Gaming, in brief

Sony expects to get around half a billion dollars back from the US government after import taxes on goods brought into the country were ruled illegal, with most of it landing in its games division. [1]

PS5 owners have gone to court to make Sony hand some of it back. Their argument is that Sony has been paid twice: once by the US government, and once by them, through PS5 price rises made while the taxes were being charged. [1]

Sony's lawyers told the court that nobody was forced to buy a PS5, and that paying the advertised price for something you chose is not an injury a court can fix. [1]

Sony also called it speculative and illogical to say the taxes caused the price rises, listing inflation, exchange rates, part costs, shipping, competition and demand instead. [1]

Its strongest argument is a second price rise: Sony raised the PS5 price again after the US Supreme Court struck the taxes down, and offers that as proof the two were never linked. [1]

Microsoft's lawyers said almost the same thing in August, telling a court there is nothing unjust about buying an Xbox at an advertised price and getting what you paid for. Nintendo has made the same argument. [1]

One company went the other way. Panic, the small US software company behind the Playdate handheld, has said it will pass its tariff refunds on to the customers who paid them. [1]

The refusal lands in the middle of a bad week for Sony's relationship with its buyers: it is arguing in a separate case that nobody really owns a digital game, and its September showcase was drowned in demands for discs. [2][3]

Why it matters. Watch whether a judge lets the price-rise claim proceed at all: every one of these cases turns on whether an advertised price a buyer accepted can be reopened later, and no court has answered that yet. [1]

From November, anyone will be able to buy hours of Xbox Cloud Gaming from the Xbox store and stream games they own, with no console and no Game Pass subscription. [7][9] Cloud gaming means the game runs on Microsoft's computers and only the picture is sent to your screen. The same announcement caps Game Pass streaming at 15 hours a month on the top tier, 10 on the middle one and 5 on the cheapest, after a year in which all three were unlimited. [10][38][40] Microsoft says the cost of running the service grows as people play longer, and that 4% of subscribers are affected. [9] An Xbox app is also coming to TCL televisions. [8]

Why it matters. It turns the heaviest streamers into people who buy hours, and opens the service to people who have never owned an Xbox. Microsoft's 2023 plans had expected cloud gaming to be the main reason anyone subscribed to Game Pass. [39]

Sony ran its September State of Play showcase on Thursday, announcing an April 2027 date for Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, a Resident Evil film clip, release dates for Until Dawn 2 and Metro 2039, and a surprise Maneater 2. [5][6] The live chat mostly ignored all of it. Messages repeated NO DISC NO BUY and spammed CD emoji, in protest at Sony's decision to stop making PlayStation 5 discs in 2028. [3] Days earlier Sony had adopted a policy in Japan banning prolonged customer demands unrelated to its products. [3]

Why it matters. The protest is about who decides what happens to a game after you buy it, which is also what the tariff case and the digital-ownership case are about.

Michal Nowakowski, who runs CD Projekt Red, the Polish studio behind The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077, said the company will not walk away from physical releases. [4] He pointed out that studios do not control disc manufacturing at all: Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo do, and a console without a disc drive settles the question by itself. His answer is to keep putting out boxes worth buying. The Witcher 3's standard edition came with a cloth map, stickers, a soundtrack CD and a lore book. [4] The disc inside may become a download code. [4]

Why it matters. It shows how little a large studio decides here. The thing a player buys is shaped by three hardware companies, not by the people who made the game.

Microsoft's disc-to-digital feature went live for Xbox Insiders, the volunteers who test Xbox software early, on 31 August. [11] It gives you a digital licence for a disc you own, so the game plays on a Series S, which has no disc drive, and on PC. Testers then found it also works on delisted games, meaning games that have been pulled from the Xbox store and can no longer be bought. [11] A disc owner can now get a working digital copy of something the shop stopped selling.

Why it matters. It is a rare case of a company handing back something the shift to digital took away, and it only works for people who still own the disc.

Cyberpunk 2077 leaves Xbox Game Pass on 15 September, along with Dead Cells, Frostpunk 2, Spiritfarer, Train Sim World 5 and five others. [12] Game Pass is a subscription: you pay monthly and play whatever is in the library that month. Games arrive under time-limited deals with their publishers, and Cyberpunk 2077 was added in March, which suggests a six-month term. [12] The Witcher 3, from the same studio, came off in August. Seven games are being added this month. [12]

Why it matters. Ten games leave and the monthly bill does not move, because subscribers were never told which games they were paying for.

DLSS 5 is Nvidia's system for using AI to draw game frames, and it was meant to launch on one game, only on the newest RTX 50 graphics cards, with developers controlling how strongly it is applied. [13] Modders got a leaked version running on almost anything first, with every setting turned up. Nvidia then told The Verge it will officially bring DLSS 5 to the older RTX 40 series after tuning the RTX 50 version. [13] It will not give players the sliders modders already have. [13]

Why it matters. Nvidia dropped the restriction that stopped being enforceable and kept the one that still is.

Square Enix, the Japanese publisher behind Final Fantasy, said no consideration is being given to taking the company private. [14][15] Going private means buying out the shareholders so the company no longer trades on a stock market. The Japanese magazine Sentaku had reported it was being looked at, and the share price rose on the Tokyo exchange before the denial. [15] The two reports disagree on the size of the jump: IGN put it at nearly 12%, GamesIndustry.biz at 8.3%. [14][15] The activist investor 3D Investment Partners, which holds about 18.5% of the shares, is alleged to have prompted the speculation. [15]

Why it matters. It follows Electronic Arts being bought and taken private by a Saudi-led group, which is why an unconfirmed magazine report moved a share price at all. [14]

Saber Interactive confirmed that Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 3 will contain no generative AI. [16] The promise follows a public row. A former Saber writer said she was fired and replaced by AI on another game, Rideshare Stimulator. Chief executive Matt Karch answered with a statement that was both pro-AI and personally insulting to her. [17] Saber later added an AI label to that game's Steam page. Games Workshop, which owns Warhammer, banned generative AI in its own design work in January. [16]

Why it matters. It is the first time on this beat that a studio has advertised the absence of AI as a feature of a game people are waiting for.

About 13 terabytes of data uploaded to Steam between 2003 and 2013 appeared online last week. [18] Steam is Valve's PC game shop, and the files include unreleased builds of its own games plus test versions of Dragon Age: Origins and Batman: Arkham Asylum. The person who posted them says no hacking was involved and the files sat on a publicly reachable address. Other accounts suggest the files came from a third-party server holding earlier leaks rather than from Valve. [18]

Why it matters. Almost nobody keeps old builds of games, so a leak is currently one of the few ways early versions survive at all.

In July, Xbox chief executive Asha Sharma emailed the division to announce 3,200 job cuts through to 2027, 1,600 of them immediate. [19] Staff told the Guardian what followed: meetings held with every camera and microphone switched off, so nobody could speak, then a flurry of goodbye messages before work accounts were shut. One laid-off Bethesda Austin developer said it never made any sense. [19] Union members have since rallied outside a Microsoft building in Austin, Texas. [19]

Why it matters. It puts faces on a number this beat has reported for weeks, and it is the same cuts the Game Pass strategy above was supposed to be paying for.

Tim Schafer, who founded Double Fine, told Bloomberg that the studio never set out to make a game it expected to lose money on. [20] Double Fine was one of the smallest studios Microsoft owned and its games sold modestly, which has led some to say it made deliberately niche things. Schafer named Keeper as a game he believes non-players would love. [20] The studio has since left Microsoft and is independent again, funding a public game jam through Kickstarter. [35]

Why it matters. It is a live argument about who should carry the cost of a strategy: the studios that filled Game Pass, or the people who chose that strategy.

Tarn Adams, who wrote Dwarf Fortress, a famously deep simulation game built over two decades, told PC Gamer at Gamescom that the industry is in a bad state. [21] He described the goal being chased as a chief executive pressing a button that makes a game, and everyone else somehow buying it without a job. [21] He also said the bosses of people he knows are slowly losing their grip. [21] Games revenue passed $200bn in 2025 while studios kept closing. [21]

Why it matters. The gap he is describing is the same one running through the layoff coverage: record money taken, fewer people needed to take it.

Tim Willits, chief creative officer at Saber Interactive, told PC Gamer that studios of a couple of hundred people all working on a single game will struggle to survive. [22] His argument is that Saber spreads people across projects of different sizes, using remasters and small games to fund big ones, so nobody sits idle waiting for one release. He gave SnowRunner, now a large franchise with over 46,000 Steam reviews, as a game that began as one person's experiment. [22]

Why it matters. It is a claim about studio shape rather than about the market, and it comes from an executive whose own studio has been in the news for other reasons.

Nintendo released version 4.0.0 of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, its Switch 2 upgrade, more than a year after that console launched. [23] The headline addition is eight-player split screen on one television, double what the game has managed since 2014. Split screen means everyone plays on the same screen, divided into panels. The update also brings sharper visuals and faster loading, and it is free to anyone who already owns the game. [23] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is the original Switch's best-selling game. [23]

Why it matters. A twelve-year-old game getting a free feature is the opposite of the pattern in most of today's stories, where what you bought quietly gets smaller.

Moon Studios, the developer of the Ori games, delayed the finished version of its action role-playing game No Rest for the Wicked from October 2026 to March 2027. [24] The game has been in early access since April 2024, meaning players can buy and play an unfinished version, and it has sold two million copies. The studio said the game is close but that close is not good enough, and promised more open testing, with a beta in December. [24]

Why it matters. Early access lets a small team be paid while it finishes, which is why a delay here costs the studio less than it would have done a decade ago.

The Tetris Company, which owns the rights to Tetris, said it takes copyright infringement very seriously after the US president's office put a clone of the game on the official US government website. [25] The clone is called Build the Wall, subtitled Zombie Border Siege, and asks the player to stop aliens and zombies crossing the border between the United States and Mexico. It was one of five simple games posted on Thursday, all copies of existing games, each promoting a US government policy. [25] The Tetris Company said it was not involved. [25]

Why it matters. Game rules cannot be copyrighted but a game's look and name can, which is why a clone is a legal fight about the shell rather than the play.

Nvidia said its N1X chip will ship in RTX Spark laptops in two versions in October. [26] The larger one pairs a 6,144-core graphics chip with a 20-core processor and between 24GB and 128GB of memory shared between them; the smaller one has 5,120 graphics cores and up to 32GB. [26] These are Arm-based chips, a different design from the Intel and AMD processors most Windows laptops use. The second chip, the N1, is not coming this year. [26]

Why it matters. It is Nvidia moving from selling graphics cards for gaming PCs to selling the whole machine, at a moment when memory prices are climbing.

Microsoft will switch on a Windows 11 feature called memory integrity across more machines from next month. [27] It blocks untrusted low-level code and drivers from running, which closes off a common way for attackers to take over a PC. Microsoft has warned before that it can slow games down, and the hit is worse on older processors. [27] Machines where someone already turned the feature off will not have it switched back on. [27]

Why it matters. It is a real trade, made for everyone by default: PC owners get more safety and some of them lose frames, without being asked which they wanted.

Pocket is Meta's new app for making small games by describing them, launched in the United States on 21 August. [28] It packages the sort of AI coding tools that until now needed command-line skills into something as easy as posting on social media. Ars Technica's reviewer got real playable versions of his own ideas out of it. The catch is where the results live: what the app makes stays inside Meta's platform rather than on the maker's own computer. [28]

Why it matters. It lowers the cost of making a game to almost nothing while raising the question of who owns the thing that comes out.

PAX Unplugged, the tabletop-games arm of the PAX convention series, will hold its first Houston show at the George R. Brown Convention Center from 25 to 27 June 2027. [29] It is the second Unplugged event; the first has run in Pennsylvania since 2017. PAX South, which last ran in San Antonio in January 2020, was cancelled for the foreseeable future in 2021, and organisers say this brings the series back to those fans. [29]

Why it matters. Conventions closed in the last few years are starting to come back in different cities, which is a slow signal about where the money for events sits now.

Nintendo cartridges made before flash memory used tiny watch batteries to hold save files, and those batteries were never meant to last decades. [30] A Verge editor powered on a 26-year-old copy of Pokemon Pinball and found the save gone. Two devices from Epilogue, the $50 GB Operator and the new $60 SN Operator, plug a real cartridge into a computer over USB-C and copy the save off it. [30] They can also play the cartridges, and an N64 version is coming. [30]

Why it matters. Nobody at Nintendo is preserving those files, so the only people doing it are the owners and a small company selling them a cable.

The Recording Industry Association of America says 17.5 million CDs were sold in the United States in the first half of 2026, up from 12 million in the same months of 2025. [31] That is a rise of 45.7% in units and 58.6% in money, reaching $171.1m, after CD sales shrank 22% the year before. Vinyl rose almost 21% to 26.5 million units. A separate study suggested only about half of CD buyers own a CD player. [31]

Why it matters. It cuts against the argument Sony uses for ending PlayStation discs in 2028, that buyers have simply moved on from physical copies.

September is unusually crowded with games, and the reason is a single unreleased one. [32][33] Publishers are scheduling around Grand Theft Auto 6, whose launch is expected to swallow attention and spending for weeks. The month brings The Blood of Dawnwalker from the studio founded by Witcher veterans, Silent Hill: Townfall, Control Resonant, NBA 2K27, Onimusha: Way of the Sword and Orbitals. [32][33] The Witcher 3 also gets a free remaster for existing owners. [32]

Why it matters. The release calendar is shaped by one game nobody has played yet, which is how a hit costs other studios money before it exists.

Ubisoft told players it will share the full picture on Just Dance: Decades of Hits on 10 September, after gameplay footage leaked online. [34] Just Dance games are usually revealed during Nintendo Directs, the video presentations Nintendo uses to announce games, and Nintendo has a history of holding one before the Tokyo Game Show, which starts on 17 September this year. [34] Nintendo has announced nothing. Treat the date as a reasonable inference, not a fact. [34]

Why it matters. Publishers increasingly answer a leak by naming a date, which turns a leak into a scheduling announcement they did not plan to make.

Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9bn: about $11.9bn to investors and up to $1bn in shares to keep staff. [36][37] Hugging Face, founded in New York in 2016 by three French entrepreneurs, hosts open AI models that anyone can download, change and run on their own machines, which is how many game studios test AI tools without paying per use. Nvidia's chief executive Jensen Huang said the platform stays open and that its chips will not be required. [36][37][41]

Why it matters. Nvidia already sells most of the chips these models run on, and now owns the shelf they are picked from.