Gaming

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.

Sony is killing PlayStation discs, and the sales data shows why nobody can stop it →

New Circana numbers reveal how few physical games still sell, as Xbox posts a surprise sales jump amid deep layoffs and a worsening memory crisis pushes hardware prices up.

As consoles head toward $1,000, Amazon and Xbox race to give games away →

Amazon dropped free cloud games into Prime Video and Xbox began testing ad-supported streaming this week - two moves to detach games from expensive hardware, because the money was never really in the box.

Valve raised the Steam Deck's price, and up to 80% of buyers walked →

A memory-chip cost squeeze is repricing gaming hardware — and Steam Deck sales cratering after a 40% hike is the loudest sign players won't follow the price up.

EA's new $150 FC 27 edition is mostly currency for its pack slot machine →

The most expensive edition of EA Sports FC yet is barely about football. Strip away the four season passes and what you're really buying is 10,000 units of FC Points and a stack of Ultimate Team packs — pulls at a randomised card machine, days before the game even launches.

GTA 6 pre-orders smash records — and the pricier edition is winning →

Rockstar's pre-orders are on pace for a record week, and the $100 edition is outselling the $80 one. That, plus EA's ad plans, more layoffs, and a squeezed disc market, shows an industry hunting for every dollar a player will part with.

A former Xbox star just explained why his old colleagues are losing their jobs — Game Pass →

The man who built Forza Horizon 5 says the layoffs sweeping Xbox trace back to one thing: not enough people subscribed to Game Pass at the price it needed. It's the clearest public post-mortem yet on gaming's biggest subscription bet.

Gaming hardware is getting more expensive, and games aren't the reason →

A memory shortage driven by AI datacenters is pushing consoles and PCs upward in price — reversing a decades-old pattern — while studios in the middle keep closing and the blockbusters keep breaking records.

An indie developer posted a clip of her game idea. The AI clones beat her to the store. →

Copying a game used to take months, and that delay was the only thing protecting a small studio's idea. AI coding tools cut it to about a day — plus the biggest pre-order week anyone has measured, and an offline mode that needed the internet.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.