Gaming, in brief

Street Fighter, a film based on Capcom's fighting games, took $51.1 million in cinemas around the world in its first weekend, more than any other film. [1]

About $31 million came from the US and $20.1 million from other countries. [1]

Paramount and Legendary, two film studios, made it with Capcom, the Japanese company that owns the games, for $82 million. [1]

GameSpot says a film usually has to earn at least twice its cost to count as a success, which here would be about $164 million. [3]

Resident Evil, Capcom's other film this autumn, opened with $60 million in the US in September. [3] A month later it was still seventh, and it has taken $324 million worldwide. [2][3]

Polygon notes that Resident Evil told a new story with no characters from the games, while Street Fighter is built on the famous fighters themselves. [2]

Critics are cool: 41% of reviews on Rotten Tomatoes are positive. [1] Audiences there rate it at 79%. [1]

The Guardian's critic called it a garish, incoherent mess, and said fans would not mind. [4] Polygon's critic said only David Dastmalchian, as the villain M. Bison, gave a great performance. [5]

IGN says the film pushes its fighting tournament, the centre of the games, to the side, a mistake the 2021 Mortal Kombat film also made. [6]

Mortal Kombat 2, another fighting-game film, opened with $38 million in the US in May and finished with $129.5 million worldwide. [3]

It will not open in China, and most of its foreign tickets were expected to come from Mexico, Brazil, the UK, Australia and Asia. [3]

IGN says the real test is the weeks ahead, and that bad reviews spreading could make a sequel harder to win. [1]

Why it matters. Watch how far ticket sales fall in the second weekend: GameSpot says good word of mouth is the film's chance to become a small hit, and it faces Clayface over Halloween. [3][2]

Steam Next Fest, a week when developers put free trial versions of coming games on Valve's PC store, runs from 19 to 26 October. [8] PC Gamer counted 8,011 demos on its preview page the day before it opened. [7] That is about double June's festival, and about eight times the thousand or so in June 2022. [7] PC Gamer blames a wave of games built quickly with AI coding tools, though it says it cannot confirm how many. [7]

Why it matters. Steam's own ranking decides which demos get shown, and PC Gamer expects it to keep most of the 8,011 out of sight. [7] A small studio's demo now competes with thousands of others for the same few places on the store's front pages.

Needle in a Haystack Simulator went viral in August, and Kotaku counts at least 14 copies of it on Steam. [9] The maker of one copy, NoGlyph, says another copy released on 16 October contains its code. [9] It found 13 of its classes, named blocks of code, with the same names, and its own error messages word for word. [7] NoGlyph has filed a copyright notice with Valve. [7] Separately, a Roblox creator copied the unreleased game Escape the Walls within 24 hours, from one video. [9]

Why it matters. Kotaku says small developers cannot afford to fight every copy in court. [9] It expects them to show fewer demos, early versions and trailers. [9]

Kepler_L2, an insider some of whose past hardware claims proved true, says the memory and storage chips in Sony's next console cost over $680 on their own. [10] In June the same insider put all the machine's parts at close to $1,000. [10] Sony has not confirmed any of these numbers. [10] Its games boss, Hideaki Nishino, told investors in June that Sony does not plan to sell consoles at big losses. [10] Kotaku blames AI companies buying up memory chips. [11]

Why it matters. Consoles used to be sold at a loss and paid back through game sales. [11] Kotaku says players now spend their time on fewer games, so that is no longer a safe bet. [11] The PS5, Xbox Series X and Switch 2 have all got dearer over time rather than cheaper, Kotaku notes. [11]

Ritchie Torres, a US congressman from the Bronx in New York, has introduced the Power to the Players Act, The Verge reports. [13] It would have the Federal Trade Commission, the US consumer watchdog, write rules so a game someone pays for belongs to them, not just a licence to play it. [13] Online games would also need an offline mode before their servers shut. [13] Torres points to NBA 2K25, whose servers close on 31 December. [13]

Why it matters. If it passed, a company could no longer end a bought game simply by switching off its servers. [14] Polygon says the bill still faces many hurdles and may never become law. [14]

Jantar Mantar Chalo, a free web game where players dodge police to reach a protest site in New Delhi, has gone viral, Reuters reports. [15] Its maker, Suraj Kushwah, a 27-year-old IT worker, says at least 2,000 people have been playing at any moment since it came out on 14 October. [15] It mocks the roadblocks and detentions faced by young protesters angry about jobs, leaked exam papers and changes to voter lists. [15] Opposition parties say those changes cut 130 million people off the lists; the Election Commission and the ruling BJP deny it. [15]

Why it matters. Players can also switch sides and break up the crowd with batons and tear gas. [15] Reuters says young Indians are using games like this to turn anger at Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government into jokes they can share. [15]

The Pokemon Company and Disney said on Friday that Pokemon Tales: The Misadventures of Sirfetch'd and Pichu will come out in 2027. [16] It is made by Aardman Animations, the studio behind Wallace and Gromit, in stop-motion, where models are moved and filmed one frame at a time. [16] It will air on Disney XD, a children's channel, and stream only on Disney Plus. [16] The first season of the old Pokemon cartoon has also moved to Disney Plus in the US and some other countries. [16]

Why it matters. Polygon calls it part of a bigger push to bring Pokemon to Disney Plus, so the shows gather in one place. [16] Disney's head of children's shows says Pokemon still reaches young viewers as well as old fans. [16]

Tru Blu Games has announced Don Bradman Cricket Jr, a cartoon-style cricket game for PC and consoles, IGN reports. [17] For more than a decade almost every cricket game has come from one studio, Big Ant, the maker of Cricket 26. [17] The new game has no official team or player licences. [17] Its one real player is Don Bradman, Australia's greatest batsman, who can be unlocked. [17] No release date has been given. [17]

Why it matters. Without the real teams it is aimed at younger players wanting quick fun, not at Big Ant's realistic games. [17] Big Ant tried a similar cartoon game in 2018 and never made a second one. [17]

Piotr Babieno, the boss of Bloober Team, the studio remaking the Silent Hill horror games, says it will sell its games on disc and cartridge for as long as it can. [18] He told GamesRadar, a games site, that most players use machines five to seven years old or older. [18] Sony plans to stop making PlayStation game discs in 2028. [18] It is unclear whether Bloober's Silent Hill remake will be out before then. [18]

Why it matters. Babieno admits selling by download is easier, cheaper and earns more for everyone. [18] He keeps discs because, he says, collecting ties players to the studio that made the game. [18]

Philippe Morin, a co-founder of the studio Red Barrels, says its horror game The Outlast Trials took six years to reach early access, a paid version sold before the game is finished. [19] The team had a build it could have released after four years, but playtests with players went badly. [19] Morin says they had made it too random while chasing endless replays. [19] About 20,000 people were playing it at once when PC Gamer wrote on Sunday. [19]

Why it matters. Only the playtests showed the team that its four-year build was not working. [19] Outlast 3 appears to have been put on hold after Trials became a hit. [19]

Marcel Pflug, who runs the online Game Boy Museum, has fitted its whole archive onto a cartridge for Nintendo's 1989 handheld. [20] It plays no game. Slotted in, it turns the Game Boy into a searchable guide to its own hardware, games and adverts. [20] It took several years of evenings and weekends, partly because the screen can show only 255 small tiles at once. [20] The file is free to download. [20]

Why it matters. Pflug says he wanted the knowledge to live on the machine itself, so it lasts whatever happens to websites, servers and him. [20]

Grand Theft Auto 6, Rockstar's crime game due out next month, lets players build a relationship between its two lead characters, Jason and Lucia, the BBC reports. [21] In September the polling firm YouGov asked more than 4,000 British adults whether a partner's romance with a game character counts as cheating. [21] About 6% said it would. [21] Another 19% said they would not be okay with it. [21]

Why it matters. Women were much more likely than men to object, YouGov found. [21] Arienne Ferchaud, who studies bonds with made-up characters at Florida State University, says games are getting better at copying real relationships. [21]

Volume.art is a free online collection of 29 tiny games, all about moving a volume slider in odd ways, PC Gamer reports. [22] Twenty-three developers made it together, among them Akuma Kira, the maker of the game Lunacid. [22] In one game the player fires a bow, and the volume is set by how far the arrow flies. [22] Another makes fun of dating games. [22] PC Gamer's writer finished all 29 in just under an hour. [22]

Why it matters. PC Gamer compares it to old Flash games and to Nintendo's WarioWare, both built from quick, tiny games. [22] It costs players nothing to try. [22]

Doneda, a dataminer, someone who digs through a game's files, has shown a large unused area from early work on Dark Souls 2, PC Gamer reports. [23] The files hold a coliseum, mines, an underground tower and a crypt. [23] Doneda loads them into Elden Ring Nightreign, a newer game from the same studio, FromSoftware, to explore them. [23] PC Gamer says the area may have become the Undead Crypt in the finished game. [23]

Why it matters. PC Gamer says Dark Souls 2 was made in a hurry, with Hidetaka Miyazaki, FromSoftware's lead creator, busy on Bloodborne and the story rewritten. [23]