Gaming, in brief

Microsoft will cap cloud game streaming on every tier of Xbox Game Pass, its monthly games subscription, from November 2026. [2][3]

Game Pass Ultimate, at $23 a month, drops from unlimited streaming to 15 hours. Premium gets 10 hours and Essential gets 5. [1][2]

Cloud gaming means the game runs on Microsoft's distant computers and is sent to your screen as video, so you need no console to play it. [1]

Microsoft gave the reason plainly: the cost of providing cloud gaming grows as more people use it and play for longer. [3]

It also said what that means for the people affected. In its own words, for some players the practical result is a higher cost. [3]

Downloading and playing the same games on your own console or PC is unchanged. Only the streaming is metered. [1]

Subscribers who run out can buy extra playtime hours in the Xbox Store. Microsoft has not published what an hour will cost. [1][6]

From November, people with no Game Pass subscription can also buy hours and stream games they already own. [4][3]

Microsoft pitched that at owners of the older Xbox One, and at players in countries where a new Xbox is unavailable or unaffordable. [3]

Microsoft says the caps will affect 4% of subscribers, and points out that most of them barely stream at all. Ars Technica puts the 4% at roughly 1.2 million people, against an estimated 30 million. [1][5][7]

In 2020 Microsoft announced unlimited cloud streaming for Ultimate. In a 2023 US court filing it called cloud gaming a niche that had never achieved consumer demand beyond it. [1]

Xbox says it streamed 500 million hours of games in its 2025 financial year, with usage up 45% on the year before. [1]

Rivals meter differently. Sony's top PlayStation Plus tier streams with no time limit, and Nvidia's GeForce Now caps how long one session runs rather than the month. [1]

Why it matters. Watch the price Microsoft sets for an extra hour. It is the number that decides whether this is a cheap way in for people without a console or a bill for the people already streaming. [1][4]

Tim Sweeney, head of Epic Games, which makes Fortnite and the Unreal engine, told Edge magazine that AI data centres can outbid the whole entertainment industry for parts, and that memory and storage prices are quadrupling. He expects a supply crisis for gaming hardware for three years. [10][11]

Why it matters. It is the same cost pressure Microsoft names for its servers, arriving at the other end as the price of a console.

A Bloomberg study of the 100 highest-grossing games on Apple's US app store found that kid-rated games with surprise prizes took more than half of all revenue in 2024 and 2025. No game rated 18-plus has been in the top ten since 2023. [12]

Why it matters. The design that once carried an adult rating is now mostly sold to children.

Microsoft is cutting its reporting to two segments from late October. Xbox joins Windows devices and search advertising in Devices and Consumer, while Azure, its cloud computing arm, is reported separately with quarterly revenue for the first time. [13]

Why it matters. Cloud gaming runs on the kind of machines that now sit in the other, more valuable half of the company.

Rovio, the Finnish maker of Angry Birds, is shutting its Copenhagen office after cancelling Sonic Blitz, a mobile Sonic game. About 20 people worked on it. Its chief executive said players did not keep coming back. [14]

Why it matters. Sega paid $776m for Rovio in 2023 and has already written $200m of that off.

Aggro Crab, the small studio behind the climbing game Peak, has launched a label to fund other people's games. It will back projects needing $500,000 or less, says it will not publish work made with generative AI, and will not hold back the final payment before release. [15][16][17]

Why it matters. Peak passed 20 million players, and the studio chose to widen its catalogue rather than its payroll.

Glowmade, based in Guildford in England, had its multiplayer game King of Meat shut down by Amazon this year. Its studio head, Jonny Hopper, called the split amicable and says the company has a team, money in the bank and financial independence. [18]

Why it matters. Losing a publisher usually ends in layoffs or closure, and this time it did not.

Asha Sharma told the BBC it is wonderful that graphics chips have more uses in the world, even though Microsoft's own AI push helped push console prices up. The cheapest Xbox now costs $500, against $300 at launch in 2020. [8]

Why it matters. The same company sits on both sides of the shortage.

Sony stops producing physical PlayStation discs in January 2028. Michal Nowakowski of CD Projekt Red, the Polish studio behind The Witcher, says platform owners control disc manufacturing, so a box may hold a download code instead. Saber Interactive's Tim Willits said he was surprised how upset people were. [19][20]

Why it matters. The collector's edition survives the disc; what you own inside it changes.

Asked about rumours that the next generation of consoles will slip, Nowakowski said consoles are here to stay and that content is what matters. He said pricing is the objective challenge. [21]

Why it matters. The studio is planning for a world where the box gets more expensive, not cheaper.

Gamecity Hamburg opened a second round of prototype funding. Applicants must submit a playable prototype, cover at least 20% of eligible costs themselves, and state whether generative AI will be used. [22]

Why it matters. Public money is starting to ask the question as a form field rather than an argument.

The Game Vault, included with the pricier tiers of the anime service Crunchyroll, reached 101 games this week and will publish its first original, a cat-collecting game called Bananya Buddies. Every game runs on a phone or in a browser. [23]

Why it matters. A subscription people bought for cartoons is quietly becoming a games service.

Activision, the publisher of Call of Duty, sent a legal representative to the home of a known cheat maker, filmed the visit and posted it on the game's official account. It says it has disrupted 375 reseller operations so far. [24]

Why it matters. Enforcement is being used as marketing to the players who stayed.

A revenue report covering over 100,000 Steam games estimates that 27.3% of games tagged sandbox have made more than $100,000, the highest rate of any tag. Hidden object games manage 5.4%. Baldur's Gate 3 is estimated at $1.79bn; a climbing game released in March at $34. [25]

Why it matters. The estimates use review counts rather than Valve's own sales data, so treat the levels as rough and the gaps as real.

Rockstar announced nopixel V, an update that rebuilds Grand Theft Auto 5 around player-made stories, with new character customisation, a hotel-casino and reworked areas. Its closed test starts on 8 September. [26]

Why it matters. A thirteen-year-old game gets a new job while its sequel waits.

Naughty Dog, the PlayStation studio behind The Last of Us, said shooting on the cinematic scenes of Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet has wrapped. No release date has been given. [27]

Why it matters. On the studio's last game the same milestone came about fourteen months before release.

ArenaNet's next online role-playing game will launch on PlayStation 5 as well as PC, a first for the series, with a beta set for late 2027. The studio says it will keep running both earlier Guild Wars games for years. [28]

Why it matters. Sequels in this genre usually arrive by switching the previous game off.

Harvey Smith and Ben Horne, who left Arkane after Microsoft closed its Austin studio in 2024, spent a year looking for money for their new studio, Black Pony Immersive. They say investors asked about NFTs, AI, and returns of a thousand times in two years. [29]

Why it matters. It is a plain account of what the money on offer to a new studio currently wants.

Sony released a trailer for Most Wanted, a mode for Ghost of Yotei in which players take bounties, hunt targets and unlock characters. It arrives on 1 October with the Complete Edition upgrade. [30]

Why it matters. Single-player games are being extended by modes that reset, rather than by sequels.

Dean Hall, who made the DayZ mod fourteen years ago, told PC Gamer that survival games get boring in the endgame and the only known fix is brute force, meaning heaps of content. He said he thinks he will die without having solved it. [31]

Why it matters. A genre worth billions still has an unsolved design problem at its centre.

Gamescom Dev drew over 6,200 registered participants this year, 15% up on 2025, across 238 sessions and 397 speakers. A leadership summit follows in Lisbon in March. [32]

Why it matters. Attendance at the business end of the industry is rising while the industry sheds jobs.

No More Room in Hell 2 launched into early access in late 2024 to Mostly Negative reviews, and its studio, Torn Banner, laid off staff soon after. Two weeks after its finished version, the rating is Mostly Positive and a million people have played it. [32]

Why it matters. Most games that launch this badly are switched off rather than repaired.

The actor, whose voice appeared in Brutal Legend, Dragon Age: Origins and Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3, has died aged 80. [32]

Why it matters. Games hired stage and screen actors for decades before anyone called it performance capture.