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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top Steam games by revenue (July 7 - 14)

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

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

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

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Steam review of the week

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

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

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

Failgirl69, ruminating rather disturbingly on Feed the Pit.

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

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

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

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

What game are you currently playing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

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

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

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

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

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

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

How tidy is your desktop screen?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faulty service

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bad reset

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deep cuts

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

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

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

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

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

Crash course

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What was on the cover?

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

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

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

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

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

Cover hits:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cover hits: Nada

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

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

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

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

C'mon, you know he did.

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

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

Cover hits:

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

In the news

July 1996

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

July 2006

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

July 2016

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

The hottest hardware

July 1996

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

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

July 2006

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

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

July 2016

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

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

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

Our highest and lowest review scores

July 1996

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

July 2006

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

July 2016

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

The back page

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

July 2006: Gary Whitta's Pride Parade

July 2016: Battlefield 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glenn Schofield, the creator of Dead Space and The Callisto Protocol, has announced his retirement after 35 years in the industry. In a LinkedIn video post, Schofield thanked his family, Electronic Arts and Activision, and "the people who supported us in videogames".

"The past couple of decades have been some of the greatest times in videogames," Schofield said. "Some of the best games have come out over these times, [from] some of the greatest talent in the world I've been able to work with. I thank you all. I had a front row seat to one of the greatest creative explosions in history, I think."

Schofield has been candid about the difficulties of securing funding, and getting games greenlit by publishers, amid the industry's post-COVID malaise. Following the release of 2022's The Callisto Protocol and his subsequent departure from Krafton's Striking Distance Studios, Schofield tried and failed to raise funding for "a new sub-genre of horror".

"People loved the concept," he wrote on LinkedIn in 2025. "We got a lot of second and third meetings. But early feedback was 'get [the budget] to $10M.' Lately, that number’s dropped to $2–5M." At the time, he said he may have directed his last game, and the industry has only become more ravaged since then, with huge layoffs at Xbox, Bungie, and Ubisoft in 2026.

Since shipping The Callisto Protocol and ultimately failing to make a new horror game, Schofield's focus has shifted to his visual art and AI. While he's no AI naysayer— he spent the bulk of his 2025 Gamescom Asia keynote praising generative AI as a creative tool—he was dismissive of Elon Musk's claims that xAI could generate a whole game from scratch ("he's full of crap", Schofield said.)

While Schofield is best known for Dead Space and three Sledgehammer Call of Duty games (Modern Warfare 3, Advanced Warfare, and WWII), his credits list is long and reaches as far back as 1991. As art director, he's worked on titles as varied as The Ren and Stimpy Show: Buckeroo$! and Barbie: Game Girl. As a director, he worked on Blood Omen 2: Legacy of Kain and two Gex games.

Still, it's difficult not to associate Schofield with a period of big blockbuster primacy that kicked into gear with the seventh generation of consoles. For most of Schofield's career, every year's release calendar was reliably dotted by at least a half-dozen triple A behemoths. Evidence suggests those days are not coming back, at least not for western studios: tens of thousands of development roles have been shed since 2022, as the industry is eroded by the popping of the COVID bubble, ballooning development costs, lengthening production cycles, and the delusional goals of executives.

Factor in unprecedented hardware cost increases thanks to the AI industry's leeching of RAM and storage, and you can probably imagine how difficult it must be to stay optimistic as a game developer in 2026: especially if you were commandeering multimillion sellers 10 years ago, and still can't get a project greenlit.

Still, despite all available evidence, Schofield says the future is bright.

"This is an amazing industry with so many talented people," he said. "And I know times are tough right now, but man, the future ahead is really, really bright. And I wish you all the next generation of game makers the best of luck. Explore, experiment, enjoy. And don't forget that the most important thing is the idea."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What game are you currently playing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How tidy is your desktop screen?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The metaverse according to Ball

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

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

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

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

Above: Ball's recent interview with The Game Business

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

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

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

Hints at Xbox's future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've seen a lot of complaints and concerns about the layoffs at Xbox that put 3,200 people out of work and resulted in the spinoff of four studios—eventually five, once the Arkane situation is sorted. One I haven't run across is a claim that it's all part of an effort to take jobs away from Americans and replace them with non-Americans on H-1B visas. That changed today, though, when Microsoft chief communications officer Frank X. Shaw took to social media to deny the claim.

The allegations are apparently rooted in stories like this one from Fox News, with the headline, "Fury erupts as US brand fires 1,600 employees after securing thousands of foreign worker visas."

Fox noted that Microsoft is laying off roughly 4,800 employees in total, the bulk of them from Xbox, while at the same time acquiring authorization "to hire from foreign countries 2,273 employer-sponsored, non-immigrant workers under what is known as the H-1B visa program."

Quoting a series of random people on X, the report states that "furious online critics claim that American jobs are being unfairly handed to foreigners," adding that "some online critics [have] claimed Sharma's Indian heritage played a role in firing the Americans, given the percentage of H-1B workers from India."

The H-1B is a non-immigrant visa that allows US business to hire foreign workers to fill certain speciality occupations. Criticism of the program and its impact on US workers has waxed and waned over the years, but it's taken on particular prominence during the second Trump administration: Earlier this year, Trump attempted to impose a $100,000 application fee for H-1B visas, although that was eventually overturned by courts. The Republican party continues to lean into it as a wedge issue, however: Vice President JD Vance, for instance, said during a recent speech that "American jobs ought to go to American workers and not foreign fraudsters, and the Department of Labor is fighting back against it."

It's the sort of rhetoric that can lead to bad places, and the accusations of H-1B visa abuse, accompanied by plenty of naked racism, has spawned countless posts, re-posts, and likes, particularly on X—enough to prompt Shaw to speak out.

"Lots of bad information out there—let's clear it up," Shaw wrote in his message. "Recent workforce changes were made to restructure the Xbox business because it is not healthy. They were not made to replace employees with foreign workers.

"The H-1B figures being referenced are Microsoft-wide visa renewals and new hire applications. They are not specific to Xbox and represent a small percentage of Microsoft's overall workforce. And the majority of roles impacted were not American roles."

Shaw also made a point of saying that "Xbox is the largest employer of American workers in the gaming industry and the largest American gaming company," and that its CEO is "American born, raised, and educated."

Earlier this week, the US Federal Reserve appointed Sharma to a new Productivity and Jobs task force, where she will help "assess the economic impact of new general-purpose technologies, including artificial intelligence, to inform the Federal Reserve's policy judgments."

Microsoft's cuts across Xbox studios, totaling 3,200 by later this year, included a massive reduction at id Software. The team lost 136 people (over half of the studio) just a day before its Doom: The Dark Ages expansion released, a bloodletting that had remaining and newly laid-off employees seriously concerned about the studio's capacity to make games and update its proprietary engine, id Tech, going forward.

"Nothing says business success like nuking a team into the dirt and relegating them to support studio size while also throwing out massive technological achievements," one impacted worker said.

Today, the official id Software X account made a statement aimed at assuaging these worries.

"While our studio was impacted, those changes were spread across teams. We still have the crew we need to build the games and tech we're known for. The team today is about the same size we were when making DOOM (2016). We have always had a flat studio where everyone is a maker, and we will remain true to that philosophy moving forward," the post reads.

That bit about the current size of the team matches a Windows Central report that also claims the studio is not being forced to move to Unreal Engine in the immediate future, as employees have openly speculated about. The studio's statement also suggests that it will continue work on id Tech.

"We are focused on supporting each other and the team members impacted. We're going to keep building the great games and tech that have defined us for the past 35 years, and we're looking forward to seeing you at QuakeCon this August."

While it's encouraging to learn that id Software won't immediately join a Fallout assembly line, as is Obsidian's new charge, the statement is unlikely to change a growing impression that Microsoft is an unfit steward of the studio synonymous with PC gaming. Personally, knowing that id Software is the same size it was 10 years ago isn't an encouraging sign for its future—it takes more people and more time to make games of Doom's scale and fidelity than it did in the 2010s, hence why the team had grown to 200-plus for The Dark Ages.

Whatever id makes next, it will now do so with an axe hovering over its neck.

Developer Mateo Covic, who went viral for complaining that thousands of people had refunded his game after finishing it in less than two hours, says he's not actually unhappy about the number of refunds or money he lost, or even Steam's policy in general—he was merely expressing frustration with players who "bragged about having a fun time with the game and refunding it after completion."

Covic is the solo dev of Paddle Paddle Paddle, sort of a very-low-budget Split Fiction. He got the ball rolling over the weekend when he shared an image of a one-line Steam review stating, "Great game, finished within 1:40 hrs (refunded)."

Tagging the official Steam account, Covic wrote on X, "This should not be possible. Would be cool if you could finally do something about your refund policy... Got dozens of reviews like that and 21% refund rate even though the reviews are 90% very positive... That's over 55,000 Refunds btw."

The message quickly blew up, and not entirely in good ways. Discussions about the obvious loophole in Steam's refund policy and what might be done about it followed, but so did a brief review bombing of Paddle Paddle Paddle, which holds a "very positive" overall rating on Steam, but is "mixed" in recent reviews. Many of those negative reviews aren't aimed at the game but at Covic himself, for suggesting that playing a game to completion and then refunding might be uncool.

My initial thought was that the numbers—55,000 refunds on a game that, according to SteamDB, hit a peak concurrent player count of 401— seemed a bit funky. I reached out to Mateo about it and he agreed: He's not sure why they're "pretty out of place," as he put it, but he shared his sales data with me to prove they're legit, and speculated that it might be simply because the game has enjoyed slow but steady sales since it launched in July 2025. He previously said Paddle Paddle Paddle had sold 150,000 copies on Steam back in December 2025.

Even the current controversy hasn't really impacted the game's sales trajectory, Covic said: "This discussion and virality right now did not change anything so far except that I'm getting plenty of hateful DMs daily and people review bombing my game."

Covic said the tweet that started all of this was something of a misstatement: The 20% refund rate on Paddle Paddle Paddle is actually pretty normal for a "rage game"—the sort of thing streamers like to play and performatively scream about—he explained, and he wasn't upset about the number of refunds but with people posting gleefully about playing the game from start to finish and then refunding it.

"My tweet phrasing was a complete mistake and I should have definitely not put the refund number in there," Covic said. "This led to a big misunderstanding: I have absolutely no problem with refunds at all and did not care about that before my tweet. The game always had a refund rate of 20% and that's normal.

"I just wanted to say that I think it's wrong to refund a game after having fun with it and completing it. That was my only point."

Covic does take issue with one aspect of Steam refunds: not the system itself, but the way people use it. "I wish that players would write down more useful comments ... many (not all) refund comments are not really helpful," he said.

"People refunded the game with the reason 'game too difficult,' and their comments do not really help me to improve or fix the game. Paddle Paddle Paddle is a rage game, so it was planned to be hard. I would like to read more constructive feedback here."

As for those who liked Paddle Paddle Paddle well enough to play it from beginning to end but then refunded it anyway just because they could, Covic said that's just not a philosophy he can support.

"One of the most common comments under my tweet was that a two-hour game isn't worth paying for and should be free," Covic told me. "Personally, I don't agree with that. Some of the best games I've ever played, such as Fears to Fathom and A Short Hike, are incredible experiences that take less than two hours to finish."

Despite all the kerfuffle, Covic is leaving the troublesome tweet up, saying he's "not gonna hide this mistake." For people who are seriously interested in Steam refund figures, he also recommended Simon Carless' Game Discovery Co. newsletter from February 2025, which dives deep on the topic. (I echo that recommendation, for the record.)

Covic is now working on a roguelite called Rogue Jungle that's expected to be out later this year.

Making a game is hard, or so I've been told by those brave enough to give it a go. Mistakes happen, and sometimes your game just doesn't work. That's what happened to the developer behind Red Flag, a social deduction game about convincing your friends you're fit to survive the apocalypse in a bunker with limited resources.

In a Reddit post last week (spotted by Automaton), the small, first-time team explains that it had unknowingly submitted a broken build of the game to Steam on the day of the deadline to get into June's Next Fest. The review and approval process typically takes five to seven days, the developer explains, so it really was cutting it close.

"It was the weekend. [Steam] Partner Support doesn’t work weekends. We sent a desperate email to regular Steam Support, honestly just screaming into the void."

Steam replied saying the build was sent for urgent review to, hopefully, get it into Next Fest in time. And a few hours later, viola, the Red Flag's demo build had been approved.

"But there was a note: the reviewer couldn't launch the game. We’d messed up the C++ redistributable setup (forgot to use the Steam common redist system, shipped local DLLs instead)."

Instead of rejecting the game and sending it back to the developers to fix (which almost certainly would've caused it to miss the deadline), Steam's reviewer fixed the issue themselves.

"Steam Support actually edited our configuration, sorted the dependencies, and approved the build so we wouldn't miss the fest. We’ve now passed our first day of Next Fest, wishlists nearly doubled, and we’re actually meeting players in our own lobby. All because Steam Support went way above and beyond."

Turns out, this is quite a common issue, with several other indie developers sharing similar experiences in the comments. "They did this for me on my first upload, too. Thought it was very cool.", one commenter wrote. It's apparently just a few clicks on Valve's behalf to fix such an issue, but it no doubt saved a last-minute panic from the game's creators.

Xbox's 'reset' layoffs have hit Bethesda hard, with long-term institutional talent shown the door—Zenimax Online Studios, which is part of the same studio family as Bethesda and works on the Elder Scrolls Online, was also particularly dismantled by Xbox, with over 60% of its staff laid off in the past year.

Understandably, Bethesda developers are irate. Partially because in some studios HR forced them to take down tributes to their laid off colleagues, but also because these layoffs seem to—as the Bethesda Game Studios Union (OneBGS) put it earlier this week—be part of a "stressful annual routine" for Microsoft.

And with 1,600 layoffs yet to come, a sword is left dangling over the rest of Xbox's studios, wondering who's to come next—prompting OneBGS to action. In a statement (shared here by Kotaku), the union said: "The company wants us to accept this as a done deal and quietly disappear. We won’t let that happen. Our next steps are to mobilize. We need every single member visible and unified.

"To that end, we are announcing our Save Our Devs March across all studios on Wednesday July 15th."

The objective, it seems, is to make sure that Microsoft understands it can't just keep doing this without adverse impacts on the developers left, who have the technical power to leave Xbox without one of their flagship studios:

"We need to show management right now that we mean business, so they will properly take care of our fellow co-workers today and think twice before ever attempting something like this again. Stay strong, look out for one another, and we look forward to seeing us all marching together on the 15th."

The scale and damage of these layoffs is yet to be properly tallied, but we know at this point that they include a near-hollowing out of id Software, the aforementioned ransacking of Zenimax Online Studios, and multiple hits to accessibility leadership.

It's a waste of talent and legacy, by all accounts, but not one that's unprecedented, mind. In addition to similar layoffs and project cancellations that occurred last year, Xbox has closed studios that've landed major hits before, including Hi-Fi Rush and Prey.

In 1984, an upstart retail company called Costco had just opened its first handful of voluminous warehouse stores on the west coast of the United States when it decided to try an experiment. It installed a hot dog cart in front of its San Diego store and started selling Hebrew Nationals with a drink for $1.50. People, it turned out, liked the hot dogs. The cart became Cafe 150, named for the combo price.

The company sold 245 million of them last year. When the CEO of the company in the 2010s complained to founder Jim Sinegal "we can't sell this hot dog for a buck fifty. We are losing our rear ends," Sinegal, likely then in his 70s, famously shot back: "If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out." A Costco hot dog and a 20 oz soda still costs $1.50.

In 1992, just a year-and-a-half after releasing a cutesy 2D platformer called Commander Keen, a tiny squad of game developers barely out of their teens started a studio called id Software and pioneered the first-person shooter. Then they followed it with Doom, maybe the most important computer game of all time. It was installed on more PCs than Windows. That tiny squad hired more people and then made Quake, maybe the most important 3D computer game of all time.

Decades later, a new generation of people at id dedicated to that legacy defied expectations to make another shooter so good it could proudly stand beside the ones that defined videogames. Then they made an even better one.

On Monday, Microsoft, which owns Xbox, which owns Bethesda, which owns id, laid off 136 developers from the Texas studio, which 12-year art veteran Derek Best described as "nuking a team into the dirt." Neither id Software or Doom were mentioned in CEO Asha Sharma's "Resetting Xbox" announcement. But the studio's new game, released one day after much of the talent behind it were laid off, currently occupies the top banner on Xbox.com.

What does it say about a company when it doesn't understand—or at any real level seem to care about—something it has become the steward of?

Doom, as a series of videogames, has generated hundreds of millions of dollars. But Doom is not just the money it's generated. It's the literally countless mods, maps, and entire games built on its bones; incredible ones are still coming out right now. Doom is the countless people making games today who cut their teeth mapping or had their neural pathways permanently altered the first time they picked up the Super Shotgun. The original game's labyrinthine levels and pulsing music and gory kills were revelatory enough, yet it's literally impossible to overstate its impact on the history of videogames from that moment forward. John Carmack programmed in the network code that enabled multiplayer in one month, in November 1993, and the game came out 10 days later. John Romero called the multiplayer deathmatch, and we're still calling it that today.

id Tech, the studio's ever-evolving engine, is not just a modern marvel that runs like a greased-up bat hurtling out of hell at a time when its competition is leaning on AI upscalers to crack 30 frames per second. It is the origin of yet more careers, thanks to its history of open source releases; one of the best indie games of 2025 uses it. It is a creation that any executive with any amount of vision would see as both a point of pride and an invaluable asset. You bought your way to the inner chamber, the very beating heart, of videogame software. Is that not a thing to revere?

Ahhh, but how much money does id Tech make? How much is it really worth? Xbox, its leadership says, is "not healthy," and as a result hard choices have to be made. That's just sensible business, not a short-sighted attempt to maximize shareholder value this quarter by kneecapping an incredible asset.

How else could this have gone? Last year Costco took home $275 billion in revenue (just $6 billion shy of Microsoft), and its former CEO—the one whose life was threatened over the sanctity of the hot dog—bluntly said "we have never been a company that puts the shareholders on top." A few months ago his successor housed a hot dog in a viral Instagram video before declaring: "The hot dog price will not change as long as I'm around."

He also said, through a mouthful of meat, that it's a good hot dog. And it is a good hot dog! But that's not why people love it.

People love the Costco hot dog because it's a symbol for the whole operation: that you're paying the membership dues because the deals are worth it. That they're going to give you a good value for every goddamn cent you give them. It stopped mattering years ago if the hot dogs themselves made money or not.

Costco's founder Jim Sinegal, who declared the buck fifty frank more valuable than a human life? The hot dog cart wasn't even his thing back in 1984. The idea started at a competing warehouse chain, Price Club, which merged with Costco in the '90s. But Sinegal knew what he had and expanded Cafe 150 into the food court, now one of Costco's biggest draws. That's how you treat a legacy.

The people at id Software—or the people who were at id Software as of four days ago—knew how to treat a legacy. They got it so deeply that it was evident from the very first moments of Doom 2016, as PC Gamer's James Davenport wrote in the very first paragraph of his review 10 years ago:

This thing here? It's important.

How does the company that's for decades been synonymous with the PC—much as we now wish it weren't—end up with its hands on the game studio that's synonymous with the PC, and not see it as a priceless asset?

"Xbox has many of the most beloved franchises in entertainment history," Xbox CEO Asha Sharma wrote on Monday. id wasn't mentioned. What does it say about the people in charge that they paid to get their hands on that kind of legacy, and then gave it less respect than a $1.50 hot dog?

John Carmack has reacted to a major round of layoffs at id Software, the studio that he co-founded in 1991. Microsoft is cutting 136 roles (reports indicate over half of its headcount) at the Doom studio, which just released an expansion for Doom: The Dark Ages this week.

"My 'Microsoft will probably be a good steward of the brand' statement isn't aging well," Carmack wrote on X, "and this is certainly going to dampen the mood of the founder reunion at QuakeCon next month."

Despite what comes across as disapproval of the layoffs, Carmack stops short of criticizing Microsoft's decision.

"I'm saddened, but I can't muster anger or outrage over it. I don't have access to the books, but I suspect that id Software was a marginal business from Microsoft's perspective. I believe the reports that Minecraft revenues have been carrying several other studios."

Carmack is referring to a recent Bloomberg report that claims profits from Minecraft had been redirected toward less financially successful Xbox studios for the past several years.

"To continue being produced long term, games need to succeed, not just be beloved. Games are competing with every other option for spending your leisure time and money, and the competition is brutal. You can't rule out the possibility that executives are idiots, but that shouldn't be your default belief. I don't think there is any obvious path that would have doubled the revenue from id games."

He then went on to offer some hypothetical strategies that could have prevented where we're at now, which is the decimation of the team behind the most critically-acclaimed shooters of the generation.

"Could they have gotten more with a different pricing strategy? Could they have created more things for fans to buy? Could they have cost effectively marketed in a way that reached more players that would have loved and bought the games?

"Could they have changed the game designs and broadened the appeal to more players without alienating existing ones? Could they have produced the games at a lower cost, faster or cheaper?

"I really don’t know."

In his own response earlier this week, id Software co-founder John Romero expressed grief for those suddenly out of a job—an ordeal that he can relate to, considering that Xbox cut funding for his studio's next game this time in 2025.

"I know what it feels like to leave id while id goes on. It's a strange and painful thing to step away from a place that holds so much of your work, friendships and history… Romero Games was there a year ago. I know how devastating it is, and my heart's with all of you."

The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, the body overseeing the implementation of United States monetary policy, has announced the creation of five task forces intended to evaluate and improve the Fed's operations. In a press release, Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh named the "external advisers" who will lead each task force, ranging from economics professors to AI investors and corporate executives—executives like Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, who will preside over a task force on employment and productivity.

Yes, that Asha Sharma. The Asha Sharma who, just three days ago, announced an Xbox "reset" that will see roughly 3,200 of her employees lose their jobs by the end of the 2027 fiscal year—a reorganization that remaining developers are reportedly convinced will cause irreparable damage to some of the company's most valuable brands.

Sharma will be one of three leaders heading up the Productivity and Jobs task force, which will "assess the economic impact of new general-purpose technologies, including artificial intelligence, to inform the Federal Reserve's policy judgments." She'll be joined by Stanford economics professor Charles I. Jones—"currently on leave at Anthropic"—and Marc Andreessen: tech VC, major AI investor, and guy who believes you can improve an LLM's results by simply instructing it to be very, very smart.

"The Federal Reserve's commitment to price stability and maximum employment is unwavering. As is our resolve to pursue our mandate with rigor. The US economy has changed significantly over the last generation, and never more so than right now," Warsh said, deploying a sentence that definitely made sense. "Each task force will carefully consider whether policymakers' means and methods, analytical tools, and policy approaches can be improved upon. I am honored that the best minds from a range of disciplines have agreed to work with us to sharpen our performance as an institution."

Considering Sharma announced that Mojang and King—two of Xbox's most valuable operations—will now report directly to her, I'm impressed that she'll be able to find the time. According to the Fed, we'll be able to follow the task forces' work in updates "posted periodically" on its website.

As reported by MMORPG, we now know the full scope of the layoffs at ZeniMax Online Studios (The Elder Scrolls Online) and ZeniMax Media, parent company of Bethesda Game Studios. A Maryland WARN Act notice shows 213 employees laid off from ZeniMax Online, and 166 from ZeniMax Media, for a total of 379.

ZeniMax Media and Online have two listings at separate offices on the WARN notice. There is no separate WARN notice for Bethesda Game Studios, indicating that the 166 layoffs at ZeniMax include those at BGS⁠—Bethesda and ZeniMax Media share an office address.

Further supporting this, the 136 layoffs at id Software were reported as "ZeniMax Media Inc. (Richardson Texas)" in a separate Texas WARN notice. It is unclear how many of the 166 people laid off from the ZeniMax Rockville office were Bethesda developers, and how many came from the ZeniMax publishing side of the business.

As for ZeniMax Online, we've already heard substantial anecdotal evidence that the studio was devastated by these layoffs, and the numbers add further perspective. Game Developer reported the ZeniMax Online Union as containing 461 members at the end of 2024⁠—mostly based in the Rockville offices, though some were spread across the country.

ZeniMax Online has lost 275 employees between July 2025 and '26⁠—a WARN notice last year for "Zenimax [sic] Media, Inc." using ZeniMax Online's office address put last July's layoff count at 62. Assuming no other significant sources of attrition and that the union accounted for a majority of employees, that means ZeniMax Online now consists of 186 people, or 40% of the manpower it had just a year and a half ago.

A September 2024 Twitter post by user Timur222 shared a since-amended LinkedIn experience entry by former ESO UX lead, Gary Boodhoo. In it, Boodhoo cited ESO as bringing in "$15M in monthly revenue for over 10 years." Now, I'm no businessman, but that sounds like a team you'd want to support, rather than laying off at least 60% of them in a year.

Here's an embarrassing thing to admit on the internet: when I was a teenage subscriber to Nintendo Power magazine, I picked the Donkey Kong 64 soundtrack as my "sign-up gift" because I wanted to be able to listen to the DK Rap on CD. Why I was obsessed with the song I can't say 25 years later, but Donkey Kong 64 is a memorable mess of a game—sprawling, ambitious, funny, inventive, and often infuriating, with a predilection for collectibles so infamous that the developers eventually made fun of themselves for it.

The point is, Donkey Kong 64 is a game that inspires strong feelings in those who've played it. So it seems fitting that members of the DK64 randomizer community, who've dedicated years to picking it apart and putting it back together, would start developing an unofficial PC port with a specific rallying cry:

"Fuck AI vibe coding bullshit."

DK64 Recompiled, announced in a YouTube video in late June, is actually the second project with that exact name, and that's no coincidence. It's the latest example of an increasingly common point of friction in the game emulation and hacking scene, as experienced programmers butt heads with those eager to use new AI tools to spin up new ports of old games in record time. In some cases, ports written with AI tools like Claude are ostracized or ignored. But in the case of Donkey Kong 64, the game's biggest fans weren't about to cede ground.

"The DK64 randomizer dev team is owning this shit now," contributor 2dos wrote in the N64 Recomp Discord server, shortly after the video's debut. "We have decided to take on and own this development due to the poor development direction of another recompilation project of DK64 happening concurrently that is heavily leaning on AI vibe code, and thus is resulting in a poor quality project that will make it progressively harder to manage as time goes on. Our DK64 recompilation project is backed by folks who have worked on and tinkered with the backend of the DK64 code for well over a decade, and do not rely on vibe coding to make code changes."

Static recompilation is a technique that, in short, translates all of a game's code from one system's language to another; unlike emulation, it's not simulating the original hardware holistically. The most prominent hobby project using this technique so far is N64 Recomp, announced just over two years ago, which is a recompilation tool specifically geared towards Nintendo 64 games. Since its debut we've seen modders use it to create PC ports of Banjo-Kazooie, Star Fox 64, Mario Kart 64, and more, while similar projects have sprung up for other consoles like the Xbox 360.

Legally, the freshly written code is clean because these recompiled ports don't contain any of the assets from the original games—players have to provide a ROM file themselves. The porting process has become an ethical, rather than legal, battleground in the last few months, as "vibe coded" projects have begun cropping up practically every day.

One developer has used Claude's AI coding to spin up recompilation tools for the NES, Sega Genesis, PlayStation, Super Nintendo, Game Boy Advance, and Virtual Boy, each with a handful of games at least bootable so far. Another's got GitHub repositories for everything from the PS3 to the ZX Spectrum. Others have used the Xbox 360 recompilation framework ReXGlue to pump out ports at a seemingly astonishing rate—but once you get past the YouTube videos hyping them up, the reality isn't quite so impressive.

"Vibe coding a recomp has started to become significantly more prominent and not in a good way," says Ballaam, a contributor to the DK64 randomizer and now DK64 Recompiled alongside 2dos. "I think GoldenEye was released somewhat recently with being heavily vibe coded and, as a result of that (and probably either dev inexperience or overconfidence in the AI output), it leads to some very critical bugs which make the recomp borderline unplayable. The main N64 recomp server has gone as far as to not promote any recomp which uses AI for a significant portion of it."

That GoldenEye project has also drawn criticism from those who know the game inside and out. The paradox of current tools making it easier than ever to start projects means anyone can vibe code their way to a partially working port, but shaping it into an accurate, crash-free, feature-rich version of a game is a different story.

2dos warns that a big risk with relying on AI is technical debt—a codebase becoming harder to understand and modify as it grows, with maintenance becoming "a nightmare" if you don't put in the work to thoroughly document it. The knock-on effect is that other humans are less likely to want (or even be able) to contribute. If a developer doesn't thoroughly understand the code the AI writes, that will also require them to spend more tokens to fix bugs. Those costs can add up fast, and the AI's "fixes" won't necessarily be good, either.

In the case of the AI-based Donkey Kong 64 recompilation, 2dos discovered that the agentic coding had modified RT64, "the base module that makes the N64 graphics render."

"That would lead to significant management and compatibility issues down the line, and cause other unexpected side effects that are currently visible in preview videos in the other recomp," he says.

Vibes: Questionable

Using AI is attractive because it skips past the slow, manual process of figuring out exactly what every function in a game is doing, which can often take years. Many of the polished recompilation ports available currently are for games that have previously been decompiled, creating fresh, human-readable source code. It's an enormous undertaking even for old games, but understanding what the source code is doing helps enormously when troubleshooting.

Decompilation also makes modding much more viable, which is one of the most attractive features for modern ports of retro games. (DK64: Recompiled's debut trailer touts support for a tag anywhere mod that will let players swap between Kongs on the fly, addressing one of the most common complaints about the game's backtrack-heavy design.)

Developer SrBananaMan64 recently released a PC port of Harvest Moon 64 alongside a range of mods to speed up messages, zoom out the camera, and so on. A completed decompilation by another developer helped make that a reality.

"Recompilation doesn’t actually need a 100% decomp to work, just enough for the symbols to be mapped out to produce a viable .elf file that N64Recomp uses," SrBananaMan64 says. "But this game seemed like it needed the proper enhancements to spruce [it] up… The quality of the game is lacking so it needs the widescreen and high frame rates to compensate for that in my opinion."

He shares the DK team's view that developers "should never let AI take the wheel," even if it can occasionally be an "amazing tool" for specific uses. "Minuscule tasks such as searching through a decomp for a certain function you would like to patch or mod," for example.

Lines for acceptable AI usage are now being drawn across the open source development scene. The maintainers of the Godot engine are now rejecting "substantial pieces" of AI-generated code. A nascent recompilation project for the GameCube & Wii declares "No AI code is used," and that it's a "human hand-made project by a group of passionate developers, who want the best for the Retro Gaming community." So does a solo project tackling recompilation for the PS1.

A port for Sonic Advance also has a "strict no AI policy," championing the endeavor's underlying purpose: "We want humans to use this project to practice their skills. Reverse engineering, documenting, understanding, being part of the process."

Tom, the developer behind ReXGlue, sees the low-effort ports as a "people problem," not an issue with the tool itself. "The real issue is people who don't bother to understand what they're posting," he says. "They're using a powerful tool without putting in the work to actually learn what it does, and then wondering why their project falls apart, performs poorly, or has nothing genuinely new to bring to the table. It's like riding a motorcycle before you can even ride a bike."

One common defense for vibe coding ports boil down to "this is just my hobby project, so ignore it if you don't like it." One counter-argument to that point is ethical. Even setting aside the broader environmental impact and stolen training data of generative AI models, there's an argument that even a fan-made port should endeavor to do justice to the original work—to honor the game's original creators by representing it as accuracy as possible. Another is that a vibe coded port that's likely to have those long-term maintenance issues 2dos warned about could pull interest away from a human-coded project that's more likely to be perfected in the long run. The existence of a half-assed project could even turn another developer away from putting months or years of their work into a game at all.

"That’s a big risk," SrBananaMan64 says. For example the Smash Bros. Battleship project which was completely AI generated will take away from the release of mine." (He's currently working on his own recompilation of the N64 fighter).

Another common defense from those simply eager to play a game they love—that anything is better than nothing—also doesn't necessarily hold up beyond the initial burst of excitement.

"I think there is some sentiment from those who haven't experienced a vibe coded recomp that 'who cares if its vibe coded as long as it works," says Ballaam, "when they don't fully realize that for the most part, they really really don't.

"LLMs nowadays have lowered the skill floor of producing a functioning piece of code that those who are technologically curious but don't have the patience or passion to fully learn a language can feel like they're coding. They scale up their projects but don't scale up their learning to accommodate their desires because they rely too much on the AI crutch."

Perhaps someday, as agentic coding continues to advance, vibe coded ports really will be sufficient. Perhaps a small portion of this initial wave of vibe coders will even pick up enough interest in the process to learn to do the programming themselves. Or maybe the rising costs of AI models will dissuade casual hobbyists from burning tokens on projects that are hard to see through to completion.

For now we're in the thick of it, and we're sure to see more competing projects like Donkey Kong 64 Recompiled before we come out the other side.

The full scale of Xbox's rash of layoffs is still to be properly tallied up—partially because CEO Asha Sharma is yet to announce a further 1,600 axed roles. One particularly harsh casualty is id Software, which has taken around 136 job losses on the chin. A move that one employee described this week as reducing it to the size of a "support studio".

We're just now learning about the projects that the developer, which had just released a large DLC for Doom: The Dark Ages, was cooking—courtesy of Gamesbeat. The report states that id Software was looking to pitch a Perfect Dark reboot:

"The team was also considering doing a game based on Perfect Dark, the franchise that hasn’t had a new addition since Perfect Dark Zero in 2005 on the Xbox 360 game console … Concept art was in the works."

And, listen—it's not confirmed this pitch hasn't been picked up, or even that it's been impacted the layoffs. But I think we can all take a deeply educated guess that it's unlikely id Software is going to have the resources to make it. It's a studio whose majority of staff has been shown the door, forced off its homegrown game engine and forced to work in Unreal. Chances of it happening are microscopically slim.

Which wouldn't be the first time Microsoft has killed a Perfect Dark reboot in the past five years. Back in 2025, a staggering 9,000 layoffs saw developer The Initiative closed, and their version of the game—which had an impressive gameplay demo in 2024—tossed into Microsoft's growing landfill of shuttered projects.

Another project from the hollowed-out studio that likely won't see the light of day is a John Wick-inspired game dubbed "Fury", says the Gamesbeat report:

"It had elements of sci-fi, noir, and Louisiana and Chicago gangsters. It had a modern, cyberpunk-like feel. It had a concept called Gun Fu, which combined gunplay with martial arts. The game was supposed to feel a lot like a John Wick movie, but it was not formally greenlit for production."

Sounds awesome, and I figure if anyone could've pulled it off, it would've been id Software, progenitors of Doom—shooter experts in their own right. Will it ever see the light of day? Well, Microsoft would have to restore an estimated 3/4ths of its staff, first. I legitimately can't think of a game that a studio who has lost that much talent could even make. When your co-founder's mourning their own former studio, you're probably in trouble.

The scale of Microsoft's brutal Xbox layoffs become clearer by the day. Among the studios that Xbox hasn't decided to dump from its portfolio entirely, we now know one of the outfits hit hardest by CEO Asha Sharma's "Xbox reset" was id Software.

The Doom studio, which just released a massive expansion for Doom: The Dark Ages this week, will lose 136 roles, according to WARN notices. It's a substantial downsizing that, according to laid-off VFX artist Derek Best (as spotted by VGC), has diminished the PC gaming institution to a "support studio size" overnight.

"I'm still in shock at how brutal the layoff cuts were," Best wrote on LinkedIn. "Collectively decades of knowledge was wiped out of the studio. The VFX team was eliminated down to one single artist with no lead or producer. The engine programmer responsible for the massive gains in VFX pipeline improvements (like all the particle editor work) was let go as well.

"Great job Microsoft. Nothing says business success like nuking a team into the dirt and relegating them to support studio size while also throwing out massive technological achievements."

It's a particularly painful pill to swallow around these parts, not just because the modern Doom series is the greatest singleplayer FPS effort happening at a large scale, but because the story of id Software is integral to PC gaming itself.

In a follow-up comment, Best says the "engine team was decimated," which could indicate Microsoft will no longer invest in idTech, the studio's in-house engine with roots in just about every FPS worth talking about.

"Writing on the wall is getting relegated to support studio size and moving to Unreal, based on internal email and the roles you can see clearly got impacted," Best wrote.

Todd Boyce, a lead VFX artist at id, also chimed in on the same thread.

"This is what insanity and despicable corporate greed looks like. What a complete disregard for people who spent months working unpaid overtime to make the DLC, and for an engine that has consistently been the industry standard for performance. It is pretty insulting how it was done, when it was done, and what it will do to the id brand and those who are still employed (for now.)"

PC Gamer has reached out to Bethesda for comment on id's future and will update if a reply comes in.

Bethesda Game Studios reportedly suffered "significant" cuts during this week's Xbox layoffs, which put 1,600 employees out of work across Microsoft's gaming division as the initial wave of a sweeping reorganization scheme aiming to achieve 3,800 layoffs by the end of the company's 2027 fiscal year.

In the aftermath of Xbox's bloodletting, the Bethesda Game Studios Union says staff at the studio's Rockville, Maryland office assembled a "Celebration of Service" display honoring their laid off colleagues—a display that employees were "almost immediately" forced to remove by the company's human resources department, the union says.

Unfortunately, HR made our office manager take this down almost immediately. They said because it's in a common area, it had to be removed. We've used common areas for many things as a team, including fan works, but HR seems to believe that a Celebration of Service is inappropriate.

— @bethesdaunion.bsky.social (@bethesdaunion.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-07-08T20:10:38.427Z

The BGSU first shared images of the Rockville display on Bluesky this morning, saying the Maryland office had been inspired by a similar display that had been organized by employees at Bethesda's Dallas offices. A follow-up post, however, indicated that the display had been short-lived.

"Unfortunately, HR made our office manager take this down almost immediately," the BGS Union said. "They said because it's in a common area, it had to be removed."

According to the union, staff had previously used common areas like the one hosting the memorial display without issue for purposes like displaying fan works, "but HR seems to believe that a Celebration of Service is inappropriate."

Now—while I'd never suggest that you have to hand it to the HR department of a Microsoft subsidiary—I will admit that the framed photos and solemn floral arrangement shown in the union's images did lend the display a certain funereal air. But if HR didn't allow staff an opportunity to alter the display to look less like it was mourning a more permanent sort of tragedy, tamping down on employee commiseration after watching hundreds of colleagues and peers lose their livelihoods isn't a great look.

The extent of the layoffs is striking: Among those who lost their jobs this week were Bethesda Games Studios staff like Christiane Meister, a senior character artist who oversaw character art asset creation from every Elder Scrolls game from Morrowind to Skyrim during her 27-year tenure at the studio.

"We lost dozens of programmers, artists, designers, and testers. Many of whom worked at BGS for decades," the BGS Union said in another Bluesky post earlier this week. "If Bethesda fans are worried this will harm the quality of future games, like The Elder Scrolls 6, let Microsoft know!"

PC Gamer has contacted Bethesda for comment and will update this story if we receive a response.

Yesterday's 1,600 layoffs at Xbox—just half of the 3,200 job cuts Microsoft intends to inflict on its gaming division by the end of its 2027 fiscal year—seem to have taken a heavy toll on the company's celebrated accessibility efforts.

In the 24 hours since CEO Asha Sharma pronounced Xbox's "reset," senior and lead accessibility specialists have confirmed that they've been affected by the associated layoffs, casting into doubt how committed the company will be to championing accessibility initiatives like it has in recent years.

The first indication that accessibility efforts weren't coming away unscathed from Microsoft's cost-cutting emerged in mid-June, when an accessibility program manager working on contract said in a LinkedIn post that he was "unfortunately part of the incoming Xbox layoffs." Beginning last week, those job cuts seemingly began to accelerate, as an accessibility test lead for the Microsoft Gaming Accessibility Testing Service made a similar post saying he was seeking work after almost three years of Xbox accessibility consulting and organizing accessibility testing on over 1,000 Xbox Store titles.

Following yesterday's announcement, the scope of the layoffs had expanded to include accessibility leads like Kaitlyn Jones, who in five years at Microsoft had led projects like the Xbox Adaptive Joystick and the company's publicly-available training program on gaming accessibility fundamentals. Elsewhere, Elisabeth Whyte—an award-winning senior user researcher for accessibility who had spent seven years at ZeniMax—made her own open-for-work posting, indicating that accessibility specialists at Xbox's game development studios were affected, too.

Xbox's accessibility initiatives have been one of its few unequivocal achievements in an era of pervasive dysfunction: By investing in the development of peripherals like the landmark Xbox Adaptive Controller and the creation of accessibility guidelines in collaboration with industry and disability specialists, Microsoft has been a driving force in promoting the gaming industry's recently-increasing implementation and normalization of accessibility and disability-conscious options.

Xbox, however, says its cuts don't mean it's retreating from those initiatives.

"Accessibility remains a priority for Xbox," a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement provided to GameSpot. "While we’ve made changes across the team, creating more accessible gaming experiences for players has not changed."

We'll have to wait and see how accurate that commitment proves to be. If Xbox is truly hoping to entertain "more than a billion people each day," cutting the employees who helped ensure its games are playable by as many people as possible seems like a strange way to go about it.

US senator Bernie Sanders is famous as not-exactly-a-friend of powerful corporations: He's previously called for OpenAI to be broken up, for instance, and earlier this year announced a bill that would pause the construction of data centers in the US, to give lawmakers a chance to catch up with, and regulate, AI companies.

But AI isn't Sanders' only PC-centric bugaboo: He's also pretty pissed off about the Xbox situation.

"Last year, Microsoft made $101 billion in profits, got a $12.5 billion tax break from Trump and paid its CEO $96 million," Sanders blasted out on X, not long after the announcement of sweeping layoffs at Xbox.

"This year, it’s raising the price of an Xbox by $150 and eliminating 3,200 jobs. Please don’t tell me corporate tax breaks create jobs. It never trickles down."

The concern is clearly more about the deeply unfair and unhealthy oligarchy we're living in, and not how much Sanders has to pay for the next Xbox, but I find it interesting that the relatively mundane dealings of a game company are enough to attract the attention of such a high-profile politician.

Of course, this isn't ol' Bernardo's first bit of Xbox-related criticism: In 2022, he joined with fellow senators Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Sheldon Whitehouse in calling out Bobby Kotick's golden parachute following Activision Blizzard's acquisition by Microsoft.

That, sadly, might lead to a certain amount of cynicism about what Sanders and other lawmakers can actually do here, aside from posting about it. The US Federal Trade Commission actively opposed Activision Blizzard's buyout, but its efforts to halt the deal, or even just pause it while legal challenges worked their way through the system, were repeatedly thwarted. Former FTC chair Lina Khan, who headed up the agency during the acquisition, pointed out in 2025 that Microsoft's actions since the merger are pretty much exactly what she tried to warn everyone about.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has made a number of big changes since taking over from former chief Phil Spencer. Some of them—dialling back Game Pass, leaning into exclusives—collectively represent a pretty clear repudiation of Xbox's choices under Spencer. In a new interview with Fortune (via Game Developer), Sharma said that Xbox spread itself too thin under its previous strategy.

"In order to grow, we made a bunch of bets ... and as we did that, we inherently didn’t focus on the core business," Sharma said. "The number one measure of your strategy is what you put your resources behind, and we simply spread ourselves too thin."

The Fortune interview was published on the same day that Sharma announced 3,200 layoffs at Xbox, and the spinoff of four of its studios.

Sharma also returned to one of her key points in that layoff announcement: That the Xbox business is not "healthy."

"A healthy Xbox could weather the shock of the hardware crisis," Sharma said in the interview. "With an unhealthy Xbox, it becomes really challenging, and it accelerates a lot of the changes we need to make."

The reference to "health" presumably means that, with better profit margins, Xbox would be able to better absorb the hit of the rampocalypse (that Microsoft, ironically, is helping make happen) because it would have more flexibility when responding to price hikes: Profits might go down in order to keep retail prices palatable, but there's more room for them to shrink without actually causing losses.

Regardless of the "health" of the Xbox, component prices are astronomically high and likely to get worse, and that impacts everyone. Materials costs alone for the next PlayStation console are currently estimated to exceed $900, and the cheapest Steam Machine you can buy is $1,049.

That's an enormous amount of money for a game console. True Xbox optimists might imagine that Microsoft could use those wider profit margins Sharma aspires to in order to bring prices down to a less eye-watering level, and sure, it could. I wouldn't hold my breath.

Sharma said Xbox executives are also experimenting with new business models, such as "buy now, pay later" financing program, which will nominally reduce the barrier to entry but—speaking as someone with a bit of experience in the retail electronics field—may also leave customers who don't read the fine print and sufficiently mind their money burdened with far heavier debt than they expected.

However it shakes out, Sharma said the process is going to take time, and hinted at the possibility of more unpleasantness ahead: "I think our core has to be healthy, and that will be necessary but not sufficient."

New CEO Asha Sharma hit the reset button on Xbox yesterday, taking out 1,600 jobs at once with another 1,600 cuts still to come before the end of the year. Very few studios escaped the scythe: even id Software's legendary name did not save it, and it quickly became clear the studio had been swept up in the bloodletting.

Now, anonymous sources tell Game Developer that the losses at id amount to around half the studio, and that the QA department in particular has been heavily affected. Meanwhile, id co-founder John Romero has taken to social media to express his grief at the cuts.

"I'm so sorry for everyone at id Software affected by these layoffs," wrote Romero. "I know what it feels like to leave id while id goes on. It's a strange and painful thing to step away from a place that holds so much of your work, friendships and history." Romero, famously, was forced to resign from id in the mid-'90s after clashing with fellow co-founder John Carmack (they're on better terms now).

Romero, for his part, is pretty chuffed with how id's current devs have continued the studio's legacy. "Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein are not easy names to carry on, especially in today's industry," he wrote. "The last few games showed real care, skill and respect for what those worlds mean to people."

Touching on an issue with particular salience in the wake of Sony's announcement that it will be ditching physical PlayStation discs in 2028, Romero professed hope that someone is doing the work to preserve "the company's ongoing legacy (the work, code, assets, stories and the people behind them).

"id's history is critically important to the history of games. I've preserved id's complete early history from our start at Softdisk through to August 6, 1996, including materials and assets that, as far as I know, id itself no longer has." In a follow-up post, Romero added that "For those asking, it's in my will to donate everything to the Strong Museum of Play, including all digital assets."

Regardless, Romero's heart goes out to the studio's current and (now) former devs: "I'm thinking of everyone at id today, and everyone else affected by yesterday's layoffs. Romero Games was there a year ago. I know how devastating it is, and my heart's with all of you."

Hitman and 007 First Light developer IO Interactive announced last week that it had lost funding for Project Fantasy, an "online fantasy RPG" first announced in 2023, and that as a result, "we have to adapt to this new reality and its short-term consequences, including staffing decisions." That sure sounded like layoffs were incoming, and today, the studio confirmed it, saying that it is closing its studio in Istanbul and beginning the layoff process for an unspecified number of employees.

"Following the end of our external finance partnership on Project Fantasy, IOI has regained full ownership of the project and our IP," the studio wrote on X. "We will continue to develop and fund it independently amongst our other projects.

"With this context, we had to find a new balance for the long-term future of the studio, focused on the success of our main internal core titles instead of external projects and potential mobile game derivatives. This has meant making changes as well as proposed changes across our studios: the closure of our Istanbul studio and starting a process to part ways with colleagues who have been a meaningful part of what makes IOI what it is."

Prior to the announcement, IOI maintained five studios, thanks to significant expansion in recent years: It opened a new studio in Malmö in 2019, one in Barcelona in 2021, and two more, in Istanbul and Brighton, in 2023.

IO Interactive didn't say who its external partner was when the end of funding was revealed last week but we assumed—and Bloomberg later stated—that it was Microsoft. The move came a week in advance of sweeping cuts at Microsoft's Xbox division, which announced yesterday that 3,200 employees are being put out of work. Xbox is also spinning off four of its studios: Compulsion Games, Double Fine Productions, Ninja Theory, and Undead Labs.

It's been an awful week for layoffs, and Lemon, it's only Tuesday, but the IO Interactive situation stands out as particularly awful and baffling because the studio released one of the biggest games of the year so far, 007 First Light, just over a month ago. A well-received, multi-million-selling game based on one of pop culture's most lucrative licenses should've been cause for celebration.

Instead, it's been mostly the opposite: Shortly after launch Amazon, which owns the license, refused to commit to bringing IOI back for future 007 games, and now this. Rubbing a bit of salt in that wound, the Hitman television series announced in 2017 was pronounced dead in March.

"These are hard, but necessary decisions, in order to retain the long-term future of IO Interactive as one of the very few fully independent AAA developers and publishers, as well as to give Project Fantasy the best possible foundation to succeed under our own passion and direction," the studio wrote. "Project Fantasy is a game, a world, and an IP that we are wholly committed to, and we cannot wait to share the love with you."

IO Interactive said that because the process is still ongoing, it doesn't have further information to share on the number of people losing their jobs.

The Xbox reset is afoot, and while there aren't strictly speaking any studio closures yet, with multiple developers in the process of moving elsewhere, the shockwaves from its impact are still being felt across Xbox's continually-shrinking staff. All in the service of a mathematically improbable 1 billion daily player count, or something. It's hard to keep track.

Anyway, given Blizzard was namedropped in the announcement post as a target that'd be experiencing "reductions" and "shifting investment", one might wonder if the developer—which Microsoft acquired for an eyewatering $68.7 billion—was on the chopping block.

The evidence points towards Blizzard escaping the reaper's scythe, for now. First up is this Windows Central article, which both quotes anonymous sources to the affirmative and has an email from Blizzard President Johanna Faires that reads: "While you can expect to hear more details regarding the day's events and what they mean for Blizzard in further communications."

Then, there's narrative designer and union member Benjamin Wagner, who wrote: "No union employees at Blizzard were impacted by today’s bloodbath—and I sincerely doubt that was because the powers that be think that we’re all vital. Odds are, they wanted easy cuts. Status Quo makes you not easy."

Not every worker at Blizzard is unionised, but there's also this statement from the World of Warcraft Gamemakers Guild-CWA, posted here by the union's Reddit account to the r/WoW subreddit. In it, the union expresses solidarity with "all other affected studios" which, by process of elimination (and the other posts above) suggests a relatively near-miss.

Lastly, Bloomberg's Jason Schreier writes: "The staff of Blizzard Entertainment were told today that they won't hear how the reorganisation impacts them until 'further communications'."

That last bit is, indeed, what I can imagine feels like a great sword dangling over the heads of every Blizzard developer. Not only because this isn't the first time Microsoft has made cuts to the studio—an acquisition-led bloodbath immediately after its purchase, for instance, saw many developers left in precarious situations by the unfeeling corporate growth machine.

But also because, as stated in that announcement post, Xbox is far from finished. Around 1,600 roles have been removed, but by 2027 another 1,600 jobs will be lost. Which I'm sure is absolutely splendid for morale, and won't have any deleterious effects on an already-terrified workforce. You simply have to give it up for Microsoft. Is it clear I'm gritting my teeth, yet?

The maddening thing here is that I cannot genuinely think of a world in which Blizzard's games aren't raking in cash. We're talking about World of Warcraft here. Overwatch seems like a free money printer with its season passes and cosmetics—the same for Diablo 4. If there's a world in which Blizzard somehow isn't profitable enough, then I'm starting to think there's no corner executives won't plunder for a shareholder bump.

It could be worse, though—Zenimax Online Studios has been hit far harder, with the Elder Scrolls Online developer suffering major cuts despite a fierce effort to bring the MMO back into the spotlight and bright plans for the future.

The latest mass layoff at Xbox will see roughly 3,200 people lose their jobs—1,600 today, and 1,600 more over the next fiscal year—and four game studios turned loose into the forest: Compulsion and Double Fine as independents, Ninja Theory and Undead Labs under new ownership. It's bad no matter how you look at it, a reflection of flailing leadership at Microsoft and a dreadful state of affairs for the game industry as a whole.

The bloodletting has inspired a range of reactions across the internet—and yes, there is a small subset of the gaming population celebrating what it sees as a victory of 'real gamers' over some imaginary ideology that holds too many game studios in its grasp.

For the most part, though, the responses are shocked, sorrowful, angry, and even among those who insist these cuts were necessary, filled with regret.

Griffin DeClaire, who was laid off from Bethesda Game Studios today, said the cut came as a complete surprise because he was just told he'd be getting a raise. "I really don't know what my next steps are," DeClaire wrote on LinkedIn.

Arkane founder Raphael Colantonio, who left the company in 2017 and now heads up WolfEye Studios, embraced a bit of dark humor in response to Sharma's statement:

We initially thought that Obsidian, which isn't mentioned in Sharma's announcement, had escaped the axe, but that later proved to be false: Narrative lead Kate Dollarhyde said on Bluesky that the studio "lost many excellent developers and wonderful people" in the layoffs.

Among those let go was Daniel Alpert, who joined the studio in 2005—just two years after it was founded—and most recently served as art director on The Outer Worlds games.

Alpert said he was grateful for having spent more than two decades at Obsidian but added, "We are clearly at a turning point in the games industry. These past months have been difficult for so many talented people, and unfortunately, it seems the challenges aren't over yet."

Larian's publishing head Michael Douse was as surprised as any of us to discover that through all these years, Xbox did not have a chief operating officer.

Gloomwood developer Dillon Rogers pointed out the incongruity between Sharma's stated commitment to Bethesda's biggest franchises, and gutting the studios that make them:

Mike Kern, who was laid off after nearly 14 years at ZeniMax Online Studios, noted the obvious difficulty that many in his position don't talk about publicly: The videogame industry simply cannot reabsorb all these people. Talent is going to be lost on a massive scale.

Dan Callan, a former designer who was let go amidst last week's layoffs at that company, reflected on the deep and inescapable shittiness of pre-announcing 1,600 layoffs that will happen over the next fiscal year.

This was the best part about the last year of Bungie, through multiple layoff cycles it was a daily battle between survivor’s guilt and waiting for the other shoe to dropI would reiterate people will not make a good video game under these conditions but that assumes any of these ghouls care

— @danjamin.bsky.social (@danjamin.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-07-06T22:08:18.292Z

Jason Schreier of Bloomberg shared the same sentiment, saying that Blizzard employees are being left hanging until further notice.

Case in point: the staff of Blizzard Entertainment were told today that they won't hear how the reorganization impacts them until "further communications"

— @jasonschreier.bsky.social (@jasonschreier.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-07-06T22:08:18.063Z

Others pointed out that the cuts come as Microsoft continues to pour billions of dollars into a pursuit of AI that seems to be growing increasingly desperate, including notable AI industry critic Ed Zitron, who had some harsh words for all involved:

This sounds insane until you remember that Microsoft is ALL IN on Ai. These folks believe most of us will be out of work in the next 5 years, drawing from UBI. What will we do with all that time? XBox hopes we'll spend our time & money with them. Dystopian thinking.www.pcgamer.com/gaming-indus...

— @crobertcargill.bsky.social (@crobertcargill.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-07-06T22:08:18.814Z

Sure Microsoft may have fired thousands of people and gutted its games division but at least it had more money to pour into Copilot, the 4th most popular AI, a product nobody wants or likes except rich executives, that is constantly losing horrendous amounts of money

— @oldpappythomas.bsky.social (@oldpappythomas.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-07-06T22:08:18.503Z

But AI-focused employees aren't immune: Kevin Flynn, a commerce growth and AI product manager who said he'd increased "PM AI adoption from 12% to 91% in 3 months by building a PM specific AI harness," revealed on LinkedIn that he'd been let go.

"The last four years have been brutal in the industry," Epic Games lead level designer Scott Maclean said in his own post about the layoffs. " I’ve not seen anything like this in my 25 year career. I keep expecting it to normalize, to balance out, but that seems to not be the case."

Keith D. Boney, a former user researcher at Bethesda whose entire team was impacted by today's layoffs, shared a similar thought, writing that "this recurring trend in the Games industry is one that is extremely detrimental to psychological safety, let alone fiscal stability."

There's more, of course, but the inherent absurdity of supposedly serious executives talking nonsense about entertaining "more than a billion people each day," which PC Gamer's Harvey Randall aptly described as "delusional," has a way of making it all feel a bit futile.

Layoffs like this, which have become par for the course since Microsoft swallowed up Activision Blizzard in 2024, are outrageous and heartbreaking, and there has to be a better way. But as we careen from "never looked stronger" to "our business today is not healthy" over the course of a single year—both of them resulting in layoffs—I find myself wondering if we're ever going to find it, or if we're just going to keep howling into the social media void until there's nothing left.

FromSoftware president and game director Hidetaka Miyazaki is one of the most revered names in today's games industry. Even figures like legendary former Tekken boss Katsuhiro Harada hold him in high esteem: Recently asked on X about his opinion of Miyazaki, Harada said the Dark Souls creator is a "rather unique, yet extremely serious game developer."

But while he called Miyazaki's career "remarkable," Harada said it's one that isn't fully appreciated by those touting FromSoft's achievements, because more attention is paid to the breakout sales successes of the Souls games than the gradual growth of the developers that made it possible.

What makes Miyazaki's career "so unique," Harada said, is that the FromSoft director was a relative latecomer to game development. After working as an Oracle account manager, Miyazaki made an abrupt decision to pursue a game dev career at age 29 after becoming enraptured with Ico on a friend's suggestion. Given his lack of industry experience, few companies were willing to consider his application—but FromSoft did.

"It's remarkable that someone who wasn't even a game developer during the dawn of the polygon era eventually became one of Japan's most representative game creators," Harada said. "In other words, compared to the rest of us from the same generation—including myself—his career path is exceptionally unusual. Most notably, unlike many of us, he was not working at one of the major development studios that held a significant technological advantage during the early polygon era."

First working as a designer on Armored Core: Last Raven, Miyazaki would later shift into a director role on Armored Core 4 and For Answer—and eventually, Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. While Dark Souls' ascendance as a global phenomenon might have seemed like it emerged out of nowhere, Harada said his tenure as Bandai Namco producer and marketing general manager—a tenure that overlapped with the Souls series and Elden Ring development—allowed him to appreciate how FromSoft had honed its craft as a studio.

"From that perspective, I can say that Dark Souls didn't suddenly become a massive success overnight," Harada said. "It was the result of everything Miyazaki and his team had built up through their previous titles."

According to Harada, the acclaim that FromSoft enjoys feels like "almost complete reversals in attitude" compared to "the days when [Miyazaki] and his team were struggling the most." It was a contributing factor to his own exhaustion with people who he says can only judge a game's merits "by saying things like, 'That title cost X billion yen to make and sold Y million copies.'"

"There were so many people who couldn't appreciate the journey or the growth of the developers themselves," Harada said, expressing surprise that "even if people couldn't properly evaluate that journey, nobody seemed interested in trying to understand the process of how those developers gradually reached where they are today."

He made sure to clarify that he wasn't talking about fans, indicating that there may have been some on the business side at Bandai Namco who didn't have much patience for game devs' long-term professional development. (Given today's wide-ranging Xbox layoffs, that's evidently an international issue.)

As for Miyazaki himself, Harada says the FromSoft director seems to have a pervasive case of impostor syndrome. According to Harada, Miyazaki's discomfort with appearing in video interviews is due, in part, to a feeling that his own understanding of game development "is still shallow" and that he's not in a position to speak about the discipline authoritatively—a notion that the Tekken boss thinks is absurd.

"It's common for well-known developers to say, 'I still have a long way to go,'" Harada said, "But whenever someone like him says that, my reaction is always, 'Come on, if you say you're still not there yet, then the rest of us won't feel qualified to talk about games at all.'"