When Diamond announced it would cease shipments during the Covid-19 pandemic in March of 2020, DC took it as an opportunity to jump ship, switching to Lunar Distribution and UCS Comic Distributors for its monthly releases and Penguin Random House for book-sized releases. One by one other publishers followed, including Marvel, until Diamond declared bankruptcy in January of 2025.

Udon was one of the last publishers to remain with Diamond (alongside Dynamite, which would rather like to retrieve half a million dollars it claims Diamond owes), but now Udon has declared it's found an alternative as well. Udon has halted all shipments to Diamond in favor of Lunar Distribution, with its Manga Classics imprint now being distributed by Simon & Schuster.

"With the current state of uncertainty and lack of communication from the new owners to both retailers as well as many publishers, we have to do what is best to serve our customers," Udon chief of operations Erik Ko said. "We realize this is a deep inconvenience for many retailers, but we're trying to do our best to serve our partners and fans, while minimizing risk and moving forward in an uncertain time."

This has affected the first issue of Udon's new series Mega Man Timelines, which has been pushed back a month to a June 25 release. Udon's future comics, manga, and art books will be distributed though Lunar, which presumably includes any more of the Capcom-licensed books it's famous for—like Street Fighter, Darkstalkers, and Final Fight—as well as its books based on games like Elden Ring and Persona.

All videogames use the environment to guide players through them—though, Tost admits, it wasn't always that way. In fact, CDPR simply stumbled into a lot of solid industry practices when making The Witcher 3.

"Level design may not have been as sophisticated as it is now. And I think the same is true for most disciplines in the industry," Tost explains. "In The Witcher 3, we didn't do too much of that, actually. The level design team was still being built, [it] was really fresh, and in some ways it took us the entirety of production to get to a point where we would do (what I would nowadays consider) more traditional level design.

"As such, we didn't emphasise guidance as strongly—we did at some point add these white decals for 'hey, climb here', but I think when it comes to overall guidance in the world, it was a relatively small element, right?"

Instead, Tost says that the design teams simply followed their noses and wound up on a lot of decisions that would later become industry practice. "We did a lot of things—and maybe it's luck—but intuitively correct … Nowadays, we're much more sophisticated with that, I think."

A good example of CDPR finally nailing down the specifics, Tost argues, is Phantom Liberty: "I think there we have all the bells and whistles of what level designers here do. We use compositional line work in our levels, to make things look particularly impressive, but also to guide the eye to certain elements … In the Witcher 3, we would use a lot of composition, but it was mostly to get the most impressive image, without the real purpose [behind it]."

When it comes to something as straightforwardly obvious as yellow paint, though, Tost says that " We've always thought about our games as being still quite accessible to a wider audience, so we're not afraid of adding elements that'll also guide players more directly, whether it's NPCs shouting out and saying 'look at this thing', or the Witcher sense in the Witcher 3."

However, "In the best of cases, [the player] doesn't understand or feel like they're being guided in any way." When it comes to what Tost jokes as "being in a 'yellow room'," he reckons they're "one of the many tools that developers can use. But they're one of the tools they can use, right?

"I believe that if you properly weaponise the entire arsenal of your toolkit of guidance as a level designer, then you can subdue each individual element and make it more subtle. And in that case, you get closer to the situation of the player not noticing the guidance. The strings carefully pulling them along. That is, for me, the sweet spot.

"I think the problem is not necessarily with the yellow paint, but it's so known and used right now that people see through the smoke and mirrors there. That 'oh, I am being guided'. But there's more subtle ways of doing it."

It's a little funny to hear an argument that basically boils down to 'you need to trick your kids into eating their veggies', but it is right. Assassin's Creed Shadows, which has plenty of colour-coded climables, tried to go without. But because Ubisoft had to put in all the foliage and pretty bells and whistles that players expected, they simply kept running into walls or missing climbable routes entirely.

So, a little direction is vital. Tost still thinks it ought to be subtle. Or at least diegetic—I'm not sure I'd consider The Witcher 3's Arkham-style detective vision to not have any sort of influence on the artstyle. A great example, Tost mentions, is Uncharted and its occasional uses of flags waving in the wind:

"It fits gently into the environment, as opposed to, I dunno—someone went into this specific spot and painted a yellow line, because at that point it's not necessarily believable."

Former chief legal officer Riley Graebner, who joined Build a Rocket Boy in 2022 and also served as chief operating officer until April 2024, announced his departure from the studio in a message posted to LinkedIn.

"After three and a half years my time at BARB has come to a close," Graebner wrote. "I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished. During that time we more than doubled the size of the company to over 450 employees. We launched multiple products worldwide. We built the legal team and legal ops infrastructure from the ground up, working to systemize and automate.

"I’m beyond excited for what’s next—but currently operating in stealth mode for a while longer. Stay tuned."

CFO Paul Bland didn't make any sort of public declaration about leaving BARB, but updated his LinkedIn profile to indicate that he'd parted ways with the company in June. Somewhat oddly, he seems to have subsequently changed his LinkedIn page: The Paul Bland page on the site (which I successfully visited earlier today) is gone, but the account itself remains available, at a different URL, under the name Paul B. I have no idea what to make of that, but it's weird.

The whole thing is weird, really. Executives come and go, it's true, but losing two C-suiters, effectively at the same time, and literally a week before the launch of the big thing you've been working on for years—well, it's not a very good look, is it?

There's no indication that anything untoward is going on behind the scenes, but even so their departures have caused an understandable ripple amongst some of the MindsEye community. As one person put it in the MindsEye Discord, "Two major players inside the company just resigned. That's concerning!" I'm inclined to agree.

Similar sentiments can be seen on the MindsEye subreddit, where people are already somewhat less than enthusiastic about the game due primarily to a relative dearth of information about it. Back when the metaverse was still a thing, MindsEye was billed as an experience taking place within the Everywhere platform, which has been kicking around—equally ill-explained—since 2016. But I know even less about Everywhere than I do about MindsEye at this point, and it seems to have fallen off the radar: The Everywhere website, for instance, now redirects to a MindsEye site—which is just a trailer and purchase links.

"They’ve done such an incredibly poor job explaining this game I still have no clue what it even is," redditor Greatnes wrote. "It’s just buzzwords and features with nothing linking them or explaining them. I’ve never had this issue with a game before with not even knowing what it is. Game is out in 13 days and they don’t seem interested in actually showing it off beyond carefully scripted gameplay trailers that don’t explain anything."

(MindsEye is, for the record, "a narrative driven, single-player action-adventure thriller" with an estimated 15-hour campaign—it looks a bit like GTA, but don't expect anything on that scale.)

The departures of Build a Rocket Boy's CFO and CLO come less than a week after the company's co-CEO Mark Gerhard caused a stir by claiming publicly that the negative reactions to MindsEye were part of a "concerted effort to trash the game and the studio" ahead of its release, being financed by an unnamed entity. That was not great either, and also very weird.

MindsEye is set to launch on June 10. I've reached out to Build a Rocket Boy for comment and will update if I receive a reply.

The layoffs were first reported last week by former Hi-Rez designer ThorDG, whose message on X was quickly shared to the Smite subreddit, where Smite executive producer Alex Cantatore weighed in to confirm "a handful of layoffs in senior management positions" last week.

"Stew [Hi-Rez president Stewart Chisam] is transitioning away from Hi-Rez as part of this," Cantatore wrote. "Travis [executive producer Travis Brown] and Radar [lead producer Tony Jones] were also affected, as well as two folks in senior management on the Rally Here side of the business. I am very sad to be losing all of them.

"Essentially, the board's rationale was that the company had a lot of senior management in relation to our current size. This does not affect our core mission, or any other people working directly on Smite 2. We will continue to focus our efforts on improving the core game and new player experience, while adding more Gods at our current one-per-two-weeks pace."

In a separate post on LinkedIn, Chisam confirmed that he's leaving Hi-Rez, writing that his departure "has been discussed for a long time [with Hi-Rez CEO Erez Goren], but the timing was finally right."

"The last few years have been difficult for Hi-Rez, and for the industry," Chisam wrote. "Certainly not everything has worked out as we hoped, but I think we also have left a unique footprint on the industry—and tried to carve out a space as a mid-size cross-platform games-as-a-service pioneer, relentlessly fighting against giants. The team that remains is absolutely incredible and I know they will enjoy success. The effort and passion they have for the players and for the Smite IP is unmatched."

Jones also confirmed on LinkedIn that he's leaving Hi-Rez "as part of some recent restructuring."

The past couple years, as Chisam said, have not been very good to Hi-Rez. The studio announced Smite 2 in January 2024 with a promise to support both the original game and the sequel, but the wheels came off that plan before the end of the year: In October 2024, Hi-Rez laid off an unspecified number of employees and closed two other games in order to "concentrate our efforts entirely on Smite 2, outside of small teams supporting light updates for Paladins and Smite 1." Earlier this year, Hi-Rez confirmed the end of development of major updates for Smite 1, Paladins, and Rogue Company.

The layoffs first came to light on the RuneScape subreddit, where users noticed that a number of moderators had seemingly disappeared. RuneScape Mod Hooli commented on the thread to say that there had indeed been a restructuring at Jagex, which included job cuts.

Hooli said the majority of the layoffs were "from non-game dev and non-player facing areas," and that the studio's plans for RuneScape remained unchanged: "Our Roadmap won't change because of these job reductions, and we'll continue the great path we’ve been on with our content."

Jagex confirmed the layoffs in a statement provided to PC Gamer.

"As part of our strategy to build the best experiences for players and grow the RuneScape community, we have proposed changes to our operational structure," a Jagex spokesperson said. "These adjustments are designed to reduce complexity, increase agility, and ensure we are fully focused on the areas that matter most—our games, our players, and our future.

"The vast majority of proposed role reductions are within non-game development and non-player-facing functions, such as operations and administrative support. Our intention is to protect and strengthen the teams directly responsible for delivering value to players. We recognize that any change of this nature is difficult, and we are committed to supporting all impacted employees throughout the transition."

Jagex declined to say how many people will be put out of work as a result of the cuts, but noted that the majority of the cuts will not impact "frontline development or player-facing teams."

The game industry has been plagued by layoffs over the past few years, and despite hopes that 2025 might be the year we all finally say enough, that has so far not been the case. Last week alone saw layoffs at Playtonic, People Can Fly, and Electronic Arts, which closed Cliffhanger Games outright after cancelling the Black Panther game it had in development; previous cuts have also been made at Ubisoft, Cyan Worlds, Mighty Yell, Eidos Montreal, and engine maker Unity.

Hosted by Mica Burton, Sean "Day[9]" Plott and Frankie Ward, the showcase will feature a frankly ludicrous number of games: over 70, and all from studios like 11 Bit, CCP, People Can Fly, Ghost Ship, Ubisoft, and plenty more besides. We've also somehow managed to secure the insurance necessary to build a state-of-the-art PC during the show, which literally cannot go wrong. Once it's built and we've cleaned the scorch marks off the walls, we'll be giving it away to one lucky viewer of the show. Could it be you!? It could. If you watch. I believe those are the terms and conditions.

The games we'll be showing are, if I may say so, wall-to-wall bangers. We've got mushroom-themed FPS Mycopunk, a new puzzle game from the OG Zachtronics team, a new reveal from Poncle that—I didn't know this was allowed—isn't related to Vampire Survivors, and something called Pigface, which you should check out just on principle.

How to watch the PC Gaming Show 2025

How and when do you tune in, then? Great question. The PC Gaming Show will air Sunday, June 8, 2025 at 12 noon PDT, 3 pm EDT, 8 pm BST, 9 pm CEST and 3 am CST.

If you're in China, then 你好, and the show will hit on June 9 at 3 am.

The show will air on pretty much every platform upon which you could conceivably lay eyes. We'll be streaming on Twitch, YouTube, X, Facebook, PC Gamer, GamesRadar+, GOG.com, Steam, Bilibili, and even more besides. We'll have localised subtitles in English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, French, Korean, German, ASL and BSL.

And if you fancy partying up for this one, we'll be co-streaming with MissMikkaa, CohhCarnage, DieHardDiva, GRONKH, Forsen and SodaPoppin. It's a feast, a veritable feast of PC gaming. Can you afford not to tune in? Absolutely not.

If you want to keep up with more updates about PCG and the PC Gaming Show—and who could blame you?—then you can find us at pcgamingshow.com, Bluesky, X and Instagram.

Which brings us to the good news. Microsoft has announced that, across the European Economic Area, Windows users will now have the option to uninstall the Microsoft Store. Should you choose to uninstall the Microsoft Store, any apps installed from it will remain and continue to be updated.

That's not all: users will also no longer get those constant irritating prompts asking them to make Microsoft Edge their default browser (it'll still do this if you open Edge, but by then you've made your choice). A knock-on effect is that other Windows functionality, like the Widgets Board and Lock Screen, will now play nicely with your default browser and open that rather than trying to sneak in Edge.

The various changes to Windows 10 and 11 within the EEA are outlined in full here. Let's breathe in that European air, because it smells good: "When Microsoft Edge is uninstalled, other Microsoft apps won’t prompt you to reinstall it in the EEA (excluding PWAs distributed in the Microsoft Store using Microsoft Edge technology)."

Jolly good show, wouldn't you say? These improvements to the user experience come after many more DMA-related concessions from Microsoft, including allowing users to uninstall Edge entirely and remove Bing results from Windows search. Microsoft even has to run its own DMA compliance website, where you can read all about the things it's done to promote "contestability and fairness in the digital sector."

"Zynga has made the difficult decision to cease operations at its Echtra studio, ending development on future titles and reducing roles," the company told the site. "This decision is part of a strategic realignment of the company's resources and priorities. We will work closely with impacted employees so they are treated with the utmost respect and consideration as we navigate this difficult process."

Echtra was founded in 2016 by Max Schaefer, one of the co-founders of original Torchlight developer Runic Games and also a co-founder of Diablo studio Blizzard North. The studio's initial focus was on Torchlight Frontiers, envisioned as an MMO, but in 2020, after "feedback [from testers], discussing with our internal teams, and receiving guidance from our publisher," Echtra announced a shift to a more conventional standalone game design, and a new title, Torchlight 3.

Unfortunately, Torchlight 3 lacked the magic of the previous games in the series. While the original Torchlight was an outstanding lightweight action-RPG in 2009 (I played it a lot), Torchlight 3 was "mechanically sound," we said in our 60% review, but "bland compared to the other options" available in 2020. Its free-to-play roots were also a little too visible in places, with systems "you'd expect to find in a predatory mobile game."

Less than six months after Torchlight 3's release, Zynga acquired Echtra, a move CEO Frank Gibeau said would help the mobile-focused company become more of a force in PC and console gaming. Echtra's first game under the Zynga banner was meant to be a cross-platform RPG developed in partnership with Zynga's NaturalMotion studio, but the project never made it past that initial announcement.

Notably, the end of Echtra comes less than three months after Zynga, a division of Take-Two Interactive, announced the looming shutdown of NaturalMotion's Star Wars: Hunters game, a move that also saw the cancellation of its planned release on Steam.

Take-Two laid off roughly 5% of its workforce in April 2024, and in November sold off its indie-style Private Division publishing division and most of its associated games. Take-Two's share price also took a bit of a tumble (but don't worry, it bounced back quite nicely) when the company announced the delay of Grand Theft Auto 6 from a planned release in fall 2025 to May 26, 2026—on consoles. A PC version still hasn't been confirmed.

In hearings scheduled to last five days, Hascoët, François, and Guillaume will be tried based on the accusations of six women, three men, and two trade unions. The former executives deny all of the allegations.

Earlier reporting from Franceinfo says that the testimonies allege that François insulted and commented on the appearance of female employees, and repeatedly showed pornography in open-plan Ubisoft offices. François is also being tried for charges of attempted sexual assault after being accused of trying to forcibly kiss a restrained Ubisoft employee at a Christmas party.

Hascoët is accused of workplace sexual misconduct, as well as racist and Islamophobic behavior. A Muslim employee alleges that, following the November 2015 terror attacks in Paris, she was asked whether she "was planning to join ISIS," and later found that her computer wallpaper had been changed to images of bacon sandwiches during Ramadan.

Patrux is accused of sexual harassment and workplace intimidation (via The Guardian), which allegedly entailed throwing equipment through offices and at employees, punching office walls, drawing swastikas in a woman's notebook in a meeting, and lighting a man's beard on fire.

Testimonies, including those gathered by an internal Ubisoft audit in 2020, also mention Black employees being subjected to racial slurs, women being told that their outfits were "invitations to rape," and junior male staff members being targeted in games of chase where they were sexually assaulted if caught.

Ubisoft's internal audit describes an "institutionalized schoolboy environment" and habitual public humiliation, where there was effectively "no HR policy until 2020." An interviewed Ubisoft manager said that executives operated with impunity, alleging that on one occasion Hascoët and François "simulated spanking while shouting 'harassment'" in front of Ubisoft's HR offices.

The three executives deny any wrongdoing. François and Patrux were both dismissed by Ubisoft following the 2020 reports; Hascoët had resigned from the company after the allegations emerged. In 2023, Hascoët and François were among five former Ubisoft employees arrested as part of a Paris Judicial Police investigation.

In 2022, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot rejected criticisms that the publisher had only pursued nominal reforms in the wake of the 2020 harassment allegations against its senior staff. "We have done a lot and I think we are a company that can be proud of itself," Guillemot said, noting that Ubisoft had "acted quickly in cutting some people's jobs" while other senior employees had been "appropriately disciplined and given an individualised action plan."

Ubisoft employee groups and affiliated trade unions have maintained that the publisher's efforts to correct its company culture have been "carefully limited."

Through its lawyer, the French videogame workers union STJV—one of two trade unions filing a civil suit against the former Ubisoft executives—says this week's trial is too limited in scope. At Ubisoft, "omerta has become a management method," the lawyer said. "This trial should also have been Ubisoft's."

You may recall Giant Skull as the studio founded in 2024 by Stig Asmussen, the director of Star Wars Jedi: games, who left Respawn in 2023 "to pursue other adventures." Well, a change is as good as a rest, I suppose, even if it's just a change of scenery.

In any event, Asmussen brought in veterans of other studios including Riot, Epic Games, and Rocksteady for his new thing, and now we've got... well, not much of a look at what's cooking, really, except that it's D&D.

"Our talented and experienced team at Giant Skull is built on creativity and curiosity," Asmussen said. "Our goal is to craft a rich new Dungeons and Dragons universe filled with immersive storytelling, heroic combat and exhilarating traversal that players will fully embrace."

Not a whole lot to go on there, and before anyone asks, no, I don't know what "exhilarating traversal" means. I do still get a bit of a tingle when I hear the words "you must gather your party before venturing forth," but that's probably not the same thing.

Wizards of the Coast president John Hight, who previously worked with Asmussen on the God of War series, was equally not-informative, saying that "worldbuilding and storytelling is in our DNA, and this collaboration reflects our evolution and commitment to our Playing to Win Strategy, building a stronger presence in digital play."

Carefully crafted corporate statements that expend a whole lot of words to say not much of anything always make me a little itchy, and following up on a monster success like Baldur's Gate 3 is no small task. That said, Asmussen has a pretty solid track record for this sort of thing: Prior to the Star Wars Jedi games, he served as game director on the acclaimed God of War 3. Even if Giant Skull's D&D game doesn't deliver a bigger and better experience than BG3 (and I don't think anyone reasonably assumes it will), I'm still hopeful it'll be quite good.

Giant Skull's D&D game is being developed for PC and consoles in Unreal Engine 5. More information will be revealed at some point in the future.

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is planning to unveil a "dedicated gaming app" that "will serve as a launcher for titles and centralize in-game achievements, leaderboards, communications and other activity."

That sounds a lot like Steam, only this app will feature games from the App Store and, of course, the Apple Arcade subscription service. However, Gurman also mentioned that the Mac version "can tap into games downloaded outside of the App Store," so maybe it will connect to your Steam or Epic Games library somehow.

Apple also recently purchased RAC7, the studio behind Sneaky Sasquatch, which might hint that they're planning to do some in-house game development.

The past few years have also seen a handful of prominent games get ported to Apple's platforms, like Assassin's Creed Mirage and Resident Evil 4, and Netflix Gaming has made some admirable progress bringing over indie games like Hades and Death's Door.

While all of that is a step in the right direction, most gamers are still opting for a Windows PC or a console to play anything beyond mobile games. A new game launcher for Apple devices will probably make it more convenient finding and managing games on your Mac or iPhone, but it doesn't address the underlying issue of game compatibility.

Unfortunately for Apple, right now gaming on Linux is a better experience than gaming on Mac, which is really saying something. One has to wonder why Apple doesn't take a page from Valve's book and develop a compatibility layer for macOS like Valve's Proton platform, which has brought hundreds of Windows games to Linux.

A compatibility layer would reduce the hassle for developers to bring their games to Apple devices, or at least to macOS, and create a path to quickly grow the player base on macOS.

Right now, Apple has to work against the Catch-22 of no players vs no game developers: game devs aren't creating games for Mac because gamers are overwhelmingly playing on Windows, and that won't change until there are more games on Mac.

Ironically, MacBooks have gotten a lot better for gaming since Apple launched its M-series chips. The issue is that there aren't very many games compatible with macOS to really take advantage of that hardware.

Some sort of Proton-like compatibility layer, which could be built into Apple's new launcher, seems like the perfect way to bridge that gap and show how good gaming on macOS can be, potentially leading more devs to offer native Mac support.

As Wojciechowski detailed in the announcement, "The suspension of the Gemini project is a consequence of the fact that the Publisher has not presented us with a draft of the subsequent content rider to the Publishing Agreement covering the terms and conditions of further milestones on project Gemini and the lack of communication from the Publisher as to its willingness to continue or terminate the Gemini project."

"Project Bifrost was suspended due to the above and the analysis of the Group's cash flow, which showed a lack of prospects for securing organizational resources and funds necessary to continue the production and release of this project."

That's a mouthful, but in layman's terms: Wojciechowski is seriously laying into Gemini's unnamed publisher, claiming that it just left People Can Fly on read for long enough that they have to cancel the project. The knock-on financial effect means the studio can't keep going with Bifrost either. To make matters worse, with both games indefinitely on hold, People Can Fly has to "scale down" its teams, meaning some of the studio's staff are losing their jobs.

Wojciechowski concluded his statement on a somber note, saying, "We wish to express our deepest regret and sadness over how these events have unfolded and our sincere gratitude for everyone's contribution up to this point."

The announcement does not mention exactly how many people will be laid off or if People Can Fly wants to leave the door open to return to projects Gemini and Bifrost⁠—but the prognosis isn't good. "Gemini" and "Bifrost" are the code names of games that haven't been officially revealed yet, but after this news, it looks like we might not ever find out what those games were supposed to be.

People Can Fly still has a ton of projects still in development, though. It's been announced that the studio will be co-developing the upcoming Gears of War prequel, E-Day, alongside The Coalition, and they are also working on the co-op survival shooter, Lost Rift. People Can Fly also appears to have three unannounced projects still in development: Bison, Echo, and Delta.

Lost Rift appears to still be on track for its early access release, with a May 27 Steam post announcing a demo for the game will be available next week as part of Steam Next Fest.

"We've all seen in recent years how the games industry has been changing, resulting in studio after studio finding themselves in situations where to continue to exist, they must make painful decisions—decisions that impact the lives of so many individual talented developers," Playtonic said in today's statement. "Like others, we've felt the knock-on effects and after exploring every possible avenue, we've had to make the incredibly heartbreaking decision to say goodbye to some truly brilliant members of the Playtonic team.

"This isn't simply a difficult moment, it's a period of profound change in how games are created and financed. The landscape is shifting, and with it, so must we."

Playtonic didn't say how many people have been put out of work. However, brand manager Anni Valkama listed 14 employees impacted by the cuts, across production, art, and design teams, in a message posted to LinkedIn.

Playtonic was founded in 2014 by former Rare employees, and released Yooka-Laylee, a spiritual successor to Banjo Kazooie, in 2017. Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair followed in 2019, and that's pretty much been it: A publishing division, Playtonic Friends, launched in early 2021, and Tencent invested in Playtonic late that same year. A new Yooka-Laylee game, Yooka-Replaylee, is currently slated for release this year, while the new game under the Playtonic Friends label, Cattle Country—developed by Castle Pixel—arrived earlier this week.

The layoffs at Playtonic continue a crisis in the game development industry that began with 2023 and continues unabated: Earlier this week, Electronic Arts cancelled the Black Panther game that's been in development since 2023 and closed Cliffhanger Games, the studio making it; less than a month prior to that it laid off a reported 300-400 employees while cancelling two "incubation projects" at Respawn. 2025 has also seen layoffs at Ubisoft, Cyan Worlds, Mighty Yell, Eidos Montreal, engine maker Unity, and others.

"QA workers from across the country continue to lead the charge for industry-wide change," senior QA tester and ZeniMax Workers United-CWA bargaining committee member Page Branson said in the announcement. "Going toe-to-toe with one of the largest corporations in the world isn’t a small feat. This is a monumental victory for all current videogame workers and for those that come after."

ZeniMax Workers United was formed in January 2023 and negotiations for a first contract began shortly thereafter, but made limited headway over the following two years. In April 2025, members voted to authorize union leadership to call for a strike if negotiations continued to drag on with no progress.

"If Microsoft and ZeniMax continue to demonstrate at the bargaining table that they're unwilling to pay us fair wages for the value our labor provides to our games, we'll be showing them just how valuable our labor is," ZeniMax Workers United-CWA Local 6215 member and senior QA tester Zachary Armstrong said at the time.

Microsoft, however, said "substantial progress" had been made over the course of the negotiations, adding that it had presented a "fair" proposal to the union that "if accepted it would result in immediate compensation increases, even more robust benefits and is in alignment to the company's hybrid model of three days in office."

This isn't the end of the process: "Contract explanation meetings" for the union's more than 300 members will take place over the next few weeks, and a ratification vote is expected to be concluded by June 20. Assuming the union votes in favor (and I think that's a pretty safe assumption), this will be the first game industry contract of its kind in the US, but it surely won't be the last.

The push for unionization at game studios in North America has picked up significant steam over the past year: 600 Activision QA employees voted to unionize in March 2024, while Bethesda Game Studios developers formed a "wall to wall" union including artists, designers, and programmers in July 2024, as did Blizzard's 500-person World of Warcraft team. Earlier this year nearly 200 Overwatch developers launched a union of their own, the Overwatch Gamemakers Guild. Game developers also launched the first industry-wide union in North America in March 2025, open to anyone in the North American game industry "irrespective of studio and current job status."

The cancellation of the Black Panther game was relayed to employees in an email sent by EA Entertainment and Technology president Laura Miele, according to the report. Miele said in the email that the decision to halt the project and shutter the studio was necessary to "sharpen our focus and put our creative energy behind the most significant growth opportunities."

That means Battlefield, The Sims, Skate, and Apex Legends, Miele said, although EA will also continue work on the Iron Man game announced in 2022, the new Star Wars: Jedi game in development, and the next Mass Effect game.

"These decisions are hard," Miele wrote in the email. "They affect people we’ve worked with, learned from, and shared real moments with. We’re doing everything we can to support them—including finding opportunities within EA, where we’ve had success helping people land in new roles."

The end of the Black Panther game and shutdown of Cliffhanger—which, again, was founded less than two years ago—comes less than a month after EA laid off between 300 and 400 employees and cancelled two "incubation projects." That happened just three months after the company made significant cuts to BioWare following the failure of Dragon Age: The Veilguard to meet sales projections.

I've pondered these Orbs myself and find them inoffensive, at least so far. At the outset, Orbs will primarily be a reward for completing "quests," Discord's existing advertising branch that gives away profile decorations in exchange for watching movie trailers or streaming a partnered game. The only Orbs quest I had access to in the Orbs beta involved watching a commercial for Orbs, a circular exercise that ended with 150 big ones (big Orbs, that is) burning a hole in my pocket.

I spent 70 Orbs on an Orbs badge. Then, well, I was too Orbs poor to afford anything else. The prices of "Orbs Exclusives" scaled up faster than I expected: An animated avatar border costs 3,500 Orbs, as does a misty Orbs profile background. More affordable is a 3-day credit for Discord Nitro for 1,400 Orbs.

That's right: You can buy Discord Nitro with Orbs. That caught me by surprise, considering Discord's premium subscription service is the primary way it makes money. It's been a topic of debate among Discord brass as well. In an interview on Orb-ic matters, senior vice president of product Peter Sellis told PC Gamer that offering Nitro for Orbs is about getting the attention of users who have yet to engage with quests or the shop.

"Nitro is the most well-understood, valuable thing on Discord, so we felt like if we were offering virtual rewards and they weren't redeemable for Nitro, we were not giving users what they actually want," Sellis said.

Before you get too excited, it sounds like grinding Orbs quests to achieve true eternal Nitro won't be a viable strategy for now. "We have a lot of control over the Orbs economy right now," Sellis added, and his team will be tuning how many Orbs are up for grabs at any given time as the feature rolls out. Interestingly, existing Nitro subscribers will be able to buy Nitro time via Orbs and credit to their accounts, delaying their next billing cycle.

"I think we can take our time to get it right so that it feels good for the users and they're not grinding at some Sisyphean task of rolling a stone up the hill, but at the same time doesn't threaten our core business of Nitro, which a lot of people pay for and is very valuable."

But Orbs is just as much about courting advertisers as it is giving users free-ish stuff. As Discord's press release on Orbs points out, "Advertisers no longer need to bring their own reward (though our users certainly love that) or worry if the reward will resonate with their target audience," because they can now default to Orbs.

As you might suspect at the introduction of a new currency, Sellis has ambitions for Orbs to someday be worth more than just cosmetics and Nitro. "I think we'll expand the shop to be more broadly applicable to not just cosmetics, but potentially to utility on Discord as well. It's just that cosmetics are the natural place to start for us."

No specifics offered there, but a natural progression for Orbs would be Discord's app store, which currently houses free games and activities for friend groups. Orbs are rolling out today for a "small number of users globally," with wider access coming "soon."

Capcom may have been underestimating the potential for PC sales growth in those estimates, as it turns out. We already know the company posted its eighth consecutive year of record profits in its most recent fiscal report, driven by the ongoing success of Monster Hunter Wilds, but an interesting detail that went buried amidst all the numbers is just how much of a role PC sales played in that success: As noted by Tweaktown, fully 60% of Capcom's digital game sales in the company's fiscal year—and more than 54% of total game sales, including physical—belong to PC.

PC has been moving steadily upward in terms of its importance to Capcom in recent years, but this is a significant surge. In the company's previous fiscal year, for instance, PC game sales account for a little over 52% of its digital game sales, and 47% of its total sales. But the real tale of the tape is in actual unit numbers: Console digital unit sales slipped slightly, from 19.7 million in FY2023 to 18.5 million in FY2024—but PC unit sales jumped from 21.6 million units in FY23 to 28.2 million in FY24.

That's a big jump, without an equivalent erosion on the console side—it's down, but nowhere near as much—and to my admittedly-not-an-analyst eye, it points to a market that's been rather dramatically under-served by Capcom's focus, until recent years, on consoles.

Dauntless, whose name I invoked earlier, is probably as emblematic of that as any individual game out there: Its reveal in late 2016 grabbed eyeballs in large part because it was the Monster Hunter on PC we'd all been waiting for, and despite some shortcomings it was a hit for the same reason—until the real deal came along to steal its thunder. And it wasn't a fluke: Despite performance problems that have saddled it with a "mixed" user rating, more than half of Monster Hunter Wilds' sales in February 2025 were on Steam.

So it's good news for Capcom, and good new for PC gamers, too—with performance like that, we can be pretty confident that PC versions of Capcom games will arrive side-by-side with console releases. Now if someone could just get that message to Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick, we'd be all set.

There's a kid with a lightsaber at the top, the tagline "beyond the unknown" as well as "May the Force be with you", links to various other Star Wars resources, and for some reason Master Yoda is recommending Star Wars Battlefront 2, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2, Lego Star Wars 2, and Star Wars the Clone Wars: Republic Heroes. "Like these games, you will" runs the text alongside.

This site, unearthed by security researcher Ciro Santilli and first reported on by 404Media's Joseph Cox, is one of hundreds created by the CIA from around 2010, and part of a network that was used to covertly communicate with CIA assets abroad. These sites were first discovered by the Iranian authorities, and may be linked to the killing of various CIA sources in China over the period 2010-2012.

Santilli's research throws up much more than starwarsweb.net. The majority of the sites Santilli has identified as being in this network seem to be news sites, with a smattering focused on areas like sports, music and gaming. Among the gaming urls involved are havenofgamerz.com, hitpointgaming.com, activegaminginfo.com, myonlinegamesource.com, and kings-game.net.

To take the first example, havenofgamerz.com can again be viewed on the Wayback Machine. Promising "the latest game reviews, previews and videos", it claims "nobody knows games and gamers like the Haven of Gamerz", features a sidebar of (legitimate) gaming outlets, and a few categories for reviews, trailers and previews. It's not going to be giving IGN any sleepless nights but, at a glance, does look like a generic gaming site.

Santilli says that the languages used across these sites suggest they were targeting users in Germany, France, Spain, and Brazil.

"It reveals a much larger number of websites," says Santilli. "It gives a broader understanding of the CIA's interests at the time, including more specific democracies which may have been targeted which were not previously mentioned and also a statistical understanding of how much importance they were giving to different zones at the time, and unsurprisingly, the Middle East comes on top."

The role of the websites was first brought to prominence by a Yahoo News report in November 2018, which detailed the "catastrophic" compromise of the CIA's internet communications network. A quote from that article:

"According to the former intelligence official, once the Iranian double agent showed Iranian intelligence the website used to communicate with his or her CIA handlers, they began to scour the internet for websites with similar digital signifiers or components—eventually hitting on the right string of advanced search terms to locate other secret CIA websites. From there, Iranian intelligence tracked who was visiting these sites, and from where, and began to unravel the wider CIA network."

This was what would ultimately lead to the deaths of CIA sources, primarily in China in 2011 and 2012. This investigation was followed-up by a Reuters report in 2022, America's Throwaway Spies, which went into further detail on how individual CIA agents were exposed by the Iranians, and included the incredible revelation that the IP addresses for the CIA's sites were sequential, meaning that once one was identified it was easy to find others that likely belonged to the same network.

Reuters identified two of the sites and described seven more examples, which was the starting point for Santilli's research. Using data like the IP addresses and domains, Santilli has identified several hundred domains that he believes were part of the CIA's network.

"We're now about 15 years past when these websites were being actively used, yet new information continues to drip out year after year," cybersecurity researcher Zach Edwards told 404 Media. "The simplest way to put it—yes, the CIA absolutely had a Star Wars fan website with a secretly embedded communication system—and while I can’t account for everything included in the research from [Santilli], his findings seem very sound

"This whole episode is a reminder that developers make mistakes, and sometimes it takes years for someone to find those mistakes. But this is also not just your average 'developer mistake' type of scenario."

Santilli says it's good "to have more content for people to look at, much like a museum. It's just cool to be able to go to the Wayback Machine and be able to see a relic spy gadget 'live' in all its glory."

Gamers do love a good conspiracy theory, but there appears little doubt that back in 2010 the CIA was operating and maintaining a network that included many gaming and nerd culture sites. It's undeniably weird to think about a cartoon Yoda being used in espionage, or some CIA spook using a front to say they "know games and gamers", and even more unsettling that these were some small part of an intelligence failure that undoubtedly led to dozens of deaths.

Leif started writing about games professionally in his 30s, at which point he had already lived at least two different, fascinating lives. In his youth in Texas he worked on a ranch and was not just a cowboy, but a cowboy poet. Leif attended the annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering and traveled across the United States performing poetry readings and songs on guitar and mandolin.

Later he studied English and history at the University of Texas at Austin and completed a Master's degree in the history and philosophy of science and technology at the University of Chicago. In Chicago, where he lived for many years, Leif worked at an art gallery, handling promotions and gallery arrangements for works from contemporary artists like Shepard Fairey as well as vintage film lithographs.

I didn't know Leif during this era of his life, which you can read more about in his obituary. But he later shared anecdotes from his time in the art world that made me think his greatest strength in that role was somehow not his seemingly boundless knowledge of art and history, but his friendliness and warmth—his giddiness when given any chance to connect with someone and burrow deeply into any topic they shared a passion for.

Leif was my good friend. After he moved back to Goliad, Texas in 2014 to care for his family's ranch, he began writing for PC Gamer and a number of other publications as a freelancer. To help the words flow, he'd often write longhand with a fountain pen before typing up his work. Back then Leif and I only occasionally corresponded over email, but he was a regular on PC Gamer, reviewing RPGs and strategy games and covering Blizzard's World of Warcraft and other MMOs, which he played avidly. He wrote a version of PC Gamer's list of the best RPGs of all time that we've been working from ever since.

As Leif's editor, I particularly remember working with him on the feature "How Unreal Tournament mods created a wave of successful indie studios," which captured an important moment in PC gaming history. It was a story I wanted to see told well, so I turned to Leif. I'm pretty sure he missed his deadline, but the end result was worth it. Coincidentally I was just resharing it with the PC Gamer team and praising his work last Friday, the day before he died. I wish I'd texted him about it, too.

Leif and I became friends in 2018, a year after he wrote that story. He moved to San Francisco where I live to take a job at Macworld, where he mostly covered Apple's tech—though he couldn't stop writing about games whenever he could squeeze them in. Leif started a video series at Macworld that he dubbed Apple Arcade more than a year before Apple nicked the name for itself.

Leif loved San Francisco. During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic when we all isolated in small social "bubbles," he was part of mine. We would go on hikes in the nearby hills and around parts of the city we'd never visited. By then he'd already gorged on the history of San Francisco and could point out landmarks and their backstories street-by-street. He was the best walking companion: always game to keep going, and never more than a minute or two from dropping another great bit of trivia that I now wish I could remember.

Even if you didn't know Leif, there's a good chance that his passion for games and his fastidious attention to detail has actually touched your life in a small way. While Leif was an excellent writer, he considered himself a better editor, and after being laid off from Macworld during the economic turbulence of Covid he ended up working as a copy editor for Apple, helping refine the kind of documentation we all take for granted when it's good and lose our minds over when it's confusing.

That work was a stepping stone to what I think it's safe to say was Leif's dream job: Games curation editor for Apple's App Store. He chose what games to feature on the store and wrote the short editor's choice recommendations for them, somehow finding a role that let him combine the relationship-building and curation he'd done at the art gallery with his passion for games. I like to think his time contributing to PC Gamer magazine helped him condense his thoughts into just a sentence or two, but that may be giving us a bit too much credit—long before writing for us he was a poet, after all.

A couple years ago I set out to write a book and asked Leif if he would be my editor. He immediately accepted the burden, because he was a deeply kind person and an even more generous friend. I'm not sure if he had the Chicago Manual of Style memorized from cover to cover, but if there's a single misplaced comma or capital letter in the entire manuscript, I probably screwed it up after he'd already done a pass. 2024 was a year full of fun texts from Leif, like:

"SO
A word on ellipses…"

In hindsight it's a funny reversal of the way our relationship started, but my memories of those early emails have all been replaced by the hikes we'd gone on, the movies we'd seen together, and the evenings Leif had spent at my apartment with other friends playing board games. His punctuality became a running joke: he always showed up first, even when he tried his best to be fashionably late.

When San Francisco's annual Noir City film festival came around every January, he was the friend I could count on to cram in as many screenings as we could stay awake for. And Leif was a great movie companion: He'd get so absorbed he couldn't help but vibrate with nervous energy or react with a little "oh nooo" when things went bad. Our record at last year's film fest was 11.

It was a privilege to call Leif Johnson my friend, and I'm just one of many people who will miss him greatly.

Such was the goal of a monster feature interviewing 32 game developers published today at GamesRadar, which included several choice quotes from New Blood, the indie studio known for modern throwbacks like Dusk, Ultrakill, and Gloomwood.

Pulling no punches as usual, New Blood CEO Dave Oshry said that most players "know next to nothing about how games are made," adding that game development teams have more in common with film and TV production than you'd think.

"With the exception of solo devs, games are an artistic endeavor that require the cooperation of handfuls, dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people at once working together to create interactive art," Oshry said. "You can put all the great programmers, artists, animators and sound designers you want in the same building but that doesn't mean they can make a great game. Great games are made by great teams that work great together. It helps when they're all friends, too."

I think most fans understand that it takes a village, but Oshry is also speaking to the surface-level chatter surrounding new games or studios as they're first announced, the roots of which often begin with the studios themselves. There's nothing a new outfit with big investors loves more than highlighting all the successful games its employees have collectively worked on, but that has almost nothing to do with what they'll eventually make together. How many studios "founded by ex-Blizzard devs" have come and gone over the years?

The idea is to sell a studio's immense talent so you can attract other talent, which is reasonable and important, but who's to say if that talent will gel together? That's the hardest part, according to Oshry, and exceedingly rare.

I rate that one a 5/10 on the misconception scale, but Oshry's cohort David Szymanski had a spicier take that I subscribe to. The man behind Dusk and Iron Lung is tired of seeing "dev laziness" used as "a blanket explanation for missing/buggy features or seemingly hacky implementation."

"These decisions are nearly always driven by an unseen web of more complex issues and/or external pressure," he said.

Not an especially spicy observation, but then Szymanski went on to say that, in some instances, the accessibility of game dev tools these days has become "a bit of a double-edged sword" when complaints start flooding in.

"It's now very easy to acquire enough knowledge to make broad incorrect assumptions about how easy a given task should be," Szymanski said.

You know, that does sound annoying—8/10 misconception. It's one level of irritation when someone with absolutely no background in your field makes a wild assumption, but it's way worse when someone believes they know just enough to tell you how it's done. When your favorite game is missing a feature that you believe should be there by now, there's always that one guy who gets 5,000 upvotes on Reddit with a post titled "As a game developer, don't let them fool you, this should be easy as hell."

Similarly, Helldivers 2 and Palword devs had some words for fans who intuitively believe that big features can be made within days or weeks when they actually take months. The whole feature's packed with quotes like that, so make sure to check out the full thing over at GamesRadar.

Eno's connection with Microsoft goes back 30 years—he composed the famous boot-up jingle for Windows 95 that was recently inducted into the National Recording Registry at the US Library of Congress.

"I gladly took on the project as a creative challenge and enjoyed the interaction with my contacts at the company," Eno wrote in an open letter posted to Instagram (via Stereogum). "I never would have believed that the same company could one day be implicated in the machinery of oppression and war."

Eno referenced Microsoft's May 15 statement "on the issues relating to technology services in Israel and Gaza," in the which company acknowledged providing Israel's Ministry of Defense with various technologies and services but denied any culpability in IMOD's ongoing attacks on Gaza—although it also said that it "does not have visibility into how customers use our software on their own servers or other devices," essentially admitting that it doesn't really know what's going on at all.

Regardless, Eno clearly isn't interested in Microsoft's protestations of innocence: "Selling and facilitating advanced AI and cloud services to a government engaged in systematic ethnic cleansing is not 'business as usual'. It is complicity. If you knowingly build systems that can enable war crimes, you inevitably become complicit in those crimes."

Eno called on Microsoft to "suspend all services that support any operations that contribute to violations of international law," and said he "stand[s] in solidarity with the brave Microsoft workers who have done something truly disruptive and refused to stay silent. They risk their livelihoods for people who have lost and will continue to lose their lives."

Two Microsoft employees interrupted the company's 50th anniversary event in early April to protest its entanglements with the Israeli military; both were fired less than a week later, but in spite of that similar protests occurred earlier this week at Microsoft's Build developer conference. The fate of those employees is not yet known.

Eno invited "artists, technologists, musicians, and all people of conscience" to join him in the call, and pledged that his fee for creating the Windows 95 startup sound will "go towards helping the victims of the attacks on Gaza. If a sound can signal a real change then let it be this one."

That same frustration comes clear in some responses to a recent mega-interview by GamesRadar's Austin Wood—which is well worth a read. It's an assemblage of dozens of developers across the industry, who're keen to dispel myths about how they make their games.

Both Arrowhead's CCO Johan Pilestedt and Palworld's publishing manager John Buckley got their say and, as two studios who found recent, unexpectedly massive success, they both have some very similar takes on the subject.

"The one thing people misconstrue the most is—if you think about when movies are made," Pilestedt explains, "You get an actor and they're there, and you tell them what to say. But games are so meticulously crafted. You have to build the actor from the ground up."

Players, Pilestedt adds, often say, "'Can't they add this or do that'," but "most of the time, the decisions you make (especially the larger the game gets) have so many consequences that cascade. [It makes] something that seems easy really hard, or something that seems really hard super simple. It's unintuitive unless you've worked in games to see how they're created."

Buckley echoes this later in the piece, as well—though he also side-eyes the live-service churn of our modern gaming landscape. "I think gamers have just become so used to this kind of constant cycle that they're now applying it to every game they play."

It does seem that way, sometimes—and while I'm guilty of having a moan about game content cycles myself on this very site (though I maintain that Square Enix isn't a small studio, and probably has enough money to hasten Final Fantasy 14's glacial patch schedule a bit) I try to at least understand that those issues, as always, stem from outside and logistical factors rather than the sin of sloth.

Buckley adds: "A new island in Palworld, that's half a year's work. That takes six months. And when it comes out, people are super excited, but you just get so many nasty comments before that about these things. And you try to explain it, and there'll always be a few gamers who get it, and they really appreciate that dialog, but quite a lot of them don't."

"We are shipping faster than ever," said Pichai (thanks, TheRegister). "We have announced over a dozen models and research breakthroughs and released over 20 major AI products and features, all since the last I/O… today, Gemini 2.5 Pro sweeps the LLMArena leaderboard in all categories."

Gemini is now so core to Google's business that it's replacing traditional search. If you use any of Google's suite of products you'll have noticed the inexorable push of Gemini features into everything. It feels a bit like a very needy child (or the spawn of a tech company desperate to goose the "engagement" numbers).

Pichai went on to talk about some genuinely impressive use cases for AI integration, with its Project Starline technology being used to offer bi-directional language translation voiced by AI-generated speech in real time. English and Spanish translation is now available for Meet subscribers, with support for more languages rolling out over the coming months.

Then we get to a more questionable use case, which is all about further personalising AI. "We are working to bring this to life with something we call Personal Context," said Pichai. "With your permission, Gemini models can use relevant context across your Google Apps, in a way that is private, transparent and fully under your control."

The initial manifestations of this idea are the little automated replies that Google offers up across services such as Gmail. Google calls these Personalized Smart Replies, and is aiming to make them much more detailed and capable of replacing actual human-to-human communication.

"Let's say my friend wrote to me looking for advice," said Pichai. "He's taking a road trip to Utah and he remembers I did this trip before. Now if I'm being honest, I'd probably reply with something short and unhelpful. Sorry, Felix. But with Personalized Smart Replies, I can be a better friend. That's because Gemini can do almost all the work for me, looking up my notes in Drive, scanning past emails for reservations, finding my itinerary in Google Docs: trip to Zion National Park.

"Gemini matches my typical greetings from past emails, captures my tone, style, and favorite word choices, and then it automatically generates a reply."

I'm not disputing that automated replies can be useful in certain contexts such as basic business communication. But even as someone who is generally terrible at replying to people I cannot imagine just giving up on that side of my personal life and leaving it to AI. I don't really think you're someone's friend, at that point.

I mean, where does this end up? We'll have AI managing all of our relationships and communication, and AIs replying to AIs, which just seems like Google is actually devaluing human communication rather than enabling it. I don't want to delegate my social life and relationships to an algorithm: maybe the Luddites had a point.

The Personal Context feature will roll out for Gmail subscribers this summer.

Equally troubling, in a different and perhaps larger way, is Google's new "AI Mode" in Google Search. This has launched, initially as a setting in Google Labs, and Google is being coy about the potential impact on every single online company that depends on Google for traffic referrals.

"For those who want an end-to-end AI search experience we are introducing an all- new AI mode," said Pichai. "It's a total reimagining of search." AI mode will begin as a new tab in the Search window, integrating with Gemini 2.5 and Personal Context (once launched).

Finally, among the many AI product announcements, Pichai at least showed that someone at Google has a sense of humour. As well as cramming AI in everywhere it can, it's also announced the launch of SynthID Detector: a website that helps us identify when content is AI-generated. I wonder if you can whack emails from your friends in there.

In 2024, Embracer announced it would split into three distinct companies across games. Asmodee handled tabletop and physical games; Coffee Stain managed indies and free-to-play titles; Middle-Earth & Friends took charge of the Lord of the Rings and other major licenses.

Now, Coffee Stain will become "a standalone group of community-driven game developers and publishers by the end of calendar year 2025." It's slightly unclear how this differs from last year's restructuring, but Coffee Stain manages somewhere in the region of 250 game developers and publishers worldwide, including the likes of Ghost Ship Games (Deep Rock Galactic) and Tuxedo Labs (Teardown).

"We're really proud of everything we've built as part of Embracer," says Coffee Stain CEO Anton Westbergh. "The games industry is more competitive than ever, but also more rewarding if you do things right, and we believe this move gives us the clarity and control to navigate the landscape better on our own terms."

"Coffee Stain Group has incredible talent, IPs and communities," says Group CEO of Embracer Lars Wingefors. "To date, it has been a true recipe for success. I am confident in Anton's strategy and leadership and see a clear long-term opportunity in attracting and enabling partnerships with like-minded independent game developers and talents."

As for the Middle-Earth & Friends side, not much is changing apart from the name. It'll now be known as Fellowship Entertainment, which I have to admit is a lot better, and "the strategy is to transform into one powerhouse group with game development and publishing at its core."

The press release also gives an idea of the dizzying scale Embracer is operating at. Fellowship Entertainment will have "approximately 6,000 employees across more than 30 countries" and will manage the commercial rights to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Fellowship Entertainment consists of more than 40 studios like 4A Games, Aspyr Media, Crystal Dynamics, Dark Horse, Eidos-Montréal, Limited Run Games, Middle-earth Enterprises, Milestone, PLAION, Tarsier Studios, and THQ Nordic. It also controls more than 300 other properties including the likes of Kingdom Come Deliverance, Metro, Dead Island, Killing Floor, Darksiders, Remnant and Tomb Raider.

Whatever else is going on in the name of restructuring, however, one figure remains at the core of all these companies. A note at the bottom of the press release says "the largest shareholder, Lars Wingefors AB, will, in connection with the name change to Fellowship Entertainment, establish a privately held holding company" named Embracer AB. It will have shares in Asmodee Group, Coffee Stain Group and Fellowship Entertainment, as well as "potentially other companies."

Embracer's role within the industry over recent years was described in a GDC survey in 2024 as "buying up large swaths of an industry" and "creating redundancies and placing innovative, more 'exploratory' studios in a position where they’ll never be seen as profitable enough for shareholders." In an industry where layoffs and studio closures are sadly commonplace, Embracer has been responsible for a significant chunk.

"As a leader and an owner, sometimes you need to take the blame and you need to be humble about if you've made mistakes and if you could have done something differently," said Wingefors in 2024, adding he's "sure I deserve a lot of criticism." But you know what really matters?

"I still feel I have the trust from many or all of my key entrepreneurs and CEOs that have joined the group," said Wingefors. "It's been difficult, but I think they all believed in the mission of Embracer."

We've got another fun feature in this issue, too. Ever wondered what it would be like to be a delivery person? Well, on PC that is now not an issue, as there has been an explosion in games released recently that let you deliver things, and in this feature we cover fifteen of the most fun and interesting.

From delivering letters as a witch on a broom, to carrying parcels as a student around their hometown, and on to smuggling contraband through deep space's most hostile systems, all your delivery desire needs are fulfilled. This is truly a special delivery not to be missed!

Then, in terms of previews, we go hands-on with the exciting new arcade football action game, Rematch, as well as deliver early verdicts on Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, Endless Legend 2, Stygian: Outer Gods, Marathon, Deliver At All Costs, Cairn, Void Sails, Duck Detective: Ghost of Glamping, and A Gentleman's Dispute.

Meanwhile, the PC Gamer reviews machine delivers official verdicts on Tempest Rising, Blue Prince, Oblivion Remastered, Expelled! An Overboard Game, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Old Skies, South of Midnight, The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered, among other games.

All that plus a big group test of webcams to see which is best, a reinstall of legendary scare-'em-up Outlast, a creepy continuation of our Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines diary, a look at Monster Hunter Wild's best new mods, a deep dive into why having a strong rival in video games is so important, a guide to mastering Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and defeating the Paintress, a catch-up with Overwatch 2 and its new perks system, a fresh dispatch from The Spy, a new case to be cracked for the PCG Investigator, Dick Ray-Tracing, and much more too. Enjoy the issue!

Issue 410 is on shelves now and available on all your digital devices from the App Store and Zinio. You can also order directly from Magazines Direct or purchase a subscription to save yourself some cash, receive monthly deliveries, and get incredibly stylish subscriber-only covers.

Enjoy the issue!

The first incident occurred shortly after the start of CEO Satya Nadella's keynote on May 19, when firmware engineer and No Azure for Apartheid organizer Joe Lopez interrupted Nadella's speech to demand he "show them how Microsoft is killing Palestinians," according to a statement released by NOAA. "How about you show them how Israeli war crimes are powered by Azure?"

Almost immediately after, a second protester, a former Google employee, disrupted Nadella's address again to say that "all tech workers should know that big tech is complicit in the Israeli genocide against Palestinians."

After the protesters were removed from the hall, Lopez sent an email to Microsoft employees accusing company leadership of lying about the role played by Azure in the Israeli military's ongoing assault on Gaza.

"Leadership rejects our claims that Azure technology is being used to target or harm civilians in Gaza," Lopez wrote. "Those of us who have been paying attention know that this is a bold-faced lie. Every byte of data that is stored on the cloud (much of it likely containing data obtained by illegal mass surveillance) can and will be used as justification to level cities and exterminate Palestinians."

The second protest occurred on May 20 during an address being given by Jay Parikh, head of Microsoft's CoreAI: An unidentified Palestinian tech worker interrupted Parikh to say "My people are suffering" and call on Microsoft to "cut ties" with Israel: "No Azure for apartheid! Free, free Palestine!"

Microsoft employee group "No Azure for Apartheid," which also held protests outside the event, later confirmed that it had assisted the unnamed worker's protest.

The protests come less than two months after former Microsoft employees Ibtihal Aboussad and Vaniya Agrawal interrupted the company's 50^th anniversary event to protest its work with the Israeli military in Gaza. They also happened less than a week after Microsoft issued a statement, referenced by Lopez in his company-wide email, absolving itself of any culpability in Israel's relentless attacks on Gaza.

"Based on our review, including both our internal assessments and external review, we have found no evidence that Microsoft's Azure and AI technologies, or any of our other software, have been used to harm people or that IMOD [Israel's Ministry of Defense] has failed to comply with our terms of service or our AI Code of Conduct," Microsoft said in its statement.

It is hard to square the claim that IMOD does not use Azure in a way that harms people with the news from Gaza, where more than 53,000 people are believed to have been killed since Israel's attacks began in October 2023 in response to a Hamas assault on Israel, although some estimates put the death toll much higher.

Microsoft gave itself a little wiggle room on the 'we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing' front:

"It is important to acknowledge that Microsoft does not have visibility into how customers use our software on their own servers or other devices. This is typically the case for on premise software. Nor do we have visibility to the IMOD’s government cloud operations, which are supported through contracts with cloud providers other than Microsoft. By definition, our reviews do not cover these situations."

Along with these in-person protests at high-profile Microsoft events, the company has also been targeted by the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) Movement, which claims Microsoft "knowingly provides Israel with technology, including artificial intelligence (AI), that is deployed to facilitate grave human rights violations, war crimes, crimes against humanity (including apartheid), as well as genocide."

"Microsoft provides the Israeli military with Azure cloud and AI services that are crucial in empowering and accelerating Israel’s genocidal war on 2.3 million Palestinians in the illegally occupied Gaza Strip," the BDS website states. "Microsoft's extensive ties with Israel's military are revealed in investigations by The Guardian with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, demonstrating how the Israeli military turned to Microsoft to meet the technological demands of genocide."

Microsoft hasn't yet issued any sort of statement on the incidents but Aboussad and Agrawal, the employees who staged protests against the company's Israeli entanglements in April, were both fired in short order and I'll be very surprised if we don't see a similar outcome in response to these protests. I've reached out for comment and will update if I receive a reply.

Patel announced her departure and new role in a very brief message posted on LinkedIn (via Insider Gaming): "I’m happy to share that I’m starting a new position as Game Director at Night School: A Netflix Game Studio!"

Night School was founded in 2014 and came to prominence with its acclaimed debut release, the 2016 supernatural adventure Oxenfree. Netflix acquired Night School in 2021, and it was a pretty big deal at the time: Night School was Netflix's first studio acquisition, and it seemed set on becoming a player in the games industry—at least in the mid-tier, indie-darling scene.

It hasn't really worked out that way, though. In more recent years Netflix appears to have dialed back its gaming ambitions: A new studio aimed at building "the next big thing in gaming" was closed in October 2024; a month later Netflix's vice president of games Mike Verdu transformed into Netflix's vice president of generative AI in games, and then four months after that he transformed again into a guy who doesn't work there anymore.

There were also layoffs in February 2025 at Night School specifically, although a Netflix rep said at the time that only a small number of employees had been let go and that its broader strategy with the studio, whatever it is, remained unchanged.

As for Patel, she's had a long and seemingly enviable career at Obsidian: Prior to serving as director and narrative designer on the very well-received Avowed, she worked as narrative designer on Pillars of Eternity and The Outer Worlds, and narrative design lead (along with Obsidian stalwart Josh Sawyer) on Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire.

Given all that, it might seem a bit odd that Patel would want to make the move from one to the other, and for now we're left to speculate: Netflix has the resources to put a lot of money on the table to attract big-name talent, sure, but it's just as likely that Patel simply wants to get creative with a smaller team. Patel herself hasn't said any more about her reasons for making the move or what she'll be getting up to at Night School, and Netflix confirmed that Patel has joined Night School as a game director but declined to comment further.

"If you follow the insider news, you are aware that it’s been a rough couple of years in the game industry," the studio wrote. "Investment dried up, studios shut down, countless developers lost their jobs, and games were cancelled left and right."

That's putting it mildly. A quick catch-up on how we got here: Campfire Cabal was founded in September 2022 under Embracer's THQ Nordic label to "focus on high-quality, narrative-driven RPGs." But less than a year later a massive investment deal fell through at the last minute, and Embracer's wings were suddenly and brutally clipped: Hundreds of people were laid off (although none of the executives responsible for the mess, of course) and numerous studios closed, including—apparently—Campfire Cabal.

"It is no secret that Embracer Group has recently entered restructuring," creative director Jonas Wæver wrote in August 2023. "As part of this restructuring process, THQ Nordic has been told to close Campfire Cabal. This decision was not related to the work we've been doing at the studio but was made from a purely financial standpoint."

Wæver said at the time that studio management and THQ Nordic "have not given up on Campfire Cabal," and that "we are still pursuing our options for finding a good resolution to this situation," although to my reading that came off almost entirely as forced optimism, especially given that his announcement was literally entitled "Studio Closure." And yet, here we are.

"Though we did have to say goodbye to many of our colleagues, the studio survived and a compact team continued the project we had started in 2022. At the end of March of 2025, we received the green light to scale back up and transition into full production," Campfire Cabal wrote today.

"We are extremely grateful that there were people within the group who fought to keep us alive through the turmoil, and that we can now emerge on the other side with renewed vigour."

Campfire Cabal also finally confirmed today that it's working on a new Expeditions RPG, something previously assumed but never officially announced, and that it was responsible for a surprise Expeditions: Rome patch that dropped in November 2024. Details weren't shared but, like previous games in the series, "it’s set in a new period of our history and in a new part of the world."

It could have, of course (it didn't). Large-scale hacks are just a part of contemporary living, and there's no shortage of high-profile examples in any given month. Here in the UK, two of our major high street retailers have recently been the victims of organised hacking, with the Co-Operative's stores having empty shelves for weeks afterwards.

Ever since its launch in 2015 the website Have I Been Pwned has offered the invaluable service of letting you check if any of your email addresses have turned up in a data breach, and today sees the official launch of Have I Been Pwned 2.0. There are some backend changes but, mainly, this overhaul just makes it all look very nice… and has a lot of confetti.

Confetti? "Well, not for everyone, only about half the people who use it will see a celebratory response," says site creator and admin Troy Hunt. Yes, you get confetti when you have not been pwned.

"There's a reason why this response is intentionally jovial," says Hunt. "HIBP is a bit playful. It's not a scary place emblazoned with hoodies, padlock icons, and fearmongering about 'the dark web.' Instead, we aim to be more consumable to the masses and provide factual, actionable information without the hyperbole. Confetti guns (yes, there are several, and they're animated) lighten the mood a bit. The alternative is that you get the red response."

The red response is what you get with your 20 year-old personal accounts that have been in 50 data breaches, but HIBP 2.0 does a much better job of how it now displays the information about how accounts have been compromised ("we considered a more light-hearted treatment on this page as well," adds Hunt, "but somehow a bit of sad trombone really didn't seem appropriate").

HIBP had a lot of this same information before, but now it's laid-out in a much more user-friendly timeline showing when data breaches occurred, and you can click through on each one for more information on a given breach, and tailored advice on what you should do about this particular instance.

There's way more new functionality, including a dashboard that integrates a lot of the site's existing features, and the debut of reasonably priced Have I Been Pwned merchandise. I would make a snarky comment here except I'm the type of guy who owns a Windows 95 T-shirt. The full notes on the changes in the site's 2.0 version can be read here.

Have I Been Pwned is just a very useful website, for peace of mind if nothing else, and now it's easier to use and nicer to look at, with all of the information laid-out much more clearly. I have it in my bookmarks for when bad things happen: like 300 million accounts being leaked on Telegram in February.

I will not end by telling you to two-factor your accounts and practice good infosec. We all get enough of that from the work IT department. But why not try creating a password through an unhinged browser game that, per PCG's Mollie Taylor, is "one of the most messed-up things I've ever played."

I have reached out to Lyall and GitHub for comment and will update this story if I hear back. Lyall has posted a message on Patreon apologizing for the takedown, saying they aren't sure what caused it, and noting that they have appealed the ban through GitHub support.

"Having the rug pulled out from under me has been quite the stressful experience and it's exposed the fact that all my eggs are in one basket when it comes to hosting the fixes that I write," Lyall said on Patreon.

"Going forward I plan on looking into alternatives for hosting the source code and releases for my work. I'll likely continue using GitHub if I can alongside mirroring my repositories and releases elsewhere.

"Hopefully this situation will be resolved soon but until then I have quite a lot to think about. As soon as I have an update on the suspension, I will let you all know."

In the meantime, and if GitHub does not reinstate Lyall's account, they have begun uploading their projects to NexusMods as a backup.

The big question posed by all this is why such huge games are reliant on an external developer's unofficial patches for fixing (or even providing in the first place) their ultrawide support. My only answers are unsatisfactory supposition: Time, money, and the utter tyranny of the standard, 16:9 aspect ratio.

A rising tide lifts all boats, and I've actually benefitted from ultrawide patches as a CRT sicko⁠—once arbitrary aspect ratios are in play, it's just as easy to squash things to 4:3 as it is to stretch them to 21:9. Ditto for the Steam Deck's slightly funky 16:10 screen.

This whole situation goes to show how fragile and ephemeral the ecosystem of user patches and mods that make many games playable can really be.

Thankfully, Lyall is in a position to reupload their work, and they may even make it back on GitHub, pending appeal, but there are no easy answers to the wider issue of fan patch/mod preservation as we stare down an increasingly balkanized, enshittified internet.

Unfortunately, Kojima told Le Film Français that it'll probably take the better part of a decade before we can play his Metal Gear successor. "Besides Death Stranding 2, there is Physint in development," Kojima said. "That will take me another five or six years."

Once Physint is squared away, however, Kojima told Le Film Français that he might finally turn his attention to directing a movie of his own.

"Maybe after that, I could finally decide to tackle a film," Kojima said.

During Physint's announcement at the January 2024 PlayStation State of Play, Kojima said Physint would be a "next-generation action espionage game" that is "also a movie at the same time in terms of look, story, theme, cast, acting, fashion and sound." Action espionage? Basically a movie? Inevitably wild casting and fashion choices? That checks all the Metal Gear boxes. (They're cardboard boxes, presumably.)

According to Kojima, we shouldn't be surprised to hear it, because he said in February 2024 chat that he's making Physint because we all kept demanding more Metal Gear. That's an interesting quote in retrospect now that we know Kojima Productions was already busy turning Death Stranding 2 into Metal Gear anyway, but I'm not complaining about a surplus of hypercompetent bandana-clad stealth goofballs.

What's curious about Kojima's conversation with Le Film Français is that he didn't mention OD, the horror game announced in 2023 as a collaboration between Kojima and Jordan Peele. Similar to Physint, Kojima described OD as a game that's "at the same time a movie, but at the same time a new form of media."

In January 2025, Kojima said that the productions of both OD and Physint had been suspended in 2024 because of the SAG-AFTRA strike. Kojima clearly seems willing to acknowledge Physint's ongoing development, but OD's current status is unclear.

If he does make an eventual pivot to directing movies, Kojima said it'll be the culmination of a life-long fascination.

"I grew up with cinema. Directing would be a kind of homage to it," Kojima said. "Besides, I’m getting older, and I would prefer to do it while still young."

Kojima's currently a spry 61 years old, and he's spent those six youthful decades as an open and unabashed movie nerd. It's hard to miss: Most of his oeuvre is a pastiche of 90s techno-thrillers, and he's been cramming familiar actors and directors into his game casts ever since his production budgets have supported it.

My only concern about Kojima's directorial debut is what kind of runtimes he'll subject theater audiences to. If Death Stranding had about four and half movies' worth of cutscenes in it, how long are his movies going to be if there isn't any pesky gameplay to get in the way?

Yes, but that's besides the point. Building a PC is a cinch these days, which is why we're making it a lynchpin of the upcoming and glorious return of The PC Gaming Show this June 8. We'll be covering ourselves in thermal paste and reseating more RAM than you can shake a stick (of RAM) at in an event that will also feature over 70 games from studios like Ubisoft, 11 Bit, CCP Games, Failbetter, Krafton, and plenty more besides.

The festivities will be presented by PCGS veterans Sean "Day[9]" Plott, Mica Burton, and Frankie Ward, who'll be peeking through their fingers as Verified PC Gaming Experts assemble a beast of a machine we're calling 'The Rig.' Even better, once we've made sure the monster gets past the BIOS screen we'll be shipping it to one lucky winner watching the show. If you love viewing and/or possessing absurdly powerful PC hardware, you can't afford not to tune in.

The whole shebang kicks off at 12 noon PDT, 3 pm EDT, 8 pm BST, 9 pm CEST and 3 am (on Monday, June 9) China Standard Time, and it'll be viewable on pretty much any service that can hold a livestream. That means you'll be able to find it on Twitch, YouTube, X, Facebook, PC Gamer, GamesRadar+, GOG.com, Steam and Bilibili as part of Summer Game Fest.

It's gonna be a big one, folks, and is probably the first PCGS where there's a greater-than-marginal risk of someone getting a mild electric shock. When you consider that and the presence of major studios like Devolver, People Can Fly, Saber, Aspyr, and who-knows-who else? This is one for the history books. So long as those history books are about PC gaming.

Raymond started Haven in 2021 just two months after leaving Stadia Games, Google's relatively short-lived internal development studio. Its debut game, Fairgames, was announced in 2023. The shooter was pitched as a "modern take on the heist genre," and a PvP sandbox with what sounds like extraction shooter loot hoarding.

According to Haven developers Bloomberg spoke to, PlayStation leadership didn't tell Haven staff why Raymond left, and that it happened "several weeks after an external test" of the game. They also said they were "concerned about how the game was received and its progress" following the playtest.

In a statement to Bloomberg, a PlayStation spokesperson said it's "deeply grateful for [Raymond's] leadership and contributions," and that it remains "committed to supporting Haven Studios and [is] excited to continue the journey" with new co-studio heads Marie-Even Danis and Pierre-François Sapinski.

It seems fair to say that, Helldivers 2 aside, Sony has been struggling to break into the live service arena. The company reportedly cancelled two unannounced live service games in January, one from Days Gone developer Bend Studio and one from Demon's Souls remake developer Bluepoint Games. And it was just late last year that Sony pulled the plug on Concord two weeks after it was released.

Bungie's sci-fi extraction shooter Marathon is due out in September, but despite Bungie's long experience with live service games, it doesn't feel like a guaranteed hit . And it's already been the subject of controversy after it was discovered that some of its art assets were stolen.

Despite all of this, Sony still seems interested in live service games and opened up a whole new studio in Bellevue, WA called TeamLFG. Let's hope that developer's game sees the light of day.

The reveal took place in 2005, and is basically a collection of signifiers that we're back in 2005: The video (embedded below) opens with an iPod ad featuring the Gorillaz, and then we get into the real business of Elijah Wood hyping up the console alongside appearances from The Killers and Pimp My Ride.

There's a brief segment outlining some gaming history, in which Microsoft says gaming began in 1972 with Pong: incorrect but who's going to be pedantic when we've got Frodo and The Killers waiting.

"You guys know how big gaming is," says Elijah Wood, "and now the time has come, you've waited long enough… I give you the future of gaming!"

The future of gaming is a blonde woman sashaying through the crowd with a messenger bag, who gets to a circular stage, pulls the Xbox 360 out, and whacks it on a plinth. As our US EIC Tyler Wilde put it while we were talking about the reveal: "I feel like at any other time, a cheap grey nylon messenger bag would not be the way to express 'cutting edge new tech inside,' but in 2005 it was."

After placing the console, the woman presses the little button, it lights up despite not being plugged in, then we get a short clip revealing the name before launching straight into The Killers and Mr Brightside.

Following the performance, Elijah Wood asks rapper Lil Jon if he's excited for the new console. "Yeah I'm looking forward to getting a free one tonight" is the unbeatable response.

Then Tony Hawk pops up to shout-out Tony Hawk's American Wasteland before a quick sizzle reel of Need for Speed and Madden.

In perhaps the most '00s moment of all, rapper and presenter Sway introduces Ryan and Mad Mike from Pimp My Ride, and we get a clip of them pimping out an OG Xbox, which was never a looker anyway but they manage to make it even more impressively hideous. This segment has one of the most genuinely interesting moments of the whole reveal however, as Sway visits Microsoft HQ and we get to see a load of prototype designs for the Xbox 360 chassis (timestamp).

They all make a big deal of the light ring on front of the console, which is nice for lovers of schadenfreude, before Xbox's J Allard is introduced with the unfortunate title of "Lord of the Ring." Quite.

This section does show how forward-thinking the Xbox design team was. Allard talks Sway through some of the things this console can do, showing off the marketplace and customisable avatars, talking about digital downloads and DLC (and yes there's even a mention of microtransactions). The Xbox was online too, of course, but the 360's embryonic marketplace and friends ecosystem was basically the direction all consoles would end up taking.

There's a documentary going behind-the-scenes on Perfect Dark Zero, before we're briefly back with Frodo and The Killers play us out with Smile Like You Mean It. By this point, everything on the 2005 bingo card feels like it's been ticked-off. Nothing could really make me feel 20 years old again, but for 20 minutes this almost did.

Trying to figure out the secret to blowing up on Steam as an indie is an impossible task. There are so many variables you could obsess over, but at the same time it almost seems random. Yes, the game actually needs to be good, but countless good games get completely overlooked on Steam every single day.

"Why did Balatro take off? You could write a million fucking essays about why that took off, and none of them will be definitely right," Marshall says. "Blind fucking luck. Is it because of the little jaunty pixel jester man? I first picked up on it when it got banned for gambling. Was that helpful to them? Probably, that's why I knew about it. Until then, I'd ignored it because it's not my sort of thing. I don't like card games, but I picked it up after that to see what it's all about."

One thing that has become clear, though, is that the old methods of making an indie hit are no longer working.

"I remember Notch mentioning one of my games back in the day, and making five grand that hour. It was astonishing," he recalls. "Now you can have people with 20 million followers on Twitter mentioning your game or doing a YouTube video about your game, providing all the links they need, discount if you like. It won't budge the needle. It'll barely do anything."

The relationship people have with the accounts they follow is a big part of the change, he reckons. "They would do anything for the person with the popular account. That wore off pretty quick, I think, to the point where now, people don't click through. People don't do anything with any information they're given. They see it, they scroll past it, and it's gone."

It was always tough to get attention, but "there's so many more people shouting now," he says. "Everything has changed. Everything is harder work." There was a period where developers could at least rely on Steam wishlists, but that's all in the past too.

"The wishlist thing was your basic measure of how good a game is going to do, five years ago," he says. "On the day of launch, you got an email saying this game you've wishlisted is available. It was basically a mailing list. And five years ago, that was the metric. Your Develop talk was why wishlists are your secret to success. Here we are, five years later, I don't think it makes a fucking difference anymore. Same problem as Twitter, right? You get an email in your inbox saying Size Five's latest game is out now. And you look at it and go, 'Well, fuck it, that's one of 20 games I've got wishlisted that comes out this week.' It's water off a duck's back. It just goes past you, and then that moment's gone."

From the other side, here in the land of games journalism, it also used to be a lot easier to predict what was going to blow up. And some of the games that would have been massive a decade ago are still enjoying that kind of fortune today. But when you've got a barrage of new releases every minute, it's increasingly hard to tell if this random, ugly game that lies about the existence of vampires is going to drift off into obscurity or become a global obsession.

"Vampire Survivors is really interesting to me, because everything about Vampire Survivors has the air of just, some bloke made a shitty little game," Marshall says. "Vampire Survivors, being polite, looked bad when it first launched, right? But obviously struck gold with a vibe that worked with people and they found it interesting and passed it on through word of mouth. And now every fucking third trailer I see for an indie game is functionally Vampire Survivors. It's an entire genre that people have run with, and the game itself has done incredibly well."

What's the secret sauce? Nobody seems to know. "You could drive yourself mad trying to recreate it—you never will," he says. "There's no point going, 'Oh, let's just do what Vampire Survivors did', and put up a bad-looking game in early access for a quid and see what happens. Because whatever that zeitgeist was, it's gone.

"The core of it was a good game that people enjoyed playing. If it wasn't, it would have died on its arse. But 'It's a good game that people enjoy playing' is not the solution to that. Because, as you know, there are plenty of good games that are fun to play that have had nothing near Vampire Survivors' success."

Maybe the solution is just to make a good game and then wing it. Hope for the best. Pray that Steam's impossible-to-understand discoverability works in your favour. But that sounds like a daunting way to run a business.

Marshall's pretty sanguine about the whole thing. "Size Five has always just plodded along without a colossal success, which is fine by me. I'm still here after 20 years, which I consider to be a success. The weird thing is, would I be happier if any of those games had done Vampire Survivors numbers? Probably not, because the spotlight and the money hose brings its whole own list of problems, right? You've suddenly got angry people demanding updates. You've got a product out that's got bugs in it. That's not how I like to operate at all."

Fortunately, my contract stipulates that I will be embalmed and lie in state like Lenin in the centre of the PC Gamer offices until the end of time, but others don't have that luxury (we're short on desk space as it is). Hideo Kojima, for instance, is achieving immortality by cramming a USB stick full of ideas for his staff to use after he concludes his tenancy on Earth.

In a chat with our comrades at Edge magazine, Kojima said a serious illness during the Covid-19 pandemic reminded him of his mortality: "Until then, I didn't think I was old, you know? I just didn't feel my age, and I assumed I would be able to create for as long as I live." Sickness disillusioned him of that. "I couldn't create anything. And I saw lots of people around me passing away at that time. I was confronted with death."

Though Kojima recovered and is now full-swing on putting out Death Stranding 2, the experience stayed with him. He began to wonder how long he had left to keep doing creative work—"Perhaps I would have 10 years?"

It's that confrontation with mortality, says Kojima, that produced the pitch for Physint, but it produced something else, too: a USB stick filled with Kojima-brand ideas for his staff to pore through after he's gone. "I gave a USB stick with all my ideas on it to my personal assistant," said the man himself, "kind of like a will.

"Perhaps they could continue to make things after I'm gone, here at Kojima Productions… This is a fear for me—what happens to Kojima Productions after I'm gone. I don't want them to just manage our existing IP."

To be honest, I can't think of anything more Kojima than games still coming out with his name over the title sometime in 2150. If anyone deserves this kind of intellectual preservation, it's the guy who got a Game Boy Advance game made with a solar sensor built into the cartridge. You reckon the idea for a game where you get old, die, and forget how to move is on there? Hopefully Kojima's assistant backed it up, in any case.

As is tradition, the games industry will gather over a few days in June to make as many videogame announcements as humanly possible before dispersing until the next big thing. But no, this is still not E3 (that was cancelled in 2023), but don't sweat it if you're confused. What used to be one event has now fractured into more than a dozen. It's a lot to keep track of.

When is Summer Game Fest 2025?

Summer Game Fest 2025 begins on Friday, June 6, at 2 pm PDT / 5 pm EDT / 10 pm BST.

That's when Geoff Keighley kicks things off at the YouTube Theater with a two-hour broadcast revealing new games or offering updates on other unreleased projects. The YouTube embed above will show a trailer for SGF until the event goes live.

This year's event mostly takes place over the following weekend through June 8, but there are usually some outliers before, after, and during SGF's main few days that aren't officially affiliated with SGF. I said it's not E3, but you can think of it like E3—everyone knows it's the big game announcement week, so they schedule their own thing.

The Summer Game Fest 2025 schedule

The Summer Game Fest 2025 schedule includes a number of smaller showcases held between June 4 and June 9, though there are even more streams not on the "official" list. Here's where to point your browser for a nearly nonstop flood of trailers.

June 4

Only one event is scheduled for June 4. Consider it an appetizer (but a big one!).

Sony State of Play

Watch on Twitch / YouTube
Airing June 4 at: 2 pm PDT / 5 pm EDT / 10 pm BST and June 5 at 7 am AEST

Sony's jumping out ahead of Summer Game Fest to show off the latest from its PlayStation studios and partners. Dare we hope for the long-rumored Final Fantasy Tactics remaster to finally appear?

June 6

Now we're getting into the action: this is when SGF kicks off.

Access-Ability Summer Showcase

Watch on Twitch / YouTube
Airing June 6 at: 8 am PDT / 11 am EDT / 4 pm BST and June 7 at 1 am AEST

Access-Ability's third annual showcase gives disabled game developers the spotlight to share their games and feature accessibility settings and design. The broadcast is among the first of the summer gaming season, with streams from years prior lasting around 45 minutes.

Where to watch Summer Game Fest 2025

Watch on Twitch / YouTube
Airing June 6, 2 pm PDT / 5 pm EDT / 10 pm BST / and June 7, 7 am AEST

The Summer Game Fest 2025 showcase serves as the big kickoff, where big studios and publishers reveal all of their worst kept secrets or genuine surprises over two hours. If you want to start researching predictions, we've got a long list chronicling everything announced at Summer Game Fest 2024.

Day of the Devs 2025: Summer Game Fest Edition

Watch on Twitch / YouTube
Airing June 6, 4 pm PDT / 7 pm EDT and June 7, 12 am BST / 9 am AEST

Starting immediately after the Summer Game Fest 2025 stream, Day of the Devs keeps the announcements rolling with more games from upcoming or underrepresented developers. The non-profit has a history spotlighting some cool as hell, recent favorites like Thank Goodness You're Here and 1000xResist.

June 7

Saturday will see a full day of smaller showcases, one after another, many of them showcases games from specific groups of creators or parts of the world.

Wholesome Direct 2025

Watch on Twitch / YouTube
Airing June 7, 9 am PDT / 12 pm EDT / 5 pm BST and June 8, 2 am AEST

Quite a few of us at PC Gamer closely follow the never-ending list of cozy games and demos, and the Wholesome Games showcases often fuel much of it. This summer's upcoming Wholesome Direct estimates it has "about 60" comforting or cathartic indies under the big ole 'cozy' umbrella to share.

Women-Led Games showcase

Watch on Twitch / YouTube
Airing June 7 at: 10 am PDT / 1 pm EDT / 6 pm BST and June 8 at 3 am AEST

The second summer showcase for games from women-led dev teams will cover 39 games, including "deep dives, release announcements, DLC" and more. There's also going to be a corresponding Steam sale from June 6-13.

Latin American Games Showcase

Watch on Twitch / YouTube
Airing June 7 at: 11 am PDT / 2 pm EDT / 7 pm BST and June 8 at 4 am AEST

The Latin American Games showcase promises 50 games in 50 minutes, a breakneck pace for upcoming games from Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic and more. The showcase channel has featured some banger indies in recent months, including Arco, Arranger, and Mullet Madjack. Expect a few of this and next year's sleeper hits to make an appearance here.

Southeast Asian Games Showcase

Watch on Twitch / YouTube
Airing June 7 at: 12 pm PDT / 3 pm EDT / 8 pm BST and June 8 at 5 am AEST

The first SGF-partnered showcase focused on games from Southeast Asia is also being sponsored by Xbox and Gamescom Asia, and promises more than 45 games from SEA developers. Of the games already announced for the showcase, Coffee Talk Tokyo and Eat the Rich have caught our eye.

Future Games Show Summer Showcase

Watch on Twitch / YouTube
Airing June 7 at: 1 pm PDT / 4 pm EDT / 9 pm BST and June 8 at 6 am AEST

The Future Games Show just wrapped up its spring event, but there's even more on the way with the summer showcase just around the corner. The next FGS includes over 40 games, and Critical Role's Laura Bailey and Matthew Mercer keep us entertained through the evening as hosts.

Frosty Games Fest

Watch on Twitch / YouTube
Airing June 7 at: 4 pm PDT / 7 pm EDT and June 8 at 12 am BST / 9 am AEST

The first showcase focused specifically on games made in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, and promising "cool sh*t." No word on how many games to expect from this one!

June 8

Another big day, featuring both Xbox and the PC Gaming Show!

Xbox Games Showcase 2025

Watch on Twitch / YouTube
Airing June 8 at: 10 am PDT / 1 pm EDT / 6 pm BST and June 9 at 3 am AEST

This year's Xbox presentation kicks things off with both first- and third-party studios, but later hands the microphone over to Obsidian Entertainment for The Outer Worlds 2 Direct. It's done the same thing for games like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Starfield, occupying anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes of that two-hour block.

PC Gaming Show

Watch on Twitch / YouTube
Airing June 8 at: 12 pm PDT / 3 pm EDT / 8 pm BST and June 9 at 5 am AEST

Oh hey, that's us! This year's PC Gaming Show returns with reveals, developer interviews, and exclusive announcements for more than 50 games on PC, Steam Deck, MacOS, and Linux. For an idea of what past streams have looked like, check out our list of every game and announcement from the 2024 PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted.

Death Stranding 2 Game Premiere

Watch on Twitch / YouTube
Airing June 8 at: 7 pm PDT / 10 pm EDT and June 9 at 3 am BST / 12 pm AEST

Premiere doesn't quite seem like the right word for an event focused on a game we first covered in 2022, but we're not going to complain about a new Kojima trailer. The event will "celebrate the game’s upcoming launch with a panel discussion with special guests and an exclusive live demonstration of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach."

June 9

We currently only know of one event on June 9, closing out this busy period.

Black Voices in Gaming

Watch on Twitch / YouTube
Airing June 9 at: 9 am PDT / 12 pm EDT / 5 pm BST and June 10 at 2 am AEST

The annual Black Voices in Gaming showcase "spotlighting an electrifying mix of games and music from talented Black creators worldwide" will include some world premiere trailers as well as interviews with developers.

This will be the second time Laura Bailey is hosting the showcase, and she seems ecstatic to be back. When sharing the news, she stated "I’m delighted to confirm that I'll be returning to present the Future Games Show for the second time. I’m really looking forward to sharing the stage with my good friend and Critical Role co-star Matthew Mercer. We’ll have a great mix of indie games and blockbuster titles to help you discover something new."

Mercer also expressed his excitement to be hosting the show for the first time, "I’m thrilled to reveal I will be hosting the Future Games Show this summer. Laura tells me I’m going to have a blast! Make sure to mark your calendars, because it’s going to be a stacked presentation full of world premieres, game demo drops and insightful developer interviews. See you in June!"

You'll be able to tune into the Future Games Show summer showcase at 4 PM ET (9 PM BST) on June 7, and the show will be hosted on YouTube, Bilibili, Twitch, X, Facebook, TikTok, and by our friends over at GamesRadar. So, there's no excuse to not watch it, really. Especially with such wonderful hosts talking us through everything and a mass of exclusive content ready to be shared.

Don't just bounce as soon as it's finished either. FGS Live From Los Angeles will be airing straight after the showcase, and there will be additional exclusive trailers, interviews, and news for you to sink your teeth into. So fret not, if your most anticipated game for 2025 wasn't shown off in the main summer showcase, there's always this event too.

Being pleased as punch about this, CEO Yves Guillemot announced in an investor call (thanks, Eurogamer) that the company'd be delaying a couple more of its mainline titles. As a treat.

The delay that came for Assassin's Creed Shadows, which Guillemot calls a "good decision to deliver a really strong quality" is to be mirrored in some of its other top brands. "After a review of our pipeline, we have decided to provide additional development time to some of our biggest productions in order to create the best conditions for success."

Guillemot says that 2026, '27, and '28 are going to be big years for Ubisoft, implying that 2025 will stay relatively humble. And hey, surely this is good news for the studio's developers, right? Ubisoft'll be giving them more time to develop their games, right? No more layoffs for cost-cutting, right?

Well, Guillemot is glad Ubisoft managed to save €200 million last year—and has henceforth pledged to save another €100 million: "We also completed our initial cost savings program ahead of schedule. We are committed to going further, with additional savings of at least €100m over the next two years to drive structural efficiencies and reinforce the foundations of our organisation."

It might just be the cynic in me, but given how cutthroat the industry's gotten, I would be shocked if this was the end of Ubisoft's shareholder-mandated march towards cut costs and infinite growth, while developers pay the bill. The two years of "cost savings" also involved laying off over 700 people since 2023, and the closure of entire teams. I seriously hope I'm wrong.

As for what's being delayed, that's yet to be announced—but I shall hold onto my nugget of hope and believe against belief that Ubisoft is merely being sensible in taking its time.

To celebrate that legacy of cutting-edge craftsmanship, former ILM chief creative officer and current senior vice president of creative innovation at Lucasfilm Rob Bredow got on a TED stage in April to share a vision of what he called "a new era of technology" (via 404 Media). That vision was a two-minute AI-generated video of blue lions and chimpanzees with zebra stripes, not to mention the ungodly outcome of snail and peacock interbreeding.

Bredow began his talk with a summary of ILM's history, founded 50 years ago to "solve the visual storytelling challenges" in Star Wars. As Bredow describes it, ILM's success came from artists and engineers working in tandem, blending aesthetic sensibility with technical innovation. He shared anecdotes from the production histories of Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, and the Mandalorian—moments where artists elevated what could be achieved with new technology, rather than be replaced by it.

"That's blending the old and new—how tech and creativity working hand in hand create things we just love," Bredow said. "So what happens when you put the latest AI tools in the hands of talented artists, both to see how good these tools are these days, and what does it do to our artists' imagination?"

Unfortunately, I don't think tech and creativity were particularly aligned on this one.

Bredow then moved on to his premiere of Star Wars: Field Guide, a short film created by an ILM artist over the course of two weeks using AI generation to "explore what it would feel like if you sent a probe droid out to a brand new Star Wars planet." And I can safely say that if I sent a probe down to a Star Wars planet and got back images of alligator heads crudely spliced onto turtle bodies, I'd be pretty bummed.

Field Guide is, to be frank, embarrassing. Despite the triumphant Star Wars score, ILM's foray into AI generation didn't produce anything remotely compelling—or even particularly alien. It made a mostly normal sloth with bits of rock sticking out of its fur. It put a peacock head on a snail. There's a bear with tiger stripes. There's a blue gazelle, and also a blue lion, and a pink iguana, and a couple walruses with octopus bits stuck on there, and none of it makes me feel anything because why would I care about a barely-fake creature—essentially just two existing animals smushed together—which nobody bothered to make themselves?

"It's pretty fun to see artist expression leveraging the latest new tools," Bredow said as the film ended to perhaps the most generous applause anyone has ever given, and I have to ask: Is it? The AI-generated imagery doesn't have any glaring errors, but what was fun here? What's being expressed by a person typing "what if a hyena had an ape's face" for two weeks?

Bredow closed out his talk as though he had illustrated a point—that his two minutes of animated creature collage is a stepping stone towards, as he said, "that next Star Destroyer moment that's going to light up screens around the world."

I'm still waiting to be convinced.

In a Reddit post last week, Hall alleged that Unity—whose relationship with game developers has been strained in recent years—accused the studio of violating its terms of service based on "bogus data about private versus public licenses." Those accusations, Hall says, raise troubling questions about Unity's data collection practices.

On May 9, RocketWerkz received an unexpected email from Unity Technologies. Unity's data, the email said, showed that some of the studio's employees had been using personal Unity licenses instead of the Pro license required for companies of RocketWerkz' size.

The email kindly informed RocketWerkz that if immediate action wasn't taken, Unity reserved the right to revoke the studio's existing licenses on May 16—just seven days after the email was delivered.

In his Reddit post, Hall explained that "a significant portion" of his studio's games had been developed with Unity, estimating that RocketWerkz has spent over $300,000 on Unity licensing over the last 10 years. As anyone might do when being threatened with the revocation of something they'd invested a third of a million dollars on, the studio asked what evidence Unity had of its supposed wrongdoing.

Unity is threatening to revoke all licenses for developers with flawed data that appears to be scraped from personal data from r/gamedev

Unity replied with five email addresses that its systems had shown as having been logged into Unity development software with inappropriate licenses. According to Hall, the email addresses Unity had flagged were:

• A rocketwerkz.com email address for a team member with a Unity Personal license, who does not work on the studio's Unity projects
• The personal email address of another RocketWerkz employee, who already holds one of the pro licenses that the studio is paying for
• A rocketwerkz.com email address for an external contractor who was provided one of the studio's Unity Pro Licenses for a period in 2024
• Two email addresses for employees at another company based in the same city at RocketWerkz, neither of whom have ever worked for the studio

Hall said "not a single one of those" is a violation of Unity terms of service, but he's particularly concerned with the two email addresses that were seemingly associated with RocketWerkz for no reason other than geographic proximity.

"Beyond Unity threatening long-term customers with immediate revocation of licenses over shaky evidence, this raises some serious questions about how Unity is scraping this data and then processing it," Hall said.

As some redditors note in the comments, Hall's explanation of the flagged RocketWerkz employees could have been caused by studio staff using their company emails for personal Unity accounts and vice versa. Those would, technically, be license violations that could cause confusion on Unity's end if it sees some users with RocketWerkz addresses working under pro licenses while others aren't.

It doesn't help that, as one commenter said, licenses for Unity are "infectious."

"If a person at the company opened their personal project with a company licensed copy of Unity, even once, then that project becomes marked," redditor TheDoddler said. "Working on that project in the future on any version of Unity that is not a licensed version then becomes a license violation. The opposite is also true, using a personal copy of Unity to open a project marked by a license is also a violation."

Another commenter noted that this was a headache they'd personally experienced while working from home on a development project. They discovered that there's no way in the Unity Hub development software to alternate between personal and professional licenses—even when a user has access to both. Apparently, when they contacted Unity, they were told that the only solution was to manually edit a text file whenever they had to switch between licenses.

If that's the case, it's—at best—an oversight on Unity's part that its software doesn't accommodate use cases that could provoke inadvertent license violations. At worst, it's pressuring developers into making additional license purchases they wouldn't need to otherwise.

Speaking to PC Gamer over email, Hall said the speculation about license juggling issues was "ironic," because every email address flagged by Unity belonged to someone who had set up separate personal Unity accounts rather than having both their pro and personal licenses associated with a single email address. His own account, meanwhile, has a variety of licenses assigned to it—and his wasn't flagged.

"The people, contractors, and employees who have gotten flagged are those who had separate logins," Hall said.

Even if RocketWerkz staff did have a license mixup, it doesn't explain how Unity concluded that RocketWerkz was to blame for two entirely unrelated user accounts. Expecting the studio to rectify the situation within a week or face complete license revocation, meanwhile, bears shades of the corporate callousness that contributed to Unity's runtime fee fiasco in 2023, which enraged just about every game developer and drove prior Unity CEO John Riccitiello to depart from the company.

Last month, Unity's current CEO, Matt Bromberg, said the company was working to move away from the period where it was "at war with our customers." Considering that even hobbyist developers are reporting that they've received similar threats of license revocation from Unity, it seems like that attempted armistice has produced mixed results.

When contacted by PC Gamer for comment, Unity only reiterated its policy that its terms of service "don't allow mixing license tiers within the same organization."

Hall told PC Gamer that the licensing dispute has only validated his studio's decision to move away from Unity development. For new projects, like the upcoming Kitten Space Agency, Hall said the studio has already "sunset" Unity development completely. Losing the studio's current license, however, would mean losing its ability to develop for its games that—at least for now—rely on Unity functionality, like Stationeers and the in-development Torpedia.

Regardless of where it leaves the studio's games, Hall said Unity's accusation leaves him concerned about data privacy, and how these types of disputes could affect developers who can't pivot to new game engines as easily.

"I do wonder if there are some serious data violations going on with Unity, and they appear to be threatening to use this data to close down developer accounts," Hall said. "How will this affect users who don't have the clout I do?"

In addition to record profits, Capcom also reported 51.87 million game sales, yet another all-time high for the company. Attributing the success to "flagship series performance," Capcom announced that Monster Hunter Wilds had sold over 10 million copies by the end of the fiscal year on March 31.

We liked the latest Monster Hunter quite a bit in our Wilds review, though I'll confess I'm hoping that Capcom can set aside some of that record-breaking income to push out a few sorely-needed performance patches for its sales leader.

It wasn't just Wilds bolstering Capcom sales, though. According to the FY2024 earnings supplement, Monster Hunter: World added another 3.1 million sales during FY2024 while Monster Hunter: Rise sold another 2.4 million copies. Altogether, the Monster Hunter series has now sold over 100 million copies. A proud day for palicoes everywhere.

Beyond hitting dinosaurs with hammers, Resident Evil brought in over 8 million sales with its various remakes, and Street Fighter brought in more than 1.3 million fighters to throw a few fireballs. Even Dragon's Dogma 2—which some especially enlightened minds have recognized as a GOTY-worthy great—added another million to Capcom's annual sales total.

Looking ahead, Capcom says its plans for the immediate future are focused on growing its catalog sales—that is, sales for games released in the previous fiscal year or earlier. In 2025, we can safely expect a continued emphasis on Monster Hunter Wilds post-release support (with an all but inevitable Master Rank expansion waiting somewhere in the wings). And hey, an Onimusha 2 remaster coming later this month can't hurt.

Someone hit it with a Gaussian blur, basically.

As reported by The Verge, Google is rolling out this change piecemeal—starting with updates to Google app on IOS and Pixel phones, and likely coming to a search engine near you. In fact, the only search engine you likely use.

The change is, to put it politely, minimalist. When I say "just hit it with a Gaussian blur", I'm exaggerating a little, but not much. I double-checked with my non-colour-blind colleagues after doing this, but I popped the old logo into some photo-editing software and hit it with the Gaussian blur tool just to see if my instinct was right. Google's new logo is on the left, the one I edited is on the right.

It's dang close. The actual logo has a little more yellow in it, and said yellow yaws a little closer to the orange spectrum of light—which might be because my blurring made the original G a smidge transparent, something I solved by duplicating the layer a lot and merging it all together.

Which leads me to a very funny conclusion: This might be the most expensive Gaussian blur in history. Brand redesigns, no matter how small, are incredibly costly. Here's a shortlist I gathered just by doing a bit of (and the irony is not lost on me) googling:

In 2022, the BBC spent £7 million on its rebranding, a fact that had to be wrung out of them during an "eight month freedom of information battle". British Petroleum came under fire in 2000 for a logo redesign that reportedly cost £4.6 million (and another £132 million to rebrand "its stationery, van liveries and manufacturing plants").

The most egregious example is when, in 2008, Pepsi apparently spent one million on a logo redesign that moved the red and blue lines of the logo slightly. This was revealed years later in what I can only describe as the funniest leaked document I've ever set eyes on. At one point, it compares the Pepsi logo to the Earth's magnetic field. The words "Pepsi Energy Fields" are on an official document from the Pepsi company circa 2008, and I am not kidding.

How much did Google's redesign cost? I have no clue, and unless the company releases the numbers itself, we'll never find out. But we can safely assume given both the scale of Google's operations and the historical precedence that it was a lot. It was a lot of money.

Anyway, I'm not interested in dunking on the team of graphic designers who undoubtedly put a lot of hard thought and work into Google's new logo. They're operating on levels of awareness of both design theory and marketing know-how that are unfathomable to me. Redesigns like this are expensive because they include rounds upon rounds of design, constant talks, iterations, focus group testing, research, and so on. It's a whole operation.

But you've gotta admit, it's a little astonishing. Hypothetical millions spent to, well, make the G a little blurrier. Wonders will never cease.

The report states that "Games revenue decreased 48% [excluding foreign currencies] due to the prior year release of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League compared to no releases in the current year quarter, as well as higher carryover from Hogwarts Legacy and Mortal Kombat 1 in the prior year."

Which all checks out. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League actually lost Warner Bros $200 million, and that was back in June 2024. It's hard to get an exact timeline, but given the game wrapped up its final proper update in January of this year, it's safe to assume it's lost a touch more cash.

Now, in fairness to Rocksteady—and the report itself—any successful game will see a drop in revenue the quarter after, for the simple fact that games take a long time to make and hits are rare. Hogwarts Legacy sold gangbusters, with over 22 million copies flooding cash directly into Warner Bros' pocket. You could make some very decent games after that and still see a drop in revenue.

The real corporate mic-drop happens as WB explains its lower expenses—what it's spending—on gaming content, which dropped 66% "primarily driven by the prior year quarter impairment related to Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and lower games revenue in the current quarter".

Oof. Having your game name directly called out as being related to a quarter-year impairment feels like the most savage takedown you'd get in a business earnings report.

Especially since that drop in expenses is likely related to a sweep of closures that saw Monolith, Player First Games, and WB San Diego shuttered—alongside a Wonder Woman game. This is all conjecture, sure—but when you say you're spending 66% less money on games after you closed a bunch of studios, then say that's because of an impairment "related" to a poorly-performing game? It's conjecture with meat on the bone, at least.

It's completely scrubbed-clean, anesthetised, unoffensive language that nonetheless suggests a miserable attitude towards Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League's market flop. I feel like I'm a noble in a highly political fantasy drama dropping my glass of wine in shock, because some lord suggested the fair lady's etiquette was passing strange. The scandal!

It's been a similarly miserable time to work in the games industry, and I personally pin this failure on the leadership who decided to make this game rather than the developers forced to make it, but it's no wonder its finale resulted in layoffs and the head of WB games stepping down.

The "Rule Concerning Subscriptions and Other Negative Option Plans", or more simply the "Negative Option Rule", is a regulation passed under the Biden administration late last year that's designed to crack down on companies using predatory tactics to try to prevent people from canceling their subscriptions. That includes any practice that makes it significantly harder to cancel a subscription than it was to sign up.

The Negative Option Rule was set to go into effect on May 14, but on May 9, the FTC voted 3-0 to delay enforcing compliance until July 14, 2025.

The FTC statement on the delay claims this was to "ensure ample time for companies to conform their conduct to the Rule," meaning adjust their policies to make cancelling subscriptions easier like the Negative Option Rule requires.

The reluctance to begin enforcing the law might also be due to ongoing lawsuits from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the Electronic Security Association, and the Internet and Television Association (NCTA), who are trying to block the Negative Option Rule.

It probably shouldn't come as a surprise that cable companies and advertisers aren't fans of a law that would force them to make it easier for consumers to save money.

Ironically, their pushback against the Negative Option Rule highlights why it's necessary. Business practices that make it unnecessarily difficult to cancel recurring charges can be the virtual equivalent of highway robbery, especially when companies are vague or deceptive about what you're signing up for—for instance, automatically charging customers for a full year's subscription without warning because they didn't cancel a "free trial."

That's not to say that free trials and subscriptions are always predatory. However, anyone who's found themself stuck on the phone or in an endless loop of customer service emails trying to get back money from a charge they didn't mean to pay knows how costly even one encounter with a shady subscription can be. That's what the Negative Option Rule is supposed to prevent.

As the FTC summary states, the rule was "calculated to combat unfair or deceptive business practices, including recurring charges for products or services consumers do not want and cannot cancel without undue difficulty."

Businesses can still offer free trials and as many subscription options as they want. They just can't make you jump through hoops and run a lap around Mordor to cancel. Being clear about what consumers are signing up for and respecting their freedom to cancel their subscriptions shouldn't be controversial.

The FTC initially gave businesses 180 days already to prepare to comply with the Negative Option Rule. An additional 2 months is generous, but hopefully the FTC doesn't continue deferring enforcement. This law might not be popular with business titans, but it's the kind of protection consumers have needed for a long time.

Subsequently, an episode of Giant Bomb's podcast in which the hosts made fun of Fandom's brand safety concerns was taken down, and several senior members of the site's staff announced they wouldn't be working for Giant Bomb any more.

An unexpected reversal of fortunes was announced at PAX East, where during a Giant Bomb panel it was revealed that Fandom had sold Giant Bomb to two of its staff, Jeff Bakalar and Jeff Grubb, who will be running it as an independent operation from now on. As Bakalar and Grubb put it in a joint statement, "Giant Bomb is now owned by the people who make Giant Bomb, and it would not have been possible without the speedy efforts of Fandom and our mutual agreement on what's best for fans and creators."

As Fandom's own statement explained, "Fandom has made the strategic decision to transition Giant Bomb back to its independent roots and the brand has been acquired by longtime staff and content creators, Jeff Bakalar and Jeff Grubb, who will now own and operate the site independently."

During the PAX East panel, it was made clear that Bakalar and Grubb will keep the site's archives and will run the site independently, with funding coming via subscriptions and merch sales.

Nintendo's specific new phrasing, distinct from its prior EULA from 2021, is that "You acknowledge that if you fail to comply with the foregoing restrictions Nintendo may render the Nintendo Account Services and/or the applicable Nintendo device [emphasis mine] permanently unusable in whole or in part." The restrictions in question are that you may not:

• "Publish, copy, modify, reverse engineer, lease, rent, decompile, disassemble, distribute, offer for sale, or create derivative works of any portion of the Nintendo Account Services."
• "Bypass, modify, decrypt, defeat, tamper with, or otherwise circumvent any of the functions or protections of the Nintendo Account Services, including through the use of any hardware or software that would cause the Nintendo Account Services to operate other than in accordance with its documentation and intended use."
• "Obtain, install or use any unauthorized copies of Nintendo Account Services."
• "Exploit the Nintendo Account Services in any manner other than to use them in accordance with the applicable documentation and intended use, in each case, without Nintendo’s written consent or express authorization, or unless otherwise expressly permitted by applicable law."

For context, the same section of the EULA used to read: "You are not allowed to lease, rent, sublicense, publish, copy, modify, adapt, translate, reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble all or any portion of the Nintendo Account Services without Nintendo's written consent, or unless otherwise expressly permitted by applicable law."

The sections I most take issue with are the prohibitions on copying, modifying, or decompiling software—particularly as it no longer accounts for it being "expressly permitted by applicable law"—as well as hardware/software modifications "that would cause the Nintendo Account Services to operate other than in accordance with its documentation and intended use."

No game or hardware modding, no extracting ROMs⁠—something Nintendo continuously asserts we cannot do, even though it is a legally protected consumer right⁠—and no dual booting to another OS.

There's also the very legitimate concern of the notoriously heavy-handed, litigious company acting on false positives. I don't know what means Nintendo has to detect such activity and kill a console, but I'm getting a clear message: You spent $450 on this hardware, but Nintendo does not think you own it.

There are plenty of legitimate reasons to jailbreak or modify a console, or extract a ROM from a game you own: Many original Switch games run better via PC emulation than on the original console, and Nintendo is only just catching up to that capability with the Switch 2's potentially compromised backwards-compatibility.

Even more pressing is the inevitable discontinuation of proprietary online services, like we saw recently with the 3DS and Wii U. Just before that was finalized, Nintendo pushed an update to 3DS consoles which made them harder to jailbreak.

This is also something that makes Nintendo's subscription-based access to its classic games library all the more galling to me, and in Nintendo's new EULA update, it now explicitly warns that it may discontinue its online services. In the face of such unreliability, user modification of a device to ensure it remains fully functional is a perfectly reasonable solution.

Going beyond legitimate hardware modifications, I'm a firm believer that piracy is as much a question of service and convenience as finance, and Nintendo's moves to consolidate its own control of products people legitimately purchase are inconvenient, annoying impositions that will annoy fans and drive away customers.

Amid an ongoing campaign against emulation, Nintendo continues to throw its muscle around, emboldened by the generation-defining sales success of the original Switch, but also clearly threatened by the rise of PC handhelds, emulators which run its own games better than the original hardware, and rumblings of future Xbox and PlayStation portables.

I feel vindicated in my assessment that the Switch 2 is all stick and no carrot: Lacking truly exciting industrial design innovations (except the Joy Con mouse, which I actually quite like) or tech/hardware improvements to set the console apart from a more crowded handheld market, the Switch 2 can only rely on name recognition, customer inertia, and console-exclusive games to move units, much like its living room-bound rival, the PlayStation 5. All three console manufacturers have well and truly left behind the plug-and-play "it just works" convenience that used to set them apart from PCs.

And there's even more in the EULA that's worth flagging, as pointed out by Game File. A change in the wording of the EULA for minors that places responsibility on their legal guardians seems designed to further head off embarrassing lawsuits like the infamous Joy Con drift ones, ensuring such cases are forced into arbitration. Nintendo also joins in an unfortunate trend we can't even escape on PC: Explicitly spelling out that we do not own our games, and instead only "license" them.

That last embarrassment aside, these odious impositions are a big part of why I'm largely a desktop and Steam Deck-exclusive gamer at this point. I want to understand, modify, and be able to use the hardware I purchase for as long as I see fit, not be beholden to the proprietary services of a notoriously consumer-unfriendly company.

Sure, Microsoft keeps trying to push a new version of Clippy that lies and screenshots your credit card information, but Linux gaming only keeps getting better thanks to SteamOS—if things get bad enough in the house that Bill built, I'll make the move. I still love the original Nintendo Switch, but everything I've learned about its follow-up makes me think the 2017 hybrid console was lightning in a bottle.

The announcement of the new union followed confirmation from a neutral arbitrator that an "overwhelming majority" of employees had either signed a union authorization card or indicated support for unionization online. The CWA says Microsoft has recognized the union.

"After a long history of layoffs, crunch, and subpar working conditions in the global videogame industry, my coworkers and I are thrilled to be joining the broader union effort to organize our industry for the better, which has been long overdue," senior test analyst II and organizing committee member Foster Elmendorf said. "Workers organizing themselves and striving for better conditions as a group allows us to present initiatives that would not only improve our workplace but videogames overall."

There has indeed been a big push toward unionization in recent years, and Microsoft has earned some credit in years past for not actively opposing such efforts: In 2022, for instance, the CWA trumpeted a "ground-breaking labor neutrality agreement" with Microsoft over unionization at Activision Blizzard, which at that time was not officially a part of Microsoft, and in 2023 it ran a pro-union ad in the Washington Post that was endorsed by the CWA. The following year, World of Warcraft senior producer Samuel Cooper gave credit to Microsoft for helping to facilitate the unionization of WoW devs.

Microsoft isn't the only beneficiary of game industry unionization efforts. One major move occurred in March, when the CWA announced United Videogame Workers—CWA, an industry-wide, "direct-join organization" that's open to developers regardless of where they work (as long as it's in North America) or whether their individual workplace is already organized.

Much of the drive to unionize arises from the absolutely brutal layoffs of 2023 and 2024, which saw tens of thousands of people in the industry put out of work. Speaking to Kotaku, Blizzard test analyst Simon Hedrick said "the biggest issue was the layoffs at the beginning of 2024," when Microsoft cut 1,900 jobs at Activision Blizzard and Xbox. "People were gone out of nowhere and there was nothing we could do about it," Hedrick said. "What I want to protect most here is the people."

Overwatch UI artist Sadie Boyd, who was previously with Arkane Austin before Microsoft closed the studio, expressed similar sentiments on X.

"Not only do I get to work alongside an incredibly talented team, but also with some of the most thoughtful and kindhearted people I've ever encountered," she wrote. "It's because of their nature that we unionize—to protect them."

The bloom might be starting to come off Microsoft's seemingly pro-union rose a little bit: In April 2025, members of the ZeniMax Workers United-CWA union voted "overwhelmingly" to authorize union leadership to call for a strike if contract negotiations, which have been underway for nearly two years, continue to fail to make meaningful headway.

Nonetheless, the Communications Workers of America says more than 2,600 people at Microsoft studios have joined CWA-affiliated unions since the labor neutrality agreement was reached, enabling them to "collectively push for workplace improvements like layoff protections, job security, wage increases, limits to outsourcing, and remote work protections."

That's a big boost over the usual 5% offering on Epic Games Store purchases, and it's simple math, as Epic demonstrated with this handy-dandy image: When, for instance, you spend $23 on 2,800 V-Bucks, you can get $4.60 back in Epic Rewards, or you can get nothing.

The 20% rewards offer applies on all platforms, and yes, it's permanent.

"Competition is a wonderful thing!" Epic boss Tim Sweeney enthused.

The announcement of the new Epic Rewards offering comes basically side-by-side with Epic's announcement that it's "submitted Fortnite to Apple for review so we can launch on the App Store in the US."

So, how did we get here? Fortnite's imminent return to the App Store follows just a week after Epic's major courtroom victory over Apple in a legal battle that began all the way back in 2020. While Apple mostly came out on top in that dispute, Epic did score one big win when the courts ruled that Apple could not stop iOS app developers from directing users to their own payment processor outside of the app, rather than Apple's.

This is potentially very advantageous for developers, because using an external payment processor for purchases would enable them to escape Apple's stiff 30% fee—so it's not really shocking that Apple's compliance with that ruling wasn't exactly enthusiastic.

Epic took exception to Apple's ongoing reluctance to comply with court orders in a meaningful way, which is what eventually led to this most recent ruling, which included a statement—from the judge, mind, not from Epic—that Apple "continued its anticompetitive conduct solely to maintain its revenue stream."

With Apple suitably chastised, Epic is swinging for the fences. The day after the ruling, Epic announced plans for "webshops" on the Epic Games Store that will enable developers to offer out-of-app purchases "as a more cost-effective alternative to in-app purchases, where Apple, Google, and others charge exorbitant fees."

To encourage people to use those webshops, any purchases made through them will also earn 5% back in Epic Rewards—not as high a percentage as its offering on its own games, but again, a whole lot better than nothing.

Even if you don't care about Fortnite or mobile gaming in general, you're not being left empty-handed: Epic is also offering 20% rewards on other Epic Games Store purchases—including games from other companies, not just Epic's own stuff—until August 31, also on all platforms. So if you were planning on buying something from the Epic Games Store, or maybe just pondering the possibility, now would be a good time.

The Epic Store purchase option for iOS devices is slated to go live alongside Fortnite's return to the App Store in the US (it returned to the App Store in Europe in 2024), which Epic obviously expects to happen very soon.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) charged Mashinsky with seven counts of fraud in July 2023. Mashinsky initially denied the charges, before pleading guilty to two counts of commodities fraud and securities fraud. The plea deal saw Mashinsky admit lying to Celsius customers about how the business operated and their funds would be invested, as well as manipulating the price of a proprietary crypto coin for personal benefit. Mashinsky also had to forfeit $48 million to the DOJ.

"Alexander Mashinsky orchestrated one of the biggest frauds in the crypto industry," said US Attorney Damian Williams in a statement at the time of the guilty plea. "Today's convictions reflect this Office's commitment to holding fraudsters like Mashinsky accountable for their crimes."

Celsius was founded in 2017 as a cryptocurrency lending platform and at one point boasted over $25 billion in customer assets (or so it claimed). Users could deposit crypto with Celsius with the promise of high-yield returns, or take out a cash loan secured against their crypto holdings, and the marketing was all about this being a trendy new alternative to traditional banks. Mashinsky characterised traditional banks as untrustworthy by, among other things, regularly wearing t-shirts with the logo "Banks Are Not Your Friends" and, yes, you're allowed to laugh.

Much like other crypto barons, such as Do Kwon and his "Lunatics", Mashinsky was the focal point for the company and had a devoted following of fans who he called "Celsians." When the Terra stablecoin and linked token Luna collapsed in May 2022, it caused an industry-wide downturn and enormous losses for Celsius (though prosecutors argue it wasn't in financially good health anyway).

The company went bust in July 2022 with court filings showing a $1.2 billion black hole in its finances, attracting the attention of both the DOJ and Vermont state regulators. The state regulator noted particularly the "losses suffered by retail investors; for example, middle-class, unaccredited investors who may have invested entire college funds or retirement accounts with Celsius."

Celsius' bankruptcy filing froze more than $4.7 billion in customer funds, of which approximately 60% have been recovered, but only partially as cash.

Mashinsky's sentencing is probably the most interesting element of the case, inasmuch as he could've faced 30 years but a plea deal should have seen that number come down significantly. Instead Mashinsky's defence argued that he should only be sentenced to a single year in prison, citing his guilty pleas, military service in Israel, childhood deprivations, and the wider crypto market's contribution to Celsius' downfall.

"This case is not about an arrogant, greedy swindler who thought he could get away with stealing people’s hard-earned money to satisfy his own hedonistic pleasures," said a court filing from Mashinsky's lawyers. "Those are post-hoc, shallow and dehumanizing tropes that do not apply here."

For its part the DOJ sought 20 years, arguing that despite his guilty plea Mashinsky had shown no contrition, and knew he was defrauding customers. The prosecution filing says:

"His crimes were not the product of negligence, naivete, or bad luck. They were the result of deliberate, calculated decisions to lie, deceive, and steal in pursuit of personal fortune. He has abandoned all pretense of acknowledging his sustained wrongdoing […] This profound lack of remorse underscores the continuing danger he poses."

So the question for the judge very much went to Mashinsky's character: is this guy someone who got in over his head, and lied to try and save the business? Or someone who set out to defraud people, deceived them about the nature of the business they were investing in, and walked off with millions?

Prosecutors unsurprisingly drew the comparison with Sam Bankman-Fried, sentenced to 25 years in prison for his leading role in the collapse of crypto exchange FTX. The defence argued the two cases were "nothing alike" and that, unlike Bankman-Fried, Mashinsky had not been accused of embezzlement or stealing customer funds (though he did withdraw $10 million from Celsius in May 2022 as everything went wrong).

The judge decided that Mashinsky's conduct warranted much more than one year and, while not giving the prosecution what it wanted, sentenced him to 12 years in federal prison. Mashinsky is 59 years old and will serve at least 85% of that time, even if granted early release for good behaviour.

It brings the curtain down on what had been a long and successful tech career. As recently as 2022 the Wall Street Journal described Mashinsky as "a brash, confident serial entrepreneur with a constant stream of big ideas", and he'd previously founded legitimate companies like VoiceSmart, GroundLink, Q-Wireless, and was briefly CEO of router company Novatel (now Mifi).