Gaming, in brief

PEGI, which gives games their age ratings across Europe, has started moving download-only games that sell paid random items from ratings of 3, 7 or 12 up to 16. [1]

Paid random items are things you pay for before you know which prize is inside, such as loot boxes, card packs and gacha pulls. [3]

The Games Rating Authority, which runs PEGI ratings in the UK, began applying the rule to a first set of games already on sale last week. [1]

Its policy manager, Connor Hinde, announced it in a post on LinkedIn. [1]

The new label reads "PEGI 16 - Paid random items", and it applies however the game was first rated. [1]

The changes roll out through October, and the authority says a large number of ratings will change in a short time. [1]

Since June, PEGI has given NEW games with paid random items a 16 by default. [2] This step reaches games that were rated before the rule. [1]

Under the same rules a battle pass, a season of rewards bought for a limited time, usually gets a 12, or a 7 if players can switch spending off. [3]

Games with NFTs, and social casino games, go straight to 18. [3]

PEGI's director Dirk Bosmans said publishers who object should "read the room" about growing pressure from regulators. [3]

Belgium has treated paid loot boxes as gambling since 2018, while courts in the Netherlands and Austria declined to call football player packs gambling. [2]

The EU's top court is weighing whether app stores can be blamed for selling games with illegal loot boxes. [2] A proposed EU law, the KIDS Act, would make parental tools compulsory. [2]

Why it matters. Watch which well-known games move to 16 as the re-rating spreads through October, and whether the EU's Digital Fairness Act draft on 11 November goes further than a label. [1][2]

Digital Sun Games, the studio behind the Moonlighter series, has dropped a public Steam test of its next game, ReVamp. [5][9] It said news of games being "reverse-engineered, cloned and published before the original is even out" made a big public build too risky. [7] A smaller test on its Discord server starts on 29 October, and a public one may follow around January. [6] ReVamp is due in March 2027. [5] Kotaku and PC Gamer tie the wave of copies to Claude Opus 5.5, an AI model from Anthropic that can turn a game back into readable code. [7][5]

Why it matters. Digital Sun wrote that showing a game early is how small studios find their fans, so hiding it costs them attention. [4] It follows Alliance Arts, which pulled a public demo of Drunken Goddess Reflux days earlier. [8]

Steam Next Fest, a week when Valve's store offers free demos of coming games, opened on 19 October with 8,202 demos, more than double last year's event. [10] In June about 17% of the festival's demos said they used generative AI, which makes pictures, text or code from a typed request. [10] One player, noting that Steam already makes developers declare AI use, asked Valve for a filter to hide every game that does. [11] Valve would first have to add AI as a tag that its filters can read. [11]

Why it matters. A declaration only helps a player once the store's search can act on it. [11] Real demos also get harder to find among thousands of others, Eurogamer says. [10]

Lucasfilm Games, which licenses Star Wars to game makers, says it is now more flexible about whose pitches it takes. [12] Its vice president Douglas Reilly told The Game Business that a studio need not be a "top five publisher". [13] Both of this year's well-reviewed Star Wars games came from independent studios: Zero Company from Bit Reactor and Galactic Racer from Fuse Games. [13] After buying Lucasfilm in 2012, Disney gave Electronic Arts sole rights to Star Wars games for ten years. [13]

Why it matters. One licence holder now chooses among many studios, so smaller teams can bid for one of the best-known names in film. [12] Reilly says big games like Battlefront stay part of the plan. [14]

A new issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly, a games magazine that stopped printing in 2014, carries a rumour that Lucasfilm wants a Star Wars Battlefront 3. [15] Reporter Jeff Grubb read it out on his podcast on 19 October. [16] It names EA DICE, which made the last two Battlefront games, as the likely maker, and Bungie, the studio behind Halo and Destiny, as the other choice. [15] Grubb said it does not sound like the game is being made yet. [15]

Why it matters. No company has confirmed it, and its only source is an anonymous gossip column. [15][16] Bungie is between projects as its shooter Marathon winds down, Kotaku notes. [16]

Brandon Stirrup, a senior business strategy manager at Xbox, posted on X on 18 October. [17] He said he had made a game by typing instructions to an AI tool, with about three hours of real work. [17] He wrote "we use AI, just as all companies do in 2026", and said studios that do not are "planning for a fake future". [17] He then deleted his account. [17] A source at Xbox told PC Gamer he did so because of the number of replies. [17]

Why it matters. It is one manager's post, not an Xbox announcement. [17] It came a day before Digital Sun said AI copying had made it hide its own game. [4]

Activision says next year's Call of Duty will start a new sub-series, instead of continuing Modern Warfare or Black Ops. [18] Its marketing chief Tyler Bahl said players did not want two games in a row from one series, as happened with Black Ops 6 and 7. [18] This year's Modern Warfare 4 comes out on 23 October, and its campaign, open early to buyers who pre-ordered, holds a 92% positive score from over 3,100 Steam reviews. [19][20] YouTuber MrBeast marked the launch with a video offering $1 million to a winner. [19]

Why it matters. A new series is a gamble: the last one, Vanguard in 2021, sold poorly and never got a sequel. [18] Sledgehammer Games, which made Vanguard, is understood to be making next year's game. [18]

Team Vitality, one of France's leading esports clubs, whose players compete in video game tournaments, says looters broke into its Paris base, V.Hive, during protests on 17 October. [21] Its windows were smashed and its trophies and computers taken. [21] Video appears to show looters pulling memory chips out of gaming PCs in the street. [21] Nobody from the team was hurt. [21] In Nice, a worker at a Micromania game shop was kicked while trying to chase rioters away. [22]

Why it matters. The riots grew out of protests over living costs and school conditions, and about 1,500 shops were damaged that weekend, Kotaku reports. [22] V.Hive stays closed until the damage is counted. [21]

Cygames, the Japanese maker of the horse-racing game Umamusume: Pretty Derby, says US visas for its voice actors have not been approved. [23] The actors were due to sing at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on 22 and 23 October, the first stop of the game's first world tour. [23] Cygames says it started the visa process more than six months ago through US lawyers and promoters. [23] Shows in London and Seoul are planned for later. [23]

Why it matters. Kotaku links the delay to the Trump administration's immigration crackdown, which other foreign musicians have also blamed for cancelled shows. [23] Some fans paid thousands of dollars to travel from across the US and from Japan. [23]

Ukie, the UK games industry's trade body, has started an AI compliance service with Sheridans, a law firm that works for games companies. [24] A studio goes through four steps and earns the Ukie Certification Mark, which it can show to publishers and investors. [24] A first check plus a new AI policy costs 1,500 to 2,000 pounds for members and 2,000 to 2,500 pounds for others. [24] Ukie's chief Nick Poole says most members use AI tools daily but worry about the legal risks. [24]

Why it matters. Sheridans partner Anna Poulter-Jones writes that material made with AI can sometimes infringe on other people's work. [25] The mark gives a studio proof that it checked. [24]

IGN, one of the biggest games websites, is pulling back from its podcasts after layoffs last month, Kotaku reports. [26] Its PlayStation show Beyond! is on hold, and only Game Scoop will still come out every week. [26] Staff were told the other shows did not earn enough to justify weekly work. [26] Three former hosts, Brian Altano, Seth Macy and Max Scoville, have launched X Button, a podcast network paid for by listeners on Patreon. [26]

Why it matters. The hosts now depend on listeners paying them directly through Patreon. [26] Kinda Funny, a network started by earlier IGN staff, shows the model can pay, Kotaku says. [26]

The RTX 5090, Nvidia's most powerful graphics card for gaming PCs, has disappeared from Nvidia's own US store, PC Gamer reports. [27] Jeff Fisher, who runs Nvidia's GeForce gaming business, denied rumours that production had stopped, saying supply is "somewhat constrained". [27] Memory chips are also in short supply. [27] In Brazil, the distributor Oderco says two pallets of the cards, worth about $495,000 at cost, went missing at Guarulhos airport in Sao Paulo. [28]

Why it matters. Rumours say Nvidia is moving the chips into its data-centre products, which Nvidia denies. [27] The only cards left for sale come from third-party sellers at very high prices. [27]

Arc Raiders, Embark Studios' shooter set in a wasteland full of robots, peaked at 1.7 million daily players across all platforms on 14 October. [29] That was its most in six months, says Alinea Analytics, a firm that estimates game sales. [29] The rise followed its Frozen Trails update on 8 October and a free weekend that ended on 12 October. [29] About 150,000 new players joined that weekend, while the game was half price at $19.99. [29] Alinea estimates 150,000 more copies sold in the next three days, worth about $3 million. [29]

Why it matters. A big update, a free weekend and a sale landed together. [29] These are Alinea's estimates, not Embark's figures, and they leave out spending inside the game. [29]

Christofer Sundberg, who founded the Swedish studio Liquid Swords, has confirmed that "Liquid Swords is closing", after reports that it had gone bankrupt. [30] He said the console version of its crime game Samson, out in September, "did far better" than the April PC version, but not enough. [30] All 27 staff lose their jobs, and Swedish law covers the two months of wages they were not paid, GameSpot reports. [30] Sundberg says talks on keeping Samson supported continue. [30]

Why it matters. Samson will be the studio's only game. [30] Sundberg had set Liquid Swords up to make games without crunch, the long overtime common in the industry. [30]

World of Warcraft's latest update for its Midnight expansion, patch 12.1.5, came out on 13 October with bugs that stopped players finishing its biggest new feature, a long solo dungeon called a labyrinth. [31] Blizzard fixed the worst bugs on 16 October, but a labyrinth still cannot be saved halfway. [31] Meanwhile WoW: Forever, a new version built on the game's early years, is breaking beta records, Blizzard developers say. [31] It launches on 4 November. [31]

Why it matters. Blizzard apologised for a similarly buggy patch in April and promised to do better. [31] At BlizzCon it put almost all its attention on Forever, not on the current game. [31]

Penguin Colony, a new game from the studio Origame Digital that mixes penguins with the horror story At the Mountains of Madness, cannot be bought on Steam in Israel. [32] Its publisher told a player on the game's Steam forum that the developer asked for the block "to demonstrate solidarity with Palestine". [32] The publisher said developers have "the right to control where their games are sold". [32] The makers of Big Walk recently kept their game off Xbox for the same boycott campaign. [32]

Why it matters. Store tools let a developer pick the countries where a game is sold, so a political choice can be applied one country at a time. [32]

A fan-made mod lets players run Tekken 6, Bandai Namco's fighting game, on Windows PCs and play online with rollback, a method that predicts moves to hide lag. [33] It passed 10,000 players by 17 October, and players must supply their own copy of the game. [33] Top Japanese player Dogura called it a "pirated version" that "crosses the line". [33] Many Western players reply that there is no legal way left to buy the game. [33]

Why it matters. Some Japanese players argue that money spent this way stops reaching Tekken 8, the official game. [33] Bandai Namco has not acted against the mod so far. [33]

Demon's Souls, Sony's 2020 remake that has only ever been sold on the PS5, now runs on a PC through KytyPS5, an unofficial program that lets PS5 games run on a computer. [42] A YouTuber showed it reaching 120 frames a second at 1080p on an Nvidia RTX 5070 card, using frame generation, which adds extra in-between frames. [42] On the PS5 the game is locked to 60 frames a second. [42] The footage still shows stutter. [42]

Why it matters. The PS5 is still Sony's current console, and a fan tool already runs one of its exclusive games faster than the console does. [42]

Jun Maeda, who wrote the Japanese visual novels Kanon, Air and Clannad, has throat cancer, his publisher Visual Arts said on 19 October. [34] He has chosen palliative care, which eases pain instead of trying to cure, over chemotherapy, to keep his strength for his work. [34] He was writing the phone game Heaven Burns Red, which he has finished up to chapter six. [34] Visual Arts says he is in hospital and determined to keep creating. [34]

Why it matters. His games became anime series that brought Japanese visual novels, story games told in text and pictures, to many fans outside Japan. [34]

Eight games leave Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft's games subscription, on 31 October. [35] They include Double Fine's remastered Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle, two 1990s adventure games, and Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. [35][36] Double Fine, the studio behind Psychonauts, is independent again after leaving Xbox. [36] Subscribers can buy the leaving games at 20% off before they go. [35]

Why it matters. GameSpot links the Double Fine exits to the studio no longer being part of Xbox. [35] A subscription holds a game only while the deal behind it lasts. [35]

The Game Developers Choice Awards, prizes voted on by people who make games, will take entries from publishers and developers for the first time. [37] Any PC or console game released in 2026 can enter, free, until 1 November. [37] Until now an invite-only panel of over 500 industry people nominated the games. [37] Two new prizes, Best Game Launch and Best Gaming Tech, will be given on 2 March 2027 at GDC, a big annual meeting of game makers. [37]

Why it matters. A game that is not entered can no longer win, so small studios now have to put themselves forward. [37]

Splitscreen, a new games industry conference, will run from 20 to 22 April 2027 at a seafront hotel in Split, on Croatia's coast. [38] It aims to fill the gap left by Reboot Develop, a popular conference whose organiser was served a bankruptcy order this year. [38] Its first speakers include Ilari Kuittinen, a co-founder of the studio Housemarque. [38] Its director Hrvoje Mitic says Croatia's game makers have doubled their yearly revenue since 2019. [38]

Why it matters. Meetings like this are where small studios find publishers and partners. [38] Mitic says Croatia's studios have also had layoffs and closures. [38]

Housemarque released a free Zenith update on 19 October for Saros, its PS5 shooter where players dodge waves of bullets. [39][40] It adds a setting that slows the whole game down, instead of cutting the number of bullets. [39] There are also 10 new modifiers that make runs easier, others that make them harder, a boss-rush mode and a New Game Plus. [39] Saros came out in April and sold slowly at first, Eurogamer says. [39]

Why it matters. Housemarque said it did not want fewer bullets on screen, so it gave players more time to react instead. [39]

Faraway, a one-button space game by developer Steph Thirion, first announced in 2010, will come out on 5 November on PC, PS5, Xbox and Switch. [41] Players guide a shooting star and use the pull of other stars to slingshot across a universe built as they play. [41] It is published by Annapurna Interactive, known for games with a strong artistic style. [41]

Why it matters. Annapurna, which also published last month's Silent Hill: Townfall, now puts its name behind a game one developer has worked on for more than a decade. [41]

CD Projekt Red is rolling out patch 5.01 for The Witcher 3 Remastered on the Nintendo Switch 2, after players said the game looked blurry in handheld mode. [43] It changes the sharpening and resolution to make the picture clearer. [43] It also turns down the brightness that players have complained about since the remaster came out in late September. [43] Other fixes stop player-controlled boats moving on their own. [43]

Why it matters. The same brightness change had already reached the game on other consoles, Eurogamer notes. [43]