Gaming, in brief

Bit Reactor, a small US studio, stopped paying most of its staff in the weeks before its first game went on sale. [1]

The game is Star Wars Zero Company, a squad strategy game in the style of XCOM, published by Electronic Arts, one of the largest game publishers in the world. [2]

People at the studio told the games newsletter Game File that 80% of staff were furloughed - still employed on paper, but paid nothing. [2][3]

A representative of Bit Reactor confirmed the furloughs to Game File but would not say how many people were affected. [3]

The cause was reportedly that the studio had run out of most of its money just ahead of the launch. A skeleton crew stayed behind to fix problems after release. [1][2]

Bit Reactor said the decision was its own, and was not pushed by Electronic Arts or by Disney, which owns Star Wars. [1]

The game came out last week and scored higher at launch than any Star Wars game since Knights of the Old Republic II in 2004. [2]

Zachariah Scott, a senior technical artist the studio let go earlier this year, said people at the publisher and the studio posted public praise for the team while the furlough stayed quiet. [1][2][3]

Scott said money was tight throughout, and that developers who wanted more lightsaber animations were told the budget would not stretch to them. [1]

Bit Reactor says it hopes to bring furloughed workers back, and has tied that to the game selling well. Nobody has said how many copies that would take. [1][2]

A separate fight over who owns the studio is already in court. Former chief operating officer Alison Kelly says she was pushed out and denied a share and wants over $20m; the founder's lawyers call the claims groundless. [1][2]

Why it matters. Watch whether Bit Reactor names a date to put anyone back on full pay - it has tied that to sales, and nobody has said what number would be enough. [1][2]

Ilari Kuittinen stepped down as head of Housemarque, the Finnish studio behind Returnal and Saros that Sony bought in 2021. He co-founded it in the mid-1990s and it is now the oldest working game studio in Finland. Sami Hakala took over on 1 July. Saros is reported to have sold about 300,000 copies in its first weeks. [4][5][6]

Why it matters. He is the fourth founder or studio head to leave a Sony-owned studio in recent years, after those at Insomniac Games, Sucker Punch and Naughty Dog. [4]

The US game shop chain told investors it expects quarterly sales of $780m to $800m, against $972.2m a year earlier, after closing stores and selling its French business. Its shares still rose 5% before the market opened, because it will pay about 27% of a $1.4bn debt swap in cash rather than new shares. [7]

Why it matters. Fewer shops is the shape of a business built on selling and re-selling discs, in an industry that is dropping discs.

Cloud Imperium pushed its space game Squadron 42 out of 2026. The studio said it would not launch a game with twelve years of work in it against Grand Theft Auto 6, because outlets and streamers would be covering Rockstar instead. [8]

Why it matters. One release is now bending the calendar of every other studio.

September brings a new Onimusha from Capcom, The Blood of Dawnwalker from former Witcher developers, and a solo Wolverine game, as studios clear out of the later part of the year. [30]

Why it matters. The pile-up is the other half of the Squadron 42 decision: everyone is dodging the same weeks.

Rockstar set up a Los Angeles team of writers, directors and producers to design the people who fill Grand Theft Auto 6. The game has over 600,000 animations for background characters, against 300,000 in Red Dead Redemption 2 and 55,000 in GTA 5. Rockstar says it will carry no generative AI and no paid extras. [9] It has also dropped the one-button car theft the series is named for. [10]

Why it matters. It shows what money at the top of the industry now buys: detail nobody is required to notice.

After days of leaked footage spreading online, Rockstar broke its silence to say it was heartbroken, and apologised for how long everything has taken. The game is still not finished. [16]

Why it matters. A studio that says almost nothing in public was pushed into speaking by material it did not release.

About 13 terabytes of files uploaded to Steam between 2003 and 2013 were published. They include early versions of Portal 2 and Left 4 Dead 2, and test builds of other publishers' games such as Dragon Age: Origins and Batman: Arkham Asylum. The person who found them says nothing was hacked and the files sat on a server anyone could reach. [11]

Why it matters. Other publishers now have to work out what of theirs was sitting in a decade-old pile they did not control.

The European Commission said Roblox, Reddit and ChatGPT each reach at least 45 million monthly users in the EU, which puts them in the strictest tier of the bloc's Digital Services Act. They have four months to comply, including assessing the harm their platforms do to children. [12]

Why it matters. Roblox now has a European regulator that can investigate how its systems work rather than only ask it questions.

Roblox banned games in its children's tiers that combine an endless video feed with rewards for watching it. The move follows a pet game, Steal an Egg, being taken down for rewarding players who watched a running feed while on a virtual treadmill. [13]

Why it matters. The company is now policing a design that its own reward system made worth building.

A Spanish union called strikes at Ubisoft's Barcelona mobile studio on 1, 2, 3, 16, 17 and 18 September over an order to return to the office. The union says worker representatives are still waiting for a reply, and that Ubisoft only delayed the order from October to January 2027. [14]

Why it matters. The union says an extra office day was already imposed in 2025 by negotiating with each worker one at a time. [14]

Panic charged US buyers of its Playdate handheld a separate tariff line at checkout. The US government refunded those tariffs, and Panic is automatically passing the money back to everyone who paid it. [15][16]

Why it matters. Nintendo received about $300m in the same refunds and has said buyers have no legal claim to it. [16]

At least four thefts hit developer booths at Gamescom in Cologne, taking laptops and Steam Decks that one studio said held personal and company files. Organisers said attendees are advised to insure equipment against theft. CD Projekt Red offered replacement hardware to one of those robbed. [17][18]

Why it matters. The trade show's answer puts the cost on the smallest exhibitors, who are the ones being hit.

MBC, a large Saudi-owned television and media group, is building a game called 1001 Threads of Mizan, begun around 2023 and shown at Gamescom. Saudi Arabia's state investment fund bought 54% of MBC in 2025. The studio says it has a policy against using generative AI. [19]

Why it matters. Saudi state money keeps arriving in games from a new direction each time, this one through television.

Undead Labs promised a closed test of State of Decay 3 this year and a 2027 release. It is the studio's first announcement since Microsoft cut 1,600 jobs across its games division and split from four of its own developers, Undead Labs included. The new owner still has not been named. [20]

Why it matters. A game keeps going while nobody outside knows who owns the people making it.

Xbox chief executive Asha Sharma told the BBC its next machine, codenamed Project Helix, will be a family of devices rather than one box, and spoke about the industry needing to improve affordability. A 25th-anniversary Series X went on preorder at around $900 and is already being resold for thousands. [21]

Why it matters. The affordability line sits awkwardly beside the price of the console it is selling right now.

Xbox said in October 2025, when it raised its top subscription to $30 a month, that the service would carry over 75 games on their release day each year. A count of every title added shows it reached the goal on 27 August. [22]

Why it matters. It is a rare promise from that year that survived, in a year Xbox cut thousands of jobs.

Hinterland moved developers off Blackfrost, the sequel it announced two years ago, and back onto The Long Dark to make new add-ons for a nine-year-old game. The studio said whole business models have been thrown into chaos since it started the sequel. [23]

Why it matters. Adding to an old game is cheaper and more certain than launching a new one, and it is becoming the common answer.

The medieval town-building game has sold over 4 million copies across all shops and shipped a large update adding cattle breeding, cider, mead and cheesemongers. [24]

Why it matters. A game still being added to years after release is the opposite of the launch-and-move-on pattern in most of this week's stories.

German studio Limbic was sold by Japanese publisher Bandai Namco to a private investor in December 2025, three years after Bandai bought most of it. Limbic kept the rights to everything it had made, including its new game Corsair Cove, and says German state support has helped. [25]

Why it matters. Holding the rights is what lets it keep earning from Corsair Cove instead of starting from nothing. [25]

The Game Developer Association of India chose 15 studios for a three-month programme run with Tencent and several advertising and app-store partners, offering mentors, publishers and investors. The association represents more than 200 studios and wants to reach 25,000 students. [26]

Why it matters. It is a country trying to build a games industry through an organisation rather than waiting for a hit.

Patrice Desilets, co-creator of Assassin's Creed, said his studio Panache has removed generative AI from its work entirely and will not use it again. Players had spotted AI-made art in a free preview, and the studio apologised and promised to strip it before the early access launch, which happened last week. [27]

Why it matters. It moved from promising to remove the pictures to dropping the tool, which is much harder to quietly reverse.

Sony chief executive Hiroki Totoki said the company is in the back half of the console's life and does not need to sell it aggressively any more, and is focused on making money from people already subscribed. PlayStation Plus has more than 125 million monthly users. [28]

Why it matters. The console is now a way to reach a subscription, rather than the thing being sold.

Nintendo will stop supplying the original Switch to European shops in mid-February 2027, because of EU rules requiring batteries that users can replace themselves. It has sold 156.59 million of them, its best-selling console ever, and still sold 660,000 between April and June this year. [29]

Why it matters. A repair rule, not a sales decision, sets the date the console leaves European shelves.

Ubisoft launched a Player Council at Gamescom, inviting players to sign up and try early concepts, prototypes and running games before release. It opened with four projects. [31]

Why it matters. It comes while Ubisoft is cutting costs and closing or shrinking internal studios. [14]