for this decision is that our website has not produced royalties for Paizo. While we cannot go into the full details of our license arrangement, the general details have been publicly known for many years. Paizo would send us early access book PDFs well ahead of release and provided us with their art assets to use on the site.

"In exchange, our team of volunteers would make sure that the rules and content of the game made it onto the website in a timely and accurate manner. Lastly, if we generated enough profit, we would pay Paizo a royalty on that money, as licensed partners typically do. Unfortunately, as of the time of receiving this email, we had not made enough profit in a given month to generate any royalties for Paizo as per this arrangement."

It's a tough blow, though one I somewhat understand on Paizo's behalf. The company is currently suffering from $10 million's worth of inventory being bound in a warehouse somewhere, thanks to a massive legal knot involving the bankrupt supplier Diamond Publishing.

Despite happening last year, Paizo's still reeling from the cost—enough that it had to lay 12 staff members off last month. Given AoN's model, by its own admission, wasn't generating enough cash to give royalties for Paizo, it's not that much of a stretch to see the cause and effect.

Which sucks for everyone involved, since part of the reason AoN didn't do that was an interest in keeping things accessible: "We've always believed that attempting to monetize the site more aggressively would result in less users and that our real value to Paizo was in the traffic and business we sent their way."

That doesn't mean AoN is shutting down, though—Paizo still allows rules to be shared freely under its community use policy. However, the site will have the majority of its artwork removed, and it will no longer receive material in advance of its release date, meaning players interested in accessing new rules for free close to their release date might have to go to a different site, like Demiplane.

I've reached out to Paizo for comment, and will update this article if I receive a response.

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."

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."

Three videogame showcases from PC Gamer publisher Future will air at this year's Gamescom in August: "Future Games Show at Gamescom" and "FGS Live From Gamescom" on August 26, and "FGS Best Of Gamescom" when the convention wraps up on Sunday, August 30.

The first of the three shows "will bring viewers world premieres, exclusive trailers, developer deep dives and brand-new game demos from some of the industry's most creative studios," says Future. FGS Live will follow directly after with more trailers, news, and interviews.

Finally, the "Best Of" showcase will include "exclusive booth tours, developer interviews and a recap of Gamescom's most exciting announcements."

Gamescom is an enormous trade show that takes place in Cologne, Germany every August, and is also known for Geoff Keighley's Opening Night Live showcase, which this year will air on August 25.

The Future Games Show has previously featured games such as Resident Evil Requiem, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and Blue Prince.

In related news, we just announced that the PC Gaming Show will return to Japan this year for the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct on September 20, during Tokyo Game Show.

XAfter an eight year stretch as vice president and general manager of the Epic Games Store, Steve Allison has left Epic Games to take up the mantle of chief business officer at Saber Interactive.

Allison said in a statement (via Games Industry) that he's "extremely impressed" with what Saber Interactive's founders have built. "Saber's strength is the talented studios that build high-quality games at 30-50% the cost of industry norms. The upcoming slate is exceptional with Space Marine 3, Jurassic Park, Turok, Hellraiser, the upcoming John Wick game and several unannounced projects that we can talk about very soon."

Prior to joining Epic in 2018, Allison served as senior vice president of publishing at Telltale Games. He also held executive roles at Midway, Atari, and Accolade. Saber Interactive CEO Matthew Karch said Allison "has done more to shape and modernize the game industry than anyone else I know," joking that he's "not only one of the most knowledgeable and experienced individuals in games" but also "incredibly handsome."

"We are lucky to have him help lead Saber into the next phase of our journey, even if I need to avoid joint photo ops," Karch said.

It's not clear exactly when Allison left Epic, although his LinkedIn page indicates he was still serving as Epic Games Store chief in July. His former boss, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, shared a tribute of his own on X. "Thanks to Epic veteran Steve Allison for launching the Epic Games Store in 2018 and driving it to 78 million monthly active users today!"

Some of the responses to Sweeney's message highlight the awkward side of Allison's tenure on the Epic Games Store: After almost a decade of operation, the launcher still kinda sucks, and it's not just me saying so, but Allison himself. He literally said "the launcher sucks" in February, right around the same time he announced that Epic would be "ripping out the guts" of the launcher as part of a major technical upgrade aimed at making the whole thing not suck.

The Epic Games Store has grown significantly since it went live in 2018, in part by giving away literally hundreds of millions of free games—billions of copies in total by now, surely—a strategy it pursues to this day. 78 million MAU is definitely nothing to sneeze at, but Steam remains the big dog in PC gaming stores: Valve doesn't share Steam's monthly numbers but Simon Carless at GameDiscoverCo did some back-of-napkin math and estimated that Steam is doing, very roughly, around 200 million MAU.

Saber Interactive was founded in 2001 and released its first game, a Serious Sam clone called Will Rock, in 2003. Apart from the title, which remains one of my favorites, Will Rock wasn't very good, but Saber persisted, and after releasing TimeShift in 2007 it teamed up with 343 Industries on Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary. The studio was acquired by Embracer in 2020, becoming one of its major subsidiaries; four years later, following Embracer's implosion, Saber was sold to a company owned by Karch for $247 million, taking most of the studios operating under its Embracer division with it—becoming kind of a mini-Embracer in its own right.

It's been over a month since the summer PC Gaming Show aired. I may be biased, but I loved it. We had more world premieres than ever before, some shadowdrops, and got deep dives into the mind-bending Control Resonant, galaxy-spanning Total War: Warhammer 40,000, and tactical PvP looter Arkheron. You can catch up on the entire show right here. But don't you just wish there was another show coming up soon, say, September 20? Well, there is. The PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct is coming back Sunday, September 20, 2026.

Last year we flew PC Gamer's own Midas Whittaker out to Tokyo for our first-ever Tokyo Direct, a smaller show nestled right between our summer PC Gaming Show and December's Most Wanted round-up. He had a blast and his merch became the envy of the office for the next month.

We also had a nose around the famous Tokyo Game Show floor to get a closer look at all the wonderful videogames on offer. What are we doing this year? Well, you'll have to stay tuned to learn more about what we have in store for you with this next iteration of the show.

What I can say for certain is that we'll have more awesome games for you to see. I can't let you know what any of them are because that would ruin the surprise, so you'll have to catch the show for yourself to find out. You'll be able to watch it in all the usual places, such as Steam, YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, and X. There will undoubtedly be a bunch of streamers who you can watch along with, too, if you like chatting about everything as it's announced. We'll reveal the full list of places you can go to gawk at the games closer to showtime.

In the meantime, catch up on everything revealed during our 2025 Tokyo Direct.

Have you noticed that things have been kind of quiet on the Ubisoft front lately? Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is doing quite well, but what else has it done for us lately? Where's the new Far Cry? What's going on with Ghost Recon, The Division, Prince of Persia? Where is my Splinter Cell?

In its 2025-26 Universal Registration Document and Annual Financial Report (via GamesRadar), Ubisoft shared a bit of bad news: All of that good stuff is coming, yes, but, well, we're going to be waiting a bit. The company said its 2026-27 fiscal year, which began on April 1, will include Black Flag Resynced and "other targeted premium games" that will be announced later, but that overall the year will have a "lighter new release slate" than it's put up in the past.

But then, good news! A "significantly bigger content pipeline" is expected in the 2027-28 and 2028-29 fiscal years, with new games from Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Ghost Recon, as well as an "acceleration of [Ubisoft's] live services," which—before you write that off as the opposite of good news—includes Rainbow Six Siege, which remains one of Ubi's bona fide hits.

I always read documents like this with a bit of a jaundiced eye. A major videogame publisher is going to publish new games in its best-known and most lucrative franchises at some undetermined point in the future? Not exactly a stop-the-presses moment. Nor is this anything especially new: Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot confirmed in March that new Assassin's Creed and Far Cry games are in the works, and of course they are: We all dutifully play the will they/won't they game, but a new Far Cry and Assassin's Creed is 100% a question of 'when,' not 'if.'

But that's what makes this financial doc a little more interesting for me than it otherwise might have been—because the 'when' part of the equation has proven so vexing for Ubisoft over the years. Beyond Good and Evil 2, which will not be born and refuses to die, is the obvious exemplar, but Ubisoft has been plagued by cancellations, delays, and long, awkward, silences for years.

The company tapped the brakes on annualized Assassin's Creed and Far Cry releases in 2016, which seemed wise at the time. But in the years since, that's come to feel less like 'taking the time to get it right' and more like a simple lack of focus and direction, and an inability to get games finished and released with any kind of timeliness.

That sensation is exacerbated by Ubisoft's highly publicized troubles over the past few years, which have seen multiple rounds of layoffs, studio closures, high-profile creative departures, and underperforming releases; a major restructuring announced in January has only seen more of the same, leading to scenarios like Ubisoft Barcelona laying off employees amidst the success of Black Flag Resynced.

So this, basically, is Ubisoft asking for more time: Not from you, the gamer, so much, but from its shareholders, who may be getting a bit jittery about the company's chances for a comeback and may therefore be more likely to entertain offers from outsiders—like, say, Tencent, a major backer of its new "creative house" structure. Tencent didn't make a move on Ubisoft in 2025 as some had speculated, but it did take a run at it in 2022, and while some Chinese companies, like NetEase, seem to be disentangling themselves from the Western game biz somewhat, Tencent's significant backing of Ubisoft's new "creative house" structure suggests to me that if it sees a clear shot, it's going to take it.

Caught up in the wave of Xbox 'reset' layoffs that occurred last week, id Software has been hit particularly hard. And while official statements given by the studio maintain that it's still of a decent enough size to make the kinds of games it used to, that sentiment's at odds with many of the developers who were laid off.

It's even at odds with some of the devs still working there. id Software producer Andrew Willis, who was a large part of the studio's efforts to unionise back in 2025, has made a series of posts on LinkedIn which are still (understandably) furious, despite the studio's official stance that things aren't all ruined.

"I think the only way to fix the video game industry at this point is for developer owned studios to start rising from these studio closures and layoffs," writes Willis, "We've got to learn from the past, be fiscally responsible, and create an environment of sustainable growth (though growth should be a byproduct of success, not a goal in and of itself)."

A "return to growth" was, after all, mentioned in Xbox CEO Asha Sharma's announcement. "we will return to growth in 2027", Sharma said. Mind, that was also in the same post that announced there'd be another 1,600 layoffs happening by 2027, but hey. It's a pretty standard tag-line for most big businesses—something to keep the shareholders happy.

Either way, Willis remains unimpressed: "It's the only path forward I can see, and these large publishers and monopolies have proven themselves terrible stewards and somehow even worse financial managers. If the people who create the value own that value, good things will follow."

In a follow-up post, Willis adds: "The games industry must change if it is going to create art and franchises that have long term sustainable value—right now it feels like the monopolies that control it are simply trying to extract as much goodwill and value (that took decades to build) as they can with little concern for the diminishing returns it's leading to.

"This is what happens when the people who control it (most ivy league MBAs) do not play games, have never shipped a game, and fundamentally do not understand the industry they manage. You'll never get another WoW or Morrowind in the current climate."

While I'm not wholly convinced that you need to play videogames to be in charge of a company that makes them, I do think you need to be humble enough to delegate or listen to the people who do—and humility is clearly rare within the executive suite.

I also agree with Willis' assessment that you probably wouldn't get another World of Warcraft in this climate—it's something I've spoken to on our MMO column before. But, and this might be proving his point, I think we're getting plenty of games that are at least on-par with the classics from smaller independent studios.

That doesn't mean it's easy, though. Studios like Larian, which is shareholder-free (okay, Tencent has a non-controlling stake, but it's Tencent. Those guys are everywhere), are a bit of an anomaly—Larian itself surviving brushes with bankruptcy in the past. Point being, sticking it to the man is hard bloody work—worth doing, mind, but not a guarantee of safety for anybody.

Just a week after South of Midnight developer Compulsion Games returned to independence amidst the latest round of sweeping layoffs at Xbox, the studio is looking for work. In a message posted on LinkedIn, Compulsion said it is "expanding opportunities to collaborate with studios across the games and entertainment industry."

"We invite partners to leverage the talent and creativity of the award-winning team behind South of Midnight, a game that was honoured with a BAFTA Award, a Peabody Award, seven Canadian Game Awards, and recognized on multiple 'Best Games of 2025' lists," Compulsion wrote.

"With deep experience in creating acclaimed original IP, we bring our artistry, technical expertise, and collaborative approach to every project. We are excited to support the development of memorable experiences that engage and entertain players around the world."

It's a disheartening message. South of Midnight did indeed win all those awards and more—one high-profile win that went unmentioned is the Games for Impact crown at the 2025 Game Awards—and we liked it quite a lot too: It earned at 83% in our review, and reviewer Andrea Shearon went on to play through it twice after after the fact, selecting it as her Personal Pick Game of the Year for 2025.

It wasn't a huge seller, though, and all that critical praise wasn't enough to secure Compulsion a future as an Xbox-owned studio, much less ensure it a follow-up release. Microsoft, which acquired Compulsion in 2018, earned some plaudits for allowing it to go independent rather than simply closing it, but my worry at the time seems reinforced by this post. Cutting Compulsion loose as an "independent" studio, especially in the oxygen-deprived environment the game industry has blundered into, may have merely delayed the inevitable falling curtain—and, one might argue, gives Xbox a way to avoid blame should that happen.

Compulsion launched as a support studio—its website says it got its start in 2009 "as a home office providing services to other game studios," including THQ and Atari—so this isn't entirely unfamiliar territory. But the environment then was very different than it is today: Sweeping layoffs and studio closures over the past several years have left countless developers without work in an increasingly constrained industry.

Quite a few Compulsion employees seem to share that feeling: A couple weeks before the independence announcement, numerous people at the studio began actively looking for new jobs, reportedly with the blessing of studio leadership.

Summer Games Done Quick, the (self-explanatorily) summer version of Games Done Quick, has tallied a lovely $2.4 million in raised money for Doctors Without Borders, a charity that provides medical care around the world to those in need.

The number's been announced via a BlueSky post celebrating the milestone, one which was—and I must emphasise, briefly—undercut by a momentary lapse in sponsorship choice. Yesterday, the organisation announced it'd be doing a speedrunning showcase with SNK, developer of the Metal Slug franchise, for its anniversary.

SNK is a Japanese studio, but as of 2022, it's majority-owned by the MiSK Foundation—which itself is owned by Mohammad bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. Given the country's history of human rights violations, that's pretty contradictory to the mission statement of the charity GDQ just finished raising over $2 million for.

This prompted some immediate backlash and, credit where it's due, GDQ pulled the sponsored stream a mere three hours later, writing: "We have canceled our sponsored stream with SNK. We have heard the concerns from our community regarding this partnership, specifically the company’s majority ownership by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, and the human rights concerns tied to the Saudi government.

"We will not accept the funds from this sponsorship or continue to work with this sponsor again. GDQ is committed to supporting human rights and inclusivity, and we recognize that this partnership conflicted with those values."

GDQ then went on to explain it "failed to conduct the level of review our community should expect from us and that was an oversight we deeply regret and take full responsibility for."

And while it does seem like a particularly large oversight—SNK's owner is no great secret, it's on the studio's Wikipedia page—I'd truly be a cynical, stone-hearted bugger to say the great effort of $2.4 million raised for a charity that actively helps people is, in any way, meaningfully undermined by a temporary lapse in judgement. Especially given the nigh-on immediate cancellation of the stream itself.

"Going forward," GDQ says, "We will review and strengthen our process for evaluating future sponsors and partners, including closer examination of companies’ ownership, to make sure they're aligned with our values."

Destiny 2 isn't going anywhere, but it also isn't… well, going anywhere. The game's servers will still be running for the foreseeable future, but Bungie has since ceased updates to its flagship shooter to move onto other projects, tragically laying off much of its staff in the aftermath of that decision.

It's a sorry state of affairs, and one that Warframe developers have lamented before, despite being in competition with the game from a ruthless, capitalistic sort of perspective. In actuality, there's a lot more camaraderie between developers, with live ops lead Megan Everett calling it "heartbreaking" back in June.

That sentiment has been repeated again by creative director Rebecca Ford in an interview with our friends over at GamesRadar+ during TennoCon: "It's horrible news, because it shows that even if you care so much, the business side of this industry always gets the last remark."

Ford says that even though the Destiny 2 team had their own successful IP and worked hard to keep it afloat, that kind of commitment just doesn't protect you from anything in the current industry:

"That's not the first time it's happened, and it'll happen again, where the business aspect of the videogame economy makes the decision for you, and it is existentially threatening at every level, because the idea that we aren't in charge of our own goodbye is something I wake up thinking about every single day."

It's something that's been grimly echoed throughout the industry, both during Microsoft's shock studio closures in 2024, which saw Hi-Fi Rush developer Tango Gameworks unceremoniously closed, and in the bloodbath years that've ensued from all corners of the videogame industry.

A greater shame, too, because according to those of us on the PC Gamer team who've stuck with Destiny 2 for years, it's been left in one of its best states—though as we've seen with other games, you can be genuinely turning a corner and still get sucker-punched.

As reported by WCCFtech, the Dutch consumer organization Stichting Massaschade & Consument now believes it has an even stronger case in its €400 million ($457 million) lawsuit against Sony over the 30% rate it charges on every game sold through the PlayStation Store, a "Sony tax" that retail games are not subject to⁠—the same retail games Sony has announced it will discontinue by 2028.

"The end of physical discs removes the last place where a PlayStation game could still be bought and sold at a competitive price," SM&C chair Lucia Melcherts told WCCFtech. "No discs means no second-hand market and no alternative to the PlayStation Store, so from 2028, Sony alone decides what a game costs and even how long you are allowed to use it.

"That is exactly the harm our Fair PlayStation claim is about: a price can never be fair when the buyer is left with no ownership and no alternative."

It's illustrative to compare this situation with Epic's Apple Store challenges and the antitrust lawsuits faced by Steam⁠—with one brought against it by another, different Dutch consumer group. Apple, which sells the hardware and maintains its own storefront⁠—a system which closely maps to Sony's⁠—was ultimately forced to relinquish some of control of that ecosystem.

Meanwhile, Steam's flat 30% take (sound familiar?) from everyone on the platform, be they EA or a bedroom programmer, is my least favorite part of my preferred storefront. But it doesn't own our PCs the way a console manufacturer or Apple controls a non-jailbroken device. Indeed, you can install alternate operating systems, competing storefronts, and even physical PC games onto Steam Decks and Steam Machines.

Tweaktown reported PlayStation's 2025 revenue as ¥4.69 trillion ($29 billion), but a $427 million lawsuit isn't anything to sneeze at, and the company is likely to face other challenges to its policies around the PlayStation Store. Whether it's physical discs or some other concession to consumers and watchdogs, as advocated by analyst Daniel Ahmad, something's gotta give.

First spotted by Kotaku, prolific director Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer, Interstellar) recently gave his takes on AI in filmmaking and the explosive success of Backrooms in an interview with The Telegraph (readers may encounter a paywall). The interview comes as part of the lead up to Nolan's next film, an adaptation of the Homeric epic, the Odyssey.

"This is why I never bought into the arguments that young audiences’ attention spans are too fried to enjoy a three-hour Greek epic," Nolan told the Telegraph in reference to the reception of Backrooms and the indie horror hit, Obsession. "Those films are so mysterious and ruminative. I mean, parts of Backrooms are like David Lynch at his most obscure. And yet young people can’t get enough of them."

Nolan also pointed out how Obsession and Backrooms directors Curry Barker and Nate Parsons prioritized practical effects, and have been publicly skeptical of AI's future in film. "I’ve never seen a more rapid wholesale dismissal of a supposedly foundational jump in technology in my lifetime," Nolan said of AI's popular rejection in the arts⁠—particularly among Gen Z⁠—despite the tech's aggressive push.

"So much energy has been expended on bringing in AI, but if you look at that generation’s reaction, they’re utterly rejecting it." said Nolan. Regarding his own children in the age cohort, Nolan observed that "Their judgment of AI slop has been immediate and harsh.

"They see it for what it is very quickly⁠—and it’s much easier for them to identify it, because it grew out of an online world they know really well. And while that doesn’t mean that every aspect of the technology is useless or meaningless, in film-making it’s hitting at exactly the wrong time. After years of driving towards heavily virtual environments, we’re seeing a renewed interest in more tactile, more real forms of storytelling."

It's been an interesting knock-on effect of gen AI that analogue methods now have increased value independent of aesthetics: Written words, blue book exams in schools, and stop-motion animation can all function as proof of work.

That's increasingly important because there has been an almost unanimous rejection of generated material or assets by audiences and critics in serious or commercial endeavors, be they games, film, writing, music, or visual art. If you get caught doing it in the games industry, you're gonna have a jpeg-of-text apology posted to Twitter in your future, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

In case you haven't heard, Sony recently announced that it will stop producing physical game discs come 2028—a move PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon argued continues a trend of consoles turning into little more than worse PCs. But Daniel Ahmad, a videogame market analyst and director of research and insights at Niko Partners, argued in a post on X that we've all done this song and dance before (thanks, Gamesradar).

"[It's] like Apple removing the CD Drive from its laptops starting in 2008," Ahmad said in the post. "There were definitely a high number of complaints at the time, but not a single person is complaining about it today. You couldn't find many people complaining in the early 2010s either."

He does add one apt caveat to this comparison, saying "this time a new laptop will cost $5,000 and my old one with a disc drive works just fine." Ahmad argued that this was an inevitable outcome for Sony: "If not PS6, then PS7." Digital sales of full games have come to make up the overwhelming majority of sales for both Playstation and Xbox, therefore "the truth is that the console ecosystem is nearly entirely digital at this point."

But he also points out this isn't just a "market-driven" change, but a "platform-led push by Sony" to squeeze out more money per user⁠—something the company's leadership has said is a major priority moving forward. Sony makes more on a digital game sale on the console's bespoke marketplace (in other words, a closed ecosystem further emphasized by the company's move away from PC ports) than it does on a retail game sale.

As console prices continue to balloon in the wake of the RAMpocalypse, the company is looking for extra ways to "focus on hardcore gamers who are willing to spend more than ever" even if it means alienating players who refuse to make the switch to digital gaming.

As for whether the backlash could change Sony's course, Ahmad isn't sure: "I'd say it's unlikely, but I wouldn't be surprised if they do end up clarifying certain aspects … Regardless of whether we're talking about bringing physical back, or embracing digital, the conversation needs to shift to consumer rights and what a license should enable. Stop Killing Games was one part of it, but gifting, family sharing, refunds, and other aspects are just as important."

I still use an external CD drive on my PC with some frequency, and it's hard to imagine the Playstation 6 coming with an attachable alternative (like the PS5's digital-only version has) now that Sony is leaving physical game discs behind. But this move has also been precipitated by the degradation of physical games' value: We all probably remember the first time we opened a box to only find a download code, or waited a good long while for an install process that was way too big to be a day one patch.

Christoffer Bodegård got into PC gaming via a DOS machine inherited from his father. "The Swedish state had a thing where basically everybody got a computer, especially state employees," says Bodegård. The first game he played on it was Disney's The Jungle book, which he recalls as being "pretty hard". But the most significant game from Bodegård's childhood was Dragon Age: Origins, which he played just before entering high school.

"I'd played roleplaying games before, but that was the game that made me go 'I love this genre,'" he says. "So doing the thing I always do, I did research on top 100 lists and just played everything … the last one I played was Planescape: Torment. That raised the bar for everything."

Bodegård's fascination with both D&D and CRPGs would ultimately lead him to create one of his own—Esoteric Ebb. Built over eight years and designed to replicate the unpredictability of tabletop RPGs, it sees you play as the world's worst cleric tasked with solving the mystery behind an exploding tea shop on the eve of a fantasy realm's first ever election.

Esoteric Ebb released in March to rave reviews and commercial success. Bodegård is currently exploring ideas for his next project, which he says will use "the technology that I made for Esoteric Ebb"—though it won't necessarily be a sequel. But he took a break from that to guide me through the many branching pathways of his Steam library.

What game are you currently playing?

I'm currently playing the same game I've been playing since it launched, basically on and off, and that is Victoria 3. I play all Paradox games and am a superfan, arguably, but I only have like 400 hours or so in Victoria, so I'm barely getting [started]. I suck at the game, basically, is what I'm saying. But I love it, it's really fun to simulate the economic aspects of that period, alongside all the political stuff.

I tried getting into Victoria 2, because my friend Max is really into it, and he tried to convince me. Played some multiplayer with him, I could never get into it. This was a year before Victoria 3, so I always said "OK, I'm gonna push that aside, I'm gonna get it when it comes out."

Now, of course, Victoria 3, it's such a debatable topic, because the mechanics—I'm trying to be a good representative of supporting Swedish game development, but Paradox, they're doing fine either way—I think it's a masterpiece in the making. It's so close to being absolutely amazing. You can just see all the things that [need improving]. Obviously, the developers are also aware of [those], they need a couple of years to work on it … I like the fact that they've supported it to actually finish making their masterpiece.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

The actual previous game I played was Abiotic Factor. It's really good. It's Half-Life with the boys. I finally have time to play games with the boys again. We have a D&D game going but, playing these general games, I usually take all the time where we usually hang out and play games and just sit and work on Ebb while they're playing. So I'll watch their stream or whatever. They play a lot of Final Fantasy 14. I purposely made the choice not to play it with them to instead work on Ebb years ago.

But it was half [price] off for Abiotic Factor, and I think one of them said "Hey, do you want to play?" and I was like "Yes, I want to play." It was really fun. It was like "Yeah, we're all into Half-Life." I'm not a base builder, but I can go around and shoot stuff, and it's just fun.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

I had to look up the specific release months and dates for these games, because I had four games that were 1999-2000. And these are some of my classic favourites. The four of them were Heroes [of Might and Magic] 3, King of Dragon Pass, Deus Ex, and Diablo 2. Which one comes first? It was Heroes 3 in February.

Which is good! Because I have a top list of games on my personal website, and at the top is obviously Heroes 3. That was basically the game that was truly influential for me. I was introduced to it by my cousin and I played it forever. I still play it. I have the modded version called Horn of the Abyss.

I like the fact that it's inspired a bunch of stuff, and I get why it's popular now. It's because of the core game loop of randomised maps, the AI being fun to fight against, building up numbers, going and killing a thing, having very strong different strategies especially for multiplayer, for hardcore players, mixing that with an extremely solid fantasy base.

Amazing music. Amazing aesthetics. Just it being a good experience to press the 'End Turn' button and have that little jingle play. It's dopamine. It's just really well designed. When we were doing the jingles for, like, the short rest [in Esoteric Ebb], the composer was like "OK, you know Heroes 3?" And we were like "Yeah! Of course, why wouldn't we?"

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

So technically it's Esoteric Ebb, because I didn't turn off the thing of Unity being counted into the hours on Steam until way too late, so I have like 1,000 hours of Ebb. But that's cheating because that's work. The real game is Europa Universalis IV. That is the game I play the most.

I was absolutely addicted to that for a very long time and then I finished the game, and I'm done in a spiritual sense. One of the caveats is that I am also terrible at the game still, so that's fun. Absolute ass. Complete bullshit. But here's the thing, I picked it up again—which also boosted the numbers—when I got into the greatest mod of all time.

Anbennar is essentially classic D&D fantasy, but in a way that fits the [EU IV] worldbuilding. It's extremely deep, extremely elaborate, extremely fun, extremely creative, and it fits a grand strategy gameplay loop perfectly … they have things that mirror the real Europe Universalis IV timeline, right? A clash between the main religions, the league wars, they have the black powder rebellion for the French Revolution.

They have all of these different things and all of it is very interesting, because they take, not just from a world building perspective and aesthetics, but the fact that they take mechanics from this—and also Victoria 3—and they revert them and twist them into something entirely new. So when you play, for example, the dwarves, you're in the mountains, most of it is uncolonized, it's just a bunch of caves, and you're playing essentially as an adventuring band using the mechanics of tribes from North America.

You move across the map as a state that is an adventure band, you grow, you go on adventures, you delve for treasures, you fight against other tribes, and then you eventually settle and expand, and it's an entirely new way of playing the game with the same mechanics, and it's absolutely incredible.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

That's Deus Ex. Ever since I played it for the first time, also in high school, I just don't uninstall it, because sometimes I hop back into it, and I've had some projects that are first-person. I want to do a first-person game at some point, that would be really fun, specifically like Ultima Underworld. I sometimes joke in interviews that if somebody gave me unlimited resources, that I would try to make an Elder Scrolls killer, but I want to do it in my style.

But Deus Ex is one of the core inspirations for a lot of the design decisions in Esoteric Ebb. It's such a classic. I try to do something different every time. It's such a good RPG because of that. You can take inspiration for how to create choice opportunities for players, where they specifically don't always have to make choices in text. With dialogue choices. There's much of that, but I enjoy way more when your choices are more "Do you go left or right? Do you hop up or do you go down, do you crash through the window or do you pick the lock?"

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

The one that's more unique and weird is Notepad++. I love it. I modded the hell out of my version so it looks really weird. I built it so that it works perfectly with Ink files, because I write scripts in Ink.

It has everything in it in order to code, and you can also plug in everything. You can edit it as much as you want, getting the highlights for different code stuff, and it just works with everything. And the reason why I love it is because it's like Notepad, meaning that it's very lightweight.

That's the main reason why I don't use all these really cool tools for interactive writing that exist … [they're] slightly not fast enough for me. When people ask how this game has so many choices while some games don't have as many choices, part of that is just stuff like voice acting … [But] it's also a thing of exhaustion on the side of the writer.

If the writer feels like it's slightly annoying to add another choice option, and it takes a little bit longer to click and add that bubble and structure it, they are going to be infinitely more likely to not add more choices. When you're writing and it's super-fast and really quick to add 15 different choices, even just as a joke, then you're much more likely to.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

I had a period where I would drag and drop images to my desktop from the internet to just save them. I stopped doing that when I started actively using the command Windows+Shift+S to take screenshots and just copy those into Discord instead.

So my desktop is cleaner now, but I had a period where my desktop would be covered in images from stuff I'd saved, to the point where at the end of the year it would be completely filled. I have an old laptop, I think, that's like, you can't see the desktop. That's insane behaviour as a person.

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced "the most significant restructure in Xbox history", which is what you call it when you lay off thousands of people and cut four game studios loose. Double Fine and Compulsion Games returned to their indie roots; Ninja Theory and Undead Labs were sold off. While it seemed at first like Obsidian Entertainment had avoided the headsman's axe, we soon found out they were also hit with plenty of layoffs of their own.

We also found out someone apparently pushed the button marked "in case of emergency get Obsidian to make a new Fallout game," with Fallout: New Vegas director Josh Sawyer reportedly heading the project.

So a mix of good news and bad there. Online, the response has included plenty of suggestions that Obsidian "already kind of gutted all the original writers and talent that made old Obsidian games what they were" and that it wasn't the same studio as the one that made games like the original New Vegas or Knights of the Old Republic 2.

Brandon Adler, a game director at Obsidian, disputed these claims on LinkedIn, saying, "The number of times I've seen people, with no understanding of who has worked on our previous games or what they contributed, talk about how Obsidian isn't who they used to be... is staggering. Most of the time they are not just wrong, but spreading an enormous amount of misinformation."

As Adler explained, plenty of people in leadership roles at Obsidian are the same people now as they were in the past. "Like, literally the same people", he wrote. "The through line from KotOR2 to our current games is pretty clear."

Of course, that doesn't mean the studio hasn't changed. "But the DNA at Obsidian is the same as it always was. The same DNA that created KotOR, New Vegas, NWN2, and Stick of Truth."

Personally, I'm interested in whatever Obsidian does next because Pentiment was a masterpiece, and seeing people confidently declare that a new Fallout game from Obsidian would be a disaster because they personally didn't care for The Outer Worlds 2 seems like a bit of a stretch.

Adler also noted that it has been a tough time for the studio, for the obvious reasons. "This has been an extremely difficult week at Obsidian", he wrote. "Not only have I had to say goodbye to some amazing game developers, but I've had to say goodbye to some of my best friends. I truly feel for every one of them. Know that if you are looking to hire one of these former Obsidian devs, you are hiring some of the best people around – both professionally and personally."

It's easy to feel like the videogame industry is an endless tornado of shattered dreams and hellfire, and that's because it is. But it also brings in a lot of money, and our beloved PC gaming space in particular is growing faster than both mobile and console markets. Thursday, a report from Alinea Analytics said Steam is just exiting its biggest six months ever.

"In the first half of 2026, we estimate that games on Steam generated $11.1B in gross revenue, the platform’s highest-ever half-year," wrote Rhys Elliott, Alinea's head of market analysis. "That’s up 14.5% on H1 2025, and up 8% even on the holiday-heavy H2 2025, which is the more remarkable comparison given the back half of the year usually wins on seasonal sales and holiday buys."

The full blog highlights some of the biggest reasons for all this growth: new games are more expensive, friendslop megahits like Meccha Chameleon rake in mountains of cash before you can blink, and third parties like Ubisoft are back on Steam after they tried and failed to escape Gabe's dread labyrinth to play ball with Steam's lessers.

The full list of causes and takeaways is in the blog, but this all follows a very long upward trend: as the report states, Steam's yearly revenue has gone from $5.5 billion in 2017 to roughly $20 billion in 2025. A growing percentage of all those sales is from old games, too: so far, "just 21%" of Steam's 2026 revenue has come from games that released this year, down from 29% in 2024.

That said, plenty of new games have been big moneymakers so far: the top five in terms of gross revenue for new games are Forza Horizon 6, Resident Evil Requiem, Crimson Desert, Slay the Spire 2, and Subnautica 2 (Meccha Chameleon snuck into sixth place). It might be especially galling to see a first-party Xbox game at the top of that list given, you know, everything. It's hard to imagine this growth will continue—or even amount to much—if the industry's biggest companies continue to destroy the teams they depend on.

A star in the games business Twitter circuit, investor and analyst Matthew Ball has made waves in the industry over recent years with his "State of Video Gaming" slideshows, which in some corners have become doctrinal explanations for gaming's 2020s woes.

Now Ball has the chance to put his analysis directly to work at one of the biggest gaming companies on the planet: Xbox CEO Asha Sharma brought him on as chief strategy officer not long before initiating her "Xbox reset," which will result in 3,200 layoffs and see multiple studios cut loose.

Speaking to The Game Business after he was hired (before this week's "reset"), Ball said that step one for Xbox is shoring up its console business. But new Gears of War games are unlikely to achieve Sharma's ambitious goal to entertain "more than a billion people each day." So what's the plan?

The big-picture Xbox strategy hasn't been shared (and is surely still developing), but Ball's history suggests that Tim Sweeney and Roblox will be major inspirations.

Ball is a big believer in "the metaverse." He authored a book on the idea, "The Metaverse: Building The Spatial Internet," which was published in 2022 and revised in 2024, and co-founded the Roundhill Ball Metaverse ETF, an investment fund with stakes in Roblox, Microsoft, Nvidia, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, and a variety of major game publishers and tech firms.

Ball also co-founded a "UGC gaming studio" that says it's creating virtual worlds for Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft. The company, Prosimetrum, is credited as the creator of Steal the Shark, a Fortnite island developed by Brazilian studio Dojo Maps.

Ball is a passive partner in the business, not a decision-maker, according to a source familiar with the matter. Also associated with Prosimetrum is former Square Enix director of business development Jacob Navok, who currently runs AI company Genvid and has argued that "Gen Z loves AI slop."

The metaverse according to Ball

A universal definition of "metaverse" doesn't really exist, but in his book, Ball describes it as: "A massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time-rendered immersive virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments."

Essentially, it's the virtual world described by '90s sci-fi novel Snow Crash, and more recently Ready Player One: A network of immersive virtual worlds in which everyone's identity is persistent.

Ball does not suggest that this sci-fi vision will come to pass without friction—skeptics have had "a real basis for their skepticism," he says in his book—and it's certainly faced a lot of friction this decade.

Facebook's 2021 rebranding as "Meta" and Mark Zuckerberg's goofy VR avatar were mocked rather than embraced, NFTs were written off by many as worthless status symbols for gullible celebs and vectors for outright scams, VR and AR headsets have yet to sweep away old-fashioned screens, and after a metaverse hiring boom, the tech industry shed thousands of workers.

Above: Ball's recent interview with The Game Business

But among metaverse true believers, it's an inevitability, not just a dream. Ball concludes that he is "certain that the future will be increasingly centered around real-time-rendered 3D virtual worlds and networks" and predicts that computers and the internet "will evolve and be redesigned in support of the Metaverse." (A thought that could influence future Xbox hardware.)

Similarly, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said in a 2024 conversation with Ball and Snow Crash author Neal Stephenson that, while a certain social media company's attempt to get everyone working in chic virtual offices was "just totally lame," the metaverse is the "inevitable future of real-time 3D in gaming."

Epic continues to pursue its metaverse vision: The recently announced Unreal Engine 6 is all about helping developers link up their in-game economies and social features so that players can take friends and purchases from one game into another.

Hints at Xbox's future

During his interview with The Game Business, Ball recalled Sharma asking him whether Xbox was "fixable." His response: "I'm a strategic optimist. I think it is incredibly defeatist to think that there is any scenario that you can't do better, that you can't improve."

So far, improvement has meant reduction: Aside from parting with four development studios and laying off thousands, Sharma has announced a desire to simplify Xbox's management structure and to invest "with greater focus, greater discipline, and greater clarity."

But Sharma also says that Microsoft is not reducing investment in Xbox, and there are hints about where the money will go (aside from toward getting The Elder Scrolls 6 out the door). The CEO said, for example, that rather than trying to own all the good indie studios, Xbox "will help independent creators succeed by providing open development tools and audiences to realize their vision." There are echoes of Epic's tools and platforms strategy in that remark.

Ball's interest in the metaverse doesn't necessarily mean that he was hired by Xbox to pivot the publisher toward that medium, but it stands to reason that the subject he dedicated book-length analysis to will feature in his advice. At the least, an increased focus on user generated content feels likely, and Microsoft could strengthen its relationship with Epic Games and Unreal Engine ("Fortnite is the future," Ball wrote in 2019).

Regarding UGC, it is notable that Minecraft developer Mojang will now report directly to Sharma, as it's the closest thing Microsoft has to Roblox.

For now, Ball has not hinted at any radical plans for Xbox's future. He said in his Game Business interview that Xbox's console business is "durable and valuable and important" and that upcoming shooter Gears of War: E-Day "looks terrific."

In his book, however, he predicts that the metaverse will be with us quite soon, suggesting that if Xbox is going to take advantage of such a radical transformation—should it actually come to pass—it ought to get to work on it with urgency.

"Though skeptics will shape the discourse," Ball wrote in his book, "I'd guess that by the end of the current decade many if not most of us will agree that the 'Metaverse' has begun (though even in hindsight, there will be no precise date of its start, nor will we be able to predict when it will arrive in full)."