It's been six years since Epic first launched Unreal Engine 5, and at its State of Unreal event in Chicago today (head to 1h 40 mins in the above video) and in a separate blog post, we got our first look at what the next major release will offer to games, film, TV, and more industries. And it turns out that the biggest direction for the changes in the new engine came from Fortnite and UEFN.

If you're unfamiliar with the latter, it's basically a version of Unreal Engine 5 that's somewhat simplified and pared back to allow anyone to make levels or entire games for Fortnite. It's hugely popular and honestly very simple to use. I introduced my partner to it a few months ago, and despite having no experience in game development whatsoever, she created a fully functional Fortnite map and game mode within a day.

The sheer usability of UEFN is core to the changes in Unreal Engine 6, and when I talked to Epic at last year's State of Unreal event in Orlando, it explained that the separation between UE and UEFN would eventually go, with the two combined into a single package and offering the best of both worlds.

In the words of Tim Sweeney, it's "UE 5 plus UEFN equals UE 6, plus some more cool stuff on the way." The idea behind the merge is to allow developers to create something and then ship across every possible platform/store at the same time, including Fortnite itself. The unification also involves bringing APIs and code together across all of the various additions that Epic has for UE, such as MetaHumans.

That said, Fortnite isn't really going to be the showcase for Unreal Engine 6; that honour goes to Rocket League, and the very first glimpse of it all was dropped last month at the Paris Major event of the RL Championship Series.

Perhaps the most significant change in Unreal Engine 6 is the move to open standards for tools, code, APIs, etc. This isn't something that can be wholesale implemented overnight, and I suspect that not every element will be open in this manner, but the end goal is to give developers (games or otherwise) an easier path to getting content and code out to Epic's and external ecosystems.

Epic didn't say anything about specific features in the keynote, so no idea if there will be a major change to Lumen, for example, but it did say that UE6 is targeted for release at some point in 2027 ("2027-ish" was the exact phrase, though the blog post says "Early Access release at the end of 2027").

It also said a few things about Verse, the scripting language used in UEFN, and how the gameplay programming model in UE6 will be shifted to that language (though C++ will still be there underneath it all). Directly related to that will be something called Scene Graph, which will replace the current gameplay framework used in UE5. That will be built entirely on Verse, and with it, Epic plans to "build a full distributed software transactional memory system" for huge, interactive live worlds.

That won't mean anything to gamers, but for developers, it means that their "game code can be written as if it were running on a single machine without needing to coordinate custom networking code all over the place."

And naturally, AI is going to become a bigger feature of Unreal Engine, with the first step being taken in the new UE5.8 release and its MCP server plugin. That system will let you set up any LLM you want to use and give it various tasks to perform, from simple code refactoring all the way up to generating a full 3D scene that you can then tweak as required.

There's more to all of this, of course, but there's not quite enough information yet to glean any insight as to whether the step from UE5 to UE6 will be as dramatic as the jump from v4 to v5 was. My feeling is that it won't be, from a PC gamer's perspective at least, but game developers will probably relish the thought of having an Unreal Engine that's easier to use and quicker at producing the content required.

It's probably fair to say that Unreal Engine is probably the most comprehensive tool around for creating games, animations, and video effects. And, with the launch of UE 5.8, it's becoming even more extensive and even a little bit more AI-friendly. Whether you're just an Unreal Engine hobbyist like me, or a full-time game developer, you can download version 5.8 right now via the Epic Games Launcher.

Even if you don't plan on using any of the new features (of which there are a lot), it's always worth trying out the latest release just for bug and performance fixes. But what's actually new? The headline acts in UE5.8 are the introduction of Mesh Terrain and Procedural Vegetation Editor (PVE). Both are experimental features at the moment, but the former should be of great interest to anyone creating big, open-world terrains, as the tool basically generates full 3D meshes for you.

PVE is somewhat similar, except that instead of creating landscapes, it produces vegetation (trees, bushes, reeds, grass, etc) from scratch, with the procedural system working in line with meshes already present in the world. For example, let's say you had a crumbled old archway in a forest, PVE will 'grow' trees around it, accounting for the natural source of light and competing vegetation.

Complementing these are MegaLights, which first appeared in experimental form in UE5.5 (but is now "production-ready"), an experimental fog screen space scattering feature, and perhaps most interesting of all, Lumen Lite. This is a mode for Lumen global illumination that Epic claims to be twice as fast as Lumen High Quality, while still preserving "much of the visual impact".

The release notes for UE5.8 specifically mention that "games that rely on global illumination for artistic purposes can run on Nintendo Switch 2 at 60 fps," so it's blatantly obvious what platform it was developed for. However, since it's also supported on PC, UE-powered games of the future could well offer this as a graphics option for low-end hardware users.

Tucked away, almost at the end of the new version details announcement—which blessedly includes improvements to shader compiling—is one more experimental feature, an MCP plugin. With this, you can implement any LLM of your choice to "connect to and understand both the engine and your project." In other words, if you want to use AI to create assets or code, carry out tests or refactoring tasks, then you should be able to hand that over to the LLM easily enough.

Epic left the note about this feature after everything else, and I suspect that's because AI is hardly flavour of the month in the world of PCs and gaming right now. After all, Epic already has a section of PC gaming fandom that takes a dim view of Unreal Engine games, whether you believe that's the fault of Epic or a given game's developers themselves, and AI-use is another PC gaming bug bear.

Anyway, because of the consternation about AI in gaming—from being the primary cause of the horrendous price increases for DRAM and SSDs, as well as the endless controversies over its use in games—the inclusion of this plugin is likely to draw ire from some quarters.

The thing is, many game studios will have to rely increasingly more on AI for certain workloads if they hope to stay afloat. With the likes of Microsoft and numerous other companies about to swing a sword of Damocles across all their gaming divisions, studio heads will be looking at every avenue that will result in them having a future.

I'm not suggesting that game devs must use AI, nor am I saying that the inclusion of the LLM plugin (specifically an MCP server) with UE5.8 is a good or bad thing; it's simply a sign of our times. One can argue that Unreal Engine's feature set is sometimes a little too far-forward in reach (console and mainstream PC hardware still isn't quite good enough to cope with an all-in Lumen and Nanite game at high fps), but this minor plugin is very much a 'here-and-now' thing.

Although many developers turn to Unreal Engine or Unity to bring their gaming visions to life, open-source Godot is becoming increasingly popular, thanks to its lightweight structure and intuitive scripting language. Now Microsoft has taken a 'first step' to expanding its user base even further, by releasing a reference sample software package for creating Godot games for Xbox on PC.

Yes, I know I should be writing XBOX on PC, given that Microsoft has decided to settle on the format, but I'll be writing Xbox until I'm in the grave. Anyway, nomenclature aside, it should be noted that Microsoft hasn't released an 'Xbox-version of Godot' or anything like that.

Instead, it's essentially a demonstration of how to implement all of the necessary Xbox on PC requirements (such as Xbox services, PlayFab, and GameInput) in a Godot-based game.

"This sample shows you how to bring sign-in, gamepad controller support capabilities and more into your game with Godot. It includes insights, re-usable integration code, and is currently compatible with the April 2026 GDK out of the box," writes Microsoft in its dev blog post.

Although Godot has been traditionally associated with 2D indie games, such as Brotato, Slay the Spire 2, and numerous cozy games, it does handle 3D graphics extremely well, and there's a decent spread of things being developed that sport visuals that wouldn't look out of place in anything made with Unity or Unreal Engine (full-blown ray-tracing aside).

I've dabbled with UE for many years, going all the way back to the late 1990s with its first iteration, having first dipped my toe into it all with UnrealEd and custom maps for Unreal Tournament. These days, Unreal Engine is a massively complex and capable package, used for games, TV shows, and more, but while it's relatively straightforward to get started with, mastering it is on a whole different level.

By having a much smaller remit, Godot is arguably easier to work with, although it's perhaps still not quite as novice-friendly as Unity. But since it's also entirely free and open-source, any revenue your game makes is 100% yours. Well, yours and the publisher's. Oh, and the platform that you sell it on, too.

Microsoft says that its Godot sample is a "source-only sample" and "not a product", as well as purely for PC at this stage, and that there is "no set update cadence for support or maintenance." That doesn't sound overly encouraging, I grant you, but the software giant does promise that "This is the first step in bringing Godot for Xbox on PC. We plan to evolve it over time based on what the community tells us is most valuable."

I suspect we won't see a full Xbox on PC version of Godot any time soon, or perhaps even ever, but if Microsoft really is serious about saving its Xbox brand, more Godot samples like this one would be a step in the right direction.

For well over a decade, Unity has been one of, if not the primary engine for indie game development, and has powered some massively successful games like Hollow Knight, Among Us, and the original Subnautica. But over the last few years, a growing number of developers have switched to Godot, an open-source engine that is similar to Unity in its scope and functionality.

For those developers who have switched, the reasons have often been ethical or financial, with various shenanigans from Unity putting developers off using the company's tech. But placing that aside, how do the two engines compare as tools? One game developer decided to find out, by making exactly the same game in both engines.

That designer is Thomas Grové, who runs the Japanese co-production developer Studio Interrupt. Grové was making a survival horror game with his son, and decided to use the project to test out both engines.

"For a long time, I've really wanted to see a side-by-side, apples-to-apples comparison between the two engines, not like the same game made by different developers or whatever," Grové says in a YouTube video discussing the experiment (via Automaton). "I thought this was my chance to finally do that and decide whether I want to move forward with Godot or keep using Unity."

Grové starts out by listing the features of his game, which is clearly at a very early stage of development. Said features include a complete character controller, a camera transition system, a scene-transition system, a tri-planar dither shader and an interactable object system. He built and ran this game with all these features in both engines, before comparing how each engine fared during the project.

The results were intriguing. From a functionality perspective, Grové explained that the engines performed similarly, with each doing some minor things slightly better or worse than the other. However, he concluded that Godot was significantly more efficient in areas like compiling, launching, loading etc.

He notes that Godot is over five times faster at loading a project, 20 times faster at exporting a project, and a whopping 31 times faster at compiling a script, which could make a big difference considering you would perform some of these tasks hundreds of times when designing a game. On top of that, Godot is also a significantly smaller program in terms of file size, taking up just 164 megabytes compared to Unity's 20 gigabytes.

Ultimately, Grové says that "If we look at all the data, Godot beat Unity on every metric except for the final output FPS", with both exported projects running at a max framerate way about Grove's minimum of 60FPS anyway. As such, he concludes that "I'm probably going to continue using Godot for this project."

While this seems like a slam dunk for Godot, some of Grove's viewers point out that the experiment may not be entirely reflective of each engine's performance. "The scene was just too simple to stress any systems, as evidenced by the very high framerate," writes YouTube user WitchfellGame, while the startlingly named jakegenocide says "If you aren't using a full, complete, game project, you aren't going to know which one is right for your project once it scales up."

Building two entire games from scratch just to test the performance of game engines isn't especially viable, however. And while maybe you could stress test further, the consistency and scale of difference in Grové's results do suggest that, broadly, Godot is the more efficient engine of the two.

These days, I'm firmly on the System Shock side of the System Shock/BioShock division that exists almost exclusively in my head, but I'll give Rapture this: it was goddamn stunning when I first took that bathysphere jaunt back in 2007. The barnacled art deco was a heck of a look, and it still is today. I can vouch for that: I replayed BioShock 1 and 2 just a couple years ago on my trusty Steam Deck.

In a recent chat with IGN, Irrational Games vozhd and 'the narrative Legos guy' Ken Levine said there's a reason for that: he's never been one to push hyper-real graphics tech to its limit. "I don't think we've ever been a company that was like, 'Oh my god, we need the latest and greatest technology,'" said Levine. "Outside of SWAT 4, we never really tried to do ultra-realism in our games."

Part of that is because, well, cramming the latest whizzbang rendering stuff in your game is pricey, but there's an artistic benefit too. "It doesn't age as well as more stylistic things. BioShock still looks good, I think because it wasn't trying to get every nut and bolt [looking] super realistic." It was trying to get every nut and bolt looking wet and gross, which is an objectively superior approach so far as I'm concerned.

It sounds like, in Levine's estimation, the endless chase of higher-fidelity graphics is a bit of a fool's errand, at least for his own studio. "Look at, say, the Switch 2, and the new Steam Machine coming out. Those are not massive technological upgrades. That wasn't their strategy. I think people are realising we're hitting a bit of diminishing returns with that."

What is the right approach? Great question. "I think if you have right art director, and the right approach, you don't need to be on the cutting edge of technology all the time, and even the stuff we're doing in Judas—all this narrative stuff we're doing—it's not CPU-intensive, it's work-intensive on our side."

I can't argue with him too much. Ultimately, you probably do need someone out there riding the bleeding edge, as that's how technology in general gets moved forward and developers like Levine and co get access to new tools they actually do want to use. But you certainly don't need everyone trying to fit path tracing and DLSS 8 billion into their visual novel about a cool horse (or something).

Heck, the most visually arresting game I've played recently was Metaphor: ReFantazio, not because of the tech (which seems barely different from Persona 5's), but because it feels like everyone was forbidden from saying no to the art team for the duration of that game's development. If that doesn't illustrate Levine's point, I don't know what does.

The Playdate is a curious little device. It's a handheld console with a crank built into the side, which developers can make use of for in-game controls. What devs can't do anymore, though, is get their games accepted onto the Playdate Catalog store if they use generative AI "for art, audio, music, text, or dialog."

So says an announcement on the Catalog developer blog. Panic Inc, the developer of the device, defines generative AI as the use of:

• Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Google Gemini
• AI-based image generation models such as Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, Midjourney
• AI-base audio generation models such as MuseNet, Suno, Udio, and others

The announcement clarifies that games using AI in their development will no longer be accepted, but custom-written functions like enemy AI are fine. It also says that games already listed on the Catalog store that have previously used AI will remain, but they will be "flagged as such", with explanations provided as to exactly how generative AI was implemented.

"There are lots of people in the world who are extremely eager and excited to create beautiful music, art, and words for your Playdate creation," the statement opines.

"If you need any help at all finding people to help with any parts of your title, you can check out the collaborations channel in the Playdate Squad Discord or the Playdate developer forum."

The use of generative AI in games is a hot topic and sure to bring up some strong opinions. While a survey at the start of the year claimed that 50% of game developers think its inclusion is bad for the industry, some investors seem to think otherwise.

It must be a tempting option for the developers of small games for a relatively niche device, though, where budget and time constraints are pushed to their limits. Still, it's a no-go for gen AI-enhanced game development on the console-with-a-crank. The wheels, they keep turning. Something like that, anyway.

Gabe Newell remains the CEO of Valve, but it's no secret that he stepped back from actively running the company some time ago: he says himself he's been "retired for a long time." Newell now divides his days between various other pursuits, including Starfish Neuroscience, a company he co-founded that focuses on neural interfaces, and Inkfish, a marine research operation. As well as buying $500 million superyachts.

I've always been a little fuzzy about exactly when Newell stepped back from the game design side of things, not least because Valve itself often credits staff equally, though he was clearly intimately involved in the design of Half-Life and its sequel, as well as spearheading the company's acquisition of fan-made properties like Counter-Strike and Team Fortress. But an interview with Portal 2 project lead Josh Weier by Kiwi Talkz, recently resurfaced by PCG sister site GR+, gives a rough idea of the timeline for Newell moving away from being hands-on with development: and the main reason why.

"If you haven't met him, Gabe is a very imposing guy," says Weier. "He's literally just a tall dude, and also his mannerisms can be imposing. So when I'm like 20 on [Half-Life 2] and he's taking me out for lunch, giving me game ideas, I'm like [mimes eating and looking at the ground] 'Yes Mr Newell!'"

Weier laughs: "Head down freaking out! And I think over time Gabe realised 'oh OK, I should let the game teams do what I pay them for' and he would stop in and give us feedback. I think his things were, he was worried about… we redesigned GLaDOS for Portal 2, because she was going to have a bigger role and felt like the old model wasn't going to quite give us what we needed. He was very adamant about us giving GLaDOS a face and we were 'ah don't really think so, we're gonna go a different direction.'

"So we kind of went back-and-forth with him a bit, and then after a while he was like 'alright, you guys got it, I'm just gonna leave you to it.' And he would check in with me personally to say 'how you doing, are you stressed, how's life going?'"

The real problem from Newell's perspective though was that he'd become almost too forbidding a presence: even the kind of top-tier developer that works at Valve couldn't quite bring themselves to push back hard enough.

"At that point I think he was realising… I think he always wanted to be part of the team, but being Gabe and being in his position, that never really worked," says Weier. "Because people would be like, 'whatever you say!' And he was more 'no no no, I want to be part of the team and come up with ideas.'

"And that was really hard for people, so I think there was a period where he stepped back and was like, 'Alright I guess I'm just not going to be able to interact with everyone that way and I'll just work at a higher level', and that was alright.'"

Portal 2 began development after the release of the original (2007) and released in 2011. While Valve had always been a successful company, this was also roughly the time period where Steam was exploding in popularity and beginning to truly dominate the PC market, so obviously the company's priorities were shifting from being solely a game development studio.

The danger, which Newell clearly spotted and avoided, was him becoming too dominant a creative presence for Valve, and ending up in a position where he was cramping the ideas of the company's game developers rather than helping to refine and realise them. On the one hand that's sad for obvious reasons, but on the other Newell obviously found many other outlets for his generational talents.

A lot of my favourite games ever made fall under the expansive rubric of "eurojank." Stalker, the first Witcher, Mount & Blade—the list goes on. But maybe it's a little unfair to confine the jank phenomenon exclusively to Europe. After all, what is 2004 RPG Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, which is still getting fan patches 22 years later, if not a prime cut of jank?

So says Andrii Verpakhovskyi, designer on the original Stalker games, in a recent interview in Edge magazine. "Some of my favourite games back in the day were Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines and Arcanum, both built by Troika Games, which was the core team [from the] Fallout games before them.

"Those games were janky as hell, but they had this same soul that was in games described as Eurojank, which is why I think it’s unfair to kind of geofence the genre." The man has a point!

Eurojank, as a pseudo-genre category, refers to a bunch of systems-heavy and ambitious games that tend to originate in Central and Eastern Europe. They often do things that no other game you've ever played even tries, but—owing to a lack of resources—they're also often crammed to bursting with weird and hilarious bugs.

Back when Verpakhovskyi and co were working on those original Stalkers, they didn't really think of themselves as making a particularly regional sort of game. "We had absolutely no notion that what we were doing we were doing differently from people building games outside of the post-USSR space. We never even drew any kind of lines between Japanese games of Nintendo fame or Sega Genesis, and the games that came out of the US, Canada, the UK and western Europe."

They were just devs making games and experimenting along the way. "We were all newcomers to the industry and people were not even specifically trained in engineering or arts." Which perhaps explains some of Stalker's myriad quirks better than the place it came from.

And while you and I might use jank as a loving term, to describe those games with lofty systemic ambitions that end up butting against the limits of a developer's budget or technological capacity, it can sometimes be an insult used by those who lack vision. "I feel like Steam especially now has smothered creativity with how rigidly titles need to fit into a specific orthodoxy," Greg Pryjmachuk, founder of Minskworks and dev behind Jalopy, told Edge. "Anything that doesn’t colour within the established genre lines is quickly punished."

Not here, mind you. At launch, 2024's Stalker 2 kept aloft the janky banner of its forebears. I loved it, and wrote as much in our Stalker 2 review.

Higher education is one of the bigger choices you'll ever make in life, and finding your path is not as simple as choosing an RPG class. When it comes to a career in game design, every journey starts at the same place: picking the right university. Let this be your first stop.

Each year, the Princeton Review ranks the 50 best undergraduate and 25 best graduate programs in the United States and beyond, using a thorough set of criteria that includes graduate employment rates, early-career earnings, faculty industry experience, curriculum relevance, and demonstrated student success in the games industry.

The list spans the best of the best programs in the country, so no matter where you land, you'll be one stop closer to your dream career. To get you into the mindset of a game designer, we've also included homework projects that explore common challenges faced by developers today, as well as a discussion on the role of AI programmers and map designers in game development.

Want to know more? Check out The Princeton Review's website for further info: www.princetonreview.com/game-design

UNDERGRADUATE RANKINGS

1. New York University

2025 Grads Hired: 53%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $84,800
Faculty: Eric Zimmerman (Gamelab), Dr. Mitu Khandaker (Spirit AI)
Graduates: Jenny Jiao-Hsia (IGF), Carol Mertz (Exploding Kittens)

2. University of Southern California

2025 Grads Hired: 63%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $107,400
Faculty: TreaAndrea Russworm (Author, "Gaming Representation"), Mark Bolas (Founder, Fakespace Labs)
Graduates: Jenova Chen (Thatgamecompany), Brent Strong (Disney)

3. University of Central Florida

2025 Grads Hired: 36%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $48,500
Faculty: Dr. Peter Smith, Dr. John Murray
Graduates: Richard Ugarte (Epic), Alexia Mandeville (Niantic)

4. Rochester Institute of Technology

2025 Grads Hired: 88%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $77,000
Faculty: David I. Schwartz, Flip Philips
Graduates: Elan Lee (Exploding Kittens), Steven Van Slyke (co-inventor of OLED)

5. Abertay University

2025 Grads Hired: 44%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $41,000
Faculty: Fraser Simpson (YoYo Games), Ruth Falconer (Women in Games)
Graduates: Zoe Sams (Riot), David Hynd (Rockstar)

6. DigiPen Institute of Technology

2025 Grads Hired: 62%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $96,096
Faculty: Claude Comair (Nintendo), Ellen Guon Beeman (EA, Microsoft)
Graduates: Kim Swift (Portal), Alex Williams (Studio Wildcard)

7. Clark University

2025 Grads Hired: 68%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $69,000
Faculty: Ezra Cove (Lord of the Rings Online, Turbine), Amanda Theinert
Graduates: Gary Goldberg (Fable Vision Studios), Stanley Pierre-Louis (ESA)

8. University of Utah

2025 Grads Hired: 36%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $71,113
Faculty: Michael Young PhD, Jose Zagal PhD (Game Studies)
Graduates: Doug Bowser (former COO of Nintendo), Nolan Bushnell (founder of Atari)

9. Savannah College of Art and Design

2025 Grads Hired: 34%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $62,500
Faculty: Nye Warburton, Cyril Guichard (Electrotank)
Graduates: Chad Dezem (Insomniac), Harrison Pink (Blizzard)

10. Michigan State University

2025 Grads Hired: 53%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $62,000
Faculty: Brian Winn (Will Winn Games), Ricardo Guimaraes (Blizzard, Ubisoft)
Graduates: Brian Murray (EA), Steven Messinger (Rockstar)

11. Champlain College

2025 Grads Hired: 78%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $50,226
Faculty: Jessie Leigh Gagnon (Riot Games, Phoenix Labs), Jason Della Rocca (Execution Labs)
Graduates: Heather Conover (Riot), Alex Martens (Rockstar)

12. Drexel University

2025 Grads Hired: 43%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $42,857
Faculty: Dr. Paul Diefenbach (OpenWorlds Inc.), Dr. Frank Lee
Graduates: Girish Balakrishnan (Netflix), Greg Lebanov (Chicory, Wandersong)

13. Worcester Polytechnic Institute

2025 Grads Hired: 50%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $82,000
Faculty: Ben Schneider (Standing Stone, Turbine), Ralph Sutter
Graduates: Michael Gesner (Riot), Jon Radoff (Beamable)

14. Northeastern University

2025 Grads Hired: 20%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $80,000
Faculty: Christopher Barney, Celia Pearce (IndieCade)
Graduates: Devin Yang (Owlchemy Labs), Ryan Maloney (Blizzard)

15. Purdue University

2025 Grads Hired: 68%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $67,066
Faculty: Robert Howard, Jeffery Kesselman
Graduates: Jeff Hanna (Volition), Keith Self-Ballard (PlayStation)

16. Falmouth University

2025 Grads Hired: 56%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $28,311
Faculty: Tanya Krzwinska, William Huber
Graduates: Rex Crowle (Media Molecule), Sophie Shepherd (Respawn)

17. Shawnee State University

2025 Grads Hired: 25%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $73,500
Faculty: Bastien Lecouffe-Deharme, Greg Lyons
Graduates: Dan Clark (Epic), Derek Lewis (Insomniac)

18. University of Florida

2025 Grads Hired: 33%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $99,000
Faculty: Dr. James Oliverio, Dr. Hyo Jeong Kang
Graduates: Jesse Rapczak (Studio Wildcard), Joshua Jayaheri (Raven Software)

19. Full Sail University

2025 Grads Hired: 10%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $62,109
Faculty: Patrick Kelly, Miguel De La Cruz
Graduates: Alejandro Garcia-Tunon, Elbert Perez (Unity)

20. Vancouver Film School

2025 Grads Hired: 11%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $65,000
Faculty: Mike Wuetherick (Unity, Cloudhead Games), Joe Bonar (Unity)
Graduates: Armando Troisi (MY.GAMES, Ubisoft), Jack Kelly (New World Interactive)

21. Quinnipiac University

2025 Grads Hired: 60%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: NR
Faculty: Roger Clark (Rockstar), Elena Bertozzi
Graduates: Donovan Sepulveda (Riot), Zaria Brogdon (Rockstar)

22. New England Institute of Technology

2025 Grads Hired: 24%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $50,000
Faculty: William Culbertson (Hasbro), Jordan Dubreuil
Graduates: Daniel Laba (Blizzard), Daniel Cuccia (Sony)

23. Bradley University

2025 Grads Hired: 15%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $45,000
Faculty: David Abzug (Deep Silver), Ray Hazlip (Deep Silver)
Graduates: Diana Hughes, Joseph Lax (Sony Santa Monica)

24. Miami University

2025 Grads Hired: 56%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $56,690
Faculty: Geoffrey Long PhD (Microsoft, Disney), Ben Nicholson
Graduates: Ellie Helbling (Naughty Dog), Brian Beebe (Riot)

25. DePaul University

2025 Grads Hired: 77%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: NR
Faculty: Ed Keenan (Midway), Allen Turner (Disney)
Graduates: Kevin Geisler (Young Horses), Mark Nauta (Firaxis)

26. Howest University of Applied Sciences

2025 Grads Hired: 54%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: NR
Faculty: Tristan Clarysse (Larian, Bioware), Kevin Hoefman (Larian)
Graduates: NR

27. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

2025 Grads Hired: 8%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $74,917
Faculty: Rush Swope (Guerilla Games), Maurice Suckling (Epic, 2K)
Graduates: Curtis Priem (Nvidia co-founder), Zach Barth (Zachtronics)

28. University of California, Santa Barbara

2025 Grads Hired: 33%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $155,000
Faculty: Pradeep Sen PhD, Tobias Hollerer
Graduates: Cody Corona (Electronic Arts), Eric Roth (Screenwriter)

29. Abilene Christian University

2025 Grads Hired: 63%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $52,200
Faculty: Dr. Brian Burton, Rich Tanner
Graduates: Morgan Davis (Gearbox), Chase Yamaguchi (Sony)

30. Kent State University

2025 Grads Hired: 34%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $65,000
Faculty: Christopher Totten, Justin McCrea
Graduates: Joey Gage (EA), Nina Marotta

31. Marist College

2025 Grads Hired: NR
2025 Grads Mean Salary: NR
Faculty: Dr. Karen Schrier (Nickelodeon), Amy Finkel
Graduates: Darren Sugg (Epic), Rex Dickson (Blizzard)

32. University of California, Irvine

2025 Grads Hired: 25%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $83,000
Faculty: Katie Salen, Constance Steinkhueler
Graduates: Rob Pardo (Blizzard), Ben Brode (Blizzard)

33. LaSalle College Vancouver

2025 Grads Hired: 44%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $70,000
Faculty: Dr. Amir Jahanlou, Lisa Smedman
Graduates: Jarett Metcalfe (EA), Dani Merrithew (Blizzard)

34. Academy of Art University

2025 Grads Hired: NR
2025 Grads Mean Salary: NR
Faculty: David Goodwine, Brian Hess
Graduates: Ciaron Ireland (Striking Distance), Tala Furniss (Playtika)

35. University of Miami

2025 Grads Hired: 32%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $54,000
Faculty: Dr. Lindsay Grace, Dr. Anna Queiroz
Graduates: Pingtin Ji (Ubisoft), Casey O'Brien (Respawn)

36. Northern Arizona University

2025 Grads Hired: 50%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: NR
Faculty: Jared Duval (Serious Games), James Palmer
Graduates: NR

37. Dakota State University

2025 Grads Hired: NR
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $41,964
Faculty: Peter Britton, Erik Pederson
Graduates: Matt Engesser (Rockstar, Epic), Jimmy Chattin (Microsoft)

38. University of Michigan-Dearborn

2025 Grads Hired: 20%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $80,000
Faculty: Brice Maxim, Foyzol Hassan
Graduates: Austin Krauss, Shane Costello

39. New Jersey Institute of Technology

2025 Grads Hired: NR
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $78,265
Faculty: Richard Thomspon, Hye Yeon Nam
Graduates: Jason Chin (Nvidia), James Tichenor (Meta)

40. University of Wisconsin-Stout

2025 Grads Hired: 10%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $40,000
Faculty: Dr. Andrew Williams, Kim Loken
Graduates: Jose Estrada (Riot), Eleanore Falck (Epic)

41. Stetson University

2025 Grads Hired: 100%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $68,000
Faculty: Dengke Chen, Matt Roberts
Graduates: Daryl Holt (EA Sports), Ben Burbank (Valve)

42. Oklahoma Christian University

2025 Grads Hired: 25%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $35,000
Faculty: Jacob Touchstone, Dr. Robert Nix
Graduates: Alex Hallenbeck (Bungie), Laurel Zwirtz (Ember Labs)

43. Bloomfield College of Montclair State University

2025 Grads Hired: 7%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: NR
Faculty: Samuel Leigh (Viacom), Oliver Hong (IGDA)
Graduates: Josiah Hunt (Cloud Chamber), Michael Murphy (Blizzard)

44. Indiana University Bloomington

2025 Grads Hired: 20%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $70,000
Faculty: William Emigh (Studio Cypher), Michael Uslan
Graduates: Max Lancaster (Psyonix), Kees Leyundjik (Nintendo)

45. University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

2025 Grads Hired: NR
2025 Grads Mean Salary: NR
Faculty: Firas Khatib, Clinton Rogers
Graduates: Matt Mrazik (WB Games)

46. ArtCenter College of Design

2025 Grads Hired: 25%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: NR
Faculty: Zachary Adams, Tim FitzRandolph
Graduates: Syd Mead, Michael Bay (Director)

47. Louisiana State University

2025 Grads Hired: 4%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: NR
Faculty: Marc Aubanel (Electronic Arts), George Robins
Graduates: Janiece Campbell (Epic), Ashley Aucoin (Meta)

48. Oklahoma City University

2025 Grads Hired: 10%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $50,000
Faculty: Justin Shaw, Shirley Zhang
Graduates: Andrew Remeniski, Jessica Jennings

49. Cleveland Institute of Art

2025 Grads Hired: NR
2025 Grads Mean Salary: NR
Faculty: Steven Gutierrez (Serious Games), Harrison Walsh (Niche Worlds Cult)
Graduates: Zack James, Tim Elek (Epic)

50. New York Film Academy

2025 Grads Hired: NR
2025 Grads Mean Salary: NR
Faculty: Glenn Storm, Andrew Allen
Graduates: Leandro Ribeiro (Afterverse), Guillermo Quesada (Amazon)

GRADUATE RANKINGS

1. New York University

2025 Grads Hired: 59%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $84,800
Faculty: Eric Zimmerman (Gamelab), Dr. Mitu Khandaker (Spirit AI)
Graduates: Jenny Jiao-Hsia (IGF), Carol Mertz (Exploding Kittens)

2. University of Central Florida

2025 Grads Hired: 80%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $94,646
Faculty: Benjamin Noel (EA), Nicholas Zuccarello (Sony)
Graduates: Carlos Barbosa (WB Games), Brian DeSanti (Blizzard)

3. University of Southern California

2025 Grads Hired: 81%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $97,857
Faculty: TreaAndrea Russworm (Author, "Gaming Representation"), Mark Bolas (Fakespace Labs)
Graduates: Jenova Chen (Thatgamecompany), Brent Strong (Disney)

4. Rochester Institute of Technology

2025 Grads Hired: 79%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $83,000
Faculty: David Schwartz, Flip Philips
Graduates: Elan Lee (Exploding Kittens), Steven Van Slyke (co-inventor of OLED)

5. University of Utah

2025 Grads Hired: 80%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $87,325
Faculty: Michael Young PhD, Jose Zagal PhD
Graduates: Doug Bowser (COO of Nintendo America), Nolan Bushnell (Founder of Atari)

6. Southern Methodist University

2025 Grads Hired: 45%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $104,744
Faculty: Dr. Elizabeth Storz Stringer (Atari), Joowon Kim MacDonald
Graduates: Grace Liu (Netflix Games), Daniel Rivin (Disney)

7. Abertay University

2025 Grads Hired: 49%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $49,000
Faculty: Dr. Kenneth Fee, Joseph DeLappe
Graduates: Zoe Sams (Riot), David Hynd (Rockstar)

8. Clark University

2025 Grads Hired: 72%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $70,000
Faculty: Terasa Ulm, Scott Niemi
Graduates: Stanley Pierre-Louis (ESA), Gary Goldberg (Fablevision)

9. Savannah College of Art and Design

2025 Grads Hired: 73%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $62,500
Faculty: Nye Warburton, Cyril Guichard (Electrotank)
Graduates: Lucas Slominski (ZeniMax), Chris Schmidt (Bioware)

10. Drexel University

2025 Grads Hired: 50%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $80,000
Faculty: Dr. Paul Diefenbach (OpenWorlds Inc.), Dr. Frank Lee
Graduates: Anna Nguyen (NetherRealm Studios), Greg Lebanov (Wondersong, Chicory)

11. Michigan State University

2025 Grads Hired: 60%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $62,000
Faculty: Amanda Cote, Susan Bonner
Graduates: Brian Murray (EA), Geoff Johns (DC Entertainment)

12. DigiPen Institute of Technology

2025 Grads Hired: 37%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $179,000
Faculty: Claude Comair (Nintendo), Brian Schmidt
Graduates: Luis Villegas (Bungie), Taralyn von der Linden (Pixar)

13. Northeastern University

2025 Grads Hired: 40%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $80,000
Faculty: Celia Pearce (IndieCade), Bob De Schutter
Graduates: Angi Liu (Blizzard), Wendi Zhang (Activision Blizzard)

14. Worcester Polytechnic Institute

2025 Grads Hired: 70%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $82,000
Faculty: Ben Schneider (Turbine, Standing Stone), Ralph Sutter
Graduates: Michael Gesner (Riot), Jon Radoff (Beamable)

15. Falmouth University

2025 Grads Hired: 71%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $43,386
Faculty: Tanya Krzwinska, William Huber
Graduates: Rex Crowle (Media Molecule), Sophie Shepherd (Respawn)

16. University of Florida

2025 Grads Hired: 85%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $99,000
Faculty: Dr. James Oliverio, Dr. Hyo Jeong Kang
Graduates: Joseph Murphy (EA), Pooja Agshikar (Microsoft)

17. Full Sail University

2025 Grads Hired: 33%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $62,109
Faculty: Dr. Shawn Stafford, Chris Keeling
Graduates: Erin Eberhardt (Dreamhaven), Aaron Hamilton Cook (Blizzard)

18. DePaul University

2025 Grads Hired: 91%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: NR
Faculty: Ed Keenan (Midway), Allen Turner (Disney)
Graduates: Sara Asmussen (Blizzard), Kevin Geisler (Young Horses co-founder)

19. Bradley University

2025 Grads Hired: 40%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $45,000
Faculty: David Abzug (Deep Silver), Ray Hazlip (Deep Silver)
Graduates: Alex Cline (Shapeshifter Games), Annabelle Pries (Blind Squirrel)

20. Purdue University

2025 Grads Hired: 7%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $67,066
Faculty: Robert Howard, Jeffery Kesselman
Graduates: Jeff Hanna (Volition), Keith Self-Ballard (Bungie)

21. Carnegie Mellon University

2025 Grads Hired: 64%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $74,000
Faculty: Jesse Schell (Schell Games, Disney Imagineer), Derek Ham
Graduates: Neil Druckmann (Naughty Dog co-president), Bei Yang (Meta, Disney)

22. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

2025 Grads Hired: 33%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $74,917
Faculty: Maurice Suckling (Epic, 2K), Rush Swope (Guerilla Games)
Graduates: Dr. Bryan Kim, Dr. Matthew Gantt

23. University of Wisconsin-Stout

2025 Grads Hired: 100%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $44,000
Faculty: Dave Beck, Andrew Williams
Graduates: Hue Vang (Dreamworks), Andrew Murphy (Apple)

24. American University

2025 Grads Hired: 50%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: $70,000
Faculty: Andrew Phelps, Krzysztof Pietroszek
Graduates: Ryan Seymour (Smithsonian), Kelli Dunlop (TakeThis.org)

25. New York Film Academy

2025 Grads Hired: 2%
2025 Grads Mean Salary: NR
Faculty: John Zuur Platten, Craig Caton-Largent (Digital Domain)
Graduates: Leandro Ribeiro (Afterverse), Guillermo Quesada (Amazon Studios)

Homework: Creative accessibility

In recent years, the industry has reinforced the importance of designing videogames with accessibility in mind. After all, the more people who can comfortably play your game, the better chance you have of reaching an audience. The most common forms of accessible game design are options that allow players to tweak colorblind settings, alter models that trigger certain phobias, or tone down flickering lights. But sometimes, a game calls for accessibility considerations specific to the project.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the breakout hit RPG of 2025, looked beyond the usual settings when designing for accessibility. Developer Sandfall Interactive took note during playtests that its jerky combat camera was causing motion sickness for some players. To get ahead of that problem, the team included a camera stabilization option at launch that mitigated motion sickness without making any major artistic sacrifices.

Imagine you're developing a first-person shooter, a strategy sim, or a puzzle game that relies on color. How would you anticipate accessibility needs and design for them?

Programming believable AI characters

Artists can produce amazing concept art and designers can think up compelling gameplay loops, but videogames never make it out of the conceptual phase without talented programmers constructing the underlying logic. Their work is often invisible—a line of code that makes a character's jump or car's drift feel perfect—but one place a programmer's work gets to shine is in the non-player characters that populate a world. Programming believable behaviors into friendly NPCs or hostile creatures is crucial to the player believing the virtual world they're inhabiting.

A recent example of great AI programming is Arc Raiders, the hit 2025 extraction shooter that attracted millions of players through its unique PvPvE format. Players can optionally fight each other on its large maps, but they're encouraged to band together because of the presence of Arc—a fleet of mysterious robots that roam the planet's surface. The Arc, and specifically the behaviors that developer Embark Studios programmed into them, are the glue that binds the whole experience together. Arc drones will dynamically patrol the map, changing up their routes and thoroughly investigating noises. They're smart, but crucially, Embark programmers ensured they aren't so smart that players can't outmaneuver them. Careful stealth and awareness of their vision cones can mitigate their threat.

The Arc's dynamic perception is impressive, but the real magic trick is how the robots react to damage inflicted by players. When players shoot off one of a flying drone's propellers, it will dynamically attempt to compensate for the loss in power, drifting and dipping through the air before it either finds balance or crashes into the ground.

The same goes for ground-based Arc robots. When a four-legged Leaper loses a leg, it compensates by changing its walking pattern. That adherence to physics-based rules, as enabled by talented programmers, makes the Arc feel alive. They're curious, inquisitive, and worthy foes with a survival instinct, not rigid constructs with a few pre-determined actions.

Programmers are also at the heart of our favorite RPGs. Baldur's Gate 3 is known for its excellent writing, but talented programmers working behind the scenes constructed the complex web of quest outcomes that made its characters so reactive to the player's choices.

Sometimes, the best way to program believable AI characters is to double down on social interactions. In Playground Games' upcoming Fable reboot, every single citizen of the open-world Albion is a real, simulated person with a name, home, and daily routine. That much has been done before, but where Fable goes the extra mile is simulating every individual citizen's personalities and their perspectives on the world. The people of Albion will form an opinion of the player,, and that opinion can change based on one-on-one interactions or choices made throughout the story.

Fable's programmers call this system the "living population." Passing citizens will remark upon developments in the main story. A shop clerk might have a high opinion of the player if that player owns the shop they're working in. If the player develops a reputation in town as a tycoon, some citizens will find them off-putting by default.

If you find yourself fascinated by the little details and behaviors that make great videogame AI and want to be a part of it, then programming may be your starting point.

Homework: Finding fun

Often in game design, creativity goes hand in hand with flexibility. It's rare that a game comes together exactly as it was pitched. Instead, developers tend to find their game's unique hook along the journey. That can mean taking your original idea and refining it, but sometimes the project's entire premise can change when an even better idea comes along.

The 2025 Steam hit REPO, developed by Semiwork, was not originally conceived as a co-op horror game. At first, the team was making a singleplayer horror cleaning game in which players picked up trash around a mansion while avoiding a monster. By showing creative flexibility, the team realized it should pivot to multiplayer (because everything is more fun with friends). That change eventually led to moving away from the cleaning concept altogether, as the team found cleaning together wasn't as fun as it originally sounded. What was fun, they discovered, was cooperatively carrying fragile objects through precarious mansions. Thus, REPO was born.

Imagine you're developing a playable prototype for a 3D platformer. Your playtesters love how the jump feels, but aren't responding well to the game's setting or characters. How do you pivot?

The art of map design

One of the most specialized disciplines in game development is multiplayer map design. Multiplayer arenas can be sculpted from anything—a California golf course in Battlefield 6, a neon-soaked city in Fortnite, a long-forgotten spaceport in Arc Raiders—but unlike traditional level designers, map makers have the unique challenge of creating spaces that delight players upon first impression while also standing up after hundreds or thousands of hours of playtime.

Good maps have to be as distinct or visually interesting as any singleplayer space, but crucially, they also have to be fair. Mapping challenges every facet of spatial design: great mappers have an understanding of architecture, nature, composition, lighting, and can visualize how players are likely to move through spaces from any direction. The balance is considering all of these principles while also taking competition into account: Are the sightlines clear? Is the space too busy or confusing? Will it be fun to navigate the hundredth time players see it?

One way designers achieve fairness in maps is through symmetry: even if two sides of a map have different theming, they'll often share a similar or even identical shape to ensure one side isn't advantageous over the other. This is why maps in competitive shooters tend to take the general shape of a rectangle or bowl—no matter which side your team is on, it takes roughly the same time to reach the center.

We see this sort of "camouflaged symmetry" used on the largest map in Battlefield 6. Mirak Valley is a wide, flat expanse set in Tajikistan. On one end of the map is a small village with lots of indoor cover. On the opposite end is a bombed-out village with fewer standing buildings, but an elaborate network of trenches. The two sides achieve the same thing—locations with cover that act as capture points—with the same general land mass, but the map team at DICE utilized cover in two different ways. The side with fewer buildings favors vehicles, while the village gives infantry players a better fighting chance. It's not 100% symmetrical, but it's close, and it's more interesting to opt for variety.

Another way to create variety in maps is when the terrain can be changed by players. The destructible maps in the likes of Rainbow Six Siege X and The Finals force mappers to really get their creative juices flowing: How do you maintain competitive integrity when the map changes every session? The developers at Ubisoft tackled this problem in Siege by designing a visual language for "soft" walls that can be destroyed by players, and "hard" walls that cannot. In this way, designers can tightly control what sightlines can be altered by players and maintain a building's intended shape.

The Finals, meanwhile, sets no such limitations. Literally everything but the ground itself can crumble—a freedom that creates unparalleled dynamism, but also forces the map team to find other ways to distinguish arenas. The team at Embark Studios goes all-in on setting for this reason: its globe-trotting maps recreate real world locations across various time periods, including a futuristic Las Vegas, Monaco, Mexico, Korea, and even 16th century Japan.

The rise of battle royale games over the last decade has created a whole new category of map design: the 100-player mega map. Creating one large map instead of a dozen smaller ones is a major undertaking that requires close collaboration between individual mappers. The average Fortnite map, for instance, has over a dozen distinct points of interest in addition to kilometers of hills, roads, rivers, and mountains between them. It's a lot to consider, but all the extra space gives designers a blank canvas to sculpt beautiful views, incorporate multiple biomes, or hide secrets.

If these are the sort of challenges that get your mind racing, you may have the heart of a multiplayer map designer.

In a small ray of light for our fallen world, an indie dev who poured their heart and soul into their game seems to have actually been rewarded for it. As spotted by Dexerto (via GamesRadar), solo dev Cakez learnt his game Tangy TD had made $250,000 in a week while he was streaming, and he seemed truly unable to believe it.

Cakez has been documenting the process of making Tangy TD on his YouTube channel and streams for the past four years. A clip of him opening his day-one sales report and seeing it had made $30,000 went viral all by itself, and when the time came to check out his week-one report, he invited the community to see it with him.

And, well, an already-emotional Cakez couldn't really believe what he saw: $245,123 gross lifetime Steam revenue ($197,847 net revenue). That's from 28,078 copies sold. Our hero couldn't believe it, and was immediately overcome by tears as his wife whooped in celebration beside him. It was, I must admit, an incredibly wholesome sight.

In a stream, Cakes stayed humble about the whole thing: "Thank you very much. I feel like I really don't deserve this. But I appreciate it... It's so amazing to see how many people have come out to support me, essentially, and what I do. It's just crazy, I really don't know what to say. I don't know why people are so nice."

Which is all rather heartwarming, if you ask me. As for Tangy TD? It's doing pretty well on Steam: 89% of its reviews at the time of writing are positive, with one player writing "Saw the reaction vid. Bought the game. It's pretty good. Love a game dev that doesn't expect anything. GG's my dude."

It is about one hour to presentation time and Alexander Helliwell has decided to experiment. His mod—an attempt to convert Prologue: Go Wayback's default temperate woodland biome to a scorching desert—was looking pretty slick last time I passed by: all dazzling sunsets and dry heat and, an added bonus, running quite well. Turns out that yanking most of the game's world out and replacing it with sand carries a performance uplift.

It's still performing quite well, but a glance at his screen reveals a new, seemingly major change. Now the sands are pockmarked by great stretches of an unidentifiable black substance, the aftermath of experimentation on the mod team's part. "Is that oil?" someone asks. Helliwell turns in his seat, eyes wide: "I don't know."

Let's jam

In the last few days of 2025, PlayerUnknown Productions summoned its developers for one of its regular in-person conflabs. Though its offices are in Amsterdam, very few of its staff actually live anywhere near the city, and to compensate for the deficit in physical communication, company policy is to have as many staff as possible make the schlep to Mokum every couple of months.

Devs roll in from across Europe on trains and planes from Finland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and beyond. At least one bleary-eyed staffer has spent 12 hours on a train from Marseilles. But they are not—this time—just here to endure a barrage of stand-ups. They're here for a modjam, the same kind of minor modding festival that fans of games like Minecraft throw all the time, with the aim of spinning up game mods in a limited period.

It's an experiment: what happens if you loose a dev team on their own game and let them do whatever they want to it, using a rough assemblage of UE5 asset-store props, the game's pre-existing systems and objects, and whatever they can gin up themselves over the course of two days' modding?

Quite a bit, it turns out. Over 48 hours, Prologue's devs spin up new mechanics, items, systems, and full-blown total conversion mods. Some of them even conjure up ad-hoc marketing departments, producing ads and mock-up Steam pages featuring their creations. At the end of the jam, they'll present their work to the rest of the studio: what they learnt, where they think the ideas could go from here. An idea that goes down particularly well might find itself incorporated, one way or another, into a future update to the game itself.

But it's also an experiment in modding as a concept. "Modding was one of the bigger requests that we've had from the community," says studio founder Brendan Greene, the PlayerUnknown in PlayerUnknown Productions. "They want to be able to fuck around and do their own thing.

"This is what the modjam is for. It's like: let's do some experiments and see how possible this is and what we can do."

What we can do

PlayerUnknown Production's developers split into 10 projects, consisting of anything from a single dev to a full team of five. I rove between them in a way that must be quite annoying, accompanied by studio head of publishing Maurice Tan, whose task is to enlighten me as to precisely what I am looking at on people's monitors, while simultaneously ensuring that I don't commandeer an empty desk and unearth forbidden game design secrets or start developing PUBG 2.

My main posting is with senior 3D character artist Hakan Kamar, who's working with four other PlayerUnknown Productions devs to create a project that converted Prologue into a full-on horror game. If you were out of earshot of copyright lawyers, you might call it a Slenderman mode: "Something follows you, you don't know what, and you need to progress through the forest finding items, and then eventually escape.

"The thing we want to test is: 'Can we make Prologue a horror game?'"

The answer, so far as I can tell, is 'yes, though not without some difficulty.' In place of Prologue's usual loop—spawn in, try to survive and make your way to a distant weather station in a generally barren world—Kamar and co's horror mod has you collect scattered pages while avoiding the creature-legally-distinct-from-Slenderman. In place of the weather station, looming over the map is a great grey monolith, lit up by floodlights in the dark. It's the Half-Life-2-esque laboratory from which your pursuer escaped.

It is also far, far too large. Kamar is futzing with it as I watch, murmuring that "100 times is too big" as the sheer scale of the building sends the game's camera careening through the level geometry and down into the heart of the Earth.

Elsewhere, other devs on the horror team beaver away on their own bits of its creation, heads down in full production mode. In evening meetings the full squad—consisting of art director Jorry Rosman, senior character concept artist Sarah Sneeboer, principal audio designer Miguel Salas, programmer Yoan Rock, and Kamar—ponders choices like whether the creature should teleport around the island or be forced to walk everywhere, which skin materials to use so it doesn't practically glow in the dark, and whether its heavy-limbed "Sopranos walk" is a positive or negative (positive, obviously).

Meanwhile, Salas works on the audio for the mod's creature-detection system, a Silent-Hill-style radio that gets increasingly distorted the nearer the monster is—the strains of Tiny Tim's Livin' In The Sunlight slowing to static as your doom approaches.

It's a remarkably serious operation for what might, at first, seem like an end-of-year jolly. Rosman even gets cracking on a full-on marketing campaign for the mod, replete with Steam pages and product screenshots. The team treats the jam like, well, game development, with all the gravity that implies, save for their first choice of name: "What Happens In The Darkest Days In The Dark?"

Right to the source

The studio bustles during the day I spend in its office. Teams work on their projects, yes, but they also flit back and forth between desks, taking in developments in each other's work, offering criticism, advice, and expressions of sheer bafflement, and occasionally coming away with new inspiration for their own projects.

It's almost too perfect: a physical microcosm of the kind of organic, freewheeling internet of yore that has been almost entirely obliterated by corporate consolidation. No wonder Greene is keen on the Modjam idea—this is his entire pitch for Prologue and the games that will follow it. "The internet is dying," he says. "What was once one of humanity's greatest hopes of technology, meant to bring us closer, has decayed into a minefield of bots, of misinformation and digital splintered digital bubbles… But we don't come online for bots. We come online for each other.

"Even here today, we have all the team in for that human connection, rather than doing stuff online all the time. You need that. Now, I think that human connection is needed more than ever."

Greene's vision for Prologue isn't short on ambition—he sees it as step one of a metaverse, an open-source "global commons" that, unlike similar pitches by Mark Zuckerberg, "cannot belong to a single company." He imagines—not Prologue itself, but the tech and ideas behind it—one day providing the infrastructure for an internet more like the one we had 20 or 30 years ago, just in 3D: a space for the spontaneous formation of human relationships (and, you know, sometimes people calling you a prick over a Star Wars argument). "People don't want 'content.' They want each other."

Am I fully bought in? Not quite, but then if you'd shown me PUBG in 2016 I wouldn't have bet that'd become the defining template for seemingly all videogames for years to come either. Regardless of what I think, Greene's grand plans for Prologue and its successor games means that events like the Modjam are kind of essential. People have to be able to build on this foundation for it to become anything like the sunlit, open-source metaverse that Greene and the team imagines down the line.

Black hole sun

The good news for that vision is: it all seems to be going quite well. As Kamar and the horror mod team gin up Steam page assets and cover the collectible pages with royalty-free baboon drawings, other devs labour on their own mods. In one corner of the office, Helliwell and environment artist Boy Best convert the game from a frigid European forest to an Arizonan desert—"You're no longer trying to stay warm, you're now trying to stay cold and cool and stay hydrated."

Despite only two days' work, a casual onlooker (me) would be hard-pressed to notice the game was not always desert-based. There are even new sandstorm mechanics to obscure your sight and scramble your sense of direction. Helliwell has, perhaps inevitably, labelled some of these mechanics "Darude – Sandstorm" in the recesses of the game code. Occasionally his speakers quietly emit the song itself, in what must surely be a boon for team morale.

Meanwhile, a team consisting of technical game designer Guillaume Lucas, senior FX artist Dominikus Reiter, programmer Adrien Fabre, and environment artist Thijs de Haas is working on making Prologue a little bit more Far Cry, adding vehicles like a hang-glider and, tantalisingly, a shopping cart to the game.

The latter might actually be the more technically demanding of the two—attempting to cajole Prologue's engine into allowing the player to fill a cart with loose objects and move them about can prove too much for it. During the project's presentation to the studio, the team runs into an inevitable crash when the trolley gets overfull, prompting whoops and cheers from their assembled fellow devs.

But my favourite of the lot is the black hole, created by technical artists Michael van den Berg and Djanco Dewus. It's, well, a black hole. A great void manifests in the sky and pursues the player about the map, sucking up potentially useful items, starting fires, and growing ever-larger as it does so.

The aim is to force the player to keep moving—a little dash of PUBG's circle in Prologue—but I mostly find it entertaining as an exercise in random destruction. You can't help but feel Prologue's devs are working out a little of their frustration with the game's sometimes-untameable engine when they create mods whose aim is to lay waste to the entire thing.

The past is prologue

Is this the future? You won't catch me making definitive pronouncements for people to mock from the comfort of their orbital habitats 50 years from now, but I'll say this: if the modjam proves anything, it's that you'll never truly kill devs' desire to tinker with tech for the sheer love of it, no matter how corporatised and monopolised our online spaces become.

Whether it's the future or not, it's not a bad foundation to work from.

Microsoft has just shared an update to DirectX, labelling it "the biggest wave of new tooling features in DirectX’s history." The company, alongside major "GPU hardware partners", has shared its "dream of bringing console-level GPU developer tools to Windows."

Microsoft reports, "AMD, Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm have worked closely with us throughout feature development, each making significant contributions to make this release possible."

The new changes come in a few different sections. The first is the introduction of DirectX dump files. As elaborated on in the Microsoft Game Dev blog, "GPU-related bugs can emerge at any point in a game’s lifecycle, and developers have sought more thorough crash-dump infrastructure to understand their causes."

These dump files can help with both retail users and developer machines, giving a better understanding of what has gone wrong and why. Dump files will reportedly give logs on the hardware and driver state, plus the state of DirectX, and what was happening in the game before the dump file was created. Giving more information in condensed forms like this can help with all kinds of troubleshooting.

Another big update to DirectX is the introduction of "Live Shader Debugging". Effectively, this would allow for real-time shader debugging, which is a celebrated feature on Xbox already. It is currently planned for release in 2027. Microsoft claims it is designed for "needle in the haystack" style problems and also reports it's "the deepest GPU tooling collaboration with hardware vendors in Windows history."

This debugging on PC was only shown off as a preview at this year's GDC, but Microsoft says the public can expect more details in the coming months.

Microsoft has also noted its new shader explorer, which it claims is "a new way to inspect, understand and debug compiled shaders, with deeper live analysis".

This new explorer works with Pix, Windows' debugging tool, and Microsoft has shown off a version working on both AMD and Intel hardware. Interestingly, the shader explorer is not paired to the driver, so developers can analyse shaders for GPUs they don't own. This could potentially help with optimising for the myriad hardware forms that make up PC gaming, especially in smaller dev teams with less access to different hardware.

Microsoft points out specific integrations that AMD and Intel have implemented for these new bits of tech, but it points out that "all four have invested in PIX plugin support to surface their hardware-specific information through PIX’s standardized UI."

Given Microsoft's push towards PC gaming with its hybrid next-generation console, Project Helix, there's a good argument for why Microsoft might want to enable console-like dev tools for Windows devices. Project Helix is losing part of its traditional console appeal with its PC gaming capabilities, so giving developers tools to fine-tune and more easily report problems could help with long-term optimisation.

Back in my day, I would pass the time waiting for my Sims family to load back into existence by staring out of the window and appreciating all the natural beauty that surrounded my folks' place. Not so anymore—compression tech has gotten so good that the only fronds I have time to contemplate are the polygonal progeny of SpeedTree.

One may be forgiven for thinking load times can't get much speedier, but Microsoft has released further details about a swish new GPU decompression algorithm in DirectStorage 1.4, assuring that they can. The company first released these details at GDC 2026, during the DirectX State of the Union 2026: DirectStorage and Beyond talk.

Also on Wednesday, Microsoft released a public preview of DirectStorage 1.4 and the Game Asset Conditioning Library, which now both support the Zstandard codec as an option for compressing game assets on Windows. The Zstandard codec is already widely used, but Microsoft claims that the additional support offered via the Game Asset Conditioning Library can improve asset compression ratios by up to 50%. To put it another way, noticeable texture pop-in might just be about to pop-out of existence.

Microsoft describes Zstandard (or Zstd) as "an open standard that improves compression ratios, enables faster load times, and provides smoother asset streaming for content-rich games."

DirectStorage already incorporates another compression codec, GDeflate. A collaboration between Microsoft and Nvidia, it's a similarly open-source bit of GPU compression tech that was first introduced back in DirectStorage 1.1. The first game to officially support it, by way of Nvidia's own RTX IO, was Portal: Prelude, an at the time 15-year-old mod.

Last year's Spider-Man 2 port also used the tech via DirectStorage, though arguably not well at launch. More recently, Resident Evil Requiem is one of the few games that use its GPU data decompression—though not all rigs will harness this tech, even though they're capable of it.

According to Microsoft's own benchmarks, GDeflate is still the way to go for developers wanting to let the GPU handle asset loading, but Zstd is better for CPU-intensive projects. Zstd does also offer a better compression ratio overall compared to GDeflate—but only by about 2%.

A number of different codecs were evaluated for inclusion, but "Zstd stands out by delivering competitive compression ratios and decompression performance, broad availability on hardware and software across operating systems, and widespread adoption in OS, cloud, and web scenarios." Basically, its inclusion alongside GDeflate offers developers another option when figuring out what will suit their workload best.

Even greater improvements to this compression tech will be ushered in down the line by "GPU partners [working] towards future hardware specific optimizations for Zstd." Those GPU partners chime in with some much-needed context, too.

"Aligning the industry on an open compression standard builds a foundation for future game titles to deliver immersive experiences with even larger worlds than realistically possible today," Daniel Staheli, CVP of Software Development at AMD, said, "We plan to make optimizations for AMD GPUs available in a public driver during the second half of 2026 and look forward to seeing how developers use these investments to enhance the player experience.”

Rival GPU manufacturer and now massive AI company Nvidia echoed a similar sentiment, with distinguished engineer Patrick Neill saying, "NVIDIA is excited to bring Zstd support to game developers, with decompression optimizations tailored for NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs arriving in the second half of this year."

Intel is also on board, hoping to "tune Zstandard decompression through DirectStorage across our GPU architectures". Qualcomm also said it will bring Zstd-tuned driver updates "that reflect our investments in Zstd decompression on our platforms" by the end of the year.

To aid in 'aligning the industry on an open compression standard,' Microsoft has also made its Zstd GPU decompression compute shader open-source. It's still in active development, but currently interested devs can get their hands on a version of the shader that is "optimized for content chunked to 256KB or smaller, consistent with modern game packaging patterns for streaming workloads."

While a lot of the language here implies a PC focus, Microsoft is definitely still interested in console hardware. Just for a start, the new CEO of Microsoft Gaming, Asha Sharma, said 'hello' by promising to "recommit to our core Xbox fans and players." Then there was the announcement of next-gen console Project Helix, a hybrid box that will apparently play both PC and Xbox games—though another GDC talk revealed this week that it's still years away.

Even so, it's clear Microsoft still wants to keep its thumb firmly stuck in the gaming pie. CEO Satya Nadella recently said the company will "always" invest in gaming, and that Xbox "at its best lifts the entire company." Smart compression improvements like DirectStorage 1.4 may help Microsoft pave its way to a brighter gaming future…bit by bit.

In November 2024, developer Maxime Foulquier posted footage of Bloodborne Top Down Arena, a fan tribute mixing FromSoftware's relentlessly goth setting with Vampire Survivors mechanics. The project looked kinda cool, if not a little close to its source material.

Foulquier went quiet on the project after posting that video, and as it turns out, for good reason: In March 2025 he received a sternly-worded letter from lawyers representing Sony. Rather than announce straight away that the project was done for, Foulquier decided to wait.

"I didn’t say anything in March 2025 because I decided to repurpose all the assets I had created for that project into a new game set in my own universe, inspired by Bloodborne," Foulquier wrote on X, where he has also posted an image of the cease and desist letter. "My plan was to reveal the letter once the game was ready to communicate.

"Unfortunately, plans have changed. I’d rather speak about it now, as my disappointment is immense. The disappearance of Bluepoint is a tremendous loss for the industry and for the dream of a Bloodborne remake."

Foulquier posted the letter just after Sony confirmed it will close famed remake studio Bluepoint. It has long been hoped—but never hinted at by Sony—that Bluepoint might work on either a Bloodborne remake or remaster. A pipe dream for sure, but Bluepoint did remake Demon's Souls and Shadow of the Colossus, two other Sony-owned games with severely loyal followings.

With the closure, one of the Bloodborne community's most powerful coping mechanisms has been dashed. It was for the hope of a Bluepoint-fronted Bloodborne remake that Foulquier received the cease and desist letter with equanimity.

"I was incredibly excited about this project and worked on it a lot in my spare time," Foulquier wrote. "Then I received the letter you can see here. I told myself, 'Okay… I expected this might happen. Maybe it’s because a real Bloodborne remake is actually in development, with Bluepoint leading it for the PS6 launch?'"

It's not the first time Sony has killed a fanmade Bloodborne project: Bloodborne Kart was, as the name implies, a kart racer set in Yharnam, before Sony's lawyers got involved. It's now called Nightmare Kart.

"Why are you making such absurd decisions, Sony?" Foulquier wrote. "Shutting down such a talented studio while you’re not even making a Bloodborne remake and on top of that, sending cease and desist letters to small fan projects? Are you serious?"

While we wait, perhaps futilely, for Sony to decide it wants to make a lot of money from a cherished classic, Bloodborne PC emulation has made a lot of progress of late.

Ubisoft announced sweeping changes to its business today, confirming more layoffs, major internal restructuring, and the cancelation of seven projects including Prince of Persia: The Sand of Time. At the same time it renewed its pledge to double down on generative AI.

In a document released today Ubisoft describes its "radically new value-creation" business model, which it claims will help it become "a more gamer-centric organization" thanks to a "rightsized and more agile organization".

It goes on: "The new operating model will further empower the execution of the Group's strategy, centered on Open World Adventures and GaaS-native experiences, supported by targeted investments, deeper specialization, and cutting-edge technology, including accelerated investments behind player-facing Generative AI."

Ubisoft's embrace of generative AI is nothing new. Last year the company revealed Teammates, a "playable generative AI research project" featuring AI-powered NPCs capable of dynamically interacting with the player. Teammates was an evolution of an earlier experiment dubbed Neo NPCs, and it's easy to see how it could be implemented in future Ubisoft games, especially its sprawling open world affairs.

But Ubisoft's "accelerated investments" in gen AI come at a time when studios are facing pressure to move away from the tech. When Larian revealed last month it is experimenting with AI, the blowback was so severe that the studio had to host a damage control Reddit AMA all about it. Arc Raiders' near perfect launch was clouded by its implementation of gen AI.

Attitudes towards gen AI will undoubtedly keep shifting with time (though it's hard to imagine it'll go the way of NFTs, which Ubisoft also embraced), but if Ubisoft announced Far Cry AI right now it's fair to say the backlash would be enormous.

Still, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot seems extremely enthused by the tech, claiming last year that it's "as big a revolution for our industry as the shift to 3D."

Even with the hardware-hungry AI industry causing component shortages and sending memory prices soaring, there's perhaps one thing I wouldn't have thought to blame on the datacentres: massive font licensing fees for game developers.

Let me hit the backspace for a spell. At the end of November, commercial font service Fontworks ended its most affordable license plan, LETS (Leading Edge Type Solution), which originally allowed game devs to use their Japanese fonts for only 60,000 yen (or about $380) a year.

Parent company Monotype Imaging, which bought Fontworks back in 2023, then introduced a new pricing structure costing easily fifty times as much as the old plan (via Automaton). US-owned Monotype's pricing structure initially offered no local pricing for Japan, but still expected devs to cough up $20,500 per year, in addition to agreeing to a ridiculous 25,000-user cap on games using the licensed fonts.

Thankfully, the parent company has backpedalled a bit since, allowing developers to extend their licenses under the old affordable plan for the time being. But why such an astronomical price hike in the first place? Allegedly, heavy investment in AI that did not pay off for the company.

According to Monotype employee Mayur Pahwa, the company had "leaned heavily on the buzz surrounding artificial intelligence." He goes on to write, "Company leaders spoke enthusiastically about AI-driven typography solutions, hinting at a future where design and personalization would be automated at scale. Significant money and resources were funnelled into these projects, with entire engineering pods dedicated to experiments that promised to 'redefine the future of fonts.'"

Ultimately, a number of these AI projects were "shelved quietly, with little to show for the investment." What Pahwa calls Monotype's "AI Misadventure" allegedly resulted in waves of ongoing layoffs, and may now explain that astronomical font licensing fee; Monotype may be scrabbling to recoup its losses. Pahwa quotes one anonymous colleague, commenting on the situation, "We burned millions and got nothing. Now they’re cutting people to pay for those mistakes."

As for the Japanese game developers affected by the font fee hike, there's little good news to be found. Monotype doesn't just own Fontworks, and a number of other Japanese font makers feature among its portfolio; since Monotype was purchased by private equity firm HGGC back in 2019, the company has hoovered up Fontsmith, URW Type Foundry, as well as Hoefler & Co, according to Automaton. As such, there are few other reasonably priced services offering Japanese typefaces for devs to turn to.

Obviously, this is far from the only example of the twin villains of private equity or AI sinking their fangs into game development. To just point one more finger at AI, surging RAM and SSD prices mean Larian will be doing lots of optimisation in Divinity's early access, way ahead of the studio's original development schedule. As for private equity, I have only two letters for you: EA—though thankfully, Lincoln has many more letters and even a few hundred words on why EA's $55 billion acquisition has everyone terrified.

Bottom line, as Monotype's layoffs demonstrate, the concern is just how many people will be swept away by big tech's volatile whims.

AI-generated voice 'acting'—despite the fact I've never heard an example that hasn't immediately made me less interested in a videogame—has still become more ubiquitous in gaming. Arc Raiders, by all accounts a dang successful videogame, uses it for text-to-speech lines.

Speaking to PCGamesN, the voice actor for Baldur's Gate 3's Astarion, Neil Newbon (who knows a little bit about voice acting because he's won friggin awards for it), was very down on AI voiceover, echoing statements both he and his fellow BG3 cast members have made before on the subject:

"Comparatively speaking, the amount of money it costs to do those voice lines compared to the rest of the game's development is peanuts. When a game's successful, I don't really get why [developers] don't go 'well, at the time we couldn't afford to do it—it was too much or too difficult—but now we've been super successful, why don't we go back and actually redo the lines with actors?' That's an option; I'm just saying."

It's hard not to empathise with Newbon, here. The rational, sensible grown adult in me whole-heartedly agrees with him—compared to other development costs, hiring someone to go into a booth for a couple hours is basically nothing, especially when your game's making a million bucks.

The cynical goblin in my heart I've got locked up in a basement is, unfortunately, completely unsurprised that a studio like Embark would go for the cheaper, tackier option simply because it's… well, cheaper. We're in an industry plagued by layoffs where seemingly history-blind and overambitious executives make big, stupid decisions, then turn around and grind studios through crunch and burnout while they buy vintage cars with their paychecks.

Point being, we are not necessarily dealing with sensible people here—if all you care about's a budget, then why make something better if no-one's complaining all that much?

"I don't really think it's legitimate," Newbon continues. "If you're going to not record the lines in the first place and just use AI to take somebody's voice and manipulate it however the hell you want, that's a problem. You're robbing that performer of that day's fee, and you're robbing that performer of the ability to look after themselves or their family—most actors, notoriously, are not rich. Most of us struggle [for] our entire career."

Andrew Wilson, the CEO of EA, took home 260 times more money than what the median EA employee made this year. I share this not to argue with Newbon, more to just—sigh and nod along with him. Anyway: "The justification is difficult. 'Ah, we couldn't really afford it;' well, maybe find a way, now that you've made your money, to go back over those lines and do it better."

He also, rightly so, states that it all sounds bloody uncanny. Not enough to turn players away, clearly, but enough to make some (and certainly this writer) feel like they're playing a Temu version of the real deal:

"It's dull as hell. I don't believe it; it takes me out of the immersion. People are saying it helps the immersion because it's reactive. It takes me out of the experience because I just hear something that doesn't sound like a human being in jeopardy, or in combat, or excitement, or whatever emotion you're supposed to be aiming for. It doesn't feel real."

Oil and water, cats and dogs, Epic and Unity. Some things just don't go together. Until now, that is. Epic Games has announced plans to team up with probably its greatest rival in game development, Unity, to bring games made using the Unity engine to Fortnite. Epic also says, "Unity’s enhanced commerce platform" will come to Unreal Engine.

What's more, the collaboration will see Unity bring Unreal Engine support to its platform. To quote the killer excerpt from Epic's announcement:

"Developers will have the ability to publish Unity games into Fortnite, one of the world’s largest gaming ecosystems with more than 500 million registered accounts worldwide, and participate in the Fortnite Creator Economy. Also announced today at Unite, Unity’s Annual Developer Conference, Unity will be bringing Unreal Engine support to their cross-platform commerce platform."

If you're wondering what led these former mortal enemies to get together in such a sweeping collab', over to Tim Sweeney, Founder and CEO of Epic Games. “Just like the early days of the web, we believe that companies need to work together in order to build the open metaverse in a way that’s interoperable and fair,” he said.

Matt Bromberg, President and CEO, Unity, echoed that, commenting, “Choice and open systems create growth for everyone in the gaming ecosystem.” Of course, for Epic, this is presumably all about its ongoing quest to transform Fortnite from a mere smash-hit battle royale into a broad, sprawling and even more profitable gaming ecosystem. As they say in the UK's satirical tome, Private Eye, trebles all round!

Explaining Epic's rationale, Sweeney also told The Verge about his vision for a decentralised Fortnite that's more akin to the open web. “Fortnite’s still this big thing operated by Epic completely,” he said, “but there will be a day when you can, from the program that’s currently called Fortnite, go to other sites that are completely controlled by other companies.

"We have nothing to do with them. We make no revenue from them. We don’t have commercial agreements with them. They’re just like websites on the web.”

In that context, Unity's role here is to be a test candidate for that more open future. For now, Epic will ensure that content inserted into Fortnite is reviewed and "ratings compliant." But, eventually, the plan is for a fully open platform.

"We’d only have reviews for stuff that we host, and anybody would be able to put anything anywhere, and people would be able to browse to it like you do in a web browser today,” Sweeney said.

As for timing, the announcement says that "Developers will be able to manage pricing, promotions, and live operations with Unreal Engine, coming early next year," while additional details about the partnership and product timing will also be shared early in 2026.

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After more than 30 years of running Activision, from 1991 to 2023, you might think that Bobby Kotick knows a thing or two about what it takes to run a successful videogame company.

He's a controversial figure, but Kotick also bought a failing company for $500,000 and turned it into a publisher that Microsoft spent $75.4 billion acquiring.

After listening to him suck up to Elon Musk on the Rushmore podcast (cheers TWIV), however, it sounds like he might have lost his strong instincts.

"Elon truly would be the best owner of any game company," he said. "No, he would. There's not a person who'd be more qualified to build and run a game company."

Musk's videogame credentials largely amount to liking videogames. He might actually be quite good at Quake and Diablo 4, too, though it's really hard to tell given his penchant for paying people to play for him.

In January, he streamed some Path of Exile 2, but seemed confused by basic game mechanics, which would have been fine if he hadn't been boasting about his skills, or if he wasn't playing on a geared-up, high-level character.

It turns out that he used an account boosting service, which he also admitted he did in Diablo 4. The 54-year-old billionaire didn't really see a problem with it, though. "It's impossible to beat the players in Asia if you don't, as they do!"

On the podcast, Musk still claimed to be "pretty good at videogames".

Musk also discussed one of his favourite videogames, Deus Ex, and once again used it to criticise the Covid lockdowns. Musk's failure to understand his favourite game has been going on for a while, and it's prompted Deus Ex writer Austin Grossman to call him out a few times.

"That kind of political weight and social satire is a real common thread between Deus Ex and Dishonored," Grossman told us. "It is the thing that Elon Musk likes, creepily. It is creepily in Elon Musk's worldview. So that may be its longest, worst legacy."

Not mentioned in the podcast was Musk's current gaming venture. Last year, he announced that xAI would develop games using AI, which he claimed would "make games great again". He said it would release an AI-generated game in 2026.

Former Sledgehammer boss Glen Schofield had a different take from Kotick, his former employer, calling Musk "full of crap" for claiming xAI could develop a game in a year.

Musk does seem to have slammed on the breaks, though. On the podcast he suggested we'd see fully AI-generated games appearing in the next three years.

Regardless, anyone who wants to cut out the humans who made all the games he loves so much, or who thinks that the truly atrocious AI tech demos we've all seen suggest that AI games will ever be anything other than hilarious mistakes, is not the kind of person who should own a game developer.

Kotick wasn't done with the flattery, though.

When Rushmore host and Endeavour CEO Ari Emanuel suggested that it was a mistake for Musk to buy Twitter, and that he should have invested in videogames instead, Kotick came to his pal's defence.

"For the betterment of society he needed to actually own X," he said. Yes, the man who let the bigots return to Twitter was doing it all for the betterment of society, and not just because he's a terminally online populist.

"No, he's way too capable," Kotick added. "The things he's working on, there are too few people in the world that actually could do that. So those are the priorities of how do you actually save humanity, improve society, he's got his priorities right."

One thing we can agree on, Bobby, is that it would be better if Musk spent more time tweeting and less time trying to ruin videogames. At least for me.

Remember Agent? After first mentioning it in 2007, Rockstar formally announced it in 2009—an espionage game in an open world, GTA meets James Bond, with all the cars-turning-into-submarines gadgetry that implies. After bouncing between different Rockstar studios for a while, Agent vanished off the radar, with its death finally being confirmed in 2021.

In a rare interview, Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser appeared on the Lex Fridman podcast recently to discuss all things GTA and Red Dead Redemption, though Agent also came up. "It had about five different iterations," Houser explained. "I don't think it works, I concluded. I keep thinking about it sometimes, I sometimes lie in bed thinking about it and I've concluded what makes them really good as film stories makes them not work as videogames—or I need to think through how to do it a different way as a videogame."

When you think about spy movies, from The Ipcress File to the latest Mission Impossible, while they may involve car chases and shootouts they're all about agents with a more singular mission than GTA's free-roaming loose cannons. "Those films, they're very very frenetic and they're beat to beat to beat," Houser said. "You've got to go here and save the world, you've got to go there and stop that person being killed and then save the world. And an open world game does have moments like that, when the story comes together, but for large portions it's a lot looser and you're just hanging out, and you're just doing what you want."

Which is why, he suggests, Agent never came together. The open world formula Rockstar had created, while well-suited to the life of a gangster or a cowboy, couldn't simulate being a spy in the same way. "That's why it works well being a criminal," Houser said. "Because you fundamentally don't have anyone telling you what to do. And we try and create external agency through these people forcing you into the story at times, but as a spy, that doesn't really work because you have to be against the clock. For me, I question if you can even make a good open world spy game."

The missions in the GTA London games where you pretend to be the Austin Powers-esque Endeavour Chambers may be the closest we ever get to a Rockstar open world spy game. Meanwhile, IO Interactive's 007 First Light seems like it might be more mission-based, as you'd expect from the Hitman studio. It's due out on March 27, 2026.

Have you ever been sitting there, watching an anime, and gone: Man, I wish I could get drawn into chaotic adventures just like Momo Ayase and Ken Takakura to help me work through my personal baggage, motivating me to become a better person? What am I saying, of course you've done that. We've all been there. Moving on.

Anyway, turns out there's a future in which something similar could be possible. Earlier this month, Yokohama City University's Minds1020Lab began trialling "anime therapy", as reported by itmedia (thanks, Automaton, for the translation).

Here's how it works: Participants will choose one of six anime avatars, each with their unique backstory. Then, in what looks to be a visual-novel style interface, a psychologist will take on the role of said anime character and conduct a counselling session. Some questionnaire-based psychological evaluation happens before and after these sessions, too.

Something interesting that's implied here, per Automaton, is the fact that a large chunk of these sessions will also be devoted to learning about these anime characters and their place in the fictional world that Minds1020Lab has set up, here.

And listen, it might be easy to see the words "anime-based therapy" and roll your eyes—and I definitely think we'll need to wait and see the findings of this study, which'll conclude in June 2026, before saying whether it's effective or not. But from where I'm sitting, this kinda rules.

I've been roleplaying in MMORPGs for a long time, and playing TTRPGs like D&D for 10 years, and while you shouldn't be treating your D&D table as a replacement for, like, actual therapy? I can't say I've never worked through my emotions while mucking about with fellow writers in World of Warcraft, or exploring my character's journey in a solid D&D campaign. Sometimes you figure things out in play.

In other words, I don't think the stories we tell each other are just frivolous nonsense, I think they do have a solid impact on our lives—fiction is powerful! And if anime therapy helps someone figure their stuff out, who cares whether it's delivered by a therapist in a mute-grey office or a therapist pretending to be a cool anime character in a visual novel interface: If it works, then it works.

Things are dire in the game industry at the moment. Which is, unfortunately, a sentence I've been writing for a lot of moments—two years of moments, actually. I am now writing it again, wincing in sympathy, as former Riot executive Greg Street has taken to LinkedIn to have an (understandable) moan about his studio's lot.

For context, Street worked on World of Warcraft (you might know him as Ghostcrawler) as well as Riot's still-fermenting League of Legends MMO, before heading out to form his own company in 2023. Fantastic Pixel Castle has been working on Project Ghost for a minute, before having the funding rug pulled out by NetEase earlier this month.

The studio's been on the hunt for money, but having a hard time, as per the post itself (thanks, GamesRadar+). "Please indulge me in feeling salty for a moment. I understand that almost nobody in the video game business is making deals right now, and those that do happen are very small.

"There are many reasons for this state of affairs, but one of the least excusable ones is some of the gigantic investments in games or studios in the previous few years that didn't pan out. A fraction of that could have created a lot of smaller games."

As our own resident MMO-knower, the cynic in me does understand that MMOs just aren't really in vogue anymore, and I'm tempted to lean towards saying well, what do you expect? But it's not as if Street is wrong, here. I mean, it's hard to believe that all those execs pumping out huge live service games are justified when Concord and Suicide Squad exist. Every so often you get a Marvel Rivals, but it's not a surefire thing.

"I'm not blaming every game that didn't hit big," Street continues, "Making games is very hard after all. But when you hear about projects where the team was burning money because the game vision kept changing, or the build was never stable, or playtests just weren't fun, or the leadership team was a revolving door, then you know that game was unlikely to ever deliver a good experience for players."

I mean hey, sometimes the playtests even were fun. Phil Spencer loved that MMO Zenimax were developing, before Microsoft decided to take it 'round the back of a shed with a 12-gauge. I don't know if Project Ghost would've hit big, but I'm already exhausted with the capriciousness of the gaming industry, and I report on it second-hand.

All of this, Street says, "can make it slightly frustrating when you do have, as we do: A team with a proven track record, that works well together with very high morale, without any leadership drama, that has taken a game halfway through development, whose vision has not strayed and whose tech is very stable, which hard data suggests players love and will play.

"And yet," Street says, "There is still no available funding." Rough.

In the world of PCs and PC gaming, debates are usually quite evenly distributed. AMD vs Intel. AMD vs Nvidia. WASD vs arrow keys. Cats vs dogs. You'll find arguments for either side most of the time. However, when it comes to Unreal Engine 5, comments from PC gamers are mostly on the side of "it just runs really badly." Epic Games has tried to counter such claims many times before, but with the debate still running, CEO Tim Sweeney has stepped in to say that the main reason why UE5 games don't run well is how they're developed in the first place.

He said this at the recent Unreal Fest event in Seoul, as reported by Korean site This is Game (via RedGamingTech). Press members asked about what Epic Games was doing to address optimisation issues for games developed on UE5. "The primary reason Unreal Engine 5-based games don't run smoothly on certain PCs or GPUs is the development process," replied Sweeney (alas, my grasp of Korean is non-existent, so hopefully the machine translation has got it spot on).

More specifically, he suggested that one particular problem is the choice of PC platform used in the formative stages of a game's creation. "Many developers begin by developing games for high-end hardware, then optimize and test on lower-spec devices in the final stages."

He's certainly not wrong. I've seen many examples of pre-alpha code being run on fairly high-end hardware, but that's only because those are the rigs that all the developers at the studio use. Once the bulk of the game is done, coders then work on getting it to run just as well on other configurations, but with less time being available to do this compared to the early stages of development, a comprehensive optimisation process isn't always possible.

While it is easier to scale up rather than down, one factor that can complicate the issue is when developers target consoles rather than PCs to judge performance. For example, the makers of Avowed (Obsidian Entertainment) picked the Xbox Series S for their benchmark hardware, and despite being a relatively weak platform, the PC version was decidedly wobbly on release. On face value, code for an x86-based console should be easy enough to translate to a PC, but they're disparate enough to make it quite a challenge.

Sweeney also acknowledged the fact that tweaking code for a range of platforms is simply a very time-consuming process. "Since optimization requires significant manual labor, we plan to provide automated optimization features for various devices, enabling developers to work faster and more easily.

"In addition to providing training on the overall testing and optimization process, it's crucial to raise awareness that optimization should occur early. If necessary, our engineers can directly intervene to raise awareness of optimization techniques and provide technical assistance."

The latter is arguably more useful than the former, because it takes time for Unreal Engine to be updated to include such tools and features, and even if they're released quickly, game developers are unlikely to use that version of UE for their game. In fact, because AAA development takes so long, many big releases come out on quite old versions of Epic's software package.

Take Stalker 2 as an example. That's an Unreal Engine 5.1 game, a version of the engine that's missing a huge amount of improvements that Epic has added over the years. The devs are currently working on shifting the whole thing across to version 5.5 (and perhaps may even make the jump to the much-lauded 5.6), but even if the update makes everything all super peachy, the damage has already been done to UE's reputation.

Avowed actually started on Unreal Engine 4, then switched to UE5, with the final release being version 5.3 in February of this year. You might wonder why game developers don't just update the tools they use the moment Epic releases a new version of Unreal Engine. After all, Unreal Engine 5.3 came out in September 2023, and 5.4 appeared in April of last year.

Well, if you've done a year or two of solid coding, you'll be familiar with the engine's quirks and foibles, and more importantly, you'll have stability. By that, I don't necessarily mean software crashes; it's about having as much consistency in the development process as possible, to avoid having to waste precious time adapting to new things. Sticking to the same engine, even if it's not the latest one available, isn't laziness—it simply involves fewer risks.

Ultimately, Sweeney is right in that the main reason why UE5 games don't often run well on PCs is the game development process itself, though I disagree that it's mostly down to choosing the wrong target platform. Of course, he's not going to blame his company's product, but at least Epic acknowledges the issue and it's trying to do something about it, just as Stalker 2's devs and others are as well.

I suspect that none of this will stop some folks from having the view that Unreal Engine 5 just runs really badly on PCs, because there will always be games based on that engine which get launched in a poorly optimised state. For those cases, either Epic and UE5 will incur the usual flak, or the developers themselves will be in the firing line.

Excuse me for a moment while I dance around my office, yelling 'same as it ever was', while a certain Talking Heads song plays in the background.

I don't like paid respecs. In fact, I think respecs should be straightforward, unlimited, and free. A bright future for all respecs! Allow me to explore and adore your game's many intricacies without starting multiple playthroughs! Viva la build! Unfortunately, Tim Cain, the OG lead on Fallout and a longtime CRPG (and MMORPG) developer besides, has ruined me.

The weapon? A perfectly reasonable argument from a seasoned developer explaining the pitfalls of free respec systems. Curses. That's per a recent video on his YouTube channel, where he fields questions from budding game developers.

To be clear, Cain doesn't say that respecs are good or bad—ending the video with the assertion that it simply "depends on your design goals." But he does spend a lot more time talking about the negatives than he does the positives, a fact I will concede is probably because critique is more complicated than praise.

Speaking of, he says that "players who like respecs like it because it lets them try a whole bunch of different build configurations." So far, so correct.

He also makes the savvy observation that it's a more user-friendly replacement for the old-school bite of de-levelling—wherein old MMOs and RPGs would level you down as punishment if you died too much. "You'd have to replay the game to regain them, but a side-effect of that is you could rechoose different things … It acted like a very rough proto-respec."

Also, "For some players and designers, respecs are great, because they give the players more choice and therefore, in some points of view, way more agency." Then he rolls up his sleeves and clocks me in the face with facts and logic.

Luckily, he starts with what I find to be the weakest argument, that respecs "lessen the impact of player decisions … knowing that anything you choose to do on your player can be undone at any time basically means that those decisions didn't matter in the slightest."

And sure, this is technically true, but I think that only matters in a game like Disco Elysium—where your build choices actually reflect on the story. When it comes to whether I deal 5% more poison damage to shielded enemies, or 12% more on backstabs, I don't exactly care.

But an over-reliance on respecs can mess up design, too: "for designers I've seen respecs be a bad thing, in the sense that it encourages very 'loose' design.

"I've talked about dead levels, where you go up and there's not much to buy—but who cares, maybe people respec at that level, so there's still choices they can make. I've talked about dead-end builds that can't finish the game. Who cares? You can just respec, and now that same character can finish the game with a new build."

He finishes this rhetorical combo with a wink-wink nudge nudge to World of Warcraft, which saw fire mages told to go sit and spin in Molten Core back in the day—turns out fire elementals are resistant to fire.

"All these things—why worry about them? Why worry about your game design at all, knowing that there's a button the player can press and just respec their character … It turns it into a player problem. When this bad thing happens, I've given you something to do, so it's not bad anymore."

And, like—I mean—ugh. Alright. He's got me. Fine.

I don't think Cain's even really coming after designers, either; most developers want to make the best game they can, but if respecs fit into the game's ecosystem, then by golly are they gonna let certain things slide because the respec system buffers it up. Deadlines are tough and they've got a job to do.

Sometimes it's even a good thing—tinkering with your build to overcome a specific challenge is, like, 99% of the reason Armoured Core 6 is good (the other 1% is my boy Rusty).

"Especailly in online multiplayer games," he continues, "you frequently find people saying 'we need this type of specialised healer', so then you have to respec, not because you want to, but because you find it hard to get into a group."

This is also true, though given how hardcore raiders are sometimes, I know they'd just pressure those same people into rerolling new characters entirely. But, alright Cain, well played. I guess paid respecs can stay. But you're all on thin ice, RPG developers—I'll be waiting, watching. And when you make me pay 300 gold I can just pickpocket off an old skeleton, thus defeating the point in the first place, I will be there to have my revenge.

Fully 87% of game developers are already using AI agents. That's according to a new survey from Google Cloud and The Harris Poll of 615 game developers in the United States, South Korea, Norway, Finland, and Sweden. It's also just the tip of the AI-berg.

Some of the tasks completed by AI aren't immediately worrisome and you'd think will speed up development and reduce costs. The report says AI is proving useful for automating "cumbersome and repetitive tasks", freeing developers to focus more on creative elements.

For instance, 47% of developers reported that AI is, "speeding up playtesting and balancing of mechanics, 45% say it is assisting in localization and translation of game content, and 44% cite it for improving code generation and scripting support." Overall, 94% of developers surveyed, "expect AI to reduce overall development costs in the long term (3+ years)."

That could help keep smaller developers in business, it might mean niche game titles are more viable, and so on. But it's only part of the picture. Arguably one of the great fears among gamers is that game design, stories and dialogue will be replaced with the sort of AI slop that's now bunging up YouTube and social media.

Well, slop or not, AI is increasingly being used for those purposes. Google's survey found that 36% of respondents are using AI for dynamic level design, animation and rigging, and dialogue writing, while 37% of developers report they have, "enhanced experimentation with new gameplay or narrative concepts."

The report is pretty granular about many aspects of game design and development and makes for an intriguing read. Overall, Google is nothing if not upbeat about the implications of all this. Of course it would be, considering it is one of the largest AI researchers on the planet. It has skin in the game, and it's trying to sell AI to the world.

"Overall, the research found widespread adoption of gen AI in the games industry—and a surprising level of optimism for it. AI is already making a big difference in developer workflows, including productivity and creative tasks.

"Developers also see promising possibilities with AI agents and other emerging AI tools to accelerate game development and enhance player experiences," the report says.

Of course, the end game, pun very much intended, of all this is presumably games fully AI generated in response to user prompts. "I want to play a first person shooter set in ancient Rome, but with modern weapons, procedural crime elements and Disney characters," or whatever. And off you go.

Of course, except the one bit that almost definitely won't be doable is the Disney characters due to IP ownership. Unless you pay extra for the Disney AI gaming subscription or similar. But you get the idea.

If that puts the burden on users to come up with game narratives, semi-curated games where the basic premise is tweaked by user prompts might make more sense for most mainstream gamers. But the main point is that it might all be AI generated one day. At which point will there be a submarket for "artisanal" hand-coded games with human-written narratives, real voices and the rest? All of this is to come, much is to be decided. But the the direction of travel looks pretty unambiguous, and a little icky.

In a note to developers, Itch.io founder Leaf Corcoran has confirmed that free adult content will be re-indexed on the platform, alongside a new content warning system. It follows the wholesale de-indexing of adult content on the indie game marketplace due to pressure applied by an anti-pornography lobby group on major credit card processors.

Since Itch.io is much smaller than Steam, and is a user-generated content platform where material can be published "with minimal barriers", Itch.io was forced to take a sledgehammer approach to content removal after it came under the scrutiny of its payment processors. Reindexing free material—which doesn't require payment processing—is the first step towards addressing a problem that was impossible for the platform to immediately fix with any nuance.

Announcing the re-indexing, Corcoran adds that "we are still in ongoing discussions with payment processors and will be re-introducing paid content slowly to ensure we can confidently support the widest range of creators in the long term." As Harvey Randall reported earlier this week, Itch.io is currently reaching out to alternative payment processors more willing to work with adult material.

One of itch.io's major payment processors isn't happy about the situation either. In a statement provided to Corcoran, a spokesperson for Stripe wrote that it's "currently unable to support sexually explicit content due to restrictions placed on them by their banking partners, despite card networks generally supporting adult content (with the appropriate registrations).

"Stripe has indicated that they hope to be able to support adult content in the future," the statement concludes. In a conversation with Stripe, Corcoran learned that the company cannot support adult content "designed for sexual gratification". With that definition in mind, Corcoran writes that "we may review that initial list for potential re-introduction." To me, that still seems like a prohibitively vague definition.

"However," Corcoran adds, "our long-term plan is to implement one or more new processors to avoid putting the platform at risk."

The debacle is traceable to the Australian lobby group Collective Shout, which earlier this month sent an open letter to major payment processors including Paypal, Mastercard, and Visa, demanding that the companies "demonstrate corporate social responsibility and immediately cease processing payments on Steam and Itch.io and any other platforms hosting similar games."

Itch.io appears to be scrambling for cover after credit card payment processors began pressuring it to remove or moderate its NSFW content, a move claimed to be at the behest of anti-porn groups like Collective Shout—an ongoing situation that's been causing a huge turmoil over the past week.

As part of compliance, Itch has been made to "deindex" many of its adult or NSFW games while it performs a review—not just porn or erotica, but games with adult, subversive, or suggestive themes.

While titillating games and art (that aren't about outright illegal things) have a right to exist in any sensible society that understands adults have sex, the situation has had a knock-on effect for LGBTQ+ and minority creators making less smutty work, too. As indie dev Jenny Jiao Hsia described it to me earlier this week, "Cutting these women off from income streams and audiences does nothing to 'protect' them."

In a recent follow-up FAQ, Itch has clarified that it's not only trying to get things even-keel as quickly as possible, it's also stated that it's seeking out other payment processors who don't faint after receiving 1,000 letters from anti-porn activists. Also, its response has been more chaotic because, simply put, it's a less regimented platform with less bargaining power than big brother Valve.

"The situation is evolving as we await final determinations from our current payment processors, Stripe and PayPal," the site writes. "There are still unknowns that prevent us from providing a fixed timeline.

"We are actively reaching out to other payment processors that are more willing to work with this kind of content. We have suspended the ability to pay with Stripe for 18+ content for the foreseeable future. Our immediate focus has been on content classification reviews and implementing stricter age-gating on the site."

As for why Itch's response was more dramatic than Steam's? It's down to scope: "Steam is a 'closed' platform where every product page is approved before it appears on the store. Because they were generally aware of the content they host, they could identify and act on specific pages.

"Itch.io is an open, 'UGC' (User-Generated Content) platform. With over 2 million product pages, anyone can publish content at any time with minimal barriers. We could not rely on user-provided tagging to be accurate enough for a targeted approach, so a broader review was necessary to be thorough."

As for why that review necessitated immediately deindexing games, Itch blinks twice to tell us it's in trouble: "Additionally, Itch.io is a small company, both in team size and in transaction volume, compared to a company like Steam. We have limited ability to 'push back.'"

The platform clarifies: "If we lose our ability to accept payments from a partner like PayPal or Stripe, we impact the ability of all creators to do business. Losing PayPal, for instance, would prevent us from sending payouts to many people. Our actions were taken to protect our payment processing abilities for as much of the platform as possible."

Itch also clears up a few misconceptions. While delisted content is par for the course, and some games have received a "content notice", the files for them should still be in the libraries of those who've purchased them, "assuming the creator has not taken down the page or removed the files themselves."

The FAQ adds: "Regardless of what happens, I personally recommend you maintain control over the content you own. Itch.io is a DRM-free platform from day 1 for this reason. Download and backup your games and don’t let any corporation dictate what you can own."

As for the site not processing payouts, Itch clarifies that it's been a long-standing policy for "bad-actor situations where a user joins the site and blatantly violates our terms to make sales before being banned", adding that it's always had a "zero-tolerance" attitude towards content that depicts minors performing sexual acts or real-life imagery.

Itch claims that any instances of this happening now "are a special circumstance. We have no interest in withholding anyone’s earnings. The measures we are taking now are to ensure we do not lose our relationships with our financial partners, which is necessary to continue paying creators without issue."

It does seem like the platform's been sandwiched between a rock and a hard place and, more importantly, is trying to walk the walk in stating that. In my reporting, I've seen some understandable lashing-out at Itch—and while I'd never claim any corporation or company, regardless of size, is your friend—it does seem like the site's been doing its level best to not sink its own ship.

Some things could've been handled better, surely, but I do not envy anyone at Itch right now—I envy the developers whose work is in jeopardy even less, who are themselves caught in the middle of a clear censorship campaign and governmental pushes by some countries to clamp down on mature content. Here's hoping for a return to normalcy soon.

In case you missed the news, let me get you up to speed—payment processors like Visa and Mastercard have, likely at the behest of anti-porn group Collective Shout, pressured both Steam and Itch.io to either delist or limit 'adult' games.

These blanket bans not only sweep erotic and NSFW works into their net, but have also impacted anything with a whisper or adulthood or severe themes—particularly on Itch.io, which has deindexed thousands of games as part of its preliminary actions to comply.

I reached out to developers who were affected, including Robert Yang, who's been making games since 2011, and is known for exploring gay culture in his games like the Tearoom.

This isn't his first rodeo, though. His game Rinse & Repeat was banned on Twitch in 2015, given the site's policy at the time that nudity can't be a "core focus or feature of the game". Its current policy is even more restrictive and hyper-specific.

"Twitch did treat me rather poorly," he writes to me in an email. "Even if we make progress, it can always be erased later—see the ongoing erosion of trans rights in the US and UK, despite the widespread support and consensus years ago."

When it comes to Itch, Yang notes that the site "hosts a lot of LGBTQ games and content, not just my games, and if we're all permanently deindexed (or deleted) then we have nowhere else to go, really."

I also talked to Jenny Jiao Hsia, who, for a time, believed that Consume Me was caught up in the wave of delisted games. This has since been confirmed not to be the case by Itch.io founder Leaf Corcoran, who has said he will make indexing requirements clearer "when the dust settles".

For posterity's sake, I've kept Hsia's comments intact, especially since the initial confusion over which games were and weren't deindexed (something Corcoran admits needs work) is a testament to how suddenly and unexpectedly this situation developed.

Consume Me won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize for Best Independent Game this year, and follows a teenage girl dealing with the stresses and trials of an oppressive, patriarchal, and expectation-laden society.

Hsia—who replied in a jointly-written email with her colleague AP Thomson, so I'll be referring to them as Hsia/Thomson from here on out—told me at the time that it was "unlikely Consume Me will ultimately be negatively impacted by these changes. Itch was already going to be a very small percentage of our revenue and our Steam presence currently remains unaffected.

"We think we'll be fine, but that is absolutely not the case for many other developers out there."

'The same song and dance'

Collective Shout's mission statement is geared towards protecting women and children—and while it has since put out a post claiming that Itch.io and Steam's responses weren't proportional to its intent, the group was far less timid when some of its members claimed victory earlier in the month on social media, with one dubbing quite a few people "porn sick brain rotted pedo gamer fetishists".

As an aside, payment processors withdrawing their support and causing problems for marginalised communities is not a new thing, and I'm skeptical it was an unexpected outcome—in 2021, the ACLU argued that Mastercard's policies against "high-risk" platforms harmed the safety of sex workers by "pushing the industry deeper into the shadows."

Both Yang and Hsia/Thomson are also entirely unconvinced: "This is the same song and dance performed by every anti-porn, anti-sex-work, and anti-LGBTQ+ organization going back decades," Hsia/Thomson says.

"There are many many women who consume and enjoy adult content. There are many many women who produce adult content and deserve to be fairly compensated for their work. Cutting these women off from income streams and audiences does nothing to 'protect' them."

Yang, meanwhile, tells me that: "Collective Shout is acting in a typical conservative anti-LGBTQ tradition with a familiar pattern: culture war morality campaigns to brand everything they dislike as pornography and obscenity.

"In the US, there's an especially strong anti-woman and anti-feminist component to the anti-obscenity campaigns, where US conservatives want to use an old zombie law called the Comstock Law to ban not just LGBTQ expression but also abortion and birth control as 'obscene.'"

It's a chilling comparison to make. The Comstock Act of 1873 was initially targeted at the postal service, making it illegal to send "obscene, lewd or lascivious" in the mail—which included any materials relating to abortion or birth control.

The law's been revised several times over the years—and while it's sometimes used for severe and indefensible crimes, such as in 2022, he's not wrong in that US conservatives are attempting to weaponise it to cut off access to abortion.

We might not get videogames in the mail, but in a way, digital distributors are a postal service of their own—and asking payment processors to intervene in the place of any democratically-elected government seems even more dire.

Yang puts it in far blunter terms: "This is their ultimate goal: they want to erase the public life and autonomy of LGBTQ people and women."

Everybody loses

The trifecta of poorly thought-out decisions (by Collective Shout, payment processors, and the platforms they're pressuring) results in even more harm being done to indie developers, says Hsia/Thomson. The problem being, there's just "no clear definition of what constitutes 'NSFW content'.

"We rely on cultural norms which are loose and always being renegotiated. Naturally, right-wing groups frequently attempt to expand this cultural understanding of 'NSFW' content to include any speech they disagree with."

While this is a huge problem for minorities, including LGBTQ artwork and political speech, there's a huge weight of artistic restriction being pushed here, too. In other words, you should probably be allowed to make and sell artwork about adult topics, whether it's smut or subversive:

"Sex is a natural part of life and culture. It just is! For many people it's a fundamental part of the human experience and as such intersects with artistic expression in a multitude of ways! Treating it as a completely taboo subject that cannot reach the public eye protects no one and mostly helps contribute to regressive attitudes surrounding sex and sexuality."

Yang concurs: "There's of course a concrete material harm: many LGBTQ game makers have unstable living and housing situations, and a few hundred dollars a month of income can make or break their lives.

"There's also a general harm against our free speech rights. Many of my experimental art games explore gay sexuality, and it’s difficult to make art about that topic without some nudity. A unilateral ban on NSFW content amounts to a ban on LGBTQ communities from engaging in political speech."

Yang, in particular, expresses a deep frustration with what he sees as selectively championing free speech from industry titans. "The larger commercial game industry champions free speech often only at their convenience. Corporate game industry lobbyists will gladly fight government regulation of violent video games and gambling, but they're strangely silent when LGBTQ indie game makers are in the crosshairs like this."

But what about hate speech? The paradox of tolerance is giving me a huge headache lately—while payment processors' actions seem untenable in a democratic society (I certainly didn't vote for any of these CEOs) the target Collective Shout used to rally its campaign, No Mercy, did glorify some repugnant stuff.

Hsia/Thomson, however, argues that—outside the news cycle of moral panics—these games tend to sputter out on their own.

"Neither of us had even heard of No Mercy prior to this recent news cycle. We still don’t know what that game is or is about and the impression we get is that it's another one of those games that's attempting to capitalise largely on extreme shock value. There seem to be a few of those every year and none of them amount to much even when left alone."

While "questions like this do highlight the importance of nuance. Our feeling is that any blanket ban is going to ensnare a whole lot of legitimate artistic expression while malicious shock-content will continue to be produced, often just sidestepping the ban entirely."

Yang more-or-less agrees: "Listen, I'm not saying this is easy to figure out or talk about. Sexuality is complicated. But Collective Shout and its right wing allies exploit this complexity in bad faith to justify imposing their conservative morality on all of us."

It was never easy

While these recent moves are troubling, Hsia/Thomson explain to me that adult game creators—whether making material that's titillating, challenging, or both—have never had it easy.

"Covering adult topics introduces new and exciting pitfalls," I'm told, such as Apple having banned adult content from its app stores for some time, "in explicit contrast to how it handles books and music. Their official policy is the games are different from other art and must be censored."

There's also, as previously mentioned with Yang's Rinse & Repeat, the issue of adult games being forbidden on Twitch or demonetised on YouTube. These policies "often result in demonetization on places like YouTube or shadowbanning on places like TikTok, meaning that curators and influencers are heavily disincentivized from covering your work." Which, as one imagines, is a death knell for any struggling indie.

As part of our conversation, Hisa/Thomson recommended some of Robert Yang's work, alongside Christine Love's games—Ladykiller in a Bind (that also won an award in 2017) has been deindexed on Itch.io—and the work of Nina Freeman.

But what, if anything, can be done from here?

"Individual developers don't have a lot of recourse," Hsia/Thomson write, "especially since we basically never deal with payment processors directly. Even platform holders don't seem to have a lot of recourse given the way they're responding to pressure.

"Right now it seems like the most immediate course of action is to get as many people as possible to complain to the payment processors."

Both Yang, Hsia, and Thomson highlighted the aptly-named site yellat.money as a place to start, alongside an ACLU petition that's nearing its goal of 150,000 signatures. Yang also noted that "if Collective Shout is going to wage culture war against LGBTQ people and 'obscene' women, perhaps it should drop its fake charity status."

Australian charity law is a little complex when it comes to a group like Collective Shout, but to be a charity, you must be operating for the public benefit and have a charitable purpose—qualifiers Yang and his contemporaries argue aren't being fulfilled. Charities advocating for specific political parties are forbidden, but those with specific political aims aren't. Regardless, anyone can complain to the ACNC if they so wish.

Hsia/Thomson hope that, "given that Collective Shout was allegedly able to spur this action with only 1000 people, it stands to reason that a much larger group of people issuing sustained complaints might elicit at least some response."

Dan Marshall was 24 when he picked up C++ for Dummies. "I've left this too late," he thought. "I'm too past-it to be learning a new skill like programming. Damn it, why didn't I learn this in school?"

Two decades on, Marshall has led the development of no fewer than three games with 80+% review scores in PC Gamer's pages. It's a rare distinction—as is the 26% he was awarded for Behold the Kickmen ("A misguided attempt at parody, underpinned by a poor sports game by anyone's standards," tutted our reviewer). With the help of a small gaggle of collaborators, Marshall has weathered 20 years in the hairiest, most volatile entertainment industry imaginable. Despite the countless office chairs sitting empty in the premises of once-promising studios, Marshall is still here.

Size Five Games began as a hobby. "It never even crossed my mind to talk to publishers in those days, if I'm honest," Marshall says. "It was all still doable in my pants in my spare room, at the time we did Ben There, Dan That! and Time Gentlemen, Please!. Those games didn't cost me anything."

In his evenings and weekends, Marshall was working to revive a LucasArts-style adventure genre that, before the days of Kickstarter, had been abandoned. "Point-and-clicks are weird, in that they died between the years of about 1995 and 2002, so not very long," he says. "But it felt like this gulf of time since anyone had made a proper 2D one."

Ben There, Dan That! and Time Gentlemen, Please! established Marshall's comic voice—the breezy, flippant dialogue which has been the glue across a range of projects in dramatically varied genres. The two games also set the financial foundation that Size Five has been building on ever since. There was a time when, if you filtered Steam games by Metascore over 80% and price under $5, Time Gentlemen, Please! rose to the top of the catalogue. "It hit a sweet spot," Marshall says. "Which in terms of getting bums on seats was like gold dust for me."

However, it wouldn't be true to say that Dan and Ben, the comedic counterparts of Marshall and fellow writer-designer Ben Ward, have become household names. "It's really frustrating, but no one remembers in a lot of ways," Marshall says. "You see people doing paintings online, like, 'I painted every indie game character in the world'. And Ben and Dan are never in it. No-one does fan art or anything. But they're quite well regarded among people who've played them."

The professionalisation of Size Five Games—still known as Zombie Cow in the late noughties—came with a diversion into edutainment.

"[UK broadcaster] Channel 4 was putting out all this educational content at like 10:30 am on a weekday," Marshall says. "So no one's watching it, right? How do you engage with kids of a certain age, with your public broadcaster remit?" One proposed answer was Privates, a free twin-stick shooter in which you control a squad of tiny Marines wearing condom hats. Your soldiers storm into vaginas and rectums to kill sexually-transmitted infections. "To a certain degree, it worked," Marshall says. "Privates had quite a big reach, comparatively."

Marshall's comedic immaturity made him the perfect person to communicate important information to teens. But it also left him ill-equipped to handle accountants and lawyers and "meetings with Channel 4 about what happens if the Daily Mail finds out". He was suddenly pulled into a much more grown-up world than the one he had known as a point-and-click hobbyist.

"You're explaining jokes, and you're suddenly painfully aware that, no matter how funny the script is when you play it in the game, it's not when you're sitting in front of someone in a suit," Marshall says. "They just have this look on their face of, 'You silly little boy. I'm a real grown-up with a real job, and sorry, you want to give them little condom hats?'"

But the lessons of that period were extremely valuable and helped ensure Size Five's longevity. "If you're making stuff, no matter how much you're doing it in isolation, there's this wider world," Marshall says. "If you're dealing with Steam, you've got to sort out your American tax affairs. It's boring, but they've got to know what you're doing.

"I deal with people today who are just making basic mistakes, in terms of, are you legally covered for stuff? Which is a constant thing you've got to be aware of when you're making videogames. Have you got the forms signed for this voice actor? Have you got the rights to use that footage in your trailer? And you see people who are just winging it."

Other hard lessons followed Privates—as with the side-scrolling multiplayer shooter Gun Monkeys. Designed for two players, Marshall intended it to be an explosive meeting place for pre-arranged sessions between friends. "But then you suddenly have a load of people with the game, and that's not what they want to do," he says. "All their friends are busy, they bought this game and they want to go play it. They log into the server and there's no one else there, because it's three o'clock in the morning in Germany."

It's the sorry experience that many indies have had with multiplayer projects. Unable to pull in the player numbers required to guarantee busy servers at all hours, they watch their audience dwindle away into nothing.

"It was constantly extremely frustrating for me," Marshall says. "I wouldn't touch multiplayer with a barge pole ever again. It's not in Size Five's budget, basically. Even with the tools you can get today, it's not a viable path, I would suggest, for the sweeping majority of indie developers. It's hard to make, it's hard to market, and it dies. There are multiplayer games I know of that came out when I was making Time Gentleman, Please! that died a decade ago and have not made any money for 10 years."

Marshall acknowledges that, with Gun Monkeys, he bit off more than he could chew. "But if there's one thing I'm really proud of about Size Five, it's that there's no guessing what's coming next," he says. "It irritates the shit out of people, but as someone who loves videogames, I don't want to play the same fucking thing over and over with a different skin on it. So I've always tried to do something a little bit stupid or a little bit different. Even if it fails, it's still a success in my eyes, because it's not the same thing that someone else has done before."

The Swindle, a Spelunky-esque platformer with a stealth twist, is a perfect example of Marshall's commitment to that bit. It asked players to thwart the development of an anti-thievery AI at a steampunk Scotland Yard, and gave them a hard limit of 100 tries in which to do it.

"People fucking hated that," Marshall says. "The mistake I made was locking the good controls behind upgrades. You're this bumbling idiot at the start, and then you get good through upgrades, which is daft. Because people see that they haven't done very well yet and go 'I've only got 79 days left!' And it's this weird psychological thing where they think they need to be 90% of the way through the game after 20 days have gone. But you know, I hadn't played anything that did that."

The response among critics and players was polarised, yet The Swindle was Size Five's greatest financial success. "The people who love it fucking love it," Marshall says. "There are people who have played more hours of that than I can understand. And that's the game that did get fan art. So The Swindle certainly propped the company up quite a lot."

In less successful moments, Size Five has been sustained by a certain thriftiness—hiring in outside help with music, art or code only in short bursts. "Until very recently when I took on employees, it's always been just me sitting here typing, and that's why my overheads are so low," Marshall says. "And I think that's probably the key."

"You see so many indie developers who rent out an office, down by the river in London. And they go and take their game to PAX, spending thousands on airfare and hotels, let alone the cost of the conference, and printing the big fucking banner out, and having someone standing there in front of their build for three days. These things are just astonishingly high cost. If I wanted 10,000 people to play my next game, the worst way to do it would be to fly to Boston and stand next to it."

Marshall wonders whether Size Five's endurance can be credited to those meetings with men in suits about condom hats. "And working out very quickly that how to run a business is not spunking money," he says. "You've got to be very careful where every quid goes."

The studio's breakthrough smash hit has never quite arrived. This despite Marshall and Ward making their masterpiece a few years ago in Lair of the Clockwork God, an exquisitely smart and funny adventure that blends point-and-click mechanics with platforming. "Critically, it did really well," Marshall says. "It's probably the game I'm most proud of. I would say it didn't sell as well as the reviews would imply it should have done. And that's frustrating, because what's that barrier that stopped people taking a plunge on it?"

If he had his time again, the one thing Marshall would alter about Lair of the Clockwork God would be its protagonists. "It was only after launch that I realised that, if I'd just changed it to two other guys—it wouldn't have taken that long, it could be Bill and Frank, quite happily—it would have possibly done better financially. It did fine, it didn't die on its arse and didn't make me rich, it's somewhere in between. But that's the one thing I think, going back, I would change. Because no matter how hard we tried to say, 'This isn't the sequel to these two games,' people who hadn't played the first two steered clear of it."

A constant of Marshall's career has been the nights when he lies awake, sweating, wondering whether the next game is going to sell any copies. "One of my biggest worries in life is all this comes crashing down, and I've got to get a real job where I'm not the boss," he says. "And I don't necessarily work from home, in my nice little house in the middle of the countryside. I might have to commute for an hour and a half every day, to go into the office. I don't want that."

But when he follows the thought all the way to the end, it doesn't sound so much like an ending after all. "Even if the worst thing happened and I didn't have any money, I would be coming home and making games in the evening and over the weekends," he says. "I would make something small and stupid and fun and put it live, and Size Five would carry on."

Stop Killing Games (which just under a month ago was all doom and gloom) has soared past its prior goals—not only garnering enough attention to have Ubisoft's CEO sweating during a shareholder meeting, but now soaring past 1.4 million signatories on the European Citizens' Initiative.

"Stop Killing Games" is a movement started by YouTuber of Freeman's Mind fame Ross Scott who, after seeing The Crew shut down by Ubisoft with nary a scrap of after-life support in sight, wanted to make sure it didn't happen again.

To clarify (per the initiative's site) the goal isn't to force companies to support their games in perpetuity, but to "implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems with no further support from the company being necessary."

Late June, Scott was about ready to tap out, given the UK's prior responses and the initiative being half a million signatures off the bare minimum when it came to the European Commission. Fast-forward a month (and some YouTube drama I shan't bog down this article with) and the movement's gained a huge amount of momentum.

The European Citizens' Initiative technically met its goals a while ago, though not without a heavy hanging asterisk of Damocles looming over the whole thing. As explained by Scott to PC Gamer earlier this month, there's been potential whispers of a signature-spoofing campaign that's put him "more on guard."

We're talking about EU law here, so any spoofed signatures—or even just people messing up bureaucracy—would be struck from the record. The solution to this is, naturally, to get so many signatures you've got a buffer against potential buffoonery, whether well-intentioned and stupid or a deliberate sabotage.

Per the initiative's page, Stop Killing Games now has a buffer 400,000 people strong, exceeding its stated targets. Unless said spoofing campaigns have really outdone themselves, the initiative's been (fingers crossed) successful. So, what happens now?

According to the European Citizen's Initiative's FAQ, as long as at least one million signatures have been validated (alongside a minimum number of signatories in at least seven countries) it's off to the European Commission. That means, after validation, the Commission has at most six months to publicly reply to the initiative's demands.

This doesn't mean the EU must enshrine Stop Killing Games' desires into law, but it's a huge step forward—requiring the commission to state "the measures it plans to take, if any, as well as justifications, and an envisaged timeline for implementing the measures." If that succeeds, it'll go to the EU parliament to be discussed like any other proposal or law.

A massive turnaround, all told—going from struggling at 500,000 signatures to far surpassing its goals, even getting support from one of the EU parliament's vice presidents. While I'm sure game publishers might have a vested interest in stopping these discussions—they said so themselves—the future's looking promising for Stop Killing Games.

Last week was a weird one for videogames—with Steam clamping down on games featuring adult content due to the pressure of credit card companies like Visa and Mastercard which, apparently, was itself a decision made due to an Australian anti-porn group.

But this isn't a new phenomenon. Back in 2021, Mastercard began a policy forcing adult websites to go through stringent requirements that were, logistically, impossible to keep up with. In Japan, Visa's also been coming down on doujinshi and manga archives to, quote, "protect the brand", as stated in a briefing last year.

Further proving this, Yoko Taro, creator of Nier: Automata, took to X last year to decry the practice (thanks, Automaton, for the spot and translation):

"Publishing and similar fields have always faced regulations that go beyond the law," Taro writes, "But the fact that a payment processor, which is involved in the entire infrastructure of content distribution, can do such things at its own discretion seems to me to be dangerous on a whole new level.

"It implies that by controlling payment processing companies, you can even censor another country’s free speech."

In a later post, Taro clarified that he felt as though "it's not just a matter of censoring adult content or jeopardizing freedom of expression, but rather a security hole that endangers democracy itself." Taro's statements—again, prophetically arriving in 2024, and resurfacing on popular gaming communities today—are a reminder that these overreaches by credit card companies aren't a recent thing.

Adult industries (that run the gamut from sex workers from sites like OnlyFans to manga creators) have been hit by, as the ACLU put it back in 2023, "vague and ambiguous policy requirements, coupled with the dangerous combination of platform over-compliance and inadequate automated tools" for some time.

This arriving at Valve's doorstep is a delayed reaction—and while it's easy to point and giggle at "gooners", something we certainly aren't above doing, I reckon we should all be very concerned at unelected CEOs with monopolies over payment processes making these kinds of decisions.

It's an area that demands nuance, mind. No Mercy, a game I personally have zero kind words for and an even dimmer critical opinion of, was pulled from Steam due to political pressure back in April.

Whatever your opinions on whether such censorship was appropriate, this was (in the UK at least) done after a complaint by technology secretary Peter Kyle. Who is at least, you know, somebody put in charge by a government we voted for. In other words, content that's illegal in your country is one ballgame, corporations unilaterally cutting off whole sections of the market is another.

From where I'm sat, it seems like we're in a situation where credit card vendors have such a monopoly, they can make adult content effectively 'outlawed' regardless of whether or not it's written into law first—by governments who (in theory) can be held to account if such decisions hit marginalised communities disproportionately hard.

Anyway; if you'd like to play some of these games before Steam potentially puts the clamp on them, or the inevitable cyberpunk-era credit card police come knocking on your door, we do have a list of sex games that aren't terrible.

Despite showing signs of ill health, videogames are still an enormous slice of the worldwide entertainment industry—making more than $100 billion across the globe each year, which is more than the film and music industries combined. The UK government is finally giving us some bloomin' recognition for this fact, announcing the formation of a UK Video Games Council in its creative industry sector plan late last month.

Shared via a press release, the council is designed to "work in partnership with government to support the growth, innovation and international reach of the UK video games and interactive entertainment industry". It'll cooperate with the UK's Minister for Creative Industries, Arts and Tourism, Sir Chris Bryant.

Twice a year, this council will meet to "provide strategic advice on how to unlock the full economic, cultural and educational potential of the UK games industry." In the same press release, the members of the council were revealed and, fair play to our government, this looks like a decent spread of representatives from around the industry.

The organisation's co-chairs are Jason Kingsley, CEO at Rebellion (Atomfall, Sniper Elite) alongside Nick Button-Brown, chair of Outright Games (a children's game publisher). As for the other members, rather than just throw a list of names at you with zero context, I've gone ahead and found some context, creating a larger, more complicated list. You're welcome.

1. Emily Bailey, CEO of Green-BiT—a software company that, best I can tell, is aiming to help the industry reduce its carbon footprint.
2. Saad Choudri, CEO of Miniclip—a flash game website from back in the day who, apparently, has gone full games publisher. They're mostly concerned with mobile games like Subway Surfers.
3. Charu Desodt, studio director at Interior/Night—the indie dev that made As Dusk Falls.
4. Kirsty Rigden, CEO at FuturLab—the studio that made PowerWash Simulator.
5. Dave Gould, senior director of sales UK and export at Take-Two Interactive—a massive publisher that handles Rockstar, Gearbox, and the mobile game dev Zynga.
6. Chris Van Der Kuyl, chairman at 4J Studios—who handled the console port for Minecraft, among others.
7. Donna Orlowski, COO of Chucklefish—Who used to publish Stardew Valley, also known for developing games like Starbound, and the upcoming Witchbrook.
8. Nick Poole, CEO of UKIE—or The Association for UK Interactive Entertainment, a non-profit trade organisation that's existed since the early 90s, previously called the European Leisure Software Publishers Association until 2002.
9. Tara Saunders, studio head at Larian Guildford—Larian Studios developed a little game called Baldur's Gate 3, as well as the Divinity: Original Sin series.
10. Maria Sayans, CEO of ustwo Games—who developed games like Monument Valley and Assemble With Care.
11. Tim Varney, Senior Corporate Counsel at Microsoft—a company that's only been growing its influence in the past years via Xbox. Growing a little too fast, perhaps.
12. Dr Richard Wilson, CEO of TIGA—Also known as The Independent Game Developers' Association, another UK-based non-profit that was founded in 2001.

While the phrase "UK Video Games Council" makes me as wary as any other properly patriotic Brit, the selection above genuinely seems solid at first glance. I'm not sure what a twice-yearly session can do for the UK games' industry, but the selection of UK-based indie studios, advocacy groups, and the inevitable representatives from industry titans does seem like a good-faith effort to hear everybody out. Hopefully it'll go better than the one time the Tories made a Discord server.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes—every so often, in times of deep economic equality, someone with a thick paycheck or accumulated wealth will waltz up and say something so mind-bogglingly disconnected from good sense and empathy that it becomes enshrined as an example of what not to say.

The latest entrant to the "Let them eat cake" hall of fame comes courtesy of Matt Turnbull, Executive Producer at Xbox Games Studio Publishing who, in a since-deleted LinkedIn post (shared here by Necrosoft's Brandon Sheffield), suggested that anyone facing anxiety about their livelihoods crumbling under them use AI to help.

Matt Turnbull, Executive Producer at Xbox Game Studios Publishing - after the Microsoft layoffs - suggesting on Linkedin that may maybe people who have been let go should turn to AI for help. He seriously thought posting this would be a good idea.

— @brandon.insertcredit.com (@brandon.insertcredit.com.bsky.social) 2025-07-04T10:57:12.856Z

He writes: "These are really challenging times, and if you're navigating a layoff or just preparing for one"—like the layoffs your company literally just pushed forward, Turnbull?—"You're not alone and you don't have to go it alone."

In a textbook use of passive voice, he then goes on to suggest people "use LLM AI tools (like ChatGPT or Copilot) to help reduce the emotional and cognitive load that comes with job loss", talking about layoffs as though it's an inevitable medical condition. He follows this up with a series of 'helpful' prompts for folks struggling after being laid off in random, often capricious ways.

These include everything from asking a LLM to rewrite your resume, to networking and outreach, to emotional support. Turnbull suggests anyone feeling down in the dumps prompt a language model with the following: "I'm struggling with impostor syndrome after being laid off. Can you help me reframe this experience in a way that reminds me what I'm good at?" Yikes.

Here is where I'd usually point out that telling the recently-jobless they're "not alone", then encouraging them to use an unthinking, unfeeling machine to output general positive platitudes is incredibly ghoulish. Unfortunately, I've hit my monthly limit for nonsense four days into July, so I'm going to go scream into a pillow for a couple of minutes.

Phew, all better.

Alright, let's attempt a charitable read. It's entirely possible that Turnbull's had his head in the sand, does genuinely feel for those facing job insecurity, and simply got it wrong. He at least had enough self-awareness to delete his post. Points for basic self-improvement.

On the other hand, given Microsoft's been pushing AI like it's the second coming of techno-Christ, and that the industry at-large has been struggling with haphazardly-applied AI tech booting people out of their positions and work to make the line go up (ever up, the line must never stop going), Turnbull might've self-reflected a little harder before he posted this rot.

Anyway, given how quickly the pipeline goes from proselytizing about AI to finding out AI can't actually do the thing that's promised (around 4 months, for Netflix's former VP for GenAI games), I can't wait for this new, dark dimension of LinkedIn culture to peter out. If Turnbull's sudden 180 is any indication, we won't be waiting long. Probably. Hopefully. Please?

Dear reader, I need to confess something to you. I have never done a proper playthrough of Skyrim. I've booted the game up countless times, gotten a few hours deep, and felt a kind of malaise drag me away. It's nothing personal—I just need more crunch out of my RPGs. Josh Sawyer, studio design director at Obsidian (who gave us New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity) hears my call.

Speaking to PCG's own Ted Litchfield at GDC this year, Sawyer got deep into the paint on the issue of difficulty and complexity in RPGs—and the back-and-forth pendulum of the CRPG genre as a whole.

"I started—maybe in the middle of the resurgence of PC RPGs, so Fallout had come out, Baldur's Gate came out, I worked on Icewind Dale and Icewind Dale 2, which are nowhere near as big or influential as those titles, but PC RPGin' was pretty good then."

But that golden age of CRPGs wasn't to last—and for a minute, RPGs fell out of favour in the mainstream as the industry's eyes turned to consoles. Despite being about to make a very good point against their design philosophy, Sawyer credits Bethesda's library as bringing RPGs into the spotlight.

"I would say, maybe in 2008, with [Fallout 3/Oblivion]? Then it was like 'woah! RPGs!' Everybody on PC and all of these platforms, you can all play [them] … It was Bethesda that started making that stuff more mainstream."

And yet, as he tells Ted, that crunchiness and reactivity—something that's grown less present in RPG mainstays like The Elder Scrolls and Dragon Age—is something Obsidian's always tried to capture to some degree.

"There is this idea of the 'super accessible RPG'," Sawyer says, before arguing that making an RPG simplistic isn't the way to go about it, and that an RPG "can, and should, be complicated in plenty of ways.

"I think we can accommodate different types of players, but it's not with a 'one size fits all thing'. When companies like Owlcat really go crazy on difficulty customization, that stuff is actually great. I'd love it if more of us did that; where we really dive in and say, like, what do you want?

"I'd like us to kind of be a little more thoughtful about that, because I want to support the sweaty boys! I am at least sweaty-adjacent in my own gameplay. If I don't play at the highest level of difficulty, I'm just below it. I do get annoyed when I play a game and there's nothing there for me to tinker with.

"I do also understand that a lot of people have a lot of fun just cruising around—they like level scaling, they like things being a slip 'n' slide … I appreciate that, and I think with not a whole lot of effort, but just good planning, we can support a wide spectrum of players."

Supporting them, however, doesn't involve taking away the focus on crunch, choice, consequence, and mature storytelling that the so-dubbed sweaty boys enjoy: "I think it's especially a mistake when we sacrifice that stuff in the name of accessibility."

Sawyer then goes ahead and lists a series of RPG mainstays that I do, as a sweat-dabbler myself, enjoy. It's enough to have me feeling downright patriotic:

"The hardcore faction of RPG gamers, they still like the same things. They like the crunch. They like making difficult choices. They like having a lot of gear to look at and mess with, and they like customization options. They like reactivity. They like more mature storytelling, and I appreciate all that stuff.

"I think that if you make systems that can do all of that, you also can make systems that support scaling and like, collapse in on themselves and simplify those things, right? It's not that it's no work, but it's not as much work as you might think if you put the time into it."

Sawyer admits that Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire took a bit of post-launch tuning to get to that point but, overall, he was happy with the higher spectrum of challenge and depth the game offered. And yet: "[In] the 'Story Time' Mode, it's almost impossible to die, and it wasn't really a huge amount of work to support that."

In other words? Both. Both is good: "I wouldn't say I'm the expert on tuning, but I think there's room to support (within a single game) both real serious, crunchy challenge, tactical combat, and also thoughtfully say, 'You know what? If you just want to cruise through this, and just kind of see the sights and go through the story, we can do that for you too. It's okay.'"

On a plinth in the pantheon of the Steam gods—surrounded by gaming giants like Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, Apex Legends, and Elden Ring Nightreign—tappeth the humble Bongo Cat. At the time of writing, it's currently the 5th most-played game on Steam.

So you'd think its creators would be raking in the moolah, right? Wrong. In a recent interview with Eurogamer, Marcel Zurawka, the CEO of Irox Games, says it's basically making no cash at all.

"Some people said, 'Oh you're now rich.' That's bullshit. I didn't make it for the money at all." To prove it, Zurawka breaks it down for the site, stating that Bongo Cat—which has over 170,000 people 'playing' it right now—makes Irox Games, on average, around $3000 a month.

"It's not even paying a developer for us. If you just look at the numbers, it's actually losing us money in the end." What's more, Zurawka reveals, he's pretty certain that of those 170,000 people, "roughly 50 percent" are bots.

A brief interlude to explain what Bongo Cat is seems in order: It's a silly little desktop pet, first created by artist StrayRogue and animated by DitzyFlama before Zurawka and co picked it up for their meme game.

You put it on your monitor and it tip-taps away as you type. You can also earn hats for Bongo Cat. That's the entire loop. As to why there are bots farming it, it's basically the same deal as Banana: There are basically-worthless Steam marketplace items folks are trading for tuppences.

Zurawka's adamant he doesn't want to charge for it—and seems perfectly happy that there's the tiniest of holes poked through his studio's wallet. Why? Because any leakage is absolute chump change when it comes to the free marketing he's getting: "It's an insane marketing tool … People are like, 'What's your next project?'"

I'm a stubborn person, so I hesitate to prove Zurawka's point for him. However, I'm deeply relieved to discover that Irox Games' next project does actually look pretty neat. It's a vibes-based exploration game called Oku where you play as a monk, wandering around and writing haiku, with a visual style reminiscent of Ōkami.

It's sort of a monkey's paw for Zurawka, who—echoing Aggro Crab's bemusement as a random jam project outsold games it worked quite a bit harder on—feels as though you shouldn't have to have a breakout, Bongo or no, to market something: "It feels like, 'Hey, before, we knocked on 50 doors; now, they are coming to us. It's a bit disappointing to see that it takes you to having to be successful to be successful."

That's not to say that Zurawka's just using it as a cynical marketing tool. He hints at a top-secret update to Eurogamer with very little in the way of details coming in the future: And I, for one, welcome our new feline overlords.

One of the more surface-level discourses in videogames in recent memory has been the hullabaloo over yellow paint—gamers the world over decrying games with obvious sunshine climbables as being patronising slop for little babies (I'm exaggerating, a little). But Miles Tost, the level design lead for The Witcher 4, tells PCG's Joshua Wolens that it's a little more complicated than yellow paint good or yellow paint bad.

All videogames use the environment to guide players through them—though, Tost admits, it wasn't always that way. In fact, CDPR simply stumbled into a lot of solid industry practices when making The Witcher 3.

"Level design may not have been as sophisticated as it is now. And I think the same is true for most disciplines in the industry," Tost explains. "In The Witcher 3, we didn't do too much of that, actually. The level design team was still being built, [it] was really fresh, and in some ways it took us the entirety of production to get to a point where we would do (what I would nowadays consider) more traditional level design.

"As such, we didn't emphasise guidance as strongly—we did at some point add these white decals for 'hey, climb here', but I think when it comes to overall guidance in the world, it was a relatively small element, right?"

Instead, Tost says that the design teams simply followed their noses and wound up on a lot of decisions that would later become industry practice. "We did a lot of things—and maybe it's luck—but intuitively correct … Nowadays, we're much more sophisticated with that, I think."

A good example of CDPR finally nailing down the specifics, Tost argues, is Phantom Liberty: "I think there we have all the bells and whistles of what level designers here do. We use compositional line work in our levels, to make things look particularly impressive, but also to guide the eye to certain elements … In the Witcher 3, we would use a lot of composition, but it was mostly to get the most impressive image, without the real purpose [behind it]."

When it comes to something as straightforwardly obvious as yellow paint, though, Tost says that " We've always thought about our games as being still quite accessible to a wider audience, so we're not afraid of adding elements that'll also guide players more directly, whether it's NPCs shouting out and saying 'look at this thing', or the Witcher sense in the Witcher 3."

However, "In the best of cases, [the player] doesn't understand or feel like they're being guided in any way." When it comes to what Tost jokes as "being in a 'yellow room'," he reckons they're "one of the many tools that developers can use. But they're one of the tools they can use, right?

"I believe that if you properly weaponise the entire arsenal of your toolkit of guidance as a level designer, then you can subdue each individual element and make it more subtle. And in that case, you get closer to the situation of the player not noticing the guidance. The strings carefully pulling them along. That is, for me, the sweet spot.

"I think the problem is not necessarily with the yellow paint, but it's so known and used right now that people see through the smoke and mirrors there. That 'oh, I am being guided'. But there's more subtle ways of doing it."

It's a little funny to hear an argument that basically boils down to 'you need to trick your kids into eating their veggies', but it is right. Assassin's Creed Shadows, which has plenty of colour-coded climables, tried to go without. But because Ubisoft had to put in all the foliage and pretty bells and whistles that players expected, they simply kept running into walls or missing climbable routes entirely.

So, a little direction is vital. Tost still thinks it ought to be subtle. Or at least diegetic—I'm not sure I'd consider The Witcher 3's Arkham-style detective vision to not have any sort of influence on the artstyle. A great example, Tost mentions, is Uncharted and its occasional uses of flags waving in the wind:

"It fits gently into the environment, as opposed to, I dunno—someone went into this specific spot and painted a yellow line, because at that point it's not necessarily believable."

Sebastian Wojciechowski, People Can Fly CEO, shared some disheartening news in an announcement on LinkedIn on Sunday. Not only is the studio indefinitely suspending two games it had in development, it is also scaling down its staff. Both are the result of negotiations with a publisher falling through and a lack of adequate resources and funding to continue the projects, codenamed Gemini and Bifrost.

As Wojciechowski detailed in the announcement, "The suspension of the Gemini project is a consequence of the fact that the Publisher has not presented us with a draft of the subsequent content rider to the Publishing Agreement covering the terms and conditions of further milestones on project Gemini and the lack of communication from the Publisher as to its willingness to continue or terminate the Gemini project."

"Project Bifrost was suspended due to the above and the analysis of the Group's cash flow, which showed a lack of prospects for securing organizational resources and funds necessary to continue the production and release of this project."

That's a mouthful, but in layman's terms: Wojciechowski is seriously laying into Gemini's unnamed publisher, claiming that it just left People Can Fly on read for long enough that they have to cancel the project. The knock-on financial effect means the studio can't keep going with Bifrost either. To make matters worse, with both games indefinitely on hold, People Can Fly has to "scale down" its teams, meaning some of the studio's staff are losing their jobs.

Wojciechowski concluded his statement on a somber note, saying, "We wish to express our deepest regret and sadness over how these events have unfolded and our sincere gratitude for everyone's contribution up to this point."

The announcement does not mention exactly how many people will be laid off or if People Can Fly wants to leave the door open to return to projects Gemini and Bifrost⁠—but the prognosis isn't good. "Gemini" and "Bifrost" are the code names of games that haven't been officially revealed yet, but after this news, it looks like we might not ever find out what those games were supposed to be.

People Can Fly still has a ton of projects still in development, though. It's been announced that the studio will be co-developing the upcoming Gears of War prequel, E-Day, alongside The Coalition, and they are also working on the co-op survival shooter, Lost Rift. People Can Fly also appears to have three unannounced projects still in development: Bison, Echo, and Delta.

Lost Rift appears to still be on track for its early access release, with a May 27 Steam post announcing a demo for the game will be available next week as part of Steam Next Fest.

I don't envy game developers sometimes, nor do I envy the assumptions they have to hear time and time again from their players. Assumptions like, 'Why didn't they add a theft/crime system?' or 'Why don't they just do this, it's so simple?' and, most infuriatingly, 'These devs are so lazy'. As a critic, I might absolutely dunk on the end product—but I'm never in doubt that folks worked hard, even when it's a stinker.

That same frustration comes clear in some responses to a recent mega-interview by GamesRadar's Austin Wood—which is well worth a read. It's an assemblage of dozens of developers across the industry, who're keen to dispel myths about how they make their games.

Both Arrowhead's CCO Johan Pilestedt and Palworld's publishing manager John Buckley got their say and, as two studios who found recent, unexpectedly massive success, they both have some very similar takes on the subject.

"The one thing people misconstrue the most is—if you think about when movies are made," Pilestedt explains, "You get an actor and they're there, and you tell them what to say. But games are so meticulously crafted. You have to build the actor from the ground up."

Players, Pilestedt adds, often say, "'Can't they add this or do that'," but "most of the time, the decisions you make (especially the larger the game gets) have so many consequences that cascade. [It makes] something that seems easy really hard, or something that seems really hard super simple. It's unintuitive unless you've worked in games to see how they're created."

Buckley echoes this later in the piece, as well—though he also side-eyes the live-service churn of our modern gaming landscape. "I think gamers have just become so used to this kind of constant cycle that they're now applying it to every game they play."

It does seem that way, sometimes—and while I'm guilty of having a moan about game content cycles myself on this very site (though I maintain that Square Enix isn't a small studio, and probably has enough money to hasten Final Fantasy 14's glacial patch schedule a bit) I try to at least understand that those issues, as always, stem from outside and logistical factors rather than the sin of sloth.

Buckley adds: "A new island in Palworld, that's half a year's work. That takes six months. And when it comes out, people are super excited, but you just get so many nasty comments before that about these things. And you try to explain it, and there'll always be a few gamers who get it, and they really appreciate that dialog, but quite a lot of them don't."

Assassin's Creed Shadows was delayed until 2025. At the time, this was considered to be a bit of a blow to a floundering Ubisoft. Fortunately for the developer, it seems like that gambit paid off in the end. The game sold well enough, making it the second-highest Assassin's Creed seller (on day one) in Ubisoft's history.

Being pleased as punch about this, CEO Yves Guillemot announced in an investor call (thanks, Eurogamer) that the company'd be delaying a couple more of its mainline titles. As a treat.

The delay that came for Assassin's Creed Shadows, which Guillemot calls a "good decision to deliver a really strong quality" is to be mirrored in some of its other top brands. "After a review of our pipeline, we have decided to provide additional development time to some of our biggest productions in order to create the best conditions for success."

Guillemot says that 2026, '27, and '28 are going to be big years for Ubisoft, implying that 2025 will stay relatively humble. And hey, surely this is good news for the studio's developers, right? Ubisoft'll be giving them more time to develop their games, right? No more layoffs for cost-cutting, right?

Well, Guillemot is glad Ubisoft managed to save €200 million last year—and has henceforth pledged to save another €100 million: "We also completed our initial cost savings program ahead of schedule. We are committed to going further, with additional savings of at least €100m over the next two years to drive structural efficiencies and reinforce the foundations of our organisation."

It might just be the cynic in me, but given how cutthroat the industry's gotten, I would be shocked if this was the end of Ubisoft's shareholder-mandated march towards cut costs and infinite growth, while developers pay the bill. The two years of "cost savings" also involved laying off over 700 people since 2023, and the closure of entire teams. I seriously hope I'm wrong.

As for what's being delayed, that's yet to be announced—but I shall hold onto my nugget of hope and believe against belief that Ubisoft is merely being sensible in taking its time.

EA has laid off hundreds of employees—reportedly around 300 to 400—across its studios, including around 100 at Respawn Entertainment, developers of Titanfall and Apex Legends. Among the many developers left scrambling in an industry where this has become shockingly routine, one in particular leapt out.

Heather Woodward, a now-former narrative designer at Respawn, was laid off a literal day after the character she'd spent a whole year writing debuted. On April 28, Apex Legends introduced a new character by the name of Sparrow:

"My first born is finally here," Woodward posted to Bluesky. "I’ve been working on this sweet ragazzo for well over a year. Writing a music video style trailer was a tough but rewarding challenge and I can’t believe I get to see my work animated by the incredible team at Sun Creature."

Then, on April 29, the layoffs hit and Woodward discovered she'd been caught in the wave of sacrifices to the altar of growth: "Well, this is awkward but… I was just mass-downsized at Respawn. These things happen and my time with Apex has been a top to bottom blast, my favorite job I’ve ever had. It’s been a true joy to write Sparrow, I’ll continue to be insufferable about him for weeks to come."

As if to properly hammer a final, capricious nail into a coffin, Woodward was then sent a promotional email for the character she wrote before she was promptly shown the door.

Woodward appears to be taking this on the chin in a way that's downright enviable—but it really does feel like a perfect nutshell of how messed up and unsustainable this industry has become. There's just zero guarantee of anything, anymore. Let's take a look at the reasons why you might get laid off while working on a game, shall we?

• Your game doesn't do well, which, sure. Harsh, but understandable.
• Your game is called a success by Microsoft. Microsoft then lays you off.
• You help make a game as successful as Marvel Rivals. You are then laid off.
• Your studio gets acquired for over $60 billion dollars. You are then laid off.
• You endure executive pressure that forces you into making games your studio isn't good at making. It doesn't go well. You are then laid off.
• Someone decides your portfolio needs to be aligned/reorganised/restructured to become more flexible/agile/versatile under economic/industry conditions. Meanwhile, your CEO might've spent $2 million on vintage cars. You are then laid off.

Now we can add "You dared to work on a videogame" to that list, I guess. Woodward's work on Sparrow could be either good or bad and it clearly doesn't matter—make a good game, make a bad game, make a game at all, and your job's at risk. But maybe I'm being too up-in-arms about it. We could just go to the beach, after all.

AI—that is, the annoyingly titled generative AI, which is super different from the AI we're used to in games, is also different from machine learning technology—has been a massive point of contention just about everywhere. In art, in music, in acting, and in coding. As a result, it's also been an issue in videogames, because they're a combination of all those things, regardless of what the boss of Amazon Games thinks.

It's a problem Larian Studios' founder Swen Vincke has been tackling, as per a recent interview with GameSpot (shown below). Partially because, well, despite being a studio known for making games like the ones yer grandma used to make—handcrafted and filled with loving detail—Larian has been using generative and deep-learning AI, it's just pretty much impossible to talk about without setting off alarm bells.

Vincke goes into the kind of things Larian uses it for in transparent detail: The "automation of tasks that nobody wants to do. The obvious things, like motion capture cleaning, or voice editing." Vincke also mentions "retargeting", which is an automated process that re-adjusts otherwise handmade animations for different species of varying shapes and sizes, cutting out a huge amount of busywork for the studio's animators. "These are things for which machine learning works really well."

The other big help has been in what Vincke calls "whiteboxing", a game development term that's used to describe what is, essentially, prototyping. The term whiteboxing comes from the white boxes used to represent various game elements, actors, and so on. It's the digital drawing board of game development.

"We discovered in the past, that if we write out a situation, and we talk about it, we're going to get very excited .. we're going to script it [in the whitebox] and we're going to try and play it." However, Vincke says, doing so with a bunch of polygons often doesn't actually give designers the right vibe.

Generative AI, then, is used by Larian to bridge that gap in the testing and ideation phase. "If you completely decorate the entire level, and you do the same exercise, and you say 'here's the situation' and you give it to the scriptor, it's going to feel more real—and you'll get a better feel for 'is this situation going to work, yes or no'."

However, "the only thing that was generated was the environment at that point in time—it's never gonna ship." Once something's passed whiteboxing, Vincke explains, it goes into "orangeboxing", which is where things are made by hand.

Larian's also experimenting with something Vincke calls "narrative validation"—essentially, automated, AI-assisted systems that will tell writers (who are still creating scripts by hand) whether something they've changed has created an inaccuracy or incongruity somewhere else. A sort of plot-hole scout for videogame scripts that get into the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of words and 1,800 characters. An extremely useful tool to have for a game with an absurd amount of choices—though he admits the tech isn't quite there yet.

As for the kind of companies that are going gaga over neo-NPCs and entirely AI-generated nonsense worlds? While Vincke acknowledges the fears of the industry at large, he ultimately thinks those publishers and studios are missing the point.

"I don't think you would have a competitive advantage if you do [that], because it's gonna be what's available to everybody—if the baseline goes up because generation is available to everybody? Fine, that's a new reality that we're in. But you're still gonna wanna create something special on top of that, and I think that's where teams like us will make the difference.

"I don't think that people in my position that say 'oh, we'll replace everyone with AI' are doing the right thing, they're doing the wrong thing. But what I do think is we're gonna jump forward in the kinds of games we make … we're gonna be making our games differently, but to say that it'll replace the craftsmanship? I think we're very far from it."

It seems eminently reasonable, and it's the sort of drum I've been banging the entire time—for artists and animators in particular, deep-learning tech is a powerful thing to work into various tools, cutting out hours of busywork. Into the Spiderverse was using machine-learning tech to draw its comic-book lines back in 2018, and I don't think anyone would accuse that movie of being anything other than hand-crafted.

But we've been forced to endure the nonsense words of tech-drowned executives who say it's going to change everything forever every two years or so. People lose their jobs, the experiment doesn't work, and people go in for round two of pie-in-the-sky nonsense.

In actuality, what I've observed is that generative AI tech is used in sort of boring, practical ways. A prime example: WoW's been using it to re-size equipment to different character models. It's hardly a game-changer, it's just a help. And, as Vincke says, the human touch is the key to making something anybody gives a crap about: "As long as the human difference is there, we will be able to make a difference."

I have something to confess to you, dear reader: I'm not an extraction shooter guy. I wasn't a battle royale guy, either. If I'm playing any sort of PvP game, I don't find it fun to slink around in the shadows for 10 minutes only to have a heart attack when I'm finally confronted by some dude with more patience and a better handle on their crosshair than me.

So believe me when I say I share Ultrakill publisher New Blood's co-founder Dave Oshry's frustration on the Quad Damage Podcast (thanks, GamesRadar+) when he jokes, in an exasperated fashion: "You've seen the posts, like, Miyazaki's been playing Tarkov—Tarkov's done irreparable f*cking damage to the game industry."

Oshry is speaking on both Nightreign and the Switch 2-exclusive Duskbloods—the first of which is a PvE battle royale-style co-op game, while the other appears to be shaping up to be some sort of weird extraction shooter… thing. Both titles are clearly the studio handing smaller projects to budding devs and experimenting with its vast success, but still.

Oshry gets in a good-natured huff about it: "Everything needs to be a f*cking extraction shooter—and like, it's cool, but it's just like… I just like regular-ass games. But I'm old. I get it, I'm not the target audience for these games anymore."

Honestly Oshry, I understand you, I really do. Call it a skill issue on my part—and there's some truth to that—but I can't stand the short windows of action in your average BR or extraction shooter game. I like to chew on a challenge: I've played most of the Souls games, and against the health of my thumbs I've gotten back into Guilty Gear: Strive recently.

But when I'm trying to get better at a game, I like to iterate, y'know? I'm a kinesthetic learner. I've gotta get my butt handed to me a handful of times so I can figure out what has and hasn't gone wrong. In any game where you have to spend a lot of time being very vigilant in very quiet environments, my understimulated brain meat vanishes into nothingness and starts thinking about Pathfinder 2e or something.

I'd be very surprised if FromSoftware is doing a full pivot to this kind of thing, though—rather, games like Duskbloods and Nightreign seem more like technical test runs, and I'm all for the devs at that studio getting to play in the space some more. Just… leave me out of the Tarkovs and the Fortnites of the world. I've only got so much time to kill.

In an industry already tanking a bunch of hits, full of layoffs and studio closures, the Japanese games industry seemed to be an exception in 2025—as noted by an analyst last month, five out of eight major publishers and studios hit all-time share price highs at the start of this year, with their only real issue being a lack of staff.

Well, the tariffs imposed by the United States have begun to put a stop to all that, it seems. Last week, the Trump administration imposed "reciprocal" tariffs across the globe. Japan is set to endure a 24% tariff that'll go into effect April 9—which has naturally created a huge dent in the stock market.

As pointed out by Japanese industry analyst Dr. Serkan Toto of KantanGames on X, many of those same eight companies have endured huge stock market losses.

"It's Monday 10 am in Japan, where Japanese game stocks currently react to these insultingly dumb tariffs like so," Toto writes. Over the course of the day, VGC247 proceeded to keep track of said stocks until the market closed. Here were the final numbers for April 7:

• Nintendo: -7.85%
• Sony: -10.4%
• Capcom: -6.61%
• Bandai Namco: -7.37%
• Square Enix: -5.62%
• Sega: -7.29%
• Koei Tecmo: -5.41%

It should be noted, again, that the hike to 24% isn't yet in effect—but baseline tariffs around the world of 10% happened after midnight on April 5. You might be wondering why those tariffs are impacting people who only publish and develop videogames like Square Enix—physical copies of games are increasingly irrelevant, after all—but it should be noted that any tariff that applies to physical goods is going to have knock-on impacts to digital services as well.

Companies like Nintendo and Sony are a little more intuitive, because they also make consoles—like the Switch 2, which has delayed pre-orders to America over the tariffs—but anything played on those consoles is bound to grow more expensive, as well. And it's not just consoles: PC parts'll feel the heat, too, even with exemptions for semiconductors in place.

As mentioned in the article I just linked, a worldwide economy also manufactures its parts… well, worldwide. PC Gamer's own Jacob Ridley explains: "When a semiconductor is manufactured and then packaged into a separate system, it could be subject to a different tariff without exemption, i.e. within an add-in card, computer or server rack."

VG247 is also right to point out that the US spends a huge amount on videogames—$46 billion in revenue in 2024, as compared to Japan, which spent around $16 billion. This disparity also can't help matters—the takeaway being that one of gaming's biggest spenders is about to be spending a whole lot less on gaming.

Ultimately, it's a nightmare web of cause and effect, where the actual impact of these tariffs—so 'carefully' and 'surgically' applied that the Trump administration has, uh, imposed a tariff on an uninhabited island of penguins and seals—is logistically impossible to avoid. At the very least, the Japanese games industry isn't alone in this—even board games are seeing a final end to the tabletop boom as a result. Unfortunately, we're all in for some very interesting times.

Unity's been having a rough few years—mostly due to its own foolishness, mind. Its prior CEO, John Riccitiello, couldn't seem to stop walking from bad decision to bad decision like a door-to-door fridge salesman in the arctic.

In 2022, he called developers "f*cking idiots". Then, he apologised for calling them "f*cking idiots". Then, he sprang a surprise, completely untenable runtime fee that'd see developers being charged every time they booted up a game. Then he stepped down. Wise.

The once-popular game engine's been walking that runtime fee thing back under the stewardship of its new CEO, Matt Bromberg, and trying to mop up its image at the same time. That mopping up has included tons of layoffs, though, which isn't great. Still, Bromberg seems keen to wrench developer goodwill back from the jaws of spite, as per a recent interview with The Verge.

"We were at war with our customers, effectively, when I arrived," Bromberg explains. "Folks were boycotting us. They were really unhappy with how we were charging them and how we spoke. And you can’t have a business where we’re [fighting our] customers. That’s insane."

Later in the interview, Bromberg gives his two cents on what went wrong before his arrival: "I’m a big believer that the way we create value is by delivering product value, and then folks will pay us for the value that we create. The thing about the runtime fee was that it was a business model … We were thinking about dynamics and how you can get people to do this versus that. If we raise one price here, then they’ll be forced to do that. That has nothing to do with creating value. That’s a trick. It’s a business model trick. It’s a hack."

When it came time to fix it, the first thing, Bromberg says, was to "to take a breath and reorient ourselves around being good partners, around authentically trying to deliver, to listen to people, and authentically trying to deliver what they need as the primary touchstone of what drives our behavior." The phrase "authentically trying to deliver" means not fleecing developers for pocket change in exec speak, I assume.

Bromberg also argues that, while the layoffs were painful for plenty of employees, they at least restructured and shuffled leadership around, too: "What is soul destroying for people is when somebody comes into a company that’s having a little bit of difficulty and they start restructuring the company and they leave the management layer intact.

"They think, 'Well, hang on a second, who is responsible for all this stuff? How do we skip over the folks who were in charge?' … 'I’m taking it in the neck. How did that happen?' If you want different outcomes, if you want different approaches, some of it’s changing culture, but a lot of it is changing people."

As for the runtime fees, Bromberg "absolutely knew" he was "going to roll it back before I even took the job," though Bromberg argues that it was important to do it right. "What I did was get on an airplane and started flying around, meeting with customers … It took a little while, but it wasn’t a very long time. It was a few months and people were saying, 'How come it took you so long?'

"I wanted to be sure they understood that we were going to do things differently. We’re going to be disciplined, we’re going to communicate, we’re going to execute at a high level, and we’re going to listen."

Whether Unity can regain devs' lost faith remains to be seen, especially since there's a little "tension" with its raised post-fiasco prizes, though Bromberg simply reminds The Verge in so many words that—y'know, it's a business. It needs to make money somehow:

"I accept that if it was completely free, maybe you’d have more people using it, but again, keep in mind that you’re only paying us once your game is really successful. And as a percentage of what you’re making it’s not… it ought not to negatively impact you … In general, our customers and the community understand that in order to invest in the engine, it’s important for us to be able to charge folks."

Fair enough. Though when you had developers who weren't even using your engine donating to other, open-source engines just to spite you? That's a lot of understanding to generate, and it's not just gonna come out of nowhere.

Making a big game that will stand out from the crowd and sell well requires many things to be exactly right. Alongside designing and building the story, graphics, and gameplay, developers have to battle through endless bugs—from a simple animation not syncing correctly to something that ultimately breaks the whole game. Any tool that can make the whole process of tracking and squashing bugs easier and quicker is going to be of interest to any developer, and now there's a new one on the market from the most unlikely of companies: Razer.

Yes, that Razer. The one that makes mice, keyboards, chairs, RGB lights, all that kind of stuff. So what on Earth are they doing making quality assurance software for game developers?

To answer that question, we only need to go back in time a few months to the CES event in January, where Razer launched Project Ava, an AI-powered gaming buddy that gives you help, directions, and sassy advice during a game. Razer told me game developers had inquired whether it could be used to do the same for programmers and testers and that ultimately led to what I saw at GDC 2025—AI QA Copilot, part of Razer's new software ecosystem, Wyvrn.

Essentially, it's an automated system that will identify bugs during game testing, generating information about the nature of the bug, steps to replicate it, and capturing footage of the issue in question. It then gets entered into a database and flagged with a suitable severity level. The AI model is trained specifically for different genres of games, so a different model is used for a MOBA shooter than for open-world first-person RPG.

I watched a demonstration of it in action and while it was clearly a 'staged' scenario, it was detailed enough to capture a range of bugs, such as failing a hitbox check, incorrect damage being applied, an animation bugging out, and so on. It was certainly better than something very similar to Razer's system that I also saw briefly showcased at the GDC: Nvidia's own AI QA bug assessment system.

From a QA tester's perspective, Razer's system takes over the parts of the role that could be deemed tedious or time-consuming, such as the logging and tracking of the bugs themselves, leaving more time for exploring either more of the game or just going back over the bug again and again to confirm the issue. While Razer's system can't actually fix any bugs, it will eventually be able to offer suggestions on how some may be resolved.

One of the first companies to partner with Razer and its AI QA Copilot is Side, which will be integrating the system into its own QA services to "help boost testing efficiency." Side is hardly what you'd call a small company, so there's clearly interest in AI QA Copilot within the game development industry.

That said, one concern I have is that AI is well-known for being a tad unreliable at times and I'm certain there will be times when the system will generate false positives or incorrectly identify the steps that created the fault in the first place. I also wonder if Microsoft might have something to say about it being called AI QA Copilot.

But if it all works as intended, and it's as popular and successful as Razer hope it will be, then gamers are the ones who are going to ultimately benefit from anything developed with AI QA Copilot helping things along the way. Just think about how many PC games launch these days with a raft of bugs—even if Razer's model only helps reduce this by 30%, for example, it'll be a very welcome change.

Surveys say that today's youth are more interested in stories about platonic friendships and social groups than romance and sex, and game developers are taking note of that and other trends in teen media consumption.

To a crowd of games industry professionals at D.I.C.E. Summit last week, TV executive turned game studio founder Sharon Tal Yguado and Roblox VP of civility and partnerships Tami Bhaumik spoke about "what teens want," presenting recent research and their observations.

The first observation: Kids are lonely. According to one study, 73% of young people ages 16 to 24 say they sometimes or always feel alone. Many also report feeling sad and hopeless. Bhaumik attributes this to everything: the state of the world, climate change, social media feeds.

It isn't all doom and gloom. Citing research from UCLA's Center for Scholars and Storytellers, Yguado said that young people aren't the superficial, fad-obsessed TikTok fiends they're made out to be: They care about things like safety, kindness, acceptance, physical fitness, friendship, and spiritual connection, she said.

Teens are less interested, however, in romance: "Like I seriously am worried about the population in the future, because these kids do not care about romance," Yguado said in a joking-but-not-joking tone.

In UCLA's 2024 Teens and Screens report, adolescents were surveyed about what they want to see in media, and "romance and/or sex" came in 15th out of 21 options. Its opposite, "content that doesn't include sex or romance," came in at 8th place. "Friendships and social groups" came in 5th.

This so-called "nomance" attitude is on the rise, UCLA researchers say. In 2023's report, 51.5% of adolescents "desired content that focuses on platonic relationships and friendships," and in 2024's report it was 63.5%. The percentage of adolescents who said that "sex and sexual content are not needed to advance the plot of TV shows and/or movies" also rose over the same period from 47.5% to 62.4%.

Even without the survey data, the notion that today's youth are especially uninterested in romance and sex has been treated as common knowledge on social media for the past few years, the story going that Covid isolation and increasing anxiety has created a generation of wallflowers. Studies do show that adolescents are having less sex than they did in the past.

But it bears mentioning that big mainstream videogames already don't contain a lot of sex and romance compared to other media. Not even 20 years ago, the tame nudity in 2007's Mass Effect was scandalous in some corners. Big mainstream games that are heavy on sex, like Baldur's Gate 3, are a recent phenomenon.

As a kid in the '90s, I remember being annoyed that they'd always put some soppy romantic subplot in movies that were otherwise about explosions, and no one seemed to worry that my generation hated sex and romance, so I'm a little skeptical that it's anything romance novelists and RPG designers should worry about. Granted, I make a poor example: I'm not married and don't have any kids, so maybe I was just ahead of my time.

Back in 2018, I remember sitting on my couch watching the RTX 20-series announcement on my then-decently powerful gaming laptop. Jen-Hsun took to the stage in a biker jacket, jokingly announced the release of the GTX 1180 (a pretty good gag), and then proceeded to blow my tiny little gaming mind. Proper ray-traced lighting for your gaming PC was finally here in the form of the Turing generation of GeForce graphics cards, and it felt like the future.

"This is a historic moment for computer graphics," said the leather-jacketed one, and it felt like it. No longer would we, as gamers, be chained to a hodgepodge of traditional lighting techniques, thanks to the RT cores on the new cards. All our rays would in future be traced—meaning that each beam of light would be calculated, reflected, and diffused in real time, in ways that make games look much more realistic than they did previously. The long-awaited real-time ray tracing future was finally here.

I remember closing my laptop lid after the announcement was finished and thinking about the mobile version of the GTX 1060 GPU inside. Suddenly my RT-coreless machine felt out of date, in a way more profound than the usual endless cycle of new hardware announcements would suggest. We all feel a twinge of necessity when a new generation of hardware arrives. How was I going to afford something equipped with an RTX 20-series GPU to revel in all this ray tracing glory?

Turns out, I needn't have worried. Real time ray tracing has been slow to arrive, at least in the way that seemed promised back in 2018. For many moons, it's been, at best, an optional extra. An upper-echelon feature for those of us with hardware beefy enough to handle it. Those days, I fear, are coming to a close.

Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Star Wars Outlaws. Black Myth Wukong. Four games released in the past year with ray tracing as the only method of lighting. Four fairly demanding games that mean, if you've been trucking along with something from the pre-ray tracing era, like the venerable GTX 1080 Ti, it might finally be time to think about sending it to the great attic box in the sky.

We're starting to live in the era of 'RTX on', all the time. Just. It's been a long time coming, and we're still just about at the point where ray tracing can be mostly ignored if your hardware is behind the times in many games. The tipping point, though, feels like it may be about to be reached. Ray tracing is creeping in as the default now—and it seems unlikely to be a passing phase.

Let's not get too down on the idea overall, though. As someone who has often made do with older hardware due to *cough* financial concerns, I always keep an eye out for DLSS and FSR versions in the specs sheets of upcoming demanding games.

These upscaling methods started out as the closest thing to alchemy we PC gamers may ever experience (Extra frames? Minimal loss of image quality? Yes please!), but have inevitably slipped into the sort of thing you often need to enable to receive smooth performance with the settings turned up.

DLSS may be Tensor Core-dependent, but AMD's FSR will run on many older cards, although it's limited in what it can achieve. And yes, ray tracing has been a big part of that modern upscaler push. Still, it also means that thanks to some upscaling help, ray tracing has become more achievable while maintaining a reasonable frame rate, with a minimal loss of quality. And in some ways, it's not quite as hardware-taxing as it used to be, either.

Unreal Engine 5's Lumen can use either software-based or hardware-based ray tracing techniques. The software version uses mesh distance fields which operate on a wide range of hardware, and are streamed in and out based on distance as a camera moves through a game world.

It works well in terms of calculating limited rays for better performance, but can struggle with light leakage on certain geometry. Plus, it's not as visually impressive as ray tracing proper, and it's still quite demanding overall compared to other lighting methods.

As for hardware ray tracing? That's the full-fat stuff, with all the gorgeous lighting and GPU-stressing factors that come with it. Still, Lumen is capable, in many ways, of being ray tracing "lite." Ray tracing for the masses, if you will. That's a pretty good deal, particularly as Unreal Engine 5 seems to be the engine of choice for many upcoming major releases.

Optimisation techniques seem to be coming on a pace in other engines, too. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle runs remarkably well even on some fairly ageing hardware, despite being an "all ray tracing, all the time" game, likely thanks to the developer's experience with Id software's in-house Id Tech 7 engine.

Here again, you get the ability to switch between full ray tracing (or Full Ray Tracing as Nvidia calls it, path tracing to everyone else) and a more stripped-down version, but either way, it's there, and it's handling the lighting—even with everything set to Low.

The hardware requirements are very steep for 4K Ultra with full ray tracing enabled, but then, you'd be surprised if they weren't for a game that looks this good. Drop the settings and the resolution down to more reasonable levels and even the RTX 2060 Super can get in on the ray-traced action, and that's a six-year-old mid-to-budget range card. That's still an RT core-equipped GPU though, even if it is showing its age these days.

Consider it a sign of the changing times. The Id Tech-based Doom games have long been known for their remarkable performance on older hardware, but even the upcoming Doom: The Dark Ages is going to be an all-singing, all-dancing, all-ray traced affair.

Id Tech 7's Vulkan API has supported ray tracing for years, as has DX 12 Ultimate, and it's no surprise that devs are reaching into the toolbox now the hardware is truly able to make use of it. Heavy optimisation and developer engine familiarity will likely help with performance, but again, according to the specs, you'll need a ray tracing capable GPU to get your Doom on later this year.

So, I don't blame some gamers for feeling sore. But while optimisations are being made, and upscalers ever-improved, at some point all hardware simply ages out of consideration. Those of you who have been trucking on with pre-ray tracing era GPUs have had a good run of it, but all good things must, unfortunately, come to an end.

I'm not saying it's all over for you at this very moment, of course. Pre-baked lighting and ray tracing have co-existed for a while now, and in all honesty, they probably will for a little while longer in many games.

But as gamers continue to upgrade their machines and the hardware moves on, it's likely only going to get harder and harder for developers to justify working on and optimising two lighting systems when one gives such spectacular results.

Not only that, but lighting has traditionally been something of a pain point for game development, with the need to use a smoke and mirrors approach that often leads to wonky-looking results. Ray tracing can potentially serve as a much more "one and done" methodology when implemented well, and developers are always going to lean towards a more straightforward (if more hardware-demanding) system if they can get away with it.

Ageing lighting techniques seem destined to go the way of the dinosaur at some point, and I believe we are seeing the green shoots of that switch over today.

The times, they are a'changing. The rays, they come for thee. And while it's difficult to get hold of a ray tracing-friendly GPU at the moment for a reasonable price, it's unlikely this current drought will last. If you've been holding out, and let's face it, missing out on some of the latest games because ray tracing is your great hardware holdback, I reckon now's the time to start saving those pennies for a ray tracing-ready GPU when prices and availability (hopefully) drop back to normal levels. Whatever "normal" means, in this context.

Or you could gracefully age out of the never-ending hamster wheel of progress. After all, indie releases and games from smaller studios will likely be the longest holdouts for ray tracing adoption, and you don't need to be playing the most graphically beautiful, highly demanding games on the block to have a good time with your gaming PC.

The choice is yours, but it's starting to become a clearer choice than ever. And in some cases, not a choice at all.

And if you think me advising you to upgrade your machine to prepare for the ray-traced future is elitist, know that I am one of you. My personal GPU is pretty bad at ray tracing too, so I too am eyeing up my meagre bank balance and considering my next move. Time marches ever forward in this game, and at some point, we all, unfortunately, must do our best to keep up if we want to stay at the forefront of gaming tech.

Or, y'know, something like Geforce Now and on-demand game streaming. You may boo and hiss, but it's really pretty good these days. Put those pitchforks away. Still, by the looks of things, I really don't think the ray tracing train is going to do anything but accelerate further towards the (beautifully lit) horizon. And in the end, at least our games will look even prettier. Even if our bank accounts don't.

Pocketpair, the developers behind Palworld, has announced its first project as a publisher—a new horror game alongside Surgent Studios. This comes a few months after the studio responsible for Tales of Kenzera: Zau put its team on notice for redundancy.

"We noticed a pattern in the entertainment industry, and Pocketpair has given us the opportunity to make a horror game about it," Surgent Studios CEO Abubakar Salim says in a press release. "Both Surgent and Pocketpair are well-versed in taking risks. This game will be short and weird, and we think players will be interested in what we have to say."

This upcoming horror game won't be in any way related to Surgent Studio's previous game, Tales of Kenzera: Zau, but that doesn't mean the studio has left that universe behind entirely. "We’re still in earnest conversation about further projects set in the Tales of Kenzera universe, but this will be a standalone piece: A mile marker between where we’ve come from and where we’re going," Salim continues.

A horror game from Surgent Studios certainly does sound interesting. I had a lot of fun with Tales of Kenzera: Zau's platforming, fights, and cool abilities, and despite not making it to the top of my list, it was one of the games that really stuck out to me last year. So, I'm pretty excited about what this developer will do with a horror game.

"This is the energy I want to see driving games in 2025—developers lifting each other up, creating together, and pushing the industry forward," Salim says. "Massive love to the Pocketpair team! It’s an incredible honor to be the first partnership announced with Pocketpair Publishing. We’ve been cooking up something fun, and I can’t wait to share it with you all. Stay tuned!"

However, this new concept is different from the previous Project Uso pitch that Salim mentioned at the end of last year. Salim described Project Uso as a singleplayer isometric, Afro-gothic action RPG: "We still have so much more to say and so much more to build on," Salim says in an interview with IGN. "And the audiences that we've already started to build as well, and the players and the people who want to champion us, they want to hear more…We are ready. We're so ready. It is just about taking that leap of faith with us."

Regardless of what the project is, it's great to see Surgent Studios back on its feet after a rough few months at the end of last year. Before it had to put its team on notice for redundancy while the studio scrambled to find a new publisher and source of funding, it laid off "just over a dozen" employees. It seems like Pocketpair saw the potential that this developer has and wanted to help get its projects back on track.

"Game development comes with many challenges, but we want to ease that process as much as possible and provide an environment where creators can pursue their dreams," the head of Pocketpair Publishing, John Buckley, says in a press release. "We are pleased to be able to support Surgent Studios’ new title as our first step. We deeply sympathize with its original ideas and passion and are honoured to help them realize their vision. We will respect the autonomy and vision of developers and work together to make great games for people all over the world."

While it's great to see Pocketpair expand its horizons and help other indie studios along the way, it still has to deal with The Pokémon Company and Nintendo's patent infringement lawsuit. Pocketpair confirmed that it had received notice of this lawsuit, and despite not getting any specific details about what patents it was infringing upon, the studio said that it is working hard to ensure this doesn't affect new projects or maintenance on games like Palworld.

In 2021, Toshihiro Nagoshi, who began his videogame career with Daytona USA before creating the Yakuza/Like a Dragon Series, left Sega to found his own studio at Chinese tech giant NetEase. Nagoshi Studio has yet to announce the name or much of anything else about its debut game, though Nagoshi has previously compared it to Yakuza by saying, "the scale of the game will be bigger".

Even that vague statement seems to no longer apply. In an interview with Famitsu (machine-translated by VGC), Nagoshi walked back that boast, saying, "the current version is so large that it's almost too large. This time, while researching existing games, we started by making a fairly large map with roads and highways. Now we are gradually shrinking it down and exploring the best balance for the game."

In response to the interviewer pointing out that some people like a game with a big map, Nagoshi replied, "You could fill it in with some element to create a sense of density, but it's not modern to have similar experiences repeated over and over again."

The developers of every live-service game in existence, and a fair few singleplayer open worlds, would probably disagree. But it's not controversial to point out that even well-received games like Ghost of Tsushima get dinged for having repetitive activities dotted across their maps, making them eventually feel like thin butter spread over too much toast.

"I feel that the era of games where the volume is the selling point is coming to an end", Nagoshi said.

Nagoshi left Sega after 32 years at the company. As he said at the time, he felt distant from the act of actually making games after reaching "the top management level", and had no desire to climb further and become the CEO of Sega.