Gaming, in brief

Amir Satvat, a former Tencent games executive who has counted games job losses since 2022, says Nintendo, Konami and Capcom each keep more than 97 in every 100 of their staff. [1][3]

His tracker counts 57,628 games jobs lost across the world between 2022 and 2026. [2]

In 2026 alone, 96 of every 100 games jobs lost went in North America and Europe. [2]

Satvat says Japanese teams are smaller, and did not chase live-service games, which keep selling things to the same players for years and need big crews to feed them. [1][3]

He says Japanese games bosses are paid two or three million dollars a year, not thirty million. [1][2]

Electronic Arts paid its chief executive Andrew Wilson $38.6m last year and cut staff this year. [2]

Take-Two paid Strauss Zelnick $42.1m in 2022 and also cut staff this year. [2]

When a Japanese studio has to shrink, Satvat says it first cuts work it buys from contractors outside Japan, to protect core staff at home. [2]

Japanese developers are paid far less: a 2019 industry survey put the average at about $37,000, against $142,000 in a 2025 American survey of 500 people. [1]

Satvat says that for a big-budget developer in North America or Western Europe this is as bad as the games crash of 1983. [1][2]

He also estimates that 18,000 to 25,000 people still start new games jobs every year, which Kotaku said is hard to square with his own count of the losses. [3]

Why it matters. The thing that would test Satvat's reading is a big Japanese publisher cutting staff at home on the scale seen in North America and Western Europe, which he says has not happened. [1][2]

Tokyo Game Show, the biggest games fair in Japan, cancelled its final day on 21 September as Typhoon Dujuan came in. [6] Organisers said on 19 September that strong winds and rain would make travel unsafe, and that everyone holding a ticket for that day would be refunded. [6] This is the show's 30th year and the first time it had run to five days, using a Japanese public holiday on 21 September to add one. [6] The floor stayed open on 20 September. [6]

Why it matters. Ticket holders get their money back. The studios that paid for five days of floor space have not been told what they get. [6]

The 2026 CESA report, an annual survey of Japan's games business, found 85.8% of Japanese developers now use generative AI in making games, up from 51% a year earlier. [5] Sixty-three per cent said they use it every day. [5] A survey of developers at this year's Game Developers Conference put use at 36%, and 52% of the people asked said they think the technology is bad for the industry. [5] Japanese respondents named lower cost and shorter build times, and said a person checks the output. [5]

Why it matters. PC Gamer called the Japanese industry far quicker to take up these tools than the North American one. [5] Level-5's apology the same week shows what happens when players notice it. [8]

Edge magazine asked a group of long-serving developers what has gone wrong with their industry. [4] Harvey Smith, a former creative director at Arkane Studios and a maker of Dishonored, said the people at Arkane Austin might have made another hit if Microsoft had not closed the studio in 2024. [4] Raph Koster, who worked on the early online worlds Ultima Online and Star Wars: Galaxies, said a market left alone concentrates into a few owners. [4] Sam Barlow, who made the detective game Her Story, said fixing games might mean fixing more than games. [4]

Why it matters. These are the people who made the games the big publishers still sell sequels to. [4] Smith said the money that might have kept a studio going is put into AI instead, because that is what lifts a company's shares. [4]

Akihiro Hino, president of the Japanese studio Level-5, admitted on 12 September that generative AI made some of the footage in his company's LEVEL5 VISION presentation. [8] Level-5 makes the puzzle series Professor Layton and the monster series Yo-kai Watch. [8] Players had spotted the AI and complained. [8] Hino said it was used to make the show 'more spectacular', apologised, and said scenarios, character designs and settings are all made by people. [8] He said the studio's wider aim for AI is cutting a five-year build to two. [8]

Why it matters. A studio reached for a cheap tool on the one thing players watch most closely, and was saying sorry within days. [8] Krafton, Square Enix and EA have all said publicly that they are putting AI at the centre of how they work. [8]

Small developers spent the weekend on X complaining about Best Indie Games, a YouTube channel with over 190,000 subscribers run by a creator called Clemmy. [9] A developer posting as devoriahub put up what it called Clemmy's cheapest tier: $2,228 for a short video, a minute in a compilation, one post and a newsletter mention. [9] Kotaku called the breakdown unconfirmed, and said other developers replied that they recognised the figures. [9] One studio said it paid $177 last year and got 1,622 impressions, with no rise in Steam wishlists. [9]

Why it matters. SteamDB counts 18,933 games released on Steam this year, about 72 a day, and 60 in every 100 of them get nine user reviews or fewer. [9] A developer with no marketing staff can only find out whether a promotion works by paying for it first. [9]

Free gifts handed out at Tokyo Game Show booths were being resold within hours. [7] A T-shirt given to people who watched a Grand Theft Auto 6 screening at the PlayStation booth was listed on the Japanese auction site Mercari for over 12,000 yen, about $76. [7] The queue for that booth closed within ten minutes of opening on the first public day because it was full. [7] A Red Bull stand giving away metal cups had to stop when the crowd became unsafe, and started again later the same day. [7]

Why it matters. Kotaku's reporter at the show wrote that people attending on the business days, before the public was let in, were already listing the shirts on Mercari. [7] Entry tickets for the whole of the first public day were gone in the rush. [7]

Nintendo opened pre-orders for a real electric ocarina, the small flute at the centre of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. [14] It costs $49.99 and arrives on 5 November, a week after the Switch 2 remake of the game goes on sale. [14] Play a tune on it and the character on screen plays the same notes; it also holds 12 stored songs. [14] Nintendo had shown the accessory at its Zelda 40th anniversary broadcast without giving a price or a date. [14]

Why it matters. The same broadcast opened pre-orders for a 40th anniversary Switch 2 console and a foil cover edition of the game. [14] The ocarina is a fourth thing to buy out of one old game. [14]

Remedy published an essay explaining how the assist settings work in Control Resonant, the sequel it is about to release. [11] Sergey Mohov, its lead gameplay designer, wrote that Easy, Normal and Hard are blunt tools, because lowering every enemy's health across the board makes progress feel unearned. [11] Instead the game exposes single numbers - how fast an enemy's shot travels, how long the perfect-dodge window lasts - and each can be made harder as well as easier. [11] Mohov asks players to try the game as built before changing anything. [11]

Why it matters. A player who cannot hit one timing, but has no trouble with anything else, can now change only that timing. [11] Kotaku called Ubisoft the main pioneer of this work and said Remedy has been doing good work in the same area. [11]

Planescape: Torment is 27 years old, and the Enhanced Edition of it got a new test patch on 15 September. [12] Beamdog, the company that maintains it, added a setting that scales the interface to a modern screen instead of locking it at 1024 by 768. [12] Saved games stored online now switch on from the Steam program itself, and saves on the GOG store now work at all. [12] The patch brings the game in line with updates Beamdog's other Enhanced Editions already have. [12]

Why it matters. Old PC games get harder to run every year, and keeping them alive usually falls to unpaid fans. [12] This one is still being patched by the company that sells it. [12]

One More Level, the studio behind Ghostrunner, priced its new first-person Soulslike Valor Mortis at $40, which Eurogamer noted is cheaper than other games out around the same time. [13] The studio said its game could go toe-to-toe with full-price titles on quality and its 20-hour story, but that 'this fall is stacked'. [13] It launches on 13 October, weeks after Marvel's Wolverine, Silent Hill: Townfall and Control Resonant, and in the same month as Gears of War: E-Day and Ace Combat 8. [13] A $60 version adds story content due in 2027. [13]

Why it matters. Control Resonant is the game that pushed Valor Mortis out of September in the first place. [13] One More Level could not move the date a second time, so it went out at $40 against games costing more. [13]

Evil Empire, a studio in Bordeaux, France, will run its Triple-i Initiative showcase again on 8 October. [15] It is a not-for-profit 45-minute broadcast of independent games with no advertisements and no presenter, set up against the Game Awards. [15] Forty games will appear, including the diving game Dave the Diver, Risk of Rain 2 and the pirate survival game Windrose. [15] Benjamin Laulan, Evil Empire's head of business, said the show receives more than 300 submissions for those 40 slots. [15]

Why it matters. More than 300 studios applied for 40 free slots, which is one measure of how hard a small game finds an audience. [15] It is the same problem the developers paying a YouTuber are trying to buy their way out of. [9]

nCore Games and Dot9 Games set the live final of FAU-G Veer Sangram, the first squad tournament for the Indian shooter FAU-G: Domination, for 17 and 18 October in Mumbai. [17] Sixteen teams qualify from an online leaderboard, each with four players and a substitute. [17] The prize pool is 1 million rupees, with 500,000 to the winners and 300,000 and 200,000 to the next two. [17] The winning squad also gets training with Orangutan Esports at an arena in Navi Mumbai. [17]

Why it matters. Deepak Ail, who co-founded Dot9 Games, said the tournament was built to find India's best team players and give them a route to professional play. [17]

Heroes of the Storm, Blizzard's team battle game, has had no new character since December 2020. [16] Blizzard had already cut its development and its tournament support in 2018, and left it running with nothing added. [16] A small team went back to it in 2022 under producer James Yen, who first joined the game in 2015. [16] At BlizzCon 2026 it opened the show with a new character, Xal'atath, and Yen told Polygon the team has plans and dates in mind for more. [16]

Why it matters. Polygon described the return as years of quiet work without overpromising. [16] A game Blizzard had stopped funding is being funded again by the same company. [16]

Dragami Games, the Japanese studio behind the revival of Lollipop Chainsaw, announced a live-action film at the Tokyo Game Show. [10] The original game, made by Grasshopper Manufacture, follows Juliet Starling through a zombie outbreak at her school. [10] The film is a prequel, rated R, described as an action comedy, with Juliet again as the lead. [10] Dragami named producers from five companies and called the team international; IGN said there is no word on whether Suda51, who directed the game, or James Gunn, who wrote it, is involved. [10]

Why it matters. It is the third thing announced out of that one game, alongside a sequel and an anime series. [10] Dragami did not make the original; it took on the name and is selling it in three formats at once. [10]

Bulkhead's shooter Wardogs launched with a server browser, a list of servers players pick from by hand. [18] It sorts by number of players, ping (the delay to the server), rules and map, and carries a section of community servers rented from outside firms. [18] There is no matchmaking button and no skill-based matching. [18] PC Gamer wrote that the game is drawing the biggest crowds this kind of round-based military shooter has seen, and contrasted it with Battlefield 6, which it said offers no such list. [18]

Why it matters. A rented community server keeps the same players together between matches, which automatic matchmaking breaks up after every round. [18] The servers are rented from outside firms rather than run by the publisher. [18]