July 2026
Sunday, 19 July 2026
Saudi Arabia's $55 billion buyout of EA clears its last big hurdle in Europe
The largest leveraged buyout in history is nearly done — and the way it's paid for tells you more about EA's future than who now owns it.
Saturday, 18 July 2026
Xbox cut about 3,200 jobs — and this time the layoffs didn't stay quiet
Microsoft's latest games-division cuts hit id Software, Bethesda and ZeniMax Online — but workers rallied in five cities and players flooded Xbox's own feedback site. Meanwhile EA's $55bn sale to a Saudi fund nears EU approval as it pushes into in-game ads, and AI tools are cloning indie games before they ship.
Friday, 17 July 2026
Sony's plan to kill the game disc is a door that only opens one way
Sony will stop making PlayStation discs in January 2028, and this week Mexican lawmakers moved to sue over it — a fight about whether the shift to all-digital can ever be undone. Plus EA eyes in-game ads, and AI floods the indie scene with clones.
Thursday, 16 July 2026
Android's app-store gate cracks open next week — and gaming's landlords should be nervous
Google will start carrying rival app stores inside Google Play on July 22, ending a five-year fight Epic started over Fortnite. Meanwhile Xbox's layoffs cut deeper, Bethesda's union heads to the picket, and Sony's plan to kill the disc quietly hands itself the power to set the price.
Wednesday, 15 July 2026
Palworld hit 40 million players and the studio kept the price at $30
A tiny studio with a runaway hit had every reason to charge more, and every buyer braced for it — then it held the line, in a week when the rest of the industry was pushing prices the other way.
Tuesday, 14 July 2026
Games studios just had their bloodiest week in years — and the store that sells their games had its best
Steam is on course for its biggest-ever year while Microsoft, Ubisoft and others cut thousands of the people who make the games. The storefront takes a slice of everything and bets on nothing.
Monday, 13 July 2026
Ubisoft did something game publishers almost never do — it told us how many copies it sold
A remake of Assassin's Creed Black Flag sold 2 million copies on day one, and Ubisoft announced the figure — its first real sales number in years. The number it chose to show, and the numbers other companies are trying not to, are a lesson in what public games figures are actually for.
Sunday, 12 July 2026
A former teacher hired a private investigator to bring a game back — and it shipped this week
The week's best gaming news wasn't a blockbuster. It was people spending years, and half a million dollars, keeping old and loved games alive.
Saturday, 11 July 2026
Microsoft admits its $80 billion Game Pass bet missed by half — and 3,200 people pay for the gap
Xbox cut 3,200 jobs and spun off four studios as its new CEO conceded the Game Pass subscription bet fell far short of the 77 million subscribers it was built for.
Friday, 10 July 2026
A game the world wrote off in 2020 just became one of the 23 best-selling ever
Cyberpunk 2077 passed 40 million copies this week — five years after a launch so broken Sony pulled it from its own store. In the same week, Nintendo and Square Enix announced two big mobile games are shutting down for good. Two opposite fates that turn on one quiet fact about how a game makes money.
Thursday, 9 July 2026
A hit game refunded 55,000 times shows who a rule really protects
Steam's two-hour refund window was built to protect buyers. For a short, well-liked indie game, it became a way to play free — and reopened a fight over who a storefront's defaults are for.
Wednesday, 8 July 2026
Xbox is giving away the studios it spent years buying — because the plan it bought them for stopped working
Microsoft cut 3,200 jobs and pushed four studios out the door this week. The studios didn't fail — the Game Pass bet they were bought to feed did, and now they're costs to shed rather than prizes to keep.
Tuesday, 7 July 2026
Sony puts a date on the death of the game disc — and quietly closes the door on reselling what you buy
PlayStation will stop making discs in January 2028. The real shift isn't the format — it's that a game you can't resell keeps every sale flowing back to the platform.
Monday, 6 July 2026
Consoles keep getting pricier — and the reason isn't games, it's the AI boom buying up the same memory chips
A shortage driven by AI data centres has pushed console and handheld prices to record highs, broken the decades-old model of selling hardware at a loss, and left the games industry as a small buyer in a market it doesn't control.
Sunday, 5 July 2026
A $6 game made in two months outsold most of this year's blockbusters — as the studios behind the blockbusters get shut down
Meccha Chameleon, a cheap and janky hide-and-seek game built in about two months, has sold over 10 million copies and gone viral into the real world. In the same fortnight, Xbox lined up studio closures and PlayStation confirmed the end of discs. The gap between what a game costs to make and what it can earn has never looked wider.
Saturday, 4 July 2026
The people making the biggest game ever ask for a union — five months before it can't afford them to strike
Rockstar developers requested union recognition ahead of GTA VI's November launch, a game expected to earn Take-Two around $8bn. The timing is the story: workers hold the most leverage in the narrow window before the release the studio can't delay.
Friday, 3 July 2026
A game engine that thousands of studios rely on just banned AI-written code — because volunteers can't keep up with the flood
The open-source Godot engine will no longer accept AI-authored contributions. The problem wasn't the code — it was that generating it got cheap while checking it stayed expensive, and the checkers are unpaid.
Thursday, 2 July 2026
A California bill to keep games playable dies — killed less by 'no' votes than by senators who said nothing
The Protect Our Games Act had more yes votes than no votes in committee. Four abstentions stopped it anyway, the same week Sony set a date to end game discs and shut its old stores.
Wednesday, 1 July 2026
Xbox is set to close or sell five studios next week — and the games are supposed to survive the people
Microsoft plans studio closures and cuts starting July 6, even as its own developers strike elsewhere to prove an unfinished game dies when its team does.
June 2026
Tuesday, 30 June 2026
Microsoft quietly walks back the all-you-can-eat Game Pass — and raises Xbox prices a third time
Xbox has stopped signing new third-party Game Pass deals, pulled day-one Call of Duty, and lifted console prices again — a retreat from the model it spent $69bn building.
Monday, 29 June 2026
Fortnite starts reselling the skins it once swore would never come back
Epic Games is putting old battle-pass skins back on sale — the same items it once made "must-have" by promising they'd never return. The promise was the product, and the industry is quietly rewriting it.
Sunday, 28 June 2026
The biggest game ever made will ship without a disc — and that quietly ends owning your games
GTA 6 pre-orders opened at $80 with no physical copy, just a download code in a box. The same week, Sony deleted 551 "purchased" movies from people's libraries. Both are the same shift: a game you buy is now a license you rent.
Saturday, 27 June 2026
Google starts cutting its Play Store fee — the price of being the only road to your phone
After losing to Epic, Google is splitting its 30% app-store cut into a billing fee and a service fee, dropping small developers to 10%. It starts June 30 in the US, UK, and Europe.
Friday, 26 June 2026
Bungie cuts most of the Destiny team — the standing crew a forever-game leaves behind
Sony laid off a large part of Bungie weeks after Destiny 2's final update, exposing the hidden cost of a game promised to run forever: a permanent crew that only makes sense while the promise holds.
Thursday, 25 June 2026
Game bosses say AI is making studios more creative. The people making the games disagree.
A week of dueling accounts — executives at EA and Epic praise AI's "rise in creativity" while developers, a union, and even a former AI chief say the opposite — set against fresh layoffs, a record GTA 6 price, and indie breakouts the giants didn't see coming.
Wednesday, 24 June 2026
The same $1,000 gaming box that Sony would sell at a loss, Valve sells at cost
Valve priced its Steam Machine above $1,000 and said plainly it won't subsidise the hardware — exposing why the same box is a loss-leader for Sony and Microsoft but a full-price product for Valve.
Tuesday, 23 June 2026
The week the games industry got exactly the AI it paid for
Epic and big publishers leaned hard into generative AI to cut content costs — and the bill came back as player distrust, fixing-up work, and partners walking away.
Monday, 22 June 2026
An acclaimed game launched, then its whole team was cut three weeks later
A nine-person studio spent seven years on one game, shipped it to good reviews, and was shut down within a month — a sharp example of how a game's fate is decided long before launch day.
Sunday, 21 June 2026
Microsoft moves to close the award-winning studios it bought — and the rest of the industry shows why
Xbox is negotiating spin-off-or-shutdown deals for Compulsion, Double Fine, and Ninja Theory; Sega writes down its Angry Birds buy; a nine-person team is laid off a month after a praised launch. A $200bn industry is contracting at the top.
Saturday, 20 June 2026
Sony quietly slams the door on PC, betting your PlayStation library is the wall you won't climb
Sony deleted PC from its strategy filing and told staff its big single-player games will be console-only — a deliberate return to lock-in. Plus an Xbox studio bloodbath, a team laid off a month after a praised launch, and a game you bought with one week left to play it.
Friday, 19 June 2026
Epic wants every game built on its engine — and just decided what that engine will do
At Unreal Fest, Epic announced Unreal Engine 6 will fold in generative AI tools and let purchases travel between games. When you own the floor most studios build on, your choices stop being offers and become the ground.
Thursday, 18 June 2026
EA opens an ad business while Microsoft admits it gave Xbox away
EA launched a platform to sell ads inside its games the same week Microsoft's CEO said Xbox has been subsidizing players, not earning from them. Both are the same bet — give the play away, charge for what comes after.
Wednesday, 17 June 2026
A game reviewers loved just cost its whole team their jobs
Luna Abyss got strong reviews and a day-one Game Pass slot. A month later, all nine people who made it were laid off — a reminder that praise and a subscription placement are not the same as the money a studio needs to survive.
Tuesday, 16 June 2026
A game nobody plays is the third most-played on Steam right now
TBH: Task Bar Hero shows ~518,000 concurrent players on Steam, ranking it above almost every real game — but the players are mostly bots farming items to flip for cash.
Monday, 15 June 2026
Nintendo pays €35m for a defect it left players to fix one controller at a time
A French regulator fined Nintendo over Joy-Con drift, ruling it hid a known fault for two years — while Xbox warns consoles may soon be unaffordable and Ubisoft shuts two more studios.
Sunday, 14 June 2026
Three studios got caught using AI this week — and all gave the same answer
Sega, Crystal Dynamics, and the Assassin's Creed co-creator's studio all disclosed generative-AI assets within days of each other. The near-identical scripts they used to explain it reveal more than the tech does.