Gaming

Bit Reactor made the best-reviewed Star Wars game in 22 years. It stopped paying most of its staff before it came out. →

The studio ran out of most of its money in the weeks before launch and put the majority of its people on unpaid leave. The reviews and the sales arrived afterwards, to a skeleton crew.

Four buyers say Sony sold them games they do not own. Sony says everybody already knew. →

A class action in the US state of California turns on one word on a button. Sony's answer is that no reasonable person thinks Buy Now means buy - and it is arguing that as the industry stops printing discs.

A $5 fishing game sold a million copies in two days. Four friends had to agree first. →

How to Fish, the first game from a studio nobody had heard of, sold a million copies in two days at $4.95. Up to four people play together, so the price had to clear four wallets at once. In the same week the industry's biggest game was costed at over $1bn for one buyer at a time.

Google will pay UK developers 260m pounds, and no judge will now say whether the 30% cut was fair →

A mass claim over Play Store fees was due in court next month. It ended on Thursday with money, no admission and no ruling - while 96% of studios stopped waiting and built their own shops.

The Helldivers 2 studio says every sales assumption in games should lose a zero →

At Gamescom the people who run studios spent the week explaining what went wrong. Almost all the evidence they have comes from the games that lasted.

A Hollywood talent agency is now funding indie games. The publisher's job is being sold in parts. →

CAA and the studio behind Journey both opened game-funding arms this week. Neither is a publisher, and neither needs to be.

Two studios walked out of Xbox owning their own games. Every sale now pays them. →

Double Fine and Compulsion Games left Microsoft with their back catalogues and publishing rights intact - an ending that almost never happens, because the games were worth far less inside a giant company than outside it.

Riot's fighting game did not fail. It stopped growing, and that was enough. →

Riot is ending active development on 2XKO because it costs more to keep open than it brings in, and Sony has stripped the always-online parts out of its Horizon spin-off. In the same week, the people leaving big studios kept rebuilding at four, twelve and twenty-six.

Xbox and EA stopped reporting their sales, and the slice still being counted hit an all-time low →

Circana lost its two biggest digital reporters in the same month US physical game sales fell to $85 million, the lowest since tracking began in 1995. The public picture of the games market is going dark.

Consoles got more expensive because AI wanted the same chips →

US console sales had their worst July since the pandemic, and physical game sales hit a 31-year low. The cause is a memory shortage the games industry did not create and cannot fix.

Congress opens a child-safety investigation into Roblox, the platform its own players build →

A US Senate subcommittee has demanded Roblox's records after the company reported 65,381 suspected child-exploitation cases in a year. It lands in a week that belonged to player-made worlds. They now carry much of the industry, and almost none of it is written by a studio.

A studio listed 10 reasons not to buy its own game. It shot into Steam's top 10 →

Buyers cannot tell a finished game from a broken one before they pay. This week one developer argued against its own sale. Four million people bought a deluxe edition sight unseen. And a new study found store reviews are badly skewed.

Four weeks after praising the numbers, Netflix closed the studio →

Netflix shut Night School and Moonloot, leaving one internal studio after five years of buying. What it kept says what it was really shopping for.

Twitch is feeding your streams to Amazon's AI. The off switch came last. →

Twitch confirmed it trains Amazon's AI models on streams, clips and chat, with every creator switched on unless they go looking for the toggle. Its product chief gave the plain reason. The same week, YouTube doubled its earnings bar and Apple asked a court for a 15% cut on purchases made outside its store.

Unity's game engine grew 2%. Its ad machine grew 69% →

The best quarter in Unity's history came almost entirely from the part of the business that sells to players after they already own the game - and the rest of the week showed the same money moving the same way, from making games to running them.

Xbox is cutting 3,200 jobs. Its best studio grew by breaking its own game. →

Netflix, Amazon and Supermassive all pulled back this week. Leaked emails show Blizzard closed the year as Xbox's top studio, carried by a ten-year-old shooter it keeps deliberately unsettling.

A $60 game you bought vanished this week, and it won't be the last →

Aliens: Fireteam Elite's Switch version was switched off with no refunds, one of several games and services that died on schedule this week as the industry moves from selling copies to renting access.

GTA 6 isn't out yet, and it's already reshaping when everyone else sells →

Rockstar's pre-launch hype for the biggest game ever is freezing the market around it - while a fresh layoff wave hits the studios waiting in its shadow.

Blizzard is quietly bringing back skins it once locked away forever →

Overwatch is unvaulting old battle passes, admitting the "miss it and it's gone" pressure went too far. It's the industry's clearest tell yet that the scarcity was always a choice, not a limit.

Nintendo's profit jumped as Switch 2 sales fell a third - proof the money was never in the box →

Console earnings landed this week and showed the industry's hand: Nintendo's profit soared even as hardware slumped, because the box is only the hook - the games are the catch.

The industry makes great games. Almost nobody can find them →

A games-summit workgroup named the same crisis it has named for years - discoverability. Roughly 2,000 games now launch on Steam every month, and the algorithms built to surface them reward the familiar over the good.

Microsoft bets your game library will follow you; Sony bets it won't →

The next console fight is over your game library. Microsoft is racing to let your games travel across Xbox, PC and handhelds; Sony is locking discs out for good.

A hacker spent $900 and 90 graphics cards to bring one dead game back →

Game preservation forced its way back into the headlines this week - a lost Final Fantasy spinoff restored at huge cost, players mourning shut-down worlds, and a campaign to make publishers hand games over before they die.

Free-to-play won mobile, and its finest studios are leaving for PC →

Ustwo, the studio behind Monument Valley, is going PC-first - pushed out of a phone market that free games rebuilt around retention, not craft.

Xbox console prices jumped, and the same box now costs a different amount everywhere →

Microsoft raised Xbox prices about a third in the UK and Europe, while Nintendo's coming Switch 2 hike and Game Pass's two tiers show the same move - one product sold at many prices at once.

Tencent spent six years chasing GTA, and hit a wall made of people →

A giant with hundreds of millions could not build a rival to Grand Theft Auto - because the thing it was up against was not a game but a crowd.

A studio and a regulator both moved against gaming's reward machine this week →

Gears of War is dropping the paid battle-pass grind and Australia switched off GTA Online's fake-money casino - two pushes on the same engine that keeps players playing and paying.

Roblox rearranged its shelf, and ten billion dollars moved →

Roblox changed the algorithm that decides which games players see - steering them away from big spenders toward slower-burning games - and wiped nearly a third off its own market value in a day.

Capcom's sales went 93% digital, and its profit jumped 81% →

A record quarter powered by old games nobody had to reprint shows how gaming's economics work when the copy costs nothing.

Riot's League of Legends card game is minting $300 chase cards →

A single card in Riftbound's new set is selling for around $300 while a near-identical one goes for cents, and the whole industry is chasing the collectible boom - even as Xbox resets and Sony's profit jumps.

Xbox is losing the two-sided game its whole console is built on →

Microsoft's Xbox revenue fell $1.7bn for the year and hardware sales dropped 29%, as Game Pass, the buffet meant to save the platform, keeps costing more than it brings in.

Record profits at the top of gaming, record job cuts below it →

Capcom and Krafton post blockbuster quarters while more studios shed staff, and the way players pay keeps shifting toward the bundle.

Both console networks went dark and locked players out of games they paid for →

Xbox and PlayStation each suffered day-long outages that blocked digital libraries, landing weeks after Sony said it will stop making PS5 discs in 2028. The week put a hard question under the whole industry: when you buy a game now, what exactly do you own?

The biggest buyout in gaming just cleared Europe, and now EA has to pay for it →

The largest buyout in the industry's history is almost done. It explains the pricier editions, the shelved games, and the layoffs that will not stop.