Gaming, in brief

Governments checking ages

Valve now takes only an Australian credit card as proof of being 18 [12][13], and Epic is adding four other checks to its own store in the same country [14]

Players pushing back on AI

Shift Up says it is taking complaints about a generative AI music video seriously [33], and Amplitude filmed a behind-the-scenes video to prove real people made its trailer [34]

Pressure on the people who make games

1,900 Blizzard staff won a contract forcing Microsoft to bargain over AI at work [15], and 61% of European developers say they expect AI to push them to work faster [27]

Money going to catalogues, not new teams

Nintendo's winter is filled with games already out elsewhere [1][2], and the maker of Valor Mortis says publishers still will not fund mid-sized projects [32]

One pressure seen across the day runs through Gaming too.

• New rules for how you sign up and how you stopBuilding ↑ · seen in 2 beats→

1. 1Nintendo spent 45 minutes on Switch 2's winter. Most of it was games that came out on other machines years ago.
2. 2Steam locks out Australian adults without a credit card
3. 3Epic offers four ways to prove an age
4. 41,900 Blizzard workers ratify a first contract
5. 5US government takes down its Tetris copy

Watch what Nintendo opens its next Direct with: this one started with a Capcom game rather than one of its own.

Valve has switched on age checks for Australian Steam users, and the only proof it accepts is an Australian credit card.

Australia's Age-Restricted Material App Distribution Services Code, in force since March, tells online stores to confirm a buyer is over 18 before showing anything rated R18+.

A debit card, PayPal and a twenty-year-old Steam account all fail. Without the card, the store page for a game like Doom will not open at all. [12][13]

IGN says only about half of Australian consumers hold a credit card, and only about a quarter of those aged 18 to 24.

PlayStation and Xbox each accept several kinds of proof, so the same adult can buy the same game there. [12][13]

Also seen in Money.

The Epic Games Store will add age checks for R18+ games in Australia under that same code.

Players will be able to verify with a selfie through Yoti, a credit card through Stripe or a government ID through Veriff, with a bank check through ConnectID due later in September.

Epic is running it through Kids Web Services, the children's account system it already owns, and says the data will only be used to confirm age.

Games people already own, and anything rated below R18+, are untouched. [14]

Microsoft did the same on Xbox in Australia last month, and in the UK in July 2025 under that country's online safety law.

Valve's single door is now the odd one out among the big stores. [14]

Australia told game shops to check buyers are 18 without saying how, so Valve now takes only a credit card and Epic takes four things.

They are adults who never took out a credit card, and Valve picked that test because its payment system was already looking for one.

the same law leaves the same blank, and Epic fills it with a selfie, a card, a government ID or a bank check, because it already owned a children's account system

US law gives a laid-off worker no claim on a job the company opens later, so the union wrote that step in itself as a 14-month right to be recalled

no court ordered anything; copyright gave The Tetris Company the right to object, and the company deciding to post was the only step between the rule and the game going

no law makes a studio say it used AI, so the box Mages Inc filled in exists because Valve decided its shop would ask

Blizzard's workers used the silence in US labour law to win a recall right, and they got it because they had a union strong enough to bargain for it.

A bank decides who gets a credit card without thinking about video games, and Valve set its check without thinking about that bank.

Between the two of them sits an Australian adult who cannot open the page for a game they are allowed to buy, and neither side can see that from where it is standing.

Staff at Blizzard, the Microsoft studio behind World of Warcraft and Overwatch, voted through their first union contract on 9 September.

It covers 1,900 people represented by the Communications Workers of America, a US union, and brings wage rises, a three-day hybrid week, disability accommodations and a grievance process.

Microsoft must also discuss and bargain over how generative AI is used at work.

In an industry first, anyone laid off can claim an open job in any Blizzard bargaining unit for 14 months after the layoff is announced. [15]

Microsoft is cutting 3,200 roles across Xbox before its financial year ends, starting at ZeniMax Online Studios, id Software and Obsidian. None of those studios is covered by this contract. [15]

On 4 September the Trump administration added an Arcade section to the US president's official website, with five browser games, each promoting a policy.

One of them, a Tetris clone called Build the Wall, has now been removed.

The Tetris Company, which owns the rights to Tetris, had posted on the same day that it was not involved and that it takes copyright infringement very seriously.

Nobody has said the post caused the removal, and a Tetris spokesperson declined to comment. [16]

The owners of Pokemon and Halo characters had stayed quiet or distanced themselves when their work was used the same way.

This is the first games company whose objection was followed by a takedown. [16]

Frontier Developments, the British studio behind Planet Zoo and Jurassic World Evolution, said adjusted operating profit rose 62% to 21.4 million pounds, the highest in its history.

Total revenue was up 16% to 104.8 million pounds, driven by Jurassic World Evolution 3 and the Planet Coaster and Planet Zoo series.

The company credited strong trading, cost control and tax credits, including a one-off 4.4 million pound transitional credit. Dan Lazarides joins as chief marketing officer. [17][18]

Frontier's money came from three long-running series rather than one large new bet, in a year when studios built around a single game have been cutting staff. [17][18]

Valheim, the Viking survival game that left early access this week after nearly six years, drew about 160,000 people playing on Steam at the same time.

That is its biggest crowd since April 2021. It is still well short of the 502,387 who played simultaneously at its 2021 peak.

The Steam number also no longer counts everyone, because Valheim now runs on PS5, Switch 2 and Xbox Series X and S. [19]

Iron Gate spent five extra years finishing a game people were already playing, and the finish brought back under a third of the crowd the launch had. [19]

Lego Digital Play, the games arm of the Danish toy company, has bought Offroad Games.

The studio was spun out of the British mobile developer Space Ape Games and makes games for phones. Terms were not disclosed, and the team said it joined this week. [20]

For a small mobile studio, being bought is the alternative to running out of money, and Lego gets a team that already ships on phones. [20]

Mark Cerny, who designed the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, and Geoff Keighley, who hosts The Game Awards, have set up the Nova Games Foundation with multi-million-dollar contributions of their own.

It gives grants to 2026 and 2027 graduates of 13 university programmes in eight countries, among them Abertay in Scotland, TH Koln in Germany and RMIT in Australia.

Applications open in December. Recipients keep ownership of their games and pick their own publisher.

Josef Fares, who directed It Takes Two, has pledged money too. [21][22]

Keighley says Nova takes no equity and does not ask for the grants back, which is unlike almost every other source of money a new studio can reach. [21]

Marc Merrill, co-founder of Riot Games, said at the PAX West convention that some of what the studio is working on is not free-to-play.

Riot was built on League of Legends and Valorant, which cost nothing to install and make their money selling cosmetic items to committed players for years.

Merrill said no rule requires every Riot game to be free, and the model has to fit the game. He also called a massively multiplayer online role-playing game the Grail.

Riot wound down its fighting game 2XKO in December. [23]

Riot is owned by Tencent, the Chinese internet company, and a paid game would mean asking players for money before they play rather than after. [23]

Achievement lists for dozens of unreleased games, including Persona 6 and Kingdom Hearts 4, appeared on the tracking site Exophase.

The Kingdom Hearts 4 list names worlds Square Enix has not announced, and the Persona 6 list hints at plot points.

Exophase's owner said private achievement data appeared to be reachable through Valve's programming interface and had been scanned in automatically.

Persona 6 was announced in June and is due on Xbox, PlayStation 5 and PC. [24][25]

Publishers spend years deciding when each detail of a game becomes public, and these went out through the shop's own plumbing rather than a leak from a studio. [24][25]

Mages Inc, the Japanese studio behind the Steins;Gate visual novels, has put a first-person shooter called Juggernaut on Steam.

Its AI disclosure - a box Valve makes developers fill in - says the source code and effects are 100% generative AI, the graphics 60% and the sound 50%.

A companion tool, Juggernaut Asset Maker Pro, will be sold separately and carries the same note. Steam users have posted complaints on the game's discussion board. [26]

Mages Inc has been making visual novels for over twenty years, and Steins;Gate has nearly 6,000 overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam. [26]

61% of European game developers say they expect generative AI to push them to work faster and produce more.

Only 35% think it might cost them their job or shrink demand for their role.

The figures come from the tenth Big Games Industry Employment Survey, written up by Tanja Loktionova of the recruitment firm Values Value; the full report is due in November.

Just over half worry AI will lower the quality of the work, and 46% say it makes real skill harder to judge. [27]

78% say AI has already changed how they work, so for most of them the open question is who gets the hours it saves. [27]

Activision is giving people who preorder Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 a weapon skin called Inner Circuit.

On Xbox it is an Xbox 25th anniversary version, in the green see-through plastic of the original console, with Xbox branding on the magazine.

On PC, PlayStation and Switch 2 the same weapon appears plain grey. Activision says both versions use the same attachments and perform identically. [28]

Players buy cosmetic items so other players see them, and this one is invisible to everybody who is not on an Xbox. [28]

Framework, which sells repairable laptops, has lowered the price of its LPCAMM2 memory modules and is sending refunds to customers whose orders shipped before the cut.

It found a limited supply of Micron 32GB and 64GB modules more cheaply than before.

In July the company said its supplier's memory prices were more than double the previous shipment.

Memory and storage have been getting dearer all year as AI data centres outbid other buyers. [29]

Memory prices have gone one way all year, and a refund sent to people who already paid is the other one. [29]

Hello Games released Cosmos, the latest of about 40 major updates to No Man's Sky since its troubled 2016 launch.

Studio head Sean Murray said space itself had never really been updated since release.

The patch adds a star map, asteroid belts, huge space hulks, orbital bases, player alliances, ownership of a space station and the ability to fly to the star at the centre of your own system.

An expedition released alongside it walks players back through every earlier update. [30]

No Man's Sky shipped in 2016 missing much of what had been promised, and Hello Games has been adding to it for a decade - about 40 major updates by the studio's own count. [30]

Gamescom Asia x Thailand Game Show has published its exhibitor list, including Razer, AMD, Lenovo, Kuro Games and Gryphline.

The business area will hold booths from 25 countries, with national pavilions from Austria, Germany, the Philippines, South Korea, Spain and Thailand, and more than 70 speakers across four stages.

John Romero, who co-founded the game studio id Software, gives a keynote called Why We Still Make Games and receives the lifetime achievement award.

Sony had no booth at Gamescom in Germany last month. [31]

The speaker list includes Roblox's head of international and Tencent's head of production, which is where decisions about Asian mobile and platform games get made. [31]

One More Level, the Polish studio behind the 2020 cyberpunk game Ghostrunner, says publishers still will not back mid-sized projects.

Ghostrunner sold an estimated 5.6 million copies and got a sequel in 2023; the studio's new game is Valor Mortis.

Its team told GamesIndustry.biz that we probably need a few more Expedition 33s to just prove them wrong, pointing at Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the French game that sold millions in 2025.

Smaller publishers now prefer budgets of a million dollars or less. [32]

The squeeze is in the middle.

Very cheap games get funded and very large always-online ones get funded, and the tier that made Ghostrunner keeps having to prove it can pay. [32]

DongKi Lee, chief technology officer of the South Korean studio Shift Up, was asked about the backlash to a generative AI music video the company put out in July for Stellar Blade: Blood Rain.

He said the studio takes the complaints seriously and understands players' fears, while defending generative AI as a tool that can be used responsibly to make a good game.

The row has overshadowed the sequel's reveal at Summer Game Fest. [33]

Shift Up made the video to show more of the game and its lead character, and the video became the thing people discuss instead of the game. [33]

Amplitude Studios released a 90-second behind-the-scenes video on 4 September showing how it made the announcement trailer for Humankind 2, its strategy game.

The trailer, shown at Gamescom Opening Night Live, had been accused online of being generated with AI.

The studio denied it and has now published footage of the shoot, which used real actors, animals, sets and props alongside computer effects. [34]

Nothing required Amplitude to make the second video except the accusation, and producing it cost the studio another shoot. [34]

Michal Nowakowski, joint chief executive of CD Projekt, told an earnings call the Polish company is still predominantly using people to make its games and is not planning to rely on AI making complete games.

CD Projekt makes The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077.

He said AI is a tool that helps in places, and that for games as complex as theirs he does not think handing the craft to it is the right or ethical path. [35]

It is at least the second time this year he has answered the same question on an earnings call, which is where the pressure to use AI reaches a studio. [35]

Stephen MacDonald, who ran game design and production at Club Penguin under Disney, has founded Magic Potion Games to build a children's online world called Imagine Island for ages 6 to 13.

Club Penguin ran from 2005 to 2017 with over 300 million registered accounts and died when Adobe retired Flash, the software it ran on; a mobile successor closed in 2018.

MacDonald says children now go from preschool apps straight to Roblox, which he says is not safe at that age.

Square Enix, 1AM Gaming, 1Up Ventures and Konvoy Ventures are backing him. [36]

A game with hundreds of millions of accounts disappeared because the software underneath it was switched off, and nothing built for that age group replaced it. [36]

Valve is testing a screensaver for Steam, along with a Big Art Mode home screen that shows more artwork from a player's own games.

Both are in the current Steam beta. [37]

It is a small change, and the Steam beta is where Valve puts these things before deciding whether to keep them. [37]