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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s one from April 30th:

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

And here’s one from May 8:

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

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

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

Item 2: In brief…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Item 3: The week ahead

Tuesday, May 19

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

Wednesday, May 20

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

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

Thursday, May 21

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

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

Friday, May 22

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Decided to cancel Super Game”

*No additional costs associated with the cancellation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The two biggest first-party video game companies in the world issued multiple jaw-dropping announcements to wrap up the week, as Nintendo and Sony provided updates on Friday about the past year of sales and their expectations for the year ahead.

Nintendo announced no less than 20 price changes to its products, including increases to the cost of the Switch 2 in the U.S., Canada and Europe, effective September 1 and the increase in various Switch 2 and original Switch models in Japan, effective May 25.

In the U.S., the Switch 2 price will increase from $449.99 to $499.99. The latter is what Nintendo previously charged for a Switch 2 bundle that included the launch game Mario Kart World.

Nintendo also announced changes in prices for Japanese memberships to its Nintendo Switch Online service and to various lines of physical playing cards.

“We sincerely apologize for the impact these price revisions may have on our customers and other stakeholders, and we deeply appreciate your understanding,” the company said in a statement alongside the list of new charges.

Nintendo competitors Sony and Microsoft already raised the prices of their current-gen consoles last year, around the time when Nintendo raised the price of the original Switch and on Switch 2 accessories.

Nintendo blamed its rising console prices on changing “market conditions.” It said it expected to incur ¥100 billion ($638 million) in costs this year, due to “higher prices for components such as memory, as well as the impact of tariff measures.”

Electronics makers in gaming and beyond are grappling with soaring prices for computer memory chips, as the supply is gobbled up by firms that want to use them for computing-intensive generative AI.

During a Sony briefing to investors in Tokyo this morning, the company’s chief financial officer, Lin Tao, said that sales of its PlayStation 5 in its 2026 fiscal year (April 2026-March 2027) would likely be constrained by the chip shortages

“We plan to base our PS5 hardware sales in FY26 on the volume of memory we can procure at reasonable prices, and we expect hardware profitability to be essentially the same as FY25,” she said.

Having just been ahead of the memory issues, Nintendo did have a huge first year with the Switch 2. Nintendo said today that it sold a whopping 19.9 million units of the hybrid console/portable in its first nine months of release, between the machine’s June 5, 2025 launch and March 31, 2026.

But it announced this morning that it expects to sell just 16.5 million—more than three million less—Switch 2 systems across the 12 months spanning April 2026 and March 2027. It attributed the expected drop to aggressive player adoption of Switch 2 in year one and “price revisions.” (For what it’s worth, Nintendo likes to set its forecasts low and revise upward, but it’s still notable that they’re stating an anticipated drop.)

Nintendo also had some big news of another sort.

In a rundown of “personnel changes of company officers,” the company revealed the retirement of Takashi Tezuka, a game creator whose early Nintendo resume, per Moby Games, includes:

• Super Mario Bros. - assistant director

• The Legend of Zelda - director

• Super Mario World - lead director

• The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past - director

• Super Mario 64 - assistant director

Tezuka’s retirement follows those of other multi-decade senior Nintendo game directors and producers, as tracked by VGC.

There were some other notable Nintendo bits of news, but let’s get to the big Sony one.

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In 20 years of covering the video game beat, I’d probably not spoken more than 20 words with Take Two chairman Strauss Zelnick, who’s been running the company behind NBA 2K, Grand Theft Auto, BioShock and Red Dead Redemption for, you guessed it, nearly 20 years.

Last week, though, ahead of a panel I was hosting at the iicon event in Las Vegas, I had about 20 minutes to interview Zelnick.

I could ask one question for each year, I joked, as we settled into our seats on opposite sides of a conference table. Take Two’s longtime head of corporate communications, Alan Lewis, was seated at Zelnick’s side.

I didn’t quite conduct our chat that way, but we wound up going through a lot, including…

• The state of BioShock

• The ramifications of the rising costs of game development

• The fate of Take Two’s recent multi-game deal with the NFL

• Some hints about Take Two’s mobile plans

• Whether Zelnick’s answer to me about Civ VII was a good one

• The do’s and don’t’s of NBA 2K microtransactions

• Take Two’s take on the Switch 2

• Oh, and GTA VI (Spoiler: if Zelnick had spilled the beans on the price of the game or a release date for a PC version or whether there will be a polka radio station, that would have been this article’s headline).

Before all of that, I would learn what it’s like to interview Strauss Zelnick, who is confident, calm and focused on delivering precise answers.

To wit, I thought I’d start our chat with something fun, a bit insidery but maybe safe for him to share. The team at Take Two’s Rockstar label delays their games a lot, I noted. Of course, those delays, however painful, tend to be worth it. So, I was wondering how Zelnick finds out about them. Take the most recent postponement back in November 2025, when Rockstar said that GTA VI would not hit its May 26, 2026 release date (just 20 days from now!) and would instead come out on November 19, 2026. Was that news delivered via a call? An email? How does it work?

“I work super closely with my team,” Zelnick said. “It's a very thin team at Take Two. The entire senior management team is six executives who sit in one hallway and share two assistants. And then, basically, there are two people who head up each of our labels.”

They meet weekly to discuss their business, he said.

So no one emails him about a delay? Nothing like that?

Zelnick craned his neck to look at my left hand. He asked if I was married.

I am, I said.

“Does your partner email you to give you information?” he asked.

Fair enough. I didn’t get the sense Zelnick was going to read me the minutes of the management meeting where the GTA VI delay was discussed.

Slight pivot, maybe I could get some personality insights about one of the most successful gaming execs of the last 20 years, before getting to my big list of questions about specific Take Two games, franchises and policies.

I asked: How do you deal with delay news like that? Go for a run? Meditate?

“I tend to default to being very calm,” he said. “I’m not a person who freaks out easily.” He noted that he has a daughter with special needs due to an illness, and he shared that that situation had gotten him worked up. It was a personal, family emergency.

“But, you know, business is not that,” he said. “I have no trouble distinguishing between, like, a business challenge and an emergency.”

He turned to his left to ask Lewis, his colleague of 17 years, a question.

“Have you ever seen me freak out?”

“Never,” Lewis replied.

“You’ve seen me upset,” Zelnick told Lewis. “Have you seen me raise my voice? Maybe how many times? Be honest, because we might as well be.”

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I think I really liked 2022 indie breakout Vampire Survivors. But I have long wondered if the game just made me think I liked it. Playing it felt great. Maybe too great?

In Vampire Survivors, you’re a hero warrior guy or a magician lady or maybe even an old man with some repellent garlic. From a top-down perspective, you see your hero swarmed by skeletons, bats and very annoying preying mantis-like creatures (but no vampires, of course). You cannot manually attack your foes. The attacking is automatic, and you just move. As enemies are killed for you, they drop blue gems. Collecting them fills a bar. Filling the bar unlocks a selection of upgrades. Those upgrades can make your attacks more powerful or more frequent. Maybe they give you a second attack, perhaps some spinning books to supplement your whip or your lightning.

If you’ve played it, you know how smoothly Vampire Survivors draws you in and how tightly it keeps you from doing anything but play it. It chirps with slot-machine sounds. It fires off virtual fireworks as you crack open a treasure chest. That progress bar keeps filling up, and the rewards keep on coming. Where once you were weak, soon you’re strong.

Did I like Vampire Survivors? Or did I just like how much it felt like a constant celebration of mindless, near-endless winning?

(The one thing I was sure was genuinely good about the game was that my kids, my wife and I could easily play it together. That was indisputably wonderful.)

My too-many hours enraptured by Vampire Survivors led me to approach its first big spin-off, April’s Vampire Crawlers, with great caution.

Crawlers is played solo in a first-person perspective, one turn at a time, as your warrior man or magician lady dungeon-crawls through forests, bridges, libraries. I presume there eventually is, an actual dungeon but I haven’t spoiled myself. Each region is filled with enemies and the occasional treasure chest.

As I dove in, I heard the familiar slot machine sound effects and saw a progress bar that kept filling up as I killed skeletons, bats and very annoying preying mantis-like creatures (but, so far, no vampires).

Here we go again, I thought. Another seductively mindless game that I better be ready to tear myself from. Actually, I was wrong about the mindlessness.

I knew that combat in Vampire Crawlers is not automatic. Each attack or item is represented as a card, and battles are a matter of randomly drawing cards from a tiny deck into your hand, then playing them, registering their effects on the enemies, discarding them, earning more cards for your deck, shuffling and playing through it again. With each hand, you can choose which cards to play or play all of them in a single button press. I mistakenly thought the latter was the preferred action. After all, Vampire Survivors didn’t even want me to press a button to attack. Surely the gameplay joke of Crawlers is that I should just play all of the cards in my hand at once?

Incorrect!

I was initially playing Crawlers by spamming the all-cards-at-once option and the action was feeling as mindless as Survivors. But, as would be obvious with any other card-based game, Vampire Crawlers players are best served by choosing the right card to play each time. The key to the combat system involves card combos. The game’s attack cards, hero cards and item cards cost different amounts of magical mana points to play. The potency of those cards increases if you play card in the order of their mana cost. For example, you’d ideally first play a card that costs zero mana, then a card that costs one, then a two card, to keep the combo going. If you’re clever, you’ll work in wild cards, maybe turn a card’s value negative. Perhaps there are other tricks I’ve yet to discover to keep the combo going.

Once this combo system clicked, I realized that the gameplay in Vampire Crawlers is meant to be thoughtful, not mindless. When playing, I need to think about how I’m building my deck to increase the chance that my randomly drawn hand will contain cards I can combo consecutively. As I’ve been playing, I’ve needed to think about which new cards to grab, which ones to trash, all to build the most potent deck. I need to be strategic. If Vampire Survivors was a slot machine, maybe this is at least poker or craps.

As with Vampire Survivors, Crawlers is proving hard to quit. This time, I don’t feel as guilty when the minutes (or hours) stack up.

Bonus game recommendation: Combolands (PC demo)

A demo for Combolands was quietly released last month. It’s fascinating.

Combolands, formerly called Tiny Towns on itch, is a city-building game that is also played using a deck of virtual cards. In this game, cards represent the things you can build. A card will let you place huts, woodcutters, towers, farms, docks, fishing boats and more, across an island map.

The structures operate on timers that tick down the virtual days. Farms will yield crops after a certain number of days. The fishing boats will fish in a certain timeframe, at a specific range. Structures modify each other, adding range or, say, making the fishing boats cast their nets more frequently.

The goal is to get these things you’ve constructed to pay out more and more points by a specific deadline date. Mastering the layout and the timeline unlocks more cards and perks, as a low-scoring town becomes a high-scoring city.

Combolands takes a few rounds for it to click, but once it does, the demo proves to be terrific.

The game’s got a promising pedigree, too. Once of its two developers designed the great reverse-city-builder Terra Nil, which was all about turning landscapes that were spoiled by humanity back into unspoiled nature. I think they’re on to something special again.

No release date for the full game yet. Just “coming soon.”

Item 2: In brief…

🚫 French game studio Spiders (GreedFall, Steelrising) is shutting down. “We're sorry that it's come to this and would like to thank each and every one of you for your support over the years,” the studio stated on social media.

• Regional video game union STJV blamed the shutdown on Spiders publisher/owner Nacon, alleging that poor business decisions will result in 71 workers being out of a job.

• One day after Spiders’ announcement, Nacon announced that its delayed showcase of upcoming games will be held next week. Back in February, Nacon filed for insolvency.

🤔 Workers at Wizards of the Coast‘s Magic The Gathering Arena development team is unionizing, Aftermath reports.

🚀 Pearl Abyss is selling CCP Games (Eve Online) back to that studio’s management for $120 million, Inven Global reports, based on a regulatory filing.

• Pearl Abyss scored a big hit this year with the role-playing game Crimson Desert. It purchased CCP back in 2018.

📉 Microsoft earlier this week reported a 7% decline in gaming revenue for the first three months of 2026, a drop of $380 million. The company cited a 5% drop in revenue from content and services and a 33% drop in hardware revenue, due to selling fewer consoles.

• New Xbox CEO Asha Sharma took the unusual step of acknowledging that performance on social media, posting: “While we have made progress expanding the business and our margins, player and revenue growth has not yet met our ambition. We know we have work to do to earn every player today and into the future.”

• Microsoft also forecast that Xbox content and services revenue for April-June 2026 will show a “decline in low-teens,” compared to the same months last year.

• Last week, Sharma told me she wants to see the Xbox division “return to growth next year.”

👀 Roblox has reported 132 million daily active users for its platform for the first three months of 2026, up 35% from the year before. It also recorded revenue of $1.7 billion in bookings (player spending), up 39% from a year ago.

• But the company’s stock plunged as much as 20% at one point on Friday.

• A likely culprit: In its quarterly earnings report this week, Roblox cut its estimated bookings for 2026 by about $1 billion, down to $7.3-$7.6 billion. The company cited “the continuation of safety headwinds.” They’re referring to Roblox’s roll-out of mandatory age-checks that it says “will result in continued short-term headwinds to user acquisition and engagement.”

• The age checks are kicking in as Roblox attempts to address the platform’s child safety concerns, which have spawned over 100 lawsuits. (Last month, Roblox agreed to pay $36 million to settle safety lawsuits from West Virginia, Alabama and Nevada.)

📈 Krafton has reported record revenue for the first quarter of 2026, at 1.4 trillion South Korean won ($932 million), driven by the performance of its long-running battle royale PUBG on PC and mobile.

• Krafton is preparing to port inZOI, its PC-based Sims competitor, to consoles (it’s announced for PS5).

• Through its Unknown Worlds studio, it will release Steam’s most-wishlisted game, Subnautica 2, into early access on May 14. That recently announced date, which the studio seems happy with, may explain why lawyers for Unknown Worlds’ reinstated CEO recently told a judge they are no longer upset about Krafton’s possible role in a March leak of the game’s May release timeframe.

💬 Here’s a fascinating game developer quote given to my former Kotaku colleague Joshua Rivera, writing for The Verge. This is from Housemarque’s Gregory Louden, co-writer and director of new, action-packed PS5 sci-fi game Saros, which tells much of its story through vague cinematic cutscenes:

“We’re also gonna make our cinematics about questions. The gameplay is the answer. So a lot of the time the cinematics are about setting things up or giving you questions to ask, and through the game experience, you answer them.”

😮 The five-year difference. Back in 2021, I interviewed developers at FuturLab who made the then newly-released Power Wash Simulator. The game’s producer revealed his dream filthy object to clean in the game: “That would be a wonderful thing to have six people running around cleaning the Millennium Falcon together… It would be a dream.” As I wrote at the time, there was no deal with Disney/LucasFilm to do any such thing. PWS was still very much an upstart game about cleaning dirty cars and buildings.

• This week: FuturLab revealed a summer-slated add-on for PowerWash Simulator 2, a Star Wars Pack.

• The trailer shows players cleaning a dirty X-Wing fighter, but, come on…surely the dream is about to come true? (Though, to be clear, the sequel supports up to four players, not six.)

Item 3: The week ahead

Tuesday, May 5

• In the Black (PC), a “realistic space combat simulator with a serious respect for science,” Wax Heads (PC, console), a record store puzzle game, and Motorslice (PC, PlayStation, Xbox), a sci-fi parkour game set in “the ruins of a megastructure,” are released.

Thursday, May 7

• Alabaster Dawn (PC, early access), a new role-playing game from the makers of CrossCode, and Mixtape (PC, console), a stylish interactive 80s teen drama, are released.

Saturday, May 9

• The NYC Video Game Festival is held in downtown Manhattan..

LAS VEGAS — Sonic The Hedgehog was great, but that’s not the Sega gaming franchise that Hollywood producer Dmitri Johnson most wanted to adapt into a movie when he started courting the Japanese game giant years ago.

“Sonic was the gateway drug to get Streets of Rage, and we’re finally making that come true,” he said during a panel in Las Vegas at the inaugural iicon event.

Johnson is the co-founder of video-game focused TV/movie production house Story Kitchen. On stage, he raved about the classic Sega brawler series as he explained to an audience of gaming executives (and some non-gaming ones) how Story Kitchen tries to turn video games into shows and films.

“When people ask us now, like, ‘How do you find [video game intellectual property] that you go after for any projects?,’ we selfishly say, ‘We’re trying to make stuff for ourselves,’” he said.

Streets of Rage, Johnson said, was a prime example. When he was pitching Sega years ago on the first Sonic movie, it was rooted in his love for Sonic but also his hopes to make a Street of Rage movie.

Musical aside: During the panel, Johnson also raved that Streets of Rage–the second one, he later emphasized to me–has “the greatest video game soundtrack of all time”. Judge for yourself…

“I almost broke news,” Johnson added, as he discussed the Streets of Rage movie project. But he caught himself. “There will be news,” he said, soon. It’ll involve some “exciting talent around that one.”

Attendees of this iicon event might be forgiven for assuming Story Kitchen is trying to turn every game into a movie or show, because they sure have a lot of ongoing efforts to mention. There’s their hit Sonic movies, upcoming projects involving Sega’s Shinobi and Toejam & Earl and efforts around breakout Roblox platform hits Grow a Garden and Steal a Brainrot. Story Kichen’s official list of projects also includes Sleeping Dogs, Vampire Survivors, Sifu and many more. Some will actually get made, but it’s Hollywood, so keep those expectations in check, of course.

For their talk, the Story Kitchen team wanted to emphasize the extent to which they try to work with writers, directors and actors who really understand the games—and how they’ve tried to normalize getting game-makers themselves involved in the process.

To underscore those points, Story Kitchen co-founder Mike Goldberg brought up his team’s efforts this very week to get a live-action movie going based on the beautiful 2023 post-robot-invasion side-scrolling game Planet of Lana.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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