Gaming, in brief

Staff at Ninja Theory, the British studio behind the Hellblade games, have been posting since last week that their jobs are at risk or already gone. [6][3]

Xbox, Microsoft's games business, said on 22 September that it planned to close the studio after two separate deals to sell it fell through. [1]

In the UK a company must hold talks with staff, called consultation, before it cuts many jobs. [7] PC Gamer says that in practice, being told you are at risk is close to being let go. [7]

Those posting include a gameplay programmer who moved to Britain for the job, the technical director, and a sound designer who spent 12 years there. [5][6]

How many people lose their jobs is not public, and Xbox did not answer Game Developer's request for comment. [1][2]

The team was making Senua, a third Hellblade game that Xbox showed in June. [1] Game File, a games news site, reported that the reveal was meant to attract a buyer. [2]

Microsoft bought Ninja Theory in 2018 for $117 million, according to filings with the FTC, the US competition regulator. [2]

The cuts are part of what Xbox calls its reset, announced in July: about 3,200 jobs, with several studios closed or sold. [2][3]

Three other studios Xbox let go, Double Fine, Undead Labs and Compulsion Games, now run on their own. [4] Arkane Lyon, an Xbox studio in France, is still in talks. [4]

Matt Booty, who runs Xbox's games, says its changes are three quarters done, which suggests more job losses in the coming months, IGN reports. [5]

More than 58,000 games jobs are estimated to have gone since 2022, most of them in North America. [8]

Why it matters. Watch whether Xbox says how many people are leaving Ninja Theory, and whether anyone takes on Senua before the talks with staff end. [1][3]

Supermassive Games, a British studio known for choose-your-path horror games, let more than 70 people go on 5 October. [9] Its IT director, who joined in 2010 when the studio was a handful of people, announced it on LinkedIn as he left too. [9] The studio had warned in August that up to 75 jobs were at risk, three months after it released Directive 8020. [7] PC Gamer says almost everyone told they were at risk has now gone. [7]

Why it matters. Supermassive's best-known game, Until Dawn, belongs to Sony, and Sony gave the 2027 sequel to its own studio, Firesprite. [9] The people who made the first game are not making the second.

Jagex, the British company behind RuneScape, took down a trailer for a new quest after fans spotted a knight with six fingers and armour boots that looked like trainers. [11][12] Jagex says an outside partner made the trailer and had explicitly promised to use no AI image tools. [10] It is the second time in a few days that AI-made work reached Jagex through a partner. [10][14] The first was a T-shirt from a clothing tie-in with 100 Thieves. [14]

Why it matters. Jagex has promised players that no AI-made material will appear in anything they can touch, hear or feel in its games. [10] It now says its own checks failed, and it will change how it reviews work from partners. [13][10]

2K, the publisher of the NBA basketball games, will remove NBA 2K25 from sale on 30 October and switch off its servers on 1 January 2027. [15][16] MyCareer, the single-player story mode, will stop working too, because a player's progress and in-game money are kept on 2K's servers. [16] Offline modes such as Play Now and MyNBA will still run. [15] NBA 2K24 was shut down in January 2026, and NBA 2K27 came out in September. [15]

Why it matters. A player's work in MyCareer lasts as long as 2K keeps the servers on, which has been about two years per game. [15] IGN says this moves players onto the newest game whether they want to go or not. [16]

Embark Studios, the maker of the shooters Arc Raiders and The Finals, has agreed to have both made into films and TV series. [17][19] Chernin Entertainment, the company behind the film Backrooms, will produce them, after beating several rival studios for the deal. [17][18] Arc Raiders came out in October 2025 and has sold more than 16 million copies. [17] The Finals, which is free to play, has had more than 30 million players in three years. [17]

Why it matters. Embark, which is owned by the publisher Nexon, picked Chernin from the companies competing for the rights. [19][17] Variety says Backrooms earned more than $400 million worldwide on a $10 million budget. [17]

Newzoo, a games research firm, says free-to-play games are not dying on PC and console. [21] Their share of playing time fell 2.9 points between 2021 and 2025, to 29.3%, but the total hours stayed about the same. [21] The growth is in gacha games, where players spend in-game money on random draws for new characters. [21] Major gacha games on PC and console went from 3 in 2021 to 17 in 2025. [21]

Why it matters. Newzoo says much of the growth is the same players moving between gacha games. [21] It also says the extra hours have not brought a matching rise in money, and its count leaves out China, India and phones. [21]

FIRY, the company formerly called Skillz, sold its whole stake in Exit Games back to Exit Games for $55 million in cash, closing on 2 October. [20] Exit Games, from Hamburg in Germany, makes Photon, software that connects players in thousands of online games. [20] FIRY bought about 10.5% of the company in July 2021 for $50 million. [20] FIRY says that is a small profit, when the average 2021 venture fund has paid back five cents on the dollar. [20]

Why it matters. Exit Games describes itself as owned by its founders and paying its own way, and the buyback takes out an outside investor that held about a tenth of it. [20] Its Photon software runs under games such as Stumble Guys. [20]

A trailer for a Marvel superhero game for phones, codenamed Project Comet, leaked online through the Chinese video site Bilibili. [22] Polygon says it looks like a gacha game, where players spend in-game money to win new heroes, such as Spider-Man and Wolverine. [22] It is said to be made by Scopely, a company funded by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. [22] Scopely bought Niantic, the maker of Pokemon Go, for $3.5 billion in 2025. [22]

Why it matters. The same Saudi fund completed its $55 billion purchase of EA, the publisher of Battlefield, in August. [22] Marvel lends its heroes and Scopely builds the game, so the name's owner earns from another company's work.

Fans have been rebuilding old Nintendo 64 games so they run on modern computers, using a fan-made tool called N64: Recompiled. [24] Last week a Banjo-Tooie version made with AI was shown on a YouTube channel that did not at first say so. [24] DarioSamo, a developer on the human-made Banjo version, says AI gets a game running but not working well. [23] He says AI-written code is hard for people to read, so nobody can fix or improve it later. [23]

Why it matters. These fan versions keep old games playable after the original machines die. [24] A rebuild nobody can read cannot be patched or modded, so the work has to start again from scratch. [23]

Halo Studios, the Xbox studio that made Halo, lost many staff in recent cuts, and the series now answers to Activision, the maker of Call of Duty. [25][5] Alex Wakeford, the series' writer, says it is absolutely the studio's intent to publish Halo: Fireteam Noble, a novel by Troy Denning. [25] He wrote that he will work for it in his remaining time at the studio. [25] The book was due out next year. [25]

Why it matters. Fans worry that Activision will restart Halo's story from the beginning, which would leave books set in the current story behind. [25] The writer who is leaving is the one trying to get this one published.

Yves Guillemot, the head of Ubisoft, answered an investor's question by saying that Watch Dogs is an important brand for the future. [26] According to Game File's report, he suggested that no Watch Dogs game is being made right now. [26] The hacking game series began in 2014, and its last game, Legion, came out in 2020 to mixed reviews. [26] A Watch Dogs film finished shooting two years ago and still has no release date. [26]

Why it matters. A company can hold a famous name for years without paying any team to work on it. [26] Players who want a new game have no date to wait for.

Rockstar's Rob Nelson told Love magazine the team builds GTA 6 in eight-week stages, checking each one before planning the next. [29] Rockstar set up a writers' room in Los Angeles only to write what passers-by say in the street. [29] Rupert Humphries, who leads its writing, said the game invents its own politics so it does not feel dated. [30] GTA 6 comes out on 19 November. [30]

Why it matters. Rockstar has worked on the game in some form since 2014, so anything it copied from today's news could feel old by release. [29][30] Dan Houser, who co-founded Rockstar and left in 2020, says he is not watching the trailers at all. [31]

The Witcher 3 had 137,724 people playing at once on Steam on Sunday 4 October, its highest ever. [27] Its old record was about 120,000, and it had 92,000 at its launch in 2015. [27] The rush follows a free rebuilt version that CD Projekt Red released last week. [27] Alinea Analytics, a firm that estimates sales, says it sold 130,000 copies on 30 September alone. [27]

Why it matters. An eleven-year-old game is selling again because its maker improved it for free. [27] Alinea puts its total sales above 66 million copies. [27]

Ace Combat 8, a fighter-jet game from the Japanese publisher Bandai Namco, peaked at 52,694 players at once on Steam on Saturday. [28] That is almost four times Ace Combat 7's peak of 13,758 in 2019. [28] Most games in the series were made for consoles and never came to computers at all. [28] It has more than 5,755 reviews on Steam, and most are positive. [28]

Why it matters. The jump shows the old console series has found a large audience on PC. [28] It comes despite anger over a bonus game that turned out to run only inside Ace Combat 8, for which Bandai Namco apologised. [28]

Overwatch players outside China are angry about a new set of character outfits sold only in China. [36] NetEase, a big Chinese games company, publishes Overwatch there under a deal with its maker, Blizzard, and makes its own outfits for it. [36] One of them changes its look during a match, as earlier China-only outfits have done. [36] Season 5 starts on 6 October with a new hero, Doctrine, and the first new escort map in nearly four years. [37]

Why it matters. Blizzard's Walter Kong said in May that these China-only items are part of the NetEase deal and will continue. [36] A player on Reddit compared them with a $40 outfit from Blizzard itself. [36]

Wizards of the Coast, the maker of the card game Magic: The Gathering, will put God Packs in its sets from 2027. [38] A God Pack holds only rare cards or better, and it will be one in 1,000 normal packs and one in 300 collector packs. [38] Shiny foil versions of common cards will be dropped from normal packs. [38] Collector packs will lose three cards. [38]

Why it matters. Wizards says buyers skip those cards when they film themselves opening packs. [38] Kotaku notes that God Packs took off in the Pokemon card game, where prices have climbed out of reach for many children. [38]

Valve's monthly Steam survey for September found 42.22% of gaming PCs now have 32GB of memory. [39] That overtook 16GB, which fell to 37.82%. [39] It happened during a shortage of memory chips. [39] The same survey shows AMD's processors in 48.37% of PCs, against Intel's 51.63%. [39]

Why it matters. Games keep asking for more: even Minecraft raised the memory it recommends to 16GB this year. [39] Tom's Hardware warns the survey is not scientific and may not reflect the wider market. [39]

Gears of War: E-Day, Xbox's big new shooter, goes on sale worldwide on 6 October, after early play for some buyers. [40] Its maker, The Coalition, released a patch that fixes a fault that signed split-screen players out. [40] On the cheaper Xbox Series S, with 10GB of memory against 16GB on the Series X, the studio moves rarely used data onto the console's storage drive. [41]

Why it matters. The game also arrives on Game Pass, Xbox's subscription, so many players will try it at once. [40] Some of its makers told Eurogamer they fear for their jobs after launch. [7]

Hideo Kojima, who made Metal Gear Solid, released a new episode of his podcast, the first with official English subtitles. [32] He said he has mixed feelings about Nvidia's DLSS 5, a tool that uses AI to make game characters look more real. [32] AI does not understand why he chose a particular lighting, he said. [32] He also said filming for his spy game Physint starts next year, with the actor Bill Skarsgard already scanned. [33][35]

Why it matters. Kojima scans actors early because processing the data takes a long time, so the game is still years off. [35] He also wants to release his horror game OD with almost no trailers. [34]

Behaviour Interactive, the Canadian studio behind the horror game Dead by Daylight, is hiring for an unannounced big-budget science-fiction shooter. [42] A job advert for a senior technical animator describes the game as aiming for a high level of realism. [42] Dead by Daylight set a new record for players at once on Steam on its tenth anniversary. [42] Its own 2023 game, Meet Your Maker, stopped getting new content about a year after launch. [42]

Why it matters. Behaviour has mostly lived on Dead by Daylight for ten years, plus games it makes for other publishers. [42] It also has a smaller team shooter, Exterminauts, on the way. [42]

Embark Studios is rebuilding Celeste, a leading character in Arc Raiders, using full motion capture of her voice actor, Diana Gardner. [43] The new face arrives with the Frozen Trail update on 6 October. [43] Embark says the old face never showed the depth of Gardner's performance. [43] It plans to bring more characters in line with their real actors. [43]

Why it matters. PC Gamer notes that the game has used AI to fill out some of its voice lines. [43] Embark now says it wants real human performances in every interaction. [43]

Illfonic, the studio behind Halloween: The Game, will sell its first paid extras on 27 October. [44][45] Two outfits for the killer, Michael Myers, will cost $10 each. [44] A pair of new survivor characters and a costume pack will also cost $10 each. [45] A new map based on the film Halloween 5 will be free. [45]

Why it matters. Kotaku calls $10 for one outfit steep, though some games charge $15 or more. [44] Illfonic says this is the first of several drops in the game's first year. [45]

Jun Takeuchi, a Capcom executive who oversees Resident Evil, said the series runs on two tracks: new numbered games and remakes of old ones. [46] Capcom has remade Resident Evil 2, 3 and 4 since 2019, and Code: Veronica is next. [46] Takeuchi said the remakes will one day catch up with the newer games. [46] He said Capcom has been preparing for that since Resident Evil Village. [46]

Why it matters. Capcom earns again from stories it already owns by rebuilding them. [46] PC Gamer notes that would eventually mean remaking Resident Evil 5 and 6. [46]

Microsoft confirmed that some games and apps crash after a September preview update for Windows 11, known as KB5124010. [47] The fault hits programs that use Windows to decode AC-3, an old Dolby surround-sound format. [47] The update is optional, but it installs itself on some PCs set to get updates early. [47] Microsoft has given no date for a fix. [47]

Why it matters. Mostly older games rely on Windows for this sound format, so they are the ones that break. [47] Players with the update have no fix from Microsoft yet.