Gaming, in brief

Sony plans to stop making discs for new PlayStation games from January 2028. It says most players now prefer to buy games as downloads. [2][1]

Game File, a games newsletter, reports that four in five games bought on PlayStation 4 and 5 in Sony's last financial year were downloads. [1]

Kenzo Saruhashi runs Nippon Ichi Software, the Japanese maker of Disgaea, and its international arm, NIS America. He says NIS America makes a big part of its money from boxed limited editions. [5]

Saruhashi told Kotaku that NIS America is in talks with Sony. He said a download code inside the box is one possible outcome, but not the only one. [5]

He said he thinks Sony is hearing a lot of feedback from customers, and that the discussion may change. [5]

A YouTube host known as Tom, of the channel Moore's Law is Dead, says Sony sent developers one of its biggest surveys ever. [2][3]

He says one question asked, indirectly, whether developers have a problem with ending disc sales. [2][3]

No other evidence of that survey has appeared. Eurogamer says it has asked Sony whether the report is true. [2]

On 25 September PlayStation opened a public survey about the PS5. Players used its comment boxes to ask Sony to keep discs, though no question mentioned them. [4]

Resident Evil Requiem, Capcom's newest horror game, sold about 4 million copies on PS5, and 30% of them were discs, by the estimate of the research firm Alinea Analytics. [6]

Iam8bit and Lost in Cult, which sell collector's boxes of games, told GamesIndustry.biz after the announcement that they were profoundly disappointed and deeply saddened. [1]

Sony's finance chief, Lin Tao, said in July that the company would go ahead cautiously, and that it knew people had strong views. [4][3]

Why it matters. Watch whether Sony lets any publisher keep pressing discs for limited editions before January 2028. NIS America's head says the talks are still open. [5]

Build A Rocket Boy, the studio founded by Grand Theft Auto veteran Leslie Benzies, has appointed administrators. [8][9] Administration is a UK process for a company that cannot pay its debts: the people it owes cannot sue while an outside firm tries to rescue it. [9][8] The studio confirmed Opus Advisory Group is acting as administrator. [8] Its last accounts, for the year to September 2025, show a 47.5 million pound operating loss and 61.8 million pounds owed to creditors. [8] Its first game, MindsEye, launched in June 2025 to bad reviews, and layoffs followed in several waves. [8][9]

Why it matters. If the studio cannot be rescued, the administrator's job becomes getting creditors more back than a plain shutdown would. [9] NetEase Games, RedBird Capital Partners and Galaxy Interactive had invested in the studio, and their directors were removed from its board over the summer. [8]

Trophy Games, a Danish studio, has bought Playrion, the Paris studio behind Airport Simulator: First Class, from Paradox Interactive. [10] Trophy pays 2.25 million euros up front, plus more over three years depending on Playrion's revenue. [10] Thirty Playrion staff move to Trophy, which calls it its largest purchase yet. [10] Paradox says it is focusing on strategy and management games, mainly for PC and consoles. [10] Trophy raised its 2026 revenue forecast to between 22.8 and 24.1 million euros. [10]

Why it matters. Trophy says it has a recipe: take a game that has proved it has players and build a series around it, as it did after buying Airline Manager 4 in 2021. [10] Because part of the price depends on revenue, Paradox is paid more only if Playrion does well under its new owner. [10]

Capcom cut prices on several Resident Evil games eight to ten days before the new Resident Evil film reached cinemas, by two reports. [6][7] In the week after the film opened, PS5 sales of the Resident Evil 2 remake rose 64% and of the 2023 Resident Evil 4 remake 54%, by Alinea Analytics' estimate. [7] Daily players of the Resident Evil 2 remake rose from about 78,000 to about 116,000. [7] Requiem, the newest game, made about $271,000 a day on PS5 once discounted, down from $284,000. [6]

Why it matters. The sale and the film overlapped, so the two reports read the same numbers differently: IGN's headline credits the film, while Eurogamer says the price cuts mattered more. [7][6] Alinea's Rhys Elliott says the discounts drove most of the rise before the film, and the film pushed sales further the week after. [7]

Ubisoft, which publishes Assassin's Creed and Far Cry, has filed trademarks for the name Motherbrain, the games newsletter Game File found. [12][11] One filing covers downloadable software that uses AI to create video games. [12][11] Game File reports that Ubisoft uses Motherbrain as an inside name for its AI projects, which it has not mentioned in public. [12] It shares its name with the villain computer in Nintendo's Metroid games. [12] Ubisoft has shown AI tools before, including Ghostwriter, which drafts background dialogue, in 2023. [11][12]

Why it matters. Ubisoft closed studios, cancelled projects and cut jobs this year, and its chief executive, Yves Guillemot, has called generative AI a change as big as the move from 2D to 3D games. [11] A trademark filing is public, so the name came out before any announcement. [11]

Kenzo Saruhashi now runs both Nippon Ichi Software in Japan and its international arm, NIS America. [13] He told Kotaku he wants more of their games released around the world on the same day. [13] Ys X: Nordics, which NIS America publishes in the West, came out in Japan in September 2023 and in the US 13 months later. [13] Saruhashi says the two companies used to work almost separately, so neither could commit to a shared release date. [13]

Why it matters. Kotaku's writer says the gap meant the game felt old by the time it reached the US, after a year of seeing it discussed online in Japanese. [13] Saruhashi says Western players want Japanese games more than they used to. [13]

Double Fine, the studio behind Psychonauts, will release Thank You Bus Driver on 14 October on Steam, GOG and Itch.io. [14][15] It is a comedy game about driving a town's bus on time and slapping passengers who break the rules. [14][15] It is Double Fine's first game since Microsoft spun it off from Xbox this summer, when the studio cut about a quarter of its staff. [14][15] It comes out under a new label, Double Fine Action Labs, for small, rough, cheap games. [15][14]

Why it matters. Tim Schafer, who runs Double Fine, says the label tells players this is not Psychonauts 3, so they expect a short game, not a big one. [15] He also says he likes Game Pass, Xbox's subscription, because it lets people try strange games without paying $70 first. [14]

MobyGames, a database of video games and the people who made them, is owned by the games company Atari. [16] Its paid service, MobyGames Professional, announced in June and now in test, lets developers claim their profile pages and add portfolios. [16] Product manager Reece Denzel says thousands of developers have claimed pages. [16] GamesIndustry.biz says it could let people left off a game's credits show their work, and MobyGames checks each person's identity by hand. [16] A full version is due this autumn. [16]

Why it matters. Denzel says studios get thousands of applicants for a single job, and a checked work history helps a candidate stand out. [16] Much of the credits data was gathered by volunteers, often from screenshots of games' end credits. [16]

The National Videogame Museum in Sheffield has opened a UK-wide survey called Behind the Screens. [17] It asks developers, publishers, former staff and collectors what they hold, from design papers and artwork to old hardware, adverts and company archives. [17] Ukie, the UK games trade body, is a partner, and the British Film Institute's Screen Heritage Fund is paying for it. [17] The museum opened in 2018, holds close to 5,000 objects and says it has had more than 350,000 visitors. [17]

Why it matters. The museum says it first needs to know what already exists, and warns that much of the UK's game history could be lost if nobody keeps it. [17] The results will show where studios could work together to protect material at risk. [17]

The Irish Game Makers Association and Screen Ireland have relaunched the Irish Games Fund with three strands for different stages of making a game. [18] The first, the Development Fund, is offering 50,000 euros to four teams whose games are past the prototype stage. [18] Applicants must declare any use of generative AI. [18] The fund will not back games that plan to ship with art, audio or writing mostly made by AI, citing unsettled copyright risks. [18] Expressions of interest close on 8 October. [18]

Why it matters. A studio that wants this money must replace any AI-made art, sound or writing before release. [18] Ubisoft, whose trademark filings for AI game-making software came out days later, is moving the other way. [11]

Wardogs, a military shooter, has sold more than 3 million copies in its first 18 days. [19] It is made by Bulkhead, a studio that split from the Chinese tech company Tencent in December 2025. [19] Bulkhead's chief executive, Joe Brammer, had said the studio would not hire people who constantly post against crunch, the long stretches of overtime before a deadline. [19] He now says he is not pro crunch but pro hard work. [19]

Why it matters. In a statement to Eurogamer, Brammer said his staff worked two extra hours a week, Monday to Thursday, for four weeks, on a four-day week. [19] He argues a new game on new technology cannot always be delayed by a month when something breaks. [19]

Bungie, the studio behind Destiny, has set out big changes to Marathon, its shooter whose player numbers on PC keep falling. [20] Marathon was built as an extraction shooter, where players normally bring their own gear into each match. [20] An October update adds a free permanent rewards pass and matches where players get free gear instead of risking their own. [20] December brings a bigger push for Symbiosis, a mode against computer enemies, and a test Team Deathmatch mode. [20] Bigger changes, including a new start for beginners, are due in March. [20]

Why it matters. Bungie says it wants to keep the tense original mode for players who like it, while adding gentler ways in for everyone else. [20] Eurogamer says the original proved too daunting for many players. [20]

Sony has filed a patent for an AI that would watch a PlayStation for problems. [21] It would use a large language model, the kind of AI behind chatbots, to write a fix or send a report to Sony's engineers. [21] The patent itself says repair orders sent to a device in someone's living room need careful limits, so a small problem does not become a bigger one. [21] IGN says it is not clear when, or whether, Sony will build it. [21]

Why it matters. To spot every problem, the AI would need access to everything processed on the console. [21] IGN guesses such a feature would arrive with Sony's next console, which it expects to need a constant internet connection. [21]

Karolina Stachyra wrote the dialogue and scenes of Family Matters, The Witcher 3's quest about the Bloody Baron. [22] She is back at CD Projekt, the studio behind The Witcher, after a decade away that included narrative director jobs at Techland and GSC Game World. [22] Her LinkedIn profile shows she consulted for the studio from February and rejoined as a full-time writer in August. [22] CD Projekt confirmed her return but would not say what she is working on. [22]

Why it matters. The Witcher 3's remaster comes out on 29 September. [23] PC Gamer notes that Ciri, the lead of the coming Witcher 4, was central to the Bloody Baron quest, though nothing yet links Stachyra to that game. [22]