The official end of the summer isn't back-to-school day. It's not Labor Day. Nope, it's Gamescom Opening Night Live day, the second Geoff Keighley-hosted world premieres showcase of each year that kicks off the gaming trade event in Cologne, Germany which signals the end of the Gregorian Calendar's videogame 'announcements season' and the beginning of traditional 'release season,' to those who observe the old ways. It's live during German hours, though, so here's when to watch Opening Night Live if you hail from some other slice of the globe.

How to watch Gamescom Opening Night Live

Gamescom Opening Night Live premieres at 11 am Pacific / 8 pm CEST on Tuesday, August 25 on YouTube. Here's when Gamescom ONL premieres in other timezones:

• 11 am (Los Angeles)
• 2 pm EDT (New York)
• 3 pm BRT (São Paulo)
• 7 pm BST (London)
• 8 pm CEST (Cologne)
• 4 am, August 26 AEST (Sydney)
• 6 am, August 26 NZST (Auckland)

What's confirmed for Opening Night Live?

As always, ONL host Geoff Keighley has already confirmed (some of) the games that will be in the show. We don't always know what each one is planning to announce—though sometimes it's easy to guess—just who's on the call sheet. Here's what he's revealed ahead of time:

• The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past (the new DLC)
• Final Fantasy 7 Revelation (part three of the FF7 remake)
• Gears of War: E-Day (Gears prequel)
• Ananta (the "anime GTA" game)
• Tides of Annihilation (a sci-fi Arthurian legend Soulslike)
• Metro 2039 (the newest mainline Metro since Exodus)
• Game of Thrones: War for Westeros (GoT RTS)
• Warlock: Dungeons and Dragons (an open world action-adventure)

Vapor World: Over The Mind is a Soulslike Metroidvania with an evocative, painterly art style reminiscent of Lies of P and the narrative platformers of Playdead. According to Korean studio Alive Inc, the game had 100,000 wishlists just before its early access launch on August 19, mostly on the strength of a demo available since January 2025.

But what should have been a triumphant early access launch went pear shaped very quickly. At launch, few talked about the quite distinctive worldbuilding or the parry-heavy combat. Instead, all focus was trained entirely on something absent from the popular demo: very obvious AI use.

"Saw the very first cutscene, before any gameplay, and how the generative AI they used couldn't even keep the main character's model consistent," reads the "most helpful" Steam review for Vapor World. "From the trailers the gameplay looked pretty fun [but] unfortunately I support people not robots. If the look you want to go for is beyond the scope you can achieve right now then I suggest you change it or wait until you can produce the art and style you want with people doing it."

That's pretty representative of the Steam reviews at the moment: Vapor World is currently sitting on 64 "mostly negative" reviews.

It's undoubtedly a disappointing result for Alive Inc, whose headcount is "about five" according to the studio. It's also possible the studio was blindsided by the backlash: this Pew Research Center survey places South Korea as the least AI sceptical nation among 25 countries surveyed, including the US, the UK, Australia and India. According to MIT Technology Review, the South Korean government has overwhelmingly embraced AI. It even tried to roll out AI-powered school textbooks (which failed).

Half (or in some cases, slightly less) of those surveyed in the US, Italy, Australia and Brazil are "more concerned than excited" by AI use in daily life. In South Korea, those "more concerned than excited" by AI make up only 16 percent.

There's a trace of surprise in the inevitable statement made by studio director Young Kim, who promised the AI-generated cutscenes would be replaced "by this weekend" (this has already happened).

"If someone asked me what I think about using AI, the honest answer is that I would have to think about it for a long time," the director wrote. "The reason I chose AI was that I believed it could reach a level of expression our existing resources could not, and that it would let us focus more on the game itself, outside of story and cinematics."

He continued: "That was a hasty judgment on my part. Unless AI takes one more leap and reaches a point where no one can tell the difference, what I believed was still closer to an ideal than a reality. I expected some of you would be disappointed by our use of AI. I did not expect it to become this big."

The statement then hits upon a question that will be raised again and again in the coming months and years concerning creative work: if AI can do it better, why not? In this instance, it unambiguously could not: the cutscenes, and I've seen them, are quintessential slop, and compare very unfavourably to the in-game art. Young Kim says the studio originally composed the cutscenes in-engine, but later replaced them with AI. Somehow, his team didn't detect this chasm.

"The truth is, we spent a long time trying to tell this game's story with cutscenes made entirely by our own hands," the statement goes on. "The results were devastating every time. We came to believe we could not properly deliver this game's complex, difficult narrative that way, and that is why we turned to AI. But if that choice hurt your experience, the fault is not in the tool. It is in our own shortcomings."

Alive Inc joins a long list of studios who have reneged on AI use after extreme public backlash, including Larian Studios and Sandfall Interactive. Vapor World isn't wholesale slop—the studio worked hard on the core game and it shows—but the outcry surrounding its launch does show that using generative AI to cut corners isn't, for now, something audiences are willing to tolerate.

Top Steam games by revenue (August 11 - 18)

Overall a pretty unremarkable week for the top ten. Kingdom Hearts is there because Square Enix hosted a sale. Phantom Blade Zero pre-orders opened.

The top 11-20 part of the list is arguably more interesting: Mortal Shell 2 debuted at number 12, Wardogs pre-orders catapulted it to number 13 (though its current beta is apparently blowing up, with an all-time concurrent players peak of 105,774), and the Lord of the Rings: War in the North reissue has sold decently enough to help it reach number 17.

As for Wardogs: expect it to factor heavily into the charts in the coming weeks ahead of its September 11 release date.

Curiously, Star Wars Zero Company pre-orders debuted at number 24, way below Phantom Blade Zero and Wardogs pre-orders. Star Wars fatigue perhaps?

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Steam review of the week

"If you Spam Punch the Dude in the start of the game you Can level your unarm to level 100.

10/10 Broken just like Morrowind"

Skybob, on The Lantern of the Laughless Saint, who I'm sure is also relentlessly bunnyhopping to increase Acrobatics.

Last week, the Communications Workers of America and the Bethesda Game Studios OneBGS union took part in the Save Our Devs rally across the United States and Canada (and on Twitch) "to call out layoffs and corporate greed across the industry and to demand fair first contracts across Microsoft’s gaming studios." Speaking to Kotaku, Bethesda artist Alex Nguyen talked about how things changed after Bethesda was acquired by the tech giant.

"Since we’ve been under Microsoft… it feels like something has changed. We didn’t have layoffs before, and now all of a sudden we have yearly layoffs," he told Kotaku, saying teams were feeling the effects of cuts which eroded institutional knowledge. “If only five people knew how this thing worked and you let all five of them go, that’s a morale killer because it’s like we already knew this, and now we have to learn it again.”

According to that article, Nguyen pointed out that fixer-uppers like Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online don't get a chance to bloom into successful fan favorites without sufficient labor and time. He also noted that there used to be a shared sense of long-term commitment among the staff at Zenimax and Bethesda—a commitment being smothered by Microsoft's current corporate tactics.

“That’s why a lot of people had such a long tenure here," Nguyen told Kotaku. "And they were like, ‘yeah, this is the place I’m gonna retire at,’ or ‘this is the place where I’m gonna finish out,’ or ‘I love being here because I want to stay in the industry for a long time.’ That was basically one of the benefits of being at Bethesda or a Zenimax studio in general.”

Last year, ex-Xbox head Phil Spencer said that "nurturing and protecting creative teams that want to go take risks" was of the utmost importance less than two years after Xbox's acquisition of Blizzard called for 1,900 layoffs. Current Xbox head Asha Sharma has sung a similar tune so far, suggesting that Xbox ought to be entertaining over a billion people each day while also announcing the "reset" necessitating 3,200 job cuts in the very same blog post. It's plain to see why workers might balk at conditions that continue to raise the bar for achievement while more and more developers lose their livelihoods.

Aw dang we cropped out my favorite sign from the Minnesota rally

— @mouseatreides.bsky.social (@mouseatreides.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-08-23T16:43:09.232Z

Ray Chase's first encounter with PC gaming was on an old DOS computer from his father's accounting job. He grew up on a digital diet of shareware demos from PC gaming's golden era. "My grandfather gave me this basket of shareware games, and we played them nonstop for years," Chase recalls. "There was Duke Nukem 1 and 2. There was Ken's Labyrinth. Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold. There was Wolfenstein 3D, of course. Jack Pack was one of my favourites because it had a level editor."

A voice actor since the early 2000s, Chase has appeared in hundreds of games, films and TV shows. He played the lead character Noctis in Final Fantasy 15, and currently voices Cyclops in X-Men '97, which just aired season two and is in the process of recording season four: "The stuff that's going on in the seasons we're recording now, I guess we'll see in a couple of years, but it's really cool, man."

Chase is also the co-founder of Sassy Chap Games, developer of 2025's Date Everything. A dating sim where players can romance dozens of anthropomorphised household objects, Date Everything was designed to be a celebration of voice acting talent. "We just finished our big update for Date Everything and we are working hard on the next chapter of our story," Chase says. "We're in the pitching process for that now."

Chase took a break from designing romanceable soft furnishings to show me around the hunk-strewn household of his Steam library. Gather round for a tale of perfumed peasants, disordered dungeons, and plane potatoes.

What game are you currently playing?

I'm currently playing Deltarune Chapter 5, but not [for] super long. The other one that I have is Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. It's the eternal game. I'm doing all of the things. It'll be a few hundred hours. But it's the perfect encapsulation of what a roleplaying game should be.

I played one [campaign] all the way through. The [most recent] one I've made, I'm doing a smell build where your character smells and looks so good and fancy that it actually works as armour. And so I wear perfumes and walk into battle with my fancy boy outfit. And my enemies are too stunned.

I'm always laundering my clothes. It's the best. I just fucking love that game.

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

I played Mina the Hollower. I love that game, my God. Jay Kaufman's music is astounding. I played that one out of order because I saw you could do that, and I really liked the challenge. So I did the dungeons all in the wrong order. I really enjoyed the feeling of doing a really hard dungeon and then going back and then saying "Oh, this is now very easy" going through it.

I also love that [Mina is] middle aged like me, and after she completes a dungeon she goes to sleep. She takes a nap, which I think is great.

I'm not a secret ending kind of guy. I'm whatever my percentage is when I complete the game. That's what I live with, and that's it. I never go back and play games. [With] Disco Elysium, the best thing about it is the cryptozoologist thing, the cryptid comes at the end and says something incredible. But I [failed the roll]. And so I will never know what it is. I'm never going to go back and play it, and I won't look it up either.

I think that's part of the fun, living with the consequences.

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

I've got Brotato here. I have very little on my PC, that's the problem. I love Brotato. It's one of my favourites. It's because it's so lightweight. It's great for planes, and you don't need a controller to play. I end up playing on my laptop on planes more than anything.

Anything that's super lightweight, I'll always have [installed]. So it's going to be Brotato. I 100%-ed it before the newest DLC, which makes it really hard.

There's so many different potatoes you can be. There's so many different playstyles. I'll take whatever comes my way. It's never old. Same with Slay the Spire … there's always something different, always something new to learn, and I absolutely adore it.

Oh, maybe Slay the Spire is older than Brotato. So then, that's my answer.

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

It's Slay the Spire for sure. It is something like 600 hours. But then I've got it on mobile too, and I also got all the way to the end with all characters.

I got into it very early on. I went to a gathering and some guy was like "There's this early access game named Slay the Spire, you should give it a shot." There was only Ironclad and Silent at the time. I don't know if it was [in] early access then, or if it was just a demo version. But I was there from almost the very, very beginning.

I'd never played a deckbuilder before, and it was the best. I played it all the way through to release to Watcher, 1,000 freaking hours in that thing. And it's easy to 100% that game. The achievements are not very difficult, but I do love Ascension, getting Ascension on all characters and then beating it on Ascension 20. That to me is the correct difficulty.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

Brotato or Slay the Spire. They're just always there, for when I'm on the plane and I'll be able to give it a quick spin.

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

My voice recording software for sure. That's pretty simple.

I use Reaper and Audacity, [they] are my two favourites. And I absolutely could not live without voice recording software.

That would be impossible.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

Extremely tidy. There's almost nothing on it. It's just the audio that I recorded this morning before coming into this interview, and then my Recycle Bin. And that's it, it's empty. I don't like having a bunch of stuff that I don't know where the hell it is.

[I'm a] one-screen guy. Sometimes I have my second screen up here when I'm recording, but today it's just my laptop and nothing else fancy. This laptop is the laptop I developed Date Everything on.

Back in February Epic Games told us about its plan to overhaul the Epic launcher, with an update in June mentioning it would start up five times faster on average. That technical overhaul will apparently be accompanied by changes to the storefront including personalized game recommendations, quick-access categories, and patch notes right there on the shop. All stuff that would have been nice to have at the end of 2018 when the Epic launcher arrived, but is it too late for a recovery? I asked Emmanuel Rosier, director of market intelligence at industry analysts Newzoo.

"I don't really see how they can turn that around," Rosier says, "because Steam has become so inevitable. The Epic Games Store, they get players by giving free games, but people just go, they log in, they get the free games, they don't even play them. You know, it's almost like collecting games rather than actually playing them."

On a sample size of one I am the person who actually plays some of the free games I've been given by Epic over the years, and without that program I probably wouldn't have tried Guardians of the Galaxy, Ghostwire: Tokyo, Vampyr, Control, Assassin's Creed Syndicate, or Kardboard Kings. But whether most people play them or not, it's telling that a free giveaway can actually boost sales on Steam, as it did for Blood West, thanks to players not wanting to split their library.

"The challenge I think Epic is facing is that they try to win everywhere in the past few years," Rosier says. "They try to win against Steam, they try to win against Apple, against Google Play, and probably they run out of steam on where they cannot fight all these battles at the same time."

Rosier is more positive about the outlook for Epic as a game developer than as a storefront. "They probably need to focus on what really matters," he says, "which I think is Fortnite. You can see they put a lot of thought in Fortnite right now. They are doing everything they can, and I think it's working better when you look at the state of Fortnite today compared to six months or one year ago."

One shift in Fortnite has been a bigger push to incorporate cosmetics based on other companies' videogames. While Epic's own games and those of games that launched as exclusives like Borderlands 3 have a history of showing up in Fortnite, now you look at the current season and see Sonic the Hedgehog, Pac-Man, Crash Bandicoot, and Mega Man have joined the roster alongside Sora from Kingdom Hearts and Joker from Persona 5.

"I think that's an important trend I see with Fortnite," Rosier says, "they are not afraid of other games." If it continues, expect to see less popstars and more platformer mascots. "It's funny because it's a gaming platform that's not even competing any more with other games. Because if you are launching a game, it makes sense to do some marketing within Fortnite. I was thinking, I'm almost surprised that GTA 6 is not doing an event in Fortnite to show the trailer, you know? Why not at this point?"

Rosier's also positive about recent additions to Fortnite like the collectible "sprites" that give players something else to do ("It's not about winning that much; it's about completing your collection of sprites," he says), but remains less optimistic about Epic's future as a competitor to Steam. "If you look at the Epic Games Store, I don't see how they can recover at this point."

South of Midnight was one of 2025's seemingly innumerable highlights—in their 83% review, evergreen writer Andrea Shearon called it "a Deep South delight drenched in superstition and pain." If you've been holding off but nonetheless rooting for the award-winning studio behind it, Compulsion Games, now's a great time to dive in: it's independent again after a lengthy stay under the Xbox Game Studios banner.

After rumors of closure came in the wake of Xbox's most recent layoffs, Compulsion announced it'd be leaving Microsoft instead and pursuing other partnerships. On Thursday, CEO Guillaume Provost explained to GamesBeat that "the management buyout is complete and that it owns its original intellectual property games again, as Microsoft has transferred the IP back to Compulsion Games," according to the article. "Provost said management has acquired the studio and staff as well."

Granted, if you happened to be avoiding games by Microsoft-owned studios because of the BDS boycott protesting the roles of various corporations in Israel's ongoing genocide of Palestinians, this particular game and others like it were already excepted by some advocates. No Games For Genocide named it as a possible exception due to its indie-like production scale and "themes of black liberation" in its FAQ, saying "it’s worth putting our time, energy and efforts into building mass boycotts for the larger titles."

Still, if you've been holding out, the studio now gets a bigger cut of the money when you buy the game now and Microsoft gets none, assuming you don't buy it through the Xbox digital storefront. And regardless of any of that, it's still noteworthy as a critical time for the studio also behind We Happy Few and 2013's Contrast. Sustainably cutting ties with such a huge publisher is no easy feat, and the turmoil at Xbox already had Compulsion devs looking for new jobs before the infamous "reset" even took place.

Double Fine has fully transitioned into an independent studio after leaving Xbox earlier this year. The studio now has full publishing rights to the games it made under Microsoft and earns all the revenue when you buy them, CEO Tim Schafer confirmed on the Kinda Funny podcast.

"Everything we got back, the transfer of the IP came back to us, and we got the publishing rights back for all our games," he said. Steam still lists the publisher as Xbox Game Studios for games like Psychonauts 2 and Keeper, but that's because it "takes a while for all of that to process," he said. "When people buy our games it helps support the studio."

Later this month, the studio will start a Kickstarter campaign based around its annual Amnesia Fortnight game jam, which is the same game jam where some of its previous games, like Costume Quest and Stacking, were born. The entire thing will be filmed and turned into a documentary, and backers of the campaign will help choose which idea gets made into a small game.

Schafer said the Kickstarter campaign and the revenue from its games will help the studio "have as much runway as possible" as it works on pitching other projects to publishers.

Double Fine laid off 23 members of its staff last month to become "a size that we can sustain," Schafer wrote in a statement at the time. The news came less than a month after Microsoft allowed it to go independent as it began a major restructuring at Xbox and laid off 3,200 people.

South of Midnight developer Compulsion Games, the other studio Microsoft cut loose, recently announced it too has full publishing rights to its games and that buying them will directly support the studio as it figures out what's next.

In addition to promoting the Kickstarter, Schafer teased a major update with new maps and modes and a price drop coming next week to Kiln, the studio's recently released pottery brawler multiplayer game. And I'll add that if you're not a PvPer, you should check out Double Fine's adventure game starring a sentient lighthouse and a bird called Keeper. As I said in the Keeper review, it's easily one of the most gorgeous games I've ever played.

One of the biggest stories this week has been of the enigmatic, self-described consumer hero Cyberleek, who's also using this whole debacle as a way to advertise and pay for their cryptocurrency. Which is probably fine and normal and not at all a concerning spectre lingering around one of the biggest games of the year.

Anyway, you'd think Take-Two and Strauss Zelnick might be feeling hot under the collar about all of this, and you'd be partially right. As spotted by Insider Gaming, Take-Two's market price (the price of one share) was around $248 before the leaks. Fast-forward a couple of days, and that same market price dropped to a low of $233.

This hit Take-Two's market cap (share price, times the amount of shares) to the tune of billions—around $2.83 billion in two days. An astronomical amount of money by any stretch of the imagination, a huge devaluation that's… actually not even much of a sweat, really.

See, Take-Two's overall market cap was still over $43 billion and, by virtue of how stock markets tend to shift and fluctuate, not even that much of a rare occurrence. On August 6, the market price dropped to a measly $229, for instance, before spiking back up to $242 the next day.

And while the overall market price between August 18 and 20 does trend downwards, it's already rising back up. At the time of writing, said market price has recovered to $241, with the market cap rising from that $43 billion total to almost $44.9 billion—just $1 billion within its previous number.

Look, while I don't think anyone at Take-Two's exactly happy to be losing a couple billion dollars in market cap to some guy peddling cryptocurrency with a full copy of their next big thing, what feels more noteworthy is the fact that a leak of this scale has mostly just pinged off the videogame giant's armour.

It's a humbling reminder of the sheer amount of money that gets poured into videogames at this scale—humbling or perhaps distressing, given the size of the industry tracks precious little to its security.

One tragedy about the fall of Arkane Austin—aside from Microsoft's seeming unwillingness to give studios a chance beyond the next quarter—is the pervasive feeling that the studio, whose devs were previously known for their immersive sims, was forced to make something way outside of their wheelhouse. Redfall was a live service shooter, and a pretty cruddy one at that.

So it might be buoying news to hear that Dishonored co-creator Harvey Smith and seasoned Arkane vet Ben Horne's new studio isn't going to try and chase down trends. In an interview with The Game Business, Horne and Smith were asked if they thought the immersive sim (which Black Pony Immersive has been strangely careful to talk around), is a dead or dying genre.

"If you look back through those games," says Smith, "There are a lot of titles that people still talk about 10 or 20 years later. They have a lot of cultural cachet. And there are a few, if you look at BioShock or Deus Ex or Dishonored, that make a lot of money."

Part of the issue, as many developers have outlined, is the general ballooning budgets in the industry itself: "If you look at Dishonored, for instance, the budget that we were working with was… I wouldn't say tiny, many triple-I developers would envy that budget, but it was very reasonable. And our [return on investment] was four or five times the total spend."

For Horne's part, one of the mission statements of Black Pony Immersive is to get away from tend chasing—which Arkane was clearly and famously bad at—and just make stuff its developers would like to play:

"The industry is growing in such a way that there are a large amount of players with a really varied appetite. We don't really know what turn the industry might take, and we're probably not going to be very good at trend chasing. And so, our best shot is to rally around a creative vision that excites us as developers. It excites the audience that we know wants to play this kind-of game. That's the best chance of making something great."

Smith concurs, outlining the (understandably cynical) perspective that, hey, he's heard a lot of these promises from big executives before: "Very well-paid people say things to me, going way back now, like, 'First-person games don't sell,' or, 'RPGs are a niche market,' 'If you're not working on a free-to-play game now, in five years you'll be out of a job,' 'MMOs are the future,' 'In the future, games will have live motion video sections with Hollywood actors in them."

If we skim through that list, we can see a lot of nonsense. First-person games have continued to sell, one of the most successful games of the decade was an RPG based on Dungeons & Dragons, and live-service free to play games have been an absolute trashfire for some publishers, even with deep wallets. And while Hollywood actors are in videogames now, they're not in live action.

"I've heard smart, good people," Smith continues, "friends of mine in executive positions, say these things over the years, and sometimes they're right. But what Ben said, going back to what you love with a strong vision, that often comes through for us, so that's what we have got to do."

Redfall is one of the biggest industry disasters in recent memory—coming from Arkane Austin, a studio known for an all-time classic in Prey, the game was panned both critically and commercially. Even we, at PC Gamer, dubbed it the "first Arkane game we don't like".

It also served as the death knell for the studio as, one year later, studio owner Microsoft announced it'd be shutting Arkane Austin down. The narrative paints itself, especially given Microsoft's utterly brutal behaviour in following years. The big bad M forced Arkane Austin, king of the immersive sim, to make a crummy live-service glob.

And that's sort of the truth—it is, after all, why the studio founder left—but it's not entirely Microsoft's fault. The studio director at the time, Harvey Smith, tells The Game Business in a recent interview that it wasn't just corporate which became swept up by the live service fugue.

"Arkane is very specialized, but the industry is growing, and there’s always more mouths to feed. And it’s great when you can reach a wider audience. We got swept up in the games-as-a-service thing, and I had the foolish chutzpah to assume that it always works out for us."

Smith describes a sort of naive optimism that Arkane could nail the same live service successes elsewhere in the industry: "We can do this. Let’s take what we love, and mix it with [games-as-a-service]. And do different mechanics by day and night. And have character classes.

"Then in the middle of all that, Covid happened. We also had the great resignation where everybody went remote and started changing jobs." Later in the chat, Smith describes a deeply chaotic development cycle, plagued by all sorts of baffling occurrences: "There were fires. The government announced aliens at some point. There was a swarm of murder hornets coming toward Texas. We had an ice storm that put power and water out for like two weeks for some people. It was crazy. That development cycle."

And, listen—I think it's clear in hindsight that Smith was wrong to be optimistic, but it's also clear that he did genuinely care about Redfall, even if it came out a mess. So much so, in fact, that Smith reveals he pleaded with Microsoft to allow himself and other employees to come back into the office and finish the game's 1.4 patch.

"We finished the game and it was very poorly received. We then worked on it for a year. We patched thousands of bugs. We then got laid off, but we had in the pipe version 1.4. It was the one that fixed tons of stuff. So, we went to Microsoft and said, ‘I know we don’t work here anymore, but can we please release this?’

"And to their credit, they did not say no. They let six or seven of us sign forms that we could come back in the building. After being fired, we released 1.4, which I think if we had that on day one, it wouldn’t have set the world on fire, but it was a much, much better game."

Ben Horne, who was the production director at the time, chimes in: "It feels like an achievement unlocked for me in my career, to release something after I’ve been fired and the studio closed down."

Patch 1.4 wouldn't necessarily save Redfall from obscurity. PC Contributor Rick Lane went back to it, writing: "still isn't the game it needs to be, or the one Arkane Austin could have made. Nonetheless, I think the update shows that Arkane could have redeemed it in the long run." The tragedy, I suppose, is that we'll never know whether 1.5, 1.6, or 1.7 would've finally turned it into Smith and Horne's vision.

This month, the biggest leveraged buyout in the history of private equity went through and now EA is owned by a consortium made up of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and the investment firms Silver Lake and Affinity Partners. We don't know what EA will be like under its new owners, but Employees are bracing for the worst. The company took on $20 billion in debt as part of the deal. Will that change the way it does business or encourage it to rely on the formula that's gotten it where it is?

I asked Emmanuel Rosier, director of market intelligence at industry analysts Newzoo, who spent nine years as a senior manager at EA.

"I think everything is open at this point," Rosier says. "I suspect that sports will remain the key focus for EA, particularly European football, soccer, because of the importance of that sport in Saudi and in Middle East territories. You see a lot of synergies in that context. You can also expect that they will push even more for esports, also given the popularity of esports in Saudi and in some other territories. The question mark is probably the second-tier or third-tier IP in the portfolio of EA."

As someone who had to double check whether the FC in EA Sports FC really does stand for football club (it does), I am personally more interested in these lower-tier properties.

"They have a lot of dormant IPs that have not been used for so many years," Rosier says. "You know, they have IPs like Ultima, they have IPs like Wing Commander and this and that, and it's not being used at all. So the question is, would some of them be maybe sold, or will they hire studios to leverage these IPs? Because we see every day the importance of IPs."

There's a real "monkey paw curling" element to the idea of Ultima and Wing Commander being revived. I remember the browser-based Evony clone Lord of Ultima from 2010, an attempt to jump on the "play now, my Lord" bandwagon with the Ultima brand that lasted a mere four years before being shut down. Much as I'd like to see something more respectful, like a tasteful remake of Ultima 4 and a remaster for Wing Commander Privateer, that would rely on anybody at EA actually caring about those games beyond their value as "intellectual property", a possibility Rosier dashes with the next words out of his mouth.

"I think there are plenty of IPs like that at EA that nobody cares about at this moment," he says. "I think probably they will leverage that either by just selling it or trying to find external studios that can work on that. Maybe mobile games."

Of course, in between its big-budget live-service blockbusters and the forgotten games they acquired when the world was young, EA owns something else close to my heart. "Then in the middle you have these IPs like the BioWare IPs," Rosier says. "They've been struggling as a studio, as a brand have been struggling in recent years, and I don't know if they will keep funding that one. I think that's the biggest question mark for me."

Surely EA wouldn't pull funding from BioWare before it had a chance at redemption, right? Dragon Age has always been swingy, a series defined by constant reinvention and ups and downs. Mass Effect had a golden age that lasted for two-and-a-half games, and that's a foundation you can build on. Right?

"I will believe it when I see it, the next Mass Effect game, let's put it that way," Rosier replies.

Of course, BioWare hasn't had much to say about the development of the next Mass Effect, but that's because the studio has had its head down working hard.

"I've worked many years with BioWare, sometimes it can stretch for years and years until something comes," says Rosier, who spent over four years as a senior franchise demand planning manager during his time at EA. "I think everything can happen at this moment. They can pull the plug very, very easily. And if the new investor, they don't have that many feelings about the history of the portfolio, they will take the most financially sound decision most probably."

Saudi Arabia's purchase of Electronic Arts, the biggest leveraged buyout in private equity history, officially closed earlier this month. With that deal done, a new Game Developer report has found that an awful lot of employees are expecting much more stringent control over what kinds of games they are and are not allowed to make.

This isn't really new, strictly speaking. After the buyout was announced, current and former EA employees alike expressed concerns about a potential crackdown on some games, particularly those that are visibly diverse and inclusive, like The Sims. Former BioWare lead writer Trick Weekes summed it up aptly, predicting that "guns and football" will be fine, but that "gay stuff" will likely be out.

Despite EA's various efforts to reassure employees that its "cultural values"—a functionally empty term to begin with—will remain intact under Saudi ownership, Game Developer has found that doubts persist among employees. One current employee told the site they believed the purchase was a way to distract from its "regressive" human rights record by "co-opting an established and comparatively progressive company culture."

That's a known phenomenon called "sportswashing," and it's been raised multiple times previously with regards to the EA buyout—in no small part because Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler and, through his chairmanship of the country's Public Investment Fund, EA's new boss, has previously stated outright that he's happy to use it to achieve his goals. "If sportswashing is going to increase my GDP by way of one percent, then I will continue doing sportwashing," he told Fox News in 2023. "I don't care."

Being a private company grants EA a certain freedom to do what it likes, but that doesn't mean the company will necessarily just embrace an anti-inclusive agenda: Instead, one employee predicted that "projects just won't get signed because they don't align explicitly with what the Saudi government wants," or that EA won't even pitch them in the first place to avoid antagonizing its new owners.

"It's certainly hard to feel good about being bought out by a regime that's very much at odds with progressive society, so it is surely detrimental to anyone who finds this buyout morally odious," one employee said, raising the point that Saudi Arabia's notoriously oppressive regime is in itself an issue for some employees.

Another said that "if EA had a culture that had any semblance of a moral backbone, it wouldn’t get into bed with a prince who's disgusted by many of its current employees' sexualities and ethnicities," adding that the presence of Jared Kushner, through his Saudi-backed Affinity Partners investment firm, "just adds insult to injury."

The problem many employees are faced with is that moral objections sometimes have to take a back seat to the practicalities of survival, and the videogame industry is in an extremely bad state. One employee said they "feel gross just thinking about it, but there's nowhere else to go. I'd love to leave, but the jobs aren't there, and I have bills to pay." Employees who own vested shares in EA will make a good dollar on them thanks to the PIF's premium buyout offer, which may help dull the moral sting, but employees who don't hold shares, including many who are classified as "temporary fulltime," won't even get that.

In a way, that reflects the broader state of EA as a whole. Being owned by the ruler of a regime that continues to oppress women and members of the LGBTQ+ community, and who is credibly accused of ordering the murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, is bad on its face, but the massive debt EA took on to finance the deal means massive layoffs seem almost inevitable, along with the cancellation of games that don't meet sufficiently lucrative financial targets. None of that has happened yet, but the mood among the rank and file certainly sounds grim.

"There was a time where execs engaged more and provided more earnest answers about the company, and it genuinely felt like they cared about us," one employee said. "It was years ago though. Now it's mostly just tired corporate bullshit."

Former Arkane Austin studio director Harvey Smith, known for his work on games including Deus Ex, Thief: Deadly Shadows, and Dishonored, has joined with executive producer Ben Horne to launch a new studio called Black Pony Immersive. The new operation features "an elite development team" built around personnel from Arkane, Insomniac, Epic, Avalanche, and Volition, including Smith's long-time collaborator Ricardo Bare.

In case the name Black Pony Immersive doesn't give it away, the new studio is "built to design and develop imaginative first person action RPGs set within well-realized worlds," with emergent game systems giving players the freedom to approach challenges as they see fit. And if you're thinking to yourself, boy, that sure seems like a lot of words to say 'immersive sims,' well, you're right. But immersive sims are in kind of a rough place right now, so I don't blame Smith and company for taking a more verbose, descriptive run at laying out what they want to do.

"During a time of industry volatility, I'm proud to announce the next step in my videogame journey with the reveal of our new studio," Smith said."This effort reflects everything we've learned, and all we hold dear. My favorite gaming memories come from seeing players approach challenges with creativity, deep-diving into our world building. We try to reward players for their curiosity and exploration. At our new studio, we're building exactly the kind of singleplayer games we're most passionate about."

Black Pony's new website is also very on point: Beneath the polished, corporate mission statement typical of new startups, it says, "Through the looking glass, we’re chasing a dream of mystery, meaning, and creative play."

All due respect to Lewis Carroll, that is 100% a reference to Looking Glass Studios, the legendary immersive sim studio that, in various guises over an amazing half-decade run, gave us Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Thief. It is, essentially, Smith throwing down the gauntlet, and I can tell you that some of us here in the PC Gamer mines are pretty excited about it.

The new studio will mark Smith's return to the industry following the closure of Arkane Austin in 2024, a year after the disastrous flop of Redfall. Smith said in 2025 that the shutdown came as "a shock," because the studio had done such great work in the past and was "working on something very cool" when the axe fell. Maybe some part of that will make it to this new operation?

What exactly Black Pony will be getting up to first has yet to be revealed, but there are some clickables on the website that might offer insights. While you wait for something more definitive to happen there, here's a fun in-depth chat from a few years back with Smith, Bare, and fellow immsim pros Warren Spector, Tom Francis, and Steve Gaynor on making PC's most complex games.

Take-Two Interactive, the publisher who oversees studios like Rockstar and Gearbox, had an AI guy. 'Had' being the operative word, seeing as he, and a decent chunk of its then-AI team, were laid off around a year after he took on the role. Dicken was previously a data scientist at Zynga, before becoming its director of applied AI in 2019, when a lot of generative AI and LLM technology was still in its infancy.

As someone who was the head of AI for one of the biggest videogame publishers on the planet, capable of making such tectonic swings that other developers are scampering to get out of its videogame's launch date, you'd think that Dicken would be one of the true believer types. It's my pleasure to, via an in-depth interview from The Side Quest, reveal that Dicken is actually overall pretty skeptical.

It's not as if he's given up on the technology entirely—but he certainly speaks with the same echo as many industry skeptics, including (perhaps tellingly) Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick himself.

First up, there's the public perception, which—when discussing Clair Obscur's lost Indie award wins after its own AI placeholder debacle—says that creatives in the industry "see the use of generative AI as an abdication of intentionality, as an abdication of authorial intent. And consequently they assume, in a lot of cases rightly (I'll caveat the hell out of what I'm saying here) but in a lot of cases rightly, that's a pervasive abdication of authorial intent."

As for the masses, "Western audiences, so North America, Europe, seem to be more strongly anti-generative. And anecdotally, what I've heard is that Asian audiences are more accepting and more tolerant of this stuff … The internet's not representative of the mass audience. So to what extent is the anti-GenAI sentiment mainstream versus vocal minority? I don't have an answer to that."

What has Dicken more skeptical from a place of authority, however, is the actual graft of how videogames are made. For example, a lot of videogames with AI-generated dialogue haven't taken off the ground because, well, more isn't always more:

"Games are curated experiences. When you look at a dialogue tree and there's three options, yeah, you could make that 50, 100, we could have made it 100 options without generative AI... you've got 100 options, but only two of them get you to where you actually are trying to go. Adding more options is not the answer."

Then there's the actual purported productivity gains where, even in areas like coding, where AI seems to've dug its heels in the most, Dicken says it's debatable: "I often see people throwing around, like, oh, my engineers are 100x engineers because of Claude Code … [but] individuals are not necessarily reliable narrators of what the impact is, so you need to be quantifying objectively, and very few people want to run those case studies."

On the flipside, "If you're a true believer, it's so obvious that it's having this massive impact, why would you run a case study? Why would you spend the time?"

It's that true believer-ism that Dicken seems the most vocally opposed to, though—batting aside the promises of generative AI as some miracle tool, because as he sees it, in a gold rush, people don't sell you the tools if they could sell you gold.

"If any of this shit actually did what people are billing it as, they would not be talking about it," Dicken says. "These would be protected like the crown jewels and Fort Knox combined … It's like the guy sat here telling you that there's a gold rush going and you need to get in on the gold rush, buy my pickaxe. The guy should be selling you the gold if he's actually got the gold."

That's not to say companies aren't able to screw you over if they have sold you the tools. For many, the price of tokens has risen substantially, a sort of looming 'oh, crap, we're in a bubble' situation that, among other things, caused the CEO of Palantir to have a bit of a meltdown on television.

Which isn't great if you're a company, because at least with employees, you decide how much you pay them—you don't get that luxury if you're leaning half of your workload on AI: "Where you bake it into a pipeline, and that pipeline has now rigidity, and you are now vendor-locked to something that you know is going to get its price jacked up."

The Side Quest compares it, aptly, to the Unity debacle wherein the ubiquitous engine suddenly jacked up its prices, leading to a year of outrage and what I can only describe as reputational implosion. "We're sleepwalking into that same situation," Dicken agrees.

And yet, the goldrush mentality persists—even as corporations repeatedly pants themselves: "These are organizations that are supposed to be serious organizations that you would imagine would have guardrails against this stuff … The FOMO and the newness and the velocity and all of these things are contributing to an environment where you can't get the guardrails down fast enough to actually prevent some of the crazy."

As for where he sees it all landing, Dicken's experience in working with AI since the technology's inception

"I think that there will be an amount of long-term changes. But in the way that the industry had to figure out how to adopt 3D tools like Maya, it's not going to be the seismic shift. That's my sense. Could be wrong … I think that they are not a trillion dollar business that's going to revolutionise everything. But as a piece of technology, I want to figure out what these things could do for games."

Still, even if I personally eye-roll at the prospect of having AI in videogames—outside of hypothetically neat toys—Dicken is at least cognisant of the fact you need to actually use the correct tool for the job, not just cram AI-generated slop into existing genres or types of games and expect it to work.

"There is a fundamental thesis to a game, and what you put into that game needs to align with that thesis." Examples where this goes wrong, Dicken adds, "is just shoving stuff in to tick the finance earnings call investor box, rather than trying to build the best damn thing you can build that's going to earn the most money, because it's building something that people want."

Rockstar's been embroiled for some time in a legal dispute after firing 30 unionised workers in the UK, which has, naturally, been seen as union-busting behaviour by those impacted. The workers, who are part of The Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB), have been making solid progress.

In June of this year, it was decided that IWGB would be allowed to present its case that Rockstar had allegedly blacklisted its unionised employees—as in, compiled a list of union members—which would be in violation of The Employment Relations Act, which plainly states that you can't compile a "details of persons who are or have been members of trade unions" for the purposes of "treating a person less favourably than another on grounds of trade union membership or trade union activities."

The full trial will be held in September, but in the meantime, the IWGB has stated that folks excited for GTA 6 don't have to boycott the game on their behalf. In a recent video, fired employees stated: "We're going to make it easy for you. Don't boycott GTA 6, win justice for the people who helped make it.

"We spent years pouring our hard work, skill, and creativity into making GTA. And we want people to experience the universe that we helped build. But that doesn't mean we want you to let Rockstar off the hook."

They then go on to remind us of the shockingly cutthroat way in which they were fired—which the union called, back then, "one of the most blatant and ruthless acts of union busting in the history of the games industry."

The video continues: "Without warning, we were called into meetings and fired without representation, evidence, or a chance to respond. In minutes, we lost our jobs, our income, our work on GTA, and had 'gross misconduct' stamped on our records."

Instead, the union calls for concerned gamers to buy a t-shirt from the IWGB, with all proceeds going towards legal funds for the upcoming dispute.

Rockstar insists that the developers in question "distributed and discussed confidential information", something the IWGB described as an attempt to "mischaracterise workers speaking about their working conditions in a private forum as 'leaking information'." Then-prime minister Keir Starmer commented on the dismissal as "a deeply concerning case."

Warren Spector is one of the industry's most storied developers, particularly among fans of immersive sims. His leading roles on games like Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Deus Ex—and you know what, even Invisible War and Deadly Shadows, which are probably better than you think—established him as one of the field's most admired and enduring names. And now, after doing it for more than 40 years, he's calling it a day.

"Let me cut right to the chase. I'm retiring from game development," Spector wrote on LinkedIn. "At least I think so. I've been here before and changed my mind but this time I'm pretty sure I mean it."

Spector said he's had a "great career" and wouldn't change a thing, but added that he's coming up on 44 years as a developer, a span that's seen him work on tabletop RPGs, board games, and "more digital games than [he] can remember," as part of teams ranging in size from a dozen people to 800. "I've worked for big companies and done startups," he wrote. "I like to think I've helped some insanely talented people along in their careers. (That last is the most important.)

"With all that behind me and with age and health (my business) catching up with me I'm feeling like I've done what I set out to do. It's time to write some books, do a lot of reading, do some lecturing, maybe do some consulting. (Feel free to get in touch about those last two.) Also there's a keyboard here just waiting for me to get my piano chops back."

That reflects something I've always respected and admired about Spector: He's commonly held up as the "creator" of this game or that (I do it myself) but he's made a point in the past of reminding people that these aren't solo ventures.

"You don't ship anything, let alone anything good, without a great team. The Deus Ex concept may have been mine, but the game itself, and all kudos aimed at it, belong to the great, great team that bought into a vision and made it a reality," he said in 2025, marking the 25th anniversary of Deus Ex. More recently, he took a similar stance with Epic Mickey, calling out Disney for failing to give "the team at Junction Point" proper credit for bringing Oswald the Lucky Rabbit back into the public eye.

Spector said he has mixed feelings about his retirement, saying there are three games in particular he'd still like to make: "One is very big... one is very small... and one I don't know how to make which scares me." But the business has changed, "and it's just not as much fun" anymore—and, he added, "there's a new generation of developers coming up who deserve their time in the sun."

He also hasn't had much luck with his more recent venture at Otherside Entertainment, where he serves as studio director. Otherside's debut game, Underworld Ascendant, was a catastrophe, and while Thick as Thieves, released earlier this year, came out in far better shape, it failed to catch on with players and ended content updates just a couple months later. The studio had also been working on System Shock 3, but that came to an unhappy end in 2020 when the project was taken over by Tencent and, as far as anyone knows, subsequently left to die. It's doubly unfortunate because those are exactly the kind of games Spector is known for and should be able to crush, but it just hasn't worked out.

Despite that, I'll always hold out hope that Spector comes back someday, but mixed feelings or not, he does sound ready to pass the torch. "I want you to remember that games are not a solved problem yet—there is, I hope, plenty of experimentation and innovation to come," he concluded. "And to all you young developers out there, I've said it before and I'll say it again, your job is to make people forget people like me ever existed.

"Will I come back? Never say never. But I think it's time to ride off into the sunset. Now stop reading and make great games."

It's a frustrating thing to watch good games disappear. We've seen it happen time and time and time again: studios spend years on a cool multiplayer thing, bank on it being popular enough to become a live-service hit, then toss the entire project into the trash when that doesn't happen.

That could have been the fate of Deceive Inc, a 2023 'PvP Hitman' shooter that has attracted a passionate, but small community. Developer Sweet Bandits supported the game with substantial updates and microtransactions for over a year, but unfortunately shut down in 2024, leaving fans to assume Deceive Inc would one day disappear, too. Then last month, the unexpected happened: an update on its Steam page announced that not only would Deceive Inc not be going offline, but work is underway on community server tools and mod support that will essentially give the game to the community, and keep it playable forever.

The update is not the work of Sweet Bandits, but an initiative of Deceive Inc's publisher, Tripwire Interactive. In an interview with PC Gamer, publishing director Bryan West explained why Tripwire—which also publishes the Chivalry games and makes the Killing Floor series—is going to such lengths to maintain a game that only a few people are playing.

"The core message is that Tripwire wants players to be able to enjoy our games for as long as they want to enjoy them. So we fight and claw to find a way to make that happen," West said.

"We don't want to leave our games in a broken state. It's a mandate from our leadership, and it's part of the reason why I'm happy to be with Tripwire."

Custom server tools and community browsers were once the norm for PC games, but in the age of matchmaking algorithms and expected cross-play functionality, multiplayer games are built around closed networking and dedicated servers. Undoing that process for Deceive Inc is not a small task, as West explains:

"It's several months of work for a very high-level engineer. It's not inconsequential, but in terms of the gains, I would say it's very important for Tripwire as a business that relies on its reputation with gamers. It's important for us to look at the long term and not the short term of how this is impacting our bottom line.

"We feel like being able to continue to sell Deceive, and not shut it down, is going to be a net win over the long haul," West said. "Plus, we get to look gamers in the eye, metaphorically, and say this is important to us. That when we sell you a game, you're able to continue playing it for as long as you want to."

Or to put it simply: "We have a lot of belief in Deceive Inc as a game, and we know that there's a community. We want to be able to continue selling it, to have it out there, to have people enjoy it."

The live service problem

West described Deceive Inc as a learning experience for Tripwire. The publisher signed the game amidst the Covid boom, when folks were staying home playing games and investment was easier to come by.

"We poured our hearts and souls into it right alongside Sweet Bandits," West recounted. "Launch went well, but it obviously didn't blow up the way we had hoped. It presents itself as a more friendly game on the surface, but when you get into it, it's a very hardcore shooter at its core."

The conceit of Deceive Inc is spies versus spies: squads of three don civilian disguises and act like NPCs (similar to the old Assassin's Creed multiplayer modes) while completing tasks. When a match really comes together, it's one of the most unique competitive games I've ever played—channeling Hitman, SpyParty, and hero shooters all at once.

"Our hope was that an 'Among Us' perspective of hiding in plain sight and trying to use stealth would have been more of the meta," West said, "but when it got to the actual audience, it was apparent the shooter aspects took over."

That hardcore meta made the game less broadly accessible and matchmaking increasingly sweaty, but it "resonated with the people that figured out how to play, and three-plus years later, there's still a core community that gets together and runs sessions."

Before the studio's closure, Sweet Bandits and Tripwire made changes to aid new players, like bot matches and rules that discourage open combat, but "by that time it's really hard to recover."

"It's got that window, and unless you get extremely lucky, it's hard to ever recapture [momentum]," said West. "We love the game, and it has done well for us as a whole, but it was not enough to sustain a studio, even a small studio, in the live ops framework. That was a huge lesson for me."

The experience changed Tripwire's perspective on live-service games. What worked for Chivalry 2 won't work for other games, and as a decision maker, West is now more interested in products built to last.

"As a publishing director reviewing stuff regularly, I'd say any small team that's looking to do that live-service model is a red flag for us," he said. "We are looking for and prioritizing games that either have peer-to-peer setups, or something like what we're doing with Deceive Inc right now, where it's more community server-run."

West calls it the "Valheim approach, where you can hook up however you want, and there's not that crazy ongoing cost. There will be big games and certain franchises where [live-service] makes sense, but on the whole, that's where we've pivoted our thinking."

Sounds like music to my ears. The old ways really do feel like the only way for inherently niche multiplayer games. For Deceive Inc—a complex, crunchy social stealth game—West reckons that firing up a custom server with friends will be not only a good option, but the best one.

"Call it its second life. The 'friend game night' type of game seems to be really coming into its own, and I think that is just a perfect way to experience Deceive, with a handful of friends on Discord giving each other grief," he said. "You might play it only once a month or something, but you've got your rotation of games you're playing, and it just fits in there. I think that's perfect."

Deceive Inc is still up on Steam and very much alive. The beta for its custom server tools is coming sometime soon.

10 billion hours in RobloxToy company Mattel is getting into the videogame business with the launch of Mattel Game Studios, which it says "will develop, publish, and operate original interactive experiences inspired by Mattel’s portfolio of iconic brands." But the approach it's taking to that task is rather different from what we've seen in the past.

The launch of the new division actually arises from a previous enterprise, Mattel163, a joint venture with NetEase that Mattel took full control of earlier this year. Founded in 2019, Mattel163 published a handful of digital card games for mobile devices including Phase 10: World Tour, Skip-Bo, and of course, Uno.

Mattel's acquisition of the company "advances Mattel’s vision to extend physical play to the virtual world by creating digital games and experiences that drive sustained engagement for fans of all ages," a line from the press blast (via Game Developer) I include just because I think we should all have the opportunity to enjoy it.

Anyway, you can expect games of that sort to continue. Another Uno-based game, Uno Wild, is now in soft launch for mobile devices, and Mattel Game Studios is also working on a new game based on Hot Wheels. But Mattel Game Studios is moving beyond mobile development, and this is the part I find interesting: The company says it also plans to release "original experiences on creator platforms such as Roblox and Fortnite."

That's a reflection of the state of mainstream gaming, and where at least some of it is headed. We've seen heavyweights like Amazon and Hasbro try to elbow their way onto the mainstream gaming scene to mixed results; at the same time, Roblox players spent more than 10 billion hours in Roblox every month in 2025—more than player hours spent on Steam, PlayStation, and Fortnite combined—while Fortnite, underpinned by the Unreal Engine, is attracting crossover deals with some of the most massive media companies on the planet, and actively pursuing an entirely new development ecosystem built on its technology.

So maybe you're not interested in a Poochie Pals extraction shooter (or whatever) but the odds are good you're also probably not interested in Brainrot. Lots of other people (mostly kids) are, though, and guess where they're getting it? In a way, Mattel's approach echoes that of Amazon and Hasbro, but without the millions of dollars sunk into chasing conventional markets.

And Brainrot may be where it starts, but not necessarily where it ends. Writing about the Ready or Not-inspired shooter TTK on Roblox, PC Gamer's Morgan Park said it's a reminder "that Roblox games don't have to be terrible." Not that TTK is an especially outstanding experience, but as Morgan wrote, "it's fine, it's free, but it's also about as good as a number of Steam shooters that release regularly." I have no doubt that for a lot of companies whose primary concern is leveraging new markets, that'll be plenty good enough.

If it works—and I have no reason to doubt—then I wouldn't be surprised to see other companies opting to pursue gamers not on Steam or game consoles, but on platforms like Roblox. And not just companies who aren't traditionally into videogames: Less than a year after announcing an all-in effort to salvage Payday 3, after all, Starbreeze seems to be focused primarily on bringing the property to—you guessed it—Roblox and Fortnite.

Hayden Panettiere, an actress with a huge body of work spanning TV, film, and videogames, has died at the age of 36.

Her death was announced by her father Alan "Skip" Panettiere in a statement released to ABC News which read: "It is with profound sadness that we share the tragic passing of our beloved Hayden. She was an incredible light and a force of nature who brought immeasurable love and joy to all who knew her—and to the millions who watched her onscreen."

Panettiere appeared in television shows and movies for almost her entire life, but shot to fame in the 2000s for her role in Heroes as Claire Bennet. Her character was the driving force of much of the show's plot, and where the phrase "Save the cheerleader, save the world" originates.

While most of her major roles lied in TV and film–such as her role in Nashville, Bring It On: All of Nothing, and Scream 4—she had a small but impactful career in videogames, too.

She lent her voice to Kairi in Kingdom Hearts, a role which she would reprise in its first sequel and Birth By Sleep, along with voicing Xion in Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance. While she hasn't voiced Kairi since 2010—Alyson Stoner replaced her in all subsequent games—her original work is still highly regarded by the community. Hayley Joel Osment, the voice of main character Sora, shared an image of Panettiere to his Instagram story with the caption "Rest in Peace".

She also provided both her voice and likeness to Sam Giddings in Supermassive Games' excellent interactive horror Until Dawn. She was perhaps one of the most recognisable names in the cast when the game originally released, and her performance easily remains one of my favourite parts of that game. She came back to the role for a post-credits scene in the 2024 remake, making it her final credited role in a videogame.

Lord of Undead is a "grim" third-person RPG about building an army of vicious zombies in order to maliciously raze the villages of mortals. The goal is to defeat peace and innocence, all the better for evil to prevail. You also get to build houses. It sounds pretty fun and, as far as I can tell, it's the second most popular game releasing on November 19 behind GTA 6.

Lord of Undead does have some advantages. The most obvious is that GTA 6 isn't coming to PC. It also has the most "Follows" of all Steam games releasing that day. Follows are different to wishlists: to follow a game is to see news and announcements about it in your news and updates feed, but you won't receive a notification when it releases. Wishlist data isn't public, but follows, for some reason, is.

Lord of Undead has a fairly impressive 2,649 follows right now, slightly more than Parry Survivor, which enjoys 2,062. Parry Survivor stars a school-uniformed anime character who must fend off waves of masked boys. It's from the creator of Kunkun League, Black Gunner Wukong and Evolve or Die, all of which have between 150 and 450 "very positive" reviews.

We have other games to look forward to as well: at least 30 more. Cute Country has 736 follows and is described on its Steam page as "super cute cure simulation operation single machine masterpiece" (I think it's basically a city builder with mobile game RPG elements). Then, with 123 follows is Phantom Vice Auto, which Chris Livingston has already written about.

Looking further afield, Man Simulator has a modest 9 follows. It's a "comedy simulator" where you get to be a slobbish middle-aged man: there's lawnmowing, fishing, hammering, wood chopping, barbequing, beer drinking, and it promises "meme-style presentation and humor".

And it wouldn't be a day on Steam, let alone GTA 6 launch day, without yet another first-person horror game. Flick is "a first-person body-cam horror game scientifically engineered to spike feelings of dread", which may help to alleviate our feelings of FOMO.

What else? Let's just list 'em shall we:

• Lord of Undead
• Parry Survivor
• Cute Country
• Phantom Vice Auto
• Flick
• Moba Team Manager
• Astro Industry Wars
• The Creator: Live Together
• Dig! Dig! Dino!
• Iona's Island
• Blyte
• Boom Rush: Desert OPS
• Core Logistics
• Sokobomb
• 树人：中国班主任
• Veil Breach: Raven County
• Neo Light
• Man Simulator
• Desert Island Time
• Utopium
• Cats and Pillos
• Anomaly Corp.
• Dungeon Cooking
• Divine Move
• Maximum Security Boyfriend
• G.E.M. Grab & Exit
• Sweet KOL (extremely NSFW!)
• Black Market Space Station Shop Simulator
• Crowns & Tiles
• Space Tenacity
• Ship Shape Slam!!!
• Pavel Repin's #tacticalunderground (DLC)

Curiously, there are actually more games releasing on November 19 than the day before and after (six on the 18th and 12 on the 20th). The same is true the Thursday before (27) and the Thursday after (5).

Will major publishers release anything close to GTA 6? And I'm talking, through the entirety of November? So far, according to our list of upcoming 2026 PC games, not really, though Devolver keeps promising it will.

Top Steam games by revenue (August 4 - 11)

Soulslike extraction RPG Mistfall Hunter disappeared from the top 10 after debuting in at number 3 last week (it ranked 12th, so almost).

Another interesting fact gleaned from just outside the top 10 is that Gears of War: E-Day came in at number 11, which is—as far as I can tell—the highest its reached since Steam pre-orders started on June 7. By contrast, Forza Horizon 6 hit number 4 on the revenue charts during the week pre-orders commenced.

I don't mean to seem like I'm ragging on Microsoft—I'm happy to do so for more important reasons—but Halo: Campaign Evolved has dropped pretty severely, coming in at 69 after enjoying 5th place last week. Assassin's Creed: Black Flag, by contrast, is dropping much more slowly.

It's neat to see Big Walk rank so highly, and it was overall a big week for niche Steam indies: Iron Nest is a heavy turret simulator and ReStory is about fixing old electronics.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Steam review of the week

"EA didn't finish the game so I'm not finishing this revi"

Phantom, on the new Madden game, which is copping an absolute flogging by Steam users.

David Brevik's gaming history began before the arrival of the IBM PC. The veteran designer grew up playing games like Lode Runner and The Oregon Trail on the Apple II. "One that comes to mind right away is the original Wizardry," Brevik says. "That had a huge impact on me. That was on the Apple II Plus, and I loved that game."

Studying computer science at college, Brevik worked at numerous software and games companies before cofounding Condor, where he designed games like NFL Quarterback Club and Justice League Task Force. It was with Condor that Brevik pitched Diablo to then-publishers Blizzard Entertainment. After Blizzard acquired Condor and the studio was renamed Blizzard North, Diablo was released with the expectation of modest sales. Instead, the ARPG would become one of the most influential games of all time.

Brevik left Blizzard in 2003 and has since designed games like Marvel Heroes and It Lurks Below. Today, Brevik is President of Skystone Games, which has published games such as Tiny Bookshop and Mistfall Hunter. But he took a break from searching for the next big hit to guide me through the isometric dungeon of his Steam library.

What game are you currently playing?

Strangely, a game that I'm playing the most recently is an old game of mine. I made this game called Marvel Heroes, which was in the 2010-12 range, and it's an ARPG with the Marvel superheroes. I originally went to that company to be the creative director, but over a period of a few years I became the CEO of the company, so I barely worked on the game for a while. I had to hire another replacement creative director, but I was still very involved in the project.

Eventually I left the company. Being a CEO was basically raising money. I like making games. The point was, not long after I left, the company went out of business and the game shut down. It was a game that I spent many years of my career working on, and nobody could ever play it again.

Along came some die-hard fans who ended up making their own server for the client, and they resurrected the game. So I've been playing this resurrected version of Marvel Heroes on this fan-made server. That's been really fun. Mainly I've been doing it a lot with the community. I was very involved with the community when I was playing. Made a lot of great friends, and I would stream the game almost every night.

It was a little weird because, after I left, they changed the game. They had one more giant update that changed Marvel Heroes [from] the way it was originally designed. They released it on console and made an update to the PC version and changed it to Marvel Heroes Omega …. A lot of the characters changed when they made this Omega update. They changed away from skill-tree builds to a more modern more casual version of the skill trees.

It's just been a real treat. It definitely has problems. I would I would prefer that there were more things to do, a deeper endgame besides just grind[ing] for a couple special items. But I think that overall, that it's still just really fun, even if you just play a couple of the characters. There's like 60 something different characters you can play.

Some of the characters that I really enjoyed originally, I didn't enjoy as much in the new version. Some of the Omega version characters I like a lot more, and probably the character I've been playing most is Thing. But I really enjoy Iron Fist and Deadpool and Elektra and Thor.

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

I had been on yet another Minecraft kick. We were starting a new server and, I often play Minecraft with my family and friends. All my kids are grown up. In fact, my very youngest goes off to college in about a month [and] my second eldest kid has a kid of her own, so I'm a grandpa.

But we get together and we make a server from scratch and play as a family. And we've been playing for a very long time, so when there's an update or the moment hits us, we'll end up starting a new server. I'm definitely the most hardcore of people. I love making all the different machines you can make and making giant contraptions for the server.

It's also changed a little bit. It's been this weird, almost cyclical thing where at first we were playing together and I had to guide them through the game a lot, and then they were too cool for school and wanted to do their own thing but really needed my help a lot. And then it was like 'Oh, we can play together again'.

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

I loved Eye of the Beholder. I mean I love/hate Eye of the Beholder. I hadn't played it in a long time, and there was some other came recently that I was that reminded me of it. I was like 'Oh, I should go back and try it again'.

Eye of the Beholder was, in 1991, one of the best games that I'd ever played. I was super into it. The graphics, the immersion. This is pre-Wolfenstein [3D], so 3D stuff was not really a thing. But this had some fake 3D-style graphics that you were taking a party through a dungeon, and it was turn-based and grid-based.

I had mapped out all the levels on graph paper. I was really into it. And then at the end, I killed the final boss, and a little dialogue box pops up and says "Congratulations, you win!" or whatever. Then quits to desktop.

So that's the worst ending of any game I've ever played. But I really love the game. It's amazing.

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

It turns out that [in] Marvel Heroes I have 540 hours, but there's a bunch of others. Right behind that is my other game It Lurks Below. I have 529 hours in that. And No Man's Sky, I have 400-something hours in that.

I like space games, so they kind of had me at hello, and I just found it fascinating. I loved going around the galaxy, exploring planets, finding things, building bases all over the universe, hunting for special ships, and they've had so many updates. I keep coming back for all of thee updates when they add new content.

It's just been something I've really enjoyed. I enjoyed the combat in the game, the dogfighting-style combat …. I didn't really like the story very much. It's kind of out there too. It was supposed to be maybe a highbrow thing or something, but I just couldn't really understand what it was. I couldn't relate to the story in any way.

I got it right on launch or whatever and I played it, and then would put it away, and then a new update would come and I'd play it some more, and every time an update comes, I play another 25-50 hours.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

I have EverQuest still installed, and that's something I go back and play every now and then. And I played so many hours. Of all the games, that's by far and away—even though it's not part of the Steam library—the game that I put the most hours into. Maybe that or World of Warcraft. But both of them I spent many years of my life playing, and my wife and I would play together, so we'd play every day for years and years. I forget my playtime, but it was years of playtime. I have thousands of hours in EverQuest.

I even play the EQ '99, which is the old version of the game, the original game plus maybe the one expansion. Some of the [servers] are two expansions. I still go back and play that quite a bit. Level up characters now and then.

Even though it's maybe the ugliest game in the world at this point, I still really love that game. It was such a unique experience. It's like trying to explain Star Wars to somebody that wasn't there in the theatre for the first time. We'd never seen anything like Star Wars, and it was the same with EverQuest.

Even though it was totally painful, a total nightmare, and everybody's got like the most horrific stories from playing EverQuest…. I had done a dragon run with my necromancer, and I had bound myself right near where the entrance [to] the dragon was, so that when I died in the dragon run, I could just run back.

But the dragon run was a total disaster and there were these giants that you had to clear to the to get to the dragon first. I died fighting the dragon, and it turned out that it had taken so long that the giants respawned and I [had] bound myself right where the giants were. So I would respawn and a giant would kill me, and I would respawn, and the giant would kill me. I didn't know what to do. I ended up unplugging my internet.

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

Visual Studio. I still do a lot of programming. I still make a lot of prototypes. I still dream of someday making games again. So that is something that's still installed.

I still program almost every single day … I work on lots of different prototypes for game ideas that I have, and someday maybe I'll have the time to actually work on one. But right now, I'm so busy that I don't have the time to dedicate to making a project.

Generally, how tidy is your desktop screen?

It's a complete mess. I have icons for games in one corner. I have tools I use for game development and other things in the middle. Other things that I have. I have the Adobe Creative Suite and other things that I can't live without. I've got all the Microsoft tools. And then I have some mobile games that I play, I'll have PC versions of those.

I have notes that are all over my desktop of different projects that are going on. Notes, feedback, all sorts of stuff. I give feedback on a lot of games and lot of ideas that people have. They ask me to give them feedback on stuff, and so I'll write up lots of notes.

I probably have 300 icons on my desktop. It's a mess.

The Rideshare Stimulator AI fiasco almost, but not quite came to a close today when writer Stella Sacco shared that she had received a private message from Saber Interactive CEO Matthew Karch, who apologized for his hurtful comments to the press regarding her employment and capabilities.

In a separate post on LinkedIn, Karch reflected on the controversy and seemingly alluded to his personal contact with Sacco. But he also couldn't resist taking a swipe at Portal writer Chet Faliszek, who has publicly criticized Karch for his actions—most notably in the form of a 26-minute vlog on YouTube.

The briefest of recaps if you haven't been paying attention (bless you):

• Saber Interactive releases a trailer for Rideshare Stimulator, a mundane job sim where you play a cabbie.
• Writer Stella Sacco claims to have worked on the game before getting fired, her workload then taken over by an LLM.
• Saber's official statement on the matter admitted to AI use in Rideshare Stimulator, but denied that any writers were replaced wholesale by AI tools.
• Saber CEO Matt Karch supplied his own statement to This Week in Video Games, belittling Sacco's competency, asserting that she was not replaced by an LLM, but also that "I would frankly in retrospect have been happy to replace her with AI."

Today, Sacco shared a post to Bluesky saying she had been messaged by Karch, and that "he apologized unreservedly for the way he spoke about me in the press." While Sacco noted that she and Karch remained opposed in their personal stances on the use of AI, she concluded that, "Apologies are simply in too short supply these days to spurn one when it's offered."

Great. Awesome. That'd have been a wonderful place to end things. But Karch also shared his own further statement on the matter to LinkedIn. Karch did not mention Sacco by name, but mostly reflected on his experience, particularly the negative consequences of responding to a feeling of personal insult with a public statement. Karch also noted that he is sticking to his guns when it comes to deploying generative AI in games.

"Resolve issues human-to-human," Karch wrote, seemingly alluding to the apology Sacco received from him. "Escalating disputes through media channels or public statements rarely solves anything. Real resolution happens through direct, personal connection. If you cross a line, own it directly with the person involved."

But Karch's fourth paragraph in the post threw us for a loop. "The digital ecosystem thrives on outrage and surface-level takes," Karch wrote. "Case in point: a 26-minute video essay from an unsuccessful writer dedicated entirely to analyzing a single sarcastic quote of mine and pretending he knew exactly who I am—which somehow concluded with personal remarks about my physical anatomy and encouragement to accost me.

"When 'industry analysis' devolves into personal insults and threats, it says far more about the creator than it does about the subject. Relying on outrage algorithms for industry insights is a trap."

PC Gamer's top news hound, Andy Chalk, clocked that this could only be referring to an August 14 video shared by Chet Faliszek, a veteran writer whose credits include Portal, Left 4 Dead, and the Half-Life Episodes. The video in question, "Who is the CEO of Saber Interactive?" is 26 minutes and 13 seconds long, and Faliszek repeatedly states that Karch's behavior is compensating for something. Faliszek also says to viewers that, if they encountered Karch at an industry event, they should "make fun of him."

To be fair to Karch: Faliszek does repeatedly mock and insult him over the course of the video, going so far as to extrapolate that he has a domineering character, and that his actions are, at least in part, meant to discipline and control employees at Saber. I can see a certain tit-for-tat fairness to getting back at the person who said that.

But also: Faliszek's primary argument in the video is that, separate from Karch's personal character or the ethics of Sacco's original treatment, Karch's statement to This Week in Video Games was a completely avoidable PR and marketing catastrophe that worsened the controversy.

Karch's own conclusion in the same LinkedIn post where he took a jab at Faliszek was that he should have not said anything and left it to the communication team. At the time of writing, Faliszek's video is coming up on 4,000 views⁠—small potatoes.

Karch ignored Faliszek's and his own advice and escalated again⁠—right as things were calming down⁠—by providing so much identifying information about Faliszek's video. He effectively expanded the story to "Saber CEO vs. Portal writer" in a way I am now professionally obligated to make note of.

As I sit here, watching Saber Interactive's CEO have a normal one about how generative AI dialogue can totally improve videogames, I can't help but grit my teeth in the same, enamel-grinding fashion I have ever since companies like Ubisoft started promising a future with AI-powered "neo-NPCs."

If you'd believe the hype, these things are potentially good on paper, right? We live in a development environment where the ambitions of big-budget open world games are far outstripping their cost—wouldn't it simply be marvellous if you could populate a world with infinite dialogue chains and storylines?

In practice, the result is… pretty middling. While yes, some of the isolated tech demos we've seen have been impressive, the actual implementation of those we've seen in videogames, such as the life sim Seed, or Inzoi, which tried to pilot "smart Zois", fell flat.

Even when they're a source of entertainment, that fun is mostly found in the process of making them believe they're pregnant—and listen, I love toys. Putting aside my general distaste for generative AI, I don't think that every single videogame that comes out has to be a work of art. Toys are fine, you can smash action figures together and have a lovely time.

But that's not been the pitch, has it? Convai, an AI NPC start-up, wants to avoid a world without games where background "characters are given one line and repeat that one line over and over again, maybe two lines at best."

Ubisoft wants "fully personalised and immersive experiences", where its neo-NPCs make games "more alive and richer," whatever that means. Meaning Machine, a company that's pioneering reactive battle banter, is pushing for narrative-based games which are entirely powered by the tech. The dream is, in a lot of places, to use AI to try and tell stories.

The problem is, this pipe dream fails at the conceptual level, because this just isn't how good storytelling works. These people don't get it. And if they do get it? They think you're dumb. They think you're dumb as bricks.

In defense of miscellany

The main lie to the idea is the implication that background details, specifically what NPCs in said background say, aren't of any great importance. This couldn't be further from the truth.

One of videogames' biggest strengths is the ability to divorce themselves from pacing. Not entirely, mind—a singleplayer game with a linear narrative is still going to care about pacing a great deal. But an open-world game can take the time to establish, create, and put forward background details that would otherwise bog a story in any other medium down.

There are more obvious examples. Say, a town crier in a fantasy RPG telling you about some far-flung event you'll likely be dealing with—but there are more subtle instances of this sort of thing working brilliantly. My favourite example by far are Cyberpunk 2077's adverts, which are tailor-made to invoke the exact right amount of corporate overstimulation and dread in you as you muddle around Night City.

In a game with a stand-out story, all of these hundreds of little opportunities will be leveraged powerfully to draw you in—they can do more than just hand you information about the plot, they can create a sense of scale or place. Combat barks can characterise an enemy faction, journal entries can flesh out a culture, and so on.

The perception that these qualities in a game's overarching script are somehow "less important" is just completely backwards—they're the backbone on which the rest of the story lies. And even when they're not exactly award-winning, this background chatter still creates a game's sense of character.

Imagine a world in which lines like "Do you get up to the cloud district very often? Oh what am I saying, of course you don't " or "I used to be an adventurer like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee" had been scraped out and replaced with the ability to, like, make them think you're Abraham Lincoln reincarnated, or something.

Heck, the fact that you're probably summoning to mind videogames with hilarious or immersion-breaking background natter proves my point, right? You're already able to tell when it's gone wrong.

Starfield's setting feels bland and dull when compared to something like New Vegas not just because of its main yarn, but because in the latter, its locations and background babble are hand-crafted and designed to surprise you, and in the former, procedurally-generated planets lie next to grey and perfunctory cities with all the rough edges sanded off.

Even just being placed next to a bunch of crap that wasn't hand-made causes Starfield to feel shallower as a result. Now imagine if all of those cities had AI-generated NPCs with disconnected, jilted, random stories to tell you—stories you couldn't even have a shared laugh at with your mate when they were bad. Does that sound better?

In this sense, the idea that AI-generated NPCs are some miracle fix that will give smaller studios the ability to tell stories in bigger worlds just completely falls apart, because those worlds are only made to feel big and textured because of thousands of little scripts that are laboriously written out by hand.

At the risk of stating the obvious, you can't just skip over that hard work and expect the same results! There's far more creativity in all the smaller choices a team of writers makes than the broad, conceptual idea that started them off. Background chatter, combat barks, NPC dialogue, side-quests, it all matters.

They think you can't tell the difference

The reason these bigwigs think they can get this crap past you has a lot to do with the same, broader, executive misunderstandings of what makes good art: People. It's a sentiment that was echoed by id Software's baffled Chris Hays, who has been watching Microsoft push statement after statement that the studio was still the same id Software, even after half of its staff were laid off.

Or take EA's head honchos, who Dragon Age creator David Gaider said believed "you made an RPG and the nerds in the cave would always show up for an RPG, because it was an RPG." It's no coincidence that Gaider, ostensibly responsible for one of gaming's best fantasy settings, was pre-emptively exhausted at the idea of AI-generated story back in 2023.

Nor is it a coincidence that Cyberpunk's quest director was unimpressed by the technology, or Larian's head writer, who called its output worse than their worst drafts. People who know what actually makes a story good aren't cringing at generative AI because they're luddites whose jobs are being threatened—if it was able to put something compelling together, they'd spot it.

They think it's garbage because it's garbage, and they don't want to have a hand in feeding you garbage. It's really that simple.

The biggest insult of suits peddling this crap is the idea that you just don't care. That you don't care if the music you're listening to is crap, you don't care if their games look hideous, and that you don't care if a game's story leaves you confused and hollow. They believe that you will merrily accept the substitute of a bunch of keys being jangled in front of your face over something that was carefully hand-crafted to make you feel something.

To those people, videogames are products. Hasbro thinks it can spit out another Baldur's Gate just by throwing the same amount of money at a different studio, Amazon's then-boss of games blithely said, in 2024, that videogames don't have acting. This is the prevailing attitude—a row of artless suits who are trying to sell you a bridge. Don't buy the damn bridge, I beg you. It won't make your games better.

One of the unexpected stories this week has been that of a rather public spat between former Saber Interactive writer Stella Sacco, who claimed she was replaced in favour of AI, and the publisher's CEO, who tore into her via a statement sent to This Week in Videogames.

"Stella who?" asked Matt Karch, "I had to ask Claude because I have never spoken to her or seen her. We have already said we are using AI for certain parts of the game and will update the Steam page once we have finalized the feature set."

Karch also added that "it was always our intention to reveal this until Stella violated her confidentiality clause and revealed this before we were ready." Sacco, who claimed she was replaced "with ChatGPT" in 2023, called the statement "remarkably pathetic for the CEO of any company to be making."

You can read both parties' full statements in the articles linked above—the most recent development is that Saber Interactive has been seemingly pressed into adding a Steam AI disclaimer to the game's store page, which is present at the time of writing, but was notably not present when the game was put on the store on July 30.

"Once it's finalised we will update the Steam page," Karch told IGN. "In Rideshare we added an unrelated experimental mode to the game to play around with these concepts. It's not the core experience. And even in this case it required us adding two writers and multiple coders to work with AI tools to try and get a reasonable result. Maybe we are bad at business but the net cost of incorporating these features was significantly higher than leaving them out."

Karch then goes on to say that "my PR team is always terrified by even broaching the subject but I would be happy to engage in a reasonable conversation about how AI can and should help shape gamer experiences."

The disclaimers in question make reference to not just these AI-generated dialogue, but also "a mix of radio stations featuring human-made music and AI-generated music. Stations containing AI-generated music are clearly labeled as such in the game."

Karch chalks up the entire debacle to a "publicity stunt… This person was removed from the project three years ago. We have actually increased our writing staff since 2023. If I wanted publicity for this little game though, then I guess I have Stella to thank for it."

The entire situation, to put it extremely lightly, is a bit of a mess—regardless of whether or not Saber's landed itself in troubled waters (Sacco seems to think so), if I were a videogame publisher, I might ask myself why I felt the need to wait to be "ready" to reveal something core about how my game was made, and why I might be making my PR team "terrified".

Could it be that AI is broadly unpopular with the gamers Saber Interactive is claiming to serve? Surely not.

In a few months, Nintendo will release a shiny remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the Switch 2. Given its reputation as one of Nintendo's crown jewels, I imagine it will be remarkably faithful to the original, but with new graphics, some tweaks to the controls, and a few other modern touches—like the kinds we've been able to play Ocarina of Time with on PC since 2022.

Ocarina of Time's unofficial PC port Ship of Harkinian, developed by a group dedicated to reverse-engineering the Nintendo 64 game and painstakingly rewriting its code, has a built-in randomizer, accessibility options like text-to-speech, and literally hundreds of enhancements, from autosaving to tunable difficulty to ultrawide to high framerate support. There are options as granular as letting Link unsheathe his sword without attacking and disabling certain graphical effects so that they can be replaced with mods.

Speaking of mods: There are hundreds of those, too, letting you use the character models from the 2011 3DS port, make the UI HD, or play as Wario if you're freaky like that. OOT's unofficial port was a rarity back in 2022, but today it's part of a bustling corner of the hobby game development scene, where hundreds of fans are reverse-engineering old games to make them playable on modern hardware (primarily PC and Android).

There are both PC ports based on fully rewritten games like OOT, but there are also new frameworks for bypassing a lot of that time-consuming work, including N64 Recompiled, ReXGlue for the Xbox 360 and RecompOne for the original PlayStation. Developing a recompilation is still a major undertaking, done for free by skilled developers on their personal time, but it's far more approachable now than it's ever been.

This scene has its challenges—namely an influx of low-effort, AI vibe coded slop that frustrates the developers who've put years of time and sweat into the tools that make these projects possible. And there are, of course, hype-at-all-costs YouTube channels that rush to make videos on each new announcement without investigating whether or not they're AI rush jobs that will never be fully faithful to the original games.

But even with those problems, I'm still going to plant a flag in the ground right here and declare that static recompilation, the go-to technique for porting retro console games to modern systems, is the most exciting thing going on in videogames here in 2026.

As my colleague Morgan Park recently pointed out in his editorial Embrace the great Tech Pause, the timing couldn't be better. Because the games are old and the process of converting the code to a modern language your PC understands is much more efficient than emulating the entire console, recompiled games can run extremely well on really modest hardware.

Morgan called out the "magical experience" of playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess port Dusklight, which runs at 90 fps on the Steam Deck:

"It's an amazing package—both a remaster and a community update bundle—that outclasses Nintendo's own preservation work with modern resolution support, high framerates, and quality-of-life toggles. Within minutes I had Dusklight recognizing the gyro of my Steam controller, enabling bow motion aiming that's better than a Wiimote… Not only are these hand-crafted ports a huge win for preservation, but they inject new life into out-of-print classics while also making them more accessible."

Just this year we've seen notable recompilations for more games than I can keep track of (though filtering out the questionably coded ones narrows the list a bit).

Here are a handful of notable ones—many of which have only ever been playable on one console:

• Jak 3
• Twilight Princess
• Banjo Kazooie and Nuts & Bolts
• Harvest Moon 64
• Pokémon Crystal
• Bomberman 64 and Bomberman Hero
• Snowboard Kids 2

Those are in addition to fan ports released in the last couple years, some of which really go above and beyond in their treatment of the original game. Like sm64coopdx, which adds four-player co-op to Super Mario 64. Or Dinosaur Planet: Recompiled, which is painstakingly restoring the unfinished, never-released N64 version of the Rare game that eventually became Star Fox Adventures on the GameCube.

There are tons more porting projects in the early stages, and hundreds of games being decompiled, though that doesn't mean they'll all end up playable on PC. But there are some other exciting recomp ports I expect in the coming months that are already public:

And there are some

• Donkey Kong 64
• Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
• Blue Dragon
• Animal Crossing
• The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
• Fatal Frame

And that's just what's on my radar right now—without mentioning a few for beloved games that are heavily using AI. We'll keep writing about the most exciting recompilations on PC Gamer, but if you want to follow along more closely, check out this thread on Resetera, where members are doing the hard work of weeding out the vibe coded projects from the real deals.

Less than two months after the release of its latest game, Unhinged, Netflix is closing developer Night School Studios, as well as its Moonloot studio in Helsinki.

Netflix confirmed the closures, first reported by Game File, in a statement provided to PC Gamer.

"Games continue to be an opportunity for us to expand the variety of entertainment we offer Netflix members, and we’ve built solid foundations in our key focus areas: Kids (Netflix Playground), Party (Netflix Minigolf), Narrative (Unhinged) and Mainstream (FIFA World Cup: Launch Edition)," a Netflix spokesperson said. "We’re especially excited about the momentum we’re seeing with cloud games and kids games."

Unhinged, as I mentioned, was developed by Night School and released just six weeks ago, on June 30. It was seemingly a hit: Less than a month ago, during Netflix's second-quarter earnings report, the company was trumpeting its success. "We really see it working," Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters said in response to a question about the company's cloud gaming strategy. "FIFA and Unhinged became our two most successful cloud game debuts, really solid numbers that put it in the top tier of game performance for us."

It sounds very upbeat—yet here we are, 28 days later, with Netflix "making organizational changes to the business" because it sees "an opportunity to be more focused in our execution." Night School, which Netflix acquired in 2021, is being closed, and Netflix is "planning to close" the Moonloot studio it founded in 2022.

"We're grateful for Night School’s work in pushing the boundaries of storytelling through games with Unhinged," the spokesperson said.

But Night School was a lot more than Unhinged. The studio is best known for the award-winning indie hit Oxenfree, released in 2016, and the 2023 follow-up Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals—in between which it put out the lesser-known but also well-received Afterparty, a game about dying, going to Hell, and outdrinking Satan.

Those games played a big role in Netflix's decision to buy out Night School—its first game studio acquisition. "We’re inspired by their bold mission to set a new bar for storytelling in games," Netflix said at the time. "Their commitment to artistic excellence and proven track record make them invaluable partners as we build out the creative capabilities and library of Netflix games together."

After charging hard into the mainstream gaming space, Netflix's ambitions seemed to shift. Two years after launching Team Blue, a studio intended to be "the next big thing in gaming," Netflix shut it down before it could release (or even announce) a single game. Just a couple weeks later, the company's vice president of games became its vice president of generative AI for games; just a few months after that, he left the company entirely.

Rather like Amazon, it looks like Netflix has decided that its future in gaming lies with AI: In October 2025, it put out the call for a new Director of Generative AI for Games, with a starting salary of up to $840,000 plus benefits.

Netflix is also making cuts beyond the two studio closures: "We believe we can operate more strategically and efficiently within our Games business, and as a result are eliminating some additional Games roles." Specifics on those cuts were not provided.

Sony's decision to stop selling physical disks for its games makes a certain kind of sense from a mercilessly realist point of view—I'd be a hypocrite if I, a person with the majority of my games on one platform (Steam), shook my fist and wept for the end of physical media.

But aside from the sentimental concerns—which, honestly, I don't hold as any less important, there's more to life than money—there is a capitalist argument against the move, too, for both the consumer and the people who make videogames. If Sony ends physical disk sales, Sony decides how much a game on the PlayStation costs, forever.

Such is the argument of one Dutch consumer group that's currently suing Sony for their proposed changes, stating last month that "no discs means no second-hand market and no alternative to the PlayStation Store, so from 2028, Sony alone decides what a game costs and even how long you are allowed to use it."

At the very least, despite Steam's monolithic popularity, Valve's not capable of forcing anybody to use it. You can still use GOG or Itch.io or… Epic, if you really wanted to. The death of physical media for PC means something very different than the death of media for consoles.

The consumer organisation, by the name of Stichting Massaschade & Consument, has gained support from another key player in the growing videogamer consumer rights movement—Stop Killing Games, which posted a video to its YouTube channel explaining its choice to throw its weight behind SM&C.

"Have you ever noticed that digital PlayStation games are more expensive than physical ones?" asks the video. I decided to fact-check this real quick, and, surely enough—if I wanted to buy Spider-Man 2 from the store, I'd currently have to shell out £69.99. If I wanted that same game from Amazon, I could get it for £37.77. GameUK has a deal for £59.99, currently. Some eBay listings for second-hand copies are going for as little as a tenner at the time of writing.

"You'd expect digital games to be cheaper—so what's going on? Sony has a monopoly on digital game sales on PlayStation … And once Sony stops selling physical games in 2028, you won't have any choice at all."

The video's description reads: "We're backing SM&C's (Stichting Massaschade & Consument) lawsuit against Sony over its total control of PlayStation Store pricing. We're putting our full weight behind SM&C's case, with the Dutch court.

"SM&C has to show the court it actually represents gamers, not just claims to. Our support backs that up globally. Every Dutch gamer who signs on backs it up directly."

Stop Killing Games will also be joined by preservation site DoesItPlay, the owner of which actually spoke with our own James Bentley this week, echoing a similar sentiment: "Less options for people is always a bad thing," Clemens Istel says. "Especially if the only option is a future in which your purchased goods can just be taken away or altered whenever somebody else pleases."

There's a problem with new technologies, in that cutting-edge technology develops quickly—in the span of years. Meanwhile, us human beings with our wet flesh bodies and our complicated bureaucracies and legal systems are glacially slow. You can see this playing out with generative AI.

For a few years now, we've heard a lot of overexcitement from the videogame industry that AI is going to let smaller companies make bigger games, that soon you'll be able to generate your own concept art, your own music, your own videogame dialogue—and, of course, the deeply tedious phrase "democratising art".

In actuality, generative AI is more of a plagiarism machine, often spitting out carbon copies and, even when it's not doing that, still requires countless copyrighted works (which sometimes have to literally be burned) to actually function. That legal heat has spooked videogame companies, so says lawyer Haley MacLean in an interview with our friends over at GamesRadar+.

MacLean, both a corporate IP lawyer and a videogame specialist at Voyer Law, tells the site that no-AI clauses are on the rise, particularly in the last year: "It's turned around, especially in the past year. I would say about two to three-ish years ago, you'd see a little bit of it … Even the smaller, more simple publishing studios are like, 'Let's include this just to cover our butts.'

"So now it's just boilerplate, to the point that if I did encounter one that didn't have a gen AI clause, if the publisher was creating assets too, I would say we need to push for that to make sure the publisher is not using gen AI in the marketing, porting, QA of your game."

It's not all too surprising, even from a ruthless capitalist perspective. There's a tension between videogame platforms, who are incentivised to rid themselves of the tides of AI slop lapping at their shores, and developers themselves. The former is encouraged to add large, obvious disclaimers so their users can filter out the garbage, while the latter is utterly screwed when they do.

Back in June, for instance, a data analyst found out that AI disclosures could reduce the number of reviews a game got by 53%, making the reviews more negative overall, which MacLean says causes a pervasive attitude of "I don't want to use gen AI because my community would hate it."

But the legal quagmire is also becoming increasingly insurmountable as legislation catches up—one particular quirk? If you use generative AI to make something, it might be impossible to prove that you copied the thousands of artists who were fed into your algorithm, sure. But it also means that, legally speaking, you can't really argue YOU made it, either.

"Sometimes I feel like I'm going crazy when I see these massive corporations … It kind of feels like a lawyer is hovering slightly over them, because they'll say things like, 'Look at this awesome tool. I can just type in 'barrel' and a barrel appears. But I have to make sure to change it a little bit!' They sort of imply that the users should be transforming every generated asset a bit, but they know that their users aren't going to do that."

MacLean uses the example of the Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis remake, which uses generative AI for its assets—the game's not out yet, so it's unclear if it'll meet this bar, but if it doesn't change those assets enough? "[if there was] an outdoor level and all the trees are AI-generated, I legally would argue somebody could go and use every single tree in the Lara Croft game, that they know is AI-generated, and put in their game, and I don't think those devs can turn around and say, 'Those are our trees.'

"No, they're not, because you didn't generate them, and legally speaking, you have no ownership title over them if you didn't put in the sweat equity to have an artist go in and, inspired by that original first pass of the tree, then transform it into an original tree asset … But I think these major companies who are always laying off, trying to cut the bottom line, increase the value of the company, they're going to cut corners when they can, and I think they're going to get sloppy."

It's sort of a 'snake eats its own tail' situation. In order to fulfil the promise of generative AI—that you could lay off a bunch of artists and just have your hallucination machine dream something up—you need to lower your headcount. But your remaining artists then need to meaningfully transform what AI generates, in order to legally lay claim to it.

And if there's not only fewer of them, but they also kinda resent you for laying off all their colleagues, then that increases the chance of legal trouble happening—or lost sales from just pissing your consumer base off. At which point, you might not even be saving the money that a handful of yearly salaries (which are pennies to the absolute billions these companies have) saves you by way of their absence.

"I think," MacLean says, "We're going to see lawsuits of those types in the coming years when they want their protection but they want to do everything faster and cheaper … What case law in the US and Canada has seen, time and time again, is that AI cannot own because it was not human-made.

"We're in that frustrating middle with new tech where it's very fun, it's very flashy, everyone's excited, but I think the legal issues are going to just be popping up more and more."

Original Story: After noticing the announcement of upcoming driving sim Rideshare Stimulator, writer Stella Sacco commented on social media that she'd once been the game's lead writer but had been fired in favor of ChatGPT. The game's publisher, Saber Interactive, denied the claim, stating that while it did use generative AI in the development of Rideshare Stimulator (which has not yet been disclosed on its Steam page), the story was written "entirely by real people."

Sacco acknowledged that the studio may have changed direction since she was removed from the project in 2023, but stood by her recollection. That could have been the end of it, but now a confusing, combative follow-up from Saber CEO Matt Karch is raising eyebrows.

In a statement sent to This Week in Video Games, Karch claimed that Sacco violated a confidentiality agreement by stating that she was fired in favor of AI, but also denied the assertion, crediting Rideshare Stimulator's "entire story script" to an unnamed writer.

Karch also stated that he didn't know who Sacco was until he consulted an AI chatbot, but nevertheless claimed that she was replaced by "someone more talented" and that he would retrospectively be "happy to replace her with AI" because AI is "programmed to be honest."

Here's Karch's full statement:

"Stella who? I had to ask Claude because I have never spoken to her or seen her. We have already said we are using AI for certain parts of the game and will update the Steam page once we have finalized the feature set.

"Let me clarify that the entire story script, were it to win an award, would go to someone who can walk up on stage and receive it. It was always our intention to reveal this until Stella violated her confidentiality clause and revealed this before we were ready.

"We look at our use of AI in this particular game, which will be a lower priced title, as a plus for consumers.

"As far as Stella is concerned, she was replaced by someone more talented and terminated for a variety of reasons a few months later. From what I can gather she enjoys controversy even more than I do. I would frankly in retrospect have been happy to replace her with AI. At least we would be dealing with someone programmed to be honest."

Sacco responded on Bluesky, standing by her original claim.

"I've seen the statement by Matt Karch, the CEO of Saber Entertainment, and all of the truly horrendous things he said about me. I think it should be obvious to anyone who reads that statement that he's lashing out because he did not want people to know there was AI use in the game," said the writer.

"Everything I said was true. Here's more truth: that statement is remarkably pathetic for the CEO of any company to be making, and combined with the AI use it will do far more damage to Saber's reputation than it ever could mine. This screed will be many people's first exposure to the Saber brand."

Three months after the release of Directive 8020, Supermassive Games is laying off employees. In a brief message posted on X, the studio said it has begun a redundancy process that will see up to 75 of its people put out of work.

"This is a necessary step to help ensure the sustainability of the company," Supermassive said.

The layoffs come in the wake of a mixed response to Directive 8020 (although PC Gamer's Elie Gould thoroughly enjoyed it, calling the game "one giant leap for sci-fi body horror" in their 85% review), but that reception feels almost irrelevant. This is the third round of layoffs at Supermassive in less than three years, the previous rounds of cuts in 2024 and 2025 also citing the catastrophic state of the games industry and urgent need to do something—which invariably works out to putting people out of work—in response.

That's no lie. The videogame industry is in upheaval, and thousands of developers are being let go every year, seemingly irrespective of the success of their work; veteran Brenda Romero said earlier this year that "we were there in the '80s for the crash, and this is definitely crashier."

That said, the whole 'we have to cut to survive' thing gets a little hard to swallow when big companies are raking in billions upon billions every year, and top executives are taking home multi-million-dollar incomes. Supermassive isn't Blizzard, but it is a division of Nordisk Film, which is owned by Egmont Group, which had an operating profit of €140 million ($162 million) on revenues of €2.2 billion ($2.5 billion) in 2025.

How many people will be left at Supermassive following this latest round of layoffs wasn't said. I've reached out to Supermassive for more information and will update if I receive a reply.

Halloween: The Game is the next multiplayer horror game from Illfonic, the studio behind Friday the 13th and Predator Hunting Grounds. Like Friday the 13th it's an asymmetrical affair: one player takes the form of psychotic masked serial killer Michael Myers, while everyone else plays the hapless survivors. It's set to release on September 9, but when it does, players based in Australia won't be able to buy it.

Illfonic confirmed as much yesterday via its Halloween: The Game X account. "Despite every effort on our part, the Australian Classifications Board has denied Halloween: The Game a rating," it wrote.

"The denial was not based on the presence of the iconic slasher, Michael Myers, or the outstanding kills that can be performed in the game, but rather the presence of a controlled substance. Unfortunately, to our disappointment (and certainly yours) this means that we cannot sell the physical or digital product in both Australia and New Zealand."

Games with the presence of a controlled substance are allowed in Australia, but it depends how they're depicted. If the use of those substances is incentivized, that's a big no-no. And that's apparently what the classifications board has determined is happening here: according to a Bloody Disgusting report from March, citing horror influencer Slash 'N Cast, smoking weed as a survivor can temporarily let you see Michael Myers' "pings across the map." That's exactly the kind of thing the ratings system prevents.

I've reached out to Illfonic to get some clarity on this. I also asked if the studio might tweak the system—or replace the marijuana asset—for the Australian market. Studios like Bethesda and Obsidian have resorted to the latter in the past, while others, like Devolver, have refused: Hotline Miami 2 is still unavailable in Australia.

I couldn't find the particular Refused Classification listing for Halloween on the Classification Board website, though its pre-order content received an automated R18+ rating in July. When I reached out, a spokesperson for the Classification Board provided the following statement:

"The Classification Board has not yet published a decision in relation to Halloween the Game," they said. "When making decisions, the Board, approved classification tools or accredited classifiers apply the Classification (Publications, Films and Computer Games) Act 1995, the National Classification Code and the Guidelines for the Classification of Computer Games 2023, all of which are available at www.classification.gov.au/About/Pages/Legislation.aspx."

"Games containing illicit drug use related to incentives or rewards cannot be accommodated within the R18+ classification category and must be Refused Classification under the Guidelines."

Not that I'm questioning Illfonic's statement: Listings for the game have disappeared from all major Australian retail outlets including EB Games and JB Hi-Fi. The landing page is now inaccessible on the PlayStation Store. True to form, Steam hasn't yet acted on the ban, but it's probably only a matter of time.

At the end of last month, id Software lead services programmer Chris Hayes offered a blunt appraisal of Xbox's management during an interview with YouTube channel Auf ein Bier, saying Microsoft's repeated mass layoffs have proved that its leadership "fundamentally don't understand art."

Elsewhere in the interview, Hayes expanded the scope of his criticism beyond the immediate damage wrought by the latest round of Xbox cuts. Looking at the industry more broadly, Hayes, who's still a Microsoft employee, says mass layoffs and nearsighted cost cutting are producing worse games, because they're denying game developers the opportunity—and motivation—to improve their craft.

While major companies like Microsoft might brag about the "great IPs and studios" that they own, Hayes said they seem incapable of understanding that they regularly harm their own capability to produce anything of value with those brands and developers.

"It is our experience together, our working together, and our past experiences that make the studio good. Yeah, you could just throw away half [of your developers] and bring in more later if you happen to need more number of hours to fill out the check boxes that you want," Hayes said. "But then you're just going to end up with a mediocre game, and people aren't going to be happy, and everyone will know it. And that's the long-term thinking that doesn't seem to be present."

According to Hayes, the biggest publishers and companies in the games industry have lost their understanding of "the actual reality of what makes a good game": Quality, he says, comes from the way a studio's developers have learned to work together—and, as is often the case in creative work, from being able to learn from failures.

"Failures are important, too. Early on when id got bought by ZeniMax and ZeniMax got bought by Microsoft, one of the big selling points was you can have failures and it doesn't mean the end of the business," Hayes said. "In a bigger umbrella, you can be riskier."

The assumption had been that, because Xbox comprised so many studios, those studios were insulated from some of the fallout when any individual creative risk didn't pay off, provided the developers were still hitting more than missing.

Instead, Microsoft—and the industry at large—has lost whatever tolerance it had for anything it might consider a misstep, and games as a medium are suffering for it.

"If you make a mistake, that's the last mistake you make as a team. That team is done. So no one's growing, no one's learning, and as a result, individuals don't have the incentive to care anymore," Hayes said.

As we saw with Tango Gameworks, successful launches like Hi-Fi Rush won't spare studios from bloodletting when companies like Microsoft are holding the knife. As developers increasingly assume—with plenty of evidence—that they're going to be cut as soon as their game launches, Hayes says those that don't flee the industry are internalizing that whatever effort they spend on their work will either be wasted or go unrewarded.

"If they do stay, they don't feel like they need to care about the future of the game they're on. When I first started, it was pretty common for everyone to be fully invested in whatever game they're working on," Hayes said. "As companies move in this direction, that's less and less common."

As that investment gets squeezed out of the industry, he says the damage is getting progressively harder to ignore. (That's a conclusion a lot of us are arriving at lately.)

"A lot of gamers, even if they don't know it, they can feel it's not right. There's something wrong. The industry is not healthy," Hayes said. "There's a lot of things—macroeconomics, the competition for attention—a lot of actual struggles to work through. But at the core, we don't have people at the helm who are looking at the long term to make the decisions to keep a healthy industry."

You won't win any prizes for guessing that Grand Theft Auto 5 has sold well since its initial 2013 release, several lifetimes ago, but on a recent Take-Two earnings call, CEO Strauss Zelnick revealed the up-to-date, astronomical figure: 230 million copies.

"The Grand Theft Auto series once again exceeded expectations, and to date, Grand Theft Auto 5 has sold over 230 million units worldwide," Zelnick told investors on the August 7 call. "Recurrent consumer spending for the series grew 3% and GTA Plus continues to thrive. All led by a series of content offerings, including the addition of the Rockstar Mission Creator, an all-new suite of innovative and in-depth tools, empowering the player community to bring missions to life.

"Global excitement for the launch of Grand Theft Auto 6 continues to build, with the title having an exceptional start to pre-orders. With Rockstar Games' recent announcement of Grand Theft Auto 6 and extended look on August 27, we believe the consumers' passion and anticipation for the next evolution of this iconic series will grow further, leading up to the title's November 19 release."

230 million is obviously a lot of copies, but it has a vague "number big" quality without added context. I'll endeavor to provide some in the form of funny statistics and back of the napkin math to drive it home:

• That's over 10 times the estimated lifetime sales of Baldur's Gate 3 (20 million), and 5 times that of Cyberpunk 2077 (40 million).
• GTA5 has sold an average of 17.7 million copies per year, a number uncomfortably close to the 25 million lifetime sales achieved by the bottom entries of Wikipedia's list of the top 50 best-selling games of all time (GTA 5 is third on that list).
• Breaking that down further, GTA 5's average sales of 1.5 million copies per month as a lifetime figure would make for a double-A development success story or indie royalty.
• It's about two thirds the population of the United States, and almost four times that of the United Kingdom.
• Still nowhere near Tetris (estimated 520 million) or Minecraft (est. 400 million).

Number indeed big. It gives you a sense of just what Take-Two is hoping to accomplish with GTA 6 and its estimated multi-billion dollar development budget. Rockstar's upcoming game is an entertainment juggernaut that has every other developer reassessing their fall release schedule, but it also has massive shoes to fill as far as the hungry hungry shareholders are concerned.

Earlier this morning, Valve began contacting customers who have purchased Steam hardware in Europe to notify them that one of its regional shipping partners, CEVA Logistics, was the subject of a recent cyberattack that "likely" exposed their personal information.

In its email—shared by notified users on Reddit and elsewhere—Valve said the attack took place sometime between July 29 and August 1, 2026. The company explained that the attackers targeted "specific delivery-related information" that Valve provides to CEVA Logistics in order to fulfill hardware orders for European customers, which the France-headquartered shipping company retains "for up to 90 days after that order."

In a statement emailed to PC Gamer, Valve confirmed that it first learned of the attack on August 7.

"Over the weekend more details came through that allowed us to assemble a list of customers that we see at risk of having been affected," Valve told PC Gamer. "Though CEVA is still investigating the attack, we wanted to at least send out messaging to all customers we can assume were affected based on what we currently know."

Valve says the name, street addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and order details of European customers whose orders were fulfilled by CEVA Logistics "may have been compromised."

The company warns that affected users should be vigilant about fraudulent messages masquerading as Valve or a delivery company, and that those attempts might use compromised information to seem genuine. However, Valve says users shouldn't need to change their passwords, and because its shipping partners aren't provided with any customer payment information or other non-delivery details, any unrelated Steam account information should still be secure.

According to FreightWaves reporting, eight CEVA warehouse hubs were affected by the cyberattack, causing shipping delays across Europe for its retail partners.

It's unclear how many users in total have been affected by the breach: Valve itself is still working to get all the details of the cyberattack, as it says it's "pressing CEVA for the full scope of what was taken and how" while it works with data protection authorities in respective European countries. In a statement given to TechCrunch, CEVA says its "thorough investigation" of the incident is still ongoing.

One of the biggest tragedies of Xbox's wide-reaching reset is id Software, which was cut by a whopping 136 roles. And while official statements from Microsoft and the studio have tried to reassure players that it's not been gutted, whether that's just a panicking Xbox trying to calm anxieties is up for debate.

Especially given the words of Chris Hays, lead services programmer at id Software, in an interview with YouTube channel Auf ein Bier at the end of last month. To say that Hays doesn't mince his words is an understatement—and I'm finding it hard to blame him, given Microsoft announced the layoffs one day before Doom: The Dark Ages released its DLC.

"Everyone had just gotten off of a worse-than-usual crunch to get the DLC out the door, finally get a breather, and we were excited for our launch on the Tuesday … Instead of watching in anticipation for people, streamers, and seeing all the hard work they put in finally pay off? Now they don't know what they're doing."

Hays adds that "it was so inhumane, it was demoralising, and morale has never been lower," though it also doesn't help that Microsoft isn't communicating much of a plan at all to folks on the studio-level: "There's been plenty of things said internally that mimics the same things that we've all seen as public statements by the company. But how that actually results in making games? That's not clear. I don't know. I don't know where this goes.

"It is hard to make a game that is AAA, that is like we've done before, with half the people. And by hard, I mean impossible. It's hard to make a game when there are entire departments gutted that you need, entire disciplines that are gone. So if they've got some kind of new plan for how this is going to work, that hasn't been told [to us]. We don't know what that is."

As for the statements that "we're still the same id", Hays says that "First of all, we're not the same id. We're half the same id. It was the people—what made us special was the people and the relationships that we have. It's not the IP, our name doesn't matter. It was the relationships we built and the experience that we had together." From his perspective, most of Microsoft's damage control is to avoid people jumping ship.

But Hays believes that Microsoft's permanently damaged its reputation in the industry, making it harder to either get those same people back if it needs to, but also denting id Software's ability to recruit again:

"They have burned a lot of bridges—it's not just us … originally, we were told, 'we hire to retire'. We were ready to be there until we retired, and no-one believes that anymore. Even the best management at the studio level won't matter if they just decide one year they would get a 0.1% stock increase if they shut down the studio.

"I think as long as we're under Microsoft, no-one will believe anything. No-one is going to believe studio management giving assurances on things, because they know they're not making the shots. They're not gonna trust Microsoft ever, so by proxy, they can't trust studio management."

Hays also says that "a lot of the cuts are hard to understand—to be clear, you can't cut 50% of a AAA studio in ANY way, and have it make sense … I don't know how that works. There are certain pieces where it's like, 'who will do that work now?'

"Who's going to make our skyboxes when we get rid of our skybox artist? How are we going to maintain our infrastructure when we get rid of an infrastructure team? How will we maintain an engine when so much of the engine team was let go?"

Ultimately, Hays says that "these decisions were not made with foresight. They were not made with the idea of a healthy games studio continuing forward … They fundamentally don't understand art. They don't understand art, they don't understand games, they don't understand that business model."

It's hard not to feel the same way, especially given this isn't Microsoft's first head-scratcher in recent years. For example, canning Hi-Fi Rush studio Tango Gameworks, or shutting down Project Blackbird despite then-Xbox president Phil Spencer having to be peeled away from it, or kneecapping Zenimax just as The Elder Scrolls Online finds its feet again, or laying off one of your most senior concept artists at Bethesda.

None of these choices speak of a desire—or even an interest—in long-term longevity, which is something that Hays reflects on: "Part of me thinks that they're looking at fiscal year 2027, and they see that we don't make money in 2027 because we released a game already.

"It's hard to know, since they don't tell us anything, but it's clear that the way they do accounting—the way they align their spreadsheets for their financial reports—is not the way we used to do it."

If you use the Xbox store to buy either Xbox or PC games—and yes, the latter is possible—you may be prompted to verify your age the next time you try to buy an R18+ game.

Microsoft confirmed as much via emails sent to users over the weekend, which I received. "Starting August 2026, to comply with Australia regulations, you may need to verify your age before purchasing or accessing apps and games rated 18+ on Microsoft Store and Xbox Store," the email reads.

To verify your age with Microsoft you can use email-based verification, a facial age estimation check via "secure selfie", a credit card or a government issued ID which can include a driver's license or passport. Email verification is done via London-based tech company VerifyMy; Yoti is handling facial age estimation, credit card and ID checks.

Age verification software has come under deserved scrutiny this year. In February, security researchers claim to have found that verification provider Persona is not only lax with information security but also does a lot more than simply verify your age. Persona is among the most widely used verification providers, with Roblox, Twitch and VRChat using the software. Discord trialed it on its UK users.

Separately, a 2025 Discord data breach resulted in 70,000 government photo IDs being compromised. Dovetailing with these obvious info security issues are growing fears that age verification technology, under the guise of protecting children from adult content, is just a trojan horse for more surveillance.

As of early 2026 both Australia and the UK have new age verification requirements, as do 25 states in the US. That said, not all companies are acting fast to abide: Steam, for instance, hasn't implemented more rigorous age verification in Australia, nor has PlayStation.

Games about cleaning are all the rage. The recent success of House Flipper, Power Wash Simulator and Unpacking demonstrates there's a mainstream-sized appetite among PC gamers for making messy places neat and tidy.

But the micro-genre goes back way further than that. The 1982 arcade game Bubbles was about using a bubble to clean a filthy sink. Cosy foundational text Harvest Moon—like its descendant Stardew Valley—has you gradually transforming a forgotten ruin into a quaint and personalised space. Then there's stuff like Chibi-Robo and Katamari Damacy.

Not all cleaning games are cosy or sim-oriented. Viscera Cleanup Detail is about cleaning blood 'n' guts and The Gunk is a 3D platformer about eliminating space gunk in order to, I'm not sure, probably save the world. And the recent wave of retail simulators have lots of cleaning and sorting.

But the cleaning or tidying game has evolved once again. Its newest manifestation may clock as either a living nightmare or the height of blissful stimulation, depending on your temperament.

To demonstrate, here's the trailer for Toy Shop Tidy Up, which launched on August 7:

With all due respect to both the creators Shiftmoon and those enthusiastic about this new virtual-tidying frontier, this trailer gives me a panic attack. But it's far from the only recent PC game focused entirely on sorting through a massive pile of objects all the better to place them on shelves.

Toy Shop Tidy Up has only been a very modest success so far, but the Steam user reviews so far offer some insight into the appeal of this microgenre.

"Although it’s a relaxing game, it’s missing that satisfying feeling of placing every item exactly where it belongs," writes Sosich. Another user, Joker, agrees. "Great base game, but the one thing I wish it had, would be that the toys had their own spot to put them in, rather than just being able to place them anywhere in the area."

For a more demanding experience, these users have a number of games to choose from, all released in 2026. Cellar Keeper, also released on August 7, plonks the player in a wine cellar and tasks them with returning exactly 2,448 wine bottles to their "proper" shelf. In other words, critics of Toy Shop Tidy Up will be pleased, because every bottle must be sorted by their variety and stacked exactly where it belongs.

"Watching disorder disappear is its own reward," promises the store description.

Many user reviews of Cellar Keeper refer back to what is clearly considered the high watermark of this burgeoning orthodoxy: Released in April, Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! has players inhabit a cosy oaken library strewn with 3,072 books. These must all go back on shelves, and in the right order. Among the key features of Librarian are listed "visual satisfaction" and "strategic efficiency".

Librarian is by far the most successful sorting game thus far: its peak all-time concurrent players figure is 29,469. Over 3,200 people are playing it as I write. It has over 17,000 "very positive" reviews.

Taking a more arch approach is Supermarket Chaos, which crash landed onto Steam on June 30. Thanks to an errant robot shelf-stacker with a sudden distaste for order, groceries have been left in a big messy pile on the floor. It is your job, of course, to put everything back where it belongs. This outing offers three maps, with the most challenging containing 9999 objects. Thankfully, online cooperative play is supported.

The most terrifying entry in this genre isn't out yet, but it does make me thirst for whisky: Never Sort By Color, which dares release in November, takes the same tack as all the previously listed games except you're sorting Lego in a room littered with 100,000 bricks. Thankfully you've got a grappling hook, a sieve tray and other tools to help.

And that's not all! Arriving next week is TV Archive: Tidy Up Together, which is the inevitable retro videostore take on the genre. Last week's Cleaning Up The Puzzle Gallery is about finding puzzle pieces in a whitewalled gallery space, all the better to re-apply them to art works. And also coming next week is Tidy Up Together. I think by now you get the idea.

And like the now-ubiquitous retail sims, sorting simulators are being turned out at a rapid pace to capitalise on the actual commercial success of Librarian. In August alone, and not including those listed above, all of these are listed as forthcoming: Sort Them Ducks, Shelve the Potions!, Shelves & Sorcery, Mall Tidy Up Together, Konbini Cleanup, Storehand, Old Market Restored, Tidy Mart, Game Shop Panic, Big Bad Pharma, Package Chaos and Megastore Tidy Up Together.

There are heaps more "scheduled" for September 2026 and "Q3" as well. Will all of these come out? I severely doubt it. But you're going to start seeing a lot more of these on Steam in the coming months.

Top Steam games by revenue (July 28 - August 4)

Steam releases its top sellers charts on Wednesdays, so the chart below doesn't account for the 1.0 launch of Fields of Mistria, the QuakeCon-themed Bethesda sale, or the recent surprise update and deep discount on Ghost Recon Wildlands.

Mistfall Hunter is inevitably quite high on the list, though we are in a major release slump. The Soulslike extraction RPG only has around 4,700 "mixed" reviews right now, though its player count is consistently much higher than that would normally imply. Its current 24-hour peak concurrents in 37,123 (the record is 44,472).

Studio Bellring Games wrote on August 7 that over a million players had signed in to Mistfall Hunter. That includes both PS5 and Xbox users. It's doing well but—and this still feels surprising to me—not as well as recent hits like Meccha Chameleon.

Three games on the list are there because of major sales: Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur's Gate 3 and Spider-Man 2.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Steam review of the week

"Worst game I have ever played. I got this game in a random Steam key bundle for about €5 along with five other games because it was on sale, and I still regret buying it. I think I would enjoy being electrocuted more."

Qube37, on the joys of electrocution compared to the drudgery that is Cyberpunk SFX.

The studio behind Warcraft, Diablo, and Overwatch just had its third-biggest year for top line revenue ever, according to a leaked email. The email (via Windows Central) reportedly contained Blizzard president Johanna Faries praising the team for finishing off FY26 as "the top-performing studio in Xbox's studios division."

"Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred and Overwatch drove exceptional performance in particular, with Overwatch delivering its strongest quarter since 2022," she wrote. She said Overwatch has been growing for multiple consecutive years for the first time since its release, and that Blizzcon 2026 should "serve as a powerful springboard into a new era of momentum."

Notably, this success is despite the fact that Microsoft is a pressure target and Xbox is a priority target of the BDS movement protesting the involvement of corporations in Israel's ongoing genocide of Palestinians. And while Blizzard seemingly hasn't been pummeled by Xbox's 3,200-layoff "reset" the way studios like Double Fine and Zenimax have, a huge portion of the job cuts have yet to land.

Rumors are aswirl as to what's coming at the next Blizzcon, the first of what used to be an annual convention since 2023. A Starcraft shooter and a remixed follow-up to World of Warcraft Classic have both been speculated about endlessly. But each of those big moments, as well as diversions like WoW's Dungeons & Dragons crossover, seem to carry a big fat asterisk with the unfinished turmoil at Microsoft hanging overhead.

It seems clear that Xbox will be relying on the studio to help shore up its so-so financials as it attempts to "return to growth" by FY27—just two years after its acquisition of Activision-Blizzard resulted directly in 1,900 job cuts and at least one major game cancellation.

Sam Barlow is the director of Half Mermaid and one of interactive fiction's modern luminaries. Breaking into game development with his one-move choose your own adventure Aisle, Barlow worked on games like Ghost Rider and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories before striking out on his own with 2015's Her Story.

Blending FMV-style video with an investigative branching narrative, Her Story was a pioneer in the detective game genre. Since Her Story, Barlow has further experimented with combining live-action footage and interactive fiction in 2019's Telling Lies and 2021's Immortality.

Barlow is currently working on two different projects, one with director Brandon Cronenberg. But he took a break from those to show me around the mystery-riddled file-stack of his Steam library.

What game are you currently playing?

I am trying to find the time to do justice to 868-BACK. I am a huge fan of Michael Brough's work—at this point [they're] the only games I still have and play on my phone, and so I was excited to see him go big with this one and be back on my PC.

I am a big roguelike guy, but also a fan of minimalism and elegance, so the way Brough's games do this 'molecular gastronomy of Rogue' thing, deconstructing the genre to its smaller parts and then refining them to a point where a single mechanic becomes a whole universe is delightful to me. This one has a lot to it though, it's humongous, so I need to step up and prove myself worthy of the full twenty course meal.

The genius and spikiness of the 868 games is that you never feel safe or powerful. Every single move you make could be a disaster. It reminds me of Resident Evil 4 in how I can't play for too long as I find the experience so stressful. But I also need to play a lot to get good! So it is really putting a strain on my body.

Whenever I have a run that goes well and then ends in flames I feel like crap and need to go lie down to recover. It doesn't help that scores in the game can go (really) negative, so it's pretty clear how much it thinks you suck. I want to be as good a player as this game deserves!

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

That would be Warp Interactive's D: The Game. I went down a bit of a Kenji Eno rabbit hole after reading that amazing viral interview between him and Miyamoto and it prompted me to go buy D on steam for a replay. It is in some ways creaky as hell and is not the best and most elegantly or fairly designed point and click game, but that said, it has the juice!

The actual cinematography and vibes are great and once you adjust your mind to how slow things move (every single movement in the game is via a pre-rendered animation from point A to B) it has a pleasant kind of atmosphere. It is still installed because a cool feature of the game is that it only lasts 2 hours and you can't save. If the timer runs out before you complete it, GAME OVER.

The idea was to make you consume it more like a movie than a game. The time limit is fairly reasonable, however when I sat down to play it, I was alt-tabbing to work and multi-task and so whilst I only put in say an hour of game time, my minimised D was still counting and I hit the time limit and was murdered right in the final stretch, so I plan to go back and turn off my distractions and give the game full attention and beat the thing.

RIP Kenji Eno, really one of a kind. The story of how he swapped the gold master discs to slip in content past the censors; and the one about how he announced D2 being a SEGA exclusive on stage at a Sony press conference. He was a wild one.

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

If we're allowing ROMS, I never leave a system without a copy of TAITO's 1988 The New Zealand Story—the finest maze game ever made, and one of my all-time favourites (I used to have a Jamma cabinet with an original board in it, but alas had to leave it behind when I crossed the Atlantic).

But if we're sticking to legally above-board digital ownership, it looks like the earliest would be Dragon Wars from Interplay in 1989 over on GOG. I have a lot of games from this period that never get uninstalled because they're pretty small file sizes, but this is one that I always re-install whenever I get a new machine.

It's essentially Bard's Tale 4, but has a slightly more unique setting and was helmed by the legendary Rebecca Heineman. A lot of people have their foundational CRPG and this was mine. It's a gorgeous game, it feels so complete but evokes so much. It uses skill checks like in Wasteland, so you might be imprisoned in the walled city and you see a pile of corpses they're transporting for disposal and you go to the menu and choose to use one of your character's skills, "hide"—and the game responds and you hide in the corpses and get transported out past the guards.

These secret actions that are never signposted, mean[ing] you have to conceive the idea and then go deep into the skill menus, so there's a real delight of having your idea pay off. It's the kind of thing that's very hard to execute in a modern, 3D, real-time simulation.

The game has lots of these moments, and it carries over the feel of open spaces from Bard's Tale's cities, but here expanded over a huge sprawling above ground map. It has such a tone and atmosphere to it. I love this game.

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

Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island. Over 500 hours of this masterpiece. The game is only a few years old, but I've been a huge fan of this series since the first title was remade on the Nintendo DS and I encountered it for the first time.

It is perhaps the greatest videogame, and certainly in my opinion, the greatest roguelike ever made. The depth of the game systems and the sense of anything being possible is unmatched. Serpentcoil is arguably the best of the lot, with a lot of clever iteration of the interface, and whilst it's easy to lament the loss of the classic pixel art, the variety of locations and enemy types and just the lovely pastoral richness to this world is really lush.

The combination of Japanese mythology and landscapes feels fresh alongside other games' more traditional Tolkien-inspired fantasy tropes. I have completed every dungeon in this game bar one—the harder version of the harder version of the hardest dungeon in the original game that was added in the final round of DLC. I keep trying and failing. But it never stops being delightful and I keep discovering new layers and ways of playing tricks with its systems. Shiren truly is my forever game.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

I've already mentioned Shiren the Wanderer, so let's not repeat ourselves. I think the one I have around like a piece of art on my wall is Riven.

Even though the recent full remake was very carefully done, it can't beat the original for me. Such an incredible work of art. The atmosphere and the richness of the visuals, the sound design. At 640x480 it genuinely feels like a real world we're snooping on through our computer screen, the textures and lighting don't feel like CGI, it's hard to see the seams or polygonal edges like you can even in the most expensive modern game.

I always have the game installed and ready to go. Whether that's just so I can wander around my favourite spots or how, every few years, I replay from the start and make little graphs to map out the beautiful open nature of its puzzle flow. One of gaming's true masterpieces.

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

Huge fan of Fade In, the screenwriting software. One of my first installs on a fresh PC. It's a marvellous thing. There's a couple of 'industry standard' screenwriting programs— Final Draft and Movie Magic—but it's always been maddening to me that they're so flawed. They charge a fortune for them, and they're feature light and prone to crashing.

So along comes Fade In, made by Kent Tessman, a luminary of the interactive fiction community. It's slicker, faster, crashes less; and has more features! If you think of something to be added, hit up Kent and he's going to work on it.

It also plays nice with a few file formats that we use at Half Mermaid to ingest scripts into our game engine and then back again. We work back-and-forth between our monolithic spreadsheets and Fade In and it all flows pretty effortlessly, helping us just write without getting too stuck on the technical stuff. It's also one of those old-fashioned pieces of software that you buy once and use forever! No monthly subscription malarky here.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

Absolute chaos. Some time ago I got into the habit of saving everything to my desktop—all my documents, screengrabs, etc. Because of this I rarely look at the desktop, I'm always opening it up with a few windows left open. But every now and then I jump-scare myself by accidentally hitting the 'show desktop' button and seeing the stack of icons that looks something like the win animation in classic Solitaire meets the 'shunting scene' in the movie Society.

During Take-Two's latest earnings call, CEO Strauss Zelnick said the current computing hardware crisis—you know, the one that's making it more economical to fly roundtrip from the UK to buy an MSRP GPU at Nvidia's QuakeCon booth than it is to buy one anywhere online—is, to quote the man directly, "not a good thing."

But while the skyrocketing costs of consoles and components are threatening to price customers out of the pastime, Zelnick said Take-Two doesn't see increasingly inaccessible gaming hardware as an insurmountable problem. In part, that's because Rockstar's parent company expects a lot more of us will be streaming games in the near future.

The "advent of streaming," Zelnick said, is something that Take-Two believes is "right around the corner, in terms of having something that's low latency and really works well for consumers. Machines that weren't game machines before will become game machines."

As a result, the company imagines its customer base will continue to grow as cloud gaming becomes standardized, regardless of what happens to the traditional gaming hardware market.

That's "if you believe in streaming," Zelnick said, "and to be clear, we really do. And I'm happy to put a timeline on it. I think we'll be in commercial streaming mode within three years."

By Zelnick's estimate, broader adoption of cloud gaming could effectively increase Take-Two's potential user base tenfold. That wouldn't necessarily produce a tenfold increase in revenue, he said, as the company's most "avid" customers are those who already have traditional gaming hardware. But game streaming "creates great opportunity for titles that are broadly desirable, even outside of core markets."

Some amount of Zelnick's vision of a glorious and lucrative game streaming future is believable: It's easy to imagine that there's a number of people out there who might, for instance, be interested in playing Take-Two games like GTA 6 even if they aren't otherwise compelled to invest in a gaming setup—especially as the cost of building one continues to rise.

But for streaming to become a more common standard in gaming, it'll need to overcome profound—and intensifying—anxieties about game and media ownership. From the Stop Killing Games effort to the outcry provoked by Sony's announcing an end of disc production, there's a justifiable unease among consumers about being left with no way to access games outside of streaming and subscription services that can be shuttered as soon as they stop generating the requisite revenue figures.

Even Hideo Kojima's in his feelings about it, recently sharing his fears that "we will not be able to freely access the movies, books, and music that we have loved." While Zelnick was bullish about digital media distribution elsewhere in this week's earnings call, it's worth noting that he previously went on record in 2020 as being "highly skeptical that subscriptions will be the only way or primary way that interactive entertainment is distributed."

In time, however, we might validate the prediction of Ubisoft director of subscriptions Philippe Tremblay, who said in 2024 that gamers would get "comfortable with not owning your game." If the hardware cost crisis continues to worsen, we might not have a choice.

Take-Two Interactive chief Strauss Zelnick has waded into the discs vs. digital debate, and given the company's decision to release Grand Theft Auto 6 exclusively in digital format, you probably won't be surprised to find that he thinks discs "don't really make sense" these days.

PC gamers have lived in an almost fully digital world for years, thanks primarily to the rise of Steam, but it's different on the console side of things, where physical game releases, and retailers like GameStop, are still a regular part of life. But two things have shaken that foundation recently: The lack of a physical edition of GTA 6—a game so big it really does have the potential for that kind of industry-wide impact—and Sony's decision to end disc production in 2028.

That's got some console gamers a little shook, but Zelnick doesn't think it's going to matter much because the digital revolution has mostly already happened anyway. "Our business is well over 90% digitally distributed as it is. It’s already a digital business," he said in today's earnings call. "So in certain instances, especially if it’s a big game, discs—and note I said discs—don’t really make sense for the consumer.

"Also, most instances you have to register online to play anyhow. So if you’re already connected, who cares if you download digitally? It’s all the same and it’s much more convenient."

Zelnick is correct, mostly, that digital distribution is more convenient, as long as you have access to the necessary online infrastructure—which is to say, internet that doesn't suck. Certainly the world is better on that front than it was 20 years ago, but there are just as certainly still people for whom downloading tens or hundreds of gigabytes is absolutely not convenient.

Beyond that, there's also the ineffable magic of game boxes, and the way they make games "real" in ways that downloading from Steam or GOG simply cannot duplicate. Some of us just love those big dumb game boxes that eat up so much space on shelves, and a not-insignificant sense of the excitement around gaming is lost when everything is reduced to an intangible clot of data.

All of that is without getting into the whole question of "ownership," and I'm sorry to say it but for as mad as we all got at that guy from Ubisoft who said we need to get comfortable with the idea of not owning our games, he was right.

Anyway, none of that represents the mainstream gaming audience, and there's no uncrossing this particular Rubicon. But Zelnick said the embrace of digital doesn't mean Take-Two is abandoning physical releases completely: Comparing it to the persistence of vinyl in the music business, he said that Take-Two will likely put out physical editions of games "now and then." But, he continued, "in other instances, it just won't make sense."

Zelnick isn't the only one in the industry who thinks the move away from game discs on consoles won't ultimately be a big deal. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said in July that "there are pluses and minuses, but we think it will not disturb the industry too much," while industry analyst Daniel Ahmad more directly echoed Zelnick's point, saying "the truth is that the console ecosystem is nearly entirely digital at this point" anyway.

Grand Theft Auto 6, for the record, remains set for release on November 19, on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. A PC version still hasn't been announced.

Five years after going public on the London Stock Exchange, indie publisher Devolver Digital wants to go back to being a private company. In a message posted on the company's website, Devolver's board of directors delivered a frank assessment of the company's current state, saying they believe it is undervalued—in large part because of inherent incompatibilities between the videogame industry and the stock market.

There's plenty of procedural guffola to dig through in the announcement if that's your thing, but what's especially interesting to me are Devolver's reasons for wanting to withdraw from the exchange. It's possibly the most succinct 'creating value for shareholders is going to kill us all' filings I've ever read.

Devolver went public in November 2021, a move CEO Douglas Morin said at the time would "ensure our continued growth and support even more wonderful games. Most importantly, it will allow us to retain our culture." But it seems that the opposite has happened: Devolver said in this new filing that in the years since then, the videogame industry has faced "significant disruption and volatility, characterised by widespread layoffs for studios and publishers, platform rationalisation and substantial impairments across the industry."

As a result of that industry-wide instability, "Devolver has faced the ongoing challenge of delivering growth in line with market expectations despite those difficult sector conditions." That in turn has seen the company's valuation plummet, because "the lifetime and long-tail revenue delivery inherent in the videogames business" are essentially non-factors.

In case that's not sufficiently clear, the filing goes on to state that Devolver's value is linked to "the timing and scale" of new game releases, which are not always the most predictable things. That's also incompatible with the market's emphasis on "predictable, sequential growth," the filing states, and Devolver "has at times faced increased pressure to deliver short-term market expectations that do not necessarily reflect the underlying long-term value creation potential of its portfolio and development pipeline."

Going private isn't just for the good of the games and those who love them: Devolver's board also believes it can save roughly $1.6 million annually as a private company, for one thing, and its shares aren't really seeing much trading action, so being on the market isn't doing much good anyway.

But the emphasis is clearly on avoiding the pitfalls that responsibility to shareholders bring: the layoffs, cancellations, and studio closures that have characterized the last few years of the game industry. Actions are louder than words and all that, but after years of watching the videogame industry be relentlessly decimated because growth isn't happening fast enough, I'll take this as a start.

"Being private will allow the Devolver Digital team, especially the finance, legal, and executive team, to singularly focus on the long-term health of the company and less on satisfying the requirements of the public market, which have nothing to do with being a successful game publisher," a Devolver rep said in a statement to GamesIndustry.

A vote on the proposal to take Devolver private again will happen in September.

With Electronic Arts now officially owned by Saudi Arabia, CEO Andrew Wilson has made some changes at the top, appointing former EA Sports president Cam Weber as president and chief studios officer, and former "chief experiences officer" David Tinson—basically the top marketing and communications role—as president and chief operating officer.

The announcement of the promotions came in a message initially shared with employees that was presumably meant to be reassuring, but lands mostly as just empty pap. After waxing poetic about the company's long and eventful history, Wilson said EA is "entering one of the most exciting and transformative moments our industry has ever seen."

"Every era of innovation expands what's possible," Wilson wrote. "New technologies open new doors, but it is the creativity, ingenuity and courage of our teams that transform possibilities into unforgettable experiences. At EA, we've always believed our greatest opportunity is to create what others haven't yet imagined. This is the spirit that has guided us for more than four decades, and it will continue to shape our future."

It's the kind of wordy, meaningless positivity usually reserved for shareholder calls (when EA had those), but vaguely familiar to my reading, too: A slightly reworded take on the increasingly common promise that yes, we're using AI for game development, but it's all driven by human creativity.

AI does seem likely to feature largely in EA's future: Silver Lake CEO and managing partner Egon Durban said the new owners will "invest heavily in EA’s growth, including what AI can do to enhance game development and player experience," and less cheerfully, there's also an expectation of massive layoffs to follow as EA looks to manage the billions in debt it's taken on to finance this deal.

The promotion of Weber and Tinson was similarly exuberant: Wilson said EA will need "bold creativity and exceptional execution" as it moves into its next phase, but fortunately it has "a deeply experienced leadership team across the company."

I think it's notable that Weber was previously the head of EA Sports. Some observers, including former BioWare lead writer Trick Weekes, have speculated that EA's takeover will leave it tightly focused on its dominant franchises—EA Sports FC and Battlefield, basically—to the exclusion of smaller-scale fare. Without wanting to read too much into it, putting the top EA Sports guy in charge of all EA studios can pretty easily be seen as movement in that direction.

Great news, if you're a fan of cool horror-action protagonists with quippy one liners or Grace Ashcroft, who doesn't want to be in said horror-action games but is trying her very best: We've got both coming to the Future Games Show this month, as the voice actors for both Leon Kennedy and Grace will be presenting a feast of games for you to sink your teeth into.

Nick Apostolides and Angela Sant'Albano are known, most recently, for their roles in Resident Evil Requiem—and they'll be helping our friends at the FGS show off over 40 games from both AAA and indie studios, including Tides of Annihilation and Onimusha: Way of the Sword.

PC Gamer's own Morgan Park was particularly taken with the latter, calling Onimusha: Way of the Sword "the best thing I saw at Summer Game Fest" last year, and its penchant for style even cracked Wes Fenlon's parry-averse heart when he played it back in August of the same year. It's one to keep an eye on.

"I can't wait to share an incredible lineup of games with fans around the world," Apostolides says, "Whether you’re into pulse-pounding horror, samurai adventures or anything in between, we’ve got first looks, exciting reveals and plenty of surprises in store."

Sant'Albano, unlike the understandably-terrified Ashcroft, is also giddy with excitement: "We’re putting the zombie-dodging to one side to bring you world premieres, exclusive gameplay reveals and brand-new trailers for some of the most exciting upcoming games. Nick and I can't wait to share it all with you—see you there!"

You can tune in August 26 at 1 pm EDT/6 pm BST, though there'll be more after the main show with FGS Live at Gamescom, which'll have even more previews and news from the packed, excited floors of the Koelnmesse. There'll also be the Best of Gamescom on August 30 at 1 pm EDT/6 pm BST, for recaps, developer interviews, and more.

You can watch on Twitch and YouTube alongside other platforms—including a sister stream from our friends over at GamesRadar+.

Electronic Arts has officially now passed into the hands of Saudi Arabia—specifically, the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund, as well as firms Silver Lake and Affinity Partners. It is with a grim lack of surprise that I now inform you that this will, reportedly, involve a lot of layoffs.

The news comes courtesy of Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, who posted to Bluesky: "EA officially goes private tonight, meaning: EA will no longer trade on the NASDAQ for the first time in 36 years, all stockholders of EA (including many employees) will receive $210/share, [and] EA will take on $18 billion (!) in debt, putting it on the hook to pay ~$1.8 billion/year in interest.

"EA's annual Ebitda is around $1.5 billion, which should be enough to service the interest payments. But the publisher has told debt investors that it will cut $700 million in annual costs including $170 million in 'organizational efficiencies,' per Bloomberg. In other words: mass layoffs."

This is, technically, a called shot—but it's a called shot in the sense of saying that a giant boulder rolling down a hill is probably going to flatten the sand castle it's headed towards. Maybe it hits a pebble and jolts out of the way at the last second—maybe $700 million in annual costs will be cut through, I don't know, pragmatic restructuring or executives reducing their salaries. Perhaps pigs shall fly. Anything's possible.

But given the state of the current industry, I'm inclined to agree with Schreier here. Large-scale acquisitions like this typically result in mass layoffs and studio closures, as was the case with Microsoft's $68.7 billion purchase of Blizzard, which resulted in a bloodbath of 1,900 laid-off employees across the company and Xbox.

That ugly trend has continued unabated: Microsoft's recent 'reset' saw 1,600 layoffs, with 1,600 more to come by 2027, Ubisoft has continued to make deep cuts as it struggles to stay alive, and yes, EA has already made significant layoffs of its own ahead of the acquisition—and that's just the past couple months.

There's a huge flood of talent, both institutional and new, that's now being dropped into a hiring pool already thousands strong—adding what's bound to be a rash of layoffs from EA to that pile is bound to be grim tidings.

All of this comes in spite of the fact that the wider industry is as big and as profitable as it always has been, with global games revenue surpassing $200 billion in 2025. Where's all that money going? Clearly not to the people making the things, that's for sure.

What counts as cyberpunk anyway? Easy, it's whatever games are currently tagged as "cyberpunk" on Steam and therefore part of the Steam Cyberpunk Fest, a sale running until 10 am on August 10 with the baffling tagline: "They say never look back. Cyberpunk says ALWAYS be in the future. Think about it."

Whatever that means, what's important is the discounts that will help us fill our backlog with even more games about cyborgs and hackers and sticking it to the man. Here are some of the highlights.

• Slow-mo brawling with a bossy hacker lady who grades you, Ruiner: 90% off, $1.99
• Immersive sim about ex-spy on the run off the grid, Neon Struct: 90% off, $1.79
• Action RPG where you cross lovingly detailed arcology, The Ascent: 75% off, $7.49
• Baffling vomitcore corpo assassin simulator Cruelty Squad: 90% off, $1.99
• Best cyberpunk story this side of Snow Crash chapter 1, The Red Strings Club: 80% off, $2.99
• Recruit a ghoul samurai and convince people he's a movie star, Shadowrun Hong Kong: 75% off, $4.99
• Turn-based stealth is a good idea actually in Invisible, Inc: 75% off, $4.99
• Historic low price for Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade: 65% off, $13.99
• If ya basic, Cyberpunk 2077: 70% off, $17.99

There are plenty of other bargains in the list if you want to dig down the Steam page, and if you still don't own the original Deus Ex that's half-price while Deus Ex: Human Revolution – Director's Cut is 85% off.

Steam's got a couple more sales planned for this month, with a Pins & Pegs Fest running from August 17–20 that will be all about "Games involving pins (pinball, bowling) and pegs (pachinko, bagatelle)" followed by the somewhat less niche-sounding PvE Survival Crafting Fest from August 31–September 7.

Let's take a look at the scoreboard: A 1TB Steam Deck costs $1,000. A top-of-the-line gaming PC costs $7,000. A PS5 starts at $650, an over 50% increase from its launch six years ago. A modest hard drive goes for rent money. The RAMpocalypse continues unabated. The Steam Machine is a hard sell out of the gate. The reasons for the slow, suffocating death of the hardware market are well-documented on this website, but basically: it's greed again.

For the average person, the latest tech is so out of reach it might as well not exist anymore. It's hard enough to justify the cost of a decent computer with years-old components when every other part of life is more expensive than ever.

What do we do with that information? One idea is to keep talking about how much it sucks and hope it changes. A much better one, I think, is to refocus: Challenge the stranglehold that the "latest and greatest" has on our attention, and instead appreciate what's already in front of us. Embrace your mid PC! Become overly interested in controllers! Buy an emulation handheld! Get into the wonderful world of Linux!

Welcome to the great Tech Pause. It could be worse.

Your PC is already amazing

It's hard to mourn the accessibility of powerful hardware when the cutting edge keeps showing us how inessential it is. Generational GPU improvement has stagnated hard in the past five years—maybe since the pivot to ray tracing, even. Manufacturers now pitch us a future where every game looks so real it's boring—look no further than Halo: Campaign Evolved—and AI shovels slop into our eyes in real time under the guise of "better graphics."

For that privilege we're expected to accept shortage prices in quadruple digits. Kindly eat my shorts.

The mediocrity of the new is so profound that being stuck with "just OK" hardware is increasingly a savvy move. If you have an aging PC, or a four-year-old Steam Deck, or a solid laptop, then congrats: you already own a device that can play 40+ years of videogames, including most of the new ones. Everyone I know has a backlog the size of a phonebook, and if you're building one for the first time, sales are deep and constant.

Developers, both indie and otherwise, are beginning to recognize the diminishing returns of extreme graphics and respond with reasonably-specced games. One of the best multiplayer games of 2026, Meccha Chamelon, is advanced hide-and-seek with basic art. Our 2025 game of the year, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, is an all-timer RPG that scales surprisingly well on older hardware. Nine of the top 10 games in PC Gamer's Top 100 list (2025 edition) will run on anything these days.

I know I'm arriving late to the party suggesting we play some old games, but I've never been more enthusiastic about looking backward than right now, specifically. I've spent the last year enjoying old games that run flawlessly on anything remotely modern, and it's been so enriching that new releases are losing the fight for my time.

It sank in recently that there are enough great games I haven't played to fill the rest of my days. That thought is definitely rewiring my brain a bit—I'm still playing new stuff, but it doesn't seem as urgent as it once did.

It helps that what counts as "old" now includes the games I once knew as cutting edge. Recently I bought Deus Ex: Human Revolution—an immersive sim I played in 2011 but couldn't remember for the life of me—for $2. It's incredible. Eidos Montreal's rendition of cyberpunk Detroit is still striking and original, and it employs these painted skyboxes that blend 2D and 3D to incredible effect. There's so much texture in the parts of the world you can't actually touch—I couldn't stop looking at this imposing view of the Hengsha's upper city:

Today, I think a modern game would just model that imposing upper city in high-detail 3D. It'd probably look nice, too, but I'm not sure it'd elicit the same overwhelming reaction. And just look at these artsy 4K screenshots of the sequel, Mankind Divided, that we featured on PC Gamer in 2016. 2016!

As I rolled credits on Human Revolution last week, I wondered why I didn't appreciate it when it came out. Then I went to YouTube and reminded myself what it looked and ran like on a PlayStation 3: blurry, choppy, and jank.

Replaying it with every setting cranked to max on a handheld PC at 90+ fps was like playing a different, better game that I can now count among my favorites. I mapped quick save and quick load to back buttons, and used Steam Input's inherent gyro support to add precise motion aiming I could activate only when I needed it.

The new retro gaming

A similarly magical experience was playing a native PC port of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess through Dusklight, a community recompilation project that dropped a few months ago. It's an amazing package—both a remaster and a community update bundle—that outclasses Nintendo's own preservation work with modern resolution support, high framerates, and quality-of-life toggles. Within minutes I had Dusklight recognizing the gyro of my Steam controller, enabling bow motion aiming that's better than a Wiimote.

The wildest part, to me, is that it also supports Mac, iOS, and Android. One of the best Zeldas (don't @ me) now runs natively on your phone.

The decomp/recomp scene is one of the most exciting things happening in videogames right now, and you don't need a mighty PC to reap the benefits. Not only are these hand-crafted ports a huge win for preservation, but they inject new life into out-of-print classics while also making them more accessible. The effort to develop them has become its own AI-tinged battleground, but a lot of amazing work is being done (as dutifully cataloged by PCG editor Wes Fenlon on his emulation blog).

Playing the best versions of aged games in whatever form I want feels more like living in the future than stressing my graphics card. It's never been easier to become even the most novice of tinkerers. I'm less than a novice—just a guy still learning what a "repo" is—but I can see the highway to sicko laid before me.

Tinkerer's spirit

In that spirit, a category of gaming tech that I still consider worth it, especially if you can find a secondhand deal, is PC handhelds. The Steam Deck has become a big part of my rotation (and a Linux gateway drug) because of its versatility. It crushes every game from the 2010s and earlier, serves as an emulation powerhouse, and benefits from the best input configuration in the biz. When I want to play something it can't handle, I stream them from my office PC with Moonlight, a community-made tool that outperforms Valve's equivalent. With the addition of a dock and a great budget controller, it has become the living room PC that I default to instead of my PS5.

But when it comes to actually affordable tech, emulation handhelds are where it's at. There's this interesting thing going on where Chinese manufacturers repurpose middle-of-the-line mobile chips and phone screens to make quality, modernized portable systems at accessible prices. Many of them run Linux, but more popular is Android, a scene that's come so far that a lot of your Steam library can now run natively through translation layers (similar to how Linux can run Windows games through Proton).

You might've heard the buzz this year about this strange 3DS-looking object flying off shelves, the AYN Thor. That's an Android handheld, and a surprisingly beefy one. It can competently emulate games all the way up to Switch and even run lighter weight Steam games through the early 2010s. It also starts at $260. That's considered a lot for one for one of these. Emulation handhelds are beginning to feel the squeeze of hardware shortages—the Thor has gone up in price recently—but it gets less dire when you scale down to machines aimed at Game Boy through PSP emulation.

Plus, these things are just fun. They're genuinely pocketable, intentional devices with creative shapes that expose the boring state of glass slab phones and the Switch's standardized "screen sandwich" gaming layout. I keep eyeing this RG Rotate, a mutant Game Boy with a T-Mobile Sidekick-like swivel action that I would've killed for in 2003.

These things may not be PCs, but they reward the same tinkerer's spirit. It's an amazing time of support for PC gaming as long as your eyes aren't locked on the release calendar—a moment when more of us than ever are embracing the freedom of form factor, of open source software, and of preservation, rather than pure hardware might. I'm having a blast.

If tech had to pause sometime (it didn't, but you know, the greed), I'm at least glad it's now, because this hobby was always so much cooler than graphics.

And now it's official: Electronic Arts, one of the most storied publishers in videogame history, has been fully acquired by a consortium made up of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and investment firms Silver Lake and Affinity Partners. EA said in a press release that the takeover "brings long-term capital, sector expertise, and strategic support" to the company, which is now "positioned to accelerate creativity and innovation to shape the future of entertainment."

"This moment recognizes the extraordinary people whose creativity, ambition and passion have made EA one of the world's leading interactive entertainment companies," Electronic Arts CEO and chairman Andrew Wilson said in a statement.

"We're entering this next chapter from a position of strength with partners who share our vision and ambition. Together, we'll invest boldly, accelerate innovation, and build the next generation of games and experiences for the hundreds of millions of players and fans who inspire us every day."

While EA's new ownership is nominally a consortium, the deal leaves Saudi Arabia firmly in control of the company, with an ownership stake of 93.4%. That's caused some concern among observers who worry that the kingdom's notorious repression of human rights, particularly among women and the LGBTQ+ community, leave the company's future support for inclusive games like The Sims—or anything that's not "guns and football," as former BioWare lead writer Trick Weekes put it—in jeopardy.

Wilson has previously said the company's values will "remain unchanged" under its new owners, but Saudi Arabia hasn't been shy about using videogames to sportswash its reputation in the past, and I see little reason to expect that to change now that it has full control of one of the world's biggest and best-known game publishers.

Still, money talks, as the saying goes, and an awful lot of it was thrown around in this deal. Saudi Arabia's purchase of EA is the biggest leveraged buyout in private equity history, which imposes significant financial risks alongside all the moral ones. No one really knows what to expect from EA going forward, but—again, invoking Weekes—it does seem that anything not EA Sports FC or Battlefield is subject to at least some uncertainty.

The specter of an increased focus on AI has also loomed over this deal, as EA has spent the last year and change laying off game devs—a move possibly aimed at helping lighten the $20 billion debt load EA has taken on to finance the deal. That didn't stop the company from giving Wilson $38 million for a year of whatever he does, though—$8 million more than he got last year.

In any event, Silver Lake CEO and managing partner Egon Durban effectively confirmed that EA is indeed looking to AI as the future. "EA’s franchises are some of the most beloved in entertainment, combining exceptional creative talent with a relentless focus on players," Durban said. "As long-term investors in technology, we admire how EA’s innovation fuels imagination and human connection.

"We’re proud to join with PIF and Affinity Partners to invest heavily in EA’s growth, including what AI can do to enhance game development and player experience, and excited to partner with Andrew and the EA team as they raise the bar for fans everywhere."

And yes, Jared Kushner, son-in-law of US president Donald Trump and owner of Affinity Partners, had similarly upbeat comments on the whole thing: "EA has created stories, characters, and communities that have become part of everyday life for hundreds of millions of people. We're excited to support the company as it continues to reach new audiences, inspire the next generation of creators, and expand the ways people around the world connect through play."

While a minority player on the financial side, Kushner was presumably key in getting the deal done: Along with being Trump's son-in-law, he has significant financial ties with Saudi Arabia through the PIF's $2 billion investment in Affinity Partners. Kushner is also a US diplomatic envoy to the Middle East.

With the purchase complete, Electronic Arts will be delisted from the NASDAQ.

Last month, as it continued to navigate the PR craters left by its thousands of layoffs and IDF patronage, Microsoft announced that it was bringing four original Xbox games to PC through a new Backward Compatibility for PC program. Now, it seems Microsoft has bigger PC port plans in store, expanding its backwards-facing content strategy.

According to reporting from The Verge, a leaked document sent to developers indicates that Microsoft is planning to enable developers to allow their previously-released Xbox 360 games to be purchased and played on PC. The Xbox 360 backwards compatibility will reportedly be available on "Xbox PCs," Microsoft's upcoming Project Helix, and handheld devices.

Expected to launch via a "gradual" rollout between 2027 and 2028, the service will reportedly let developers opt into allowing PC backwards compatibility for their games in their Xbox 360 release catalogue.

An eventual emergence of Xbox 360 backwards compatibility seemed likely, as users realized last month that the four OG Xbox games newly released for PC were running in an Xbox emulator that was, itself, running inside an Xbox 360 emulator. With "minimal" reverse-engineering, emulator developers were able to get Microsoft's nested emulation solution to run dumped Xbox 360 games.

The leaked document also provided details for the disc-to-digital program that previous Verge reporting said was in testing at Microsoft, which will allow owners of Xbox One and Xbox Series X game discs to obtain a digital license for the game across Xbox devices. Unfortunately, that service doesn't seem to extend to Xbox 360 discs; if I had to speculate, I'd guess it's because 360 discs likely lack the disc-level licensing tech that Xbox had originally planned to utilize with the Xbox One launch.

But users who already own a digital copy of Lost Odyssey might soon be able to play it on PC—something PC Gamer has been hoping for since at least 2017.

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