Gaming, in brief

Paramount finished buying Warner Bros. Discovery on Tuesday 6 October, and the joined company is now called Skydance. [1][2]

Reuters puts the price at $110bn and the Guardian at $111bn. [1][2] The figure counts the debts Skydance takes on, not only the shares it bought. [3]

Skydance now owns Warner Bros. Games. That includes Avalanche, which made Hogwarts Legacy, NetherRealm, which makes Mortal Kombat, Rocksteady, which made the Batman Arkham games, and TT Games, which makes the Lego games. [4]

Hogwarts Legacy alone has sold more than 30 million copies since it came out in 2023. [4]

Skydance's announcement that the deal had closed did not mention games once. [4][5]

Its co-chief executive, Ynon Kreiz, who used to run the toy maker Mattel, told staff the company would find 'plenty of opportunities' in new products and games. [4]

Skydance plans $6bn a year of savings within three years. [1] It says most will come from technology, buying and offices, but Reuters reports the cuts are expected to reach jobs across Hollywood. [1][4]

The joined company carries about $80bn of debt. [1] Part of the money was borrowed on a bond that pays lenders almost 9% a year until 2066. [6]

Bobby Kotick, who ran Activision for 32 years and sold it to Microsoft for $68.7bn, joined Skydance's board of 13 directors. [7][8]

Twelve US states sued to block the deal over fears of less competition and fewer films, then settled in September. [2] The settlement makes Skydance release at least 30 films a year and keep independent editorial boards at CBS News and CNN. [2][1]

Warner bought Player First Games, the maker of its fighting game MultiVersus, in 2024 and closed it seven months later. [9]

Skydance already had its own games arm, Paramount Games Studio, and is making a Call of Duty film with Activision for 2028. [4]

Why it matters. Watch where the first of the $6bn of savings fall, and whether Skydance puts Warner's game studios under its own Paramount Games Studio. [1][4]

Asha Sharma, head of Xbox, Microsoft's games business, told staff on 6 October that Xbox has 'started to return to growth' after 'an all-time low'. [10] She said the growth was '2 to 3 times what we were', but gave no figures for it. [24] She said Xbox's old plan for Game Pass, its games subscription, had sent the business into 'freefall'. [25] She also said Xbox's next machines will be a 'family of devices', some made by partners. [15]

Why it matters. Xbox has cut nearly 2,000 jobs this year. [25] Hundreds more Xbox staff are still due to lose their jobs in the coming months. [10]

The Verge reported on 6 October that Xbox had won the only right to stream Grand Theft Auto 6 from its servers at launch. [15] Streaming means the game runs on Xbox's computers and plays on a phone, TV or PC, with no console needed. [26] Hours later Matthew Ball, Xbox's strategy chief, called the report 'misreporting' and said the game 'will not be streaming exclusively or to PC'. [16] From November, Game Pass plans cap streaming at 5, 10 or 15 hours a month. [15]

Why it matters. Rockstar has not announced a PC version, so a stream would have been the only way to play GTA 6 on a PC at first. [15] The game comes out on consoles on 19 November. [16]

The teams behind Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering at Wizards of the Coast, the games company owned by the toy maker Hasbro, said on 6 October they are joining a union. [27] It is the union that workers on Magic's online version won in a vote earlier this year. [21] They have asked the company to recognise it by 13 October. [21] Their demands include protection from layoffs, a written rule on AI and ownership of work they make in their own time. [27][21]

Why it matters. Wizards did not recognise the first union by choice, so this one may also need a vote. [21] The union says bosses have pushed AI tools on teams 'without regard' for what the teams want. [21]

Yellow Brick Games, the studio behind the fantasy action game Eternal Strands, has let staff go, according to posts by workers on LinkedIn. [11] Mike Laidlaw, one of the creators of Dragon Age, founded it in 2020 with former Ubisoft developers. [11] Eternal Strands came out in January 2025 and is its only game. [11] The studio had 68 people in 2024, and it has not said how many lost their jobs. [11]

Why it matters. It is the third studio in three days to cut staff, after Ninja Theory and Supermassive. [11] Yellow Brick paid for and sold Eternal Strands itself, so no publisher's money carries it to a next game. [11]

Philip Holt, head of Undead Labs, said this week the studio will be owned by its staff, with shares handed out in the coming weeks. [28] Xbox let the studio go this year, and its managers bought it after a sale to another studio fell through. [28] Holt said Undead Labs showed State of Decay 3 in 2020, while its team was still small, so the public would know the game existed. [29] He feared the studio could be 'swallowed up or divested' first. [29]

Why it matters. The studio cut a 'significant' number of jobs in September, and Holt says he warned staff early that cuts were coming. [30] It must now finish its zombie survival game on money its own games earn. [28]

GameStop, the US games shop, now sells a used PS5 Pro for $1,399.99, or $1,499.99 with a disc drive. [13] That is about $500 more than a new one. [12] New ones are sold out in Sony's own shop, and sellers on Amazon, Best Buy and Walmart raised their prices to match GameStop's. [13] The PS5 Pro launched at $699.99 in 2024, and its price has risen as memory chips got dearer. [13]

Why it matters. Game Developer links the jump to GTA 6, which is advertised as improved on the PS5 Pro. [13] People buying their first console of this generation now face a dearer market, not a cheaper one. [13]

Daily players across five Resident Evil games rose from 500,000 on 30 August to 750,000 on 20 September, the research firm Sensor Tower told GamesIndustry.biz. [31] Copies sold each day rose from 34,000 to nearly 80,000 over the same weeks. [31] The new Resident Evil film opened on 18 September. [31] Capcom, which makes the games, also cut their prices from 8 September, and that alone lifted daily players by 21%. [31]

Why it matters. Analysts at Sensor Tower and Ampere Analysis say the jump is small next to the games' sales over a whole year. [31] They say Capcom's real gain is keeping the name known before its next games come out. [31]

Star Wars: Galactic Racer, a $60 racing game, came out on 6 October. [32] Amazon's Prime members can stream its story mode from day one on Luna, Amazon's cloud gaming service, without paying anything more. [17][32] Jeff Gattis, Amazon's head of games, said it is the first time Luna players get a new game on its launch day. [17] Prime members can also claim ten PC games to keep this month, including Doom from 2016. [33]

Why it matters. The game came out on PC, PS5 and Xbox the same day, so Prime members can try it without buying it. [17]

Netflix announced The Conjuring: Unspoken, a horror game set in the world of The Conjuring films, coming only to Netflix on 13 October. [34] It was made by Supermassive Games, the British studio behind Until Dawn, which recently announced layoffs. [35][34] Players use their phone as the controller and the TV as the screen. [34] They hunt ghosts with tools such as an infrared camera and a spirit box. [34]

Why it matters. Netflix says players who know the films will 'get a lot more' from it, so the game leans on a film series people already watch. [35] It needs no console, only the phone in the player's hand. [35]

The Wi-Fi Alliance, a body that certifies wireless gadgets, listed two unannounced PlayStation devices. [36] Their model numbers follow the PlayStation Portal, Sony's handheld that streams games instead of running them. [36] Both run Android 15, as the Portal does. [36] A leaker said earlier this year that Sony was making a Portal with an OLED screen. [36]

Why it matters. Sony said in June that streaming needs very little memory, which makes such devices cheap to build while memory prices rise. [36] Sony did not immediately reply to The Verge's request for comment. [36]

A Reddit user found details of the Xbox Elite Series 3 controller in the back end of Xbox Design Lab, Microsoft's site for ordering custom controllers. [37] The files listed sticks that sense movement with magnets, which avoids the wear that makes old sticks drift. [38] They also showed better rumble, an audio wheel and four versions to buy. [37] The files were later removed, and Microsoft has not announced the controller. [37]

Why it matters. The current Elite controller came out seven years ago, and its sticks can drift. [37] Magnetic sticks have no parts rubbing together, so they should not wear out the same way. [38]

Tsuyoshi Saito, a senior executive at Sega, the Japanese maker of Sonic, told the newspaper Nikkei that Sega is 'not entrusting the creative aspects of games to AI'. [23] He said Sega does use AI to save time in publishing and office work, and to come up with business ideas. [23] Sega set up a committee on generative AI last year, with a team that builds its own AI tools. [23] Earlier this year it emerged that AI was used for background art in Crazy Taxi: World Tour. [23]

Why it matters. The same committee answers game stores that now ask makers to say how they used AI. [23]

Martin Klima, co-founder of Warhorse Studios, which makes the Kingdom Come: Deliverance games, told PC Gamer that AI 'is not a get out of jail free card'. [22] He said laying off half a team and replacing it with AI is a 'fundamentally flawed idea'. [22] He said bosses have a 'simplified mental model' of what AI can do in games. [22] He still expects AI to become hard to avoid while saving money stays the main goal. [22]

Why it matters. AI has been named as one reason for this year's long run of layoffs, PC Gamer notes. [22]

Rodrigo Terra, head of Abragames, the trade group for Brazil's game makers, told GamesIndustry.biz he wants Brazil among the world's top five game producers within ten years. [39] He wants games to spread Brazil's culture the way The Witcher made a Polish way of telling stories known. [39] Patricia Sato, who runs Brazil Games, an export programme, said people elsewhere mostly link Brazil with football, samba and carnival. [39] She pointed to Hell Clock, a game about a war in Brazil's history, the War of Canudos. [39]

Why it matters. Terra said soft power, a country winning influence through its culture, is part of the plan. [39] On the same day the Australian state of South Australia doubled its fund for local game makers. [40]

The South Australian Film Corporation, the state's screen agency, doubled its Digital Games Fund to $1 million. [40] Its first round, last October, gave $500,000 to 11 studios. [40] Studios can now get up to $30,000 for early work, $150,000 to finish a game and $50,000 after release. [40] Applications open on 21 October, and a new scheme will pay part of the wages of early-career staff placed in local studios. [40]

Why it matters. It is the state government's largest single investment in game making. [40] The first round drew more than 50 applications. [40]

RealRadec, a well-known PlayStation fan, said hackers took his PlayStation Network account at the weekend and changed its email address. [41] He said Sony's support phone line was offline. [41] He got the account back after Colin Moriarty, a podcaster whose own account was stolen this summer, asked his contacts at Sony for help. [41] RealRadec said it was fixed fast 'because of the position I'm in'. [41]

Why it matters. Moriarty reported in May that hackers can get past two-step login by giving support staff ordinary facts such as purchase dates and birthdays. [41] Stolen accounts are resold online for hundreds of dollars, with the owner's games inside. [41]

An unofficial version of GTA V that ran inside a web browser went live on 6 October and was gone within hours. [20] Alex St. Louis, founder of Wonder Interactive, shared a clip and said it had been converted with the help of AI. [20] It is not clear who took it down. [20] Take-Two, which owns GTA's maker Rockstar, has shut down a similar browser copy of GTA: Vice City before. [20]

Why it matters. Rockstar lets players make mods, but its rules forbid uses like this even when nobody is charged. [20]

The Coalition, the Xbox studio that made Gears of War: E-Day, found a way to fit the game on the weaker Xbox Series S. [14] The Series S has 10GB of memory, against 16GB in the Series X. [42] The studio uses part of the console's fast storage drive as extra memory, moving data in and out as it is needed. [14][42] Giving up a couple of gigabytes of storage frees about one gigabyte of memory. [14]

Why it matters. Most games handle the gap by making the Series S version look worse. [42] Eurogamer says other Xbox games could probably use the same trick. [14]

Sony has filed a US patent for AI that changes a game's computer-controlled characters using data from how people play. [43] It could change a character's look and how it fights, not only what it says. [43] Sony writes that believable characters now take a lot of scripting and money to make. [43] A patent claims an idea, and there is no guarantee this one becomes a product. [43]

Why it matters. Sony and Microsoft are both working AI features into their next consoles, IGN notes. [43]

Twitch, Amazon's live-streaming site, has added a Shopping category in the US, where presenters sell products with links to Amazon. [44] It puts the category on its front page and in its top menu. [44] When Kotaku looked, six shopping streamers had 65 viewers between them. [44] Twitch is also testing AI that writes down what streamers say, to decide where ads can run. [44]

Why it matters. The test began during Amazon's Prime Day sale. [44] Kotaku says Amazon is trying to compete with TikTok and Instagram for people's attention. [44]

Infinity Ward, the studio making Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, set out its plans for DMZ, a mode where players fight over loot and must escape to keep it. [45] DMZ has its own 70 levels, and its own money and crafting materials that carry over between rounds. [45] Weapon progress is shared with the rest of the game and with Warzone, its free battle mode. [45] The studio wants DMZ to become a main part of the series. [45]

Why it matters. It builds on a test version that ran in 2022's Modern Warfare 2. [45] Infinity Ward calls it the series' 'definitive extraction shooter experience'. [45]

A trailer for Battlefield 6's fifth season ends with soldiers in armour like Dead Space's hero, beside one of the series' alien Markers. [46] EA, which owns both series, calls it a limited-time Halloween mode. [46] The season also adds a faster free battle royale mode and six new weapons. [46] EA's 2023 remake of Dead Space got strong reviews but weak sales, and the series has been on ice since. [46]

Why it matters. Polygon reads the mode as a sign EA has not given up on Dead Space, though no new Dead Space game is announced. [46]

A modder called LoreanXavier has rebuilt P.T., a free horror demo from 2014, to run on Windows PCs, and says it is about 97% done. [18] P.T. was a teaser for a Silent Hill game led by Hideo Kojima, a famous Japanese game designer. [18] Konami, which owns Silent Hill, scrapped that game after falling out with Kojima and removed the demo from the PlayStation store in 2015. [18] Kojima has shared an article about the port. [18]

Why it matters. The port reuses P.T.'s original files, so fans are urging the modder to publish his code in case Konami has it taken down. [18]

A user called VinasExplosao posted video of the PlayStation 5's menu system running on a PC through an emulator, a program that copies how a console works. [47] The team behind the RPCSX emulator says starting the PS5's system has been possible since early 2026. [47] Kotaku calls this the first proper video of it working. [47] It is not yet the same as running PS5 games on a PC. [47]

Why it matters. People breaking the PS5's locks have made big steps in the past three months, Kotaku reports. [47]

A modder called EpicNNG has made Borderlands Online playable, in English, about a year after a copy of the game was found. [19] It was a free spin-off of Borderlands, planned only for China, and was cancelled before release. [19] The team had to get past its login screen and translate the whole game. [19] EpicNNG says no money is made from it and they will stop if Take-Two, the publisher, asks. [19]

Why it matters. EpicNNG released it early because AI tools are getting powerful enough that others could soon do the same work quickly. [19]

The YouTube channel Pixel Game Squad bought a storage unit at auction and found game design papers, concept art and chips holding unreleased versions of games. [48] They included a prototype of Contra III and level plans for Double Dragon and a Terminator game. [48] The unit is believed to have belonged to Tom Tanaka, a designer who worked at Virgin Games in the 1990s. [48] Much of it has gone to private collectors. [48]

Why it matters. Papers in a private collection are closed to people studying how games were made, Kotaku notes. [48] Frank Cifaldi, head of the Video Game History Foundation, called it 'deeply unsettling'. [48]

Artstorm, the maker of the online naval game Modern Warships, admitted it used an artist's ship design without permission. [49] Alex Jay Brady drew the design in 2014, an aircraft carrier that skims over water on wings, and spotted it in the game. [49] Brady said he would have agreed if they had asked and paid him. [49] Artstorm apologised in public and said it would contact him 'to make this right'. [49]

Why it matters. Players can pay up to $700 to buy the ship outright, by IGN's sums, so the copied design earns real money. [49]