Gaming, in brief

Money kept inside one shop

Roblox will pay creators in ordinary currency each working day instead of Robux, its own in-game money. [2] Sony's plan to stop pressing discs for new games in 2028 removes the second-hand market and moves those sales into the PlayStation Store. [5]

Studios closing and shrinking

Polyarc, the Seattle studio behind the virtual-reality game Moss, stopped operating on 11 September after twelve years. [3] Double Fine cut 23 jobs to get back to just under 70 people after leaving Microsoft. [10]

AI pushed at creators

Roblox is widening Build, a tab that turns a written description into a playable game, into Serbia and Singapore. [2] Twitch is testing a tool that grades a stream afterwards, months after it made AI training on creators' videos opt-out by default. [6]

Betting money reaching games

Riot Games, which makes League of Legends, has discussed esports sponsorship with the prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket. [8] Minnesota banned both firms this spring and a federal judge has paused the law while the case runs. [12]

One pressure seen across the day runs through Gaming too.

• Taking it to a courtBuilding ↑ · seen in 4 beats→

1. 1Roblox will let creators ship games outside Roblox, and pay them in ordinary money each working day
2. 2Polyarc closes after twelve years
3. 3Why Sony dropped Kojima's game
4. 4A list of every time Sony said you own it
5. 5PlayStation discs fall 10%, not 90%

Roblox will let creators release their games as standalone apps on mobile, PC and consoles, with Roblox running the technology underneath. [1][2]

Watch which shops agree to carry the first standalone Roblox games, and what share Roblox keeps when one sells.

The company says it will start with a small test group.

Polyarc, a game studio in Seattle, stopped operating on 11 September, twelve years after it was founded. [3]

Its first game, Moss, came out in 2018 and put the player alongside a small mouse called Quill in a virtual-reality storybook world; a sequel followed in 2022. [3]

The closing message gave no reason beyond saying the work was finished. [3] It ended by listing all 29 staff by name and asking studios that are hiring to take them. [3]

Polyarc's Moss games were built for virtual-reality headsets, and the studio published them itself. [3] Its 29 staff are looking for work in the same month Double Fine cut 23 jobs. [10]

Bloomberg reported on 11 September why PlayStation walked away from Physint, the spy game by Hideo Kojima, the Japanese designer behind Metal Gear Solid. [13]

People close to the project said it had missed deadlines and was heading well over budget while still years from release. [13][14]

Sony was also reluctant to spend hundreds of millions on a game that would eventually appear on other machines. [13]

Kojima's last two games, Death Stranding and its sequel, were praised by critics but did not earn what Sony expected. [13]

Xbox picked the project up straight away, so the cost that put one owner off did not put off the other. [14]

Sony has tightened its production checkpoints since Concord shut down in 2024, and several games have been cancelled since. [13]

Sony's lawyers told a US court last month that reasonable consumers already know a digital game bought on the PlayStation Store is a licence rather than a possession. [4]

The Consumer Rights wiki, a volunteer-run site, has answered with a table of more than 30 places on Sony's own websites where the company uses the word own. [4][11]

One is the help page for Marvel's Wolverine, which tells Standard Edition owners how to upgrade. [4]

The class action says the store breaks a California law against selling a digital good with the word buy. [4]

A licence can be withdrawn at any time, so the argument decides whether people keep games they paid for. [4]

Sony's own marketing is now the main evidence against its legal defence. [11]

Roblox creators earned money that only spends inside Roblox, and built games that only run inside Roblox. This week Roblox said both can leave.

It also tells the next maker choosing where to build that whatever they make will be stuck in the same place.

one analyst says ending new discs removes the second-hand market, so a sale that used to happen between two players has to happen in Sony's shop instead

what a buyer holds is a licence kept in Sony's account, so the thing they paid for cannot be lent, sold or moved

Twitch set the default on training AI with creators' videos to opt-out, and its product chief said an opt-in version would get nobody

Roblox says it will still run the technology and the services under a standalone game, and it has not said what share it keeps when one sells.

Roblox wants makers it does not have, Sony wants more of each sale, and a creator wants money that pays rent this month.

Anyone reading this has games, saves and account balances sitting on somebody else's machine, under terms that machine's owner wrote.

A wave of reports said Sony was about to cut PlayStation disc production to a tenth of its current volume. [5]

Sony's disc-making arm, Sony DADC, says the figure was misread: output is expected to fall by 10 percent in 2028, not down to 10 percent. [5]

Sony said in July that it will stop pressing discs for brand-new games from January 2028, while reorders of older titles continue. [5]

Sony makes its discs in-house, while Microsoft licenses outside plants to press Xbox discs. [5]

The analyst Daniel Ahmad of Niko Partners says ending discs kills the second-hand market and moves spending into the PlayStation Store, where Sony keeps more of each sale. [5]

Shawn Layden, who used to run Sony's worldwide studios, called a disc-free PlayStation depressing but solvable. [5]

Twitch, the Amazon-owned livestreaming site, is testing a tool that watches a creator's stream and then tells them what to do better next time. [6]

The streaming reporter Zach Bussey published screenshots of it on 11 September; Twitch has not confirmed the tool, and it is running with a small group of users. [6][17]

Twitch says this one would be opt-in if it ever went wider. [17]

Earlier this year the site made the use of creators' videos to train AI opt-out by default and buried the setting. [6]

Twitch's product chief Mike Minton explained that earlier default plainly: if it was opt-in, nobody would opt in. [6]

Twitch's own note says the coach's advice may contain errors and is not a guarantee of results. [6]

Riot Games, the Tencent-owned studio behind League of Legends and Valorant, has discussed esports sponsorship deals with Kalshi and Polymarket. [8]

Both are prediction markets, where people buy and sell contracts on whether a real-world event will happen. [8]

A Riot spokesman said the company is evaluating the area with a focus on safeguarding competitive integrity, and no deal has been announced. [8]

Minnesota became the first US state to ban both firms this spring, and a federal judge has paused that law while a lawsuit runs. [12]

The case is expected to decide whether states or the US federal regulator control prediction markets, which sets what Riot is allowed to sign. [12]

A Minnesota lawmaker said teachers had reported under-18s downloading the apps. [12]

Also seen in Space, Food and Sports.

Microsoft added monthly limits to Xbox cloud gaming this month: five hours on the cheapest Game Pass tier, ten on the middle one and fifteen on Ultimate. [9]

Windows Central, citing unnamed Microsoft sources, reports that Microsoft stops making money on the service past 15 hours, so every extra hour costs it. [9]

The site links the squeeze to server memory being given to AI work on Azure instead. [9]

Statista put average play time at 9.5 hours a week in the United States in 2025. [9]

The cap is an accounting line rather than a guess about how much people play, so it moves when the cost of memory does. [9]

Take-Two's chief executive Strauss Zelnick said in a recent results call that everyone would be streaming games within about three years. [9]

Tim Schafer, who runs the studio Double Fine, has described how it left Microsoft after the layoffs at Xbox that also cut several studios loose. [10]

Microsoft bought Double Fine in 2019; Schafer says the arrangement worked while Xbox wanted good games on Game Pass, and stopped working when that goal changed. [10][18]

He negotiated to take the studio's game rights and its funding out with it. [10] Double Fine has since cut 23 roles, taking it to just under 70 people. [10]

Schafer's line on it was that no one puts Double Fine out of business except him. [10]

The studio is pitching new games to investors for the first time in seven years. [10]

GamesIndustry.biz published a survey of games unions on 11 September. [15]

The Polish Gamedev Workers Union is formally recognised inside ten Polish studios, with the rest of its members spread across smaller firms. [15]

Its founder Artur Ganszyniec says Poland's union law was written in the 1980s with heavy industry in mind and is tilted towards employers. [15]

Organisers list four-day weeks, six-hour days, pay rises, protections against AI and better redundancy terms among what members have secured. [15]

Union officials say most of their early casework was teaching employers what the law already required of them. [15]

It is the counterweight in a year of cuts: Polyarc closed this week and Double Fine shed 23 roles. [3][10]

Take-Two, which owns Grand Theft Auto, is down about 15 percent this year even though GTA 6 arrives in November. [16]

GameSpot traces most of the fall to January, when Google showed Genie, a system it said could build games from a written description, and investors sold games shares. [16]

Take-Two had been trading at a 52-week high of $265 before that and has not recovered. [16] Over five years the stock is still up 39 percent. [16]

Rhys Elliott of Alinea Analytics told GameSpot the stock market largely has no idea what is going on with games and is reacting to leak headlines rather than sales. [16]

The biggest game launch in years is arriving while its publisher's shares sit well below January. [16]

The Rocket League world championship final will be shown live in AMC cinemas across the United States on 20 September. [7]

Twenty teams play at Dickies Arena in Fort Worth, Texas, for $300,000 out of a $1.2 million prize pool, in a broadcast lasting about eight hours. [7]

Adult tickets cost $19.49 at the door and $22.18 booked online. [7] The paper ticket carries a code for the same Twitch rewards a viewer would collect at home. [7]

Esports is normally free to watch on Twitch, so charging for a seat tests whether people will pay for the room rather than the match. [7]

AMC's Ellen Copaken said cinemas are built for shared events. [7]

Kai Cenat, 24, is the most-followed streamer on Twitch, and he spent most of the past year not streaming at all. [19][22]

He had turned his home into a stage where LeBron James cut his hair and Nicki Minaj gave dating advice, then stopped to learn the clothing trade. [19]

His label Vivet holds its first runway show this Saturday, broadcast on his own channels. [19]

He has since returned and finished a second run of Streamer University, a series in which he coaches people who want the job. [19]

The biggest name on a games platform stopped using it for nine months, then came back and ran a second series coaching newcomers. [19]

Twitch is now testing a machine to give the kind of advice Cenat gives in person. [6][22]

The Financial Action Task Force, a money-laundering watchdog based in Paris, said in a report on 9 September that online gaming and gambling platforms are increasingly being used to launder money and finance terrorism. [21]

It points at the spread of unlicensed and offshore platforms that accept e-wallets, mobile money and crypto. [21]

The report says those payment methods have created extra risk in digital spaces that are not well regulated. [21]

It lands in the same week Riot Games was reported to be talking to two prediction-market firms about sponsoring its esports. [8]

The Blood of Dawnwalker, a role-playing game released last week, gives the player a limit of 30 days and 30 nights, and every quest completed uses some of it up. [20]

Its most downloaded mod on Nexus Mods removes that limit. [20]

The Better Story Timer mod has been installed more than 115,000 times since launch and sets the main story to 90 in-game days by default, adjustable further in a settings file. [20]

It also strips out the time cost of learning skills. [20]

The timer was the game's central design idea, and the most popular thing players have added is a way to switch it off. [20]

A modder called Morry has added 235 working Flock cameras to Grand Theft Auto 5. [23] Flock makes the automated licence-plate readers used by police forces across the United States. [23]

In the mod the cameras photograph passing cars, alert the police to the player's position, and sometimes do so when the player has broken no law. [23]

Destroying one drops parts worth about $600 in the game. [23]

Players have rebuilt a real piece of street surveillance inside a game so they can drive into it. [23]

The mod keeps the photographs it takes, which is what the real devices do. [23]