Gaming

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

An investor wants the studio behind Elden Ring to "maximise earnings" — and the dev says that's the threat →

An activist fund is fighting to reshape FromSoftware's owner around monetisation and hard targets, while Xbox weighs a spinoff and Ubisoft shuts two more studios. One week, three versions of the same question: who gets to decide what a studio is for.

Destiny 2's fans crashed the servers to say goodbye — and to prove a point →

Bungie shipped Destiny 2's last content update and the players flooded back in droves, hitting a two-year high and burying Bungie's new game in the process. Plus Valve dates its living-room PC, and another studio gets caught using AI.

Ubisoft and Xbox both reach for the same lever: cut people to cover a revenue gap →

Ubisoft is closing two studios and cutting up to 380 jobs while Xbox warns of 'major' July layoffs and a '100-day reset' — two companies bridging a gap between steady spending and income that hasn't arrived.

The richest gamers in the world, and almost no one is making games for them →

A wealthy, growing audience of players over 55 keeps spending while the rest of the industry shrinks — but the people who build games, and the dashboards they watch, can barely see it.

Xbox admits the price hike cost it "millions" of Game Pass subscribers →

At Summer Game Fest, a Microsoft executive said a 50% Game Pass price rise shed millions of subscribers in months — a rare confession of how soft a big number can be. Plus Sony's exclusives keep selling fewer copies, and a record 212 million Americans now play.

When the game you bought stops being yours →

A California bill says publishers can't just switch off games you paid for. Live-service shutdowns, a Steam monopoly fight, and a quiet indie hit all circle the same question — what do you actually own when you buy a game?

The platform takes its cut, and the live-service bet keeps coming apart →

Court documents in Valve's antitrust case show how Steam guards its 30% fee, a California bill would force studios to keep dead games playable, and the live-service gamble that was meant to fund the industry keeps producing closures.

All three console makers are rethinking the bet at once →

Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony are each recalculating how consoles make money — while Amazon tries again through owned IP, one indie hit saves a studio, and a lawsuit probes who really controls the store.

A new Tomb Raider used AI to build its world — and players noticed before they played it →

A buried AI disclosure on a gorgeous remake set off a backlash, and it points at the real pressure underneath: big games cost more to make while selling fewer copies. This week showed every escape the industry is reaching for — cheaper art, owned franchises, subscriptions — plus a huge market it keeps ignoring.

Everyone built the same kind of game — now the games business is paying for it →

For years studios chased the "forever game" — a live service you keep paying into — because a few of them made fortunes. This week the bill came due: a Destiny goodbye, fresh layoffs, and a chorus of developers admitting not everything can be live-service. Meanwhile two ordinary buy-it-once games quietly outperformed, and an industry that ignores its fastest-growing audience got a number it can't unsee.

The games business in retreat: Bungie cuts, Steam goes to court, and a law that won't let you 'kill' a game →

Layoffs at Bungie and Epic, a survival game shut six months after launch, an antitrust fight over Steam's 30% cut, and a California bill to keep paid games playable — one week that shows how the money decides what gets made.