PlayStation fans and gaming preservations have been alarmed since late last week that a new 30-day timer attached attached to newly-purchased digital games for PlayStation 4 and 5 might render those games unplayable if the system they’re on is offline for longer than a month.

But a rep from Sony told Game File today that new system will require only a single online check before it functions as a perpetual license for the digitally purchased game. That is consistent with a newer theory that emerged by gamers testing the 30-day timer over the last two days.

“Players can continue to access and play their purchased games as usual,” a rep for PlayStation told me over email. “A one-time online check is required after purchase to confirm the game’s license, after which no further check-ins are needed.”

The rep’s explanation squares with the current understanding among players about what’s happening.

A multi-day mystery

A post last Friday by YouTuber Lance MacDonald spread awareness over the 30-day timer. Quickly, players began stress-testing the system, removing a battery within their PlayStations and checking what would happen if their systems were offline past the timer window. They noticed that setting a PS4 or PS5 to be the “primary” console—a common Sony-authorized method to retain rights to a digital game—wasn’t overriding the 30-day limit.

On Tuesday came the breakthrough: A gamer called Andshrew on the Resetera forums posted the results of some tasting. They found that digital games purchased on PS4/PS5 after some time in mid-April would get a 30-day timer that could then be removed and replaced with a perpetual license that would allow the game to be played offline. The transition to the perpetual license occurred some number of days after the digital game was purchased and the system was connected to the internet. They believed that a PlayStation’s online check-in would trigger the license change no sooner than 15 days after the user had purchased the game. This synced with the theory that Sony’s new system is related to the 14-day window that PlayStation users have to request a refund for digitally purchased games. The new timer/check-in system could be a way to defeat some exploit in that refund system, some users theorized.

In a follow-up, I asked the Sony rep if the 15-day timeline is accurate or if the perpetual license can be activated sooner after purchase. If they share more, I’ll update this post.

Sony has not said why they’ve introduced the timer and whether it is designed to stop people from exploiting the refund system.

But their explanation suggests that this new DRM method should not result in long-term loss of access to digitally purchased games, just because a PlayStation is offline for a month or Sony’s servers are down.

Xbox flashback

For many some gamers, the initial reporting of the 30-day timer conjured memories of Microsoft’s disastrous May 2013 announcement of the Xbox One, which was going to require an internet-connected check-in once a day, lest your games become unplayable.1 After widespread backlash, Microsoft abandoned that plan, ahead of the Xbox One’s launch.

LAS VEGAS — Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson repeatedly downplayed the idea that AI might take the jobs of workers at the maker of Madden and Battlefield, during a talk this morning at the new iicon gaming event in Las Vegas.

“I saw some data recently, I think, now almost all—like 85%—of our quality assurance [work] is done with some kind of machine learning or AI-driven algorithm,” Wilson told Fox Business Network’s Liz Claman, who interviewed the EA boss on stage in front of hundreds of industry attendees in a conference room at the Fontainebleau Resort.

“Yet as a company, we hire more QA people than we ever have.”

AI is being used for rudimentary QA work, Wilson said, giving examples of it being tasked with “the simple stuff: turn the box on, turn the box off, boot it up, shut it down, does it crash, all these things.”

But, he said, droves of QA hires are needed to analyze the AI’s findings.

Asked by Claman where she might see AI replacing jobs at EA, instead of augmenting them, Wilson said, “So far, it’s been almost entirely augmentation.”

Wilson’s panel kicked off iicon, a new event operated by the Entertainment Software Association, the former organizers of E3. That big trade show in Los Angeles, used to provide the peak moment of hype in the game industry’s calendar each year. At E3, the world’s biggest video game companies showed off their most important upcoming releases in a cavernous convention center. The ESA last held an in-person E3 in 2019 and officially got out of the E3 business in 2023.

Iicon is comparatively much lower profile and is focused on convening the heads of the game industry with leaders from tech, entertainment and sports to discuss gaming and the other fields with which it does or could overlap. An executive at an ad firm who I rode the elevator with en route to an iicon mixer last night told me he’d been pitched that iicon could be the “Davos of gaming.” (It was unclear who he heard that from.)

The attendance list is dazzling.

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The hero of Saros, the new game from Finnish studio Housemarque, is living in a loop. He wakes up in a base on the planet of Carcosa, a bit confused, a bit unsure of what is going on. He is driven to go into the wilderness to shoot strange foes and dodge their incredibly abundant bullets (or sometimes use a shield to absorb them). Most of the time, he dies, revives back in the base, and does it again.

The hero of 2021’s Returnal, Housemarque’s prior game, also lived in a loop. She would wake up in a crashed spaceship on the planet of Atropos, a bit confused, a bit unsure of what was going on. She was driven to go into the wilderness to shoot strange foes and dodge their incredibly abundant bullets. Most of the time, she’d die, often revive back at the crash site, and do it again.

Housemarque, a studio behind many dazzling shoot-em-up games over the last 30 years, appears to be in a loop of its own with a new game that is distractingly and at times disappointingly similar to its last one, even if it is ultimately a blast to play.

I had to venture through many loops of Saros to come to grips with that. The new PS5 exclusive is the first Housemarque game in a long time that I had trouble getting into.

One thing that helped were the bullets. The mesmerizing, enemy bullets.

Look at this…

And this…

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I’m trying something different today: offering all Game File readers a free write-up of a big interview, while also offering the interview transcript to paying readers.

If you want to get the essence of my conversation with new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty, with context around their comments, check out the free piece. If you want more depth, this transcript is for you.

I’ve lightly edited the conversation for clarity and flow, but you’ll still get plenty of Sharma and Booty’s thoughts, my questions, and a good sense of how our conversation progressed—complete with follow-ups, some conversational detours, and the best quotes that made it into the free piece.

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In a memo to Microsoft’s video game team yesterday, the company’s new CEO of Xbox, Asha Sharma, along with Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty, laid out some goals.

The Xbox platform “will be built to be affordable, personal, and open,” they wrote.

Their team would be called “Xbox” again, dropping the “Microsoft Gaming” moniker of recent years.

That Xbox team would, among other things, work to “fortify Game Pass” with “sustainable economics,” “strengthen our 5-year slate” of games and “stabilize Gen9” (their Xbox Series consoles) “as a healthy and high-quality base.”

The memo even briefly addressed some of the biggest questions around Xbox since Microsoft announced in February that Sharma would be replacing Phil Spencer, Xbox’s boss of the past 12 years: whether to continue Microsoft’s recent effort to bring more Xbox/PC-centric games and franchises to rival PlayStation. The Xbox team “will reevaluate our approach to exclusivity, windowing, and AI, and share more as we learn and decide,” they wrote.

So, what’s that all mean?

Yesterday afternoon, I connected with Sharma and Booty via a video call. Over the course of a 28-minute interview, I asked if they could elaborate.

Note: This article is free for all Game File readers, but I’ve also published the interview transcript for paying Game File subscribers, if you want to read about our exchanges in greater depth. Not a subscriber? You can sign up directly via the article or on Game File’s subscription sign-up page.

Fortifying Game Pass, Sharma told me, meant that, “to grow a subscription business, you need more players who love the subscription, that are staying longer and that are happy.”

She pointed to Monday’s announcement of a price reduction on the recently price-hiked Game Pass subscription service. With that came the change that new Call of Duty games will now be excluded from the service until they’re out for a year.

“We think that this decision is going to give us all three of those,” she said.

Sharma’s desire for Game Pass subscribers to stay longer suggests to me that, however many people as Call of Duty may have brought in when Black Ops 6 launched in 2024, those new subscribers just might not have stuck around.

“We've been thinking about Game Pass in two steps,” she said. “One is just: let's make sure it's affordable, which we addressed. The second is: what does value look like eight years later after the advent of Game Pass and the world changing around us and the next generation coming online? And so we're exploring a number of different things.”

Shortly after we spoke, one of those explorations appeared to leak, per The Verge: A 50-game Game Pass “Starter Edition” bundled with Discord’s Nitro service.

Strengthening the five-year slate, Booty told me, meant building on some fundamentals for Xbox’s games and game studios: “Predictable cadence, robust roadmap, aim for quality.”

I pressed him on whether Microsoft, which had recently seemed to solve its gaming drought problem, was aiming to improve game quality and create more bona fide Game of the Year contenders. Other game publishers keep claiming those trophies, I said. Nailing those fundamentals, he said, could “create the conditions for the lightning in a bottle of winning Game of the Year.”

And what exactly did an effort to “stabilize Gen 9” Xbox Series consoles involve?

“We have formed a team [and] we’re investing in console features,” Sharma said. “We are standing up the muscle to make sure that all of our performance and reliability and quality is great. We are investing in it as a first-class experience again, and we want to make sure that all the players who want to be on Gen 9 are on Gen 9 with a great console with regular updates.”

She teased that there were more updates coming, but didn’t want to get ahead of their announcements. “I think that the Gen 9 is a great piece of hardware, and we want to make sure that gameplay and the platform experience is excellent. We know we just haven’t invested as much there and so we’re getting back to that.”

As for those hottest of topics, Sharma and Booty had no additional info to share with me about exclusivity. No calls made yet. Choices around Xbox’s approach to exclusive games are “long-swinging decisions that have decade-long impact,” Sharma said.

“We’ll take a data-driven approach and a strategic-driven approach, and then we’ll look at our principles and we’ll make some calls. So we’ll share more when we’re ready,” she said.

I specifically asked if they had a timeframe for making a decision. “Nothing we’re ready to commit to,” she said, pointing out that she was in her role for only about 60 days.

She wasn’t going to rush it: “I want to make the right decision, not the fastest decision.”

A deliberate pace is what you might expect from the new leader of a sprawling gaming division that is responsible for Xbox, Halo, Call of Duty, Candy Crush, Minecraft, World of Warcraft, Fallout, Forza, and much more.

But Sharma, with Booty, a 16-year Xbox veteran at her side, has made her mark quickly.

On the 14th day since Microsoft announced she’d be running its game team, Sharma announced Project Helix, the codename for Microsoft’s in-development next-gen console.

On day 35, Microsoft confirmed that Sharma had retired the company’s controversial “This is an Xbox” ad campaign that de-emphasized the centrality of playing Xbox games on an Xbox console.

On day 60, she announced the Game Pass price cut and the removal of Call of Duty from its day-and-date offerings.

The memo (and our interview) was on day 62.

I was curious if Sharma had been given a mandate when she took the job.

“The big things that we’re thinking about are we want to make great games,” she said, pointing out a Peabody Award win this week for South of Midnight, the release of Double Fine’s multiplayer pottery brawler Kiln that day as well.

“The ‘’Return of Xbox’ really came from an ethos of: We have to restore the core,” she continued. She was referring to a phrase she used in her note in late February when she introduced herself to her team and the gaming world. “We have to restore the core fundamentals of our product and console. We have to restore the core and increase our strength on PC. We need to overhaul discovery and search, etcetera.”

Before taking the Xbox job, Sharma was a top executive at the start-up Porch, then Meta and Instacart, then re-joined Microsoft in 2024 to run an AI team. She said she’d meet regularly with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and that, during a session in his office, the possibility of the Xbox job came up.

“What he shared was, as we are looking out for, you know, 10 years, this is a very critical audience and category to the company. And we have one of the most incredible brands and portfolios in entertainment. And so he thought this would be a great opportunity for me to learn, a great opportunity for me to partner with Matt with my consumer background. He’s obviously got a longstanding history in content and gaming. [Satya] said that this was really important to the company’s future, and so I thought that was an incredible experience.”

She also liked the idea of working on something consumer-facing, with the broader public as your potential customers. “You have to earn every player every day, every hour,” she said. “And so it’s been really awesome getting back to that energy.”

(A mystery solved: In March, I reported that Sharma had done some Xbox work during her original 2011-2013 stint at the company. What’d that involve? “I was there for a short moment doing some sports and influencer marketing at the time,” she said.)

Plenty of Sharma and Booty’s memo is optimistic and meant to inspire the company’s games team, but it’s not all positives. And some of its terms are certainly open to interpretation.

“Players are frustrated,” they state in the memo. “Our presence on PC isn’t strong enough. Pricing is getting harder for people to keep up with.”

They describe Xbox as a “challenger,” an acknowledgment that, however mighty some parts of its business are, its competitors have the lead.

From the outside, I could appreciate the words of support for Gen 9 Xbox Series consoles, but I noted to Sharma and Booty that Xbox console sales have been in decline. Microsoft’s quarterly earnings updates have shown years of hardware revenue drops. Did Sharma expect Series console sales to go back up?

“I can’t share guidance on what’s going to happen in general,” she said. “We are wanting to see Xbox return to growth next year, and so we’ve got work to do.” (That’s the Xbox division returning to growth, she’d later clarify.) “There’s no silver bullets, and our focus is going to be: how many players are playing every single day in the Xbox ecosystem?”

The memo also talks about Xbox being built to be “open,” which tripped me up. I initially took it as a reference to the kind of approach the public saw last year for the Xbox-branded portable, the ROG Xbox Ally. That device, made by Asus in partnership with Microsoft, includes the Xbox PC marketplace right next to Valve’s dominant Steam service (as a result, it’s an Xbox-branded device on which I can play the Steam version of PlayStation’s God of War). The Ally hinted at a more open-platform approach for Xbox.

Then there was a line in Sharma and Booty’s memo about the next-gen Project Helix and how it would “play your console and PC games.”

In early February, a few weeks before Microsoft announced Spencer’s exit and Sharma taking over, Epic’s Steve Allison, who runs his company’s PC marketplace, told me he expected the Epic Game Store to be on Microsoft’s next console: “Unless their policy or stance on it changes, they are telling us they’re going to welcome that,” he said at the time.

I wasn’t sure if that was the kind of “open” thing the memo was hinting at, and, I’d been scratching my head for some time about how it would be economically viable to let other storefronts operate on its hardware.

Sharma pulled me back a bit from all of this.

“So what we shared with our team is that we want the platform to be open for more people to create on the platform and more players to participate in customizing and extending that,” Sharma said.

But an open platform approach as with the Xbox Ally as well? I cited Allison’s comments about what Microsoft’s plans for the future Xbox hardware had been, at least under the prior regime.

“I wasn’t part of those conversations, so we’ll make those decisions going forward as a team and with our partners,” Sharma said. “We’ll share more when we can.”

And then there’s Sharma and Booty’s intriguing pledge in their memo for Xbox to be “affordable.”

This week started with a Game Pass price reduction. That’s part of Microsoft’s Xbox gaming business. So, too, is Xbox hardware, which, as with rival consoles, has had price increases.

“I think that there’s a lot of different people around the world that have different needs,” Sharma told me, as I prompted her about what affordability looks like at Xbox, especially given that one of its products is a console, which can be expensive.

“I think, historically, our pricing hasn’t been as flexible,” she said. “And I think that’s the big thing we want to go work on. You saw that with Game Pass. It had become too expensive. So we took a step to address that.”

She added: “I want to continue to make sure, as we build hardware, software, services, we’re spending just as much time on performance and play time as we are on making sure that we can innovate to offer more affordable devices and hardware and services. And so, look, there’s a reality to the market that we’re in, so there’s no promises around what the price points are or anything like that. But I want to make sure that people around the world are able to play.”

The gaming business is changing radically these days. Signs of stress are everywhere, as studios are shut down, developers are laid off, the plug is pulled on faltering games quickly after they launch.

In their memo, Sharma and Booty talked about competition for players’ attention. The mentioned hit games emerging from tiny teams of developers and even from bigger teams outside of traditional markets, but whose work competes with “the most established Western studios.”

They described an industry that is reshaping.

“Players have access to more games than ever, even as the cost and time to build blockbuster titles continues to rise, putting pressure on what gets made and how risk is taken.”

Given that, I wondered if Sharma and Booty felt there were any hard truths that they thought Xbox fans needed to understand about where gaming is going.

“I would just turn around and say it’s on us to understand the fans,” Booty said. “Our job is to…build what the fans want to play and create places for them to play, and worlds to explore.

“So the understanding is for us to think about how the expectations have changed around how social games are, around the approachability, how easy they are to get into, about the balance between satisfying the core that wants really sweaty, hard games, but making sure we don’t lock people out that want to join for the first time.”

He added: “I think player habits, competition for attention, expectations about where and how they play, these are all changing. And we’re putting a lot of energy across our teams into really understanding and delivering what players want.”

So, what does success at Xbox look like?

“Xbox will be where the world plays,” Sharma said. “And we’re going to do that across our full stack platform.”

Correction - April 24, 7pm: Xbox dropped the price of Game Pass on the 60th day after Sharma was announced Xbox’s new boss, not the 59th.

Two gamers have filed a class action lawsuit against Nintendo, alleging that the company will be unjustly enriching itself with any refund it secures from the U.S. government over widespread tariffs last year that, among other things, hiked the prices of Nintendo hardware and accessories.

“Unless restrained by this Court, Nintendo stands to recover the same tariff payments twice—once from consumers through higher prices and again from the federal government through tariff refunds, including interest paid by the government on those funds,” the suit states.

Nintendo sued the U.S. government to secure a tariff refund in March, after the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs a month prior, saying they were illegally implemented by President Donald Trump..

The gamers who have sued, California-based Gregory Hoffert and Washington-based Prashant Sharan, both say they purchased Nintendo goods that had increased in price due to tariffs, according to the complaint.

They filed their suit in the Western District court of Nintendo of America’s home state of Washington and are seeking class action status to represent all people in the U.S. who purchased price-hiked Nintendo goods between February 1, 2025 and February 24, 2026.

They allege that Nintendo’s recovery of any tariff refunds would constitute unjust enrichment and violate Washington state consumer protection law.

Similar class action lawsuits pressing companies to pass on tariff refunds have been previously filed against FedEx, UPS and eyeglass importer EssilorLuxottica.

The tariffs were announced in early April, and by mid-month, Nintendo had announced $5 price increases for controllers for the then-forthcoming Switch 2. In August, it raised the price of the original Switch.

In their suit, the gamers cite comments from Nintendo executives connecting the tariffs to price increases. In May 2025, a month after the tariffs were imposed, Nintendo CEO Shuntaro Furukawa told investors “Our basic policy is that for any country or region, if tariffs are imposed, we recognize them as a part of the cost and incorporate them into the price.”

Nintendo’s March lawsuit, along with tariff-recovery suits from hundreds of other companies was immediately put on hold pending the implementation of a refund system.

The U.S. government announced the beginning of the refund process earlier this week. Companies could receive as much as $160 billion, per CNBC.

In March 2026, after Nintendo filed its lawsuit to recover the cost of the tariffs, I asked the company if they planned to pass their refund on to customers who’d paid increased prices.

The company’s response acknowledged the existence of the lawsuit but avoided answering that question: “We can confirm that we filed a request. We have nothing else to share on this topic.”

Even a promise to consumers may not have spared Nintendo this week’s lawsuit. FedEx previously promised to pass its tariff refunds on to consumers. They’ve been sued over them anyway.

Update - 5:55pm: I asked Don McGowan, former chief legal officer for The Pokémon Company who now runs a consultancy called Extreme Grownup Services, what he made of the class action suit. His take: “I have exceptional difficulty seeing how this is a valid lawsuit. There’s nothing distinct between raising prices because of tariffs and raising prices because you just want to make more money. There’s no legal obligation to keep your margins low. Nintendo didn’t receive tariff funds as a fiduciary or with any legal obligation to return them to the consumer.” He added that he was sympathetic to the plaintiffs who he thinks may not realize that, to him, they don’t have a case.

Microsoft’s subscription gaming service is getting its first major price drop, just six months after getting its biggest price increase.

That’s in part to a major change to what Microsoft is promising Game Pass subscribers.

As of today, Microsoft’s Game Pass Ultimate–the top tier of its subscription service–will cost $22.99/month, down from $29.99/month.

PC Game Pass, the version not for Xbox consoles, is dropping from $16.49/month to $13.99/month.

The company described this as a global change, with pricing varying by region. The new price kicks in at the start of existing customers’ next billing cycle.

Microsoft also announced that, beginning this year, new Call of Duty games, which tend to launch annually in October or November, will no longer launch into Game Pass. Instead, they’ll be added to Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass the following holiday season.

These changes follow the Verge’s report last week that the new head of Xbox, Asha Sharma, told employees that Game Pass “has become too expensive.”

Announcing the new plans today, Sharma wrote: “We’ll keep learning and evolving Game Pass to better match what matters to players.”

Microsoft has not released subscriber counts for Game Pass since early 2024, when it said all tiers of the service had a combined 34 million subscribers.

Today’s price change effectively alters the annual cost of Game Pass Ultimate for Xbox users from $360/year to $276/year. That’s a savings of $84. But that comes with Microsoft dropping a new $70 game from the service until it’s added a year after release.

Microsoft did not provide any detailed explanation for a change that, from the outside, appears to be an assessment by Sharma and team that the price of Game Pass needed to justify the inclusion of Call of Duty launching into the service was simply too much for its customers to bear. That’s certainly true for those Game Pass Ultimate subscribers who weren’t interested in Call of Duty or planned to purchase the series from PlayStation or on PC via Steam instead.

Two key timelines - Game Pass prices and Microsoft’s Activision plans

The new prices and Call of Duty switch represent a major twist in the saga of Microsoft’s $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard.

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Some time last year, a person put a dead fly in an envelope and mailed it to the game publisher Panic.

That was intentional.

So was the wedding invitation sent by another player of Panic’s games. And so was the missive that included a recipe for peanut butter cookies.

But the child’s tooth that came in the mail this past January? That was an accident.

“Thank you for everything you do making the little yellow boxes of joy!” a gamer named Joe wrote on a small card, praising Panic’s tiny, square Playdate gaming system. Also in the envelope was a small tooth.

Since mid-2024, Panic had been receiving bundles of mail from players of several Panic-published games, including the British comedy Thank Goodness You’re Here and the South American adventure Arco, as well as users of the Playdate.

The mail has arrived in piles, turning part of Panic’s office in Portland, Oregon into what the company’s head of marketing, Kaleigh Stegman, told Game File “feels like a Christmas mailroom.”

It’s all the result of a customer rewards program that has turned unexpectedly rewarding for Panic and its game makers themselves, as fans send expressions of their appreciation for Panic’s games.

“The range of things we received was wild,” Stegman said.

• An Arco player mailed in needlepoint crafts featuring that game’s characters.

• A Despelote player sent a drawing of them playing the game.

• A Thank Goodness You’re Here player sent in an actual iPod Nano with a custom playlist, Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser told me, when I interviewed him about the mail-in program.

Stegman sorts through most of the mail and has developed a system to manage at least a dozen more envelopes that each day. She’s also processed thousands of return mailings of special game-themed patches.

It was Stegman who, in late January, found the tooth in one of the mailings sent in for a reward. That one was puzzling.

The note that the tooth-mailer had sent ended with the sentence: “It’s amazing what a community has sprouted!”

For a moment, Stegman wondered if the word “sprouted” was a reference to the tooth. But that seemed like a stretch.

Panic’s rewards program involves the company sending something back—a patch—in a self-addressed stamped envelope, so Stegman was able to include the tooth with the return mailing. “You lost your tooth (?!) again!” she wrote on a purple square of paper.

In late February, the person replied, mortified. They’d just grabbed a random envelope for the mailing, they explained. They hadn’t realized their kid’s tooth was in it. They were very sorry.

Stegman and the Panic team were fine with it. The tooth was another delightful surprise in what has been an unexpectedly joyful project.

Panic’s mail-in program was inspired by an old promotional program in the 1980s from game publisher Activision. Long before it was making Call of Duty or Tony Hawk games, Activision was producing Pitfall, Kaboom and River Raid. And it was offering to send players special patches for their jacket or bag, if they sent the publisher photographic proof of their achievements in specific games.

“It’s neat that they built that connection with players,” Sasser remembered thinking. “And what a cool feeling that, when you beat a game, there’s a little something extra that you get.”

Panic could do something like that, too, he figured.

They could put a web address in their games’ end credits and invite players who cleared their games to send in a self-addressed stamped envelope. But Sasser worried that it might be hard for some of their players.

“We realized there are a lot of people who will want to do this who have never sent a letter in their entire lives,” Sasser said

Panic chatted with James Carbutt, artist for Thank Goodness You’re Here, who quickly drew an instructional comic strip that would load in a browser when players typed out the link they found in the credits.

Carbutt added an unrequested element: In one panel, he encouraged people to “include a note to the devs.”

Over the last two years, players who have completed Thank Goodness You’re Here, Arco, Herdling and other Panic games have discovered the link in the credits, loaded the comic up and taken its encouragement to send a note with their stamped envelope.

One person who played Despelote told the game’s developers via a hand-written note that they hadn’t been able to play soccer in over a decade because of health issues. The game had reminded them of what they’d loved, and they were grateful.

Another thanked the game’s developers for representing their native Ecuador so well.

Another player wrote in to joke that Thank Goodness You’re Here had saved their marriage and cleared their skin. More seriously, it had led to some fun date nights, they said.

Players often wrote in saying the game they’d completed the game in question with a friend or family member, that it helped them strengthen a bond.

One person sent a note that they wrote with marker on a receipt.

Another wrote their note on a gum wrapper.

“My favorite one was, ‘I’m sorry for pirating the game, here’s $20,’” Stegman said.

Yes, some people send money.

Someone invited the developers of Blippo+ to their wedding (no word on whether the devs will attend).

Someone included a glitter bomb that exploded into glitter when Stegman opened their envelope. Was that one a troll? “I received it positively,” she said.

“We didn’t know that we were going to get stuff like this,” Sasser said. “We really thought we were gonna get a blank envelope, and we would put a patch in and return it. And I think, when James made that single panel in the comic that just says, include a note to the devs, that opened this crazy and incredible door to people.”

Along with the comic strip, the webpage players access asks them to include their gamer handle from Steam, Switch, etc. It notes that Panic reserves the right to check their profile to confirm they’ve finished the game. No patches for non-completists!

The response has shocked Sasser, Stegman and the rest of Panic, in the warmth and creativity of the notes players have sent and in the sheer volume of replies.

In the first month of this project, back in 2024, Stegman estimated that they got over a thousand pieces of mail. Panic’s local postal delivery worker has joked that the publisher is keeping him employed, Sasser said.

But there have been a postal learning curve for Panic, too. International postage has been tricky for players, so Panic handles that.

They also had to scuttle an early idea that was over-stuffing envelopes. The first game in this program was the British comedy Thank Goodness You’re Here, so Panic originally tried to send players actual tea bags. Some of those were returned to sender.

“Thickness of envelope is like a big deal with the postal service, if you’re doing a regular first class letter,” Sasser said.

Stegman is confident that plenty did reach their destination. She went through a box of 400 tea bags, she said, and didn’t get that many back.

I heard about Panic’s project last October when a Game File reader named Dimitrios told me he’d played through the game Herdling and noticed a link in the credits that led to a comic strip encouraging him to mail in a letter in order to receive a “little congratulations.” He also discovered the Panic-published Time Flies, a game about the short lives of flies, via my article about it. Playing through it, he found another link in the credits, and another invitation to send a note to the developers, along with an envelope to receive something back.

When Dimitrios wrote to me, he had no idea what he was going to get back. He was waiting, and understood that it might take months.

But by November, he had answers.

Panic were sending patches, he told me. He included photos.

In the letter he sent after completing Time Flies, Dimitrios told the developers that the game had made him re-think how he treats animals that are considered “pests.” He also said he was happy about potentially receiving a “little congratulations,” but that “even without an incentive, I’ve now become more inclined to just write developers to share how their work has impacted me.”

Notes like this have reinforced the Panic team’s instinct to scan every piece of mail that comes in. Archived digitally, they’re easier to share with the development teams around the world. It’s a way to share good vibes.

That physical mailing itself, Sasser and Stegman emphasized, is also really special.

“For us, used to living life online, maybe you see some positive Bluesky posts about your game or the thing you made,” Sasser said. “But it’s nothing like this. It’s nothing like someone taking the time to write something down and put their feelings on a piece of paper and physically hand it to you.

“That was a complete surprise how powerful that was.”

A common problem with video games is that many of them are too long. Even the short ones.

The issue isn’t really the hour count.

The test-chamber dark comedy Portal is great across its mere four hours. But so is The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s sky-to-underground adventure, which demanded my attention for 60 hours.

Games that are too long are games that wear out their welcome, no matter their length or brevity. They might be engaging to play for a spell, but they feel padded, perhaps to justify the work put into making them, player expectations or their price.

Last year, the co-op jaunt Split Fiction took me and my kids only about a dozen hours to complete, but some of its levels dragged. I think it would have been better if it ran under 10.

The original God of War, a thrilling PlayStation 2 game that ends in nine hours, would be better at about 8 ½, minus some tedious block-pushing puzzles.

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, a gorgeously grotesque demon-combat Capcom game I was thrilled to start last summer, runs 15+ hours. But I found it drained of interesting things to do in it five hours in.

Enter Pragmata, a new Capcom game of ordinary plot and extraordinary gameplay. Lasting me 13 hours, it is a master class of what developers can do with each hour of a player’s time.

Pragmata is a PC/console action game about a man named Hugh, an android girl named Diana and their cooperative violent work to defeat robots in a lunar base where tech has run amuck. The game starts with the mysterious Diana rescuing Hugh from an investigative mission gone awry. Soon they’re battling lots of bots, something they must do together.

Hugh runs and shoots,.

Diana hacks.

Hugh’s shooting is largely useless, until she hacks.

So gameplay involves Diana piggybacking on Hugh to create the best tandem offense in video games since a red breegull took a ride in a dopey bear’s backpack. The player lines Hugh up in front of an opposing robot, then triggers Diana to hack the robot to make it vulnerable. She starts a hack, producing a grid of squares on the screen through which the player must direct a cursor to impair the robot in some way, perhaps opening its protective shell. Then Hugh aims at the exposed weak spots and shoots.

Most games spend their early moments teaching their basics, so the start of Pragmata amounts to hacking-then-shooting pre-school. Diana’s initial hacks are simple. Robots are slow but can move out of the way. The player is taught to hack quickly, then shoot.

This gameplay combination is novel and produces a strong first hour.

Then things get more interesting. Pragmata pre-school leads to Pragmata grade school, up to college and beyond.

Read more

“It’s just tough getting seen,” game designer Jake Kazdal was telling me earlier this year, in a hotel suite in Las Vegas as he showed me Awaysis, the next video game from his veteran indie team at 17-Bit.

“I’ve talked to a lot of close friends that know a lot,” he said. “And they’re like, ‘What are you doing?’ And I’m like, ‘Have you not seen anything I’m doing?’”

Awaysis is an upcoming top-down sword-fighting dungeon crawler that uses a complex physics system to give its characters’ movements noticeable momentum and weight.

The game’s mix of inspirations includes Chrono Trigger and Super Mario 64, channeled to make something that feels cutting edge to play now.

Awaysis was revealed and promoted back in June 2025. It was featured in a Day of the Devs showcase last December and had a demo on Xbox.

Yet Kazdal and his team are still facing down the dominant challenge of the modern game developer: working in a field flooded with more than 10,000 new games a year, trying to get people to notice.

“There’s been a lot of stuff,” Kazdal said, of the distractions that might keep people from hearing about the game he’s been working on since 2022. “There are a lot of shows. There’s constantly things going down.”

It can’t help that Awaysis’ most arresting element is not how it looks or even sounds (though there’s a good story involving a Nintendo legend there), but how it feels to play.

Read more

Note: Today’s newsletter is a bit different. The planned lead item needs a little more time, but the rest was done. So you’re getting a headless edition. Consider it an easy skim to wrap up your week. (And if you like this format, let me know!)

In brief…

🚫 Amazon is dropping some key features of its Luna game-streaming subscription service, per the company’s customer support page.

• As of June 10, games purchased a la carte will no longer be playable and no more games will be sold that way.

• Luna is also losing support for third-party game stores (such as EA’s), will no longer sell third-party game service subscriptions (such as Ubisoft+) and will no longer let users stream games from any third-party partner platforms.

🤔 Gunzilla, developer of crypto-based multiplayer shooter Off the Grid and reviver/owner of Game Informer, has been accused of not paying some workers for months, according to an Insider Gaming report discussing Gunzilla workers’ social media posts.

• Gunzilla CEO Vlad Korolev replied on X/Twitter, calling criticism of the company “FUD” (fear, uncertainty, doubt). He says the company has been “optimizing costs.” He added: “…to not disrupt company operations, some payments may be scheduled in a way that works for the company’s cash flow — not always for everyone individually. That’s the reality of the world we live in.”

📦 Sony Pictures has signed a deal with Final Destination filmmakers Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein to potentially direct a Metal Gear Solid movie, though prior plans for a movie adaptation have gone nowhere, per The Hollywood Reporter.

✈️ The United States’ Federal Aviation Administration, still thousands of air traffic controllers short of its staffing needs, is launching an ad campaign to recruit gamers, something they previously tried to do in 2021 under then-President Joe Biden, The New York Times reports.

• In early 2025, the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency cut hundreds of FAA staff, but no air traffic controllers, NBC reported at the time. A contemporaneous March 2025 NYT reported that Trump transportation secretary Sean Duffy accused Musk’s DOGE of trying to fire air traffic controllers (which Musk reportedly denied).

👀 Epic Games is developing an Arc Raiders-style extraction shooter featuring Disney characters, set for release later this year, according to an extensive Bloomberg report on the stresses and next steps at the Fortnite-maker.

💡 The next game from Sunset Visitor, the studio behind 2024’s thoughtful sci-fi hit 1000xResist, is called Prove You’re Human, release date TBD.

• The set-up: “Prove You’re Human splits the main character in two, and you drew the short straw. You’re the digital copy of a person who was paid to test a corporate product. But the product is convinced it’s as human as you are. Maybe even more.”

• Early footage shows the player solving those security CAPTCHA puzzles where you need to click each square that contains such-and-such object.

Item 2: The week ahead

Monday, April 13

• Moves of the Diamond Hand (PC), the latest from surrealist indie developer Cosmo D, is released.

Tuesday, April 14

• Mech/cooking game Dosa Divas (PC, console) and cyberpunk sidescroller Replaced (PC, Xbox) are released.

• Co-op pirate survival game Windrose (PC) goes into early access.

Thursday, April 16

• Mii-based life simulator Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream (Switch), cartoony first-person shooter Mouse: PI For Hire (PC, console), and medieval manuscript-writing simulator Scriptorium (PC) are released

Friday, April 17

• Hack-robots-while-you-shoot-them action game Pragmata (PC, console) and math-based dungeon-crawler/puzzle game Towers of Scale (PC) are released.

• Generation Exile (PC) a city-building game from developers who worked on Gone Home, Firewatch and Far Cry (intriguingly, none of which are city builders!) gets a full 1.0 release.

More upcoming games keep grabbing my attention. Among them, At Fate’s End, a violent family drama from Thunder Lotus slated for later this year.

“In At Fates End, you have to fight the people you love,” the game’s creative director, Nicolas Guérin, told me at a game showcase in San Francisco last month.

I was at the controls of the beautifully animated 2D fantasy game, directing protagonist Shan Hemlock through the game’s opening moments. Shan has returned to her home kingdom, encountering big sister Camilla outside a castle. Their mother had recently died, but before her death, mom told Shan that she would be the Princess of Swords. That’s a title given to someone who must gather precious, magical swords from each family member in a process called The Gathering. Each sword had claimed a part of its wielder and imbued them with special powers. Camilla’s weapon took her left arm; Shan’s her throat.

“Full disclaimer, those guys on the screen are pretty much assholes,” Guérin said, as the sisters face off. “All of them, including you. Because they’re rich, because they’re powerful, because they’ve been in a family that ruled the world for millennia.”

Guérin’s previous project at Montreal-baed Thunder Lotus was 2020’s Spiritfarer, a beautiful game about escorting people into the afterlife. It was a game about death, basically. This one’s about families and the failures of a fantasy world’s ruling class. “I’m French, I love history and I can tell you that knights and aristocracy have not been a good thing,” Guérin said.

Gameplay mixes crunchy 2D sword combat with side-scrolling investigation. Shan needs to get her family member’s swords, through combat or perhaps by talking things through, based on what she’s able to learn.

In the demo, Shan lost her first duel with her sister, then explored the castle grounds observing and logging clues. Collected information is displayed as cards that fill out an investigation board. Tarot cards are a heavy creative influence, as Shan acquires powers rendered as cards which bequeath different abilities depending on their orientation.

One of the game’s most intriguing touches is its skill tree (see above). Players navigate the skill tree to unlock abilities for Shan, but the branches double as a family tree, with each skill node representing a member of Shan’s ancestral lineage. Guérin promised that the family history that is revealed through unlocking skills is “super flawed and fucked up.”

Sold!

Guérin and team are hoping to ship At Fate’s End later this year, on PC, PlayStation and Xbox.

Blighted is a top-down action game from Toronto-based Drinkbox Studios, in which you’re collecting memories by eating brains. It comes off as more heroic than it sounds. The game is set in a colorful, rugged fantasy world in which people are buried with a seed in their head, with the seeds sprouting trees whose fruits contain their memories. A villain has destroyed the memory forest, but defeating bosses in the game lets you eat their brains, which will alter your character.

Skillful play in Blighted changes the game in real-time. As you succeed in combat, you’re filling a “frenzy” meter, increasing its numerical level and strengthening both yourself and you enemies. Higher levels trigger traps in the world and expose players to new enemy attacks that players would miss if they’re struggling. A higher frenzy level can also empower your own character and trigger special player abilities.

Drinkbox co-founder Graham Smith told me at showcase last month to expect a game that mixes Dark Souls combat and Metroidvania back-tracking exploration. An added inspiration is Tunic, a beloved 2022 action-adventure game that was packed with secrets that were hiding in plain sight.

I know Drinkbox’s work best from its older Guacamelee games, a pair of Metroidvanias from the 2010s. But Smith told me that the studio’s most recent game, 2022’s hero-transformation adventure Nobody Saves the World, was the biggest the reason that Drinkbox has been in good shape as a studio while making Blighted. “I think each of our games have helped us fund the next game,” he told me, noting that “Nobody Saves the World was our most financially successful game.” Smith estimates about 16 people are working on the Blighted full-time.

The new game is nearly done and currently playable from beginning to end, Smith said.

A high priority now is extensive play-testing, which Smith consideres a Drinkbox hallmark. “We probably do more play-testing than most other studios,” he said. For Nobody Saves the World, the team was conducting external playtests eight months before submitting the game for release, as one tester at a time played through the game over the course of a week. “Almost every week we had someone playing the game,” he said. “They’re streaming it over Discord. Our team is watching. We’re working and watching.” (Those Discord streams are private, of course!). The team would check to see where the player died a lot, why they sometimes spent two hours doing something the developers thought was doable in a half hour. The studio uses its testing to smooth out unnecessary friction, Smith said, while trying to retain some level of challenge: “Sometimes someone will die at a boss 50 times, but they’ll tell you, ‘I had fun.’ And you’re like, ‘Hmm, 50 seems too much.’”

Blighted is announced for PC and Switch, so far, releasing in the fall.

I will always take a meeting with 11 Bit, whose reps last month showed me the game they announced today: Crop. It’s externally developed by new Norwegian studio Carbonara Games and published by Warsaw-based 11 Bit.

It was back in 2014 when 11 Bit earned my trust, as they asked me to check out a very different kind of war game. This War Of Mine, shown on a small laptop at GDC that year, was about civilian survival during urban warfare. It was as un-glorious a war game as there’s ever been. This was a studio avoiding easy thrills, I noted.

Since then, I’ve been impressed with 11 Bit’s bleak sub-zero city survival game Frostpunk. Last year’s clone-management survival game The Alters was among my favorites.

At a hotel near this year’s GDC this year, 11 Bit was showing Crop, a dreary farming game in which your character wakes up naked in the trunk of a car, wanders to a wrecked farm, and starts planting crops under sunless skies. This is the kind of farming game that teaches you to dig holes in the ground by forcing you to dig a grave for the farm’s prior owner.

Gameplay in Crop is intentionally slow. You dig and plant and rake. Eventually you unlock irrigation. Slugs, rats and crows can bother your crops. Harvests of mushrooms and vegetables can be sold, but for less money if they’re “lousy.”

This is not a farming game where you’re dating the townsfolk, an 11 Bit rep told me. But there is a town, populated with strange people. Part of the game is detective work. How’d you get here? What’s up with all these weirdos?

Oh, and why was that car overflowing with blood?

11 Bit is busy, with some four games at various stages of internal development, including a reimagining of the original Frostpunk. Crop is among three externally published games slated for a 2027 launch. The company has published a batch of games of late. While many past and future have the bleak, meaningful narrative heft of 11 Bit’s signature work, company reps point to Crop as an example of a renewed emphasis on mechanically satisfying gameplay, too.

I’m just wondering if one of the mechanics for Crop is going to involve watering crops with your character’s blood. There were hints, if not confirmation.

A global mix of games

Today’s write-ups cover two Canadian-developed games and a Norwegian game published by a Polish game company.

That’s not by design. It’s just the wonderfully international nature of the video game industry.

Consider this: I saw one of the above games, Blighted, at an indie showcase hosted by Nintendo. The Switch-maker had rented a demo room in a hotel in San Francisco and secured several studios to show their Switch/Switch 2 games. As I checked the games at that Nintendo, I was struck by how international the room was: Blighted hailed from Canada; a peaceful puzzle-platformer called Hoa 2 was made in Vietnam; an octopus side-scroller called Darwin’s Paradox was developed in France; a black-and-white cartoony first-person shooter called Mouse: P.I. For Hire was crafted in Poland. Elden Ring was there, too, so that’s Japan. And Mina the Hollower, the promising next game from the makers of Shovel Knight, essentially repped the U.S.

The spread of talent and creativity from around the world is one of my favorite things about video games.

The data is clear. The reasons behind it are not, though the Easter Bunny might have a clue.

Netflix’s virtual Game Controller app, which is used to turn iPhones and iPads into controllers for multiplayer video games streamed to Netflix subscribers through TVs (or computers), is suddenly one of the most in-demand iOS apps in the United States.

On Friday, April 3, it ascended into the top 25 free iOS apps, ranked by downloads. The next day, it rose to fourth.

On Sunday, April 5, the Netflix Game Controller app took the number one slot on the iOS free app charts. In doing so, it vaulted past scores of popular mainstream apps, including those for Chat GPT, Google, Walmart, McDonald’s, Door Dash and Netflix itself.

The controller app has drifted down since then, but even today, Wednesday, April 8, it was ranking eighth, ahead of the likes of Telegram and TikTok and regular old Netflix itself (it’s since declined to 17th during the editing of this piece).

The controller isn’t some brand-new app benefitting from buzz or marketing around its launch. It’s been available since 2023 in limited testing and got a bigger push last November when Netflix launched Game Night, a suite of multiplayer games streamed to subscribers. Those games include multiplayer versions of Boggle and Pictionary as well as the social deduction games Party Crashers and Dead Man’s Party. The games are streamed at no extra charge to user’s TVs or computer screens, via the Netflix app running on those screens. But they require phones or tablets to be used as controllers, which is where the app comes in.

Netflix has not promoted the controller app’s sudden surge, focusing its gaming PR machinery this week on the rollout of a kids gaming app. A rep for Netflix did not have any comment to share about the controller app’s rise, when contacted by Game File.

The controller’s success does not appear to be the byproduct of paid marketing. I’ve seen no ad campaigns, nor have any been detected by the mobile app experts at Sensor Tower, according to the service’s lead gaming analyst Sam Aune.

One possible explanation about what the chart rankings are showing: Netflix game-streaming may be a thing that blows up during holidays, when families get together and possibly commit to playing a round of Netflix-streamed Boggle or competitive Tetris. Aune shared some data that supports that.

Read more

Screenbound, an upcoming video game still deep in development, is a 3D game and a 2D game all at once. That’s why its developers are promoting it as a “5D game.”

That’s some iffy math, sure. But the idea behind Screenbound is terrific.

You play as Pavi, searching for your mother in a world called the Q-Realm that you can perceive in 2D and 3D simultaneously. For Screenbound players, that means that you see the 3D world through Pavi’s eyes, while you see the 2D version of that same world in the GameBoy-like Qboy held in Pavi’s hands.

The 20-second clip below shows off those basics, right from the start of the game:

Last month, I played a bit of Screenbound’s first world and got a tease of its until-then secret second world during an Xbox-backed showcase of smaller/indie games. As I played and captured the footage that you can see in this post, producer William Buckle explained the game’s origins.

Some years back, Josh Presseisen, a developer at the indie studio Crescent Moon, was playing Firewatch, the 2016 classic set in a forest, on his portable Steam Deck while walking through a forest.

“He remembers looking down at his Steam Deck and then looking up and seeing the woods and thinking, ‘How can I… this is a thing!”

Presseisen and a development partner made a short visualization of what that could look like as a video game and posted it in early 2024.

They got a good response, and a brainstorm became a real development project. Crescent Moon is now co-developing Screenbound with Buckle’s studio, Radical Forge, which has experience with 3D puzzle games.

Almost exactly 14 years ago, I wrote about a genuine 4D game and, I recall that these things are easier shown than written up.

So, here’s a longer clip of me playing Screenbound, to help you grasp how this only-in-video-games concept works.

(Note: All videos in this post are also on my amusingly meager YouTube channel1, if you prefer to watch them there.)

Observe how the 2D and 3D game world interact.

• The Qboy shows a 2D world that represents the ground below and ahead of Pavi in the 3D world.

• Veering off that path in 3D is as simple as turning left or right. In the 2D world, it’ll look like Pavi has stayed put (or in other instances, shifted to another 2D plane)

• Items sometimes appear in the 2D world, but not in 3D; or vice versa. Early in the clip, for example, Pavi must grab a red balloon shown in the 2D world to traverse a gap in 3D.

Later, the game introduces hazards only visible in 2D and enemies only visible in 3D. Watch this short clip to see both:

To understand how to effectively direct a player’s attention when there’s more than one view to look at, Screenbound’s developers studied games from Nintendo’s mid-2000s two-screened portable, the Nintendo DS. Buckle said the key takeaway was to not put too much information on the secondary screen. Players will mostly be focused on the main one. “People are going to basically focus on the 3D,” he said, of Screenbound. The game will let players position the handheld Qboy in the center or off to the side, to use as a secondary visual reference.

Screenbound has plenty more development to go, though Buckle said the team is hopeful for a late 2026 release. The game is set to launch on PC, PlayStation and Xbox. It’s at least an option for Nintendo, too. They haven’t announced it but one of the game’s reps told me they’d shown Screenbound to the maker of the original Game Boy (I’d asked if the Qboy was legally in the clear; they said Nintendo hadn’t raised any concerns when they showed the game to them).

Screenbound’s publisher is Digital Pajamas, a recent start-up founded by former leaders of TinyBuild, pushing “fair” terms and “sustainable” funding. The publisher’s Allie Paul told me they’ve built up funding from a “lot of non-traditional investors,” including people who typically put their money in real estate. “Even on conservative projections,” she said, investing in games, “is a better [return on investment] than a lot of traditional investments outside of games. Obviously, you never know.”

As for that semi-secret second world in Screenbound….

Back in 2024, after Crescent Moon posted that first post-Firewatch visualization, the studio published a follow-up message:

“ok now imagine playing Link’s Awakening like this”

Link’s Awakening is the first Zelda game that ran on Game Boy. It featured a top-down perspective.

Thus, as shown in a teaser at the end of the Screenbound demo I played last month, here’s a glimpse of the game’s very different second world:

Item 2: More games I played last month in San Francisco that caught my eye…

(These were at a Day of the Devs showcase)

Tournamentris

• From Studio ZeF, release date TBD

• Like Tetris, but different. Instead of dropping blocks to make lines, you’re dropping different-shaped brackets, to complete tournament brackets. It’s odd and oddly beautiful.

• More info here

Tire Boy

• From GameTeam6, release date TBD

• The protagonist of this game is a boy sitting inside a big tire. You roll him through a 3D world that very much feels like Hyrule from Nintendo’s 2017 masterpiece The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The movement in the game felt fantastic.

• More info here

Item 3: In brief…

🎮 Yoshihisa Kishimoto, lead creator of influential 1980s co-op beat-em-up Double Dragon, among other classics, has died at 64, Eurogamer reports.

• Kishimoto’s son thanked fans for their tributes. “Please continue to enjoy my father’s works with a smile in the future,” he said, in a post shared and translated via X/Twitter.

🤔 Korean game studio Shift Up (Stellar Blade) has acquired Unbound, the new Tokyo-based studio founded by Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, God Hand), in a union of action game experts, Game Developer reports.

👀 An unusual format change: Thick as Thieves, an upcoming game shown in press previews as a competitive player-vs-player heist game from new studio Otherside and new publisher MegaBit, has been reconfigured to be a solo/co-operative game, because its designers say, that was turning out to be “more fun.”

• The genre shift is particularly notable because the game’s development has been led by Warren Spector and Greg LoPiccolo, two veterans of the “immersive sim” genre, with games such as Deus Ex and Thief on their resume. They’d previously presented Thick as Thieves as a stab at making that kind of game again, but focused on PvP.

😮 Some surprisingly persuasive fan theories posit that 2025 indie standout Baby Steps is an unofficial spin-off to PlayStation’s marquee Uncharted franchise, per this IGN report.

• I am now a believer.

Some quick Mario movie thoughts (while I’m otherwise on vacation)…

I took my kids to a 1:20pm matinee yesterday. Only one other family in the theater, but it’s spring break and lots of people are traveling.

The kids (both 9) had a good time. They tend not to be critical of the movies we see and were amused. There’s a dinosaur part that my daughter enjoyed, and she was proud of herself for predicting a revelation about a couple of the characters.

Aside from that, it was one of the most lightweight movies I’ve seen with them. We watch a lot of movies and TV shows together and it’s really striking how little either of these Mario movies accomplish in terms of character development, underlying themes, or providing any heft beyond offering piles of references to parts of Nintendo games.

Sure, there are some creative action scenes, but the kids and I have been watching through the late-2000s Nickelodeon cartoon Avatar The Last Airbender, which is just as action-packed but has something to say about people and how they relate to each other. Frozen is arthouse cinema compared to the Mario Galaxy movie.

All that said, across two Mario movies, it sure feels like the people writing these movies want to be telling Princess Peach and Bowser stories. Mario is the least interesting part of his movies (and Luigi isn’t much better).

It’ll be interesting to see how the Zelda movie compares next year. Right now, I can’t tell if these Mario movies are a byproduct of Nintendo itself wanting its films to be as void of narrative and thematic texture as possible ... or if this is just Nintendo and Illumination’s assessment of what a Mario movie should be like. After all, Mario games also are all-action and have nothing to say about people--which is fine with me when I’m playing a Mario game! But it also makes for really flimsy films, judged against other kids’ entertainment or otherwise.

My kids have spring break this week, which means Game File is mostly on break, too. Look for new editions starting the week of April 6.

My big goal for April is to dig myself out of a backlog of interviews going back to late 2025. With that, I should soon be able to show you a cool “5D” game, tell you a story about an odd piece of mail that was accidentally sent to a game studio, share some insights about the state of the global game development talent pool, and a few other pieces tied to recent interviews.

Now that I think about it, it’s quite fitting that I spend a few hours this past weekend playing through A Game About Digging A Hole.

The game what it sounds like. I liked it, but, without trying to be clever, I will say I found the game a little shallow. No dinosaur bones to dig up? No hidden cities to unearth? Just lots of rocks to mine and an end-game that triggers at 100 meters below the surface? It was basically a joke game and developer DoubleBee was probably wise to not stretch things out.

Also a bit shallow was the demo for Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, which my daughter, as expected, loved but also finished really quickly. Living the Dream is a life simulation game from Nintendo. Players create virtual people (Miis; remember them?), give them some personality traits and then watch them interact with each other. The demo lets you make just three Miis, so my daughter created herself, Avatar the Last Airbender bad-boy Prince Zuko and a cheerleader named Gabby. She’s also taught them all how to talk about “fire-bending.”

Once you’ve made your three Miis and unlocked two shops, the Miis quickly run inside and go into a loop hyping the retail version of the game…

I told my daughter that the game is coming out in April. She of course thought this meant April 1. Alas, April 16!

I also told her I had review code for a game about an octopus. She was far less interested in that.

Item 2: In brief…

🚫 Lots of layoffs/closures, unfortunately: 124 roles cut at Embracer-owned Eidos Montreal, along with the exit of studio head David Anfossi; cuts at Polyarc, developers of the acclaimed Moss VR games, after failing to secure funding for a new project; Wanderstop studio Ivy Road closed after failing to land funding for their next game.

• Here’s a timely quote that keeps making the rounds, from industry veteran Brenda Romero to GamesIndustry.biz: "I feel like the industry's in a really horrible place… I mean, we were there in the 80s for the crash, and this is definitely crashier. There are so few people that have not been affected, or their partner's affected, or they're worried about being affected. It's a really difficult time right now.”

• Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has apologized for its handling of the layoff of a programmer who has terminal brain cancer and was left without life insurance. Sweeney says Epic is now “in contact with the family and will solve the insurance for them,” Kotaku reports.

🎮 Krafton has shut down PUBG Blindspot, a top-down tactical spin-off of its popular battle royale game, just 53 days after its early access launch, IGN reports.

• As with Highguard, which was pulled 45 days after launch, games launched in 2026 are getting a very short period of time to prove themselves.

🤔 Nexon, publisher of MapleStory and Arc Raiders, told investors that it will be taking “fewer bets” but putting “more conviction behind each,” as part of a capital markets presentation to investors today.

• This comes as the company says it will miss its 2027 earnings target but believes it can build on the Arc Raiders success to strengthen its footing in the west.

• Regarding any future mergers and acquisitions, newly elevated executive chairman Patrick Soderlund, whose own Embark Studios was acquired by Nexon several years back, said: “Every deal we evaluate runs through a filter: will this result in a game or portfolio of games? Can the game build a loyal player community that lasts for years. Will the leadership team stay on. And it has to meet our margin requirements. If it doesn’t pass through those filters, we walk.”

🚨WARNING: Wednesday is April Fools Day, so be highly skeptical of any surprising gaming news that you come across.

• If it seems too good/weird to be true… it probably is.

Item 3: The week ahead

Tuesday, April 7

• Musical role-playing game People of Note (PC, PlayStation, Xbox) is released.

• Bethesda’s once-Xbox/PC-exclusive Starfield (PS5) gets a PlayStation port and some updates.

Wednesday, April 8

• Visually intense side-scroller ChainStaff (PC, console) and Pokémon Champions (Switch, coming later to mobile) are released.

Item 4: An interview with me

Earlier this month, I was interviewed by Kalie Moore for the Naavik Gaming Podcast. We talked plenty about games reporting and my transition from exiting Axios to launching the reader-supported Game File newsletter that you’re reading right now.

It was a fun chat that you can watch above or listen via Apple, Spotify, etc.

This story, perhaps appropriately, goes on a bit longer than you might expect, past what may feel like the conclusion.

And it ends with a surprise.

This was not by design. In my business of reporting, you can’t plan surprise endings. But it is what delightfully happened.

This story is merely an accurate account of my absurd endeavor from earlier this month, when I tried to finally play through 2025’s most acclaimed video game, the role-playing phenomenon Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, in a sudden rush.

I had a deadline: a date when I expected to have a chance to chat about Clair Obscur with some of its creators. We would perhaps discuss the game’s ending, which, in their business of making video games, they could plan for.

I will get to all of that. I will get to Thursday night, March 12, when I spoke to two of Clair Obscur’s creators, discussed the ending and got myself an in-person consultation about my characters’ builds.

But I must start this story on an airplane.

It’s Sunday, March 8 and I have downloaded Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 to the portable ROG Xbox Ally X, a Switch-looking device that can run games offered via Xbox Game Pass. At this point, I have only played a little past the prologue of Clair Obscur, back on an Xbox in my house. Cloud saving has transferred my progress to the portable. In the game, our protagonist Gustave and his sort-of sister Maelle have set out on Expedition 33, the latest annual beach landing of adventurers who hope they will be the ones to take down the distant and mysterious paintress, who somehow, magically annihilates everyone of a certain age each year.

I know I’ve given myself barely enough time to play through this game ahead of Thursday, when Clair Obscur is likely to win another pile of awards at the former Game Developers Conference (now GDC Festival of Gaming) and when I’ll be backstage with an opportunity to interview the winners.

In the weeks prior, I’ve been busy writing and reporting and, in terms of actually using a controller, playing through Resident Evils.

Just back in February, I had been backstage at a different gaming awards event, where I’d met some of the makers of Clair Obscur and where I’d not spoken to them about the game, because I had other coverage goals for my chats with the winners.

For the Game Developers Choice Awards on March 12, though, I want to talk about the games. My friend urges me on. You should try to finish Clair Obscur, he says. They haven’t spoken about the ending all that much, yet it’s all the game’s fans talk about. You gotta find out what happens, he says, even if you just have to watch a video. Perish the thought.

So I’m on United Airlines flight 1777 from EWR to SFO, comfortably seated in window seat 39A. My Ally X is in my hands, and Clair Obscur is running, well before takeoff. I’ve boarded fairly early. Soon, a man with long curly hair takes the middle seat next to me. There is still plenty of elbow room for me, and I start playing. Best I can tell, the man in the middle seat soon starts a nap.

Gustave, alongside a magically powered woman named Lune, are fighting enemies called Nevrons in dramatic turn-based fights. They reunite with red-haired Maelle. As the plane takes off and begins to cross the United States, things are going well. I’m loving the combat and the look of the game’s world.

Before my plane lands, I reach the end of Clair Obscur’s first act. Big twist! I’ve been rushing, avoiding sidequests, and, wow. I did not see that coming. I’m stunned, but I don’t think anyone on the flight notices. I make sure not to disturb the curly-haired guy next to me, who I think at this point is watching a movie?

After my flight lands, I text my friend to confirm that I have not seen Clair Obscur’s wildest turn. I have not.

I have flown to San Francisco for work. I file a newsletter and then, on Sunday evening, I go to an indie gaming showcase. Later, I play Clair Obscur well into the night.

On Monday, I have a business breakfast, a panel to cover, a panel to be on, and a business dinner. I am busy, but I am also on a mission. I return to my hotel and resume playing.

A pattern develops: I fall asleep quickly, then wake up at some strange post-midnight hour, play some more and go back to bed ahead of my morning appointments.

Tuesday is similar. I’m digging into Clair Obscur’s Act 2, which feels slower. I’m learning about a new character named Verso and am expanding my party some more. I start getting lost a lot, perhaps because I’m rushing and playing at stupid hours, or because Clair Obscur’s developers refused to include a mini-map.

On Wednesday, I’m writing about Nintendo’s Donkey Kong developers and taking notes about PlayStation fonts, but I can’t stop hearing Clair Obscur’s lovely soundtrack in my head.

I consider that what I’ve been doing is unhealthy. But the costs have been sunk and I’m going to pay them. That night, I try to get to the end of Act 2. I conk out. I wake and play on. It seems that I am nearing the game’s finale. Clair Obscur does what many RPGs do. It pulls my characters through a series of remixed battles with all the enemies I’ve encountered until this point. It builds to a showdown against a powerful boss, which I can see will lead to another, probably with multiple phases. I’ve rushed too much and am not powerful enough. I drop the game to “story” difficulty and beat these bosses.

Then, I clear it. Lengthy cutscenes play. Characters reunite. Meaningful glances are exchanged. The music swells. And okay, some very shocking things happen. The title card that announces I’m in an epilogue might as well announce that I’m in a sequel, because I can tell that, actually, there’s a whole lot of game left.

It’s 3AM on Thursday morning. I have no time left.

I look online to find out what remains. There’s an endgame, an ultimate battle and a choice of two endings. I read what they are. Wow. Even wilder. I am interested enough to want to play to that choice someday, but I need to sleep, and I’d prefer to savor the remaining sections.

On Thursday, I file another GDC dispatch, go to some panels, attend some meetings, and then hit the awards.

That night, Clair Obscur cleans up at the awards. Each time they win, members of the development team from Sandfall Interactive come backstage. Reporters in the green room are told when we can interview them and when they need to swiftly take an official trophy photo and go right back to their seat in time for the next possible win. At one point, they win an award for sound, and I find myself briefly complimenting them about the crack of Renoir’s cane.

Then Sandfall wins the big award. Game of the Year. A gaggle of developers from the game are backstage. I get the attention of Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, the game’s lead writer, and Tom Guillermin, its lead programmer.

I explain that when I saw them at a prior awards show, a month ago, I had not yet played much of Clair Obscur. But I have played most of it in the past week, I explain. I cleared Act 2 this morning at 3AM.

And I have done it so we can discuss the ending. They are some mix of amused and horrified, best I can tell.

“Nobody’s talked to us about the ending,” Svedberg-Yen says. I can tell she is joking. I also realize that, in all my manic playing, I had not thoroughly checked for if and when the developers had spkoken about the ending and what they said about it.

(At this point, I’ve been vague, but PARTIAL CLAIR OBSCUR ENDING SPOILERS NOW. I’ll also mark when the spoiler part of this piece ends.)

Act 1 of Clair Obscur concludes with a surprise character death. Act 2 ends with the revelations that the paintress was not the true enemy, that the world our Expedition lives in exists inside the painting of a boy who has died. The conflict within that world is a manifestation of his Parisian family’s struggle to mourn him. The game’s actual ending involves the player choosing to side with one of two characters, Verso or Maelle, to determine the fate of the world in the painting.

I ask Svedberg-Yen and Guillermin about their twist-filled game and why they made an adventure that keeps changing the player’s sense of what the game is even actually about.

“We actually came up with the entire concept together as a whole,” Svedberg-Yen tells me. “And it was a question of how best to unfold that story. It wasn’t like we were purposefully thinking, ‘We’re gonna hide it towards the end.’ Although, we do also love twists, from a dramatic effect perspective… Ultimately, it was about the journey of the Expedition and uncovering the truth.”

Svedberg-Yen also tells me she liked the idea of focusing on a small number of people who have dramatic effects on an entire world. “When we look at the conflicts in the world, often it boils down to individuals making choices,” she says. “And one of the things we wanted to explore in this game was: What are the costs of some of those decisions? Things that seem very large-scale have a very human cost. At the end of the day, we have to think about: ‘Whose happiness are we prioritizing?’ ‘What is the cost?’ Very rarely can we find a happily ever after.

She says they always planned for multiple endings: “From the very start, there would always be two, and they need to be understood together.”

Players keep asking about them, she says. “They want to know: ‘What is the right ending?’ There is no right ending. You have to understand them together as a duality.”

She tells me she’s heard from players who are upset, who interpret the ending as just saying the action of the game was a dream and doesn’t “matter.” But, she considers, if players are upset about the deaths of virtual characters, then don’t those dream worlds matter?

I ask both of them if Sandfall has any data about which ending people preferred. “We have no way of knowing,” Guillermin says.

Svedberg-Yen tells me she’s polled players on Instagram but assumes that there could me a skew based on platform. In one poll, with about 1,000 people responding, 54% said they’d sided with Verso, 26% with Maelle. 20% chose the poll’s joke option of a “secret Clea ending.”

Even if there’s no “correct ending,” people ask if there’s a canon one. I wondered that, too. A week later, I would check in with Svedberg-Yen about that. What if you want to make more games in this world? Or in some other way continue the story? Are you prepared to pick one? Or make accommodations in sequels (a la Mass Effect) for players who chose different endings? “We knew from the start there would be two,” she reiterated. “We know the ramifications of that, and there is NO canonical ending, full stop. That is intentional.” She had no comment about what this could mean for any future games.

(End of Clair Obscur ending spoilers)

Back there, on that Thursday night, I ask Svedberg-Yen and Guillermin a bonus question: Never mind the best ending, what is the best Picto—the best perk to have equipped on one of my characters? Which one should I have been using the most?

Guillermin mentions “roulette,” a Picto that gives you a 50/50 chance for your attacks to land for half damage or double damage.

“Roulette is really quite a lot of fun,” he says.

“Really?” I reply. I had avoided it. “I’m not a gambler.”

It is good to use, on average, he says. “It’s adding randomness to your run, which can also get a bit addicting.”

I tell him that I’d been using Pictos that give my characters extra Action Points (AP), which are spent on moves. My copy of the game is nearby, on the portable Xbox Ally X that’s in my bag.

“We can judge your build!” Guillermin says.

“If you’re into it,” I reply. “I would love for you to judge my build.”

Guillermin and Svedberg-Yen answer some other reporters’ questions. And Svedberg-Yen excuses herself from any build talk. Somehow, it seems she might have better things to do.

I boot the game up and hand Guillermin the system. He pokes through the menus.

I explain that my battle strategy is to light enemies on fire with Lune, then use their burning status to bring Maelle into her “Virtuose Stance,” where she hits harder.

Guillermin approves of this: “Burning is key in triggering many things.”

As he peers at my Pictos, he questions why he isn’t seeing one of them in my loadout. “No AP gain on parry?” he asks.

“I’m terrible at parrying,” I say. (I mean, am I? Or am I just terrible at parrying when I’m playing past midnight?)

“That makes sense,” Guillermin says. “The game is also built to accommodate people who love parrying, and people who just don’t feel like it.”

He mentions that skills that apply “defenseless” are “undervalued” by players. Noted.

He likes that I’d pushed Maelle’s luck stats high. She’s got a weapon that scales well when you put points in luck.

How was I doing overall?

“I think you will manage,” he says.

“Is there anything I can be doing better?”

He politely tells me that I was overdoing it “maybe a little bit” on Pictos that beef up my Action Points.

He also encourages me to look more closely at the stats each Picto grants my characters. The Pictos apply special powers but also can boost basic stats like health. I should look into swapping out low-level Pictos that only add low stats. He shows me that I have a “Longer Shell” Picto that has an irrelevant perk but offers really high stat boosts. He notices I have a Picto called “Painted Power” that lets me exceed the game’s initial damage limit of 9,999. We both realized that I must have just obtained it, possibly at 3AM. “Okay, let me just put it in there,” he says, as he changes one of my character’s Pictos and gives her Painted Power. This was great! The maker of the game was updating my loadout.

Stepping back, does he approve of my main battle trio of Sciel, Lune and Maelle?

He says he liked to keep Verso and Maelle in the party together and use their synergy with powers tied to “marking shots.” He’d used that strategy throughout the game.

I ask if I was missing out by not using the character Monoco. He is really strong but “harder to control at first,” Guillermin says. I conclude that I did not need the hassle.

And that is about it. I got my interview about the ending. I also got in-person gameplay tips from the lead programmer.

All that playing was worth it.

The end, right?

This story has an epilogue.

On Friday, March 13, I take one last swing through GDC and head to the airport. I decide I will do other things for the flight back: maybe watch something or do some reading. For this flight, at least, I am on a Clair Obscur break.

To get home, I am flying United again. SFO to EWR, UA 2626. I had again booked a window seat, though in a different row and on the other side of the plane. Seat 37F.

I board fairly early and settle into my seat. Soon, a man approaches to claim the middle seat. The man has long, curly hair. I recognize him right away.

In four decades of flying, I don’t think this has ever happened to me before.

I ask: You sat next to me on the flight here on Monday, right?

Yes, he says. He also seems amazed.

Had he just been to the Game Developers Conference? No. He’d been to Yosemite.

But he recognized me, too, he says. He remembers me from the first flight: “You were playing that video game.”

Item 2: In brief…

😮 Sony is raising the prices of the PlayStation 5 by at least $100, starting April 2, the company said today.

• The base PS5, which launched in 2020 at $500, will now cost $650; the disc-drive-free PS5 digital, which launched at $400, is up to $600; the PS5 Pro, launched in 2024 at $700, will cost $900.

• Sony had already increased PS5 prices once last year.

• From today’s announcement, which confirmed price hikes globally: “We know that price changes impact our community, and after careful evaluation, we found this was a necessary step to ensure we can continue delivering innovative, high-quality gaming experiences to players worldwide.”

• Just yesterday: I wrote about how rising RAM prices, which have spiked due to the AI industry’s rush for components, led to a price hike for the Nex Playground console.

🤔 Pearl Abyss CEO Heo Jin-young told shareholders during a financial update that he’s aware of criticisms of the storyline in his company’s hit new game Crimson Desert, Forbes reports.

• As he is quoted in the report: “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.”

• Crimson Desert has sold over three million copies since its March 19 release, making it one of 2026’s breakout hits.

Item 3: The week ahead

Monday, March 30

• Puzzle Spy International (PC) is released.

Tuesday, March 31

• Raccoin: Coin Pusher Roguelike (PC) and Super Meat Boy 3D (PC, console) are released.

Wednesday, April 1

• The Super Mario Galaxy movie premieres.

Thursday, April 2

• Octopus side-scroller Darwin’s Paradox (PC, console) and I Am Jesus Christ (PC) are released (In 2022, I previewed the latter, which is indeed a Jesus Christ simulator).

• Temtem Swarm(PC, PS5), think Vampire Survivors meets Pokémon, gets its 1.0 update.

Two weeks ago, as we were mostly discussing the uncommonly good news that his video game company was experiencing, David Lee and I briefly discussed a looming pothole.

Lee is CEO of Nex and he’d been regaling me in a hotel suite in San Francisco with upbeat news about his company’s upstart motion-controlled Playground game console. The family-oriented machine launched in 2023, had a hot holiday (outsold the Xbox in the U.S. on Black Friday!) and is expected to reach 1 million units sold next month.

But what about the RAM shortages that have been wreaking havoc for so many electronics makers?

Tom Kang, the company’s president chimed in. “We have secured supply for this year,” he said, “But we ran out the last two years. So, if there are signals that there’s going to be excess demand, then we’re going to have to find more supply.”

They’d have to explore all options, Lee said, potentially raising the Playground’s price.

Lee even floated an intriguing change to the Playground. The system uses older DDR4 RAM. But AI companies are placing so many orders for newer DDR5 RAM that supply lines for the older type are closing down in order to spin up more production of DDR5. That could lead to more DDR5 supply, which would be an opportunity for Nex to make a shift. “There’s also technology advancements we could leverage as well, if we move to more highly available memory,” Lee said.

“We want to be a responsible business,” he added. “It’s very important that we manage things really well and continue to service our customers for the long-term. This is the most important thing for us.”

Yesterday, Lee announced to Nex customers that the company was raising the Playground’s price, from $249 to $299, effective April 1. He cited rising costs of “key components — especially memory (DDR) and storage (eMMC)” and said the added expense is “no longer something we can sustainably carry on our own.”

In at least that regard, the Playground is typical. Everyone’s raising prices or warning that they might have to.

But during our chat in SF, I learned plenty about how extraordinary this system and its parent company—with its tiny but growing first-party studios and its six-figure game budgets—has been.

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Here a Game File, I am skeptical that ChatGPT can make me a better writer or reporter. But I am an open-minded sort, and I’ve had people recommend I try the tech to enhance my journalism.

So, perhaps this quick example might be instructive for everyone.

Less than an hour ago, I was marveling at the length of the title for Nintendo’s Switch 2 release tomorrow: Super Mario Bros. Wonder – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Meetup in Bellabel Park

I wondered: Is this the longest title Nintendo has ever used for one of its game?

I Googled for a list of Nintendo game titles. I found one, dating back to the 1980s.

As I started scrolling past the likes of “Sin and Punishment: Successor of the Earth” and “Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3-e Series 1”, I realized this was an idea I did not have the bandwidth to turn into reality.

A thought flashed. Could AI help me?

I loaded ChatGPT and asked for an assist:

“list the 10 longest video game titles on this page, from longest to shortest https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_games”

Quickly, ChatGPT produced an answer:

Great, right? 10 titles by length, cool trophy emoji, some methodology notes that assured me that “I considered full visible titles exactly as written.”

There was just the wee little problem that ChatGPT’s list did not include “Super Mario Bros. Wonder – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Meetup in Bellabel Park”

I asked:

why does your list not include "Super Mario Bros. Wonder – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Meetup at Bellabel Park"?

It answered, providing three possible excuses and three actual excuses:

“The list I gave was incomplete, not correctly exhaustive”

Really!

I asked ChatGPT to re-type its list with character counts at the end. It could confidently miss game titles, but surely it could count numbers good.

It replied with this list, complete with apologetic footnote for excluding the Mario title.

Notice how ChatGPT was now offering to create a “fully accurate” list? I mean, sure, that’s what I wanted in the first place. I get more helpful first-time answers when I’m asking my kids what they want for lunch.

I asked the AI for an accurate list using all the game titles on the page.

The result:

See that game up top?

“Super Mario Bros. Wonder – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Meetup at Bellabel Park — 96 characters”

“Your example is now correctly #1 by a wide margin,” ChatGPT told me.

It even offered to “export the entire page parsed + sorted programmatically (so it’s 100% reproducible).” Very nice of it to do so.

There I had it. A full list. My pre-publication instincts proven correct. What more could a hard-working journalist ask for?

Just one other problem.

While ChatGPT was thinking (or whatever passes for thinking), I had counted the characters for “Super Mario Bros. Wonder – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Meetup at Bellabel Park“ by hand.

I counted 78, not ChatGPT’s 96.

I pasted the Mario title into Google Docs and hit the word count button: 78 characters there, too.

I returned to ChatGPT once more, though, full disclosure, I typed 79, not 78. But who cares, right? Just numbers…

“The earlier numbers (including 96) are not reliable.”

Ha ha. Oh, silly ChatGPT.

“If you want a truly correct result….”

I did double-check with ChatGPT about the 78 vs. 79 thing. You see how it had told me that its “key takeaway” was that my count of 79 was “correct”?

Well, after I double-checked, it gave me a “verified count” of 78.

It offered to provide me with a “character-by-character index breakdown so you can verify it independently.”

No, ChatGPT, I think you produced enough results for this one.

“You probably don’t like us,” Troy Batterberry said to me in a reasonable tone, when I introduced myself a couple of weeks ago at GDC.

I had identified myself as a member of the media, as someone from the other side of the kind of situations he’d spent the last half hour talking about: leaks.

I told him there were no hard feelings. I was just interested in people doing interesting things.

Batterberry’s session had been one of my most-anticipated of GDC. I’d been looking forward to it for weeks, since I’d combed through the show schedule and found, predictably, dozens of talks about the wonders of AI. My eyes had been drawn to a more surprising talk—his—that was about how AI could somehow help video game companies with “stopping insider leaks.”

We’ve all seen some insider leaks: memos from gaming CEOs announcing policy changes or layoffs, trailers and screenshots for unannounced games, official fact sheets for games not yet made official.

Was AI coming for some of my peers’ sources? And for some of mine?

The jury is still out on whether AI can speed up a game studio’s workflow, illustrate useful concept art, help code a game effectively, lower online toxicity, and recommend good games for people to try.

But could it also create a new era of gaming in which a publisher or studio can confidently keep the news of a new Blast Corps to itself, until it is good and ready to market that news? Could AI eradicate the phenomenon of the leaked corporate memo? Could AI be so good at stopping internal leaks that attorneys for Cognosphere, Epic and other leak-minded video game legal teams would soon be bored?

By the time Batterberry was showing GDC attendees that his company, EchoMark, was developing what he called “a whole other level of watermarking,” I knew I’d chosen the right talk to attend.

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