The Coalition has confirmed that Gears of War: E-Day suffered a DDoS attack over the weekend, causing intermittent disconnects and login issues for players on Xbox Series X and S and PC. The studio said its teams are continuing to monitor and mitigate the activity and will provide updates if there are significant changes.
Will de Renzy-Martin, who plays lead character Coen in the English version of The Blood of Dawnwalker, says generative AI can only replicate the way his voice sounds, not his personality or the choices he makes in the room. Developer Rebel Wolves previously used text-to-speech AI tools to plan cinematics before hiring actors, though nothing in the game was created with AI. He added that anyone using AI-generated voices would still need someone to interact with it and get the desired performance, and that person would cost more than an actor.
DMZ for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 has been released early, according to Eurogamer. Infinity Ward has also ruled out PvE content for the mode.
Stardew Valley creator's new game, Haunted Chocolatier, is "more of an action RPG" than farming sim
Nintendo Latin America vice president and general manager Bill van Zyll said the company currently has "no plans to ditch physical" media, adding that Nintendo has historically been agnostic and follows consumer preference. He noted the Switch 2 is barely over a year into its life and supports both digital and physical. The comment comes as Sony has confirmed it will cease production of PlayStation discs in early 2028, with Microsoft likely to follow.
Jobs roundup: October | Playstack CEO Harvey Elliott voted chair of UKIE
Stardock founder and CEO Brad Wardell discussed Clairvoyance, an app that began as an internal tool and is now free, running a team of AI agents locally on Windows, macOS and Linux on top of tools like Claude Code and Codex. He said much of game-making time goes to grunt work such as build errors, importers and hunting for assets, so AI's best use is freeing artists and designers to create rather than replacing them. He argued digital distribution, not AI, is breaking AAA economics, with around 30,000 games expected on Steam this year making attention the scarce resource.
BAFTA has awarded over £270,000 in grants to 112 recipients in the UK and North America through its 2026 Prince William BAFTA Bursary and scholarship programmes. The bursary supported 100 recipients, a 40% increase from last year, with grants of up to £2,000 each. UK scholarship recipients receive up to £12,000, while US recipients receive up to $60,000.
Nintendo Latin America VP and general manager Bill van Zyll said Nintendo has no plans to abandon physical game releases and will not follow a full shift to digital. The stance comes after PlayStation announced it would soon drop physical versions entirely, sparking industry discussion. Nintendo's Switch 2, launched last year, supports both digital and physical formats, with physical releases split between full cartridges and game download cards.
Tencent announced that The Division 2's mainland China server will officially shut down at 11:00 on December 14, citing a change in business strategy after talks with Ubisoft. Recharges and new user registrations stop at 11:00 on October 12, and forums and dedicated customer support close at 11:00 on December 22. Users who recharged before 11:00 on October 12 and still hold tokens in their accounts can claim gift packs for PUBG Mobile, Battle of Golden Spatula, Valorant, CrossFire and Honor of Kings during the compensation period.
Wonder Boy in Monster Land, a 1987 arcade game that never received an official PC port, appeared on Steam on September 28 under publisher Retro Maniac with the name misspelled as "Wonderboy." Original composer Shinichi Sakamoto called the port illegitimate and noted it is unavailable in Japan, while the listing is said to be a ROM running in the MAME emulator with the Sega logo removed. The page remained live as of the article.
MMO mobile game in-app purchase revenue fell from $5.3 billion in 2021 to $2.8 billion in 2025, a 47% drop that far outpaced the RPG genre's 38% decline and the broader mobile market's 1% dip, according to an analysis by Naavik. Downloads also dropped 40%, from 345 million to 206 million, and revenue fell another 27% year-over-year from January to September 2026. The report attributes the structural collapse to engagement fatigue, spending fatigue and gameplay homogenization, compounded by open-world adventure RPGs like Genshin Impact raising the bar.
GameLook reports that overseas AI game-creation platform Astrocade announced 10 million monthly active users, double the 5 million MAU four months earlier, with users generating playable content from natural language; it raised 56 million dollars in May from investors including Sequoia, Sea, Google's AI Future Fund and Nvidia. Tencent's Huya listed the AI game generator BinkBink on GooglePlay, Google partnered with Unity on the AI game platform Playground, and Meta unveiled Horizon Create and Horizon Studio at Meta Connect 2026. The article notes none of these platforms has settled on monetization, with Astrocade saying it is focused on user growth and will consider revenue growth sometime next year.
The demo of Teach My Little Sister How To Drive, a driving-teaching sim from four-person studio Easy Fox, went viral on Steam and social platforms, with playtest numbers growing more than 20-fold in a month. Because the sister's voice is generated in real time by a cloud large language model, daily AI costs exceed 160,000 yen, about 7,000 yuan, forcing the team to take out a bank loan to keep servers running and to say the demo may be taken down early. The studio says the full release will fold AI costs into its price so buyers pay no extra token fees.
Mick Gordon, who composed the soundtracks for 2016's Doom and 2020's Doom Eternal, told IGN at PAX Australia that he would return to id Software's Doom series "in a heartbeat" if the right conditions fell into place. He said he still has a whole list of ideas he'd love to explore for Doom one day. Gordon previously accused id Software in a 2022 Medium post of failing to pay him for half his work on the Doom Eternal soundtrack and singled out executive producer Marty Stratton.
NetEase has revealed ECC: Redline, a self-developed "extreme-sports tactical shooter" coming to PC via Steam and mobile, and players have called it a "1:1 rip" of Activision's Call of Duty: Warzone, citing similar gun feel, UI, sound effects, and camera blur. The free-to-play game has no release date, but some Call of Duty fans frustrated with Warzone say it could fill a specific void.
Steam hit a new all-time record today with 43.5 million concurrent users.
The Discord server for the Terraria mod Calamity was compromised and used to promote a cryptocoin named after the server, which was immediately pumped and dumped. The server owner was tricked into handing over access by two users posing as former moderators, one of whom revealed themselves to be a hacker known as "Kata." A former moderator has since wiped the server's contents, and tens of thousands of users have left in the past two days.
The EU announced action against ten companies including Activision Blizzard, Mojang, Ubisoft, Riot Games, Crytek, Supercell, InnoGames, King, Plarium and Playrix, led by the Italian Competition Authority, over platform-specific virtual currencies that rarely match the price players want to pay. The press release also cites virtual currency bundles, dark patterns, inadequate parental controls and a lack of assistance when accounts are blocked. Epic has said that starting this month players can spend exact amounts of V-Bucks on specific purchases, except on PlayStation.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 has revealed paid spawn options for DMZ. Eurogamer reports that these options give paying players an enormous advantage over players who spawn on foot.
Former Sledgehammer Games head Glen Schofield thinks the major publishers have shifted their focus away from creativity. "What I've seen is some of the big creative people marginalised. They need to flip the switch again and give the creatives a seat at the table." https://bit.ly/47HMj0U
Nier creator Yoko Taro says he still works in gamedev because it's 'good for preventing dementia' https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/nier-creator-yoko-taro-says-hes-achieved-his-career-dreams-but-he-continues-working-because-its-good-for-preventing-dementia/
Google and Unity unveil gen-AI game-making platforms, and demonstrate one of them with depressingly rubbish "dream game" Space Corridor https://bit.ly/4hw0vQs
Bit Golem's Dagon: by H. P. Lovecraft has passed 2 million players and more than 12,000 Steam reviews five years after release. The fixed-camera visual novel, adapted from Lovecraft's 1919 story, hit 100,000 downloads in two days with a review score above 95%. A free DLC previously exclusive to the console version is coming soon.
'We Didn't Expect This': Gran Turismo 7 Continuing to 'Sell Very Well' on PS5 https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2026/10/we-didnt-expect-this-gran-turismo-7-continuing-to-sell-very-well-on-ps5
Grand Theft Auto 6 has been confirmed to include sex scenes and rendered nudity, while a swath of indie games with adult themes were delisted by Steam and itch.io last summer under pressure from payment processors. Commentator George Osborn argues the difference is that online stores like Steam and itch aren't subject to age rating regulation the way physically released games like GTA 6 are, leaving them more vulnerable to external pressure.
Series creator Kazunori Yamauchi told Traxion that Gran Turismo 7 is still selling very well on PS5, a result the team had not expected from the beginning, and that the growing user base is why it keeps adding content and game modes. The first phase of the Spec 4 update arrives next week with six new cars and the Sportsland Sugo circuit, with more content following in December. The game, nearing its fifth anniversary, has never been part of PS Plus, so its growth comes entirely from premium sales.
Easy Fox's AI-powered driving instructor sim Teach My Little Sister How To Drive is spending over $1,000 per day on AI services for its demo after player numbers grew more than twentyfold. The studio has taken out a bank loan to keep the demo running and says it may have to close it earlier than expected before the full release, which is planned for January next year.
Gears of War boss says the next game won't take seven years to make as he dances around the question of layoffs. https://bit.ly/4hKunr8
Phasmophobia has confirmed 30 million sales, and its Crimson Eye Halloween event has returned. Eurogamer reported the news.
"We can't control what the publisher scene looks like, but we can control what we're making, and how we ship it, and how we communicate with an audience" – Why two of the developers behind Multiversus ditched AAA for indie https://bit.ly/4rNOmtG
The studio behind Star Wars: Zero Company says it will bring back as many people as possible after furloughing most of its developers. Eurogamer reported the news.
"We have to go a different path" - Krafton thinks PUBG https://Ded.Net's pulpy gameshow hyperviolence and roguelite twist can make it the next big battle royale
Undead Labs has spoken about its split from Xbox. The studio said it has to make some changes to State of Decay 3 following layoffs.
"Game streaming services tended to make profit projections that conveniently ignored long-term costs," says Rob Fahey. "Now that the huge vaults of growth capital have dried up, it's hard to ignore that streaming's numbers don't add up" https://bit.ly/4icDulO
Gears of War: E-Day studio finds a way to get more performance from Xbox Series S - one that other Xbox games could probably use. https://bit.ly/4yEEtBg
Pragmata lead producer Masachika Kawata said Capcom at one point considered making the new sci-fi game "a little bit more horror focused." The idea was dropped because Pragmata is a new IP and horror would overlap too much with Resident Evil, though horror elements such as human-looking robots remain in the game.
CD Projekt Red outlines which Witcher 3 Remastered fixes are coming next, but there's still division about the changes. https://bit.ly/4zbPA4k
Supermassive Games has suffered layoffs, with more than 70 developers said to have left the company this week. Eurogamer links to its full report.
GTA 6 devs tried "not to jump on the bandwagon" of passing trends and instead created their "own slanted, overblown versions". https://bit.ly/4zklaNy