Last week, I checked out more than two dozen new and upcoming video games in Los Angeles. Let me quickly tell you about a lot of them.

Read on for:

• A game that came to its developer in a dream

• A game made by someone who worked on God of War’s yak

• A game by a developer who may or may not still have my surround sound speakers

• A game about dinosaurs that kill you, a game about you killing dinosaurs, and a game where it could go either way

• A game where you can play as Sonic or Tails

• And so many more…

First up is a batch of games I checked out at the Indie Mix last Friday evening, on the roof level of the Grammy Museum in downtown L.A. This annual meetup is always great for spotting some niche titles and hearing from scrappy developers.

Don’t Let It Starve [demo]

• Developer: Eduardo Scarpato

• PC | June 12

This is a puzzle game about carefully filling the spaces in bento boxes to feed some weird creature who reaches out from what I think is an air shaft. You score bonus points for food combos, for filling every slot in the box, etc. The pitch is that it’s like Resident Evil 4 inventory management turned into a full game, and with food.

I played it for a few rounds, found it creepy and fun, figured I’d wait for release to play it more. Then their PR rep sent me a review code but I got too busy to play it. Whoops. But it’s out today and there’s a demo.

Neighborhoods

• Developer: E-Line Media

• PC | TBA release

A Sim City riff about fixing up a city. It’s got a squishy, claymation art style and is meant to be cheerful and cozy. Instead of building up cities, as I understand it, the player is improving neighborhoods. With a computer mouse in hand, I spruced up one dilapidated block by opening up a bakery, planting trees, picking up trash and adding some pretty banners.

Entropy

• Developer: Lovely Hellplace

• PC | August 18

This is a turn-based RPG, and I don’t have a super strong memory of playing it. But it stuck with me because it was one of several games at the show flaunting low-polygon PS1-era art. I liked the retro look.

Dungeon Lurker (13AM Games, PC, TBA) also had good throw-back visuals…

Ball & Gun

• Developer: NVZN Studios

• PC | June 5

This game was ridiculous in all the right ways. “You’re playing basketball during the zombie apocalypse,” developer Art Grayson told me as I walked up to play it. He and his brother made the game and had released it just that morning.

In your left hand, you’ve got a basketball. Hold a shoulder button just long enough to shoot it precisely. In your right is a gun, which is used to clear the court of zombies. As you play, you can upgrade your basketball shots (so you can also dunk, for example) and your guns (to wield a rocket launcher, among other things). Very silly. Why play NBA 2K or Call of Duty when you can play a game that combines the two?

Deckcrawler

• Developer: Outside Joke Games

• PC | TBD

Here’s a first-person tactics game with a fun origin story. Developer Leslee Sullivant woke up in the middle of the night, having just dreamt it. At 2am, she envisionsa person in a fantasy setting holding cards instead of a sword or magic wand. She immediately tells her husband, Chris, and they decide they’ve got to make it. At the Mix event, Leslee and Chris describe Deck Crawler as Slay the Spire meets Skyrim. It’s early.

Poly Fighter [demo]

• Developer: Heartloop Games

• PC | TBD

Game developer Osama Dorias waved me over to try Poly Fighter, a 2D fighting game roguelike that he thought would primarily appeal to fans outside of the fighting game community. Instead, he says the team’s heard a lot of enthusiasm from fighting game fans and they’re now working to make the game’s moves a bit more complex. They’re also taking the game to this month’s Evo fighting game tournament, making it one of the only single-player games ever demo’d at the show, Dorias said.

Gunstoppable [demo]

• Developer: CAGE Studios

• PC/Xbox | August 5

This is a first-person shooter where the pitch is “speed = damage.” You’re meant to zip through its levels, eyes on a speedometer that you want to push past 100%.

I did my best, but I wasn’t able to gain much excess speed. It might be because I was distracted by chatting with the game’s solo developer, Salaar Kohari, who told me he’s ex-Sony Santa Monica and had worked on “vehicles” for God of War Ragnarok. Wait, wasn’t that game set in the world of Norse Mythology? Was I forgetting a car? Was he talking about a boat? “The bobsled and the yak,” he told me. Right. In video game design terms, those are vehicles. He couldn’t tell me what he worked on on Laufey: God of War before he left Sony Santa Monica. Guess it wasn’t the cube!

The Alley [demo]

• Developer: AIXLAB

• PC | 2026

I had to settle for watching other people play this first person horror game in which you wield… a phone! The in-game phone is used as a camera to decipher what’s real and what isn’t. So much for there being ghosts in this game. Any game that has you glancing at your phone while you’re supposed to be walking somewhere is hauntingly realistic.

That was it for the MIX. On Saturday, I started a three-day tour of Summer Game Fest’s Play Days. Picture a city block of mostly one-story buildings. An open walking lane cuts through the middle, so you can access all the buildings from within the middle of the block. From the inside, you’ve got a periphery of buildings and cabanas occupied by various publishers. For example, Annapurna’s got a building next to a Wizard of the Coast tent, which is adjacent to a Saber Interactive building that’s conjoined to a Sega structure. And so on.

Blood Message

• Developer: 24 Entertainment (NetEase)

• PC/console | TBD

Technologically impressive, Blood Message is the latest proof that Chinese studios can now make games that resemble the biggest-budget productions from the west. Emphasis on “resemble,” because, though it it is set during the late Tang Dynasty in 848 AD, Blood Message looks a whole lot like one of Sony’s Uncharted or God of War games, with a stout lead character squeezing through tight cracks, battling enemies in cinematic close-up, even doing that thing where your computer-controlled ally gets to high ground, reaches down for your hero’s arm and hoists him up.

You play as a messenger, and there’s something going on around your character’s son, but the melee, the swordplay, the glimpses of horseback riding all look like a game in search of an identity beyond Game You’ve Played, But In China. To be fair, while Blood Message felt merely fine to me, other attendees I chatted with named it one of their favorites of the show.

Sea of Remnants

• Developer: Joker Studios (NetEase)

• PC/PS5 | TBD

One of the most baffling game preview experiences I’ve had in a while, with total miscommunication between me and the NetEase official demoing it. What I understood: it’s a real-time pirate sailing adventure when you’re on the high seas; it’s a turn-based role-playing game when you’re exploring on land. What I didn’t understand: Just about everything else, mostly due to me being left to my own devices and tossed into the middle of the game with a heavily upgraded party and a very busy game map.

Sonic Pico Park

• Developer: Tecopark

• PC, console | TBD

This 2-8 player game was a delight. Sonic Pico Park is a spin-off of a decade old series of cooperative side-scrolling puzzle games. I played this new one as Tails, along with three Sega reps in control of Sonic, Knuckles and Amy Rose.

In each brief level, we needed to work together to reach a goal. In one, three of us had to stack up so the fourth could climb and hit a switch to get us all through. In another, we had to roll into balls to speed toward a goal. As the levels got more complex, we had one where the four of us were tethered together, two of us had to climb on top of a floating platform, and the other two dangled below it to grab a key.

Refreshingly strong level design.

Valor Mortis [demo]

• Developer: One More Level

• PC, console | October 13

One of my favorites of the show. Soulslike combat and level design + first-person parkour, set in some twisted version of the Napoleonic wars. Our hero is back from the dead, sword in hand, battling some grisly, mutated enemies while hearing Napoleon’s voice in their head. There’s lore, too. You collect notes and look at ghostly after-images to figure out what happened. I liked it a lot, but am a little worried it’ll be tuned to be tougher than I’d like. We’ll see.

Star Wars Galactic Racer

• Developer: Fuse Games

• PC, PS5, Xbox Series | October 6

I played this game. As a condition for doing so, I can’t write about it until later in June. (Embargoes are common at events like these, though usually not for that long). I also can’t tell you yet if I enjoyed it or not. But feel free to guess.

Bub

• Developer: Paperfrog

• PC | Q4 2027

One of the best games I played at Play Days, but be warned that I am highly biased due to the very special connection I have with one of its developers.

I wouldn’t say we’re close, per se. But he lives with a friend of mine, and, years ago, I gave that friend a surround sound system that my wife and I didn’t want anymore. So, for a time, this developer had my old surround sound speakers. I’m sorry if you feel scandalized right now.

My intimate connections aside, Bub’s development was led by two friends, Case and Todd who’ve made a stop-motion adventure about an artist in New York City. It’s quirky, intermittently sad and hopeful, influenced by Case being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis during development. Tough to describe, but quite lovely. Bub’s announcement video is worth a watch.

Ithaca

• Developer: The Pixel Hunt

• PC | TBD

The most intriguing demo I saw all weekend. It’s first-person. You’re driving a car. You’re an environmental rights lawyer. There’s a body in your trunk. It’s a road trip game.

You can customize your character by looking at the rearview mirror, can check your quest log by looking up, where your to-do list is organized as constellations. You can call people via your car’s computer.

There might be integration with real-life podcasts, but the developers aren’t sure–they didn’t tell me this, because they weren’t there, but they coded little multiple choice dialogue options inside their demo to explain their design intentions.

Also, your name is Penelope and you can text Hermes? There are demos where my bewilderment is bad (Sea of Remnants) and there are demos where I cannot wait to find out more about the madness with which I’ve just interacted (this one).

Lazy River

• Developer: Mike Boxleiter, Kevan DuPont, Jake Yetter, Joel Corelitz and Karlee Esmailli

• PC | summer 2027

Here’s an absurd multiplayer game about crafting and enhancing a floating base of pool floats as it drifts down a lazy river in a sci-fi water park… while trying to fend off attacks from zombies who are defeated when they’re soaked. It’s the only game I’ve played this year in which you use a pool noodle as a weapon.

Sadly, I barely had time to play Lazy River, but I was amused by a premise that would have been the weekend’s most ridiculous, if not for Ball & Gun.

Erosion

• Developer: Plot Twist

• PC | TBD

I was excited to see this one. It’s a twin-stick shooter, a Western with blocky voxel graphics and a design hook wherein every time you fail a violent run through its enemy-filled levels, time advances 10 years.

During my 10 minutes playing the game, the moment-to-moment action was easy to sample. It was frantic, as twin-stick shooters go.

What was harder to assess was that time system, which is tracked by an in-game timeline that shows how you can make decisions in one decade (save a town vs. help cultists take it over, for example) that will impact the look and layout of the game once it jumps 10 years forward. You’re trying to rescue your daughter, who starts the game at age 8. The developer showing me the game wouldn’t say how many decade jumps are possible. I’m curious for more.

The Lost Wild

• Developer: Great Ape Games

• PS5, PC | 2027

I got a theater demo presentation for this one. Dark room, head of the dev studio narrating the action, as a small group of us watched a character named Saskia find herself on an island populated with dinosaurs. Pitched as “evasion-baed survival horror,” this is a first-person game about avoiding dinosaurs by hiding in the bushes, throwing objects to distract a stalking Allosaurus, and generally trying to not get eaten.

There were certainly Jurassic Park vibes to this one, but also a dash of Lost, thanks to Saskia’s discovery of a seemingly abandoned facility run by a mystery corporation. Warning: They told us that the dinos can kill your character even when you’re trying to save your progress at an in-game kiosk.

(The game’s title might ring a bell. It was first teased in October 2021.)

Bad Magpie

• Developer: Milktooth

• PC, Xbox | 2027

This was cute. You’re a magpie with one wing, so you skitter around looking for shiny things, solving environmental puzzles along the way. Grab a small log with your break, light it on fire, burn down a fence, grab a shiny thing. Enter a house, walk into an old TV set, retrieve a shiny thing. Peck at a sand castle. Shiny thing. Make a nuisance, get rewards. It’s of a feather with Untitled Goose Game.

Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis

• Developer: Crystal Dynamics, Flying WIld Hog

• PC, console | February 12, 2027

What to say? I never played the original, because my college console of choice was N64, not PSX. Was Lara Croft always a ruthless dinosaur killer, slow-mo shooting bullets into their skulls? Were these puzzles about floating cog wheels in the original? My favorite Tomb Raider was 2015’s Rise of the Tomb Raider, a game that was more bow, arrow and pickaxe. This remake seemed fine, I say, though I clearly don’t have a good point of reference. Much of the buzz the game generated over the last week was over how the developers couldn’t spell Tomb Raider without using the letters AI.

Slap Out Of It

• Developer: Turbo Button

• PC, console | 2027

The personal detail I most enjoy sharing with people is that I don’t like comedy, after which I explain that I don’t have time to laugh and then they wonder if I’m joking. I can report that I was laughing on the inside while playing Slap Out Of It, one of the most enjoyable demos of the weekend.

This is a first-person “slap-and-solve” game which starts with a tutorial in which you must solve a bunch of cartoony people’s problems and/or slap these people.

A man’s hair was on fire. I took his burning dollar bill, sprayed him with a fire extinguisher. Then I slapped him. Somebody needed a jigsaw puzzle, but those cost two bucks.. I photocopied the first guy’s dollar, bought the second person a puzzle, then slapped them. A cop had a bad donut. I improved it. Slapped him.

Later, I explored a proper level that involved elevators, fog machines and literally turning a bathroom upside down. I actually saw this game secretly about a year ago and most of the elevator level was the same. But the developers added a really good gag involving a magazine centerfold. A glorious use of development time.

Stuntman: Hollywood

• Developer: Saber Interactive

• PC, PS5, Xbox Series | TBD

You’re a Stuntman in this third-person driving game. I played a Back to the Future level in which I performed jumps, skids and swerves, as directed, while dodging “actors’ shooting machine guns at me. I played a level based on the 1974 disaster movie Earthquake, as I dealt with crashing jumbo jets while trying to nail my jumps.

This was fun, and the movie licenses helped. Now, how come my demo didn’t include any Jurassic Park levels?

Clutch

• Developer: Maverick Games

• PC, PS5, Xbox Series | Spring 2027

Then most lavishly-produced (technically) independent game of the weekend, from a team helmed by the former top developers of the Forza Horizon games. Much of Clutch’s development was bankrolled by Amazon before the commerce giant started backing off most of its game development projects.

The idea is that this is open-world racing with an interesting story, which is a low bar to clear when the main competition’s plot is “There is a big party in country X.” Maverick is upping that with the tale of sibling race car drivers, Theo and Cass Martial, who witnessed a friend/rival die on the track, have decamped to the open-world 780-road playspace that is the French Riviera and now drive in a mix of official races (be fast, stay on the track) and street races (drive wildly, accrue faux-livestream accolades).

Any doubts I may have had about whether a Forza Horizon-like game needs a story evaporated when the developers showed me a heist mission that involved stealing a souped up car that shoots a harpoon. You use this harpoon to shoot at a telephone poles in order to then whip your car in orbit around a curve (see clip above). Amazon, how did you not love that?

Alien Isolation 2

• Developer: Creative Assembly (Sega)

• PC, console | TBD

I played this one in the dark. Sega had a camera pointed at me to film my reactions, but I don’t think I gave them good material. I’m very serious when I’m working, as established above.

The AI2 demo starts on another planet during a ferocious storm. It’s first-person, and a good chunk of the time is spent trudging through a forest, walking down wind-battered cliffs, then reaching a crashed spaceship. Ignoring common sense, we open the hatch, go inside, crawl through vents and soon enough, you see…it.

The original Alien Isolation was all about having a game that pits you against one smart, lethal enemy. The sequel’s doing that, too. I tried hiding under a desk. I tried slowly crouch-crawling to a door. I tried ducking into a vent. The Alien got me a bunch of times. In my defense, Ripley never had to noisily rush past the Alien because she’d double-booked her Sega game demo with a Nintendo third-party showcase.

Turok: Origins

• Developer: Saber Interactive.

• PC, console | Fall 2026

At the Nintendo third-party showcase I first tried Turok. You can play this dinosaur-hunting game in third-person, but, come on, it’s Turok. The classics were in first-person, so I quickly toggled to that view. This was another of the weekend’s it-was-fine demos. I shot some bad guys and some bad (I guess?) dinosaurs, gathered some plants to heal, and wound up in a boss battle against a heavily armored T-Rex.

Among Us Story: On Guard

• Developer: Innersloth

• PC, Switch 2 | TBD

Innersloth co-founder Forest Willard sat near a couple of Switch 2’s running this new, single-player story-driven spin-off of his team’s perpetually updated multiplayer sensation. He called this small game a “relaxer from the grind.” You play as a crew member called the Guard, who has been wrongly accused of murder and been ejected from the airlock. You survive, and you must investigate. It’s a dialogue-filled mystery, with a demo hitting Steam on the 15th.

Demi and the Fractured Dream [demo]

Developer: Yarn Owl

PC, console | February 2027

As I started to play the same demo of Demi and the Fractured Dream that you can try on Steam via the link above, it was explained to me that the two developers making this game loved The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. That was certainly clear to me, given the hooded sword-wielding protagonist, the puzzle rooms, and the curly-cued cartoon smoke.

Thankfully, I dig Wind Waker, too, and had the instincts to know when to seek a treasure chest to find a needed key and when to wave a special feather item to move the platform I was standing on. No complaints from me about playing a Linklike.

And that’s it! That sure was a lot of previews, but those weren’t all the games I saw. There are a handful of other upcoming games I’ll be telling you about in the coming weeks, mostly tied to some pretty interesting interviews.

I hope this run-down put some new games on your radar!

Last Sunday, a trailer that aired during an online Xbox event showed Valor Mortis, an upcoming action game that re-imagines the age of Napoleonic wars as a conflict with the plague-ridden undead.

It’s a first-person game that mixes Dark Souls-style combat with parkour—it’s from the developers of the acclaimed, fast-paced cyberpunk wall-running Ghostrunner games—and a setting like nothing else that’s out there.

Valor Mortis’ trailer concluded with a release date: September 24.

But by the time it aired, the teams behind the game knew that was no longer Valor Mortis’ release date. Days ago, they’d learned the hard way that September 24 would be untenable and that they’d have to change it.

Today, they’ve announced a new one, October 13, after speaking to Game File about getting out of the bind they recently found themselves in.

“When we picked September 24th, it looked like a very, very clear date,” Blake Rochkind, head of publisher Lyrical Games, told me during an impromptu interview on Monday in Los Angeles.

“Very quickly it became not such a clear date.”

Lyrical and development studio One More Level had a feeling the deate might need to change, Rochkind recalled. But they had to lock in September 24 “many, many weeks” ago.

Really, though, who could know if that was the right call when they made it?

“There were so many unknowns,” Rochkind said. “This was before Sony State of Play, before Xbox Showcase, before Nintendo Direct, before Summer Games Fest.”

Then on Tuesday, June 2, during a PlayStation showcase held just five days before their planned release date reveal, things changed.

“As soon as Control announced September 24th, we knew we were moving the date.”

It wasn’t just the PlayStation showcase reveal of the release date for Remedy’s upcoming third-person thriller. There were others. And changing their own trailer this close to its airing, Rochkind would later tell me, wasn’t possible.

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“Do you know Crazy Taxi?” Kenji Kanno asked me and about a dozen other people last Saturday. We were sitting in a compact room in the basement level of a small building at the Los Angeles Summer Game Fest. Sega had booked it to show some of its upcoming games.

Kanno is the designer of the original 1999 Crazy Taxi, an iconic arcade game about swiftly and recklessly driving a yellow cab from one passenger drop-off spot to the next.

That was the last question he asked in English before switching to his native Japanese. Most of the rest of his comments would be translated by a man sitting to his right.

In attendance were other reporters on the gaming beat, along with creators or influencers, as they’re called.

“Oh yeah!” someone shouted in response to Kanno. It was a high-energy answer to a high-energy guy.

Kanno, I’d learn over the next half hour, was quite good at being “on.” I was in store for a dynamic demo of a new Crazy Taxi, one tinged with some implicit insights about status and ego in the worlds of game development and game promotion. I was going to learn plenty about the game. But I think I learned a bit about Kenji Kanno by the end, too.

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Microsoft didn’t. Sony didn’t. Capcom, EA and Ubisoft haven’t done it.

But Nintendo and Sega-owned Atlus, undeterred by anything else happening in gaming in the penultimate month of 2026, announced a game release during today’s Nintendo Direct showcase. Yes, it’s for a Switch 2 port, but still…

Metaphor Re:Fantazio Switch 2 edition will ship on November 12.

Metaphor is the acclaimed October 2024 role-playing game from the lead creators of the Persona series. It had previously come out for PC, PS4, PS5 and Xbox Series.

The lede for this story isn’t me being cheeky. Sure, Metaphor isn’t a brand new release, but it’s still exceptional that Sega/Atlus will be doing this.

The November 2026 video game release calendar is barren, very likely due to the one big game that is announced for the month: November 19’s Grand Theft Auto VI.

GTA VI isn’t even scheduled for Switch 2, certainly not for Nov. 19, so owners of that system are currently not looking at many new releases to play that month.

The scant other releases for November for any platforms include a remastered version of Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters, and a Barbie Rewind compilation, both from Atari.

Worth noting: Nintendo did not announce any games of its own for November, nor December. That Metaphor announcement is from Sega/Atlus, and was simply made via Nintendo’s Direct showcase. This doesn’t mean Nintendo itself is dodging GTA season. The company has taken its time lately announcing release dates, and it and may well hold off on announcing releases for either or both of those months until September. Last year, Nintendo’s two big Switch 2 exclusives for November weren’t publicly given release dates until August (for Kirby Air Riders) and September (for Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment). Metroid Prime 4, released in December 2025, didn’t get its release date until September 2025 as well.

Other news from today’s Direct:

• Nintendo did pile on to September: The already-clogged September release calendar will also get the new Nintendo-published Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave strategy game on the 17th of that month.

• A Wii Sports return with Nintendo Switch Sports Resort, a 12-sport compilation from Nintendo slated for October 22. It includes tennis, bowling, boxing, even thumb wrestling and skateboarding (the last of which is handled with Switch 2’s mouse controls)

• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake for Switch 2. No release date other than 2026 for this new version of the classic time-travel adventure that debuted on the Nintendo 64 in 1998. Just a glimpse of a non-gameplay clip. (Given the spots Nintendo has claimed for itself in September and October, this seems likely for November or December).

• New Xenoblade: Nintendo and Monolith Soft’s long-running role-playing game series Xenobloade is getting an original sequel subtitled Genesis, for release next year (Switch 2-upgraded editions of the first three numbered Xenoblade games, dated for July, October and December).

• Strong third-party Japanese support:

  • A “2D-HD” retro-styled new Final Fantasy, subtitled Resonance, from Square Enix on October 22 (also for PC, PlayStation and Xbox)

  • A new Dragon Quest Monsters game, The Withered World, also from Square Enix in December (also for PC, PlayStation and Xbox)

  • A surprise trailer of the long-awaited Kingdom Hearts IV, confirming it’ll ship for Switch 2 alongside other platforms at a TBA date, also from Square Enix. The game was announced back in 2022.

  • The Duskbloods, the Switch 2 exclusive from From Software (Elden Ring, Dark Souls), with a closed network test this summer

  • Dragons Dogma 2, including a new Dark Arisen expansion, from Capcom for October (also for PC, PlayStation and Xbox)

• A fair amount of FOMO. Nintendo in recent years has had a thing for releasing games for limited times. During today’s Direct, the company announced two time-limited experiences: a Mario-themed series of challenges integrated into the Switch 2’s Donkey Kong Bananza, running only through September 1; and a series of challenges tied to classic Donkey Kong games offered to Nintendo Switch Online subscribers, also only through September 1

• More Pokémon. There is no mainline new Pokémon game slated for late 2026, but there will be expansions to this year’s hit Pokémon habitat-building Pokopia game. Nintendo announced a three-part expansion, beginning its roll-out in August, though no price was announced.

I am not telling you news when I tell you than an executive at a major entertainment conglomerate has looked at a popular franchise and decided that they can—they should—do more with it in video games.

But Shawn Kittelsen, a longtime games writer and designer who is now head of creative and production at Paramount Games Group, makes a decent case when it comes to Star Trek.

Many recent Star Trek games have been niche, he recently told me: a lot of 4x strategy games (like this one), a lot of PC-first games. There was a VR game that Kittelsen really liked, 2009’s Star Trek Bridge Crew, but it too was on the fringes.

“There haven’t been a lot of bigger console releases, especially in recent generations, for Trek,” Kittelsen said.

But, as a job such as his dictates, he’s now pondering a world if there were.

First up will be Star Trek Shadow Frontier, announced this weekend, from horror game specialists Bloober Team (Silent Hill 2 remake, Cronos the New Dawn).

It’s slated for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series and is pitched as a haunting action-adventure featuring Ro Laren, a cult-favorite character who has dipped in and out of Star Trek TV since 1991’s Star Trek The Next Generation episode “Ensign Ro.”

In the game, she’s crash-landed on a mysterious planet, which, well, here’s the marketing copy:

The planet is a spaceship graveyard where nothing is as it seems. As she explores the planet’s corrupted surface and crosses paths with other survivors, she must face twisted creatures, a hostile ecosystem, and an entity that seeks to envelop her body and mind.

Kittelsen says players should expect a game that’s less grim-dark horror, a la a Dead Space or a Resident Evil set in Star Trek, and is more of psychological thriller, akin to Ninja Theory’s Hellblade games.

“There’s plenty of Star Trek episodes in which a character really goes deep into a conflict within themselves,” Kittelsen said, promising a Bloober take on that. The game is “an opportunity to go deep with this one character and to make a character study—which I think gives us a chance to explore aspects of the lore that haven’t been as developed in games before.”

Kittelsen believes there’s a lot of commercial promise around combining psychological thriller, survival horror and action adventure, moreso than “if we made it another 4X strategy game, for example.” Not to beat up on that other genre, he said. “I love 4X strategy, but I think you can overserve that.”

Another way Kittelsen put it to me is that Star Trek Shadow Frontier is meant to show an unusual side of Star Trek, a different side than the standard Trek that’s been showing up in games for a while.

“This is, I think ,an exploratory opportunity for Trek fans to see what we can do with a game that doesn’t try to be the, let’s say, the right down the middle version of Star Trek.

“We wanted to do something that’s more interesting and engaging and will get people’s attention.”

Bloober Team began developing Shadow Frontier before last year’s formation of the new Paramount Games Group. It’s now a central project to that amplified push for games. Kittelsen regards Trek as one of Paramount’s “big four” franchises to build up in games. It’s Star Trek, along with Avatar the Last Airbender, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Spongebob Square Pants.

New game focus, not revivals

Earlier this spring, one of the more unusual Trek games in recent memory, the story-driven Star Trek Resurgence, was pulled from digital storefronts following the expiration of publisher Bruner House to sell the game. It’d only been released in 2023.

Given Paramount’s priorities, I was curious if Kittelsen’s team had plans to bring the game back.

“No plans to re-list Star Trek: Resurgence at this time,” he told me. “Kevin Bruner and the team at Bruner House put a lot of love into the title, but it struggled to find an audience. I’ll never say never to bringing a game back if there’s enough demand, but right now we’re focused on new Star Trek titles.”

I’ll have more Summer Game Fest coverage in upcoming editions of Game File. And, if you missed it, earlier today I had a piece on the return of Xbox exclusives.

Microsoft’s big announcement at its Xbox game showcase today wasn’t a game, but a strategy.

The previously announced that two big upcoming games, Gears of War E-Day (October 6) and Clockwork Revolution (2027), will both be released as “XBOX console exclusives,” the company revealed.

*That phrase means that Xbox is the only console they’ll be released on, but they are also still slated for PC, including on Steam. I noted this, because the wording “Xbox console exclusive” led some Game File readers to ask me if that meant “no PC.” It doesn’t.

For the last couple of years, Microsoft has shipped more games to rival PlayStation and Nintendo consoles, including a Gears of War remake to PS5 last summer. That was under Xbox’s prior management.

In April, I’d asked new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma about when she’d be deciding on whether to return some Xbox franchises to Xbox exclusivity. Her answer at the time:

Sharma: Nothing we're ready to commit to. It's been 60 days. These are decade-long decisions from before. These are very consequential decisions. I want to make the right decision, not the fastest decision.

Just past 100 days, she and her team have made the call about at least a couple of games.

On her Twitter/X feed today, Sharma wrote:

We want people to choose XBOX because of great games and experiences. That also means giving you something that was made for XBOX.

Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution will be XBOX console exclusives!

And on the official Xbox news page, the company emphasized that these are meant to be permanently on Xbox/PC, permanently not on anything else:

These are not timed exclusives. Games already announced for multiplatform releases will stick to that plan – we’re committed to investing in and growing XBOX both on console and beyond.

---

** Sharma signaled an openness to making some Xbox games exclusive interviews last week, when she told a Bloomberg interviewer that the company is…

“… the number two publisher in the world.. And in order to be a great publisher, you must have your games reach large audiences to play. At the same time, we’re increasingly becoming a platform. In order to be a platform, you must have exclusive content and services. We’re looking at that very closely. We have to be very thoughtful about each title and how we want to think about it and learn from similar cases in the industry. And that’s what we’re doing.”

Consistent with that, not every upcoming internally developed game from Microsoft’s Xbox studios is skipping PlayStation.

During today’s showcase, Microsoft also revealed a third Hellblade game from its studio Ninja Theory. That game, called Senua, will ship in 2027 on Xbox, PC and PS5. It also offered more details on State of Decay 3, another internally developed game, revealing that it too is slated to ship in 2027 on Xbox, PC and PS5.

Microsoft’s biggest owned franchises, such as Call of Duty and Minecraft, are not expected to abandon PlayStation (and are in fact CoD is committed to the PlayStation through 2033 or so), but some first-party Microsoft games in 2027 will still come to PlayStation as well.

Game File reached out to Microsoft for more details on how it made decisions on Gears as exclusive and State of Day as not. They declined to go into further details. But it’s worth considering that the day-and-date release of Gears of War Reloaded on Xbox and PlayStation last summer gave Microsoft some data about the cost-benefit of having a new Gears on or off PlayStation.

Entertainment conglomerate Paramount has built up a new video game division that’s hatching plans for games tied to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Avatar the Last Airbender and more.

Paramount’s first big announcement from the group is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin, a third-person action-adventure developed by renowned action game studio PlatinumGames, revealed on Friday afternoon in Los Angeles during the Summer Game Fest kick-off show.

(If that news triggers any deja vu, hang on, I’ll get to that.)

The Paramount Games Group group is the result of the 2025 merger between Skydance Media and Paramount which has to, among other things, a game division that will be responsible for future Star Trek projects while also developing a Star Wars game.

Shawn Kittelsen, the Paramount Games Group’s head of creative and production, explained the overall endeavor to me, before I peppered him with questions about various projects and series.

“Paramount games now is a business unit,” Kittelsen said. “We are a content pillar alongside film and TV. We’ve been a priority for the company since the merger,”

The group began coalescing last summer.

Internally, the Paramount gaming team consists of two former internal Skydance Studios, one responsible for VR hit The Walking Dead Saints & Sinners and the other making the upcoming Marvel 1943. Those have been combined with game licensing efforts tied to Paramount’s big franchises, as well as a new publishing team.

Paramount Games Group’s big franchise priorities will involve titles tied to what Kittelsen called their “big four”: TMNT, Spongebob Squarepants, Star Trek and Avatar the Last Airbender.

They also have access to Mission Impossible, Top Gun, South Park, Yellowstone, Survivor Scream, Dora the Explorer, Paw Patrol, all potentially source material for future games.

“You take this list that you have of all the great IP, and you kind of rank them by, all right, what’s gonna make the easiest transitions to games?” Kittelsen said. “What’s got the most fan appetite for games? Which platforms is that audience using? Like, I don’t think that a triple A Survivor. Game necessarily is what that audience is looking for, right? So we need to find out where we can meet that audience in games.”

(I floated that Paramount could make a CSI game in the vein of Case of the Golden Idol. Kittelsen laughed.)

Wary of attempts by other companies in recent years to start up a bunch of expensive new game projects at new game studios all at once, Paramount will be more conservative and isn’t immediately planning to build a bunch more studios, Kittelsen said.

“If you look at the landscape of the industry, the worst possible strategy we could have would be to be just voraciously acquisitive and get too deep into a portfolio of games that we’re not prepared to support, and teams that we are not prepared to manage.”

The Paramount Game Group is not overtly tied to any plans or intentions that Paramount’s leaders have for WB Games, the sizable game division that is set to join the conglomerate, should Paramount’s bid to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery passes regulatory hurdles.

WB Games includes Lego-centric gaming studio TT Games, Hogwarts Legacy studio Avalanche, Batman game-makers Rocksteady, and Mortal Kombat team Neatherrealm.

“I can’t say anything about that, only insofar as there’s nothing to really say because we’re just focused on Paramount now, that’s enough to manage,” Kittelsen said. “And the merger and any pending transaction is still a ways off from closing.”

Paramount is run by David Ellison, whose sister, Megan Ellison, runs Annapurna, which has a game label of its own (they recently published Mixtape, are helping fund Control Resonant and will publish Silent Hill Townfall and the upcoming dinosaur survival game The Lost Wild).

There’s a family relationship there but no business one across the groups, Kittelsen said.

“We’re all about blockbusters and trying to reach the biggest possible audience,” Kittlesen said. “And so we’re sort of the mainstream counterpart to I think Annapurna’s funkier, more offbeat styling.”

Lots of project updates

TMNT: The Last Ronin, as noted above, will be developed by Platinum, a studio with a great pedigree in action games (Bayonetta, Nier Automata, Ninja Gaiden 4) though with some considerable staff turnover of late. Overseeing this one, Kittelsen said, is former Tekken producer Yohei Shimbori who will be joined by Platinum veterans. Last Ronin was originally a comic book mini-series about a lone surviving Ninja Turtle on a revenge quest.

• This is a different project than the TMNT: The Last Ronin game revealed in 2023 with Black Forest Games and THQ Nordic. That one is defunct, Kittelsen said.

• This is Platinum’s second game in the series, following 2016’s Activision-published Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants in Manhattan. That game “did not get the kind of support that I think that the Turtles deserve or that Platinum deserves,” Kittelsen said. “So this was also a chance to do justice by Platinum’s TMNT fans and say, ‘Hey, let’s see what they can really do when we get some of the resources.”

• Kittelsen on Platinum’s pitch for the game: “On the face of it, the pairing of Platinum and The Last Ronin made a lot of sense just from a genre fit standpoint. But when we had the first conversation, the first pitch, it was about so much more than what I expected. I expected [them] to go deep into the action and the quality of combat dynamics. And instead we spent a lot more time talking about themes and character and the growth of the turtles and how we all were raised with this much simpler version of the Ninja Turtles in our mind… and now we live in a more complicated time, and we can’t have all the nice things we have when we were kids. There’s a twist on it, but we still want to build a better world for the next generation.”

• As for gameplay, per Kittelsen: “You’re a tank of a Ninja Turtle in this game. So it’s gonna play differently than Ninja Gaiden or Bayonetta might.”

Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game: This externally developed upcoming 2D fighting game has been generating strong buzz at pre-release showings. Previously a licensed game, it’ll now be properly published by Paramount and will be the first game to come out under the Paramount Games Group label.

Previously announced Avatar The Last Airbender role-playing game: An Avatar RPG, announced in 2024 as coming from Paramount and Saber Interactive is no more. “That particular project wasn’t in production when we started this new division,” Kittelsen told me. “The Airbender franchise is a high priority for us, so given the right team and opportunity, we would love to bring Aang’s world to life in a AAA game.”

Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra: This World War II adventure featuring Captain America and Black Panther is from the Skydance team overseen by former Uncharted creative director Amy Hennig. Last November, Skydance said the game would not be released in early 2026, as previously planned. The Marvel game does not have a new release date yet. It “needs more time to cook,” Kittelsen said. “So that’s why it’s all hands dedicated to that right now and making sure that that first game comes out as good as it can.”

Untitled Star Wars Game: In 2022, Skydance announced that Hennig’s team would also develop a Star Wars game, a return to a franchise she’d previously been working on at EA. “The Star Wars game is one that we’ll have to talk about after 1943, because one at a time is enough,” Kittelsen said.

Unannounced game from former Skydance VR team: The team behind the VR games The Walking Dead Saints & Sinners and The Behemoth is making a non-VR game for PC and consoles, Kittelsen said.

Note: I’ll have more from my chat with Kittelsen and Paramount’s plans in an upcoming edition of Game File.

Item 2: In brief…(Summer Games Fest edition)

👀 Sega’s Stranger Than Heaven game that spans 50 years of Japanese history (1915-1965) will feature celebrity cameos from Snoop Dogg and… Tupac Shakur (with the cooperation of his estate).

• I asked Sega how Tupac’s voice will be handled. They pointed me to the game’s latest press release, which states: “RGG Studio is treating this integration with the utmost respect for his legacy, crafting every aspect in the close collaboration and without the use of AI, including his character design based on archival footage and photographs.”

🎮 1666 Amsterdam, a project long incubated by lead Assassin’s Creed creator Patrice Desilets, not only is coming to early access this year, but has a PC prologue available now.

💥 Mafia: The Old County is getting an expansion on August 14.

⚔️ The MMO Guild Wars 3 was announced for PC and PS5, releasing 2027.

😮 Capcom’s next remake, Resident Evil: Veronica, is slated for 2027.

☁️ Final Fantasy VII: Revelation, the final part of Square Enix’s remake trilogy, will be released in Spring 2027.

☔️ ShiftUp, maker of 2024 hit Stellar Blade, revealed Stellar Blade: Blood Rain, no release date.

🤖 The next game from Gen Design, the studio led by Fumito Ueda (The Last Guardian, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus) is called gen Atlas.

Item 3: The week ahead

Saturday, June 6

• Events: A day of showcases, all linked here: Southeast Asian Games Showcase (11am ET), Wholesome Direct (noon ET), Story Rich Showcase (1pm), Green Games Showcase (2pm ET), Pride Parade (3pm), Frosty Games Fest (6pm)

• Events: Plus: IGN Live all day and the Future Games Showcase (noon)

Sunday, June 7

• Events: Xbox Showcase and Gears E-Day Direct (1pm) ET, PC Gaming Show (3pm ET)

Thursday, June 11

• Game release: Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions early access)

On Tuesday, during Sony PayStation’s State of Play, one of the most-watched gaming showcases of the year, viewers got a look at a new game in the old Stuntman franchise.

Stuntman: Hollywood was a big surprise. It’s the first new game in the series since 2007 and, in a twist, it features real, recognizable shows and movies.

The trailer showed how players will be able to perform stunts based on Miami Vice, Knight Rider, Back to the Future, Fast & Furious and Death Race.

All those teased franchises are part of Universal Pictures and NBCUniversal TV.

There’s another Universal tie-in that the Stuntman’s developer and publisher, Saber Interactive, wanted to show, but couldn’t: Jurassic Park.

It’s not because they’re skipping it.

The iconic dinosaur series will also be featured in Stuntman: Hollywood, Saber CEO Matt Karch tells Game File.

So why wasn’t it in the game’s first promotional video?

Saber was not allowed to include it, Karch said, due to an unexpected months-long period of silence around Jurassic Park-related announcements that extended well beyond Saber’s game.

While the issue appears to have just been resolved, it was not done so in time to cut a new Stuntman trailer.

Karch said he was never told by Universal just what the problem was. “But I have since been informed that it's resolved,” he said.

It’s unclear what the hang-up was. A rights issue? A copyright concern? A rep for Universal did not reply to a request for comment by press time. (Jurassic Park began as a 1990 novel by the late Michael Crichton, who sold the film and TV rights to Universal. )

Fans began noticing some strangeness around all things Jurassic Park in mid-March as usually-active social media channels tied to the ongoing film series went quiet.

Those fans are now celebrating signs earlier this week that whatever was going on seems to be in the past.

On June 2, the official X/Twitter account for Jurassic World posted, without explanation, “We’re back in business.”

The account had last posted on March 17.

A Jurassic-focused YouTuber Swrve was ebullient. On his channel, he noted: “Over the course of the last 76 Days, a strange never-before-seen anomaly with the Jurassic IP has been ongoing where it remained silent without a peep from all of their social channels. Today, that just ended!”

Whatever the reason for the silence, the multi-month dino crisis also impacted another game: Frontier Development’s late-2025 strategy park-builder Jurassic World Evolution 3.

Frontier had been releasing new dinosaurs as free monthly downloadable content for the game. In February, they added the Cryolophosaurus. On March 16, they added the Amargasaurus.

But no dinosaur was added in April. On May 1, a Frontier rep posted to the studio’s Discord that “due to reasons outside of our control, we were unable to release April’s free species, despite our best efforts.”

On May 26th, the rep apologized again, this time for not yet being able to release the late April dinosaur nor the planned May species “due to ongoing reasons outside of our control.”

A day later, the rep delivered good news: “We are now able to confirm that we will be returning to our planned schedule of content over the coming months.” That same day, the game’s social media account ran an in-character apology for “the recent loss of communications” and said that the Dracorex and Liopleurodon dinosaur species would be added to the game on June 1.

While we’re discussing Jurassic Park games…

As for Saber, the company has more Jurassic Park-related video games in the works, beyond a slice of Stuntman: Hollywood. Back in December 2023, at The Game Awards, the company announced the development of the first-person game Jurassic Park: Survival.

Little has been heard about it since.

“Happy to say JP Survival is very much under active development and is looking very solid,” Karch told Game File, when I opportunistically asked.

Both it and the new Stuntman, he stressed, are “looking good.”

The most extraordinary element of yesterday’s big PlayStation showcase wasn’t the show-closing reveal of a new, undated God of War game featuring the post-death exploits of Faye, the wife of series protagonist Kratos.

It was the number of games that the showcase made clear will be cramming themselves into a slender release window.

• We’ve known that Marvel’s Wolverine, a first-party PS5 exclusive, will come out on September 15.

• We learned that massively multiplayer game Dune Awakening is coming to Xbox Series and PS5 on Tuesday, September 22

• And Remedy’s third-person thriller Control: Resonant claimed Thursday, September 24. (Or September 22 if you want to spend $70 on the game instead of $60 and have a PS5; only the 24th for Xbox and PC)

• Konami also slotted first-person horror game Silent Hill Townfall for September 24.

• Capcom, which has little trouble selling games these days, claimed Friday September 25 for its Onimusha revival.

It’s tempting to read this all as a rush to avoid the blast radius of Grand Theft Auto VI, which is slated to land on November 19. There are currently no other big games announced for November (apologies to Crymelight.)

A less-discussed factor is Tokyo Game Show. That public showcase is often the final promotional stop for the fall’s Japanese-published games, with numerous games shipping right after. TGS this year runs from September 17 through September 22, just ahead of the aforementioned new games from Japanese publishers Konami and Capcom.

Sure enough, that post-TGS timeframe has releases from more Japanese publishers, including Natsume’s next Harvest Moon game and SquareEnix’s Switch 2 edition of Dragon Quest XI S, both on September 24.

(Just a week later, on October 1 and 2, respectively, we’ll get a remaster of Dynasty Warriors 3 from Koei Tecmo and Bandai Namco’s Ace Combat 8).

Warning: September could get even more packed. There are still more big game showcases in the coming days. Plus, Nintendo at some point will begin announcing games and dates for its Switch systems’ titles; the prolific publisher hasn’t dated any releases beyond July.

Some takeaways from Sony’s State of Play:

• Marvel’s Wolverine game is so violent, so full of bloody dismemberment, that it’s a news story that the usually family-friendly game-maker Insomniac will provide players options to tone down the blade-handed hero’s goriest moves.

• The announcement of God of War: Laufey, a full-scale sequel set in a fantastical death world full of gods from multiple pantheons, triggered a cascade of clarifications about Sony Santa Monica’s work: namely that Cory Barlog, longtime God of War developer and game director of the series’ acclaimed 2018 revamp, is now considered creative lead of the whole studio. Santa Monica veteran Ariel Lawrence is directing the game. And, rest assured, they said, more Kratos-led adventures are coming. Barlog also thinks there are more stories to be told about the character Sindr . Hmm.

• Absent from the showcase were any new live service games from Sony’s studios, just a glimpse of the new season in Bungie’s Marathon. Instead, Sony’s other game announcement was for 2027 teenage horror sequel Until Dawn 2, from Firesprite, a first-party studio last seen making a PSVR2 game.

Item 2: In brief…

🎮 Last Friday produced some drama about logos and a controversial mea culpa from Xbox CEO Asha Sharma.

• The short version: veteran Xbox game content boss Matt Booty said on the official Xbox podcast that day that, during its upcoming game showcase, Microsoft would show logos for whichever platforms each featured game will run on. Microsoft has done this in recent years; rivals Nintendo and Sony do not.

• After complaints on Twitter/X from hardcore Xbox users who said Microsoft should prioritize its own brand, Sharma responded to one such user calling the logo announcement a “miss.” She added: “We are talking about how we adjust for future XBOX shows.” (That remark then elicited criticism over whether Sharma was putting too much stock in social media backlash).

• On Tuesday, Sony stuck to its approach of only showing PlayStation logos, meaning you’d need to Google or read pieces like this to learn or be certain that third-party games such as the new Control and Onimusha are also slated for Xbox and PC.

🚫 PlayerUnknown Productions, the studio led by PUBG lead creator Brendan Greene, said today it’s laying off workers and halting development of survival game Go Wayback, which had launched last November, Game Developer reports.

✏️ Pearl Abyss plans to patch the story of its early 2026 hit role-playing game Crimson Desert, Forbes reports.

• From the developer’s roadmap: “To further strengthen the narrative flow of Kliff’s journey and to make it more engaging, we are working to refine and improve the coherence of key scenes.”

• In May, Pearl Abyss CEO Heo Jin-young told investors: “I partially empathize with the disappointment users feel regarding the story. I believe it would have been better if we could have handled it better… The development team tried to fill in the gaps in the remaining time, but ultimately, we focused on strengthening the gameplay, which is what we do best."

🇺🇸 212.3 million Americans between age 5 and 90 play video games, according to the Entertainment Software Association’s latest annual survey of U.S. gamers.

• The survey counted 205.1 million U.S. gamers a year ago.

Item 3: Fox McCloud wants to get paid

Star Fox, the June-slated Switch 2 remake of 1997’s Star Fox 64, plays so faithfully to the original on-rails space-ship shooter that my 29-year-old muscle memory kicked in last Friday, when I tried the new version at a Nintendo demo event in New York City.

I knew when to turn, when to shoot, when to anticipate that an enemy would arrive to chase Slippy toad. I loved the game back in ‘97 and was pleased to play it again.

The graphics are light years more sophisticated than the original.

What I wasn’t quite prepared for were the significant changes to the game’s script. Mid-mission chatter is a bit different, but the overall set-up of the game has a much different tone—our hero is more clearly a gun for hire.

Compare the original version’s initial mission briefing dialogue between our hero Fox McCloud and military commander General Pepper :

And here’s the script for the new one (I couldn’t capture footage of it, so I just have the words)

ROB: Incoming hail from General Pepper. Priority 1 communication. Patching him through now.

Pepper: We need your help, Star Fox.

Fox: Hey there, General. You seem a little on edge.

Pepper: Andross’ invasion has found its way to our doorstep. His forces are laying siege to Corneria as we speak. The Cornerian Defense Force is spread too thin. I need your team to get down there and launch a counter-offensive.

Fox: That’s no small ask, General, but as it happens, my team’s available to deploy immediately.

Pepper: Andross’ forces have already occupied numerous worlds throughout the system. If they take Corneria, then and all hope is lost. Save Corneria. Liberate the Lylat System. And you can name your price.

Fox: You’ve got yourself a deal. It’s a pleasure doing business with you, General. [To his team:] Prep the Arwings. We’ve got a job for you, Star Fox. We’re going to take the system back from Andross, one planet at a time.

Speaking of comparisons, I wanted to share the old version and new version of the line reading of Peppy exhorting Fox to “Do a barrel roll!” The late Rick May’s performance of that line was one of the most famous early pieces of video game voice-acting. But, again, no capture allowed and I couldn’t get the okay from Nintendo to share the audio I recorded of it. So I’ll just tell you. The new Peppy sounds a tad younger, but the line is otherwise pretty close to the original.

Each year since 2020, Sony has sold millions of fewer copies of the games it has developed and/or published for its PlayStation consoles—until a small uptick in the past year—according to data released by Sony and collated by Game File.

At the recent peak of its performance, in the 12 months between the spring of 2020 and the winter of 2021, Sony sold 58.4 million copies of its games. That was during a remarkable stretch that included the massive hits The Last of Us Part II and Ghost Of Tsushima, as well as the launch of the PlayStation 5.

Four years later, in a 12-month cycle that included Game of the Year winner Astro Bot and the infamous flop Concord, Sony sold less than half as many first-party games.

The company’s most recent total, tallying first-party PlayStation games sold on PS4 and PS5 from April 2025 through March 2026 showed the first improvement in a half-decade, up to 32.1 million first-party games sold.

That modest rebound came in a year that featured the marquee release Ghost Of Yotei.

The decline of first-party PlayStation game sales since 2020 can be seen in Sony’s own annual financial results published each May. Since 2020, the company’s data has included a total number of units sold for “first party titles.” When it began reporting this, Sony even shared historical sums back to 2018.

Viewed in total, the steady drop may help solidify a feeling among PlayStation observers who’ve sensed something off about the Sony gaming group’s performance since the start of the PS5 generation in 2020.

PlayStation still sells millions of consoles each year and makes multi-million-selling games, but a half-decade that was dense with studio acquisitions has failed to significantly offset a downward trend in the number of copies Sony sells of its own games. A recent rush of remakes and remasters hasn’t bent the curve upward either, it appears.

The drop since 2020—what looks like a slowdown of bona fide Sony-backed hits—is why events like Tuesday’s PlayStation State of Play showcase stoke so much enthusiasm among fans of Sony’s game consoles. That event is already slated to showcase the upcoming Wolverine game from Sony hit-maker Insomniac. More of Sony’s game teams feel due to show up and deliver, though whether they do or not is TBD.

As with any data, some caveats and context about Sony’s first-party sales decline is needed.

Most importantly, the peak year when Sony sold 58.4 million copies of its games was the year of the spread of a global pandemic. The Covid outbreak triggered worldwide stay-at-home lockdowns, which spiked interest in homebound entertainment, including video games.

But if it was all just a come-down from the pandemic, the total number of games sold on PlayStation consoles would be down similarly. A check of Sony’s data shows they’re not.

Read more

Note: Thanks to a holiday-shortened work week and the need to get the weekend going (for me and for you!), this is an all-round-up edition of Game File. I’ll be back next week with some original stories–and with coverage of the coming avalanche of E3-style gaming events and announcements.

In brief…

👀 Colorado governor Jared Polis has vetoed a bill that would have forced gamers in the state to pay an extra 5% fee for downloadable content for video games, The Denver Post reports. The money would have been used to fund youth mental health and education programs,

• Polis said he vetoed the “Online Add-on Transaction Fee Youth Enterprise” (full text of the bill) due to “serious legal concerns about the bill’s enterprise structure and its reliance on fees on gamers to fund these important programs and enforcement functions.”

• With more nuance about video game DLC than you’d expect from a governor, Polis added: “the fee imposed on these add-on transactions means that consumers would not only be charged extra for things like character costumes and upgrades, but also for storyline content for online games. This type of content represents digital storytelling and artistic expression, and I do not support such a fee.”

🎮 Rockstar Games employees in the U.K—including in Scotland where Rockstar North historically has built the bulk of each Grand Theft Auto—have formally announced a workers’ union, Aftermath reports.

• No word yet from Rockstar about whether it will voluntarily recognize the union.

😮 Valve has significantly raised the price of its Steam Deck handhelds, citing “rising memory and storage costs.”

• The 512GB OLED model went from $549 to $789.

• The 1TB OLED model went from $649 to $949.

🇯🇵Switch 2 sales in Japan exceeded 200,000 units for the second straight week (through May 24). The surge came just ahead of a May 25 price increase to the Japanese-language edition of the device from ¥49,980 ($314) to ¥59,980 ($376)

• Just a month ago, Switch 2 was selling about 40-50,000 units in Japan each week. Then, in early May, Nintendo announced the May 25 price hike.

📱 Nintendo’s new mobile game Pictonico, which turns user’s photos into comedic, rapidly played micro-games was co-developed by Intelligent Systems, the longtime co-developer of Nintendo’s WarioWare games, which are… compilations of rapidly played micro-games.

🟩 Microsoft has delayed the role-playing game Fable, one of its biggest upcoming releases, until February 2027. The company cited a crowded 2026 calendar of its own games (Halo: Campaign Evolved, Gears of War: E-Day) and third parties’ (GTA VI, Star Wars: Galactic Racer).

• In January, Xbox Studios chief Craig Duncan told GamesRadar that releasing three games during October 2025 was a moment “where we were probably on top of ourselves.”

• The new Fable, developed by Forza Horizon studio Playground Games, was announced in 2020 and has been in development since 2017 or so (just after the studio released Forza Horizon 3; they released FH6 this month).

💥 This year’s Call of Duty is Modern Warfare 4, set partially on the Korean peninsula and coming to PC, PS5, Xbox Series and Switch 2.

• That Switch element is notable. In February 2023, Microsoft signed a 10-year agreement to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo platforms, as it tried to assuage regulators’ concerns over its planned purchase of Activision Blizzard. CoD has not appeared on a Nintendo platform since the 2013 Wii U release of Call of Duty Ghosts.

🃏 Balatro and Case of the Golden Idol publisher Playstack is expected to be sold to Integrated Media Company, the owners of gaming editorial outlets GameSpot and Fandom for $151 million, pending a shareholder vote, Kotaku reports.

⚔️ CD Projekt Red is indeed preparing a new expansion for their 2015 hit role-playing game The Witcher III.

• Called “Songs of the Past,” it’s slated for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series in 2027 and will be developed “in partnership” with external studio Fool’s Theory, the company said.

Item 2: The (eventful!) week ahead

Monday, June 1

• Event: Kicking off what used to be E3 week and now is commonly referred to as Summer Game Fest, the MIX Summer Game Showcase airs online at noon ET. It will highlight a batch of upcoming indie games.

Tuesday, June 2

• Event: The Black Voices In Gaming summer showcase airs online at 3pm ET.

• Event: An hour-long Sony PlayStation State of Play showcase will air online at 5pm ET. Sony is promising a new look at Insomniac Games’ Wolverine alongside “updates, announcements, and gameplay reveals from top studios around the world.” The PlayStation team considers the overall showcase a big enough deal that they’re organizing watch parties at movie theaters across the U.S. Shall we finally see Sony Santa Monica’s next game?
  
  (If you’re curious about Xbox’s version of this, their event will air on Sunday, June 7. And Nintendo, well, they haven’t announced a showcase yet… didn’t do one in 2025 seemingly because they’d just aired a Switch 2 showcase in April … and aired one in 2024 on June 18, more than a week after all the other SGF stuff concluded. They do their own thing, if you haven’t noticed.)

Thursday, June 4

• Event: The Latin American Games Showcase airs online at 5pm ET.

• Event: The Women Led Games Showcase airs online at 7pm ET.

Friday, June 5

• Event: The actual Summer Game Fest showcase will be held in-person in L.A. and streamed online at 5pm ET, with some two-hours of game reveals and updates.

• Event: The Day of the Devs (indie game) showcase airs right after, at 7pm ET.

(That’s not all! Even more events will unfold into the weekend; I’ll run another breakdown in next Friday’s newsletter.)

“There was a Sri Lankan place, not many in Seattle, that opened up during the pandemic,” the video game developer Chandana Ekanayake recently recalled.

“Food was excellent. I got to support this place as much as possible. They lasted a year and had to shut down, which was unfortunate.”

“There’s a Vietnamese place we would overtip,” he remembered. Ekanayake just wanted it to remain open.

“I love this place. It's close to the house. And I would make sure we're spending more than we probably should. But I want to make sure that they are also staying around, and luckily, they are.”

Hardships have shaped Ekanayake’s work as the co-founder and creative director of Outerloop Games: hardships in small businesses, in this economy, in capitalism, in the lives of people whose cultures are being mixed into the rest of North America.

The studio works to create games that empathize, sympathize, resonate, and self-reflect with the awareness of everything going on in the world, while still figuring out a sense of good, a sense of justice to aid marginalized folks who have been going through extremely tough times.

Outerloop’s latest is Dosa Divas, a role-playing game released last month for consoles and PC. It’s an interactive tale of sisters Samara and Amani and their food truck/mech Goddess, as they fight corporate lawyers and cops in turn-based combat. They gather ingredients from their surroundings to whip up dishes, while also trying to right previous wrongs with old friends, coworkers, and family members, after a decade away.

It’s a game about all those hardships and what people can do about them.

It hit me hard.

Read more

To truly appreciate Mina The Hollower, an extraordinary new throwback of a game, I sent myself to Yacht Club University.

That’s not a real institution of higher learning, but it’s the best way I can explain much of the past several weeks as I prepared to play Mina by playing the four biggest game previously made by studio Yacht Club Games.

I had expected Mina the Hollower, in development for six years for PC and consoles, to potentially be something special.

A demo I tried in March had felt great. Mina the Hollower had an old-school premise: a singular move for its hero that felt so good to control and so rich with possibilities that, in the hands of skilled designers, it could be riffed on in various ways for the length of a full game.

Mina’s core maneuver, her hollowing, made her sort of an upside down Super Mario. Nintendo’s hero jumps through the air, discovering power-ups at the apex of his jump by bonking overhead blocks, then defeating enemies by landing on them.

Mina essentially jumps into the ground, digging (“hollowing”) into the earth to fetch buried treasure, then burrows for a short distance to emerge on the other side of a wall that hides treasure or an enemy that needs some battering.

I wanted to understand how good Yacht Club was at making games. I wanted to see how far they’d come. If Mina was terrific—as I predicted it might be—I wanted to feel how they got there, one button press at a time.

On May 6, 21 days before the writing of this review, I checked with Yacht Club Games co-founder and programmer David D’Angelo, to ask which of the studio’s games I should play to truly appreciate the new one’s design.

“Hmmm all of them?” he wrote back.

“Starting with Shovel Knight definitely is helpful,” he continued, referring to Yacht Club’s first game. He gave me a link to a spreadsheet of over 400 cheat codes that could help me out, if I found the game too tough.1

“Most folks say Specter of Torment is the least difficult and quickest to finish in terms of playtime, and [it] refines much of Shovel Knight,” he told me. “King of Cards is a big celebration of everything we did in [the Shovel Knight compilation] Treasure Trove— might work for you better if you’re a fan of shorter, Mario-style courses. And it’s probably the closest to Mina in terms of polish.”

So that was that. Four games, none of which were required. Mina is a whole new game in a whole new world, best I can tell. I’d barely played that first Shovel Knight before and never the other three.

I just thought it’d help. It did. It turns out that playing a game studios major works before their latest is very illuminating.

Read more

Eight days ago, Microsoft opened up a new “Players Voice” online forum where its Xbox users can request features.

What are they asking for?

I explored the threads and can share what I found. I also spotted one request that Microsoft has already reacted to and begun fulfilling.

The top request, with over 19,000 votes and 2,500 comments, not surprisingly, has been for Exclusive Games. That request comes in reaction to the company’s barrier-breaking moves since 2024 to put Sea of Thieves, Forza, Gears of War and even a Halo game on rival consoles.

Writes user Carlos Hernandez:

XBOX was built off of great game exclusives, you cannot sell any consoles without a reason to buy the console compared to your competition or even sending your tentpole games over to your competitor. BRING THEM BACK PLEASE !!!

The second-most requested: Make online multiplayer free to access.

Other top requests include adding more games to Xbox’s Backwards Compatibility program, the addition of Game Pass family plans for households with three Xboxes (or more!), and support for disc-based games on Microsoft’s next console.

Sorting by comment volume instead of votes, the request for exclusives still tops the list. Coming in second is a request for a Ukrainian region setting for consoles. That request is followed by one for full Arabic language support on the Xbox console and in the platform’s games.

The ninth-most popular request was the first to get an Official Microsoft response: Change Playtime from Days to Hours, which would alter how the Xbox interface displays how long someone has played a game.

Microsoft posted on Friday afternoon that it would roll out this change to select users, just a few days after the tweak was requested. That’s a speedy response.

Online, I saw some fans cheer the change; others wondered if platform decisions impacting millions of players were going to be disproportionately impacted by thousands of forum voters—to which others replied, well, go vote, too.

On Friday, Xbox’s head of next gen hardware, Jason Ronald, acknowledged all the fan feedback on the Player’s Voice forums:

In the first week, we have received over 6K+ ideas and suggestions and we have already shipped our first new feature in response to your feedback. Keep it coming. We are listening!

The forums don’t allow for downvotes but do contain counter-points. Under the one about exclusives, for example, many people wanted to see games made just for Xbox (“Brand value perception isn’t built overnight”, “Exclusives are a must because you need to give people a reason to buy an Xbox”). But others said it wasn’t necessary (“Why do I care if someone on PlayStation plays the same game I’m playing on Xbox?”, “Gamepass is the reason me and my wife sold our PS5s, not Exclusives.”).

Oddly, the playing time request, which I had seen last week before Microsoft’s response, was over-written by the announcement of the change. That makes it impossible to look back at the original wording and the discussion under it.

That playing time thread is the only request that has received an official reply from Microsoft so far.

(For what it’s worth, getting an Official Microsoft Response doesn’t always make for the most edifying exchange. Over in the Excel version of the feedback forums, a user who wrote “good” got an official reply stating “We appreciate your feedback to Microsoft.” Last week, I spotted a new Excel feedback forum thread that stated: “yr6486t94w8tiydrdiygisiyglj,” and it got an official Microsoft reply stating: “There is not enough information for us to take any further action on your feedback.” That exchange has since been deleted.)

Some heavier requests show up in the forums. A handful of threads, none with more than nine votes, call on Microsoft to cut contractual ties with Israel (Xbox has been subject to a boycott for the past year over Microsoft’s contracts with Israel and reporting alleging the company’s tech has been used to attack and kill Palestinian civilians; an internal Microsoft review led to the cancellation last fall of one contract.)

Other users have called for lower console prices and/or region-specific pricing of games.

Some of the quirkier requests in the forums include a controller with a quieter d-pad, support for YouTube background playback while gaming, the return of the Xbox One “Snap” feature that ran a secondary app in a sidebar and the inclusion of patch notes for games when they are updated (“We shouldn’t be looking at Steam to get an idea of what’s the latest update even for first party games. Make the hard work of devs discoverable easily”).

The highest-voted request involving a specific game or game franchise: It wasn’t about Halo, Fable or Forza. No, coming in at 51: “New Banjo-Kazooie game.”

Item 2: In brief…

🎮 Bungie is ending development of its 2017 massively multiplayer online sci-fi shooter Destiny 2 with a final update on June 9, saying it was time for the Sony-owned studio to “begin work incubating our next games.”

• In May 2025, Bungie had said it was launching a new phase of Destiny 2, the “Fate Saga,” which was to include four expansions, the second of which released in December.

• But by February 2026, fans and press noticed that the game’s roadmap for upcoming content was MIA.

• Sales of Destiny 2 expansions have been in decline, contributing to big cuts at the studio in 2024.

• Bungie is preparing layoffs for next month and doesn’t plan to immediately start developing Destiny 3, should it makes it at all, per Bloomberg.

• Bungie’s newest game, the player-vs.player shooter Marathon, released in March, has had a mediocre start, though Bloomberg’s report says Bungie plans to invest more resources into that game.

• Destiny and Destiny 2 will remain available to play, Bungie noted.

💰 Star Citizen, the massively multiplayer sci-fi game that has been in development since 2012 or so, has now raised more than $1 billion in crowdfunding, PC Gamer reports.

• A single-player portion of the game, Squadron 42, is due for release this year, with the multiplayer version slated for 2027 or later.

🇺🇸 Nintendo’s Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, was the best-selling premium game, ranked by dollars, in the U.S. for April, according to research firm Circana.

• Circana has revised its ranking system to include projections for digital sales for publishers, such as Nintendo, that don’t share that data.

• Capcom’s Pragmata ranked second.

• Circana calculated that spending on game content, hardware and accessories in the U.S. reached $4.3 billion in April, up 3% from April 2025. Switch 2 was the best-selling hardware, ahead of PS5 and Xbox Series, in units and dollars.

• Personal note: Tomodachi Life certainly has also topped the charts in my household. It’s been my nine-year-old twins’ most-played game since its launch. They’re both hooked on getting their Miis to hang out, date, break up or all of the above.

🟩 Microsoft has hired Matthew Ball as chief strategy officer for Xbox, reporting to new(ish) Xbox CEO Asha Sharma.

• Ball is a former Amazon executive, and a long-time investor and researcher, whose annual State of Video Gaming slideshows have been must-reads.

• Earlier this year, Ball’s 2026 report explored gaming’s struggle to hold the attention of people who’ve become distracted by social media videos, gambling and crypto.

• That report identified five potential areas for industry growth: non-core markets (the likes of Mexico, Brazil, the Middle East, compared to a tapped-out U.S.), advertising, alternate direct-to-consumer payment systems (where game-makers bypass app stores like Apple’s, if possible), outsourcing game development and Roblox.

• About Xbox, Ball told Bloomberg, “Our job is to turn around the business, to grow its reach in players and player hours.”

💥 This year’s Call of Duty will be a Modern Warfare game, led by development studio Infinity Ward, per announcements rounded up by Eurogamer.

📉 Ubisoft’s headcount was down to 16,590 at the end of March, according to the company’s latest full-year results.

• Studio closures, attrition and a pullback on hiring has significantly shrunk the company since March 2022, when its headcount totaled 20,665.

• Ubisoft reported more than €1 billion in losses for the past year and predicted a “lighter new release slate” for the 12 months concluding March 2027. The only big (sorta) title announced for that stretch is July’s promising remake: Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced. (Note: In March, I broke down how severely Ubisoft’s output has slowed.)

• The company predicts major releases tied to Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Ghost Recon in the two year span between April 2028 and March 2029.

• Ubisoft recently released mobile versions of Rainbow Six and The Division. Mobile editions of its big franchises had previously been touted as a major opportunity for the company, but both releases were described as having “had a slow start.”

✂️ The Embracer Group is planning to split again in 2027, into Fellowship Entertainment (Lord of the Rings, Tomb Raider, Kingdom Come; the studios Crystal Dynamics, Eidos Montreal, Warhorse) and Embracer (Alone in the Dark, Killing Floor; publisher/studios THQ Nordic, Aspyr, TripWire).

• Two years ago, the Swedish gaming conglomerate said it would split into three, breaking off the board/card game company Asmodee into its own public company (that happened) while the other two parts would consist of a AAA-centric Lord of the Rings/Tomb Raider group and a company containing both a batch of smaller punch-above-their-weight studios such as Coffee Stain (Goat Simulator) as well as mid-level publishers/studios such as THQ Nordic.

• But, the Coffee Stain spin-out wound up only including the smaller studios, leaving the THQ Nordic-tier parts of Embracer attached to the AAA LOTR/TR group.

• The most recent split gets back to the original idea of there being a powerhouse AAA “Fellowship” group consisting of relatively few big studios—which may well become an acquisition target.

• In a letter to investors, Embracer founder Lars Wingefors wrote: “I think the assets held by Fellowship Entertainment are among the most undervalued in the industry and I feel it’s my duty as the largest shareholder to change this and create a structure to realize their full potential.”

• As part of the announcement, Embracer said that Kingdom Come studio Warhorse is working on a sequel and on an open-world Lord of the Rings role-playing game.

🇫🇷 The eSports World Cup, the Saudi government backed multi-week competitive gaming, will be held in Paris this summer, not Riyadh, where it ran in 2024 and 2025.

• In a press release, organizers said they were running a non-Riyadh location sooner than planned, “in light of the current regional situation,” which is a euphemism for the U.S. war with Iran.

🚫 NetEase-owned Quantic Dream, is shutting down its multiplayer game Spellcasters Chronicles, which launched into early access on February 26 and will be gone on June 19.

• The company cited a “particularly challenging market.”

• Some 95 jobs may be cut as a result, which led to a union blasting the studio for “catastrophic project management,” Game Developer reports.

🤔 Take Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick shared a notably specific anecdote about how his company uses AI, during the company’s latest earnings call:

“Now I’ll give you a real-world example. I was visiting one of our studios, and they showed me some advertisements that they were putting together to advertise their games. These were live-action ads, and they were funny and cute, 15-30-second ad units that you’ve seen a zillion times. They were all created with AI, licensed AI, legal AI. The script was done in-house for free. Well, by people, colleagues who work at the company already.

“The AI software was used. The entire cost of making the spot was zero. Previously, we hired third-party companies to actually create those with human beings, and those spots could cost $25,000, $50,000, $100,000. Now, please note, not only were we not interested in reducing our head count to make this happen, we didn’t have the opportunity to reduce our head count to make this happen. The entire marketing team at this particular studio is two people. They’re doing a great job. What AI has allowed them to do is be more efficient, make great stuff, and do it cheaper. This is all a benefit to our company.”

Item 3: The week we’re in

Monday, May 25

• New Releases:

  • EMUUROM (PC) is a non-violent creature-scanning Metroidvania. I really enjoyed playing its demo last year.

  • Enter the Chronosphere (PC, early access) is a colorful top-down when-you-move-the-enemies-move shooter. The demo I played in February was superb.

  • Paralives (PC, early access) is a new Sims competitor. Not many of them!

Wednesday, May 27

• New releases:

  • 007: First Light (PC, PlayStation, Xbox; out later for Switch), from Hitman studio Io Interactive, is the first new James Bond game for PC and console since 2012’s 007 Legends.

Thursday, May 28

• Event: The Thinky Direct puzzle game showcase will air online at 1pm ET, and the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase will kick off on Steam. It’s like E3, but just for puzzle games. Expect new games, demos, etc.

• New Releases:

  • Crashout Crew (PC, Xbox) is the multiplayer forklift game cooked up by the part of dev studio Aggro Crab that was not off co-developing Peak (See this Game File interview for more)

  • Map Map (PC) is a puzzle game about marking the locations of ruins and treasures on island maps.

  • One Move Away (PC, PlayStation, Xbox) looks like a 3D take on Unpacking, except you’re loading trunks of cars.

  • 868-Back (PC) is a sequel to the great 2015 strategy game 868-Hack

  • The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time (PC) is a puzzle game about a lost role-playing game and the fake history of its development. A demo of the game caught my eye back in 2024.

  • Pictonico (mobile) is a new mobile game from Nintendo, just for phones, that turns photos into WarioWare-style mini-games.

• Corporate: CD Projekt announces its quarterly earnings to investors… on the same day its developers hold an anniversary livestream for the old Witcher III expansion Blood and Wine…(and, for what it’s worth, there have been rumors of a new Witcher III expansion being in the works).

Friday, May 29

• New Releases:

  • Mina the Hollower (PC, console) is the long-awaited next game from retro specialists Yacht Club Games (Shovel Knight). This one’s a top-down adventure, a throwback to the likes of Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.

One of the game industry’s more bizarre legal sagas may be coming to an end.

Microsoft has agreed to pay $250 million to settle a 2022 class action lawsuit brought by a Swedish pension fund that originally hoped to to thwart the tech giant’s $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard.

That’s according to a notification of a preliminary settlement filed yesterday to Delaware’s Court of Chancery and made public today.

The pension fund, Sjunde AP-Fonden (or AP7), had argued that in 2021 Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick had rushed the sale of the company he’d built up for decades to avoid the threat of termination. AP7 alleged he had therefore deprived shareholders of a better stock price than the $95/share agreed to by Microsoft.

Kotick had vehemently denied this, pointing to another settlement to disprove the claims and to the state of the current game industry to argue he’d secured a good price. Microsoft also maintained it had participated in a fair sale process.

Should a judge approve the settlement, all shareholders who owned Activision stock between Microsoft’s January 2022 announcement of its Activision Blizzard bid through the closing of the deal in October 2023 will be eligible to receive another 30 cents per share.

As is the norm, no one in the settlement admitted to any wrongdoing. Language of the settlement locks such sentiments in.

“Microsoft is entering into this Stipulation solely to avoid the burden, expense, and distraction of continued litigation,” the company said in the notification about the settlement.

It continued:

“Microsoft does not substantiate any allegations that there has been systemic or widespread workplace misconduct at Activision; that Activision senior executives ignored, condoned, or tolerated a culture of systemic harassment, retaliation, or discrimination; or that Activision’s Board of Directors, including its Chief Executive Officer, Kotick, acted improperly with regard to the handling of any instances of workplace misconduct.”

In its 2022 lawsuit, AP7 had parroted claims derived from a July 2021 sexual misconduct and discrimination lawsuit brought by the state of California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing, later renamed the California Civil Rights Department, or CRD. That suit did not directly accuse Kotick of misconduct, but it excoriated his company for a “‘frat boy’ workplace culture” of alleged sexual misconduct by managers and workers at Activision Blizzard. That suit was settled in late 2023 for $54 million, with all allegations withdrawn.

With this new settlement, AP7 has backed off, now saying the CRD itself admitted its claims had never been “substantiated”:

“Plaintiff acknowledges that its original claims were based in part on media reporting and characterizations of allegations made by the California Civil Rights Department (the ‘CRD’), which the CRD itself admitted in a court-approved consent decree have never been ‘substantiated’ by any “court or independent investigation” and now have been expressly withdrawn.”

Those statements from Microsoft and AP7 are made prominently on the second page of this week’s 58-page settlement notice. Their subject matter underscores the extent to which a pension fund’s shareholder lawsuit had transformed into a potential re-examination of sexual misconduct claims made about Activision Blizzard five years ago.

That dynamic was certainly clear in January, when Game File was first to report about Kotick’s extensive efforts to use the case to present his version of the final years of his run at Activision Blizzard and the aftermath of his company’s sale.

A lawsuit about other things

In an extensive filing made public that month, Kotick alleged that AP7 had brought the lawsuit to benefit the Swedish gaming company The Embracer Group, in part to distract from bad news about a delay to Dead Island 2. He alleged that one of Embracer’s executives at the time, Emma Ihre, used her position on AP7’s board to bring a suit that could arguably weaken Activision. (Ihre did not reply to a Game File request for comment at the time; Embracer denied to Game File that it had anything to do with the suit being brought.)

Kotick’s lawyers said in January that he would use the suit “to shine a light on the gross misconduct of the activists who invented the false narrative of misconduct at Activision, and to expose the relationship between those activists and AP7.”

The former Activision Blizzard CEO also argued that the 2021 claims of misconduct at the root of lawsuits like California’s had been trumped up by labor organizers and their political allies to motivate well-compensated video game workers to join unions (and pay dues) for protection.

The Communication Workers of America, the main union accused by Kotick, had called such claims “false” and “insulting to the Activision workers who spoke out about the harassment they faced.”

(In 2021, Activision Blizzard had settled a separate sexual harassment suit brought by the U.S. federal government for $18 million; at the time Kotick said he was “grateful to the employees who bravely shared their experiences” and said “I am sorry that anyone had to experience inappropriate conduct.”)

Crucially, Kotick’s filings in the AP7 case have cited court-approved language from the 2023 California settlement that matches what appears in this week’s AP7 settlement. From the CRD one circa 2023:

“no court or any independent investigation has substantiated any allegations that: there has been systemic or widespread sexual harassment at Activision Blizzard [or] that Activision Blizzard senior executives ignored, condoned, or tolerated a culture of systemic harassment, retaliation, or discrimination.”

Those sentences about unsubstantiated allegations and independent investigations (Activision disclosed the results of one in 2022) have, in fact, been a mantra for Kotick in recent years, as he has used them to manage his reputation.

The former Activision Blizzard CEO has worked with a legal team to press news outlets that cover Kotick and/or the 2021 suits to use those California settlement words in their stories—or update them under legal pressure if they don’t.

Last October, for example, a Reuters report about the status of the AP7 lawsuit was updated to note:

In an October 7 letter sent after publication of this article, Kotick’s defamation counsel disputed claims of widespread harassment at Activision.

“Not a single investigation, court finding, verdict, or ruling ever concluded that there was any merit” to the allegations of widespread harassment at Activision, Tom Clare and Nick Brechbill of Clare Locke wrote.

Note: It happened to me, too. After I published my January 2026 piece about Kotick’s take on the AP7 suit, Clare Locke attorneys contacted me, demanding that I add that California settlement’s language to my story. When I pointed out that my article had already included those lines, they apologized.

Microsoft, which is the biggest party settling today, has kept a lower profile in the case in recent months. It did not co-sign Kotick’s claims about the origins of the suit.

Kotick had been replying to the lawsuit as a former member of Activision’s board and therefore as one of the lawsuit’s defendants. Near the start of 2026, he even counter-sued AP7 over what his side claimed was an “abuse of process” in the suit being brought in the first place (this is where the allegation about AP7 suing to help Embracer came from).

In January, the Swedish pension firm called Kotick’s counterclaim against them “rambling, bizarre and baseless.” They accused him of trying to “hijack this proceeding for the purpose of litigating a vendetta against government regulatory agencies and unions.”

Kotick’s side was no doubt casting a wide net. They had issued subpoenas to numerous current and former officials from the California Civil Rights department, showing an intent to pressure the very parties he believed conspired against him to testify under oath. By February, Activision’s former board said they wanted to subpoena a former National Labor Relations Board official who worked with a union organizing game workers. They also asked the Delaware court to apply pressure under the Hague Convention to serve discovery of Embracer chairman Lars Wingefors.

AP7, meanwhile, pressed to re-open the settled misconduct allegations of 2021. It sought access to statements, interviews, and testimony from the California and federal investigations, all to build their argument that Kotick’s leadership position in late 2021 was precarious and motivating him to move fast on a sale. Into the weeds they went in their filings, questioning what Activision’s board knew and when they knew it.

All of this meant that what had ostensibly been a shareholder payout lawsuit dragging along since 2022 could in 2026 have become a legal showdown over misconduct claims at Activision Blizzard. Such a showdown had never fully happened before. The claims of 2021 had been settled instead of going into a full trial, without a judge or jury deciding either in support of the allegations or finding them lacking.

This past February, at its most aggressive, AP7 was even ready to aim its legal firepower on a key part of Kotick’s reputational defense, that language from the California settlement. AP7’s lawyers wrote:

“The full text of the recital makes clear that it is not a finding that there was no widespread sexual harassment at Activision, but only that there was as yet no court opinion or order or final conclusion in an independent investigation making formal findings that there was such widespread harassment…”

A month later, Kotick’s team responded, saying, no, the California language was solid:

“although AP7 may quibble with the Consent Decree’s language and the settlement payments—it cannot deny that the CRD Consent Decree stated unambiguously: ‘no court or any independent investigation has substantiated any allegations that: there has been systemic or widespread sexual harassment at Activision.’”

Within weeks, as seen today, AP7 would also adopt such language in its own settlement with Microsoft and Activision’s former board.

About the board of directors, it should be noted that Kotick’s side argued in March that AP7’s approach was focusing on the wrong things:

“Paintiff’s insistence on relitigating the merits of regulatory investigations and individual allegations of harassment has no place in this Action, which concerns whether members of the Activision Board of Directors fulfilled their fiduciary duties in pursuing and approving this transaction, and therefore turns on what the Directors knew and did”

As of today, AP7 has backed off its skepticism about the board’s support for Kotick. This is from the pension fund in the new proposed settlement:

“based on the materials provided to date, there is compelling information which undermines any claim that the Board or Mr. Kotick failed to operate in good faith with respect to the matters alleged in the Action.”

A hearing on both sides’ arguments and counterclaims, much of it about discovery and just how much of Kotick’s arguments would admissible as part of the suit, had been slated for May. Pressure had been mounting for more document disclosures and more depositions of people in the orbit of any of the issues raised.

But in March, the new filings reveal, a mediator proposed a $250 million settlement.

By early April, all sides began the paperwork to agree to it.

Last week, I emailed a Ubisoft PR person some extremely specific questions about Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, the July-scheduled remake of the company’s 2013 pirate adventure.

I was curious about the remake’s location of the Voynich Manuscript.

It seemed to have moved.

Was I right?

Whether you know anything about Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag or nothing, you may correctly wonder why in the world I was asking this.

Black Flag Resynced is the remake of the blockbuster pirate (and assassin) exploits of Edward Kenway, grandfather of the main protagonist of Assassin’s Creed III. It’s set across much of the Caribbean circa the early 1700s. You’re a pirate with a pirate ship, and can sail the sea, raid rival ships, dock at cities, explore islands, get in a dinghy to spear sharks, use a diving bell to plunder wrecks and chase down wind-blown pages of shanty lyrics so that your crew can sing them.

As the original made clear, this is all experienced via a fictional memory-simulation device called the Animus, used in the modern day, by people tied up in a centuries long conflict between rival secret societies.

Collectible manuscripts are not a major feature.

Black Flag is a game from Ubisoft’s glory days that has been overhauled—however necessary or not—to help Ubisoft in one of its lowest moments, as the company’s output slows and it struggles to release a hit.

Ubisoft is spending its promotional energy for Resynced by showcasing the remake’s graphics (they’re indeed great), the game’s improved combat mechanics (definitely better; you can trip people and throw them into boxes), better stealth (you can now crouch with the press of a button rather than waiting for Edward to walk into high foliage to trigger a finicky auto-crouch) and the company wants me and you to know that there’s a big helping of new content sprinkled across the game (I found some of it).

Last week, I played Resynced for three hours in a meeting room on Manhattan’s East Side, in a space I shared with a Ubisoft PR rep, a quality assurance lead, an expert combat designer, and an IT official.

I legit got a lot out of the session, and I respect that they set up the multi-stage demo to show several exciting parts of the game. I played the revamped intro (shot-for-shot similar to the original, except there’s a moment when our shipwrecked pirate protagonist must briefly dive and resurface to reach shore—this teases that Resynced lets Edward swim below the waves, where he’ll sometimes find coral and treasure. The Ubisoft team wanted to impress press like me and engineered the demo to end with a mission involving Blackbeard. Between, I did a lot of sailing and some plundering.

Sure, that was all nice.

But I got a little hung up on the Voynich Manuscript, a very unimportant collectible that was part of a series of 20 real-life bits of mysterious writing. These papers were locked in treasure chests found on islands across the original Black Flag’s map.

The night before I played Resynced, I’d stayed up until 2 am playing the 2013 PS4 version of the original game, to be ready for a comparison. I had played the PS4 edition’s first missions, dipped into its rendition of Havana, and briefly sidetracked myself to raid a guarded courtyard where I found a treasure chest that contained the Voynich Manuscript.

When I sauntered into Resynced’s Havana at the Ubisoft-hosted preview, I approached what I thought was the same courtyard, beat up a few enemy guards, reached into that treasure chest and grabbed… the Tabulae Rudolphinae?

Whoa, whoa, whoa, Ubisoft remake team!

A different, real, mysterious manuscript?

Later I consulted Google. The Tabulae Rudolphinae was in the original Black Flag, too, but it was in a treasure chest in Nassau.

What was going on here? Just how different was this version of the game?

You see, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag is a certain type of video game remake. It is not strictly a shot-for-shot, prettier-but-perfectly-faithful remake a la Nintendo’s 2023 Metroid Prime Remastered.

I don’t think it is a a meta-adventure about being a remake, a la Square Enix’s 2020 Final Fantasy VII Remake.

It seems closest to EA’s 2023 Dead Space remake, which tells the same main story as the original with largely the same moments, some restaged for impact, but with major graphical upgrades, numerous quality of life improvements, better gameplay and a bevy of new side-quests woven in.

So what are they moving manuscripts around for?

Over email, the game’s creative director, Paul Fum told me this was the result of the team rebuilding the original game’s virtual Caribbean, adding new, more detailed locations that led to them redistributing some of Black Flag’s in-game treasures. “There are now different chest types with different rewards,” he wrote. “Food, ammo and petty loot can be found in logical spaces where we added bits of environmental storytelling, including new areas. As such, we did reshuffle a lot of rewards in the game to fit this expanded version of the Caribbean.”

Let it be known to writers and users of Black Flag walkthroughs and tips: The old guides clearly aren’t going to work.

I had an even more specific question that Fu’s colleague, game director Richard Knight, humored:

Why were there now nine climbable survey points in Resynced’s Havana vs. the original game’s eight?

Yes, I, the author of 50 Things About Assassin’s Creed III That You Should Know (2012) and Another 46 hours with Assassin’s Creed Shadows (2025), notice these kinds of things.

“Good catch!” Knight wrote, understanding the wisdom of flattering the previewer.

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What’s an impressive sales number for a video game? What’s a number big enough to cheer?

A little over one year ago, the publisher of the upstart role-playing game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 announced that the game had sold 3.3 million copies in its first 33 days of release.

That was cheeky and remarkable. Clair Obscur was a surprise hit.

Last week, the developers of Subnautica 2 announced that their game had sold two million copies in less than a day.

That was a show of confidence, too (and a sign that a major payout to the studio’s founders and CEO could be on the way).

So, what to make of the news late last week that Titanium Court, an indie, grand-prize winning comedy kingdom simulator (I mean, it’s a tile-matching war game (sorry, it’s an adventure within a play within a game))) had sold 25,000 copies in just over two weeks?

The number was smaller than the figures that dev studios and publishers usually brag about, but both parties tell Game File that it’s really good news.

“25K is more than any of my previous releases have sold, so in that way it absolutely exceeded my expectations!” Titanium Court designer AP Thomson told me over email.

“My goal with commercial releases has always been to sell enough to allow me to make my next game at my own pace, and Titanium Court's success looks like it's going to give me a significant amount of runway to that end.”

The 25,000 isn’t just great for Thomson and his $15 game but for others as well.

Chris Wright, founder of the game’s publisher Fellow Traveller, told Game File that he now believes Titanium Court “should be profitable enough for us over time to fund another 2-3 bets of a similar size.”

He broke down what he was expecting vs. what happened.

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First of all, Subnautica 2, released into early access on Thursday after a long development cycle and a lot of legal drama, is lovely.

Yes, it can be stressful when you dive a bit too deep on the ocean planet of Proteus, your oxygen running low and some sort of alien barracuda gnashing its teeth at you. But it’s viable to spend a lot of time near the surface, just drifting through the gorgeous aquatic environment. Float around up in the gorgeous shallows. Kick the flippers to chase down colorful fish. Find some text logs in mysteriously destroyed undersea bases, as you try to figure out what went wrong.

Maybe you’re the last person alive on this planet? That’s something worth investigating. Maybe that can be a pretty chill experience.

The conceit of Subnautica 2, developed by Unknown Worlds, is that your human protagonist has woken up in an undersea base on a strange planet, trying to figure out what happened to the rest of the explorers, and just how to not die.

Almost all of the action I’ve experienced so far has happened in a beautiful underwater seascape of rainbow fish, coral domes, and deep caves filled with ore and strange plants. At night, the bioluminescent flora and fauna illuminate the sea floor like it’s the Vegas Strip.

At the start of this survival adventure, you can catch the local fish with your hands, but you can’t digest them. That’s the developer’s way of teaching the player to seek out biological adaptations—peculiar, glowing plants, of course—that transform a hero’s body to make it more in sync with the surrounding ecosystem.

Early gameplay in Subnautica 2 involves comfortably meditative loops: diving into the ocean from whichever base can print your body after your most recent death, grabbing some fish, using a newly crafted scanner to identify odd plants, managing your oxygen level to not dive too deep (and die), eventually gathering enough resources to build a base, learn some recipes, craft extra gadgets, and explore some more. So far, there’s nothing revolutionary and nothing all that different from the brief moments of earlier Subnautica games that I’ve played, but it makes for an appealing experience nonetheless.

Subnautica 2 benefits from its relative non-violence. Sure, there are fish that butt heads and some menacing ones that’ll chase you down. But distraction and evasion are more the order of the day than direct conflict. The game is, most often, peaceful, at least in the hours I’ve played. That vibe is partially due to a decision made by Unknown Worlds co-founder Charlie Cleveland over a decade ago, when he decided to leave guns out of the original Subnautica. It’s easy to picture this first-person game giving players a gun. It doesn’t. Appalled by the scale of mass shootings in America, Cleveland said back in 2016 that the world might benefit from one less piece of art glamorizing guns. ”I’ve never believed that video game violence creates more real-world violence,” he said at the time. “But I couldn’t just sit by and ‘add more guns’ to the world either. So Subnautica is one vote towards a world with less guns.”

It’s a PC hit, but there’s also a console angle: Unknown Worlds and publisher Krafton have already announced that Subnautica 2 has already sold two million copies, in less than one day of release. The game’s numbers on Steam, more than 467,000 peak concurrent players on launch day, verify that Subnautica 2 wasn’t just the platform’s most-wishlisted game but now a widely-purchased hit.

Subnautica 2 is also on Xbox, its lone console at the moment. The game is in “Game Preview,” which is Microsoft’s jargon for what Steam calls “Early Access.” Microsoft, moreso than rival Sony and certainly more than Nintendo, has supported the early access release for games on console (the principle, if you’re not aware, is that users pay for an incomplete version of the game, with the promise that developers will add to it over time and potentially charge other players more, once the game reaches its full release 1.0 version).

Subnautica 2 is not just in Game Preview on Xbox but in Game Pass. And save files from the Steam or console version can be uploaded to the cloud and then accessed on any device. I brought my Steam Deck save to the Xbox, so I could play the game on a big screen. It looked great.

Ahead of release, I joined a media call with the game’s developers and asked about Unknown World’s approach to early access on consoles, noting that the previous Subnautica, Below Zero, had also been out early on Xbox.

“The studio actually was one of the very, very first participants of the Game Preview program on Xbox, and at that time they developed a really good relationship with the people over at Microsoft,” Subnautica 2 lead developer Anthony Gallegos told me. “So when it came time for us to do Early Access, it was really important for us figure out if there was a console partner that we could do that with.”

Gallegos said that Unknown Worlds plans to keep Subnautica 2 in early access for at least two years, and he promised feature parity between PC and console throughout that time.

“Every patch that goes out will go out on Xbox and Steam and the Epic Games Store, all of our store platforms at the same time, because we have cross-play,” he said. “We’re even looking at trying to figure out like, are there ways that we could do different branches with the Xbox? But that’s still sort of the discussions we’re having. Because we typically always run experimental branches [on PC.]” The goal, he said, is to give players on all platforms as early a view of the game as possible.

Things are still kind of awkward. Subnautica is the rare video game that is releasing in the midst of an ongoing lawsuit brought by the dev studio’s former leaders against the studio’s relatively new ownership. A partial decision in the suit restored one of Unknown Worlds’ leaders, Ted Gill, to studio CEO just two months ago. But the legal battle over whether parent company Krafton tried to deprive the leaders of a chance to earn a nine-figure payout as a result of the game’s performance is still ongoing. Note that the two other ousted studio leaders involved in the suit are Charlie Cleveland and Max McGuire. (Remember those names, as you read on!)

During the pre-briefing, Krafton’s host encouraged reporters to ask Gallegos and a colleague about the game’s development, but she shut down a question asked by Dean Takahashi of Games Beat about what it was like for the developers to be building this game during a lawsuit.

“That’s not something this session is set up to cover,” the host said. “Anthony and Scott are here to talk about Subnautica 2 in depth, so happy to take any questions on what’s inside the game.”

That wasn’t a big surprise. But I was surprised when I was reading the press release sent out today to trumpet Subnautica 2 selling two million copies.

As recently as March 12, right before Gill’s reinstatement, press releases about this game, from the firm Berlin Rosen, described the game like this:

Subnautica 2 is latest entry in the genre-defining Subnautica series. The game takes players to an entirely new alien world within the Subnautica universe, introducing new ecosystems, modular vehicles, and cooperative gameplay while bringing the series’ signature exploration and survival experience to life using Unreal Engine 5. The game is scheduled to enter Early Access on PC and Xbox Series consoles in 2026.

And the the beginning of a similar description from April 2, two weeks after the ruling about Gill:

Subnautica 2 is the official sequel to the Subnautica series, which helped define the ocean survival genre and has sold 18.5 million copies worldwide.

Since then, things have changed. The description in Berlin Rosen’s most recent press releases has been much more overt about just who is behind this game:

Here’s one from April 30th:

Created by Unknown Worlds, founded by Charlie Cleveland and Max McGuire, Subnautica 2 is the official sequel to the Subnautica series, which has sold more than 18.5 million copies worldwide and helped define the ocean survival genre.

And here’s one from May 8:

Developed by Unknown Worlds — founded by Charlie Cleveland and Max McGuire — Subnautica 2 is the official sequel to the Subnautica series, which helped define the underwater survival genre.

Today’s name-checked the studio, Cleveland and McGuire, too.

I asked a Berlin Rosen rep today if they could share any insight about the change. They said they checked with Krafton and that the publisher had nothing to share.

Item 2: In brief…

📈 ARC Raiders, one of the biggest games of 2025, remained hot this year, selling 4.1 million copies in the first three months of 2026 and subsequently passing the 16 million lifetime mark, according to Nexon’s latest financial results.

😮 Capcom sold more than 59 million video games in the 12 months the ended March 2026, a record for the company, per the company’s latest annual financial results.

• Capcom’s stated long-term goal: “100 million units in annual sales.”

• The Resident Evil and Street Fighter maker emphasizes a global strategy, driven by PC sales and doing business in 244 countries or regions (eight of those locals are now responsible for more than a million copies of games sold per year; up from five regions just four years ago (check page 27 and 28 here)

• Capcom’s headcount rose from 3,766 at the end of March 2025 to 3,976 at the end of March 2026, with forecasted growth to 4,230 by March 2027. (By contrast, Square Enix, which has been struggling to release hits, cut its workforce from 4,604 to 4,290 in the past year, according to its latest financial results).

🇻🇳 A Bloomberg report about a government-supported Vietnamese video game showcase and recruitment drive included this stand-out anecdote:

“You have to constantly innovate,” says Nguyen Van Khiet, a 22-year-old developer, whose all-black attire looked subdued compared with the cosplayers milling around. “We don’t have enough developers, programmers and artists.” He received five job offers after networking at the event, underscoring the demand for coders.

Item 3: The week ahead

Tuesday, May 19

• New release: Forza Horizon 6 (PC, Xbox; PS5 later this year) brings the series’ open-world racing to Japan, after recent games set in Mexico and Great Britain. (People paying for the deluxe edition could start playing it on the 15th).

Wednesday, May 20

• New releases: Thick as Thieves (PC) is a heist game overseen by Deus Ex/Thief veteran Warren Spector. Until April it was bring promoted primarily as a PvP game, which made this release date for what’s now a PvE game surprising. Phonopolis (PC) is an avant-garde adventure game about resisting an oppressive leader, from the always-interesting studio Aminata Design (Machinarium, Samorost)

• Corporate: Ubisoft and the Embracer Group both report their full annual financial results to investors.

Thursday, May 21

• New releases: Yoshi and the Mysterious Book (Switch 2) is a new Nintendo-published sidescroller whose dev studio is as yet unannounced. Zero Parades: For Dead Spies (PC) is a new role-playing game from the same studio, if not the same exact people, that developed the renowned 2019 detective role-playing game Disco Elysium. (Another game to keep an eye on: cute puzzler Walk the Frog.)

• Corporate: Take Two Interactive reports its full annual financial results. As always with them, there’s the question of whether they or Rockstar will make any GTA VI-related news, such as saying how much the game will cost.

Friday, May 22

• New release: Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight (PC, PlayStation, Xbox; Switch 2 later this year) is the first new Lego game from core franchise team TT Games since 2022’s Lego Star Wars the Skywalker Saga. (People paying for a deluxe edition can start playing on the 19th; and some others accidentally already got it). Bubsy 4D (PC, console) is a slick new 3D platformer in a year that’s been rich with them.

• Event: Japanese indie game festival BitSummit begins in Kyoto, running through Sunday.

The PR pitch to entice a reporter to interview Mitch Patterson, founder of Wolfjaw Studios, is that he runs what may “be the most important studio you’ve never heard about.”

To back this claim, when I met him, Patterson was able to rattle off a past or present client list that included Sony PlayStation and Bungie, Riot, Wizards of the Coast, Innersloth and Take Two Interactive. Recently, they added Krafton.

Wolfjaw, based in Troy, New York, doesn’t make video games.

They make the infrastructure for online games. They do the work of getting online account systems and in-game shops to function correctly for a given game. They smooth out inventory management for cross-platform online titles. They keep voice chat working when players hop servers mid-game. They do unglamorous online backend stuff.

“The problem is no one at those studios actually wants to do this,” Patterson told me, when we met at the DICE conference in Las Vegas earlier this year. Well, it might be a problem for the studios. It’s an opportunity for Wolfjaw, which for about a decade has been specializing in this kind of work.

“We’re the backend team for Destiny 2,” Patterson told me, referring to Bungie’s multiplayer online shooter. “We are the backend for Marathon,” he said, name-checking their newest one.

Not just Bungie. “If there’s a piece of backend software Among Us, we’ve done it,” he said, citing tiny Innersloth’s massive hit.

Not just Among Us. Wolfjaw worked on Transformers: Reactivate, Tencent’s multiplayer robots-in-disguise game that was in development at Splash Damage before it was cancelled early last year. (Patterson had played it; said it was kind of like Destiny with Transformers.)

Not just Transformers games. He said Wolfjaw worked on games for Take Two? “Yeah.” NBA 2K is listed on Wolfjaw’s website.

And he said that Wolfjaw worked with multiple studios across Take Two. Did that mean what it sounds like? “Probably yes,” he said.

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Sega has cancelled development of its “super game,” a mystery endeavor previously promoted to investors as a crucial future money-maker that could bring in $600 million in lifetime sales for the gaming giant.

The company’s announcement, delivered in its report to investors this morning, was succinct:

“Decided to cancel Super Game”

*No additional costs associated with the cancellation

This afternoon, Game File received a more substantial explanation from a Sega rep about the Super Game’s demise. The company chalked it up to competition, the moment and the state of Sega’s own business:

“When we launched the initiative in 2019, we positioned 2 major pillars of our growth strategy; 1) to focus on our major IP and expand them, and 2) develop a triple-A online title to achieve significant growth in mid- and long-term, and we named this project ‘Super Game’ to reflect our strong commitment to pursuing this ambition. Leveraging the expertise of developing and operating online games that we cultivated through Phantasy Star Online 2 and our extensive IP portfolio, we worked to create a new form of entertainment that goes beyond the concepts of conventional games.

“Given the ambitious nature of the project, we adopted a long-term R&D phase for technical validation and related activities. We proceeded cautiously, with the intention of moving to full-scale development only after we can confirm sufficient feasibility. However, in light of intensifying market competition, the emergence of competing titles based on similar concepts, and our business conditions, we made the decision to discontinue the development of Super Game during the fiscal year ending March 2026.

Close observers of Sega’s perpetually tantalizing and consistently vague teasing of the Super Game might have seen this one coming.

In late 2023, Sega’s president at the time, Yukio Sugino, said the company was “conducting R&D activities to create a “Super Game,” a major title that scales globally, by the fiscal year ending March 2026.”

That deadline passed six weeks ago, leaving Game File at the time to ask Sega what happened to the project. Or, somehow, could the Super Games had already been released or at least announced, just without being called Super Games.

(Sources had speculated previously that Sega’s retro revival projects around Crazy Taxi and others might have been the Super Game. Doesn’t seem like it, as they’re still in development. Or perhaps the big-budget multiplayer game Hyenas, which was cancelled in 2023.)

If you’ve read this far and are still not sure just what a Super Game even was, you’re probably not alone.

The Super Game mystery dates back to 2021, when Sega revealed the project and, months later, a partnership with Microsoft.

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