Gaming, in brief

Marvel's Wolverine, Sony's new game for the PS5 only, was the best-selling game in the US in September. [1][2]

That is by the count of Circana, a research firm that tracks US game sales from shops and downloads. [2]

It made more money in its launch month than any game Sony has published since Helldivers 2, a shooter from February 2024. [3][2]

Helldivers 2 cost $40 and also came out on PC. Wolverine costs $70, so it needed fewer copies to reach the same money. [2]

Ampere Analysis, another research firm, estimates Wolverine sold about 2.35 million copies in September. Sony has given no figure. [4]

PS5 consoles sold 22% more units than in September 2025, and the money spent on them rose 43%. [1][5]

Bloomberg puts part of that gap down to price rises over the past year, and to the $900 PS5 Pro, which has sold out or is scarce in many online shops. [5]

Bloomberg says buyers are getting ready for Grand Theft Auto 6, which comes out on 19 November. [5][6]

Sony is also selling refurbished PS5s from $499 ahead of the launch, The Verge notes. [7]

Xbox Series consoles sold 27% fewer units, the lowest September Circana has recorded, beating the record low set a year before. [6][2]

Yet the money spent on Xbox consoles fell only 2%. Switch 2 units fell 14%, and the money spent on them 12%. [1]

An all-digital PS5 now sells for $600, and the comparable Xbox Series X starts at $750, Kotaku notes. [3]

Americans spent $4.8 billion on games, consoles and accessories, 1% less than a year before. The year so far is 3% behind 2025, at $41.0 billion. [3][1]

Spending on mobile games fell 14%, while spending on PC games rose 27%. [1]

NBA 2K27, the yearly basketball game, came second and passed Resident Evil Requiem as the best-selling US game of 2026 so far. [8][1]

Why it matters. The next test is Circana's October report, which covers Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's launch month, and then November's, when Grand Theft Auto 6 comes out on 19 November. [2][6]

Staff at five more EA studios say they lost their jobs in the cuts that closed BioWare on 21 October. [10] They include Maxis, maker of The Sims, Ripple Effect, which helps make Battlefield, and Full Circle, maker of Skate. [10][18] Staff at Motive, which is making an Iron Man game, and Respawn, maker of Apex Legends, are affected too. [10] EA said about 400 jobs would go, but named only BioWare's 50 and a smaller Skate team. [10]

Why it matters. The names come from staff posts on LinkedIn, gathered by the news site Vertical Slice, so the full list is still unknown. [18][19] Variety's sources say Respawn and DICE, the Battlefield studio, are making a new Star Wars Battlefront, which EA has not named. [20]

Gears of War: E-Day, Xbox's big new shooter, cost more than $500 million to make before marketing, a source told Kotaku. [15] The Game Business, a trade newsletter, reported the same figure. [21] A Windows Central reporter says the figure is not wrong, but cannot say whether it also covers running the studio. [21] Alinea Analytics, a research firm, estimated 230,000 copies and $37 million in the first week. [15]

Why it matters. At $70 a copy, $500 million is more than seven million full-price sales, and nearly 2 million people first played it, many through Game Pass, Xbox's subscription. [15][21] Kotaku's source says it was unlikely to earn back its cost on any platform. [15]

A security researcher, Sammy Hajhamid, has broken through the Nintendo Switch 2's protections in software, 16 months after it went on sale. [12][22] He says OpenAI's Codex, an AI coding tool, helped him find the flaws over about two weeks. [12] The way in is SmileBASIC 4, an old Switch app for writing simple programs, and the hack resets every time the console is switched off. [23][24] Ars Technica reports the app has already been taken off the Switch store worldwide. [12]

Why it matters. It lets people run homemade software and change games, but not take full control of the console, Ars Technica says. [12] Kotaku expects copied games to be the main use, though the steps are still far too hard for most owners. [22][23]

Square Enix stopped players logging in to Final Fantasy 14, its online role-playing game, on 21 October while it fixed a flaw in PHP. [13][25] PHP is a programming language that runs many websites and game servers, and the flaw lets a stranger run their own code on them. [26] Logins were back on by 22 October, after about 18 hours, though save backups stayed off. [13][25] Umamusume: Pretty Derby, a Japanese horse-racing game, went fully offline and later gave every player free in-game currency. [25]

Why it matters. Security agencies in the US and UK advised sites built on PHP to go offline until fixed. [26] Cloudflare's boss says attempts to use the flaw rose from thousands to millions once it went public. [26] Path of Titans, a dinosaur game still in testing, was taken down for up to three days. [25]

World Quest, a travel game first released in 2011 on GREE, a Japanese phone-game service, has closed for good because of the PHP flaw. [14] Its makers say its ageing systems cannot be made safe. [14] The game had shut in 2019 and came back unchanged in 2020, so people could visit places virtually while borders were closed for Covid. [14] Save My Demonic World, a text role-playing game with no updates for two years, closed for the same reason. [14]

Why it matters. Neither game could be updated to fix the flaw, so their players lost them in a day. [14] Kotaku warns that other old online services nobody maintains face the same choice. [14]

A trailer for the cancelled Mass Effect game, titled Mass Effect: Universe, appeared on Reddit on 22 October, a day after EA closed BioWare. [27][28] Bloomberg's Jason Schreier and IGN both confirmed it is real. [27] It shows a new hero working with Liara T'Soni, a character from the first three games. [29] Kotaku says it may have been meant for 7 November, the fan day BioWare marked every year. [29]

Why it matters. Tony de Waal, a BioWare cinematics lead, says the game aimed for more player choice than any other, after seeing what the makers of Baldur's Gate 3 and The Witcher had done. [30] Writer Catherynne M. Valente, who spent three years on it, says the team was making good progress. [31]

Avi Lewis, leader of Canada's New Democratic Party, said BioWare's developers should get government help to buy the studio and run it themselves. [32] BioWare was based in Edmonton, Canada. [32] Lewis blamed private equity, investment firms that buy whole companies, and said they 'rip them apart for short-term profit'. [32] His party has traditionally been Canada's third-largest. [32]

Why it matters. Warren Spector, a veteran game designer, wrote that anyone who took part in the closure should be ashamed. [33] James Ohlen, who spent 22 years at BioWare, asked studios that are hiring to start with its people. [34]

Caitlin Sullivan Kelly, lead writer of Star Wars: The Old Republic, called it heartbreaking that BioWare's farewell post left the game out. [35][36] BioWare launched the online role-playing game in 2011, and it is still running. [35] EA moved it to another studio, Broadsword, in 2023, so the closure does not touch it. [35][36] The post named Baldur's Gate, Dragon Age and Mass Effect, and even Anthem, the online shooter that failed badly. [36]

Why it matters. Kelly says the game paid for the studio's other projects for years with its income and its staff. [35] Broadsword also runs Ultima Online, another long-running online game. [35]

Archetype Entertainment, a studio started by former BioWare developers including James Ohlen, showed a new face for the male hero of Exodus, its science-fiction role-playing game. [37] General manager Chad Robertson said the change came from players' feedback over recent months. [37] Exodus comes out on 7 April 2027 on PS5, Xbox and PC. [37]

Why it matters. GameSpot calls Exodus a game in the spirit of Mass Effect, and it came out with the new look the day after EA cancelled the next Mass Effect. [37]

Gamepires, maker of the survival game Scum, said last week it was cutting staff, eight months after Splash Damage, the studio behind Gears Tactics, bought it. [11] Splash Damage made its own layoffs three months before that purchase. [11] Those came two months after investment firms bought Splash Damage. [11] Splash Damage told PC Gamer on 22 October that work on Scum goes on, but not how many people lost jobs. [11]

Why it matters. When it bought Gamepires, Splash Damage said the deal gave its group of just under 150 people meaningful work and protected jobs. [11] It has not released a game since Gears Tactics in 2020. [11]

Sony has stopped selling its last 4K Blu-ray disc player in Japan, the UBP-X700, with sales ending on 22 October. [38] Sony Japan's website lists it as out of stock and not coming back. [38] In Japan, the PS5 is now the only new Sony machine that plays these discs. [38] Panasonic is the last big electronics company still making such players. [38]

Why it matters. Sony has already said it will stop making PlayStation game discs in 2028. [38] About 35% of Wolverine's PS5 copies were sold on disc, Ampere Analysis estimates. [4]

The cheapest Nvidia RTX 5050 graphics card PC Gamer could find costs $400, against a list price of $249. [9] The RTX 5060 Ti with 16GB of memory costs $789, against about $429, the same as the faster RTX 5070. [9] A graphics card is the part of a PC that draws a game's pictures. PC Gamer blames the shortage of memory chips. [9]

Why it matters. The site's own tracking shows prices rising again. [9] The only card it found close to list was AMD's RX 9070 GRE, at $570, $20 over. [9]

Cassia Curran, who advises game makers on prices for Steam, Valve's PC store, told The Game Business she wished Hollow Knight: Silksong had cost more. [17] Team Cherry sold the hit for $20, only $5 more than the first Hollow Knight in 2017. [17] Curran says $24.99 would have helped many studios with similar games. [17] She has studios compare their price with their most successful rivals'. [17]

Why it matters. So when a hit is cheap, similar games find it hard to charge more. [17] Kotaku notes Scott Pilgrim EX struggled at $30, while Mina the Hollower did better at $20. [17]

Roblox, a platform of games made by its users, was played for 4.05 billion hours on PC and console in the first half of 2026, more than any other game. [39] A report by two research firms, Newzoo and GEEIQ, finds 80% of its players over 16 spent money on games in six months, against 59% of other players. [39] About 30% of those who leave Roblox prefer realistic shooters such as Call of Duty. [39]

Why it matters. Roblox is adding age checks, which left its spending per child under 13 lower than expected in its second quarter, the report says. [39] GEEIQ counted only 15 promotions by game companies on Roblox since 2021. [39]

Epic Games, maker of Fortnite and the Unreal Engine game-making tools, announced the AI MegaJam, a contest to make a game from 12 to 15 November. [40] Entrants are 'highly encouraged' to use AI tools, PC Gamer reports. [40] Winners in three categories get $7,500 each, and teams can win grants of up to $50,000 to keep going. [40] Some people will work at an event space in San Francisco. [40]

Why it matters. Epic's boss, Tim Sweeney, says the company is moving developers around 'to retool for maximum AI acceleration'. [40] One critic replied that the Ludum Dare game jam lasted just 24 hours back in 2002. [40]

Dispatch, a comedy game about managing a team of superheroes, has been played by more than 5 million people a year after its first episode came out. [41] AdHoc Studio, started by four former Telltale developers, says one publisher funded it partway and then dropped it. [41] It comes to phones on 9 December, with the first four episodes free and the rest for $20. [42][43]

Why it matters. Its boss, Michael Choung, says Steam kept it on its front page through all its weekly episodes, which brought hundreds of millions of views. [41] A concert of its music is planned in Los Angeles on 3 December. [41]

Pantaloon, a small games publisher, has launched the Playbill, a subscription with 14 games from other studios plus its own. [44] The full tier costs $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year. [44] Pantaloon buys a fixed number of each game's keys, and a game leaves once subscribers outnumber its keys. [44] Its newsletter, which feeds the service, has 50,000 readers. [44]

Why it matters. Co-founder Jamin Smith says nobody has made a subscription work for small games yet. [44] His first goal is for 5% of newsletter readers to pay. [44]

Matthew Karch, chief executive of Saber Interactive, says Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival has done 'extremely well' since it came out on 8 October. [16] His post, as IGN reports it, gives no sales figure. [16] Karch argues that mid-sized games built on known names, with controlled costs, carry less risk than huge-budget ones. [16] Barker, who created Hellraiser, said he was 'genuinely astonished' by how far the game went. [45]

Why it matters. Karch says more Saber games built the same way come in a few weeks. [16] His case lands the same week Gears of War: E-Day's budget was reported at over $500 million. [15]

Owlchemy Labs, a Google-owned studio known for virtual reality games, is releasing Hyper Visor for $1.99 on the Google Play store. [46] It is a launch game for XREAL Aura, high-tech sunglasses that plug into an Android phone. [46] Players use their hands to clear eight short levels, each in the style of a different kind of game. [46]

Why it matters. Its boss, Andrew Eiche, says headsets fail what he calls the cafe test: people will not wear them in public. [46] He says the XREAL Aura is starting to pass it, because wearers do not 'look like a bug'. [46]

Atari will close the online store for its VCS console on 1 February 2027. [47] The VCS is a small computer loosely styled after the original Atari 2600, and plays classic Atari games and streaming apps. [47] Games already downloaded will keep working. [47] Atari plans an update so the console no longer needs its servers to sign in or run software. [47]

Why it matters. The console reached buyers after a crowdfunding campaign and years of delays. [47] Atari also plans a homebrew app so fans can keep adding games. [47]

Mike Morasky, a long-time Valve composer, named a project called 'HLX' on a sound panel at GameSoundCon in Burbank, California, on 21 October. [48][49] Fans believe HLX is the working name of a new Half-Life game, first spotted in Valve's files in early 2024. [50] Valve has never announced it. [48] The developer beside him was heard saying 'Nice work'. [51]

Why it matters. Valve, which runs the Steam store, last released a Half-Life game in 2020, the virtual reality game Half-Life: Alyx. [48] GameSpot notes fans get excited every year and nothing has been announced. [51]

Embark Studios ended a one-week test in its shooter Arc Raiders in which players could pick matches without fighting each other. [52] Players ran more than 30 million of these rounds, Embark says. [52] Players online at once rose from 50,000 to 185,000 around the test and a big update, by PC Gamer's count. [52] Embark is surveying players and expects to say more in November. [52]

Why it matters. Embark says the test split its players, and that the game's overall health will decide whether the mode returns. [52]

Freeplay, which runs Parallels, an independent games showcase in Melbourne, has rejected claims of prejudice over a sponsor it dropped. [53] On 8 October, the day of the event, it refunded and removed Wren Brier of Witch Beam, maker of the game Unpacking. [53] Brier, who is Jewish, says a speaker had called her a 'zionist'. [53] Two board members have resigned, a games news site reports, and ACMI, the state body that runs Melbourne's games week, paused its support. [53]

Why it matters. Brier says nobody checked the claim before she was dropped. [53] Freeplay says it decided under time pressure because the event was at risk, and that its board has received violent threats. [53]

Debra Wilson, an actor in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and God of War Ragnarok, told GameSpot she is tired of developers giving her characters her face. [54] She plays Callisto in Marvel's Wolverine, and says she refused when its makers wanted to scan her tattoos too. [54] Some players now joke that she is in every game. [54]

Why it matters. Wilson says she would rather play characters who do not look like her, so players are not pulled out of the game. [54]

Bryant Francis, an editor at GameDeveloper.com, wrote that saying Star Wars: Galactic Racer was 'made by a core team of 75' hides most of the people who built it. [55] About 1,100 people appear in the racing game's credits. [55] The phrase came from a GamesIndustry.biz post about Fuse Games, the studio that led the game with partner companies. [55]

Why it matters. Francis notes that investors often back the small core team, while staff at partner studios are sometimes barred from saying they worked on a game. [55] GamesIndustry.biz's features editor says the industry has no settled words yet for this way of working. [55]

A retired painter and decorator in Woking, in the UK, sold a Pokemon card collection he had forgotten in his loft for 1.56 million pounds, about $2.09 million. [56] He began collecting in the late 1990s, when his son swapped the cards at school. [56] He went looking after reading that one card had sold for over 6,000 pounds. [56] A full Skyridge set he bought for 300 pounds fetched 97,500. [56]

Why it matters. Ewbank's, the auction house, called it its most successful sale in 30 years. [56]