Gaming, in brief

The European Commission proposed a law called the EU KIDS Act on 17 September, after Ursula von der Leyen, who heads the Commission, announced it in her annual speech the day before. [5][4]

Its headline rule bars children under 13 from opening a social media account. 13- and 14-year-olds could have a parent-opened account with limited contacts and strict time limits, and 15-year-olds their own. [5][3]

Online games are covered too, by separate rules. Game platforms would have to check a child's age before they can download a game. [4]

The draft's own text calls an online game any game played on a computer, a mobile device or a console, whether the software runs on the machine or on a server, free or paid. [2]

The only games left out are ones you can buy and reach exclusively on a disc or cartridge, with no online part at all. [2]

Paul Diegel, a policy adviser to the European Parliament member Marketa Gregorova, said that wording reaches single-player games, because they connect to Steam for updates. [2]

For games the draft says makers must not encourage children to play too much. Andreas Lober, a lawyer who advises games companies, reads that as often ruling out daily login bonuses and benefits you lose by not playing. [1]

Games would also have to limit contact between children and other players, and fit parental controls and age checks, though less strictly than social networks. [1]

The rule on showing the real money value of in-game currencies and loot boxes appears only in the draft's explanatory opening for games, not in the binding text, which limits it to social networks and video sites. [1]

Breaking the rules would be enforced under the EU's Digital Services Act, where fines reach 6% of a company's worldwide sales. [7][6]

Age would be proved through a Commission-built phone app that returns only a yes or no, keeps no identity documents, and holds no central record of who was checked. [7]

Age checks are already reaching games without this law: PlayStation began checking ages in the UK and Ireland in April, and Australia's rules mean Steam takes only an Australian credit card as proof for adult games. [9]

None of it is law. The European Parliament and the 27 member governments have to agree a final text, which could take months or years. [1][6]

Why it matters. Watch the definition of an online game in the next draft. If the clause covering any game that can be bought or reached online survives, every game sold on Steam in Europe is inside the law.

Heart Machine, the American studio behind the 2016 action game Hyper Light Drifter, laid off nearly all its staff after a publishing deal collapsed. Studio head Alx Preston wrote on LinkedIn that without that income, and with no other funds within reach, almost everyone had to go. It is the fourth round of cuts in under three years, after one in November 2024 and two in October 2025. Preston said he does not yet know what is next for the studio, and asked anyone hiring to get in touch. [10]

Why it matters. A publishing deal is the wage bill for a studio whose game is not out yet, so these people lost their jobs over a contract none of them signed. Thirteen Heart Machine staff had won voluntary union recognition from the company earlier this year. [10]

Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, made by Japan's Arc System Works and published by Sony, came out six weeks ago to good notices, scoring 85 on Metacritic. On Steam it went differently. PC players hit performance problems at launch, the Steam rating sits at 49% positive, and on 18 September the 24-hour peak fell below 1,000 players for the first time, down from almost 25,000. The research firm Alinea estimates 740,000 copies sold across all machines. The developers have apologised to PC players and are shipping stability updates. [11]

Why it matters. A fighting game needs somebody to fight. Under a thousand players spread across the world is a long wait for a match, so anyone who bought it on PC now owns a game that needs a crowd it does not have. [11]

Sony's chief executive Hiroki Totoki told the Wall Street Journal that the company has not settled on a release date for the PlayStation 6. The PlayStation 5 came out in 2020 and analysts had expected a successor around 2027. Both Sony and Microsoft have said they considered delaying their next consoles because memory chips have become expensive and scarce. Buyers would carry that on day one. A PlayStation 5 sells for about $650 today and the Pro model for about $750. [15]

Why it matters. A console is sold cheap and earned back on games, so launching into a chip shortage is the worst possible timing. Sony is choosing a later machine over a dearer one, and buyers wait either way. [15]

Valve priced its Steam Frame virtual-reality headset at $1,059, above what it had planned. Developer Jeremy Selan told the BBC the company set out to make something far more affordable, and that the global memory and storage markets hit it the way they have hit everybody. Asked whether the same shortage changes plans for a second Steam Deck handheld, developer Pierre-Loup Griffais said not really. Valve has not said whether it sells the Frame at cost, as it does its Steam Machine living-room PC. [14][13]

Why it matters. Memory and storage are a large share of what any games machine costs to build, and AI data centres are buying the same chips. Every console maker is now picking between a higher price and a later machine. [14][15]

SK hynix is one of the world's two biggest makers of memory chips. Reuters reported on 16 September that the South Korean firm is in talks with Intel about making memory in the United States for the first time, citing three people familiar with the discussions. The options are leasing part of Intel's planned Ohio plant or forming a joint venture, possibly alongside the cloud computing firms buying most of the world's memory. SK hynix already packages chips in the US but does not make them there. [16]

Why it matters. Nothing here changes a price this year, because a chip plant takes years to build. It matters because the shortage pushing up console and PC prices is now being treated as permanent enough to build factories for. [16][18]

PC Gamer, which checks built gaming PC deals every week, says the cheapest machine it could find with Nvidia's mid-range RTX 5070 graphics card is $1,399, and that one uses a repurposed laptop processor. A version with a proper desktop chip is $1,600. The site's own build guides now open by naming memory and solid-state drive prices as the reason. In its own reader poll, 56% said they would pay over $600 for their next graphics card alone. [17][19][18]

Why it matters. This is where the chip shortage reaches an ordinary household. Not as a story about data centres, but as a machine that costs several hundred dollars more than the same machine did last year. [17][18]

Aniimo, an open-world game about collecting creatures, passed 166,000 people playing at once on Steam within days of release, according to the tracking site SteamDB. That put it ahead of Rust, Delta Force and Slay the Spire 2, with only eight games busier. It is openly built in the shape of Pokemon, Nintendo's creature series, which almost never appears on PC. Its Steam rating is Mostly Positive: favourable reviews praise the resemblance, and critical ones object to how it sells things inside the game. [20]

Why it matters. Pokemon's absence from PC is a Nintendo business decision, and it keeps leaving room for other studios. Palworld did the same thing in 2024 and has now been passed. [20]

Wardogs is a shooter from the British studio Bulkhead in which up to 100 players split across three teams, and you pick your colour as you join. Polygon reports that within days a reputation attached to each colour. Blue is seen as the newcomers' team, so blue almost never wins and some matches do not start at all because nobody will join it. Red is seen as the aggressive team, topping the scoreboard while losing on the objective. Bulkhead knows 100 does not divide into three and says it does not mind. [21]

Why it matters. Nothing in the game assigns these meanings. Players built them in under a week, and a studio that lets people choose a side has handed away part of how its own matches balance. [21]

Valve opened a waiting list for the Steam Frame and began emailing people to say whether they had a place or were still queuing. Resellers listed their places on eBay almost immediately. Valve charges $1,059 for the 256GB headset and $1,299 for the 1TB version; the eBay listings start at $1,700 and reach about $2,000. What is being sold is not a headset but the right to buy one. Some buyers are reporting the listings. [12][30]

Why it matters. Valve's own developer said the company fought hard to hold the price at $1,059. A reseller has added $641 to it before anybody has played anything. [12][14]

Reviewers had Valve's headset for weeks before the price was announced, and came back split. The Verge's reviewer tested it for nearly three weeks and called it the most comfortable he has worn, at just over a pound. He said it is less a VR headset than a wearable PC that also streams a player's whole Steam library. Kotaku's reviewer was unconvinced and called it a confusing creation. IGN reported there is no new Valve game to launch it: it runs on a Qualcomm phone processor and ships with Half-Life: Alyx from 2020. [29][28][31]

Why it matters. At $1,059 the headset's strongest argument is the Steam library a buyer already owns, rather than anything new to play on it. [29][31][30]

A large batch of documents said to be Bungie's internal plans went online, originating on 4Chan and collected on Reddit. One claim was that Bungie would fold its long-running shooter Destiny into Marathon, the game it is making now. Julia Nardin, Marathon's creative director, who has worked on both, wrote on X that the merger part is fake, and that the two share a lot of Bungie's DNA but are separate. She did not address the rest of the leak. [22]

Why it matters. Bungie knocked down one specific claim and left every other detail standing, which is an invitation to read the rest. [22]

The Blood of Dawnwalker, from the Warsaw studio Rebel Wolves, was made on about $40 million supplied by the Chinese company NetEase, according to a Bloomberg report. Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, a lead developer on The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, paid for the first year himself while a small team built a prototype; NetEase then funded the game and took 26% of the studio. For comparison, IO Interactive's 007 First Light is reported at over $200 million. The game found an audience. [23]

Why it matters. Most studios closing this month were spending more than they were earning. A $40 million game that works is the example the rest of the industry is hunting for. [23][10]

The Resident Evil film directed by Zach Cregger and released by Sony took $60 million in the United States and Canada and $48.3 million elsewhere on its opening weekend, the best the series has had. Most forecasts had put the domestic figure at $40 million to $50 million. The film uses an original character played by Austin Abrams rather than the games' cast, and retells none of their stories. Resident Evil is Capcom's horror games series, and the earlier run of films starred Milla Jovovich. [24]

Why it matters. Capcom licensed a games brand to a studio that then threw out the characters, and it beat every earlier attempt that kept them. [24]

1312 Interactive, which describes itself as India's first publishing house dedicated to PC and console games, has raised $1 million in seed funding led by T-Accelerate Capital and ChimeraVC. A publisher pays for a game's production, marketing, testing and translation, and takes a share of sales. Founded in 2024 by Deepak Gurijala and Raviteja Mantena, it published Winds of Arcana: Ruination last year and Palm Sugar: A Village Story last month, with two more games due in October. [25]

Why it matters. India has no shortage of studios making games for other countries' publishers. This is a small amount of money aimed at the step that has been missing at home. [25]

FromSoftware has stopped adding to Elden Ring Nightreign, the co-op spin-off of its 2022 game. A modder called Doneda has rebuilt Eleum Loyce, a frozen city from 2014's Dark Souls 2, as a playable map inside it and released it free on Nexus Mods. It needs a separate tool, Mod Engine 3, to run. Doneda previously restored a cut sewer level that Dark Souls 2 never shipped, and says more Nightreign maps are coming. [26]

Why it matters. Once a studio stops paying people to add to a game, whether anything more arrives depends entirely on whether somebody will do it for nothing. [26]

LG Display, the South Korean company that makes screens for monitor and television brands, announced a 24.5-inch OLED gaming panel that refreshes 720 times a second, which it says is the highest rate of any gaming OLED screen. Refresh rate is how many times a second the picture is redrawn. The company says the response time is 0.02 milliseconds and that the gain shows in fast shooters and racing games. This is a parts announcement from the maker, not a monitor on sale. [27]

Why it matters. Competitive players are the group most likely to notice 720 redraws a second. LG Display says it wants to move the gaming monitor market from LCD screens to OLED ones, and this panel has gone to a monitor maker first. [27]