I guess I don’t need color in my video games, because I’ve been dazzled this year by a trio that’s in black and white.

All are out now and well worth a look…

Helix: Descent N Ascent

• Developer: Badass Mongoose

• Platforms: PC, Switch

Helix: DNA is one of the most visually interesting games of the year, with an art style inspired by, the developers say, “1980s indie comics, 1990s manga, and 1970s Franco-Belgian comics.”

You can admire it up top and in the screenshots below:

Helix is cleverly designed, but its excellence snuck up on me.

When I started, I thought I was a basic top-down exploration/puzzle game about a strange bipedal character walking through a starkly stunning world. My guy quickly gained the power to conjure blocks into existence. This ability is represented by a square that can be seen in the game’s user interface and in symbols in the game world. I used the power to drop blocks into watery gaps, forming bridges where old ones had crumbled. I explored a small world, using that power to solve some puzzles, found an exit and returned to the hub world where I’d begun.

Soon, I found a new symbol that gave me a new power: an ability represented by smile-curve (with a horizontal line under it) allowed my hero to summon and control a drone. This power replaced the ability to conjure blocks. Back into the main game world I went. I could no longer cast blocks to cross gaps, but I could send my drone into pipes to activate remote switches. Different puzzles solved.

Okay, I figured I’d keep finding powers that would swap with the previous one I’d collected.

Not quite.

Back in the hub world, I noticed a pedestal marked with a strange symbol. The light bulb went on. The strange symbol was a combination of a square and a smile-curve (with a horizontal line under it). I activated the symbol and, sure enough, I now had the block-making power and the drone-summoning power. Even better, I discovered I could combine those powers: I could make a block, fly the drone into it; the drone would posses the block, allowing me to move the block remotely.

That’s what this game actually is: not finding a small number of puzzle-solving powers and using one of them at a time, but repeatedly diving into a world equipped with different combinations of those powers, discovering what each combo can do.

I have a long way to go, but the interface—and the game’s promotional copy—indicate there are 25 different ways to play. I’m excited to find out what they make possible.

Towers of Scale

• Developer: Makiki

• Platform: PC [free demo available]

There might be some purple in this game, but the levels I’ve played have been black and white (with shades of gray).

Towers of Scale is a math game about directing a warrior through a dungeon filled with stationary enemies and locked doors. Your warrior starts at a power level designated by a specific number: say, 5. Every enemy also has a number: say, 3. If you’re a 5 and they’re a 3, walking into them eliminates the enemy and turns you into an 8.

That’s pretty much the game.

Some enemies have negative numbers that lower your total. And those with higher numbers than yours won’t budge. You might have to pass through a gate that halves your power. Try to do that when your number is low. Be sure to drink a power-doubling potion when your number is high.

All you need to do is find a numerically feasible path to the next staircase.

Easy, right?

Towers of Scale is tough!

Even as you scale up to defeat enemies marked 100, 500, 10,000 and beyond, your climb is easily stymied by bad mathematical decisions. I’ve gotten stuck a lot, keep hitting undo, and then I try again to find a good route. It’s a captivating challenge.

What’s the Password?

• Developer: Trampoline Tales

• Platform: PC [free demo available], mobile

This puzzle game features over 100 challenges, each of which is solved by inputting a four-digit password.

I’ve solved 14 puzzles so far, some easier than others.

This one wasn’t that tough: the solution is 4371

This is the next one. What’s the password? I’m not sure yet.

Those are my top three.

Have you played any great black-and-white games this year? Let me know!

Item 2: In brief…

🚫 Blizzard has fired a QA tester who helped a group of players cheat to complete a World of Warcraft dungeon in record time, Kotaku reports.

• In a very different kind of speedy feat, WoW developers say they’ll soon add a virtual version of the viral raccoon Jimothy as a collectible pet, GameSpot reports. Jimothy became a social media phenomenon earlier this month.

💬 Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot is the first AAA publisher to be on the record about Sony’s plans to stop producing discs for new PlayStation games in 2028, thanks to an analyst asking him about it during the company’s earnings call on Thursday.

• Asked about the plan’s potential impact on Ubisoft’s business, Guillemot said: ‘“What we saw on the PC is that it helped to grow the market. There’s also some pressure, for the future, on the cost of machines, so being able to be only digital will help to have a more accessible machine, I would say. As you said, there are plus and minus, but we think it will not disturb too much the industry.”

• Unpacking that a bit, Guillemot is anticipating a PC-like future for consoles, where discs are all but gone and almost all games are obtained digitally. And he’s speaking vaguely about the potential increase in component costs for future game consoles, which could drive a company such as Sony to avoid the expense of including disc drives in their consoles.

• (For a smaller publisher’s take, check out Game File’s interview with the CEO of Serenity Forge.)

🎮 Cuts among Microsoft workers and contractors who worked on accessibility—ensuring video games are accessible for people with disabilities—have raised concerns about the scale of such work going forward at Xbox, Aftermath reports.

• Accessibility has been a signature Xbox initiative over the past decade.

👀 Microsoft is testing a program that will allow Xbox users to play cloud-streamed versions of games they own for one hour at no added cost, as long as they sit through up to two minutes of pre-roll ads.

• Normally, gamers would need to pay for a monthly Xbox subscription to stream games. Watching ads could offer an alternative way for “paying” for that.

• Mobile gamers are used to being offered ads to watch in exchange for playing time and other perks. That approach is largely unexplored on consoles.

🎬 Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto says the company greenlit recent Yoshi and Star Fox games to capitalize on those characters being featured in the latest Mario movie, per an interview with Famitsu covered by VGC.

🗓️ February 2027 is filling up. There aren’t many confirmed video game release dates for 2027, but the few that have been announced are clustering in one month:

• Tomb Raider remake Legacy of Atlantis (Feb 12)

• Role-playing game remake Persona 4 Revival (Feb 18)

• Microsoft’s recently-delayed role-playing revival Fable (Feb 23)

• Newly announced, Sony’s major spin-off God of War Laufey (Feb 16)

• First-person shooter Metro 2039 is also slated for Feb 2027, no specific date yet

Item 3: The week ahead

Tuesday, July 28

• Game release: Halo Campaign Evolved (PC, PS5, Xbox) is a remake of the original Bungie-developed first-person shooter, and the first (last?) Halo game to ever be released for a PlayStation.

Wednesday, July 29

• Game release: The creatively named Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World?! (PC) is an anime-themed game about driving a magical delivery truck and helping fight monsters in another world.

• Event: Microsoft presents their quarterly earnings for their first quarter (July-August). That should provide at least a brief update about the state of the Xbox business.

Thursday, July 30

• Game releases: Kick (PC) is a sidescrolling game built around kicking a soccer ball; Rita (PC) is a 3D puzzle game in which using words to solve crossword puzzles and word searches then manifests those words as helpful objects in the eponymous chicklet’s world.

Early last month, while playing the Switch 2 version of the big, upcoming puzzle game Order of the Sinking Star, I stumbled across a surprising piece of text.

The game is developed by a studio called Thekla for PC, PS5 and Switch 2 and is played from an overhead view. In the center of its massive map, players control a queen. She moves across a strange land filled with over 1,000 block-pushing puzzles, one grid square at a time. I’d made her venture to the greenery in the east, a portion of Sinking Star’s map called The Mirror Isles. That region is full of clever puzzles about reflections, and it is based on a 2014 puzzle game called Mirror Isles.

At the entrance to the zone, I’d found a sign rendered in the fashion of a slab you might see in front of artwork at a sculpture garden. As the queen approached, text appeared on the screen: “Instigator: Hazelden, A.”

I understood this to be a reference to Alan Hazelden, the puzzle game designer who in 2016 had given Sinking Star lead creator Jonathan Blow, himself an acclaimed puzzle game designer, permission to base a portion of the new game on Mirror Isles.

Four big chunks of Sinking Star are based on small indie-developed puzzle games, all licensed with permission. The south of the map is based on another Hazelden game, Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes. Sinking Star’s north and west are based on two other designers’ games, Jonah Ostroff’s Heroes of Sokoban trilogy and Sean Barrett’s Promesst series.

By the time I was playing Sinking Star, all four had publicly distanced themselves from Blow over comments he’d made in the past. That made the appearance of Hazelden’s name so prominently in the version I played interesting and unexpected.

Two weeks later, when I played another version of the game, Hazelden’s name was gone from that spot.

A bold game’s unusual debut

Back in December, at a less controversial moment, I’d spoken to Blow about Order of the Sinking Star, ahead of its unveiling at The Game Awards. He’d described the game’s origins, first as a project he’d intended to be tiny, just a proving ground for a new programming language he was creating. “I should have known that it would turn big,” he said. “But for some reason I was like, ‘No, we’re gonna make a small game.”

The math behind Sinking Star’s concept had forced it to become immense. The game’s conceit is that players learn the rules of the puzzles in each of the four areas and then discover how each areas’ rules mix with the others, where they share borders. In the northeast, for example, the gameplay systems based on Heroes of Sokoban cross over with the rules governing The Mirror Isles. Across the map, at the six borders where the regions touch, the combinatory effects produce a multiplicity of puzzle game ideas.

Back then, ahead of the announcement, Blow told me that the four source games he’d chosen years ago were “made by some of the best designers in the world, who nobody really knew at that time.”

When I realized that two of them were by Hazelden, I was delighted. Just two months earlier, I told Blow, I’d become enamored with Spooky Express, which Hazelden had designed alongside a puzzle maker Hazelden admired named Lucas Le Slo. Between that and my introduction to Order of the Sinking Star, I was coming to appreciate how puzzle game designers share their talents with each other and intermingle their expertise.

Blow and I briefly discussed A Monster’s Expedition, a lovely puzzle game Hazelden had led. It’s about rolling logs and making bridges across a scattering of islands. Solving one of its puzzles leads to a memorable epiphany about something else the logs in the game can do. Blow recalled this moment. “That is definitely one of the features of his games, is they have those surprises,” he said.

Three days after Blow and I spoke, just before 9pm ET on December 11, Order of the Sinking Star was revealed via a Game Awards trailer.

Within a few minutes, Hazelden posted about it.1 He called it “a great concept” and listed the source games’ creators, linking to their work, emphasizing that Sinking Star was made by a team—though he did not work on it—and then distancing himself from Blow.

He wrote that: “…in recent years it has become increasingly clear that Jon’s beliefs/priorities and mine are not aligned.” Hazelden said Blow was “adversarial to people talking about privilege and representation, is dismissive of diversity efforts.” He labeled him “pro-MAGA.”

(Blow did not respond to the thread, as far as I can tell.)

Soon, the designers of the two other games sourced for Sinking Star said on their social media feeds that they agreed with Hazelden’s praise for the game and criticism of Blow.

It’s remarkable enough to see a whole game based on the idea of polishing, expanding and then intersecting four existing games, all used with permission.

It’s all the more unusual to see the makers of those games separate themselves from the recognized lead creator of the project.

Initial coverage of Order of the Sinking Star didn’t cover this. Reporters had seen the game ahead of The Game Awards reveal, and many published their coverage when the embargo lifted, without plausibly knowing of the source developers’ dissent.

In late January, Bloomberg wrote about the controversy, citing Blow’s mocking of someone on Twitter/X for using pronouns in their bio, for calling Donald Trump, in early 2025, “the best President we have had in my entire life, by far.”

Blow declined to comment on the controversy to Bloomberg. Instead, that article quoted the head of Sinking Star’s publisher, Arc Games, saying Blow’s political views “were not taken into consideration” when they signed the game. Arc had simply considered the game to be promising, they said.

Hands-on in LA

This past June, I was playing a development build of Order of the Sinking Star on a Switch 2 at Nintendo’s section of a Summer Game Fest showcase in Los Angeles Summer Game Fest. It was the last game I’d be able to see, as the three-day event was minutes from shutting down. Each game at Nintendo’s event had its own space, most of them set up to feel like small living rooms, with chairs and couches near a TV.

I was impressed with what I played. The Mirror Isles levels were challenging but fun. I learned how I could position my character on one small island, several squares below a mirror angled at 45 degrees. I could then teleport to a spot on another island, where the mirror was reflecting. I later tried Hazelden’s original, playable in a browser, and had a terrific time with it, too.

I ventured to Sinking Star’s north, where I was playing Hearty Heroes of Hauling, Thekla’s variation of Jonah Ostroff’s Heroes of Sokoban. I learned how a Warrior character could push blocks and how a Thief could drag them. A Wizard was able to swap places with the blocks. Some of these puzzles were tough, too, but also delightful to solve. I felt the most stress from a room that placed me as the Wizard amid a crowd of eight big crystal blocks. Through a lot of trial and error, I successfully found my way out.

Not long after I saw “Instigator: Hazelden, A” on the screen, I looked up. I’d been sitting in a chair situated at one end of the demo area’s coffee table. Other people had sat on the couch near the table. And, in the chair across from me, Blow had taken a seat.

I said hello and apologized for not yet publishing a write-up about his game, despite us having spoken about it back in December. Other stories had gotten in the way, but this hands-on would give me a new reason to get to it, I said.

Time to rewind

I have my own unusual history with Blow and the games he is known for.

In late 2008, while I worked at MTV News, the rapper Soulja Boy made a video laughing about how the Blow-developed time-bending puzzle game Braid was “stupid as hell.” That somehow led to me engaging in a video game battle with Soulja Boy in the MTV News offices in Times Square. (I beat him in Geometry Wars 2’s multiplayer mode; he beat me in Gears of War 2; he narrowly beat me in the world’s worst-played match of Street Fighter II).

In 2010, while I worked at Kotaku, I spotted an unattended demo station at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle. I saw Blow standing against a wall nearby, trying to not be noticed, and I realized the game in front of me was secretly his next project, The Witness. He wanted to see how people played it. I believe my coverage of that mysterious demo amounted to the game’s first press preview.

In 2023, while at Axios, I interviewed Blow about his post-Witness project, a remake of Braid. By that point, Blow had drawn controversy, not just from his occasionally cantankerous demeanor but from the ideas and politics he was expressing on social media. One batch of tweets from 2017 involved his belief that there were “biological factors” that played a role in what he believed were statistics showing women to be less interested than men in programming. Back in 2017 he took umbrage with backlash to his posts: “this constant insistence on suppressing speech is a big part of what turned me away from current ‘progressive’ politics.”

I’d seen Blow criticized for his statements, but could not recall seeing him questioned about them in interviews. So, six years after he’d made those tweets, I brought them up for the Axios piece. He didn’t sound happy about it, said he felt misunderstood. To the extent he wanted to address the topic, he told me this: “When we hire people, I very much believe in just hiring the best person for the job, because it’s just so hard to make games,” Blow told me at the time. “And we’ve hired quite a few women because they were the best people for the job.” He also told me he was trying to refrain from making a lot of non-gaming comments on social media.

Last December, Blow and I spoke about what his latest project was, this grand puzzle game with more than 1,400 puzzles, borne from a desire to create a new programming language. As he solved some of the game’s block-pushing puzzles over a video feed, we spoke of puzzle design. He talked about his team shaving the tedium out of the puzzles they were making for Order of the Sinking Star. He’d noticed they kept requiring a lot of busy work before players got to the fun part of the solution. “Now the set-ups are such that you’re really only a few moves away from doing the cool thing,” he said.

Meeting Patrick

I knew that playing Sinking Star in Nintendo’s booth in June meant it was likely I’d see Blow. As interested as I was in the game, I’d also need to ask him about what was happening around it.

So, at the distance of a coffee table, in the final minutes of Summer Game Fest, with, by that point I’d realized, at least one PR person for the game seated on the couch between us, I asked Blow if he wanted to talk about the pushback to the game. What did he have to say about these developers, upon whose work Order of the Sinking Star was built, all criticizing him and distancing themselves from the project?

Blow threw his head back, thinking about what to say. The silence was awkward. He gestured toward the PR rep nearby, told me they didn’t want him talking about it.

As Bloomberg noted in January, and as comes up in Reddit threads and other forum posts about the game, discussion around Order of the Sinking Star involves a perennial question about if, how or when to separate the art from the artist. More accurately, though, it’s about art and artists, plural.

Hazelden’s critique last December wasn’t simply about Blow’s politics but about the tendency to associate some games with a single creator:

“I hope the game will get a more nuanced label than ‘new Jon Blow game.’ While the creative vision is his, he didn’t make any of the original games and there are a lot of talented people at Thekla who also deserve credit.

“I was disappointed to see the store page description put his name front and center while not mentioning any of the creators of the original games. This industry’s obsession with auteurs is not healthy.”

Blow himself had not hidden the contributions of Hazelden and others from the game when we’d spoken in December. Press materials provided at the time named the other developers and their games. Blow had also told me about other esteemed game developers who were actively working with him on the game, including Patrick Traynor, the designer of a wonderful, recursive puzzle game called Patrick’s Parabox, which came out on Steam in 2022.

But a look at, say, Order of the Sinking Star’s Steam page shows a game listed as coming from Thekla, the studio Blow runs, and promoted as a Blow creation:

“From legendary director Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness) comes Order of the Sinking Star, a massive puzzle adventure featuring more than one thousand hand-crafted puzzles designed to put your intellect to the test.”2

After Blow’s no-comment on the controversy, and to cut some of the tension, I remarked that I had struggled with that puzzle room involving the teleporting Wizard and the crowd of eight big crystals.

But you did it, enthused one of the men who’d sat down on the couch near me. I didn’t recognize him, and I asked if he’d worked on the game. He had. He’d worked on the very puzzle I was talking about. What was his name? Patrick, he said.

The lightbulb went on. Blow wasn’t the only top puzzle game designer sitting near me.

This was Patrick Traynor, the Patrick of Patrick’s Parabox, sitting feet away as I’d played some of his portion of the game. I’d nearly not known.

The text disappears

Shortly after I played Order of the Sinking Star in early June, Thekla released a PC demo. Many players were impressed, excited about the nuances of the puzzles and the obvious depth of the project.

On the 16th of June, one player started a discussion thread on the game’s Steam forums. They liked the game, they said, and they had a request: “Blow, please credit the original games and creators!” Blow did not reply, but other players did. They discussed the relevance and virtues of crediting the source games’ creators and the likelihood of bringing attention to those developers’ criticisms of Blow. Some mentioned that, in video streams, Blow has named the source games and even played parts of them.

Downloading the demo to my Steam Deck, I once again walked the queen to the Mirror Isles, where I’d solved puzzles on the pre-release Switch version two weeks before. I made the Queen approach the slab that had produced the words “Instigator: Hazelden, A,” but this time they did not. Instead, a large red square with symbols on it appeared. It was some sort of puzzle, kind of a vague map of the game’s overworld, I thought. It didn’t seem to be a game credit.

This week, I contacted Hazelden and asked about the credits. He said that his thread back in December was never about getting credit.

“My intent with that thread was to talk about how the game is discussed and viewed by its audience, not how my work is or isn’t acknowledged,” he said. “When I wrote my statement, my understanding was that the authors of the original games would be credited in-game at the start of each corresponding section, which I appreciated and considered to be appropriate.”

But he expressed disappointment with how credits were handled in the demo and was aware, before I’d mentioned it, that an earlier build of the game had had more prominent credits. “I’ve communicated with the Thekla team since they released the demo to let them know my expectations.”

Hazelden was concerned that the credits would now not appear until a player completed the game, rather than accessible at least from the main menu, which has become more of an industry standard. But he has seen one change he considers positive.

“Since I raised my concerns earlier this month, the website has been updated to include an FAQ entry which mentions the original games,” he said. That new portion of the website update says Sinking Star’s foundation “is built upon four brilliant titles,” links to them and names their developers, along with those such as Traynor who are making the new game.

I reached out to the Sinking Star’s PR reps about all of this earlier this week, noting that the “instigator” credit for Hazelden that I’d seen in the Switch version didn’t appear in the PC demo. Could they share anything about how credits would be handled in the final game?

They replied with a statement from Blow: “Contributors to the game will be credited.”

If you’ve read the piece, you’ll have heard most of this already, but the first few minutes also cover details about the event where I did my reporting. The final minutes revisit the Kingdom Hearts anecdote that a lot of people got into.

I’m still experimenting with how these videos complement the written pieces, how much they overlap, what kind of material readers and viewers will find most interesting and most valuable. Please keep the feedback coming!

(If you prefer to watch via YouTube, you do so at this link.)

New York City — I’m at the Paley Center for Media in midtown Manhattan, several flights up on a sweltering day. I’m wearing a blue suit that I’d tracked down the day before, after accidentally leaving it at the dry cleaners for two years (that’s a long story).

I’m eating some free lunch, ready to listen to a talk about an intriguing new video game company.

It’s about an hour before I’ll ask the former CEO of Disney about green-lighting Kingdom Hearts.

I’m here with low expectations for Michael Eisner, the head of Disney from the mid 1980s to 2005, because I’m a gaming reporter, and Eisner, to the best of my knowledge, doesn’t figure much into gaming history. There’s just this one anecdote I found from the early 2000s about a Disney executive who had to get Eisner’s approval during a trip to Tokyo for Square to keep making its not-quite-authorized mash-up of Final Fantasy characters with Mickey, Donald and Goofy.

I’ve arrived at Paley with higher expectations for Casper Daugaard, whose video game company Delphi Interactive has come out of nowhere this year to suddenly be a major force in the industry. They’re the talent matchmakers behind a critically acclaimed new James Bond game 007 First Light, and they’re the reason there’s a splashy if simplified FIFA World Cup game available on Netflix via a streaming connection.

What’s Delphi’s deal? Where did they come from?

Conveniently, that’s a big part of the panel that Daugaard is on at Paley. He’s up there with Eisner, who is a Delphi investor, taking questions from Moritz Baier-Lentz, an Open AI advisor who is also a Delphi investor.

To avoid over-hyping I will briefly skip past the conclusion of the panel to the moment Eisner steps down from the dais and I approach him, identifying myself as a reporter. I ask him if he can recall saying okay to a game called Kingdom Hearts.

No, he replies.

You were pitched the game in Tokyo, I tell him. It was Final Fantasy plus Disney characters.

Oh, I remember now, he says.

Do you recall why you said yes?

I don’t, he tells me.

Later, I realize I should have shown him some character art. Maybe Sora with a keyblade. Perhaps I could have jogged his memory. What a mistake.

But let’s rewind to the beginning of the mid-day panel, to Daugaard talking about Delphi’s origins, about contacting the James Bond rightsholders over five years agoafter a decade-plus drought of any big new Bond games.

“It turned out that the owners had sort of soured on the partnerships they had with big corporations like Electronic Arts and Activision and some of the games they had made,” he explains to an audience dining on fancy lunch, dressed in suits and dresses. (The invitation called for business attire, hence my blue suit).

Daugaard, who hadn’t previously worked in gaming, has a good story. He says he tried to intern for IO when he was a teen, but they said he was too young. He made some tech start-ups, says Delphi came into existence to get a Bond game made.

Some Delplhi skeptics I’ve spoken to figure the new company as a bunch of middlemen. I’m not sure Daugaard would entirely disagree. He explains on stage and later to me during a sitdown interview that Delphi’s purpose is to work outside of the traditional game studio system, to match elite game development talent with popular intellectual property.

It’s interesting. Delphi’s FIFA stuff is interesting, too, as Daugaard tells the audience about reading in The New York Times a few years ago that FIFA and longtime gaming partner Electronic Arts were breaking up. He describes how he audaciously emailed FIFA to see if, on the strength of Delphi already getting Bond, perhaps they’d like to make a deal, too.

But I have underestimated Eisner.

Dauguard is on stage talking about some of the principles of the FIFA game, one of which is to make it pretty easy. Just let people have fun.

And here’s Eisner, sitting next to him, with a killer Disney anecdote that is partially related:

“We learned…at Walt Disney World: make our golf courses easy. People come down there for a week. Fathers are not that interested in It’s A Small World. Playing golf, they want to think they did well. So we’re always saying the opposite of what most courses say. You know what? We don’t need quite as many sand traps, right? So the idea of making something easier resonates with me.”

I take mental notes about all the interesting things I’m hearing about Delphi during this panel that I will share with readers.

But, wow, here’s Eisner getting awfully blunt about Disney’s bungling of the video game business in the 1980s:

Read more

Nintendo is asking a court to dismiss a proposed class action suit that was filed this past spring by gamers who say the Mario maker is breaking the law if it doesn’t pass on its U.S. tariff refunds to consumers.

Those consumers “received exactly what they bargained and paid for” when buying price-hiked Nintendo goods last year, the company said in a filing on Monday in the case of Hoffert et al v. Nintendo.

“Plaintiffs are not entitled to a rebate simply because of intervening legal developments related to tariffs.”

Nintendo increased the price of Switch 2 controllers and the original Switch last year, following the imposition of globe-spanning U.S. tariffs (tariffs described by Nintendo’s lawyers on Monday as “sweeping” and “constantly changing”).

This past February, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the tariffs were illegal.

A month later, Nintendo sued the U.S. government to get a refund. And in April, gamers filed the class action claim against Nintendo in Washington, saying it would be illegally double-dipping if it made money from tariff-hiked sales and then from a refund. The gamers sought relief for anyone in the U.S. who bought price-hiked Nintendo items between February 2025 and February 2026.

“The common thread among Plaintiffs’ claims is that it is somehow ‘unfair; that Nintendo has not retroactively adjusted its prices for completed sales in response to the outcome of the tariff litigation,” the company’s lawyers wrote in today’s motion to dismiss.

“But that is not how commercial transactions work.

Read more

I was inspired by a Kotaku article I saw this morning, covering a fun bit from the latest installment of the Kit & Krysta Show, which often includes stories from the co-hosts’ lengthy stints working for Nintendo. In the new one, Kit Ellis explains how he was one of fewer than 10 people at Nintendo of America who was aware of Nintendo’s plans to announce the Zelda sequel at that E3.

Ellis tells his end of the story at the 54:14 mark of their newest episode, which covers the biggest secrets the pair kept at Nintendo.

As Ellis explains it, Nintendo wants to keep the news from leaking and even excluded mentions of the Breath of the Wild sequel from the official E3 marketing plans…. until the last minute.

My video is about the press end of things: In the era of all-digital Nintendo Direct E3 showcases, Nintendo would invite a select number of reporters to screen the Direct a couple of days ahead of its airing. In this case, I watched the Direct on Sunday, June 9, 2019. In each prior year, Nintendo had shown us the whole thing. The version they showed us on June 9 ended with the reveal that the classic Nintendo 64-era characters Banjo-Kazooie, now owned and controlled by Microsoft, would return to Nintendo platforms as fighters in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Fun stuff.

Just watch this video and imagine it ending at the 40:40 mark. That’s what I saw. I thought it was the whole Nintendo E2 Direct!

On Sunday, June 10, Nintendo even sent reporters an embargoed “final” press release of their E3 announcements.

And on Tuesday, June 11, the Nintendo Direct aired. Except, when it aired, it included an extra 80 or so seconds of trailer footage that they hadn’t shown to the press: the teaser for Tears of the Kingdom.

I checked Nintendo’s official E3 2019 press release and, sure enough, it has only a brief mention of the Zelda teaser. That now makes a lot of sense, given Ellis’ explanation that even much of Nintendo didn’t know they’d be revealing it. Down in paragraph three, right at the end, after the mention of Banjo-Kazooie, there’s just this one line (that i’ve bolded):

Nintendo also revealed two new paid downloadable fighters coming to the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate game: Hero from the DRAGON QUEST series to be available this summer, and Banjo-Kazooie for this fall. The Nintendo Direct presentation concluded with the reveal of the sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which is currently in development for Nintendo Switch.

Game companies keep secrets from the press all the time. It’s their right. I can’t recall any other instance, though, where they told the press everything except their one-more-thing. Given the scale of Nintendo’s news that E3, though, I get it.

If you’d rather watch the video on YouTube, check out my channel, where it should be live shortly after this version of the post is published.

In the wake of Sony’s surprise announcement that it will not produce discs for any new games as of January 2028—even as fans flood Sony with negative feedback online—most game publishers aren’t talking.

No comment from Take Two. Nor from EA. Nor Ubisoft. Capcom hasn’t said anything, nor Square Enix, nor Bandai Namco. Microsoft’s been mum, as well.1

About a week ago, I reached out to Zhenghua Yang, founder and CEO of mid-sized game publisher Serenity Forge, to get his thoughts. I’d featured the disc copy of one of his company’s games, the Dear Dream-developed Cooking Companions, in the the photo I used atop Game File’s coverage of the Sony news.

Yang told me that he and his team had noticed disc copies of the Serenity Forge-published Doki Doki Literature Club making the rounds as part of the debate, too.

Unlike the other publishers, Yang was happy to talk.

Over the course of an email interview, Yang was diplomatic about Sony’s move but also very clear about the importance of disc games to a publisher like his.

“For us, physical publishing has actually never just been another sales channel,” Yang told me.

“It's actually an important part of our mission to bring meaningful games to as many people as possible globally.”

“Physical games help us reach audiences that digital often can’t.

Read more

How did I get that story? That’s what today’s behind-the-scenes video is about. You’ll hear a bit about the actual reporting…. where the info came from, how I got more details and wound up with an unexpected scoop. You’ll also hear about the realities of working as an independent reporter and being a parent, where the work of breaking a story must live alongside the more important duties of picking up the kids from camp, making dinner, and so on. This saga includes a side quest: the hunt for a blue suit that I’d lost.

As I mention in the video, I can’t tell the behind-the-scenes story of every article I run. Some back-stories might be too boring, others too sensitive and secret. But occasionally there are some that I think Game File readers might get a kick out of. This is one of those. And I’m doing it via video.

Please let me know what you think!

(Note: Among the experiments here is using Substack’s option to simultaneously publish to YouTube. If you’d like to watch the video there, go to my channel, where it should be live soon, if it’s not already up).

There are major changes happening atop Maryland-based ZeniMax Online Studios, developer of the Elder Scrolls Online, Game File has learned.

Joe Burba, a 14-year veteran of the studio who was appointed to run it last July, is departing, along with ESO executive producer Susan Kath, studio game director Rich Lambert and production director Ala Diaz.

Their roles were listed among hundreds of others cut last week from the Maryland offices of ZeniMax, in a WARN letter sent to the state by ZeniMax and obtained today by Game File.

Tonight, BUrbam Kath, Lambert and Diaz notified Zenimax Online Studios workers of plans to “transition” to a new leadership team consisting of promoted ZOS veterans. That transition will occur “over the next few months,” they told workers, according to a copy of the notice reviewed by Game File. “We will remain in place during the transition period to help ensure a smooth handoff.”

Last week, Microsoft laid off of 1,600 workers across its vast gaming teams in locations around the U.S. and abroad. Just who has been impacted and how hard various studios have been hit has been emerging day by day.

Game File reported last week that Microsoft/ZeniMax notified officials in Maryland that 379 gaming jobs were being cut across the state. They tallied cuts in two locations: one for ZeniMax Media Inc. (covering Elder Scrolls/Starfield/Fallout-maker Bethesda Game Studios and central Bethesda game publishing) and one for ZeniMax Online Studios (Elder Scrolls Online). More than 200 jobs were cut at the latter.

Last week’s totals did not reveal job titles, nor did Microsoft announce any leadership changes in the ZeniMax group.

That has now happened.

Earlier today, Game File obtained from Maryland officials a breakdown of the 379 impacted roles, which, extraordinarily, included “studio head.”

Microsoft later confirmed to Game File which studio head that referred to: ZeniMax Online Studios’.

Microsoft has since has notified studio employees and internally announced new leadership. ZOS will now be run by Josh Henderson, previously head of business operations at the studio, and Nick Giacomini, who was promoted to game director for ESO last August.

Last week’s news of 200+ cuts at ZeniMax Online Studios generated public sympathy for those workers and questions about the long-term viability of the Elder Scrolls Online. ESO is a massively multiplayer online game that inherently persists on the strength of new content being developed for it.

Earlier today, fans and workers in Maryland protested the cuts at the ZeniMax teams in a rally organized by the Communication Workers of America, the union that represents many of the impacted employees.

Regarding concerns around the game, a community manager stated on Saturday: “The plan is still to deliver great content, and we will hopefully have an update soon.”

In their note to the studio today, the outgoing leaders of ZeniMax Online Studios predicted “growth” for the game:

We have tremendous confidence in Josh and Nick, the future of this studio, and the continued growth of ESO. With exciting experiences still ahead for our players as we wrap up work for Update 51 and beyond, we believe that your passion, creativity, and commitment to each other and the community will continue serving as the heartbeat of ESO.

The list of jobs cut in the ZeniMax WARN notice in Maryland includes several very senior roles, including:

• Studio Head

• Studio Operations Director

• Studio Game Director

• Studio Audio Director

• Studio Art Manager

• Vice President and Controller

• VP, Global Sales & Business Development

While some of those job descriptions match the exiting ZOS leadership team, Game File couldn’t verify if all were from that studio. The full list of cut roles shared by Maryland officials also covers workers at Bethesda Game Studios and its central publishing office.

The following is an excerpt:

The list of 379 eliminated ZeniMax jobs in Maryland also includes:

• four animators

• three bilingual CS (community service) leads for Chinese, Italian, and Japanese

• a creative director for the Elder Scrolls Online Player Life Cycle

• two food service workers

• seven producers

• more than 60 senior QA testers.

• and many others

The WARN notice states that almost all of the 379 workers were notified of their layoff on July 6.

In fine print, it states: “Approximately 9 employees were notified of the elimination of their position prior to July 6, 2026.”

A 2021 mega-merger scaled back

Microsoft announced in 2020 that it intended to buy ZeniMax and its network of game studios in 2020, and closed the $7.5 billion deal in March 2021.

The purchase, which preceded Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, added several award-winning studios to Microsoft’s portfolio, including Bethesda (Elder Scrolls, Fallout), Arkane (Dishonored), and id Software (Doom).

The studios’ output since then included a 2024 Game of the Year contented from MachineGames in the form of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle along with Starfield from Bethesda and the poorly-received Redfall from Arkane Austin.

In recent years, a Microsoft repeatedly in cutback mode closed ZeniMax’s Tango Gameworks (which was reconstituted by Krafton) and closed Arkane Austin.

The Xbox cuts last week have hit the ZeniMax group hard, with 158 jobs eliminated in Texas, many of them at id, and 379 from the ZeniMax teams in Maryland.

Xbox also said last week that it would be entering a consultation process around Arkane Lyon, a process expected to end in a sale, shutdown or other form of divestment. The Lyon team has been working on a game tied to Marvel’s Blade vampire-hunting super-hero.

To review this month’s supposed remake of 2013’s Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, I must first correct the record.

Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced isn’t a game about pirates (and assassins) in the 18th century Caribbean.

Sure, sure, that’s what the trailers would have you believe. They’ve go their clips of Edward Kenway swinging his swords and steering his pirate ship into cannon-blasting combat against British frigates.

Is Resynced truly a pirate game?

Of the 47 hours I spent playing Resynced over the past few weeks, I will admit I spent maybe 44 (?) of them collecting plunder with Blackbeard, drinking rum with Anne Bonny and debating the pros and cons of the lawless pirate-run settlement Nassau with Benjamin Hornigold. I may in fact have spent dozens of hours sailing to remote islands, reading treasure maps, opening messages left in bottles, sinking the odd Man o’ War with a well-timed broadside, collecting sea shanties for my crew, befriending a pet monkey, and hunting whales.

I am nevertheless neither so Gullible nor so Narrow-Minded as to call the magnificent Resynced a “pirate remake.”

Oh no.

Forget any reviews of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced you may have read.

Forget what you yourself may have played, if you’ve spent any time with the game since its launch.

What Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is really about

I’m here to give you the scoop (spoilers for Resynced’s Animus menu lore, which many players are probably not going to see):

Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, the new game whose development was led by Ubisoft Singapore, is set in the year 2096.

It’s about a societal split, about revolution, about an old Assassin’s Creed adventure repurposed in the series’ distant future as propaganda or samizdat.

It’s about the overheated future of 2096, essentially conquered by the series’ well-established nefarious Templar-run company Abstergo.

(In this future, Abstergo is, among other things, remaking a 2013 pirate movie called Devils of the Caribbean, but this time in VR. The VR version will be backed by a marketing plan that involves AI influencers, a 10,000-avatar “metaverse premiere event” and that manufacturing of memes aimed at “50 million VR nodes.” See what I mean about Abstergo being evil?)

Resynced is about a late 21st-century population mollified by the widespread use of Abstergo’s Animus devices which let people experience the lives of historical figures culled from “genetic memories.”

It’s about an insurgent faction of Assassins. And it’s about a plan to wake the population into revolutionary fervor by showing them the memories of 18th century pirate Edward Kenway, who—as depicted in the original Black Flag and again in Resynced—gradually comes to an understanding about the Assassins of his day and their centuries old fight for freedom.

Resynced is also about an AI developed within the late 21st-century Animus, called Ego. It has found a way to alter genetic memories, to create and show Animus users false ones. The game is about Ego’s efforts to tell the people experiencing Edward Kenway’s memories that Kenway was wrong, that fighting against order is folly, that we should crave a world where “compliance is rewarded with power.”

Who are we in this game? We’re an unnamed Animus user in 2096 who experiences Kenway’s journey virtually. At four moments during Kenway’s exploits in the Caribbean our virtual jaunt can be interrupted for 10-15 minutes, as we explore Animus “rifts” where Ego explicitly tries to tell us how wrong Kenway was.

None of this is what 2013’s Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag was about, of course.

That was a different game, even if you also spent dozens of hours pirating as Kenway in that game, across missions and a map that’s been faithfully reintroduced and rebuilt for Resynced.

The 2013 Black Flag was about you playing as an unnamed researcher newly hired in 2013 by Abstergo Entertainment, the video game development wing of the Templars’ evil-corp. In that game, you were assigned to use the Animus to dive into the genetic memories of Desmond Miles, a man who died in Assassin’s Creed III and who was descended from a long line of Assassins (and at least one Templar) whose adventures were featured across the prior AC games.

In 2013’s Black Flag, your mission was to plumb the Edward Kenway experience for material that Abstergo could use in productions such as the motion picture Devils of the Caribbean, though the Templars had some ulterior motives for the assignment.

Resynced is therefore not a remake of 2013’s Black Flag. It’s a sequel.

It is a new game about a new exploration of Edward Kenway’s pirate/assassin journey, set 83 years after the framing sequences of the original game. Resynced provides a new narrative framework that, thanks to the concept of an AI that wants to alter historical memories, arrives with creative justification to tweak a now-classic 13-year old game.

That makes Resynced, already a hot seller, a tantalizing hint of where Ubisoft could go with a line of Assassin’s Creed remakes. They could remake the first game, the Ezio games, even the recent ones set in ancient Egypt and Greece. And for each, they could not just modernize the graphics and controls but expand and alter their sequences of events to use them as reference points for a conflict set in the late 21st century, as rival factions try to weaponize historical memories.

A story most players will probably miss

If you didn’t know any of this, I’m not surprised.

If you played the game and still didn’t catch it, I’m not a bit shocked.

If Ubisoft has no plans to do more of this, I won’t fall down.

Almost all of what I’ve described is optional and missable in Black Flag Resynced.

I nearly missed it myself, as I planned for a breezy playthrough of an old Assassin’s Creed favorite. Instead, I found myself in a 40+ hour hunt for the “real” story, buried deeper in Resynced than any gold-filled chest.

The story of 2096 is Resynced’s meta-story, told in two remote pockets of the game: 1) four optional playable “rifts” that players may find as they proceed through Resynced’s pirate fantasy , 2) in dozens of text files tucked three menus deep in the game’s barely-interactive Animus hub.

Assassin’s Creed games have almost always had a meta-story about people in the 21st century (usually matching the game’s release year) and their connections to the main history portions you play. Those meta-stories have always been squeezed into the margins, though seldom as severely and as, uh, graphiaclly simple, as in recent games.

Back in 2013, the modern-day exploits of you as an Abstergo Entertainment employee were prominent. They were portrayed via first-person portions that occasionally interrupted the third-person Kenway experience and could be explored for hours, complete with their own missions, side quests and puzzles.

Resynced’s 2096 story—of Assassin “Watchers” vs. Abstergo/Tempar goons, of rogue AIs, of panicking scientists, of a woman wondering why her Animus-addicted husband is muttering about Mary Read (“What does he mean by Assassins?”), of a fight for the population’s hearts and minds via varying interpretations of Edward Kenway’s life choices—is mostly told through unlockable text files.

The files are interesting. Offered via diary entries, intercepted chats and news reports, they present varied perspectives of a world in crisis. One set works as a narrative puzzle as it reveals the Rashomonic interpretations of a massacre, or was that a successful Assassin hit? Another favorite reveals the rising bitterness of a person who, through Edward Kenway’s journey, now shakes at the ignored evil around him.

One surmises that Ubisoft is averse to putting the Assassin’s Creed’s meta-story in the way of more marketable pirate playgrounds and ninja/samurai epics. Instead, we get a better-than-nothing text-in-menus approach introduced in 2025’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows. In Shadows, players unlocked the meta-story text files largely via time-gated missions that called on the user to kill X number of enemy type Y, clear three enemy castles, re-win a three-phase fighting tournament, and other grinds. Time restrictions on accessing these missions and unlocking the files meant it could take players months to access the full story in-game. But even in the most hardcore Assassin’s Creed hangouts, the fanbase instead seemed to throw up their hands rather than grind to keep up.

In Resynced, Ubisoft has shown some mercy, diminishing the amount of new text files that are tied to timed grinds. Now, most of the text-based 2096 lore are associated with “data file” collectibles that players can find in the world. That includes a batch of written entries that explain a historical link between the feudal Japan era in Shadows and the piracy adventures in Black Flag.

Players who explore a lot will find dozens of data files, though the game does not appear to offer any in-game tracker for finding each one. You just need to keep looking for them. As of this writing, I have most of them, but not all. I can’t find any full guide for them online. And even Ubisoft’s optional $5 microtransaction that reveals lots of items in-game does not appear to reveal the locations of the text files (at least the official description omits them from its collectibles list). That’s not a huge bother, because tracking the data files down compelled me to re-explore the waves and islands of Black Flag. That was a thoroughly pleasant task to do for the first time in a dozen years. I expect many players, though, will be content to wait for the files to be reproduced in an online AC wiki somewhere, the easier to read on a web page.

It may not seem enticing to play a video game in order to gradually unlock pages of text to read. Why not, you may ask, just read a book, where they put the pages in order? For one, they’ve not tucked this latest installment of Assassin’s Creed’s meta saga in a book. I also enjoy the unordered delivery, the dawning comprehension of a story about 2096’s desperate people and questionable tech, which I glimpsed first at its middle, then the end, then the front, then other moments in between1. I am also enamored with the idea of the Assassin’s Creed games I’ve previously played, including Black Flag, being repurposed for an information war.

The ideas in Resynced’s meta-story, which builds off characters and ideas in Shadows’ chunks of text, are strong. The potential of where they could go with it is exciting.

As for the pirate stuff?

Looks great, controls pretty well, is fun to play and oh so speedy in terms of how much of a good time you can have with each sit-down. It never gets old to chase a new shanty page across a rooftop, bombard a fort with upgraded mortars or use a diving bell to explore sunken wrecks (hats off to the team at Ubisoft Barcelona that worked on the underwater portions in Resynced; that team is now facing layoffs, such is the misery of modern gaming and oft-troubled Ubisoft).

New pirate missions in Resynced involving new ally characters are brief, dramatic and add more to Edward’s story, even if the gameplay perks they provide barely enhance the gameplay. A new denouement for high-class pirate Stede Bonnet is affecting; a new hunt for Blackbeard’s treasure is a welcome extra moment. A new epilogue to hunt down a pirate killer, on the other hand, over-complicates Kenway’s character. The ending credits remain my favorite of any game I’ve ever played.

Black Flag provides great source material. The revisit is well-made and a great sign of what could be. It is offered in a different wrapper that hints at an opportunity for more interesting remakes to come, should Ubisoft choose to pursue such treasures—and as we brace to resist or comply with an Abstergo future.

Ubisoft appears to be newly wary of the pitfalls of releasing a game after its optimal release date, according to the company’s latest annual filing to investors about how its business works.

As part of its 356-page annual report published this week, Ubisoft has broken down the risks stemming from the development and launch of its games. Much of that section is recycled from last year’s report, including an acknowledgement that things can go badly if a game come out too early, “without it being sufficiently developed.”

New this year is the additional warning that…

…releasing a game too late – when market anticipation has waned and it no longer meets market standards in a highly competitive environment – can also hinder its success.

That may state the obvious, but updates to corporate risk disclosures can indicate issues that gave become more acute concerns for a company.

In last year’s annual report, for example, Ubisoft added a substantial note about the risk of its games and developers being subjected to online “bashing.” It added that note shortly after its latest Assassin’s Creed game was the subject of intense, online culture war attacks.

Ubisoft does not name any games that may have prompted its warning about lateness. But the preceding year was certainly rich with games that company management may have wished came out sooner:

• 2025’s AC Shadows brought the company’s top franchise to a setting fans had requested for nearly two decades, but it lost sales momentum quickly and has already had its post-release support ended

• Mobile releases in Rainbow Six and The Division were greenlit when Ubisoft (and much of the rest of the industry) was convinced that putting big console/PC series onto cell phones was a path to riches. That hasn’t panned out. Both mobile games have had “a slow start,” Ubisoft told investors in May.

Ubisoft’s next big games are all taking a while. The upcoming sequels to three of its biggest franchises, AC, Ghost Recon and Far Cry, were all recently promised for release in the next two years and have all been in development for longer than their series’ standard cycles.

Ubisoft is also still developing a game that was announced in 2008 and re-announced in 2017, where it was shown at the E3 trade show. Beyond Good & Evil 2 is so late, that it makes all the aforementioned games seem rushed.

Given all that, a worry about video game lateness seems timely.

The above comparison of changes in Ubisoft’s latest annual report is part of a tradition here at Game File. Each year, I compare video game companies’ annual public filings with the ones they issued the year prior. Ubisoft’s warning about late games is one of several changes to their 2025-2026 report that caught my eye.

Also notable:

Micro-transaction “more fun” line dropped

Last year, Ubisoft was pilloried in the press for the following sentence in its 2024-2025 annual report:

Our monetization offer within premium games makes the player experience more fun by allowing them to personalize their avatars or progress more quickly, however this is always optional

This year, that line is gone.

A modified worry about game pricing

Read more

Deep cuts in Microsoft’s gaming division have eliminated 158 positions in Texas across the ZeniMax group of gaming teams, according to a WARN layoff notice provided by state officials to Game File.

That cut is hitting 96 roles in Richardson, Texas, 40 remote roles for that same office, as well as 22 in Austin.

The Richardson location is the publicly listed address for Doom studio id Software, but also includes workers from other Bethesda groups, Game File understands.

(Yesterday, Aftermath reported that id had lost more than 90 workers.)

The Austin location that’s losing 22 jobs is also part of the Bethesda gaming team.

These cuts are part of the 1,600 layoffs announced by Xbox CEO Asha Sharma on Monday, themselves part of 3,200 jobs Microsoft plans to cut from its gaming division by the end of June 2027. Sharma cited an unhealthy Xbox business for an overall 20% downsizing of the Xbox gaming team.

Most of the discussion of the cuts has involved the spin-off of five studios (accounting for roughly 350-500 people) and the downsizing of Xbox’s platform team. But the cuts have impacted the swathe of Xbox studios, including id, the venerable first-person shooter studio which released an expansion to its most recent Doom game yesterday.

Microsoft has a massive gaming operation, and its big cuts are hitting in a number of states.

A WARN notice in California, received by Game File this morning, indicates that role-playing game specialists Obsidian Entertainment is losing 52 workers. That includes 43 based in Obsidian’s California offices and nine in-state remote workers. Obsidian was purchased by Microsoft in 2018 and last year released three games (Avowed, The Outer Worlds 2 and Grounded 2).

Update - July 9, 7:13am: Maryland has posted layoff counts for studios in their state. At ZeniMax Online Studios, 213 roles cut; at ZeniMax Media Inc (potentially a mix of Bethesda publishing and Bethesda’s central game studio), 166 jobs eliminated.

In addition, on Monday, Washington State displayed a WARN notice from Microsoft that tallied 605 overall jobs (not just gaming) impacted by the day’s company-wide layoffs. Locations for the Washington-based Microsoft roles were redacted this time (not previously). Among the list were some clearly gaming-oriented jobs such as “game design” and “game producers.”

WARN notices are specific to employers and workers in a given state, and so the totals for the aforementioned teams won’t include workers in other states or countries.

The Texas-based ZeniMax layoffs and Obsidian cuts will officially happen on September 4, per the WARN notices.

Of the 158 jobs cut, a ZeniMax official noted in the WARN letter, approximately 146 are represented by a union, the Communication Workers of America. The official said it would negotiate with the union to determine actual termination dates.

Wide range of jobs cut

The WARN notices list job titles, which help give some sense of the range of roles impacted.

For the Texas layoffs, impacting id and Bethesda, the jobs cut include four gameplay designers, one director of engine technology, two principal engine programmers, nine QA testers, 13 senior QA testers, a senior skybox artist and three producers.

For the Obsidian cuts, the roles eliminated include two art directors, a recruiter, a narrative designer, and five area designers.

Below are the anonymized rundowns of impacted roles. The first set spans the ZeniMax Texas cuts. The second is Obsidian.

Microsoft is cutting its gaming workforce by 1,600 workers today, with another 1,600 slated for cuts across the duration of the company’s fiscal year, ending on June 30, 2027.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma called the mix of layoffs and studio divestments the “most significant restructure in Xbox history,” in an email to the gaming team that was also posted publicly to social media platform X.

Sharma framed the cuts as a “painful” way to address an Xbox business she describes as “not healthy.”

Cuts at Microsoft’s vast network of studios will range in size, from relatively small at many Activision studios to large ones at other studios, according to a source familiar with Microsoft’s plans.

Two massive cutbacks speak to Microsoft’s changing strategy, as Sharma breaks from the approach of the preceding leadership team by divesting of many of Xbox’s smaller development teams and as it shrinks the core Xbox platform group as well.

Five studios on the way out

Five game studios, all with critically acclaimed, relatively smaller games in their past, are set to leave Microsoft, though none are outright being shut down:

• Double Fine, the San Francisco-based specialist in quirky, often comedic games (Psychonauts, Keeper, Kiln) will be returned to its management. The studio will retain rights to its pre- and post-acquisition intellectual property and will receive runway funding from Microsoft to start new games and find new investors and publishers, Sharma said. Microsoft had acquired Double Fine in 2019, as part of a spree of studio acquisitions.

• Compulsion Games, the Montreal makers of last year’s award-winning Louisiana bayou adventure South of Midnight is also returning to management in the same fashion as Double Fine.

• Undead Labs, the Seattle-based studio behind the upcoming zombie game State of Decay 3, which was just shown off by Microsoft at its June gaming showcase, is planned to continue under a new owner. Microsoft has entered terms with a new owner, though the parties are not yet ready to announce who that will be (likely later this summer, a source familiar with today’s restructuring plan told Game File). The deal calls for continued funding and eventual release of State of Decay 3 but will not obligate the game to any Xbox-controlling terms, such as having to be on Game Pass.

• Ninja Theory, the Cambridge, England-based creator of the Hellblade series, which just showed off a third entry, Senua, at the June Microsoft showcase, is in a similar position to Undead Labs, with Microsoft having made a deal for a new owner for the studio, set to be revealed later this year.

• Arkane Lyon, the French studio, currently working on a game about Marvel vampire-hunter Blade, is also slated for an exit. Given local laws, though, Microsoft has been unable to explore its future—ranging from sale, to management buyout to shutdown—until today. The fate of the Blade game is contingent on the studio’s future.

Those studio spin-outs will account for more than 300 jobs leaving the Microsoft gaming team, per the source familiar with today’s moves.

They also mark an extraordinary reversal of E3 2018, when then-Xbox chief Phil Spencer announced five additional studios for the Xbox group: the newly formed The Initiative (closed in 2025) and the newly acquired Undead Labs, Ninja Theory, Compulsion and Playground Games. “These five new teams will have the resources to take bigger risks for you,” he said at the time. By some time later this year, Playground will be the only studio still in the Xbox group.

With DoubleFine also on the way out, most of Xbox’s 2018-2019 studio acquisition spree will be undone.

In surviving and remaining part of Xbox, Playground is joined by InXile, maker of the upcoming Xbox/PC-exclusive Clockwork Revolution, and Obsidian, which released three games last year but has no announced project on the horizon.

Arkane Lyon is one of several studios Microsoft acquired when it purchased ZeniMax in 2021 that did not last. Since the deal closed, Microsoft has closed Arkane Austin (Dishonored, Redfall), mobile studio Alpha Dog (Might Doom), and Tango Gameworks (Ghostwire Tokyo, Hi-Fi Rush), the last of which was reconstituted by Krafton.

Remaining ZeniMax studios include Bethesda (Elder Scrolls), id Software (Doom), MachineGames (Wolfenstein, Indiana Jones) and ZeniMax Online Studios (Elder Scrolls Online).

The divested studios are vestiges of a bygone era of Xbox, when small and mid-sized teams were enlisted into Xbox to maintain a flow of new, often original games for Microsoft’s Game Pass service.

Sharma has publicly said that Xbox needs to refocus on core franchises—read the likes of Halo and Fallout—which are not obvious fits for the DoubleFines and Ninja Theories of the world.

Major downsizing of platform team

Microsoft’s platform team, encompassing hardware, marketing, Game Pass, is getting a substantial layoff.

“Our platform teams are 40% larger than they were at the start of this generation, even as our player base and playtime have declined,” Sharma said today.

The plan here is for Xbox to proceed with a smaller team, though just how much a group like that can be cut and still function effectively remains to be seen.

Microsoft is still planning to release the Project Helix console, still planning to operate Game Pass—a nearly $5 billion a year recurring revenue business, for which it’ll still sign new deals, the source privy to Microsoft’s plans told Game File.

Sharma said today that the platform team, in some cases, has 14 layers of management, which will be reduced to no more than five. That kind of metric suggests prior bloat, but the public has seen tech CEOs confidently slash allegedly oversized teams deeply before. The wisdom or folly of doing so is often quickly borne out in its impact on the product.

Divorce from past strategy

Sharma took over the Xbox group from longtime boss Phil Spencer in February and had warned her team in May that the games team would be “making hard choices about what we build, where we invest, and what kind of company we need to be going forward.”

Today, in explaining the cuts, she described a past strategy that did not his its growth targets and that has run smack into the reality of skyrocketing hardware costs that are causing hardware prices to spike at game companies and beyond. Wrote Sharma:

We entered Gen 9 with a smaller install base and a higher cost structure. To grow, we bet on Game Pass, multi-platform, and a broader portfolio of content. While those businesses have created meaningful value, they did not grow at the pace we expected. As that happened, our core business weakened, and we added more teams, more investment, and more time, hoping for a better outcome. And now the industry is facing the most severe hardware crisis in its history

…

We now find ourselves competing not only with the largest publishers, but also with smaller independent studios. It is neither possible nor desirable to own every great independent studio. We have also learned that we are not the best home for every type of studio; in a typical year, we lost 64 cents for every dollar we invested. As we reset XBOX, we will help independent creators succeed by providing open development tools and audiences to realize their vision

(The math on losing 64 cents per dollar pertains to the small/mid-sized studios Microsoft has added over the past decade, some of which are being divested now.)

Franchise shift

Two of Microsoft’s crown jewels, Minecraft and King (Candy Crush) will be moved within the company’s gaming organization to report directly to Sharma, instead of to the division’s content and studios chief Matt Booty.

Sharma considers Minecraft to have been massively underinvested, a source familiar with Microsoft’s plans told Game File. They noted that Roblox, the hugely popular platform for player-made games, and Minecraft, more or less the virtual Legos of gaming, were comparable in size six or so years ago. But they estimated that Roblox has been investing more than five times as much in its business as Microsoft has on Minecraft. Minecraft was funding much of the rest of the Xbox gaming team, the source said, rather than being deeply funded itself. (Correction: The preceding sentence initially mistakenly started with the word “Microsoft”; that was a typo, as readers who noted it to me inferred. Apologies for the confusion.)

Cuts that follow cuts and more cuts

The logic of Sharma’s cuts is that Microsoft had, in her past words, “over-extended” its gaming teams. The studio spin-offs are an acknowledgment that the company gorged on studios it couldn’t handle. Microsoft’s reputation for hands-off management of its studios, for free creative rein, is being swapped for talk of focus, for mining core franchises, for raising expectations that the biggest things Microsoft could be doing in gaming is what it’ll be doing.

But this focus is far from the gaming team’s first contraction.

Microsoft cut 1,900 gaming jobs in early 2024 after the close of its purchase of Activision Blizzard. It cut another 650 in September 2024. Did another large cut in July 2025 as part of 4% Microsoft-wide job cuts that also ended development of major announced and unannounced game projects (Perfect Dark, Everwild, Blackbird) and downsized its publishing team and their projects.

Thousands of people lost their Xbox jobs in recent years, and the assessment Sharma and her leadership team are now making is that that all wasn’t enough.

That’s a brutal and shocking reality for Xbox workers, who’ve trusted past and current leadership to steer a console-making behemoth successfully.

Xbox is now saying it won’t actually reduce investment in content this year, that it’s shifting its priorities to pursue the most likely avenues of success.

That’ll be little consolation to those losing their jobs in this latest round, pain Sharma acknowledged today. This time, does Xbox have the right plan? The proof will be in whether Microsoft finds itself announcing more massive Xbox gaming cuts in the years to come.

Epic and a former worker have agreed to a settlement over a case that saw the gaming giant accuse one of its own contractors of leaking Fortnite collaborations with Minecraft, Peak, South Park and more.

That’s according to filings by Epic to federal court in North Carolina that have been reviewed by Game File.

Lawyers for Epic told the court last Friday that they and former contractor Hayden Cohen have agreed to a judgment against Cohen and to an injunction that bars Cohen from “possessing, accessing, using, or disclosing any of Epic’s confidential or trade secret information” or helping anyone else to do so.

The proposed settlement, which still must be approved by a judge, does not mention monetary relief. Epic’s lawsuit had sought damages covering “actual loss and unjust enrichment.”

“We took legal action against the former contractor who repeatedly leaked confidential partner IP and trade secrets that they received while working with Epic,” Epic spokesperson Natalie Munoz confirmed to Game File. “We’ve asked the court to approve the stipulated injunction to ensure they cannot publish or share Epic’s confidential information again.”

Asked about Epic’s request for a monetary award, Munoz said Epic had nothing further to share.

Cohen did not reply to Game File’s requests for comment.

Epic has previously successfully sued Fortnite cheaters and scammers.

(As I was publishing this, I noticed that Law360 reported the settlement earlier this week; credit to them for being first)

Item 2: PlayStation disc fallout

Sony’s mid-week announcement that it will stop producing discs for new PlayStation games as of January 2028 has landed poorly with a large portion of the public.

It’s caused at least one critically acclaimed developer to say it discourages him from developing games for the platform.

It’s also a message that was delivered slightly differently to PlayStation’s array of development and publishing partners, as Sony made a point of explicitly saying that pre-2028 games will still be able to get discs in 2028.

Taking that last one first…

Read more

New games sold for PlayStation consoles will only be available digitally and won’t be sold on discs effective January 2028, Sony has announced.

The move applies to all PlayStation games released from that point on, including those made by Sony and those released by third parties.

The PlayStation group calls the change “a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs,” according to a PlayStation blog post reviewed by Game File in advance of its publication.

As movies, TV and music have shifted from physical media to an age of downloads and streaming, Sony’s move could speed the demise of physical media in a gaming. The industry has offered consumers games via cartridges, cassettes, floppy discs, CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays across a 50-year stretch.

Sony has been reporting to investors in recent years that PlayStation games have been increasingly purchased as downloads, not as discs. The most recent figures show nearly four in five purchases of full games for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 were purchased digitally in the past year.

Stats like that may cause today’s news to carry an air of the inevitable. But Sony’s declaration for 2028 is still likely to produce a shock, as the biggest gaming platform on the planet that uses game discs leaves them behind.

Discs going away, but the fate of game boxes is unknown

Sony is committing to still selling games in physical retailers even after they drop discs in 2028. Just how those games will be sold—in boxes with codes inside, as cards marked with digital redemption codes—is unclear.

Digital games will also continue to be sold in the online PlayStation Store.

New games released for PlayStation consoles prior to January 2028 will be unaffected by the policy change, Sony says. That means the PS5 games of 2027, be they a new Madden, a new God of War, a new Call of Duty, a new Sly Cooper (one can dream?), would still potentially be offered on disc.

PlayStation 6 implications

Sony’s timeline for a transition to a no-disc era will also spin up more speculation about the timing and configuration of Sony’s next-generation console, the probable PlayStation 6.

“This pretty much guarantees that PS6 won’t arrive until 2028 at the earliest,” Piers Harding-Rolls, senior games research analyst at Ampere Analysis tells Game File. Harding-Rolls also concludes from today’s news that “the base version of a PS6 will not include a physical media drive,” as Sony looks to keep costs down on the device.

Sony itself is saying nothing about the PS6 today: not its timing, nor how it might or might not support internal or external disc drives in order to run disc-based PS4 and PS5 games, should the console be backwards compatible.

The many signs this was coming

Industry support for games being released on physical media has been waning. As has consumer interest in them.

PC games effectively went all-digital years ago, thanks to the popularity of playing games through Steam and other digital storefronts.

The Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns that kept much of the global population home helped shift shopping patterns toward downloads. Sony’s own data shows PlayStation game downloads being an uncommon consumer choice a decade ago and now becoming the norm.

On consoles, physical media has been in such decline that Sony and Microsoft both launched their current gen Xbox Series and PS5 consoles in 2020 with cheaper versions that lacked disc drives.

In early 2024, Phil Spencer, then head of Xbox, told me that ““[w]e ship games physically and digitally, and we’re really just following what the customers are doing.” He added that the game industry had become an outlier in still supporting disc-based entertainment, even as movies and TV have bailed on discs in favor of downloads and steaming:

“Gaming consoles themselves have kind of become the last consumer electronic device that has a drive. And this is a real issue, just in terms of the number of manufacturers that are actually building drives and the cost associated with those. And when you think about cogs that we’re going to go put in a console—and as you have fewer suppliers and fewer buyers—the cost of the drive does have an impact.”

Last year, the Nintendo’s Switch 2, which uses cartridges rather than discs, introduced the concept of game-key cards, which are physical media that contain no game, just a prompt for a download.

Even disc-based games aren’t what they once were, now frequently containing just stubs of games rather than the whole thing. The website Does It Play has tested over 3000 games and found that, for example, that the disc version of this year’s hit 007: First Light, only contained the game’s first mission, with the rest needing to be downloaded.

Beyond all that, last week brought the news that Grand Theft Auto VI, likely the biggest game launch this decade, will debut for PS5 and Xbox Series without a disc-based version.

Discs helped define PlayStation

However the trends in entertainment may be going, it is still remarkable to see PlayStation ditch discs given their importance in PlayStation history:

• In the late 1990s, the first PlayStation’s support for games on relatively cheap CD-ROMs instead of traditional game cartridges allowed the upstart console to outmaneuver cartridge-based systems from Nintendo and Sega, as it drove down game prices down in the process. (The cheaper disc format even prompted Final Fantasy VII maker Square to taunt Nintendo in a magazine ad, saying that if the game was “available on cartridge, it’d retail for around $1200.”)

• PlayStation devices often doubled as machines for watching movies and TV on the latest disc-based formats. In the late 2000s, for example, Sony’s pricy PS3 gained traction as a go-to device for playing then-novel Blu-Ray discs.

• In 2013, Sony effectively roasted the digital game-sharing restrictions proposed by rival Microsoft for its upcoming Xbox One console by showing how games could be shared for the then-upcoming PS4. In a 21-second clip that has over 20 million views on YouTube, one PlayStation executive simply handed a game box—presumably with disc inside—to another, who said “thanks.”

Sony’s possible motivations

The PlayStation announcement today cites “consumer preferences” and a shift away from discs among “the broader entertainment industry,” but does not delve into the decision-making process that brought Sony to this point.

Sony is not discussing the economics of this move (I asked!), but there are a number of potential factors:

1. Abandoning discs will spare Sony the cost of manufacturing and shipping them, which analysts and industry veterans I spoke to said could account for $1 or so of a game’s retail price. For first-party games, that’s direct savings for Sony, though the amount is limited by the winnowing percentage of people who were even buying the disc-based versions. For third-party games, Sony could pass the savings on to partners or just retain the better profit margin for themselves.

2. As the 2024 comments from Phil Spencer alluded to, leaving discs behind could mean leaving disc-drives behind, allowing Sony to produce consoles more cheaply.

3. Switching to digital-only for games could diminish the risks of copies of new games leaking. It would also seemingly make second-hand sales of used games impossible, pushing more people to buy their own copies of games.

These economic benefits for Sony could be boons for the games industry overall, Ampere analyst Piers Harding-Rolls tells Game File. Among other things, it could free publishers and retailers from having to worry about securing an inventory of game discs when trying to sell games, he noted.

“If there is a way to streamline the business of games retail, I generally think it’s a good thing for the industry as it removes unnecessary costs,” Harding-Rolls said. “This will help offset pressure on margins from other directions – development and staffing costs for example.”

Should the industry shift from game boxes that contain discs to smaller, cheaper game cards, Harding-Rolls said, that reduces pressure on publishers and retailers. “The advantage of everything going digital for the industry is that sales can be tracked much more easily and there is less commercial risk for publishers wanting to continue selling via retail,” he said.

The shift to no discs will also likely impact game development timelines, as developers will no longer face the same urgency to have a build ready to submit to PlayStation for the production of a disc, as industry experts noted around GTA VI’s no-disc news last week. Instead, projects may gain weeks of development time, in the event delivery deadlines for platform approval move closer to release date.

Preservationists’ likely worries

While millions of gamers have shifted to digital, there are still people who associate game discs—and only game discs—with actual ownership of PlayStation games.

That portion of the gaming community spoke up last week about wanting to buy a version of GTA VI that they could hold in their hands, could lend to a friend and could potentially pop into a well-preserved PS5 console three decades from now and still see it run. Such gamers didn’t want to worry that they’d merely purchased a digital copy that could lose access to the game if, say, the company behind the game someday turns of the servers that transmit downloadable copies.

Digital copies of games are inherently less long-lasting, because consumers aren’t actually buying a game (on a disc), just buying access to the game. The fine print in online gaming shops notes this, as does a recent law that went on the books in California in 2025. That laws requires game publishers doing business in the state to refrain from words like “sell” when offering digital copies of games, unless they explicitly tell consumers that what’s being sold isn’t the game itself but a potentially revocable license to access it.

A Sony spokesperson noted to Game File that “[w]ith all digital content, including games, movies, and music, players are purchasing a personal license for non-commercial use.”

Regarding the fears of PlayStation games being lost to time in an all-digital era, the rep also noted that Sony remains “committed to delivering experiences from past generations to the new platforms our players are using.” They noted that PlayStation has used emulation and remasters to keep offering its classic games to modern gamers.

It’s true that many consumers have become accustomed to not having physical copies of new music albums or movies, but the relative precariousness of digital copies of games is in fact being highlighted today by….

Sony’s other big announcement: the upcoming closure of the PS3 and PS Vita online stores

Sony said today that it will be closing the online marketplaces for its PlayStation 3 console and PS Vita handheld in most countries in July 2027 (sooner elsewhere: August 2026 for the PS3 store Mexico, Honduras and Nicaragua; late 2026 for PS3 in other Latin American countries and the Middle East).

“We know this news may be disappointing to PS3 and PS Vita players who hold a special place in their hearts for this generation of gaming,” Sony said in its announcement, saying the move “was not an easy decision for us to make.”

Sony said that PS3 and Vita marketplaces “are no longer able” to support modern commerce systems, prompting a “need” to close the shops and focus on more modern PlayStation platform stores.

The news may spark some deja vu.

Sony announced back in March 2021 that it planned to take the PS3, Vita and PlayStation Portable marketplaces offline that summer. The move would have caused some 2,000 digital-only games to become unavailable for new purchasers, according to a VGC analysis at the time.

Fans complained loudly. By April 2021, Sony walked back the PS3 and Vita shop closures, with then PlayStation boss Jim Ryan saying “it’s clear that we made the wrong decision here.”

This time around, Sony is giving a longer notice period in most regions.

The closure of those stores is still likely to cut off access to new purchases of digital-only PS3 and Vita games.

The current PlayStation 5 marketplace sells PS5 and PS4 games, as well as a selection of PS1 and PS2 games. It does not sell PS3 games, because games for that platform can’t run on the system (some are offered via a PlayStation Plus streaming option). Vita games also aren’t sold via PS5.

Sony says digitally purchased PS3 and Vita games will be downloadable after the stores’ shutdowns “for the foreseeable future.”

Sony’s move contrasts with Microsoft’s Xbox platform, which continues to sell and support games from all four Xbox console generations.

But it puts it in line with Nintendo, which disabled purchases in the marketplace for its Wii console (a contemporary of the PS3) in 2019. Nintendo discontinued purchases in the online shop for its 3DS portable (a contemporary of the Vita) in 2023.

The big questions about Sony’s 2028 post-disc era

1. Will Microsoft follow suit, ending support for new disc-based games on Xbox platforms and therefore all game consoles, too?

2. Whether Microsoft does or not, will third-parties that can no longer release games on discs for PlayStation, simply ditch the disc options across the board?

3. Given the GTA VI no-disc experiment launching this November, will more game publishers decide to forgo disc-based offerings even in 2027?

4. How will no-disc PS5/6 games be packaged and sold in brick-and-mortar retail stores?

5. What becomes of game sharing in an all-digital era? Will Sony modify its current set-up, which currently allows some sharing of digital games across a pair of consoles, to allow more casual lending? (See for example, Nintendo’s year-old system of letting players lend a digital game to another player in a “family group” for up to 14 days.)

6. Will there be a version of a PS6 with a disc drive? Or will a drive be offered as an add-on? And how will gamers who want to retain access to PS4/PS5 disc-based games react to whichever configurations Sony chooses to offer?

7. What will the final disc-based PlayStation game be?

At a Nintendo preview event in New York City about four weeks ago, after I had the opportunity to play the very silly music game Rhythm Heaven Groove, a rep for Nintendo asked me what I thought of it.

I told her that what I was about to say was meant in the nicest possible way: the game, I said, was so dumb.

Recognizing this compliment sounded like an insult, I emphasized that I adore Rhythm Heaven games. I’ve relished them since I imported the Japanese original for my Game Boy Advance in 2006. This new one seemed as silly, as ridiculous as magnificently weird and nonsensical as the series’ prior entries.

Rhythm Heavens are strange games about tapping a button at the right time to match the shooting of arrows, the punching of rocks, or the hitting of a baseball into outer space.

The new one has a demo out that lets players open an umbrella to the beat or command a dog to catch a flying disc at the right rhythmic moment.

Back at the NYC preview event, right before I was asked what I thought, I’d played a multiplayer mode in Groove in which four couch-bound players each try to press a button at the end of a countdown to see which of their characters gets to eat a piece of cake.

Here’s a video of me playing that mode, some of the most fun I’ve had at a Nintendo game event in some time… (I’m the guy named “mama” who has green hair.)

See what I mean? Ridiculous. Fun. Not at all taking itself seriously. Silly, stupid, dumb, whatever you want to call it.

All these terms, in this case, are the highest of compliments.

That brings me to another upcoming game I recently played at a Nintendo preview in New York City: Splatoon Raiders.

I don’t recall if a Nintendo rep asked me what I thought of that one, but I’ll tell you: It was very Ratchet & Clank. You know, the Sony PlayStation series of third-person shooters featuring a furry Lombax and his robot/backpack?

Again, maybe that doesn’t seem like a compliment? I promise that it is.

First, though, a negative. There’s no big breakthrough with this game, best I can tell from over an hour of hands-on time.

The original Splatoon was a revelation when I first played it back at E3 2014. Nintendo hadn’t made a multiplayer shooter before. None of the many non-Nintendo studios that did had made one where the goal was less about deathmatch kills and more about which team could paint more of the floor.

It was a great idea. Players loved it. Nintendo made two more Splatoons, all prioritizing competitive multiplayer.

The three mainly multiplayer Splatoon games included brief test-chamber-style solo campaigns. Two had single-player focused expansions. Following those, it does not appear that Nintendo was sitting on some great breakthrough idea for its first game-length Splatoon campaign.

There was no paint-the-floor twist in what I played a couple of weeks ago at an actual paint-shooting studio in New York City.

You are a mechanic who puts on a backpack tank, hops on a ship and sails with a trio called Deep Cut to an archipelago of islands, searching for treasure. You do this by picking missions from a map and then being flung into them. In each mission, you splat hordes of enemies with paint, mixed with some climbing and jumping, en route to a treasure.

You can collect, equip and upgrade a wide array of weapons and gadgets, retaining progress even if you die, as you face some of the thickest storms of enemies I’ve seen in a Nintendo game. You are blasting baddies, fetching loot and, ideally, finding secret stashes along the way.

In my hour-plus run through a few campaign missions, I equipped a tactical tank that let me launch multiple paint-filled balloons, each tethered to the other. I also placed turrets while rapidly shooting paint at my many enemies.

Between missions, I kept upgrading my ever-improving and explosively experimental arsenal.

In playing Splatoon Raiders, it felt that I was playing a game with the same rhythms and energy of one of my favorite game series, Ratchet & Clank.

And, why not? Sony’s Insomniac Games, once a mass-producer of annual Ratchet games, has only made two since 2016, most recently five years ago. The people in charge of that last one have been busy for at least the last two years making a bloody game about the X-Man Wolverine.

Usually, I’m most into Nintendo doing things only Nintendo does, like, you know, making rhythm games about opening umbrellas and eating cake. But if they’re the only people in position to deliver the vibe of a great PlayStation series, sure, go for it.

Nintendo itself isn’t saying they’re going for an R&C feel with Splatoon Raiders. They might be mortified by the comparison. It’s just what I got out of my hands-on preview.

As for Raiders’ more Splatoon-specific elements, you are still splatting paint on the ground, can still turn into a squid to swim through it. And everyone is just so stylish and cool…

The heroes!

The supporting cast!

Even the bad guys have great, clever, eye-catching designs!

Rhythm Heaven Groove is set for Switch/Switch 2 release on July 2. Splatoon Raiders is Switch-2-only, for July 23.

One other thing: I do not remember the plot of any of the Ratchet & Clank games very well (usually: Captain Qwark did something…) but I believe it’s a Splatoon Raiders original that the game’s story is propelled by economic anxiety. In some unlockable newspaper scraps that I found during the preview, I learned that Splatsville, the main city in Splatoon, has been plunged into debt, in part due to overspending after they found themselves with a surplus. Thankfully, the fabled Spirhalite Islands seem to have risen from the sea, and, with it, some debt-off-setting treasure.

Item 2: In brief…

🎮 A bill that would have required video game companies operating in California to make their games playable in perpetuity or issue refunds if a server-shutdown would make the game unplayable, failed a key vote in the state senate, ending its chances for passage this term, VGC reports.

🪧Unionized game developers at Microsoft are calling on the company to reconsider the mass layoffs that are expected to hit the gaming division after the conclusion of Microsoft’s fiscal year, which ends today, Kotaku reports.

• The cuts are expected to occur next week.

• The unionized workers, speaking on a call with press arranged by their parent union, the Communication Workers of America, called the expected cuts unnecessary. Citing Microsoft’s overall profits (beyond gaming), one worker said: “They’re just choosing not to protect us.”

👀 Microsoft has pulled out of a funding deal to publish a fantasy game in development at IO Interactive (Hitman, 007 First Light), Bloomberg reports.

• The Xbox-maker told Bloomberg that it is “taking a fresh look at where we invest so we’re focusing on our highest priorities,” adding “ We expect to invest about the same in content as we did last year. What's changing is where we're investing and the kinds of projects we're backing.”

• Last week’s edition of Game File about 1666: Amsterdam noted that that game previously had an Xbox publishing deal. (Xbox pulling out of publishing deals with some high-caliber studios and talents has been a trend).

🇺🇸 The United States Supreme Court has agreed to hear Apple’s appeal over a contempt ruling in its long-running Fortnite lawsuit with Epic, Reuters reports.

• Apple had been ordered by a lower court to allow apps to direct users to outside payment options, but was found in contempt when it attached a fee to any resulting non-app-store transactions that nullified any significant savings for app-makers.

• The hearing, a rare video game case for the Supreme Court, will occur in the next term, which begins in October and runs through June 2027.

🎬 A live-action TV series based on the role-playing game series Persona is in the works at Netflix, Variety reports.

• Perennial video-game-to-show/film adaptation company Story Kitchen (Sonic, Streets of Rage, Tomb Raider) is producing.

At a cafe in Los Angeles three weeks ago, game designer Patrice Désilets asked me if I was superstitious about numbers.

No, I said.

He’d never asked me this before, though usually it’s me who asks Désilets questions.

We’d first met in 2006 at E3, when he was showing off his brainchild, Assassin’s Creed.

We’d last chatted in 2019, when he was promoting Ancestors: A Humankind Odyssey, the debut game from his Montreal-based start-up game studio Panache.

We were now talking on June 6, 2026, which, come to think of it, was a date that had three 6s in it.

This interview was about Panache’s new game, 1666: Amsterdam, a third-person action adventure about witches, cats and time. It’s a game Désilets has been trying to make since 2011, and it’s set for an early access release on PC later this year.

“Three, six, nine are the numbers of the game,” Désilets said. I was certainly getting signs that he was superstitious about numbers.

He had a story to tell me.

“Stephen, when I got fired from Ubisoft, JF and I went to have a sandwich in a deli,” he said, referring to a fateful day in 2013 that he spent with Panache co-founder Jean-François Boivin. “When we received the bill, it was 16 dollars and 66 cents.”

I laughed and told him I was skeptical.

Désilets swore it was true. He’d taken a picture of the receipt, he said. The memory was vivid. They’d gotten two smoked meat sandwiches. “And a pickle.”

Our interview at this cafe in LA. was fairly impromptu. Désilets and I hadn’t been in touch in years, and I was surprised to see him on stage the day before at the Summer Game Fest showcase revealing that 1666 was Panache’s next game and was launching a prologue demo on PC that day.

Désilets had been talking about and working on versions of 1666 for over a decade. He’d sued his two-time employer Ubisoft over it. Now, this game developer with one of the best resumes in the business (the rewindable adventure Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, the history-reliving Assassin’s Creed) was back. 1666 was back. And I reached out to see if we could catch up.

The year of the devil

Over lemonades, we discussed his long journey with 1666: Amsterdam, the unusual structure of a game set across three time periods, why he keeps making games about time and why he so badly wanted to make the game.

Among the things I learned is that 1666 isn’t meant to be a one-off. Just as Désilets’ original Assassin’s Creed included a map of global locations where future games might be set, 1666 is meant to travel, too.

“The thing you need to understand, that’s why I fought for 1666,” he said. “Amsterdam is the first game. This is where we’re going. Then you just change the place, but each time, talk about 1666 the year.”

Subsequent games would go “elsewhere around the world” to explore this “year of the devil,” he said.

Intriguing, yes, but first Désilets and I were going to discuss how this first one came to be. And maybe get a little more proof about some of this numbers stuff.

Read more

Microsoft announced a price hike for the Xbox Series consoles today, the third in little over a year.

Effective August 1, the Xbox Series S, which launched in 2020 for $300, will cost $500 in the U.S.

The Xbox Series X, which launched in 2020 at $500, will go for $800.

This follows a round of PlayStation 5 price increases from Sony this spring, and a slow-motion increase for Nintendo’s Switch 2, which will kick in in the U.S. in September. (Mind you, there were also eight video game industry price hikes in six months of 2025).

The chart up top shows the sudden ascent of console prices over the past year, a sudden surge in an already unusual hardware generation. Prices had been flat for years, now “up” is the new “flat.”

Game console prices used to go down across the length of a console generation, but not this time around.

Microsoft’s explanation for the new price hike today:

We hoped another price increase would not be necessary, and we have spent the last several months working with suppliers on options. Unfortunately, console storage and memory prices have increased by more than 2.5x and we expect another doubling by the fall of 2027. The entire consumer electronics industry is struggling with the current components crisis, but the effects are particularly hard on consoles. Unlike phones, computers, speakers, and other consumer devices, consoles are typically not sold at a profit, but instead for less than they cost to make.

This is an issue well beyond game consoles. Apple announced price hikes on its computers and tablets today as well.

Item 2: Brutal Bungie cuts

Bungie laid off “most” of its Destiny development team and some developers who worked on Marathon, the newest game from the struggling Sony-owned studio.

A WARN notice issued by Sony to Washington State, where Bungie is based, tallied cuts impacting 292 workers, effective next month. That’s strictly for Bungie/Sony jobs in Washington and wouldn’t account for any elsewhere.

The video I clipped below shows the redacted list of Bungie cuts filed to Washington State officials. As you’ll see, I had to scroll for a while…

In a note emailed to PlayStation workers and published online, PlayStation game studios chief Hermen Hulst offered the following explanation for these latest cuts at Bungie:

This is painful news, especially for talented colleagues whose roles have been eliminated. This decision was made only after extensive discussion and careful consideration, and I want to provide some context on how we arrived here. Over the past several months, together with Bungie leadership, we reviewed the studio’s long-term direction, development priorities, resource needs, and role within our broader portfolio strategy. We explored multiple alternatives before concluding that a reduction was necessary to align the studio’s resources with its current priorities and long-term goals.

In 2022, Sony bought Bungie for $3.7 billion. The studio’s marquee game, the multiplayer live service shooter Destiny 2 was losing popularity at the time. Its next game Marathon, released earlier this year, has been well-reviewed but had a slow start.

Bungie is renowned for making great shooter games, and Destiny fans have mourned the wind-down of Destiny 2. They’ve also expressed bewilderment over reports that Destiny 3 is not, per Bloomberg, immediately in the cards.

After over a year of speculation, Rockstar Games has announced that Grand Theft Auto VI will indeed cost more than the average video game.

The open-world crime adventure set across a fictionalized version of Florida called Leonida will cost $80 for its standard version and $100 for a deluxe edition.

Both versions launch on November 19 and are being detailed by Rockstar and publisher Take Two today ahead of a midnight (local time) June 25 opening of pre-orders for the game.

The $80 version is the equivalent of the standard edition of GTA V that launched in September 2013 for $60. It’s the base game, minus some frills.

(For GTA V, Rockstar and Take Two also sold $80 and $150 special editions with bonuses.)

The $100 version of GTA VI offers more in-game content, include multiple exclusive in-game stores, a set of collectible classic cars, exclusive vehicles, clothes and weapons and even an exclusive “illegal goods store” players can rob. Rockstar hasn’t said how many other variations of these types of locations and items will be available in the standard $80 version of the game.

The heightened price for GTA VI was expected, given the expected scale of the game, the cost of making it over its nearly decade long development cycle and the strong likelihood that millions of people are ready to buy the game sight unseen.

From 2007 or so through 2020, major new video game releases sold for $60.

At the start of the current console generation, the common new-game price for big titles rose to $70.

In June 2026, Nintendo launched the Switch 2 alongside Mario Kart World, which it sold for $80. Microsoft initially announced an $80 price for its late-2025 role-playing game The Outer Worlds 2, before lowering that to $70 ahead of launch.

Take Two has been selling deluxe $100 (and higher) versions of its games consistently for years, often offering earlier access to the games—usually several days—as part of the incentive to pay more. The $100 version of GTA VI does not come with early access.

In April, Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick told Game File that chart-topping sales of the $100 versions of last year’s NBA 2K26 where a sign that “a special edition that offers a lot of added value can appeal to a relatively small subset of consumers.”

The big question: What about GTA VI Online?

Rockstar today said “Grand Theft Auto VI features a single player experience launching on November 19 to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.”

That sentence re-confirms that GTA VI won’t be out for PC on November 19. It also should lock in expectations that what will be playable and purchasable for mid-November is a single-player game.

Take Two said last month that it had shipped nearly 230 million copies of GTA V to retailers since the game’s 2013 launch, making it by far one of the best-selling games of all time.

While the game’s solo campaign was critically acclaimed and commercially popular, much of its success can also be attributed to GTA Online, the online multiplayer version of the game, set on the same faux-Los-Angeles map. GTAO emerged over the years as a popular game to play, to mod and to watch other players play and role-play online.

GTA Online launched on October 1, 2013, two weeks after the based GTA V game, at no added base price, though it has been supported and expanded for over a decade with a mix of content that can be obtained for free or via microtransactions. Rockstar and Take Two.

Rockstar and Take Two have not said a thing about the online aspect of GTA VI.

Where’s the disc?

Boxed copies of GTA VI that are available at launch will include a download code in a box, not a disc with the game on it, Rockstar and Take Two said today.

GTA-watchers have speculated that the game would ship without a disc version, to diminish the likelihood of leaks. But comments from Take Two chairman CEO Zelnick left the door open for a disc at launch.

In February, Variety had asked Zelnick about rumors of physical copies being delayed until 2027 to avoid leaks. “That’s not the plan,” the outlet reported him saying.

Last month, Zelnick said the game’s launch would have a “physical component.”

At this point, the physical component of GTA VI on launch day appears to be a box, not a disc inside it.

Game File has asked Rockstar if or when a physical version would include a disc. No word back yet.

For preservationists, even news of a disc would not necessarily be enough. Many games sold on disc these days don’t include the full game on the disc, requiring a download regardless.

Bonus: Who is on GTA VI’s $100 bill?

Newly released images of GTA VI feature glimpses of all sorts of details from the game, including its currency. The in-game $100 bills do not feature Ben Franklin. Who is it?

Online, some fans told Game File that it’s President Hardin from Rockstar’s 2018 western Red Dead Redemption 2. One told me the money even appeared in earlier GTA games, though I wasn’t able to independently confirm.

The overlap has been spotted before, fueling theories about whether Rockstar’s two big franchises are narratively connected. Or maybe Rockstar’s artists are just having some fun.

I started and finished Netflix’s next video game—arguably its most interesting video game—in a hotel room in Manhattan last week.

It took me less than an hour.

I died twice.

The game is called Unhinged, and if you’ve learned anything about what Netflix has been doing with video games in the last few years, well, unlearn that.

Unhinged isn’t a mobile game offered as a free perk to Netflix subscribers.

It’s not a game aimed at little kids, a market Netflix has been targeting by pitching parents the prospect of kids’ games that have no micro-transactions or ads.

It’s also not one of Netflix’s new wave of party games—Pictionary, Boggle, Party Crashers, etc—that are streamed from Netflix’s servers to smart TVs, with players’ phones turned into controllers that display simple inputs.

It’s a first-person suspense game with decent enough 3D graphics that you could imagine playing it on PS4 or PS5, though you don’t use a controller to control it. You use your phone as a combination flashlight and in-game phone.

It’s developed by Netflix-owned game studio Night School (Oxenfree). The graphics of the game are streamed to your TV. The virtual phone interface is streamed to your phone.

You playing as a woman named Ava (voiced by Zoë Kravitz) who is trapped in her apartment building during a hurricane. Ava’s neighbor is not answering their door. Someone else is creeping around in the building.

Something is very wrong.

But Ava is at least in touch with a friend via her phone, as she tries to plot an escape.

It’s not a shocking set-up, but it is a quickly comprehensible one. And it works. Its action, careful and slow, interrupted by moments of panic, held up over a streaming connection when I played it last week.

To play Unhnged, you point your phone at the screen as if it’s a flashlight. Where you point is where the in-game beam shines. You’re helping Ava see, and you’re pointing at what you want her to interact with or where she should go. Your phone is also basically Ava’s phone, displaying a fake phone interface through which Ava receives calls and texts.

The real-phone-as-controller-as-fake-phone interface is neat. It’s a shame Netflix hasn’t shown it in the game’s trailer. Moving a real phone to simulate a flashlight/telephone feels like playing a descendant of a Wii motion game or a Wii U double-screen experiment. In fact, when I played Unhinged, its director, Sam Warner, straight-up cited a design trick from Ubisoft’s Wii launch game Red Steel. In that game, players could hold the remote-shaped Wii controller to their ear and listen as an in-game character issued commands through the controller’s speaker. “That was magic,” Warner said. “That was the kind of thing that we are inspired by.”

A team of 20 developers at Night School worked on Unhinged for about 18 months, following an earlier phase of prototyping the phone-flashlight interface.

Netflix’s brief-game bet

The biggest novelty of Unhinged is its brevity. Netflix argues it’ll help get more people to play games.

“Our vision for this is: How [do] we take people who love horror and thriller films and TV shows and bring them closer to interactivity?” Sean Krankel, head Night School told me.

“We went, ‘Well, what’s one of the things that’s the most daunting about games in general to a lot of folks who may not even play games? And it’s like, not just the skill threshold, but also the time investment. If people are on Netflix expecting 30 minutes to an hour of a show or a film or a series, this really kind of fits inside of that.”

Unhinged will be available in Netflix’s “Games” section on June 30, and the company see how it does. There are no sequels locked in, no set of shorts releasing alongside this one. “This doesn’t mean that we are now inherently going to do only short games forever,” Krankel told me.

But, what if?

About seven years ago, many of the power-brokers in the traditional video game industry quaked at the prospect of Google and Amazon throwing their financial and technological might into the field. How might they disrupt an industry of EAs, Xboxes, Nintendos and the the like? Those fears were overblown. Google’s game-streaming platform Stadia died quickly. Amazon pivoted its gaming plans a dizzying number of times. Those giants failed to outmaneuver the veteran companies.

But Netflix, having also pivoted a couple of times, brings a new experiment with Unhinged. What if the secret to getting more people into video gaming overall is to put shorter single-sitting video games in front of them? What if Netflix is on to something?

Item 2: Slay the Empire

The most shocking thing about the upcoming Star Wars Galactic Racer racing game is that it’s a roguelike.

Excuse me.

To use the term bandied about in press releases, promotions and by members of the game’s development team at Summer Game Fest earlier this month, it’s a run-based game.

(It’s a roguelike.)

Galactic Racer, which can be played in a quick-race arcade mode or in multiplayer has a solo campaign that is is “inspired by other run-based games like Hades or Slay the Spire, those sorts of things,” Matt Webster, head of Galactic Racer dev studio Fuse Games told me, as I played the game at SGF.

Roguelike, run-based… the idea is that, as with the great games Webster cited, Galactic Racer sends players through a semi-randomized, branching campaign, where players build up their character’s abilities throughout the run, but where failure is likely. And, as with those games, each failure leads to new runs where you retain some of the ability progression you achieved during your past attempts.

In each run of Hades, you’re a godling who battles through chambers filled with the friends and foes of Greek mythology, getting stronger after each run-restarting death.

In Galactic Racer, you’re an entrant into the Galactic League racing tournament set across multiple Star Wars planets some time after Return of the Jedi. If you fail, you re-enter the circuit, but with a better speeder and improved racing perks and prowess each time. Your exact build of your previous racer will be lost, but some upgrades and unlockes carry over.

Each planet in the game offers a randomized, branching sequence of events. An event might be a traditional lap-based race set near a crashed Star Destroyer, or an eliminator that requires finishing in the top three. Perhaps a field test for running the vehicle’s supercharged ramjet for as long (and fast) as possible.

As players win races, they earn parts and currency that they use to upgrade their racing vehicle, unlock or add parts, change their racer’s style or in some other way alter the abilities and stats associated with speed, cornering, shields and such. Each run is meant to feel like you’ve crafted a unique racing build.

You don’t exactly die and revive with each run. You’re no Greek deity. But you can only crash your speeder so many times before your run in the league has failed and you must start over, slightly improved for trying.

Fuse Games has strong racing game pedigree. It’s staffed by veterans of the Burnout and Need for Speed games, some of whom had moved to non-racing work at their last employer. The idea to make a Star Wars game emerged from some of the team’s prior efforts on EA’s Battlefront series, mixed with a hope to make the first new Star Wars racing game in ages, Webster said.

As for the roguelike (run-based!) structure, Webster said they wanted a campaign format that felt “contemporary, something that drove replayability, something that synchronized into that core mastery experience-that mastery feeling that you get out of getting better and better at racing.”

Note 1: Ahead of reporting this item, I mentioned in Game File’s reader chat that this game’s a roguelike. Surely there’s a Star Wars pun to be made? I floated the inherently terrible R2 haDes 2 and the only slightly better RogueSquadronLike. Credit to reader Conway Twitty for the Slay the Empire riff. I liked that one best.

Note 2: In a game-preview first, PR for the game sent me a capitalization guide to inform my Galactic Racer preview. This is style set by Lucasfilm themselves. I’ll have you know that “podracer” is NEVER capitalized. Same with landspeeder, speeder bike and skim speeder. These are the four main vehicle types in the game, but they’re not proper nouns, people.