Minecraft has a new boss: Maria Angelidou-Smith, who is joining Microsoft from Reddit, where she spent not quite a year as the platform's chief product officer.

"We wanted someone who has built products for communities at enormous scale, who is deeply technical, and who understands how creators, product, technology, and monetization come together," Xbox CEO Asha Sharma said. "Maria brings a rare combination of those experiences. She spent nearly a decade at Meta, where she led Facebook Groups used by more than 1.8 billion people each month, as well as Events, Creators, Search, Profile, and Monetization.

"She later led product and technology at Personio and served as Chief Product Officer at Reddit, another of the world’s largest community platforms. She has built products used by billions of people and led product and engineering organizations through significant growth and change."

Angelidou-Smith also has "a respect for what makes Minecraft special," Sharma said. "Her first priority will be learning from the teams and communities who know Minecraft best."

Just three months after Microsoft shot down a racist conspiracy theory claiming the company was laying off thousands of American workers so it could replace them with foreigners via the H-1B visa program, the Trump administration has suspended the company's ability to apply for green cards for workers on the H-1B program, accusing it of fraudulently using the program to replace American workers with foreigners.

"The H-1B visa program is meant to allow companies to bring in the best of the best from outside the United States of America for positions that are completely impossible to fill with American workers," US vice president JD Vance said (via AP). "Unfortunately, the program has become rife with fraud over the last several years—probably the last several decades.

"There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused this system more than Microsoft ... Microsoft laid off last year 6,000 American workers. At the same time, the company benefitted from 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards. In other words, if you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one-and-a-half foreign indentured servants."

Calling H-1B visa holders "indentured servants" is certainly a choice, painting legal immigration as a form of human trafficking and the workers as victims, rather than specialists who've chosen to work in the United States.

Microsoft will still be able to hire non-American workers on a temporary basis via the H-1B program. It simply won't be able to apply to make them permanent, and thus grant them permanent residency, via the green card program—something that clearly does not comport with the Trump administration's intense focus on mass deportations.

"Our message to Microsoft and to any other foreign or domestic corporation is quite simple," Vance said. "We obviously want you to thrive in the United States of America. We want people to invest in the United States of America, but we want you to employ American workers.

"And so our message to Microsoft is you're a great American company, but you've got to hire great American workers. You cannot lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign indentured servants."

Responding to Vance's message, Microsoft issued a statement saying it looks forward to "providing the administration with additional information," including that 80% of the roughly 6,000 H-1B applications it filed in the previous fiscal year "were to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees," not to hire new employees. The remaining 20%, Microsoft said, were for new employees who were already in the country legally, rather than new arrivals.

Microsoft also addressed Vance's "indentured servants" comment directly, as well as claims that H-1B workers in general are paid significantly less than their American counterparts, saying it pays employees on H-1B visas "the same as any other employees doing comparable work."

Ironically, the suspension of Microsoft's ability to apply for permanent residency for H-1B visa holders comes on the same day that US president Donald Trump presented Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. Other recipients honored today include X owner Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Dell Technologies chief Michael Dell, all of whom have been friendly with the Trump administration.

Trump recently disclosed significant Nvidia stock trades made in August, according to a new Reuters report. In September, the president renamed artificial intelligence to "Super Intelligence" and allowed the AI industry in the US to self-regulate.

More big news out of Xbox today: A new division called Xbox XP will take the lead on "film and television, consumer products, strategic partnerships, and live experiences."

As detailed on today's announcement, here's what that breaks down to:

• XBOX PICTURES: Bringing our worlds and characters to new audiences through film, television, and other forms of linear storytelling.
• XBOX PRODUCTS: Creating products that are authentic to the fandom that allow fans to celebrate and express the franchises they love.
• XBOX PLACES: Bringing communities together through live events, immersive experiences, attractions, broadcasts, and destinations.
• XBOX PARTNERSHIPS: Working with creators, brands, and communities to develop new experiences, sponsorships, and brand partnerships.

Xbox XP will be headed by Kayleen Walters, who previously spent a couple years as president of Minecraft studio Mojang and before that spent close to a decade in different brand and "franchise development" roles at Microsoft. Prior to that she spent 13 years at Lucasfilm, finishing her time there as vice president of franchise marketing and integrated planning.

"XP is a play on 'experience points'," Xbox CEO Asha Sharma explained in a separate message, "and formalizes four investment areas for us: Xbox Pictures for film and television adaptations; Xbox Products for licensing and merchandise; Xbox Partnerships for sponsors and brand partners; and Xbox Places for our marquee broadcast and in-person events, theme parks, and other location-based experiences.

"Our franchises can mean more to people than the time they spend playing them, and Kayleen knows how to build those experiences with the industry without losing what made people care about the franchise in the first place."

A Minecraft Movie was a massive hit and I have no doubt the sequel will be too, and it's understandable that Microsoft would want a bigger piece of that action—and to leverage it across other brands too, although how many of them have that same potential is a big question.

But coming while Xbox is in the midst of laying off thousands of people who make the actual games that serve as the foundation of these franchises? The business behind Xbox XP may be solid, but it's not a great look.

Former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, who left the company and the videogame industry at the end of 2023 following its acquisition by Microsoft, is back in the game. Skydance, the company formed by Paramount's acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery, has added Kotick to its board, where he will serve as an independent director.

In a press release, Skydance credited Kotick for building Activision Blizzard "into one of those world's most successful videogame companies" during his 32 years as CEO.

"Bobby led a global entertainment company through three decades of sustained growth, and he brings real perspective on building enduring franchises and connecting with fans," Skydance CEO David Ellison said. "His record of pairing bold strategic moves with disciplined capital allocation is exactly the experience we need as we bring our businesses together."

Skydance now owns a frankly alarming number of media companies and brands, and yes, gaming is in the mix. While the announcement of the acquisition's closure on October 6 focused on film, streaming, television, and "a leading content portfolio that includes live sports, a deep programming library and expansive collection of iconic brands and franchises," it also includes Paramount Games—which was founded earlier in 2026, basically by mashing up Skydance Interactive and Skydance New Media—and the far more storied Warner Bros Games. A Variety report says those two operations will be merged into a single entity.

Thus, the obvious question: Is Kotick there to take the reins of the company's newly reconstituted gaming division?

It's possible: Skydance heaped praise on the former Activision boss for his leadership and business acumen. "He showed a rare ability to anticipate shifts in how consumers engage with entertainment, investing in new platforms, new business models and new ways of reaching fans while keeping creative excellence at the center of the enterprise," the company said, adding that "his experience scaling a franchise-driven business, managing the complexity of a global public company and steering major industry transitions will serve Skydance well as it navigates an evolving media and entertainment landscape."

But his tenure was also controversial. In 2021, the company faced allegations of "unlawful harassment, discrimination, and retaliation," and was the subject of a lawsuit filed by California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing. At the time, PC Gamer, interviewed three women who cooperated with that investigation, and who described an unprofessional workplace where bad behavior was excused.

The matter was ultimately settled in December 2023, shortly before Kotick's departure: Activision paid $54 million to the state to settle pay and promotion inequity claims, and set aside another $47 million to handle accusations of gender discrimination; the California Civil Rights Department (formerly the Department of Fair Employment and Housing) dropped its sexual harassment suit, stating in the settlement that "no court or any independent investigation" has substantiated allegations of "systemic or widespread sexual harassment at Activision Blizzard" or that Kotick acted improperly with regard to handling workplace misconduct.

Earlier in 2023, Activision Blizzard paid $35 million to settle an SEC complaint that it had violated rules for the protection of whistleblowers and failed to disclose information to investors. The terms of that settlement stated that the payment did not represent an admission of guilt.

Kotick has previously served on the boards of the Coca-Cola Company and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, illustrating that ultimately, these moves are all about business.

The plague of games industry layoffs and studio closures that seemed to explode in 2023 has yet to subside. Just about every week there's news of some new restructuring, closure, or cancellation as the videogame industry, particularly in North America, is battered by global economic forces, corporate maneuvering, and private capital.

Here's the latest news related to the crisis that continues to unfold:

SUPERMASSIVE GAMES

In August, three months after the release of Directive 8020, Supermassive issued a statement saying that up to 75 of its employees were at risk of layoff. LinkedIn posts from multiple former Supermassive employees (via Insider Gaming) indicate that those layoffs have now been completed, and that effectively everyone who was at risk of redundancy was let go.

"More than 70 brilliant people are leaving Supermassive: developers, artists, producers, QA, operations and more," Frank Tindle, IT and facilities director at Supermassive who'd been with the studio for 16 years, wrote on LinkedIn. "Any studio would be lucky to have them."

NINJA THEORY

It came to light in June that Microsoft was planning to either close or sell off Senua studio Ninja Theory, even as the studio unveiled a new game at Summer Game Fest. In July, amidst the big "Xbox Reset," it announced Ninja Theory had been sold, but then in September it said two attempts to divest the studio had fallen through, and so it was moving toward a closure instead.

That now appears to be happening, as multiple employees on LinkedIn have reported over the past week that they have either been let go, or are at risk of losing their jobs. (Ninja Theory, like Supermassive, is based in the UK, where a legally-mandated consultation period is required ahead of actual layoffs. Technically, employees in the consultancy process are not certain of layoff, but practically speaking—as seen with Supermassive—it's about as close as you can come without actually being shown the door.)

"It's incredibly sad knowing that we won't get to finish what we were working on," gameplay programmer Katrin Mair wrote about the cuts. "So much care, talent and effort went into it, and I really wish we'd had the chance to see what it could have become."

THE COALITION

It speaks to the current state of the game industry that some developers on Gears of War: E-Day are not looking forward to basking in the successful launch of their game, or even the ongoing responsibilities of post-launch support, but are instead worrying about the possibility of being laid off. Multiple sources at the studio told Eurogamer that confidence in The Coalition's stability as the home of Gears of War has given way to trepidation as Microsoft has repeatedly demonstrated that no one is safe.

That feeling crystallized in September when Gears of War: E-Day story director Juan Vaca was laid off as part of Microsoft's latest round of cuts, just weeks before E-Day's release. Others were reportedly cut shortly prior to that. "We honestly expected the layoffs to hit us post-release, but that seems to not matter now," one source told the site. "Now we're just expecting the next wave, or being reorganised under Activision or something later this year."

Those worries are heightened by the potential loss of performance bonuses tied to Metacritic scores, which are reportedly contingent on being employed at the studio when the bonuses are paid, which one source said "should be near the end of October." Some current employees are worried Microsoft could impose cuts to avoid paying those bonuses: While employees who are let go shortly after the game's launch should still be eligible for the payout, one employee said, "It's hard to believe anything [Microsoft leadership] say anymore after discarding staff in this manner."

WARHORSE: A WARNING

This one isn't about layoffs or closures, but is rather a prediction of continued heartbreak for developers in North America and Western Europe. In an interview with PC Gamer in September, Warhorse Studios co-founder Martin Klima predicted that efforts to reduce the cost of game development (or at least rein them in a bit) could lead studios to move their operations to "countries that are cheaper ... it's maybe Central and Eastern Europe, maybe China, maybe India, maybe East Asia in general."

That's not an entirely new or original sentiment, and as PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens noted at the time, it's potentially good news for devs in those parts of the world, at least until the vagaries of capitalism catches up. But it's far less upbeat for industry workers in North America already facing pressure from rising costs, generative AI, and bottom-line-obsessed shareholders.

Tonda Ros was first drawn to PC gaming at seven years old, after playing the action-adventure classic, Beast. "It's kind of like an open, nonlinear Sokoban that's action-based and not puzzle-based," says Ros, the creator of 2025's Blue Prince. "I think it was the next year where we had a 386 PC in the house, and that's when the floodgates opened … when I played Tank Wars and the original SimCity and Star Control."

Establishing a career as a cinematographer and visual artist, in 2016, Ros began working on Blue Prince. Inspired by games like Myst, board games like Jewels in the Attic and puzzle books like Maze: Solve the World's Most Challenging Puzzle, Blue Prince was painstakingly created across the best part of a decade. When it released last year, it quickly established itself as a modern puzzling classic.

After taking a break following Blue Prince's launch, Ros is currently working on tech support for the puzzler, while also experimenting with new projects. "I think the next game will have to be a smaller game, logistically," he says. But he stepped out of his game development lab to show me around the ever-shifting parlour of his Steam library.

What game are you currently playing?

I'm currently playing Cairn, by The Game Bakers, which is just a gorgeous rock-climbing simulator/adventure game with some survival elements. What's remarkable about the game is how much it feels like rock climbing, and how simple and intuitive the controls are.

I didn't even have to do a tutorial to understand, because that's just how simple and intuitive the controls are—where you control each limb in sequential order. It's just one of the most well-executed control schemes that I've ever seen. And it's not a control scheme that I had seen before.

I think what's really interesting to me is how similar the controls are, conceptually, to last year's Baby Steps, because these are both games where you're controlling individual limbs [and] climb up a mountainous terrain. But one is incredibly intuitive and smooth and frictionless—in the way the controls are executed at least. And then of course Baby Steps goes to the opposite side of the metric.

I love both games, and I think it's cool to see such similar design work conceptually, but with just slight tweaks in the game feel, they're completely different and unique experiences.

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

That would be Big Walk, which is funny because that's also a game about climbing and walking. But yes, I just finished—two weeks ago—Big Walk with my group of friends, and that was an amazing experience.

I have been waiting for that game since it was announced at The Game Awards many years ago, and it's fascinating, because it's the first social proximity chat game I've ever played. I had been waiting for Big Walk for so long that every time other ones came up, I was like, "Yeah, I'd like to play this, but I'm waiting for Big Walk."

It's fascinating because they started development before this whole social chat scene kicked in. It reminds me a lot of Blue Prince, because I started Blue Prince's development before there were any deckbuilders. So you kind of get a sense that this is something that was created in parallel to those design trends, and you see the different decisions that they made, in the same way that I don't think Blue Prince really feels like a deck builder, though you could probably tell we share similar tabletop designs.

I played it with [seven] people. We had been prepped to play this for years … we played it on Thursdays and Sundays, Thursday was a shorter session and then Sunday was a little bit longer. And it was fun because seven people really allowed us to get lost in groups, where two people would be in a conversation and get distracted and fall away, and we wouldn't see them again for four hours. And that was exciting to me.

I don't want to spoil Big Walk for anyone that plays, but the ending just blew me away. I will say that it literally shook me. I think for a lot of times, I'm playing as a game designer, and you can't help but have a little design hat on where you're like "Oh, I would have done this differently" or "I think I could see ways that they could have improved this."

And when I played the last act of Big Walk, I was in awe, because there is no way I could have come to a fraction as good of an ending to that game, as the way they did. So hats off to House House, well deserved success.

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

I had thought it would be this, and I'm happy to report it's Myst, 1993. I have Cyan's entire catalogue installed. Myst will always be on my PC. It might not always be the oldest, but Myst is not one that's going anywhere.

There were many, many years where I just liked hanging out in that world, just to listen to the atmosphere while I was working. Hearing the wind and the oceans lap at the shore of Myst island. It has a serene quality. And it has a very deep familiarity because of how many years of my life were spent in that game as a kid, and especially [because] it was my first exposure to an immersive graphical world.

The very first time I played Myst was at a friend's house, and I was going to check out their Super Nintendo because they had just gotten [one] around the same time, and then he was like "Do you want to play something else?" And he took me to his father's office, who had a PC on his desk, and he booted it up, and I was just absolutely stunlocked … and I remember the day I got back, I told my parents—I didn't ask for a Super Nintendo—I told them "We need to get a computer with a CD-ROM."

I'm glad that my game and Big Walk and these games are finding success … because unlike a lot of other genres that are oversaturated, the first-person puzzle game is really not oversaturated. It's crazy, because you have Outer Wilds and Obra Dinn and all these games finding success and [being] universally beloved, and the community is ravenous for new experiences … I hope it encourages more people to explore these areas.

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

I'm only looking at Steam here, so thankfully I get to discount Battle.net, and I'm going to disqualify my own game. So the winner would be Mossmouth's magnificent UFO 50, clocking in at 691 hours. But I'm pretty sure a few hundred of those hours are because of Pilot Quest, which likely won't surprise anyone familiar with the game.

If you aren't familiar … UFO 50 is a collection of 50 games—so it's kind of a cheat in terms of the hours—that all belong to a fictional 1980s console called the LX. And if my hours of play are any indication, these are not 50 mini games. They're 50 games, full games that have a lot of depth, and they're as sizeable as any of the games from the '80s.

There are games across every genre. I remember when I first heard of it, I was like, "OK, that's a cool concept, [but] I don't really play a lot of retro nostalgia-driven games." But when I first saw a clip, the design work I was seeing was like, "Oh, they're doing some cool stuff." I think I saw a clip of one of the games called Mortol. It's like a puzzle platformer where, instead of lives, you have a spaceship full of little men, and each one sacrifices his life to progress everyone else. I just thought the design work was insane, and I spent an entire year playing the game, and I decided to give every title its due.

I think it's easily my favourite game of the last 20 years. I have golden in every cartridge, and I've cherry'd most cartridges. I speedrun a few of them, and one of the titles is Planet Zoldath, so hours can clock up when you're speedrunning.

My favourite is a game called Mini and Max, and it's a game about a little girl trapped in a closet, and the entire game takes place in this walk-in closet. But she learns through the help of her dog—who can talk to her, of course—that she can shrink herself down, or at least use her imagination to pretend she's shrinking herself down, and so the game takes place at a minuscule scale within the closet …. Without spoiling too much about this game, I have a massive, 100-page notebook for the game where I was just mapping out things to a micro scale.

My official recommendation, as someone who had an amazing experience … is boot it up and just start chronologically. Act like you're a kid who only gets one game a week, and just play that game until you want to give up on it, but maybe try to play it a little longer than your instincts.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

I think it would have to be something that would be inconvenient to reinstall … there's a few borderline abandonware games that I remember having to jump through hoops to actually play again. One at the top of my mind is a game called Lighthouse: The Dark Being. I think it's by Sierra, and it's a first-person, point-and-click, post-Myst exploration game.

It's not the most amazing game in the genre. There were a lot of post-Myst point-and-click adventure games of various quality levels. But I was one I was fond of as a kid, and it's one that was technically difficult to play, at least when I tried to play it.

The work of Michael Brough, actually, his game Cinco Paus is not on Steam, and that's one of my all-time game experiences. I think you can download it from itch. These are games I used the executable files on, as opposed to using Steam. I'll say Cinco Paus too. I won't uninstall Cinco Paus.

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

Adobe Photoshop. It's the software I know the best, and the one I'm technically the most fluent in, having used it daily since 1999.

It's the one piece of software I've used across all my creative pursuits in my career. It's my canvas when I paint. I use it for motion graphics, for compositing work. It's the foundation of all my web design for all the websites I've made throughout the years. For game design, obviously, all the graphics in Blue Prince, and even for niche stuff like DVD menus, which was actually my first job when I moved to Hollywood.

I'm not into a lot of the changes over the last few years. Obviously, all the AI integration. I just want to stick on, essentially, because I developed all those skills. I'm really comfortable in the 2019 model, right before they moved to the subscription.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

For my workstation, it's a bit of a mess. I basically never see my desktop as my monitors are eternally occupied with various game dev software that I never shut down. Unity and Photoshop pretty much have 100% uptime. I don't shut my computer down when I go to sleep, so when I get back up, I resume exactly where I left off, just get right back into it. So that's always dominating my screen real-estate, so I don't have too much incentive to keep it clean.

However, on my dedicated Steam machine, which is a mini PC that I use to game on the couch, that desktop is kept really clean, because I don't want anything on that PC that's not software that I need to run games. On that desktop, it's just a shortcut to Steam, an executable file of Cinco Paus, and one Chrome shortcut to a random Kyle Bosman video playing his Happy Monday song, which I play every Monday for my pet bunny.

I have no idea why, but that bunny gets so excited when he hears the piano at the start of that song, and it's the only music he's ever responded to.

Can we see your pet bunny?

Steam's global top sellers are my Top of the Pops

• A new entry for an older game, Cyberpunk 2077 is number 5 thanks to a 70% discount.
• Who let the dogs out? Wardogs continues its slow slide, dropping to number 4.
• Former number 1 EA Sports FC 27 slips as well, dropping back to number 3.
• Counter-Strike 2 is number 2 and will stay there until morale improves.
• Steam's new number 1, soaring over 30 places, is AION 2: a Korean MMO with the same art style they've all had since Lineage.

Capcom has been on an historic run over the last few years, delivering hit after hit during a period when many other publishers are struggling to keep their heads above water. This year alone, Capcom has released Resident Evil: Requiem, Pragmata, and Onimusha: Way of the Sword, all of which landed to both critical acclaim and commercial success.

So now is obviously the perfect time to wade into the not-at-all controversial topic of AI-powered game development.

Yesterday, Capcom held its own tech conference titled "Capcom Open Conference RE: 2026" during which programmer Satoshi Ishida gave a talk detailing the company's future plans for its proprietary RE: Engine—which powers all the publisher's modern games. During this talk, Ishida revealed Capcom's intentions to gradually transform RE Engine into an "AI-generation game engine."

Now, it's important to stress here that what Capcom appears to mean here is an engine for the AI generation, rather than a generative AI engine. As reported by Gamebiz (via IGN), Capcom's plans are more nuanced and detailed than slapping ChatGPT into its game development workflows.

During the talk, Ishida stated that the project is called "REX", and it involves six different programs that will integrate AI and machine-learning technology into RE Engine. Some of these are designed for enhancing program performance during development. Re:Dox, for example, is a data handling program designed to translate different types of data into a common set of rules for faster processing, while RE:UI is built to provide AI-assisted optimisation the RE: engine's development tools—sort-of like adding DLSS support for Blender.

Alongside these are tools designed to make the process of game development itself faster. There's a program called RE: Runtime, which apparently allows the engine to animate large numbers of objects and characters in groups—rather than running those real-time animations individually. Most intriguing is RE: Flows. This is apparently designed to simplify the implementation of game mechanic ideas, then convert them into a standardised programming language. This sounds vibe coding-adjacent to me, though it's hard to say for certain without seeing it in action.

According to Gamebiz, Capcom says it wants to integrate all these ideas into RE Engine for several reasons. First, modern games are so massive and technically complex that data management is a huge challenge and making changes to that data takes a long time. Second, more than 2,000 people now use RE Engine, including people from many different nationalities, so Capcom wants to create a system that is universally understandable. Third, AI technology is rapidly evolving and is essential for streamlining development—a somewhat arbitrary justification that I'm not convinced by.

Broadly though, these plans fall in line with Capcom's previously declared stance on AI, where the publisher stated it "will not implement assets generated by AI into our game content", but would use it to "enhance efficiency and boost productivity" in its development pipeline. Certainly, none of these tools appear designed to create art or character models and so forth, though it seems like some of them would require AI generated or AI assisted code to function.

It's also worth noting that Capcom's approach to development has worked pretty well for it over the last ten years, earning a reputation as one of the most reliable developers around. While I can understand the desire to make game development faster and more efficient, as the old adage goes, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".

To most, the highlight of this week's big Deadlock patch is the snazzy map makeover, new heroes, and tons of quality-of-life additions. To me, it's all about the patch notes.

I spend a lot of waking hours reading white-text-on-black-background changelogs in this line of work, so when a page comes along that was specifically designed to be pleasant and exciting, it deserves to be rewarded. Valve has a long history of designing beautiful, bespoke webpages to introduce meaningful changes to its games, but the graphics department is really going ballistic with Deadlock.

The City Never Sleeps patch notes are styled like a tourism brochure for Deadlock's refreshed New York City, walking readers through scenic stops across the four major districts (Chinatown, Theater, Haunted Lot, and Plaza). Descriptions weave between in-world storytelling and technical explanation where it makes sense, with Valve's splashes of humor reminding readers not to take any of this too seriously.

Dotted lines draw the reader to new points of interest as they scroll while furthering the map motif, and the page is stuffed with custom artwork for new items and mechanics that might only exist there. Valve did such an annoyingly good job with presenting the next era of Deadlock that I'm almost tempted to play a MOBA (but only almost).

Finally, some good food. Welcome back, Valve patch notes.

Valve's golden age of patch notes

It cannot be understated that Valve pioneered storytelling in multiplayer shooters with Team Fortress 2, arguably kicking off with the 2009 WAR! Update, aka "Soldier vs. Demo." This was before the concept of multiplayer games having seasons, before League of Legends had a TV show, before "live service" was even a thing—Valve had created a cast of nine lovable weirdos and new updates that weren't just dropping items, but telling stories that put the characters in conflict with one another and added context to the multiplayer maps we'd already been fighting in for two years.

It was weird in the first place for an FPS to receive so many free post-launch additions, and it was even weirder for a developer to treat the arrival of new weapons, modes, and hats as worthy of dedicated splash pages with accompanying comic books.

TF2 was the gold standard for post-launch support, and its patch notes drew massive interest, often dropping late on a Thursday or Friday, Pacific time, hinting that Valve may have been polishing until the last minute. Valve's blog posts were never the same month-to-month, often adopting new color schemes, layouts, and original elements for the occasion.

There was no single template they stuck to. The Engineer update introduced his advanced Gunslinger gauntlet and Wrangler as blueprints with hand-written notes, while Scout's update debuted the Force-A-Nature scattergun in a department store catalog. I especially love announcing the Mac version of TF2 with a white, sanitized home page complete with symmetrical boxes and tiny text in the style of Apple circa 2002.

Poring over the "history" section of the TF2 website in 2026 is like uncovering one of those lost civilizations that invented a ton of sophisticated things before everyone else.

We're in an era marked by formulaic seasons, videogames as advertisement platforms, and teams scrambling to alter plans when they're not immediately popular. And yet 15 years ago, Valve had so much confidence in its direction that it could decide to wage a war between Soldier and Demoman one day (live-tracking the kills between both classes—Soldier narrowly won with 6.40M kills to the collective Demomen's 6.37M), introduce a crafting system the next, and then rebrand as Scream Fortress for October.

It wasn't exclusively good vibes—Valve caught flak for its (now quaint) paid hats, paid loot boxes, and speculative marketplace that became a fixture of updates. In a move that I would be surprised to see a studio make today, Valve made fun of itself at the time with a subsequent "Hatless Update".

Deadlock's blogs are practically retro, it feels weird to say. I wonder what inspired Valve to go this hard again. Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2's changelogs do not share the same sense of theater. Their patch notes are comparatively regular, functional bullet lists—perhaps in line with how often those games are updated. Valve does occasionally produce unique web pages for major CS2 announcements or Dota 2 events, but we're far from the days when an incremental Mann VS Machine update was announced with a lavish movie poster in the style of kaiju cinema.

TF2's exceptional, ever-changing patch notes were a reflection of the game they promoted. Valve leveraged the flexibility of an arena shooter and imagined a world where Red and Blu were real factions locked in stupid conflicts. You never really knew what elaborate scenarios Valve would think up next for its over-the-top action figures, and that filled TF2 fans with a sense of wonder that very few games have pulled off since. Maybe it's no coincidence that the only example of innovative multiplayer storytelling in recent years, Helldivers 2, is another over-the-top war game that finds comedy in the futility of endless violence.

Valve is tapping into that dormant TF2 energy in small ways with Deadlock, and it's great, though I wonder if, being a MOBA, the game's inherent sweat level will eventually lead to a regimented, low-nonsense future that's more focused on the minutiae of balance. Whatever Deadlock is up to years from now, I'll be keeping up with the patch notes.

Clones have been a fixture in the games industry forever. For every Mario Bros there's a Giana Sisters, for every Stardew Valley there's a Fields of Mistria, and for every Needle In A Haystack Simulator there's a A Needle In a Haystack, or Needle in a Haystack, or Needle In A Haystack, or Needle In A Haystack - A Time For Goats, or Story of The Needle In a Haystack.

The total slopification of Steam continues apace and the recent spray of haystack games is the purest manifestation of this phenomenon. The first—as far as I can tell—was Needle In A Haystack Simulator, which is scheduled for release in Q4 2026. According to developers Studio Bitdot, a playtest in August attracted around 23,000 players, which is an astonishing figure for a game about finding a needle in a haystack.

I'm not surprised that Needle In A Haystack Simulator is popular, mind you. Games about meaningless and repetitive labour are all the rage. Needle In A Haystack Simulator hybridises sorting and incremental games: the player must manually sift through hay to find the needle, but sifting will also unearth items that can be sold for profit, all the better to invest in more efficient hay sorting technology. It sounds arduous and annoying, but there is, regrettably, a market for it.

At least two needle in a haystack games have beaten Studio Bitdot to release. Needle In A Haystack - A Time For Goats released on September 19 and, according to developer Red Key Games, had sold a thousand copies by September 26. Upon release, the studio wrote in an update that it was aware of the sudden onslaught of needle in haystack games. "We decided to set out and make this game and are very aware that since then, multiple hay games have surfaced and tweets have gotten super popular," the studio wrote.

"We want to let everyone know that this is a crazy coincidence and not us copying ideas. We were already months into production when this all happened". The studio goes on to share its SteamDB data as proof. Then, just yesterday, the studio added a bizarre new first-person shooter endgame, presumably to differentiate it from other haystack games. ("Dude, what are you thinking??" wrote user djcassar in response to this free expansion. "It is a completely different play style to what people are buying the game are intending to experience. Get rid of it!")

The other already-released haystack game came out on September 25 and is called, creatively, A Needle In A Haystack: Sorting Game. According to Steam reviews it is a substandard piece of software and I am not surprised.

But Needle In A Haystack Simulator has very many other competitors on the horizon: the demo for Needle In A Haystack, which releases in full on September 30, apparently attracted 20,000 players. Elsewhere, Story of The Needle In a Haystack is scheduled to release on November 28 and has a live demo.

Here's a list, which I doubt is exhaustive:

In response to a viral X post surfacing the haystack slop phenomenon, the creator of Needle in the Haystack Simulator, going by the name Nas, offered their apologies. "As the dev of the one that went viral, i would like to formally apologise to the steam storefront," they wrote. When someone expressed sympathy, Nas didn't welcome it: "Don't feel bad, it's the ultimate slop game. I have no complaints."

The creator does seem to approach the whole affair with a modicum of humor (they used their game to spoof Wolverine, for instance). But the copycats, it's wise to assume, are in it for the cold hard cash. It's not rare for joke games to spawn unjokeful clones—A Game About Digging A Hole had countless copycats, as did Banana—but the haystack game dovetails so neatly with the sort slop boom that there's every possibility one, two or several of these haystack games will make a tidy profit for the shovelware merchants responsible for them.

And, I mean, I can pretend to be polite and open minded about this, but… finding a needle in a haystack? I can understand wanting to take every opportunity to dissociate from the reality of 2026, but there are over 100,000 games on Steam.

But whether the game sucks or not, it does highlight the risk of showing off your bizarre new indie game on social media: if it goes viral, or people take to it, the churn industry will be paying attention.

Top Steam games by revenue (September 15 - 22)

Wardogs' dominance continues: according to Bulkhead the game has sold three million copies since preorders opened on August 11. Considering how difficult it is to launch a live service multiplayer game in 2026—countless have tried and gone out of business—it's a big win for the UK studio.

FC 27 comes in at number two but do note this is for preorders only: the chart takes in September 15—22 and EA's latest football sim didn't release until September 25. In other words, expect it to hit number one next week.

Amusingly, considering how popular and lucrative the FC (formerly FIFA series) is, EA Canada and EA Romania have employed generative AI during development: "Generative AI may have been used in creating pre-rendered or live-generated content for this game," the disclosure reads. "All such content is the result of a human-led artistic and creative process."

The only real surprise this week is how well Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter has done: I know this series has its audience but I didn't expect PC gamers to show up so strongly for it. It's currently sitting on over a thousand "overwhelmingly positive" reviews. PC Gamer's Sean Martin dug it.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

The latest stage of Xbox's delicately named "reset" arrived last Tuesday—but its impact on World's Edge Studio, the developer now behind the Age of Empires series, was only briefly mentioned in Xbox CCO Matt Booty's announcement. On sites like resetera and LinkedIn, former employees of the RTS developer have shared that it was hit especially hard.

"What a morning," said former World's Edge creative director Adam Isgreen on resetera, posting under the verified account name Tempus Chaoti. "FYI World's Edge was not spared completely—just under half the studio was let go—myself included. Been fun, y'all!" This is in addition to the studio now answering to Activision alongside Sea of Thieves developer Rare.

Andrew Martz, former senior software engineer at World's Edge, posted on LinkedIn adding that "as part of that reorg, our next project was canceled and a large chunk of our studio was laid off. I was part of that layoff."

Isgreen also had more to say on LinkedIn, reflecting on his time working on the RTS series: "I didn't think I'd be working on RTS games again years after their first 'heyday,' but am I ever proud of what our studio team and partners were able to do with the series and juice the genre's return. I think the fans would agree (mostly!) that we delivered the goods for all of 'em."

While layoffs are always devastating to the affected workers, this latest round of calls from Xbox is especially baffling, and Microsoft's track record of destruction goes far beyond the games industry, it's still alarming how little regard for this medium's history has been shown in this "reset." This situation with World's Edge Studio echoes the company's treatment of id Software and countless other teams earlier this year.

William Pugh grew up on a diet of shareware Mac titles like 1993's Scruffy versus the Invaders from Mars, but his earliest PC gaming memory is engaging in annelid antics in Worms 4: Mayhem—his first encounter with online multiplayer: "I remember playing that for the first time with random matchmaking," he says. "I think it was a 1v1 or whatever, and you're face-to-face with a complete stranger … I remember that being a kind of door opening for me."

That door would lead Pugh into the cartoonish arenas of Team Fortress 2, which in turn introduced him to the Source engine mapping community. Eventually, this brought Pugh in contact with fellow modder Davey Wreden, with whom he would write and design The Stanley Parable—2013's gleeful poke at player agency, and a remake of Wreden's mod of the same name.

Following The Stanley Parable's success, Pugh founded Crows Crows Crows, which specialises in comic adventures such as Dr Langeskov, The Tiger, and the Terribly Cursed Emerald, the VR game Accounting+, and stealth sequel The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe.

Pugh is currently working on his "next big game" with Crows Crows Crows, as well acting as producer on upcoming PS5 exclusive Hunter's Moon, which he describes as a "historical folk horror game". But he took a break from all that to guide me along the yellow adventure line running through his Steam library.

What game are you currently playing?

I'm playing a lot of Deadlock. It's my third job. I'm a recovering Dota 2 addict. I'm mostly off now. But the thing is, I never quite got with Overwatch. I must have a few hundred hours in Overwatch. None of the other hero shooters kind of work for me. But Deadlock is like Dota, but with a load of the pointless crap that's just accumulated in the MOBA genre taken out. Mana? Bye-bye. Creep stacking? Bye-bye.

A lot of the useless rubbish, they've done a good job of slicing that out. The characters are fun. Maybe they won't completely screw it up when they get to monetisation on it. But right now, it's kind of pure. There's only one skin per hero. Everybody feels like they're working at it and discovering it. It's really fun to play in a duo lane with a friend.

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

Me and my friend group are working our way through Big Walk, obviously. Damn! What a game! House House, they're too good.

It's interesting—and no hate on anybody involved, I love it, I love every game developer, but as a PC gamer, I saw the Big Walk announce trailer something like two years ago at some games [event], then Peak came out a suspicious amount of time later, and I'll admit my first [thought] with Peak was like, "Man, this is fucking Big Walk at home, but shipped a year faster."

The initial premise of Big Walk was, it's local, play it with your friends, it's got spatial audio and you're exploring a world. And Peak just seemed to ape that in every regard. Then Peak spawns the whole friendslop—I mean, I went through walking simulator, so I feel like they have to be called friendslop, you get assigned your name as a genre—but I felt like that all exploded, and I felt like, "Ah, Big Walk's gonna get left behind in a way. They've missed the magic."

But fuck! What a game! That's got to be game of the year for real. It's really special. They took their time with it. They didn't get spooked by everything moving ahead … it has gameplay that seeps into the way you are talking to each other, and it's really beautiful.

Don't get in your head, boys. Make a sequel. Make Big Walk 2! Just make Bigger Walk. Don't think about it too much. It's a winning formula.

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

Maybe Team Fortress 2. That's perma-installed on my computer.

Where to begin? I won a Saxxy award that I still have in my Steam inventory. It turns people gold. It's a replacement for every class's base melee weapon. So I tend to play Engineer and Spy. Those are my two main dudes. I have 1583 hours in there. I was an idler for the first round of hats. I used the idle program. I admit it. I've served my time, and I'm sorry to all the people who played normally and got hats the normal way. If it makes anything better, I've never got an unusual hat, despite my 1500 hours and super-limited Saxxy award.

I've been playing it since 2008. It's what got me properly into mapping, which is what got me properly into working on The Stanley Parable. It's just one of my great faves. It's probably my game of all time. Loads of people felt this way, and like I said with Worms, this kind of just levelled it up. It's like, 'Oh, it's a whole team of people working together.' You could speak online. I was part of a community server that did trial runs for maps. So you could make a map, a work-in-progress thing, and they put it on the server and people could play it—that community-based stuff was incredible.

It's a bit crazy now. They lost something of the art style along the way …. Going back to it, it's an absolute cesspit. You'll hear shit on public matchmaking where it's like, "These people need to be in jail" …. But in terms of games being made as pieces of art that are also spaces for human beings to connect with each other and have fun and to unwind and blow off some steam, it's a real 10 out of 10 goats for me.

I appreciate what they're doing with Deadlock. It's great. But what we really need is Team Fortress 3, and I'll die on that hill.

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

Dota 2 is 1,603 hours … I want to say TF2, but it's not true. It's Dota 2. It's like a drug.

It's interesting because there's no other game that even comes close to this volume of time. But if you ask me, "Did you have a good time playing Dota 2?" The answer is "no". The answer is "fuck that fucking game".

My teammates were feeding. They weren't supporting. When I was supporting, my carries weren't carrying. There were people who weren't in position. People who went too far out, people who were diving who had no business diving, people whose item picks were stupid.

Even thinking about it now, I've got to turn my fan on. I'm getting a little bit sweaty and a little bit pissed off. I'll say it—fuck everybody who plays Dota 2. If they're good at the game, fuck them. They've got no lives, and they should just get off it. It's what started this whole AI shit. If you remember, OpenAI, one of their earliest things was they made a bot that could beat a pro.

It's not a game made of love. It's a game fuelled by hate and a desire to conquer. It's like chess. I played chess as a child, and there's sweaty people who play chess. But at least you're not playing chess with people and then when you make a mistake, they get on voice and they're like, "Yo, this is exactly how you're fucking up. Stop fucking up and wasting an hour of my life."

But I was never any good, which is the saddest fucking thing. That you spend 1,600 hours of your life and you're not actually any good at it. Goddamn, what a horrible game. I bet in your usual interviews, someone's like, "I've spent 300 hours in this game that I love. When I had this personal tragedy, I would play this game and it helped me get through that." For me, it's like, "Fuck Dota 2, I hate it."

This will be my last thing about it. The reason that it's appealing is that it is so complex and taxing, it takes 100% of your brain power. You cannot be thinking about some other shit that's torturing you while you're playing. It's like you get handed a five-dimensional Rubik's cube, and you're sat solving that for an hour. So that is the good thing about it. If you want to be truly distracted, your brain can't be elsewhere if you're playing Dota 2.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

Probably TF2. I'm just a Valve fanboy.

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

Basically Blender. 10 out of 10 for Blender. [It's] open source and it's free.

We need a Blender for literally everything. Like I wish I was on Godot, but I've sunk a bit too much time into Unity in my career. The dev cycles on the games I work on are so long that [for] the next thing, I might look into Godot for that, but it'll still be a long while.

Generally speaking, a lot of software that has found itself in the gamedev pipeline … it's just this company that's sat on it and wants to generate revenue in perpetuity through licenses, so anything that I've been using that isn't Blender—in the sense that it's community run and open source—that's something that in five years' time or in 10 years' time, I want to be off that. I don't want to use a rare interview to promo something where it's like "Hey, this is owned by a company that is actively just shit."

The entire strat of open-source stuff is that you own it forever. If you want to make changes to it, you can. It's a community-led, grassroots approach. Photoshop's losing the war, like all the other 3D software packages are losing the war to Blender, and I just want to keep seeing that …. All these big companies, they just want to lock you in and they want to up what you pay, but so long as open-source software keeps fucking getting better, keeps having people who love making art working with them, they get stronger, and the premise of these subscription-based software models gets weaker. And I love to see that, because it puts power in the hands of the people who are actually making art, which is the fucking best thing.

[So it's] anything that's open source. I think Blender is incredible. I think the work that the Blender team are doing on Blender is just fantastic.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

Not.

I've never been a tidy guy, so my desktop is never tidy … I'm a big 'New Folder 3' kind of guy. I used to have all my passwords in plain text on my desktop. It's just messy.

I'm a weird one in the sense that, I think I've got everything that I've ever had on a PC since 2005 on physical hard drives. So one day—I wanted to say, "One day I'll put it all in a museum." But that's such an egotistical statement. So instead, I'll be like, "One day it'll be used to convict me of all my internet crimes. All the trolling I've been doing."

It's all my old flash cartoons. All the weird stuff I was making when I was a child, all my old maps, all this kind of stuff. I'd just feel so sad if I lost that …. I think everyone peaks artistically when they're 17, and you're just out there trying to recapture it. You're just wanting to make stuff because it's cool and because that's what you're into. There's a purity to art you make when you're a teenager.

We do a lot of thinking about digital storefronts here at PCG, and a great struggle is that we don't want to demonstrate too much bias in favor of Steam. But Valve's platform just does it better.

It's not perfect: Uneven moderation has rightly come under the most scrutiny in recent years, and I find those stories about how hyperprofitable Valve is a little hard to stomach in the face of its flat 30% revenue cut—it would probably continue to be one of the most profitable enterprises in human history with a more relaxed or graduated system.

But our hobby would be so much more worse off without Steam, and I generally trust Valve as a steward of PC Gaming, certainly more than any other company.

One thing that always shocks me is comparing it to any other service, marketplace, or social media platform of the same vintage—going on 20+ years now, depending on whether you set the start date at its literal inception, or when it started to be recognizably Steam.

There are vanishingly few products, pieces of software, anything digital that have been around this long and not been enshittified beyond belief. Whatever Steam's issues, I've never felt like Valve is operating in bad faith or treating me like cattle to be monetized, and I think that goes a long way toward explaining its enduring popularity.

Earlier this week, Xbox laid off 268 people on top of the 1,600 jobs it cut earlier this year. It has shoved Obsidian into Bethesda, handed Halo to Activision, said Sayonara to Double Fine and Compulsion Games, and State of Decay developer Undead Labs, and is primed to close Hellblade developer Ninja Theory.

All of this is part of Xbox's "reset", under its new(ish) CEO Asha Sharma. Sharma has been the public face of the company's deeply controversial restructuring, defending it with statements like "great technology gets better when it gets simpler, not bigger" which, incidentally, is why aeroplanes always perform better when you rip one of the wings off.

But both Sharma and Xbox are ultimately part of a much larger organisation. So what does Microsoft's head honcho Satya Nadella think of all these cuts, closures, and cancellations? Well, he thinks that Xbox's "streamlining" is "great to see".

Speaking on the Sources Podcast with Alex Heath (via Kotaku), Nadella briefly touched upon the subject of the Xbox layoffs as part of a much wider-ranging interview, starting by gassing up all the intellectual property that Xbox has under its belt. "I feel fantastic about the IP we have right now," Nadella stated. "If I look at the studios, the IP portfolio we have, and our ability to then take that and produce great games going forward, I feel fantastic."

As for the radical studio reorgs and the cuts which have left thousands of people jobless, Nadella described the process as if Xbox was designing a new Formula 1 car. "There's some amount of streamlining the team is doing, and Asha is doing, which is great to see," he said.

Nadella then quickly turned to Microsoft's future plans for Xbox: "Then we have to invent the right sustainable business model that allows us to deliver gaming to more and more people. That has always been the goal, which is, we want to be a great publisher and a great platform provider to games across both PC and Xboxes." he told Heath. "And so that is sort of our goal. And I think Asha and the team have said that Xbox is going to get growth in the next fiscal year."

If I understand Nadella correctly here, the plan is to embark upon the most dramatic reorganisation of Microsoft's gaming division ever and then come up with the business model that it's going to pursue. Which, to extend my aeroplane metaphor, is a bit like ripping one of the wings off before saying "Right, how do we circumnavigate this 'globe' thing?"

But that doesn't mean Xbox is going to stop. Oh no. When the most recent layoffs were announced, Xbox's Chief Creator Officer Matt Booty said the company was "roughly three-quarters of the way through previously announced restructuring". Which means there's more yet to come.

Konami really goes all-out for Tokyo Game Show. It had the coolest booth at the convention two years in a row on the strength of extremely good cosplay. Last year it was thanks to the perfectly creepy student from Silent Hill f, while this year Castlevania got the spotlight. I shot a quick video of the actor playing Belmont's Curse protagonist Rose Belmont, but other times I walked by there were actors for Trevor Belmont and Dracula giving their best runway looks.

Tom's Hardware and Respawn First recently reported on a fun new patent from those wiz kids at Microsoft, one that would dynamically pause your game to show you advertisements. Here are the big wham lines from the abstract of US 202610260258 A1, "Contextually Aware Management of Interactive Software Application Access:"

• "A content management system may suspend a user's interaction with the interactive software application based on the promoted content trigger event." (Emphasis mine)
• "A content management system may present the promoted audiovisual content to the user."
• "A content management system may establish a credit … the credit delays suspension of the user's interaction."

That's the sort of whimsical creativity that made me fall in love with games in the first place. In plain English: This is a system for showing advertisements during gameplay, one that pauses your game (suspends your interaction). Similar to ad-supported mobile games, Microsoft proposes a credit system where these tokens can be exchanged for more ad-free game time.

Microsoft explains that videogames do not lend themselves to regular commercial breaks in the same way as TV shows, necessitating a partially user-controlled, credit-based system for managing advertisement delivery. The other half of the equation: Having it monitor gameplay and avoid deploying ads during climactic or lean-forward moments. How thoughtful.

This sounds, quite frankly, god-awful. One of the worst case scenario arguments against always-online consoles and subscription-based gaming outlined in a patent. I'm not sure there is a game good enough, or an ad-supported Game Pass package cheap enough, that would make me subject myself to this. Forget the inconvenience⁠—the indignity of it all is enough to drive you to the brink.

The silver lining, if you're still rooting for Xbox⁠—it still holds some of my favorite studios hostage⁠—is that patents are not always put into practice. Seventeen years ago, Sony signaled intent to have us all stand up and shout "McDonalds" to make a vision of a burger go away, and that never happened.

The popular outrage against the patent may already be giving the planners at Microsoft pause. On the other hand: Xbox's CSO Matthew Ball is still a big believer in in-game ads. Meanwhile, The ailing titan EA has already rolled out EA Advertising, a new platform for "in-game integrations, creative partnerships, and scalable advertising capabilities." I love scalable advertising capabilities.

Martin Klíma is an iconoclast. As the co-founder of Warhorse Studios, he's responsible for one of the crunchiest, most peculiar, and best RPGs of the last decade—Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, a game few other studios would make. As a former student rabblerouser in the old eastern bloc, he's the only person I've ever spoken to for this job who can say they helped overthrow a government.

He's celebrating the Warhorse's 15th anniversary, a milestone moment in a life that has a lot of them already. "I'd swear it was just yesterday," he says, that he and his fellow co-founder—the eternally fractious Daniel Vávra—were two disaffected devs striking out on their own. But Klíma's career did not begin with the incorporation of Warhorse Studios. It began in the actually existing socialism of Czechoslovakia, in the 1980s.

History check

"I was learning English at school, but it was sort of difficult," recalls Klíma. English educational materials had to be imported from friendly countries, and the only friendly English-speaking country at the time was Ghana, whose materials were miles away from the things Klíma was actually interested in. "I mean no disrespect to the people of Ghana, but it's a bit of an unusual approach to teaching kids English, and so our vocabulary was more about combine harvesters and blast furnaces than swords and dwarves."

What Klíma wanted to read, more than anything, was The Lord of the Rings. But although The Hobbit had been officially published in Czechoslovakia, there was no such luck for LOTR. Around 1987, Klíma was able to get his hands on a copy that someone had brought back from a trip westwards, "but I didn't know enough English to read it, so I had to improve my English. One thing leads to another, and the very fact that we can talk to each other right now is because of JRR Tolkien."

The first movie adaptation of The Hobbit was, in fact, this 1967 animation produced in Prague.

Not long after, Klíma was lucky enough to obtain another imported fantasy treasure: a Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set. "I think for everybody who experiences a role-playing game for the first time, it's an amazing experience: this idea that you can pretend to be somebody else, and you can assume a role and you can live through these amazing adventures in your fantasy."

The game gave him a kind of missionary fervour, a desire to spread the good word of D&D. "I started translating it with my then-girlfriend, now wife, and we went through maybe 80% of the text." The thinking was to publish a translation of the game via Czechoslovakia's underground printing presses; "to officially translate it, officially license it… that was completely unthinkable." Klíma already had experience in this sort of thing—he ran a fanzine that quietly printed popular sci-fi by "[pretending] that they were contributions to our student magazine."

Klíma's dreams of clandestine TTRPG distribution were disrupted by the other part of his life. The group he played D&D with was, in fact, a subset of an independent student union that he and his allies were organising, Stuha. As a student at the University of Prague, Klíma had organised a petition against the demolition of campus buildings. Not, ordinarily, a revolutionary act, but to the flighty Czechoslovakian government it was a "borderline rebellion."

In decades past, people might have shied away from signing a petition like Klíma's, but things had shifted by the late '80s. "Gorbachev was in power [in the Soviet Union]. There was this talk about 'change' and 'opening' and so on, so people did sign my little petition. In the end, almost 1,000 people signed it, and this really helped me to reach other people who were interested in changing things." It was not Klíma alone—Stuha had other organisers, other borderline and not-so-borderline rebels out to overturn the system—but his was an important role.

Important enough, in fact, that he was chosen to speak for Stuha at a public demonstration on November 17, 1989—International Students' Day, an observance tied to Czech student resistance to Nazi occupation and its subsequent violent repression. Klíma summarises it like so: "There was a big demonstration against the German occupiers in 1939, and on November 17, all the Czech universities were closed [in retaliation] by the Nazi government.

"It seemed like, if you make a student demonstration on the 50th anniversary of these events, then you must be very safe, because no regime would be so stupid as to fight students, exposing itself to this very obvious comparison to Nazi Germany."

The Czechoslovakian government, it seemed, did not see things that way. "There was this confrontation with the police, and people were badly beaten… that really radicalized the students and radicalized the rest of the country. In a week, there was a general strike, and by the end of December, Václav Havel was president of Czechoslovakia." The Velvet Revolution—Czechoslovakia's chapter in the Soviet bloc's collapse—had taken place.

Rolling dice

As capitalism took root in Czechoslovakia (and, after 1992, the Czech Republic), Klíma's sci-fi and gaming ambitions started to look less like a hobby and more like a career. Though he and his partner had been forced to set aside their translation of D&D by the Velvet Revolution, he returned to it in the aftermath. "I wrote a letter to [D&D publisher] TSR, and they never answered me… I even persuaded my relatives in the US to send them letters and faxes… but we never got any response from them. Maybe they thought it was a crazy idea. 'Why would some communist kids want to play D&D?' Maybe it felt absurd to them."

Eventually, inspired by the German TTRPG Das Schwarze Auge, and convinced no one at TSR was going to pick up the phone, Klíma decided to adapt the work he and his partner had already done into something new. "We rewrote most of the text. We created our own classes and our own races. We created our own combat system." That last bit in part because Czechoslovakia did not really possess the means to manufacture 20-sided dice in the early '90s, "so we only had a six-sided die and a 10-sided die."

The result was Dračí doupě. "It became hugely successful, because it was the first fantasy RPG [in Czechoslovakia], and it was really like when it rains in a desert and green sprouts appear… and then I've worked in the games industry ever since." It wasn't long before he moved into computer games with titles like Fish Fillets, Original War, and UFO: Aftermath, developed under the Altar Interactive brand, itself spun off from Altar Publishing, whose name was on Dračí doupě.

Klíma's experience in the games industry between the 1989 revolution and Warhorse's 2011 founding could probably fill books by itself, but a recurring theme in what he told me about those days is frustration with publishers. This came to a head in the late 2000s with an RPG called Vision, led by Czech board and videogame designer Vlaada Chvátil. "This is going to be our big break," Klíma remembers thinking at the time, "This game is going to make history."

The game's publisher, CDV Software, was not quite as bullish. "CDV asked us to do some changes, and when we did these changes, they told us that the managing director who signed the original contract with us had left, and now they were no longer interested because of these changes that we made. And then six months later, they went bankrupt as well.

"We were sort of despondent and turned over the company to Bohemia Interactive," says Klíma, with the transfer happening in September 2010. After working on games like Arma for a while, followed by a stint at Codemasters, he was approached by Operation Flashpoint lead designer Viktor Bocan (now one of Warhorse's two creative directors, alongside Prokop Jirsa).

Bocan knew a guy with a vision: an achingly realistic RPG set in 15th-century Bohemia, he just needed someone "who is good with Excel, who will do this boring stuff about numbers and plans and so on." The game, of course, was Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and the guy with a vision was Daniel Vávra, its director. Bocan told Vávra to wait right there while he got Klíma on the phone. Warhorse Studios was born.

Thy will be done

One of my first questions to Klíma was, if he could travel back in time and tell his past self how KCD had panned out, would he have been surprised? His answer: the game's success wouldn't have shocked him a jot, but the fact that it actually got made and released would have amazed him.

"We were asking for quite a lot of money," Klíma recalls, and publishers, perhaps predictably, weren't champing at the bit to take a big risk on a studio making a historical RPG that had strong opinions about the order in which you equipped your armour. "It was really difficult at the time… It took us two years to find an investor."

The investor was Czech-American billionaire venture capitalist Zdeněk Bakala. Bakala's cheque gave Klíma and co the means to properly start Warhorse and begin work on KCD, but not enough to complete the game from beginning to end. "We had a really nice demo of the game. We hired an agency. We traveled the world. We talked to, I don't know, 50 different publishers on three continents. Nobody was interested."

The answer: Kickstarter, where it turned out that 35,384 backers were more willing to take a punt on Warhorse's weird medieval RPG than major publishers were. "I think [it's] the idea of a grown-up RPG," Klíma reflected. "I still am bored and tired of all the RPGs where you are this chosen one… Nobody is making a game that would say, 'Okay, this is a big RPG, and you are nobody, and you are not going to become a world saviour. This is a game about an ordinary random person that's doing ordinary, random-person stuff, and at the end, he is just moderately less of a nobody.'"

KCD scratched that itch for over 35,000 people, where "publishers, bless their hearts, are very conservative by the nature of their business… If you have this huge studio, like these established publishers do, it means that your next game is going to cost $100 million… and then you need to sell 4 or 5 million units just to break even, and that's difficult with a new IP.

"I've been in this business for 30 years now, and I only managed to sell one game to a publisher, and that was Original War back in 1997. This experience, trying to sell Kingdom Come to publishers, was really eye-opening in realizing how difficult, almost impossible it is. So it was a great relief and vindication when we saw that the players agreed with us."

All we have to decide is what to do

The first KCD did not light the world on fire—and in Klíma's estimation, is more like Kingdom Come "zero point eight" than a full realisation of the studio's ambitions (that would be KCD2)—but it hit hard enough to let Warhorse expand and to put it on the path to KCD2. "There are of course people who think that KCD1 was a better game than KCD2 and KCD2 is just a watered-down, mainstream, plays-by-itself game for the masses.

"I don't agree… but I can see why somebody thinks that. But still, I think the fact that [KCD1] crashes every three hours is not a good experience," he jokes, "even if you are the most hardcore player ever."

But lots of people, us included, really did like KCD2, and the game was successful enough to send Klíma full circle, from teaching himself English via LOTR books to negotiating the development of a Warhorse-driven LOTR game. "It's clear that because of the success of Kingdom Come, somebody would be willing to entrust us with this license."

Warhorse is now a two-game studio, its teams divided between its LOTR game and an upcoming Kingdom Come adventure. "Now you have people sitting in the same office that used to work together, were part of the same team even recently. And now we have to split them into two groups and focus them each on their own project, and that's quite a challenge."

But overall, probably one of those problems it's nice to have. So there's a little paradox: with Warhorse and its ambitions both growing, the wider games industry seems bleaker than it's been in decades, riven with layoffs and ignominious cancellations. For Klíma, it indicates one thing: the growth of videogames as a market has run into limits it can't transcend, even as the progress of technology continues to demand splashier games with bigger goals and larger teams. "You throw more people on the job, and that makes the games more expensive… If the game is more expensive, it needs to sell more units in order for this to be a viable business.

"How can you do it? The easiest [way] is you grow the market… But we reached the limit here long ago… If somebody is not playing the games, it's because they don't want to play the games, or they can't afford to play the games. So there's no way unless we teach dogs how to play games." Another way to squeeze more profit? Cut out the middlemen, but the industry's done that too: "We destroyed retail, and we took all their money," jokes Klíma.

"The last thing you can do is to increase the unit price. That would help a lot, but everybody's scared to death about it. Now, hopefully, GTA will blaze the trail…but I think we've run out of options." Meanwhile, technology keeps getting better (though it's maybe been arrested, a little, by the RAMpocalypse) and expectations keep getting higher, in Klíma's assessment.

"I don't see a way out of it other than moving the production to the countries that are cheaper… it's maybe Central and Eastern Europe, maybe China, maybe India, maybe East Asia in general." Good news, perhaps, for Czechia-based Warhorse, but a grim prognosis for North American and west-European development. "I take no pleasure in being a prophet of doom and desolation, but specifically in North America, I think it's a really, really huge problem right now."

The solution much of the executive class is keen on is, of course, AI. For Klíma, many of them have a "simplified mental model" of how it can be introduced that doesn't quite work in reality. Paraphrasing him, that model goes like this: if AI is a 5x force multiplier, he says, many people imagine you can cut a 200-person dev team down to 40. Even if each developer needs their own AI, and each AI costs the same as one dev, you can now do the work of a 200-person dev team while only paying for the cost of an 80-person team.

Even leaving aside questions of the quality of the AI's output, Klíma doesn't think it works like that. If you have 200 devs and a magical AI multiplies their output by five, players are just going to want the game that 1000-person-dev-team equivalent can make. "This is not a 'get out of jail free' card, the AI. It will not reduce the cost of the game, but it will allow us to create bigger games for the same cost."

I'm more than a little sceptical, as you might expect, but it's clearly a question Klíma, and Warhorse, has been thinking about. Will the force multiplier (as he describes it) of AI play a role in Warhorse's future games? For the first time in our long chat, Klíma demurs at the question. "I can't talk about it," he says. Something for us to find out, I suppose, on our next visit to Middle-earth or Bohemia.

The PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct wasn't even a week ago and it was filled to the brim with news, but we thought you deserved one last announcement so you'd have something to look forward to at the end of the year. The PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted returns December 3.

That's right, in just under three months we'll be back to show off more world premieres, DLC, updates, release dates, developer interviews, and The Council's 20 most hotly anticipated upcoming videogames. We made the decision to trim the list form 25 to 20 to give each game that's included more room to shine.

When the time is right, we'll be revealing the full longlist of games The Council chose from, and you'll be able to see if you can guess which ones they picked. The Council is made up of PC Gamer staff, brilliant videogame developers, streamers, and even some celebrities. They all know and love games deeply, so you can be sure they'll pick some cool titles.

We well, of course, have a host or hosts, because who doesn't like a friendly face talking them through all the news? You'll have to wait to find out who that will be, too.

While you wait for December, you can check out everything announced during our last show. We had 13 world premieres, over 30 games, and some great footage right form Tokyo Game Show. You can also head over to our Steam page where all the games are just waiting to be wishlisted.

Mind our dust! And don't let any of it get into your PC's fans.

We're temporarily testing a new version of the PC Gamer homepage called the Hyperfeed that you'll see getting lots of updates over at pcgamer.com/hyperfeed. This is a very early, pre-pre-proto-alpha test, a minimum-viable version for early data gathering and experimentation. You'll notice a bug or three as we continue to iterate.

Why are we trying something new? The impact of Google's coercive integration of AI has affected the online publishing ecosystem a lot, and we're trying to make our homepage (already the most-visited page on PC Gamer) a much richer experience. We're excited to modernize pcgamer.com in a way that better reflects how you and we play.

Apart from a different look, the main thing you'll notice are short, ephemeral posts currently only found on the Hyperfeed. Gaming in 2026 is so often about the microscopic stuff: character abilities, individual voice lines, a fun character you cooked up in an RPG, two minutes of one session you had in ARC Raiders, a weird ice-poison wand you looted in Diablo 4. We want to talk about our observations and feelings on these small-but-significant things by giving ourselves more flexibility to publish timely, authentic coverage directly from our editors and writers that isn't strictly article-shaped.

Right now in the Hyperfeed, you'll find stuff like this—experiences, gripes, daydreams, and scorpion-related experiences about PC games and hardware such as:

• Fraser spending too much money on a spaceship
• Jess cramming anime figures into her PC (for science)
• Andrea spots a forming supercell of recent tornado games
• The upsetting-but-funny things that happened to my simulated alien babies
• Ted asks a hard question: "Have you ever actually tried crouch walking?"
• Lincoln wishing for a Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters management sim

We also want to use these short posts to help us quickly react in a timely fashion to serious moments, emerging trends, things devs say, patch notes, and more. Obviously we'll continue to publish loads of daily, in-depth article coverage—this is just another tool that expands our constellation of work.

What's live right now is v0.01, far from the final form of the Hyperfeed, and we have about three-thousand more ideas that haven't been implemented yet, but we'd still like to hear your initial reaction to what you see there, if you have 30 seconds for a short survey.

This one's for the Neo Geo freaks. The Video Game History Foundation's free digital archive of game magazines has passed 5,000 issues, a major milestone. More importantly, the archive is now expanding beyond English to support Japanese mags, starting with Neo Geo Freak (1995-2000), which require a unique approach to preserve:

"Professional archivists in Japan pointed us towards their preferred libraries for Japanese document transcription, which we integrated into the text mapping toolset that we use for English-language magazines... We took the additional step to index the major articles from complete run of the magazine in English. Rather than attempting to translate 10,000 pages of Japanese text, we assembled a group of Japanese-fluent volunteers to create a list of major articles and interviews for each issue.

"We think this is a practical and efficient method for making these magazines’ contents more accessible, while avoiding the pitfalls associated with automated bulk translation."

Listen, you can say what you want about Avowed—I wouldn't even blame you if you didn't like it, or much of what has come out of Obsidian's recent catalogue. There's even a tiny, selfish scrap of my gamer heart that's secretly very glad that Obsidian is working on a new Fallout game, again.

But this is pretty rich, given the grinder that Obsidian's been put through in the past few months. As a reminder, in July, 25% of Obsidian's staff was laid off during Xbox's ongoing, brutal "reset", totalling around 52 employees. When this happened, a sequel to Avowed was cancelled, along with multiple unannounced games. More recently, Obsidian's being folded into Bethesda.

Now, in fairness to Braff, it's entirely possible that this particular merging did not ruin Obsidian's ability to express itself. It's entirely possible that the post-bloodletting Obsidian we were left with in July and the one currently under Bethesda now are pretty much interchangeable.

However, the idea that Obsidian's creative identity has been respected by these moves overall is laughable—cancelling multiple projects is the opposite of that, actually. Making it work on a franchise it hasn't really touched in 16 years is the opposite of that, actually. And pushing it into a get-along t-shirt with Bethesda? I have a suspicion that time'll prove this move the opposite, too.

Many are justifiably annoyed about Steam's new age verification requirements in Australia. Whereas most platforms and shopfronts offer several ways to verify one's age, Valve offers only one, and it's amusingly ill-suited to the Australian market. To prove that you're over 18 years old and thus, legally allowed to purchase games like Metal Gear Solid 4, Doom Eternal or Rimworld, you need to provide details for an active credit card.

The problem? Very few Australians use credit cards.

Even if you opened your Steam account as far back as 2003 and own a handful of R18+ games already, Steam will still require that credit card.

I don't want to big up Microsoft for doing slightly more than the bare minimum, but an email I received overnight does at least cast renewed light on how terrible Valve's approach is. An email from Microsoft regarding my "Microsoft Age Verification Status" had this to say:

"Due to your longstanding account activity, we’ve estimated your profile to be an adult account and updated its age verification status to “Verified.” At this time, you are no longer required to complete further age verification for uninterrupted access to features across certain Microsoft products, including Microsoft and Xbox storefronts."

(I've made no edits to that message, aside from removing the new all-caps in Xbox because it's lame).

I don't like having to verify my age to buy videogames, and honestly, I'd prefer to provide credit card details than scan my face or provide a government-issued proof of existence. Age verification systems raise extremely pertinent security and privacy concerns.

But Valve offering only one option is pretty much the epitome of a pisstake, especially since the one option it has presented is extremely ill-suited to the Australian market. It could possibly even pass as malicious compliance: Valve is technically adhering to the law, but doing so in a way that's likely to lead to even more chaos.

The fact that my Steam account can be over 20 years old and I still have to prove my age, is also kinda insulting.

Whatever the case, if you want to buy an R18+ game on PC right now, I've compiled all the Steam alternatives that make it much easier.

Not that things are great for anybody at the moment, but I'm not entirely sure how anyone in the videogame industry keeps their head together—Josh Daniels, one of the latest victims in Xbox's brutal series of resets, has been promoted and then laid off in the same week.

For some context, this forms part of the previously-announced 1,600 layoffs that'll be happening as Xbox's fiscal year whirls around. This is, of course, after a 1,600-person bloodbath that preceded it, leaving a sword dangling precariously over Microsoft's remaining videogame studios.

Daniels' absurd circumstances remind me of a report, which surfaced in July, that described a situation in which an anonymous source told Game Developer their layoffs "left colleagues scrambling to make sense of the situation using unofficial channels—many of which are overseen by union members and organizers."

Also in July, Bethesda developers were also reportedly told they had jobs until September right before the axe swung. What's clear is this: Nothing, absolutely nothing, signals safety in the videogame industry anymore. Even if you're promoted, you can get punted from a studio in the same week.

I honestly wouldn't have put strong odds on State of Decay 3 seeing the light of day. Even before the Microsoft mass layoffs we hadn't heard much about the survival game since the 2020 reveal trailer, and we found out later the game only existed in a Word document when that trailer was released.

In 2024 it rose from the dead again with another trailer, and then there was basically nothing until this past April when alpha tests were announced. Then July hit, and Undead Labs was part of the "significant restructure" at Microsoft: the studio was dumped, in other words.

But as its name hints, Undead Labs simply wouldn't die and becoming employee-owned sounds like a great first step toward a new future... but as we saw with Double Fine, that first step also includes, you guessed it, more layoffs. Even good news comes with bad news these days.

As a college student, Minh "Gooseman" Le had a substantial hand in shaping PC gaming history: He co-created Counter-Strike. When Le and his development partner later sold the IP to Valve, the purchase agreement stipulated that the studio would also hire the pair as employees once they completed their degrees. Hired in 2000, Le ultimately spent six years with the company, witnessing impactful moments of Valve history—moments like Gabe Newell's Mongolian throat singing phase.

In a YouTube interview with games marketing consultant Joe Henson, Le called the mythologized Valve founder a "very eccentric" person with a tendency to "venture off into interesting hobbies." According to Le, one of those ventures involved a hyperfixation with Mongolian-Tuvan throat singing, a distinctive singing style in which a vocalist harmonizes multiple pitches simultaneously through precise muscle control.

It's sick. But by the end of Newell's fascination with the technique—initially sparked after the CEO watched a documentary about its Mongolian practitioners—some Valve employees might not have thought so.

"He started to practice that. He started to do Mongolian throat singing, and he was doing it throughout the office. You would hear him try to sing with his throat as he's walking down the halls," Le said. "I remember a lot of people in the office were kind of annoyed, because, you know, it's kind of loud. And he would just walk along the halls just doing this throat singing. And he would do it daily."

Thankfully, Le said, the phase only "lasted for about five months."

Other additions to the Newell canon:

• Newell evidently isn't just a knife guy—he's also a sword guy and axe guy. Le said he maintained a room where he maintained a collection of "all these big-ass medieval swords and axes."
• Newell has a tendency to drop "difficult questions": When he first met Newell, Le—then a 23 year-old—found himself suddenly having to explain what makes a great game for Valve's CEO in the middle of a company lunch. Le said it's not a "malicious" habit, and that Newell's otherwise a "very nice guy."
• He loves a corndog: As a demonstration of how the Valve founder could be "just like a regular colleague," Le recalled passing Newell in a hallway as the CEO was enjoying a corndog—a delight that he, magnanimously, encouraged Le to partake in as well.

What happened

• Xbox executive vice president and chief content officer Matt Booty has announced another round of layoffs and studio reorganizations as part of the continuing "reset" of Microsoft's gaming division
• Xbox has cut an additional 268 employees "across Halo Studios, other first-party studios, and the XGS management and central functions layer," which Booty says brings the company "roughly three-quarters of the way" to completing its downsizing plan that previously put 1,600 people out of work in June
• Activision is now developing the next Halo game with "a new, purpose-built team," and will also oversee Rare and Age of Empires developer World's Edge
• Obsidian will be folded into Bethesda, and will continue its current projects like Grounded and the previously-announced "new Fallout project made in collaboration with Bethesda Game Studios"
• Playground and Turn 10 will be "formally" merged into one studio after being "creative and franchise partners for over a decade"
• Candy Crush developer King will be "uniting" with Microsoft Casual Games
• While Compulsion, Double Fine, and Undead Labs have been transitioned to independent or new publisher ownership, Xbox says it's now moving towards the studio closure of Ninja Theory after two attempted divestiture agreements "fell through"

Does anyone expect this to work?

I'll believe it when I see it. In her announcement initiating Xbox's current sweeping restructuring, CEO Asha Sharma wrote that "great technology gets better when it gets simpler, not bigger"—a principle that had been lost at Xbox through redundant layers of management complexity that "slowed decisions, blurred accountability, and made it harder to deliver for players." Xbox, she said, was going to simplify.

It's now three months later, and Xbox's idea of simplification apparently consists of shoving entire studios under new management with the belief that a sufficient number of developers can produce a respectable Halo or Fallout or Fable just because someone says they can.

Meanwhile, its own developers maintain that sustained organizational chaos makes quality game production impossible.

You do not, as a rule, see studios respond to rumours, reports, and speculation, but a recent Bloomberg report that Sony dropped Physint, Kojima Productions' upcoming stealth game, because it was overbudget and kept missing deadlines must have rankled the studio a little, because it released the statement above yesterday to quell fears.

To quell fears of what? Well, mostly that the relationship between Hideo Kojima and Sony has gotten as bad as the relationship between Hideo Kojima and Konami, his erstwhile employer. Sure, says the studio, they might have split on Physint, but it was amicable. They'll probably even still spend Christmas together.

Meanwhile, Xbox has swooped in for an easy PR win: picking up the cheque for Physint's continued development. All's well that ends well? We'll see.

It's been a busy week for prodigious game publisher Hard Shark Games: on September 15 it released an astonishing 29 games on Steam across a huge variety of genres.

Not only did Hard Shark Games publish that many games, but the company is also marked as developer for every one of them. All of which, mind you, are early access affairs. "We're launching in Early Access to involve the community from the very start," reads the first sentence of every single one of the early access blurbs for Hard Shark Games released in September 2026, which include genres as diverse as racing, retail sim, survival horror, sport, flight sim and 2D platformer.

The same is true for some of the 29 games Hard Shark Games released on March 4 last year: "We're launching in Early Access to involve the community from the very start," reads the first line in the blurb for Speedboat Simulator. “We're launching in Early Access to involve the community from the very start," reads the first line in the blurb for Toy Battlegrounds: Shoot 'Em Up Survival. You get the idea.

The "company" has also taken a similar approach to early access updates: the update notes for Starship Fighters, Sky Combat and Streets of Rageness (!) are identical: "Optimized several core systems, resulting in smoother gameplay and up to 10% better overall performance, especially during longer sessions," reads the first sentence of all three, each of which were published on March 5 within five minutes of each other.

Will Hard Shark Games profit from any of the 29 Steam games it released last week? You may be surprised. It costs $100 to open a Steam store page, which is recoupable if a game makes more than $1,000 adjusted gross revenue. So it would have cost Hard Shark Games $2,900 to publish its 29 very unpromising looking games on Steam, all of which carry an AI disclosure for capsule art but no other aspect of development.

Using the popular Boxleiter Method (via impress.games), which uses a game's public Steam review count to estimate sales, Supermarket Life Simulator—to use just one example—could have made as much as $885 as a high estimate, or $295 on the lower end. Then there's Pool: it could have made as much as $2,780 or as little as $926. Meanwhile, for F1 Simulator we're looking at $1,686 as a high estimate and $562 as a low.

So adding up the low estimates, those three games alone—of 29—have made $1,783 in the five days since release. That's well over half of Hard Shark Games' outlay for the store listings in less than a week on the market, though if the high estimates are more accurate, the $2,900 outlay has been long passed and Hard Shark Games' investment is already paying off handsomely.

Of course, that assumes these games cost nothing to make, and that's unlikely, even though they all look pretty low effort. For example, Supermarket Life Simulator clearly uses the $50 Checkout Frenzy - Convenience Store Simulator Unity template, which very many retail sims on Steam do. There's nothing wrong with using a template, but comparing the images of Supermarket Life Simulator with the Unity template screenshots reveals some identical grocery imagery. Steam user reviews claim Supermarket Life Simulator is a straight asset flip of the template, and this is an accusation levelled at Hard Shark Games quite often.

(Also: how the heck did Kratos end up in a screenshot for the creative-titled Axe Slasher?)

Hard Shark Games has a total of 217 listings on Steam. Of all of those—which take in 121 games and 96 demos—the highest peak concurrent player figure is a whopping 13. To add insult to injury, that record high is for a demo, namely Supermarket Simulator Pro Demo, which is no longer available. So not many people play these games in the scheme of things, but assuming Hard Shark Games is just one person turning out extremely cheap template-based software at a rapid pace, the enterprise is definitely capable of making a tidy sum of money.

I've reached out to Hard Shark Games to see if someone there will shed further light on their method. It's hardly the least prolific publisher on Steam though: BFG Entertainment has released a whopping 555 games, while PlayWay—the spiritual home of quickly turned around retail sims—has 340.

Top Steam games by revenue (September 8 - 15)

Wardogs hitting number one in its launch week was inevitable: it's a rare example of an early access multiplayer launch where the conversation isn't focused on what's wrong with the game. Players—including our Morgan—seem to be loving it.

Last week The Blood of Dawnwalker hit number one in its launch week; now it's down to 10, which is a good result for a single player RPG. It did seem to outperform Onimusha, on PC at least: last week the latter ranked sixth, while this week it's at 13th. It's likely selling much better on PlayStation.

Halloween: The Game isn't available in Australia—it was refused classification—but appears in the chart nevertheless.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

As reported by Kotaku, the organizers of the Tokyo Game Show have announced that its final day has been canceled and tickets for Monday, September 21 will be refunded. This was supposed to be the first five-day event in TGS' 30-year run⁠—while I am not a superstitious man, God or karma or something may be trying to tell us that it's just supposed to be a four-day deal.

"Due to the approach of Typhoon No. 25, strong winds and rain are expected to intensify in the afternoon and beyond, and disruptions to transportation are also a concern," event organizers wrote on Twitter. "Therefore, prioritizing the safety of all attendees, exhibitors, and related parties, as well as ensuring safe return home, we have decided to cancel the event for the entire day."

The TGS showfloor will remain open for today, September 20, with potential modifications. There is no word on how the event will address publishers and devs who rented out space for the final day.

As reported by the Japan Times, Dujuan is the 25th named typhoon of 2026, and is predicted to dump the heaviest rainfall (almost 16 inches) on the Kanto region containing Tokyo. Nippon Airways has canceled many flights in the region, while the East Japan Railway is fully and partially suspending service on some lines.

We were on the ground at TGS 2026 as part of our annual PC Gaming Show: Tokyo Direct, interviewing developers and showcasing trailers for a number of upcoming games. If you missed out on watching the latest PCGS live, you can catch the VOD on our YouTube channel or read through a collected list of all the announcements.

The PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct returned, and it revealed new details for 36 games and their DLC, including 13, count 'em, 13, world premieres. There was gameplay, there were developer interviews, scenes from the Tokyo Game Show show floor, you've got demoes to download, and videogames to add to your wishlist.

You can check out our Steam list which includes every game featured in the show, and you can read on for a rundown of all the reveals in the order they aired. There's also an embed to the full broadcast above if you missed it live. Enjoy!

Really Illegal Golf

Lufia 1 & 2 The Sinistrals Saga

Fool King

Never worry about matchmaking again with this asynchronous autobattler. Fool King blends stylish art with tactical warfare in a fantasy setting. The game launches November 16, 2026, but you can download the demo right now.

Let's Build a Dungeon

Let's Build a Dungeon has you control a videogame studio and make the MMO it's developing. You've got to keep your players happy or they'll leave bad reviews and play something else. The game is launching into early access February 11, 2027. Wishlist it on Steam.

Night Plane

Night Plane is a horror game made specifically to scare me, because you also have to be a flight attendant, and I have a deathly fear of flying. Attend to passengers while kicking shape-shifting demons off the plane, and be ready to save some souls if you crash land. Download the Steam demo now and wishlist the game ahead of its October 26 release date.

We Were Here Tomorrow

We Were Here Tomorrow is the latest game in the We Were Here puzzle series, and this one comes with new abilities and upgrades. The only way to solve these problems is with a pal, so line one up before the October 20 launch date and wishlist it on Steam.

Stronghold 4

15 years since the last numbered Stronghold game, the castle sim series is back. Get ready to design some unconquerable fortresses and lay siege to the other guys' slightly-more-conquerable fortresses. Coming later this year, wishlist it on Steam.

Ball x Pit: Risen Ballbylon

Quarantine Zone: Miami Zero

Piroker

Piroker wonderfully blends the nautical world of pirates with the chaos of a poker game changed by the power of relics. Score higher than your opponents or walk the plank. Sign up for the playtest on Steam.

Hodka

Neon Abyss 2

Neon! Co-op! Running! Gunning! Up to three friends! Perhaps fishing! And definitely a whole new final boss called Theia: God of Vanity. Neon Abyss 2 is gearing up for its full release, and it looks chaotic, inexplicable, and utterly joyous. Launching October 8, wishlist it on Steam.

Vaewolf

Part werewolf, part vampire, and part elf? Well that's certainly a mix we didn't see coming. Vaewolf is a frenetic action game coming early 2027. Wishlist it on Steam.

Tenebris Somnia

Tenebris Somnia blends a retro 2D aesthetic with survival horror gameplay and live-action cutscenes. Using an award-winning film crew from Argentina and as many practical effects as possible, this is one to add to the wishlist for horror fans. Launching October 16, just in time for Halloween.

Hello Sunshine

Hello Sunshine's latest trailer gives us a closer look at the relationship between the Nomad and the giant robot they follow through the corporate desert. Wishlist the game on Steam.

Brave New Wonders

Brave New Wonders is a factory builder where you can give direct commands to your robots in plain text. The game launches tomorrow, September 21, and you can wishlist it on Steam.

Lemonade Apocalypse

Wane

Beautiful Freaks of the Desert

Escape From Playtime

Fancy being scared? Fancy being scared and very, very small? Fancy being scared, very small, and accompanied by up to three of your pals? Escape From Playtime has just the thing for your very specific desires, friend: play as a tiny Smiling Critter navigating a haunted factory in a co-op survival horror whose playtest is taking signups now. Launching October 21 on Steam. You can also sign up for the playtest at EscapeFromPlaytime.com.

Young Suns

Imagine a future that's… good? This strange concept is the heart of Young Suns, which tasks you with designing a spaceship home in the stars in orbit around Jupiter, a newly liberated planet with a bright future ahead of it. Build your dream space-home, explore the environs of our solar system's largest planet, and grow deeply attached to the game's cast of Jupiterians when it hits on November 3. Wishlist it on Steam.

Dust till Dawn

Hellcard 2

Hellcard 2 is the sequel to the highly praised Hellcard. It's a co-op roguelite deckbuilder with a unique paper aesthetic, and you can download the new demo on Steam.

Cairn On the Trail: Deep Water

Survival climbing game Cairn is getting the first of its free DLC October 29. There are more routes to climb, a new character to try out, and a new mode. Wishlist On the Trail: Deep Water and grab the base game for 20% off until September 26.

Core Keeper

Core Keeper's Riders of the Underground update launches tomorrow, adding rideable mounts, a new sub-biome, and a trio of terrifying hydras to the game. There's also a mysterious door with tantalising secrets hidden behind it. Download the update from Steam tomorrow.

Thief: The Dark Project Remastered

Get ready to stuff your pockets because Nightdive's Thief remaster looks downright glorious in a new, gameplay-heavy trailer. We even got a peek at the controller UI, which looks to be taking its cues from the original game's mod scene. Good choice. There's no release date just yet, so make sure you wishlist it on Steam to keep up with the news.

The Rabbit Haul

The Rabbit Haul blends tower defense with farming sim and roguelite mechanics and dresses the whole experience up with an adorable 2D art style. It's out tomorrow, and there's already a demo you can try out on Steam.

The Hollowing

Virtue and a Sledgehammer

Virtue and a Sledgehammer is coming October 27. Return to your hometown and destroy it brick by brick, all while smashing through androids that have digitised your once-neighbours. Wishlist it on Steam.

Mycopunk

Visit exotic alien planets and decimate the fungal lifeforms with your robot buddies. Mycopunk's 1.0 update is coming October 20. You can dive into the FPS early access game right now, on Steam.

Marked for Mayhem

Undefeated: Genesis

Undefeated: Genesis lets you live out the fantasy of becoming a superhero. Awake on an alien world and fly, shoot lasers, and wield incredible powers in the new demo, out now on Steam.

Loftia

Loftia, the cosy, eco-friendly MMO life sim, is launching into early access November 3. Build a sustainable home on a sky island and work with your community to build the third space of your dreams. Wishlist it on Steam.

Toxic Frontier

Obstacle Overdive

Relive childhood memories and navigate your radio controlled cars over obstacle courses built out of toys in Obstacle Overdrive. The game launches October 2 and you can wishlist it and download the demo on Steam.

Fish & Ships

Mark Darrah isn't much for reminiscing about games he played in his childhood, but he does recall being struck by his first encounter with Command & Conquer in his late teens: "The thing that probably affected me for the longest, the most deeply, was that you could do storytelling for real," Darrah says. "It had cinematic storytelling, at least for the time [and] I think the original Command & Conquer had a branching storyline."

Two years after C&C's release, Darrah joined BioWare as a programmer, a role he'd perform for Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate 2, Neverwinter Nights, and Jade Empire. But Darrah is best known as the executive producer of the Dragon Age series, as well as being co-director of Dragon Age: Origins and the director of Dragon Age 2.

In 2021, Darrah departed BioWare after 23 years at the studio. Today, he runs a game design consultancy business and moonlights as a YouTuber, sharing his development memories and lessons on his channel: "I work with someone who now works at a college teaching game development, and they wonder why I give away so much information for free," he says.

Darrah took a break from sharing his wisdom as we delved into the deep roads of his Steam library, where we picked through ancient factories, (briefly) pored over obscure conundrums, and stumbled upon lost civilizations.

What game are you currently playing?

I play Factorio with my son. He likes Factorio a lot. That's what I was playing mostly for the summer. [We were playing] the new expansion pack—I guess it's not new anymore. I think it's called Space Age.

If you want to know what kind of programmer someone would be, have them play Factorio for 25 hours and look at what their base looks like. I'm a programmer who will keep it working, but also there's going to be a lot of binder twine and duct tape holding the thing together, and definitely you can see that in my Factorio bases.

I've played Factorio since before Inquisition shipped, so more than 12 years. It was one of the games that when [my son] got old enough to play games, I showed him and I think he just has an engineering mind, and so that complexity, that problem set, he definitely approaches it in a different way than I do. He sits down, plans it out, figures out how it should be arranged, deconstructs the entire base then reconstructs it … [whereas] my base has always ended up being these amoeba monstrosities.

The issue I have with Factorio is that I would say it's three games now. There's the beginning part where you're running around, which I actually find excruciating. Then there's the middle part where, mostly, I've automated everything, and then now you've got this third part where it's like "OK, now I've got multiple planets on the go, I'm building spaceships." And that's really interesting, but it is different because your little guy's presence in the game is almost irrelevant.

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

It looks like it was Eternal Strands. Obviously, I have a certain amount of bias there because of my relationship with people in the studio. But I think it's a very good first game. That sounds like damning with faint praise, and I don't really mean it like that. But it shows the potential of the studio.

The game that it reminds me of—there's a game where you played a wizard and you combined different elements, and it was a top-down game—Magicka! The combat in Eternal Strands reminds me of Magicka in a good way. It's not like that, but it is like that in a way that speaks to me.

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

I have Riven installed. I didn't play Riven before, and I have only put three minutes into Riven, so I still haven't played Riven. I've heard people talk about it from a puzzle design perspective. I definitely feel like there's an art to puzzle design that I feel like I could develop. I've never done puzzle design. I wasn't responsible for puzzles that existed in any of the Dragon Age games.

But the BioWare philosophy since forever—partly because of leadership in the early days of BioWare—it's always been to make sure that all puzzles could be completed by all people, in sometimes heavy-handed ways. Like, "Here's the solution to the puzzle in a book right beside the puzzle." And obviously, a puzzle game like Riven cannot do that.

The reason I installed it was, "Let's play this game—which I have not done—and let's see what there is to be learned." Because it's come up in conversations at least twice in the last two years. So I think for a game that old, that's a good sign that there's something there to be learned.

If we exclude remasters, then it might be Dragon Age: Origins. I do not play games I work on after they come out [but] I played some on stream for my channel, and whenever I do a video where I'm going to talk about what I remember with the game, I play the game long enough to capture footage to use as background for the video.

I played through DA:O all the way on stream …. I'm not a streamer. I don't have that skillset. I think people find it sort of interesting to listen to me play a game that I worked on, but I think it can be disillusioning to some people because I think a lot of game developers, myself certainly included—and people can attest to this if they watch my Anthem video—are a lot worse at these games than the average player. Not everyone, but a lot of us.

Because of the role I've had on these games, basically since Dragon Age [and] even before, I play parts of it, random parts of it, and then I've seen a fairly wide tube through all the content. So with DA:O, it's like, "Oh wait, I remember a bunch of this, but I don't really remember how to play." I've seen probably 60% of all the content in the game. I've played probably like 6% of all the content. There's this weird disconnect of: I remember a lot, but I also have weird blind spots.

The other thing that I notice happens, which is really weird, is that I remember versions of the content that don't exist. My memory of a level is the version that was like five versions before the final version.

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

Factorio, I have 832 hours. Then I have two versions of Fantasy Grounds, which is a tabletop simulator, and then I have Civilization 6.

Often, I will play a game long enough to understand it and then move on. Balatro is a good example … I finished Balatro a couple of times, but I didn't obviously get all the content out of it. Maybe that's just because I've worked in games for, I guess we're at 29 years now, and I'm always trying to see what there is to be learned, which is why I often like a really short game. Like Unpacking is a short game. I roll credits on it, that's four hours. Four hours is enough for me to get, like, "I get what you're trying to do, and I learn something, and we can move on."

[But] I have a long history with Civ, because I played the one right before Alpha Centauri and then Alpha Centauri, and then I had a bit of a break. But I do love Civilization. It is a time sink for sure. I guess in what we were talking about [before], playing a game until I understand it. You have to play through Civ at least once to understand it.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

So I don't uninstall anything. But what I do is when I migrate PCs, I essentially uninstall at that point. The game that I would reinstall as soon as I got a new PC would probably be Factorio.

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

EA is a company that communicates through PowerPoint. But not in the way that PowerPoint is intended to be used, more as PowerPoint as a way to make shareable documents.

So after I left BioWare, I bought a copy of PowerPoint rather than using Google Slides, rather than using whatever the free version of Microsoft is. I probably use it almost every day, and most of that is not stuff for other people.

Because of whatever weird bit of communication cancer got installed by the culture of EA, I actually use PowerPoint to make decks, almost like note-taking software for my own purposes. There are better pieces of software for that. But I think it comes from when I worked at BioWare, whatever you were working on was eventually going to probably become a pitch deck, so you might as well go into PowerPoint now.

Also, versus Word, PowerPoint forces a brevity that I think is useful.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

I have 54 icons on my desktop. They're all on the left side, they are a literal random selection of things, and there are eight things where at some point I uninstalled or the link broke, so they're just dead file icons.

I've not cleaned them. I've never cleaned it up. I just don't put things on my desktop in the first place. It's tidy due to a lack of use.

Sony's recent decision to cut ties with Kojima Productions's Physint is one of the more unexpected turns of 2026. Even with the industry's many struggles, and speculation that Death Stranding 2 didn't sell as well as Sony hoped, the PlayStation studio shutting the door on one of the industry's most famed and respected designers was a huge surprise.

While Kojima Productions would eventually find a new publisher for Physint in Microsoft, it took a frantic three months of pitching for that happen. This is partly because Kojima himself was similarly blindsided by Sony's decision, as the veteran designer revealed in the first interview he's given since switching publishers.

Speaking to IGN, Kojima revealed that in June, Sony contacted him saying they wanted to have a Zoom call, which he agreed to. It was during that call when Sony broke the bad news: "They said they can no longer fund development for Physint. I was shocked and I said 'What did you say?'" Kojima explained. "I couldn't quite process what they had said. I wasn't sure because I was in such shock."

Kojima told IGN that he understood "the situation in the industry as a whole", with many studios being shut down and projects being cancelled. But he genuinely believed Physint "was safe" from the industry's broader turbulence. "I was surprised, but not just surprised. We didn't understand the reason. I didn't have any anger or sadness; my first thought was 'What am I going to do with my studio?"'

Indeed, Kojima Productions' financials were such that it would have struggled to continue operating as it had with one of its two projects—the other being the horror game OD—deprived of funding. "I thought I might have to cut all the people working on Physint, right? Or our studio could end up collapsing because we'll run out of cashflow." Kojima specified that he has "borrowed money from the bank" to help fund Kojima Productions, and that "If they find out a project has been stopped or cancelled, we'd be in big trouble."

The reason for Sony's decision still seems to elude Kojima—or at least, if he does know the reason, he hasn't stated it explicitly. But there is an implication that his relationship with Sony has shifted, as people he knew at the company have left or retired. "I've been working with [Sony] for like 30 years… Mr Ken Kutaragi, Mr. Hirai, I was close with them. But it's not like that recently."

Nonetheless, Kojima reiterated that, despite Sony's decision, he doesn't view the company negatively. "Nothing could’ve prepared me for their decision to step away from the project. So I thought, 'What am I going to do from tomorrow?' But from my side, I love Sony. And I don't have any bad feelings against them."

Once Kojima got past the shock, his first thought was to protect his staff: "I can't really tell them the game has been cancelled. I didn't want to do the same thing we did for P.T. Of course, I didn't want to worry." As such, Kojima began thinking about pitching Physint to other companies.

Rather than pitching Physint as a single game, which he described as being "a very old-fashioned way of doing things", he decided to pitch it as a broader IP with multimedia potential: "I want to consider everything like movies, dramas, anime, TV, comics, music. Let's create a new IP with all of this included."

Kojima made such a pitch to various people, claiming that "everyone had positive reactions". But Kojima wanted a partner who could feasibly support such wide-ranging plans, which is why he took Physint to Xbox. "I approached Xbox and they were great. They could support us technically. And also we've been working on OD with them, so we already had a connection. I made a proper pitch of Physint to them. And then their first reaction was like: 'This pitch was fantastic. Never seen a pitch like this!' And that was how it started with Xbox.'"

It may seem odd for Xbox to be considered the safe option, given the company is in the middle of cutting thousands of jobs and recently parted ways with several studios of its own, including Double Fine and Compulsion Games. However, Microsoft clearly sees getting to publish Kojima's games as a feather in its cap, and it has previously safeguarded the designer's games from its own downsizing on more than one occasion.

In 2013, Valve head honcho Gabe Newell spoke to students at the LBJ School of Public Affairs in Austin about "Productivity, Economics, Political Institutions & The Future of Corporations." It was a much more interesting topic than that makes it sounds, and has been doing the rounds again thanks to being sliced up into shorts by the Webknower channel.

One clip that's been going around is Newell's response to being asked about how easy it is for hackers to get into game worlds and do things the creators don't want them to do: "One of the biggest mistakes game developers make is to mistake hacking, or to mistake a genuinely entertaining action by a player as hacking. So the example game developers tell each other is when Lord British was killed during his first speech in Ultima Online they rolled the world back rather than recognizing that it was the coolest thing that had ever happened in Ultima Online."

In the early singleplayer Ultima games, Lord British had huge amounts of hit points and other defenses to discourage players from attacking him, which of course made some of those players see it as a challenge. Blasting him from offshore with a shipboard cannon or using a magic artifact called the Skull of Mondain were a couple of the classic techniques.

In Ultima Online, where Lord British was controlled by Ultima creator Richard Garriott, his murder also took some doing. A player named Rainz waited for Lord British to give a speech, and used his high-level pickpocketing skill to steal a scroll with the fire field spell from someone in the crowd. He didn't know it would work, but after the server reset immediately before the event, Garriott had forgotten to toggle his character's invincibility back on. Lord British caught fire and died, and Rainz was banned from the game as if he'd cheated when actually what he'd done is contribute to the lore that gave Ultima Online its reputation.

Newell's point is that if Ultima Online had embraced that, rather than resetting the server and pretending it never happened, the player-led storytelling would have made for something more interesting than the ongoing plot of Ultima Online. Which is forgotten today, while the assassination of Lord British is a central text of MMO lore. Game designers will be telling that story to new hires for years to come.

In an interview first published in Edge Magazine issue 428 and shared online via its Knowledge newsletter, former Tencent Games business development director and inaugural Game Awards Game Changer Amir Satvat offered his take on why the now-yearslong games industry layoff crisis has been so uneven in its geographic distribution.

There's been a lot of debate whether the past three years have matched the infamous '83 videogame crash⁠—Brenda Romero says yes, Tim Cain argues not quite (both saw it firsthand). "I think this is as bad as the '83 crash if you’re a game developer based in North America or Western Europe, in a traditional triple-A studio," said Satvat. "That is ground zero for the destruction." Satvat expanded on this particular observation in a recent post on LinkedIn.

"Japan is a completely different ballgame," Satvat said, praising its industry-wide tendency to retain staff, even if sacrifices are required in short-term profit or executive compensation. "Everyone calls out Nintendo, but you can look at Konami or Capcom⁠—these companies all have staff retention of 97%+."

"My understanding is that, generally, Japanese teams tend to be much smaller and leaner," Satvat added. "They didn’t get swept up in the live-service trend, or into these mega-blockbusters with 500-person teams." He also pointed to one of the great crazy-making contradictions of the ongoing crisis: "The executive salaries. [Japanese executives] still make great money, but it’s two or three million dollars, not 30 million."

Satvat provided some caveats: There have been mass layoffs at Japanese gaming firms in recent years, but nowhere near the level in North America or Western Europe. One issue Satvat did not touch on was developer compensation⁠—it's not just the CEOs who are paid less. A 2019 CEDEC report⁠—discussed in English in 2022 by consultant Serkan Koto⁠—put the average salary of Japanese game devs at $37,000.

Looking at the same period of time in the US, the website Love For Games catalogued 5,966 entries for base salaries offered to H1-B visa applicants at game companies in 2018. Most were in the high five or low-six figures, while the lowest entries I spotted were still north of $40,000⁠—sorry gamers, I don't have the time to average all 6,000 manually for this article.

More recently (so a less relevant, but still worthwhile comparison with the 2019 CEDC data), the 2025 GDC Salary Report put the average pay at $142,000 from a survey of 500 games industry professionals.

Back to the layoff crisis, Satvat estimates that the industry is still growing when it comes to new positions, but at a rate that barely covers attrition and pales in comparison to its growth at the end of the 2010s (the following figures were provided to Edge by Satvat or are based on his data):

• 18,000-25,000 new jobs per year
• 14,500 total layoffs predicted for 2026
• 58,000 total layoffs from 2022-2026
• The industry grew by 32,000-67,000 new jobs from 2022-2026
• Compared to growth of 150,000 new jobs from 2017-2021

"It is hard for me to foresee a picture where the industry doesn’t eventually contract from its current size," Satvat said." If I’m being optimistic, there is some number that is not a ghastly decrease from where we are now, where things can stabilize out. But for it to stay exactly the same as when you had these very large firms that were relatively stable? It’s hard for me to visualize how that happens."

As reported by Automaton, the 2026 CESA Videogame Industry Report, a survey-based assessment of the Japanese games business, shows a sharp uptick in AI adoption by Japanese developers: 85.8% in 2026, up from 51% just last year. In July, a separate survey covering just online game devs showed a 100% rate of AI adoption.

Breaking things down further, 63% of total respondents claim to use generative AI tools on a daily basis, while 22.8% turn to them more irregularly. The survey did not distinguish between disciplines or different forms of generative AI output like code, concept art, in-game assets, or text.

Developers cited benefits including improved efficiency and reduced cost and development time, while "human verification" and avoiding the use of generated material in player-facing circumstances are commonly-deployed safety measures.

The Japanese industry has been far quicker to adopt AI tools than its North American counterpart: Just 36% of respondents to a similar GDC 2026 survey reported using AI tools as part of their job, while 52% of survey respondents believe generative AI is negatively impacting the industry.

One thing I'm curious about is whether Japanese gamers are as vocally hostile to generative AI use as their anglosphere counterparts. Even if there isn't the same social stigma amongst developers, it just looks tacky and cheap when AI-generated assets sneak into a retail game.

The Japanese industry certainly appears to be in a healthier place overall compared to North American triple-A, but I'm skeptical whether generative AI adoption has significantly contributed to that health, and it could very well precipitate quality, player trust, or employment stability issues down the line.

The Last of Us game director Bruce Straley has apologized for singling out God of War Laufey in a comment about lack of innovation in triple-A games.

"God Of War Laufey, I look at that game, and every pixel is mindblowing," Straley said in a recent Edge magazine feature. "The amount of work and skill that's gone into every single frame… I've made those kinds of games, and I'm still blown away. But when I actually look at what you're doing in the game? I'm not excited. And that's nothing against the God Of War team. Just, across the board in triple-A, it feels like there's no opportunity to inject fresh, innovative ideas."

In his apology, posted on X, Laufey said that his comment is being used for "clickbait."

"I want to apologize to the Laufey team for dragging you all into this uninvited & unnecessary negative attention," the director wrote. "I was trying to illustrate an industry concern & my mistake of naming your game is being used out of context & for clickbait. You don't need this. I'm sorry."

Straley didn't take back the central thrust of his remark, however, expanding on his position in a series of posts which place blame on industry leaders for the lack of "clear direction and conviction" he perceives in today's big budget development scene.

"The quest for GaaS & wanting to recreate the next Overwatch, Fortnite, Roblox, etc is not a viable strategy & frankly shows these 'industry leaders' don't know their own brand," said Straley.

"Hot take: There's a lack of good leadership, clear direction & conviction from the ppl at the top, in charge of the money. (Money = stability) I believe if they understand their brand, they could have honest, inspiring conversations w creators to steer our medium to innovate."

Straley left triple-A development in 2017, and founded a new studio, Wildflower Interactive, in 2021. The indie studio is working on singleplayer adventure Coven of the Chicken Foot.

It's generally agreed that this is a very bad time for the videogame industry. There's some disagreement on just how bad it is—Tim Cain says it's not as bad as the infamous crash of the early 1980s, Brenda Romero says it's worse—but the bottom line is that if you're comparing your current situation to that very specific moment in time, the situation is definitely not good.

In a new Knowledge newsletter, originally published in Edge magazine, numerous veterans of the game biz shared their thoughts on the industry's troubles, and what might be done to address them. It's a very interesting discussion, but also a bit disheartening to some extent, because several make the point that the real problem goes way beyond just videogames.

"It's impossible for me to look at this as a game industry problem, when really it’s the result of this much bigger, complex system that we’ve allowed to be captured by greedy, rapacious forces," former Arkane Studios creative director Harvey Smith said.

Pointing to Redfall, the game that preceded the closure of Arkane Austin in 2024, Smith continued, "Instead of just being crushed and thrown to the wind, maybe those people would have figured it out and then, another cycle along, they would have had another Dishonored.

"And, even if they just made the occasional hit—one out of every three or whatever—wouldn’t you want to hold onto that? I guess the answer is no. You wouldn’t want to do that, if there’s an opportunity cost where instead you could put that money into AI, and even if it’s a bubble, your share price goes up massively."

Other developers shared similar thoughts. "I don’t think our current financial models are set up for art or entertainment," Kitfox Games co-founder Tanya X. Short said. "I just don’t think art is what capitalism is designed to nurture. But humans are."

Ultima Online and Star Wars: Galaxies vet Raph Koster, whose Playable Words studio recently launched a new MMO called Stars Reach, said "systemic dynamics are what really make this happen," and that "absent regulation, it develops into market concentration, followed by cartels, followed by monopolies. That’s intrinsic in how it works."

Sam Barlow, known for games including Her Story, Telling Lies, and Immorality, put the situation in even starker terms: "Ultimately, to fix what’s broken in the videogame industry, we might have to fix reality."

It's a depressing thought alright, particularly given humanity's seeming drive to do the opposite of 'fixing things,' but it's hard to dispute the point when the mainstream videogame industry is busy swallowing itself via multi-billion-dollar mergers and acquisitions that seem to inevitably lead to massive layoffs and increasingly constricted creative decisions. Earlier this year, Devolver Digital, which went public in 2021, announced its intent to get off the stock market because the videogame business is simply not compatible with the market's demands for "predictable, sequential growth"—a stark admission that the system as it stands just isn't working.

Despite the gloominess of the situation, Smith said he's "an optimist," and he believes that "people will keep coming together and keep making cool things."

"The model might be different, the structure of it all might be different, but I’m hopeful there’ll always be a market for that, as long as people are brilliant and creative, and they want to do good work," he said. "That’s what gives me hope. As long as I see that, I’m like, we’re going to come out okay in the end. It may suck for a while, we may have to depose some kings, but it’ll be okay."

The full report covers a lot of ground, and features commentary from other industry veterans including Shawn Layden, Tim Sweeney, Craig Duncan, and Amir Satvat, who was honored at The Game Awards in 2024 for his work assisting laid-off game developers. It's worth a few minutes to read in full—check it out at edge-online.com.

PAX Australia returns to the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre in October, and this year's Expo Floor promises to be packed with playable games.

For starters Sega will have four games to try including Total War: Warhammer 40,000 with three playable scenarios, as well as Alien: Isolation 2, Persona 4 Revival, and Yakuza's noir prequel Stranger Than Heaven. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's multiplayer will also be playable ahead of its October 23 launch.

Square Enix's booth will have a hands-on opportunity for players to try Final Fantasy 14 on Switch 2, then create a bracelet and take a themed photo. FF14's localization director Michael-Christopher Koji Fox and global community producer Toshio 'Foxclon' Murouchi will be taking part in a behind-the-scenes panel where they endure a hot sauce challenge while sharing war stories. Attendees will get an early peak at Final Fantasy 7 Revelation at a special showcase too.

The Ubisoft Community Esports stages will host Rainbow Six Siege competitions, an Assassin's Creed sea shanty singalong, the Ubisoft Cosplay Runway, and a Just Dance-Along, among other events.

PAX Australia runs from October 9–11, and badges are on sale at the official website. I'll be spending most of the weekend at the PAX Rising indie showcase trying to play as many of the more than 90 indie games on show as I can. There's plenty more worth checking out on the full schedule.

Judging by the November release schedule, few publishers will dare release within spitting distance of GTA 6. Which is understandable, but it's caused a massive bottleneck in October: Ace Combat 8, Gears of War: E-Day, Star Wars: Galactic Racer and Modern Warfare 4 will all release next month.

And that's not including all the other anticipated games not under the wings of a major publisher. I'm talking about a new Hellraiser game, Silver Pines, Jonathan Blow's next one, Planet Zoo 2, a remaster of Tales of Eternia, and the 1.0 launch of Enshrouded. There's even a new Final Fantasy 2D-HD remake.

Joining this fray will be Valor Mortis, a new first-person soulsike (their words) by the creators of the Ghostrunner series. It looks better than the concept sounds: a recent demo was well-received, mostly because it seems to nail first-person melee combat, which is famously hard to get right.

I wouldn't dare predict how well or otherwise Valor Mortis will sell when it releases on October 13, but it certainly has its work cut out for it. Its publisher Lyrical Games is well aware of this, as CEO Blake Rochkind told The Game Business in a recent interview.

"By virtue of the development schedule, the cards we’ve been dealt is that we are one of the only new IPs launching this fall," Rochkind said. "We are pretty confident in Valor Mortis. But ultimately, the worst thing we could do is not push our chips in and say, ‘We want this to be a game that you can pick up alongside these other great games.’"

That's basically the approach Lyrical Games is taking: they've priced Valor Mortis at $40 so that people can play it and the pricier blockbuster fare releasing alongside. “A developer I spoke to recently had a lot of success with a game priced at $30, which would probably be $40 today. One thing they said that really stuck with me is: ‘We never regretted being an ‘and’ game. We never regretted pricing our game as something that you can pick up alongside other games.’ Going with this price point will help us be an ‘and’ game.”

This is probably common sense among publishers but it's interesting to hear it presented so bluntly. Just as it was interesting to hear the creators of Peak rationalise its low price: "4 bucks is also kind of 5 bucks, 3 bucks is 2 bucks. And 2 bucks is basically free".

It's also interesting, albeit understandable, that a AA action game would prefer the company of four other blockbuster competitors rather than GTA 6. The only meaningful November competitor there is Nintendo's Ocarina of Time remake, which is also something most wise publishers will want to give a wide berth to. Neither are releasing on PC.

As reported by TorrentFreak, the ubiquitous DRM producer, Denuvo, is attempting to take one of its biggest foes to court over their work circumventing the antipiracy measures on games like Hogwarts Legacy and Black Myth: Wukong. The case is unique in that it comes from Denuvo and not one of the individual copyright-holders of an affected game.

The target of the lawsuit, who goes by "voices38" on various channels, is particularly prolific when it comes to putting out DRM-circumventing patches or "cracks" for games that license Denuvo's copy protection software. Denuvo is suing voices38 under the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which prohibits tampering with digital protections.

While voices38 is an anonymous actor, Denuvo lists a number of social and gaming services accounts associated with them in its filing, an indication that the company will likely subpoena Valve, Reddit, and/or Discord for identifying information. We saw a similar move from Rockstar recently as it attempted to uncover the identity of GTA6 leaker Cyberleek.

"On information and belief, Defendant is an individual who has circumvented Denuvo’s technological measures that effectively control access to copyrighted works," Denuvo wrote in its filing with the Northern District of California. "Defendant has further announced, posted, or disclosed online, including through Reddit, how to circumvent Denuvo's technological measures that effectively control access to copyrighted works, facilitating or allowing others to similarly circumvent those controls and access video games without authorization."

Denuvo's software is largely unpopular with gamers, pirates or paying customers, as it is seen as invasive and a drain on system resources (Denuvo claims that its software does not affect game performance), but major publishers still turn to it as an antipiracy measure. Denuvo's legal strategy echoes the successful actions taken by Bungie and Activision against cheat developers for their competitive multiplayer games⁠. In addition to keeping up in the anticheat arms race, some companies have taken to suing cheat makers out of existence.

But part of what let them pursue that strategy is the fact that developing hacks for multiplayer games had evolved into a grey market business with identifiable, profit-making entities to sue, while piracy is more diffuse and inherently not a moneymaker. Successfully unmasking voices38 is the cornerstone of any successful legal action by Denuvo.

Voices38 does not seem particularly bothered by the threat, or they're just playing it very, very cool. "All is fine, everything will continue as normal," they wrote in a comment on the piracy-focused CrackWatch subreddit.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says the European Union's plan to restrict social media use by children, including a complete ban for anyone under the age of 13, is "terrible for the next generation of humanity" because of the impact it will have on the growth of creativity and expression.

Announced today, the EU KIDS Act—"Keeping Internet Digital Spaces Accountable and Trustworthy," because overwrought acronyms for serious legislation isn't a uniquely American phenomenon—imposes a blanket ban on social media accounts for anyone under the age of 13, although "specially-designed child-friendly video-sharing services" can be established via their parents' or guardian's accounts.

From the ages of 13 to 15, accounts can be set up under the supervision of guardians, although they should have "limited features and screen time." From 15 up, minors can set up their own "autonomous accounts" without parental consent, although "parental guidance remains essential during this stage."

The goal of the new regulations is to effect a "gradual approach" to social media use—the digital equivalent of teaching kids to swim before throwing them into the lake. Notably, the KIDS Act covers not just traditional social media platforms—Instagram, TikTok, and the like—but also "video-sharing platforms, online games, AI chatbots or companions," plus app stores and operating systems. Some services, like online encyclopedias, educational platforms, and digital news outlets, would be exempt.

"Today, our children are engaging with the most sophisticated technologies ever created. Technology that was never created with their wellbeing in mind," EU president Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement. "Our KIDS Act is reversing the burden of proof—it is for platforms to show they are safe by design. And we put parents back in the driving seat, giving them the tools to help their children navigate a safer online world."

Sweeney takes a different view of the situation, however. "This would be terrible for the next generation of humanity," the Epic chief said on X, a day prior to the act's official announcement. "The apps and games of today are the paintbrushes and tree forts of yesterday. Fortnite has Creative Mode, Roblox has Roblox studio, and being a digital creator is in everyone's reach, till politicians take it away."

It's fair to say that it would not be great news for Epic if the EU suddenly made it a whole lot harder for kids under 15 to play Fortnite, and without wanting to sound like an 'in my day we drank straight from the hose!' guy, I would point out that paintbrushes and tree forts are still readily available. It's not as if pre-teens will be reduced to cave painting and hitting each other with rocks if they're suddenly no longer able to generate content for billionaires.

Even so, I find myself on board with Sweeney's broader stance—this isn't a great idea—not out of concerns that it will dull the creative instincts of the next generation, but simply because it's a potential security and privacy nightmare that's difficult to enforce and may or may not achieve its stated goals anyway.

And as other PC Gamer writers have previously pointed out, the impact of social media on young minds is only part of the problem, and arguably a relatively minor part: It also bakes the brains of adults with startling efficiency.

The EU KIDS Act is not a done deal. The proposed regulation has been submitted to the European Parliament and Council, and from there will enter the legislative process required for approval. Given the recent enactment of social media bans for kids and online age verification requirements in Australia, the UK, and some US states, though, and "the clear demand for urgent and comprehensive action" expressed by the EU, I expect it will be soon enough.

The industry obsession with high-resolution graphics has haunted it for years, but given the dire state of things in regards to both layoffs and hardware prices? It's now starting to be downright incompatible.

Raph Koster, a veteran developer who worked on Ultima Online and was the creative director for Star Wars Galaxies—and is now making another MMO, Stars Reach—has been banging that particular drum for years.

"I think the first time I spoke about, ‘Hey, cost is going to kill us’ was 2005," he tells our friends at Edge Magazine in a massive interview inside Issue 428. "Myhrvold’s Law says that software is a gas—it expands to fill whatever computer you have … The place that shows up the most in games, for better or worse, is in content costs."

Reiterating similar thoughts spoken to me when I chatted to him back in June, Koster says that "what used to be a single 128x128 texture is now multiple 4K textures with shaders and all this stuff. And, yes, tools have improved along the way. You don’t handpaint that texture pixel by pixel any more—you can use procedural tools like Substance, or just purchase it from a texture library or whatever.

"But there’s still [a] downstream cost, even if it’s just testing how those umpteen textures and shaders interact. It all adds up." Combine that with the fact that game prices haven't gone up in parallel to these ballooning development costs, thanks to constant deals—"who buys something at $60, even, today?"—and you've got a recipe for disaster.

A cyclical one, mind. "Unless we hit the singularity," Koster says, "a platform will come along that changes things." Koster lays out a few key qualities this hypothetical platform would require in order to save the industry (or at least, the developers working within it) from this steadily-approaching iceberg:

"It needs to provide a new affordance, meaning there has to be gameplay you cannot get except on that platform … [it needs to be] worse for making traditional games—because that means the big incumbents cannot just transfer their expertise, come in and dominate.

And to top it all off? "The number-one biggest thing this new platform needs is to have shitty graphics." Referring to a few historical examples, like Flash games, social games on Facebook, the Wii, and mobile. That's not to say these platforms'll be immune to those problems, though.

"They eventually catch up, and then the costs rise in exactly the same way. But we haven’t had a new platform come along to reset that cost curve in a long time. Like, a long time."

Heart Machine, the developer of the Hyper Light games and Possessor(s), has laid off "nearly everyone at the studio" following the collapse of a deal with an unnamed publisher for funding of its next project.

"I have very difficult news today," studio founder Alx Preston wrote on LinkedIn. "We had been working on an unannounced title, funded by a publisher. This week, they decided to no longer move forward with it. Without this key income for the studio, any other immediate prospects or other funds, nearly everyone at the studio had to be laid off. It's devastating.

"Everyone will be provided with as much support as possible, including assisting with placement. If you know of any roles for extraordinarily talented, kind people, please reach out and we will coordinate."

Heart Machine's debut game, Hyper Light Drifter, launched to critical and commercial success in 2016; the studio's follow-up, Solar Ash, didn't meet quite the same acclaim when it arrived in 2022, and Heart Machine ran into trouble a few years later, ending development of Hyper Light Breaker while it was still in early access and laying off employees. Released just after those layoffs were imposed, the action-platformer Possessor(s) earned "mostly positive" reviews on Steam, but not very many of them.

It's not clear what comes next for Heart Machine. Preston said the studio will "keep pushing to find a path," but also warned that at this point, he's "not sure yet what's next for Heart Machine to survive."

MindsEye developer Build a Rocket Boy (BARB) appears to have undergone another round of layoffs, and these latest cuts could be fatal, as multiple people have indicated that all remaining employees are being let go.

BARB has been struggling since the release of its startlingly bad (yet still strangely entertaining) action-thriller MindsEye in 2025, a situation made outright bizarre by the studio's repeated claims that it was the victim of a sabotage campaign. The insistence on that narrative seemed to drive a wedge between BARB and original MindsEye publisher IO Interactive, which ultimately washed its hands of the whole thing; updates continued to flow, including an execrable expansion that promised (and utterly failed to deliver) "evidence of the sabotage" that brought MindsEye low, but so did multiple rounds of layoffs and employee allegations of gross mismanagement and unauthorized employee surveillance.

Taken altogether, and particularly given the unforgiving nature of the videogame industry, a bad ending for BARB seemed inevitable, and that point may now have been reached.

"Unfortunately, along with the rest of my colleagues at Build a Rocket Boy, I am facing redundancy and now looking for a new opportunity," lead weapon and prop artist Adam Ridsdale wrote on LinkedIn.

Principal talent acquisition partner Dan Hawkins shared a similar message, writing, "With a very heavy heart I raise my green banner, along with the rest of my colleagues at Build a Rocket Boy. I am 'Open to Work' actively looking for a new adventure." Hawkins added that he "will be seeing BARB through till the very end, helping wrap things up here in the HR department," suggesting that "the end" is at hand.

Senior VFX artist Jason Waller also pointed to a studio closure: "Along with everybody else left at Barb my role is being made redundant." Numerous other employees have also reported their layoffs, without mentioning the wider impact of the cuts, including Rockstar veteran Stuart Ross, who served as head of audio at BARB.

Build a Rocket Boy hasn't made any sort of public statement on the reported shutdown, but it certainly looks like it may have finally reached the end of the line. I've reached out to the studio for comment and will update if I receive a reply.

It's that time of year again, folks. The PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct is nearly upon us. We sent a crew out to Japan to film exciting moments from the show floor, and we'll be giving you more information on over 30 games. We'll have world premieres, shadowdrops, DLC, release dates, and more.

This year's show will be hosted by the fantastic Frankie Ward, an award-winning presenter, frequent PC Gaming Show host, and all-round esports legend. You'll also see our wonderful senior editor Wesley Fenlon delivering vox pop interviews straight from the event itself.

Here's how to watch it live, so you can be among the first to see everything we're showing off for you.

How to watch the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct 2026

The PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct 2026 airs Sunday, September 20, 2026 at 9 am PT, 12 noon ET, 5 pm BST, and 1 am JST—this will technically air Monday, September 21 if you're watching from Japan.

You've got your pick of the litter when it comes to where you watch. The show will be airing on YouTube, Twitch, X, GamesRadar+, Steam, Bilibili, eCLUTCH, Ginx.tv, ESR Network, and Kuaishou.

Grab your snacks and a drink, because the show will be around 90 minutes long and feature games from Arcane Ermine, Caldera Interactive, Chorus Worldwide, City From Naught, Clear River Games, Devolver Digital, Firefly Studios, Fireshine Games, HABBY.FUN, KO_OP, Loftia, Megabit, New Tales, Skystone Games, The Game Bakers, Total Mayhem Games, Veewo Games, and WuselFaktory.

We've got more than 10 world premieres, a new trailer for Let's Build a Dungeon by Springloaded, the exclusive release date reveal of Virtue and a Sledgehammer from Devolver Digital, a new trailer for RTS Stronghold 4 from Firefly Studios, and a deep dive into Tenebris Somnia, the retro survival horror adventure with live action cutscenes from New Blood Interactive. You can check out all of the games on our Steam page.

There will also be some great streamers watching along, so you can join them and enjoy the show with a group. If you're interested in co-streaming the show yourself, just fill out this form.

Dungeons & Dragons has had a rough handful of years. A new version of the Open Game Licence (OGL) leaked in 2023, portending doom for independent creators and giving Wizards of the Coast a licence to rug-pull any third-party creator it didn't like (among other such horrors). This began the long and arduous process of mending burned bridges and un-pissing everybody off, starting with an immediate walk-back.

Since then, there have been upsets, ones I've been plenty critical of myself. But in late 2025, D&D got a new head in Dan Ayoub, who is now in charge of the D&D franchise at Wizards of the Coast. And his words last August gave me hope—and continue to do so, given the refreshingly straightforward candor of them.

In an interview with Wargamer's Mollie Russell, Ayoub doesn't mince words: "Bluntly, we're recovering from a lot of missteps—very loud, very public missteps. And we're not going to fix it in one year. I can talk 'til the cows come home, but we've got to show more than tell, and that is going to take some time. I'm very conscious that it's going to take a lot of time to win back the trust to the extent that I would like.

"Having said that, I think we've started strongly, and a lot of these things are still happening behind the scenes." To Ayoub's credit, there've already been some solid signs of change. After bungling its weird 3D tabletop in Sigil, D&DBeyond has focused on its already-present 2D offerings and incrementally improved it considerably.

Rather than trying to muscle out third-party competition, Wizards has also been doing extensive partnered content with those same creators, which is genuinely lovely to see. It's not all roses, mind—Hasbro has been engaging in some nasty union busting behaviour. Which didn't take, as UWOTC-CWA was formed thereafter.

Still, overall, Ayoub does seem to genuinely be walking the walk, not just talking the talk: "Honestly, if I would give myself good grades on one thing in particular over the past year, I think it's been listening. We established the community council. I've personally spent a bunch of time talking to not just fans, but retailers and consumers."

Regarding the OGL itself, Ayoub states that: "D&D is about, for, and by the fans. That's the first fundamental point that we can never lose. I think, over the course of several years, we lost sight of what was important. We lost sight of who our audience was."

Ayoub admits that the OGL fiasco "was a rug pull, right? A lot of people and businesses were built up around a specific thing. Trust was given to the brand, and people rightly felt the rug was pulled from under them. In some cases, it's caused damage we are still trying to fix today. So I understand the hesitancy of 'okay, here's this new guy saying all these things'."

"My biggest takeaway as I step into this role is that trust takes a long time to build and a second to break. I'm keenly aware it's going to take me a long time to repair this, but my hope is people will give the benefit of the doubt as we continue to show that lessons have been learned. This is a new direction, a new voice, and a new spirit and energy behind D&D."

While the grotty old cynic in me is still tutting and shaking my fist at recent crossovers, I still feel more optimistic about the system's future than I have in a long time. For one, just having its current head speak so candidly is kind of jarring—let alone the actual enthusiastic collaboration with third-party sources. The future's looking brighter by the second. Or, as Ayoub puts it, talking about bringing in partners to help write core source books:

"What was rewarding for me was, when we laid out that we want to bring all these voices back, I was thrilled with the level of excitement from these partners. It was almost like this exhale of relief."

I don't know if you've noticed, but the games industry kind of sucks. Despite (and because of) the absurd amount of money games rake in, there's an ungodly degree of consolidation, the RAMpocalypse, and constant, huge waves of layoffs. Tim Cain, who co-created the original Fallout, uploaded a video to YouTube last Wednesday explaining why he thinks the current state of affairs is so terrible, if not terribly surprising.

"Why are things looking particularly bad right now? Well, the simple answer is 'cause they are bad right now," he said in the video. "Correction for [reckless investment during] COVID, hardware costs have shot up—a lot due to AI data centers—but investors are redirecting their money outside of the games industry, in some cases outside of the US … things had to contract. And that means people are gonna get laid off.

"These things will pass. They really will. I know if you're caught up in it, you're thinking, 'this is terrible.' They'll pass. That's the good news. The bad news is, new ones are gonna happen."

Cain was careful in his video to clarify that he understands things are uniquely bad now, but also said that things have been bad and will be bad again. "If you're somebody who got into the games industry in that time period, in the last five or 10 years, and you thought it was going to be a stable job that would see through 30 or 40 years, you assumed incorrectly. You're wrong."

He warned taking a decadeslong career like his own as evidence that gamdev work is reliable for up-and-comers was "survivorship bias." He recalled the stateside video game crash of 1983 as an example of what he introduced as his main point: "What's happening now isn't novel, it isn't new to the industry, and it's always gonna be around." As for why that is, he posited that games sit at the intersection between art and cutting-edge tech, both of which change rapidly as a rule.

For workers trying to weather industry conditions anyway, he suggested either honing an eclectic and broad set of skills or hyper-specializing and becoming a go-to guy in a particular niche. Notably, there is also a larger fight for labor rights in the industry trying to change some of these conditions for good: Blizzard Entertainment workers, for instance, just won what the Communications Workers of America called "a breakthrough first contract" for all the studio's game development teams and shared services. The Independent Workers of Great Britain, meanwhile, is currently rallying in support of Rockstar Games workers as the company grapples with union-busting allegations.

Ashly Burch's first encounter with PC gaming was playing a Donkey Kong knockoff on a PC her mother had bought to practice typing. But the first PC game that truly resonated with her was LucasArts' Day of the Tentacle: "That was the first time I played a game that I can remember that had a narrative and comedy," she says. "It was one of those things where, when you're younger, you find something that expands your concept of what a thing can be."

Burch came to the world's attention through the online, gaming-themed sketch show Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin', before making her videogame acting debut as Tiny Tina in Borderlands 2. Since then, Burch's roles have included Chloe in Life is Strange, Parvati Holcomb in The Outer Worlds, and Aloy in Guerrilla Games' Horizon series.

More recently, Burch returned to sending-up videogames in Apple TV's game-development comedy Mythic Quest, and is currently working on her passion project I'm Happy You're Here—a YouTube comedy series that explores coping with mental health issues: "They're easy, shareable, hopefully easy to understand distillations of complicated concepts, and yeah, they're all for free on YouTube," she says. "It's something I've wanted to make for a long time."

Burch took a break from puppet psychotherapy to show me around her Steam library. We deliberated the benefits of notebooks in detective games, vetted cosy gaming's dating profiles, and discussed the secret sauce behind Slay the Spire.

What game are you currently playing?

The Incident at Galley House. I just started playing yesterday. It's brand new. I'm at that part that I think happens with every detective game, where you're like, "I have too many leads".

I'm overwhelmed. I resist having a notebook at first when I do detective games, and inevitably I have to cave and start physically writing stuff down. I did that with Blue Prince. I had a massive notebook for [that], and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, I had to have a massive notebook for that.

Why do I resist it? Is it laziness? It might be laziness. There's a part of me that's like, "It's fun that a game is complex enough that you have to keep your own personal notes." And then there's another part of me that's like, "But shouldn't that all be internal to the system?" Like, shouldn't whatever mechanism you need to track things be housed within the game? But there's no rule for that.

I love detective games. I think the first one I fell in love with was Return of the Obra Dinn. And then I think when I played Chants of Sennaar, I was like, "This is my new favourite genre." It often felt like adventure games could be a bit arbitrary. It wasn't necessarily logic that would lead you to the solution for something. It might be brute forcing, just being like, "I don't know where the fuck I'm going—rubber chicken on every single thing that I find."

When it's a good detective game, you really feel like a detective. You really are putting clues together and creating logical connections … and especially in Return of the Obra Dinn, when you get things correct, you're like, "I'm a genius".

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

I just uninstalled it because I put too many hours into this game, and I can't look at the little icon anymore. It was Fields of Mistria.

I usually seek out cosy games when I'm using my brain a lot in my day-to-day, if I'm in a writer's room or I just feel like my brain is full of too much stuff. I will do a cosy game to just zone out.

What I really liked about it is that I find sometimes in cosy games, if there are romance options, there's like two characters with distinct personalities, and everyone else is the same. They might have different hobbies, but they don't fundamentally feel like different people. And I feel what Fields of Mistria did well is that—and it's not perfect, I still think there's a handful of characters that feel similar—but more than most games, I would say half the characters are distinct.

And the other thing that's interesting—this is a strange compliment—but they managed to capture the kids very, very well. There's three kids in the village, and they're maybe the most interesting.

A difficult thing with writing is that often people feel like their characters are distinct because they have certain backstories or they have certain interests, but if you don't pull those things forward and have them affect the way that they speak, the way that they act, they way that they move, they don't end up feeling different. I think often games can fall into that trap. These characters look, even just aesthetically, they look really different, so that should be enough. And it's like, well, you have to write them differently. I really liked that about Mistria

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

I mostly play on my Steam Deck. I think the oldest game currently installed on my Steam Deck is Kentucky Route Zero. Don't take my gamer card away, I never finished it. That's why it's installed, because I was looking through my library and being like, "What games do I need to give another crack at?"

I was a lot younger because [it was] 13 years ago, and I think I just couldn't latch onto the abstract David Lynch-y vibe of it. I think I was more impatient with games too back in the day. And also since 2020 I've become a reader. I didn't really read books very much before 2020. I was just so tired of looking at screens that I was like, "I have to put my eyes anywhere else."

So now, I think I've built up more patience and attention span, frankly, from reading. I am curious about how I would feel going back into Kentucky Route Zero now that my frontal lobe is completely developed.

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

Fields of Mistria isn't as bad as I thought. Slay the Spire 2 is as bad as I thought—270 hours. I got really obsessed. I loved Slay the Spire very much, and then, actually I'm curious because I don't just play PC. I'm all over the place and I don't have my old Xbox anymore. I wonder if Spelunky would have more hours? Probably.

But yeah, it was one of those things where I would be like, "Well, I'm waiting for this thing, I'll do a run." Then there were definitely nights where I was like, "I have to get to Ascension 10" and do 10 hours or something. I would like to say that part of it is because it has co-op, and I played a lot of co-op, but I haven't played that much co-op. Most of those are singleplayer hours.

It's such a well-designed roguelike. I mean, Slay the Spire 2 is still in early access obviously, so it's not as tight necessarily as Slay the Spire 1. But it's still quite comparable. And it's so addictive too. It has this thing of the luck and skill are in perfect balance in that game. It's the consolidation of many, many different, smart choices that make it a good game. And I don't think you can point at any one main mechanic or something.

The other thing—it's such a small thing—but what I really love is that, again, it's the thing of distinct characters, you get the idea of who these people are through how they play. There are these little sprinkles of characterisation that just make it feel fuller. Like the Regent is a new character, and he's sort of a prissy, shitty king. It took me many playthroughs to realise that the throne he's sitting in is being held up by two little minions whose legs are constantly shaking because they're having trouble holding him up. That is such a fun little detail, you get so much information about who this guy is from just looking at him.

I think we can get trapped in, with games, this stoic, cool character [archetype]. There's a lot of stoic, cool, badass characters. You know what I mean? So when there's a shitty little posh prince, I'm like, "Yes! Give me more of that." I want more shitty little bitches.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

It's probably League of Legends because I play ARAM with friends. I haven't played in a minute. I need to get back on it. But for a while that was my after-work ritual—I would get on with a few friends and we'd play a couple of games of ARAM.

I remember being in a group chat with them or something [during the pandemic] and they were like, "You should learn [League] because what the fuck else are we going to do right now?" Which I'm glad about because it's so much to learn. And truly I would not have been able to if we were not in a global pandemic and I had time to do it. I just don't like the number of characters, and they're always releasing new champions, and then you have to know how the champions work, and then you need to understand all the items, and thank god I don't have to worry about runes anymore. But now I have the hang of enough champions, and I know enough about how the other ones work, that I can hold my own.

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

This is kind of a lame answer, but I have Audacity, which is how I record my voice auditions, and I've used it now for so many years that I'm sure I could use a different program. I just don't want to because I'm not doing anything complicated.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

Quite tidy. There's a draft of something I'm working on. So on the left side of the screen, I have like two documents and Fade In. Oh, I guess this is another answer to your previous question. I don't use Final Draft for writing scripts, I use Fade In. So this is probably another program that I would never uninstall.

Final Draft is so expensive, and it feels like every two years they force you to update and then force you to buy it again or something. Fade In is like, I think when I bought it, it was like $60, and then you're done. I don't know how they make money, frankly. And it's like the same thing with Audacity, which is like I just need you for script format. That's all.

I can't handle clutter. When I start to write something, especially, the space around me has to be clean or I can't focus. And if my house gets too cluttered it's the same thing. I have to be tidy before I can do anything else. I do have OCD, so that might be why … it really calms my nervous system down.