Kotaro Uchikoshi announced the establishment of CRASH KEYS, a new game studio headquartered in Shibuya, Tokyo. The studio is moving forward with new original projects and is seeking investment partners. Founding members include Uchikoshi as CEO, along with writers Akira Mine and Muri Sasaki, the latter having contributed to gameplay sections of the Zero Escape and AI: The Somnium Files series.
New Blood boss Dave Oshry says he puts the money from hits like Ultrakill into new projects such as Gloomwood, Fallen Aces, and Tenebris Somnia instead of opening a big office or milking the IP with sequels. He says if he had forced David Szymanski to make Dusk 2, Iron Lung and its $50 million movie, funded by a YouTuber, would never have happened. Dusk and Amid Evil are still being updated, a new Dusk episode or proper sequel has been discussed, and a Dusk spin-off called Dungeons of Dusk is in the works from a different developer.
Summer Eternal, formed by former Disco Elysium developers, has detailed a studio structure in which a Players Non-Profit owns 5 percent of the studio, with the other 95 percent split between full-time workers, freelancers and investors. The non-profit can summon a general assembly to discuss topics and use game revenue to organise events or support union work. The studio also announced a 500 page Anthology priced at €69 for the Standard edition and €99 for the Deluxe Firestarter bundle, with buyers entitled to membership in the non-profit.
Eurogamer reports that former Disco Elysium developers have formed a non-profit studio with a structure owned by both players and developers. The studio describes the non-profit as the voice of the gamers.
Ex-ZA/UM developers reveal Red Rooster, an "incendiary RPG" that is very intentionally not trying to be a "Disco Elysium successor" or "Disco-like"
Apple has officially launched an "Indie Game Week," bringing seven well-known PC and console indie titles including Sifu, No Man's Sky, Vampire Crawlers and 9 Kings to iOS. Previous 3A ports like Resident Evil 4 Remake performed poorly on iPhone, with 357,000 downloads and about $208,000 in revenue after six months. Apple's 2019 Apple Arcade subscription ecosystem has largely withered, with natively developed mobile indies now nearly absent.
Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii shared a text-based interrogation game on X, saying it took about 30 minutes to make with AI. He said AI now lets people make a decent game alone by giving instructions, even without drawing or programming skills, and compared it to making The Portopia Serial Murder Case by himself in 1983. In the game, players question a 72-year-old former locksmith named Komiya before a lawyer arrives at 11pm, using evidence to break his lies as his agitation rises and his resistance hits 100.
Dragon Quest co-creator Yuji Horii has released a new text-based interrogation game that he says was made with generative AI in about 30 minutes. In a post on X, he recalled creating The Portopia Serial Murder Case alone, and said that with AI he can now make a decent game just by giving instructions. He also warned players not to press the boost button.
Coder Lorean Xavier has built an open source porting tool that creates a playable x86 PC executable from the original PS4 files of Hideo Kojima's P.T., rebuilding the engine in C++ and Vulkan to recreate every level, model, texture, sound, script and cutscene. Players still need their own legitimate decrypted copy of the original P.T. to generate a playable PC version. The native port adds upscaling, frame generation, a camera mode, experimental third-person and VR support, and a "museum" section for viewing and listening to in-game assets, including unused content.
Dwarf Fortress creator Tarn Adams says he has never been tempted to use generative AI in the game, calling AI-written code bloated and saying you can tell a vibe-coded game when your computer fan starts spinning. He notes he has worked with traditional AI for decades but now avoids the term entirely, and says only platform pressure from Microsoft could force him toward generative AI.
In a recent GQ interview, Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone said Haunted Chocolatier is "more of an action RPG" focused on adventuring, finding equipment, and getting more powerful, with monsters and boss fights. Announced in October 2021 and in development for more than five years, the game still has no release date, and Barone said he has "returned to isolation" to finish it.
Stardew Valley creator's new game, Haunted Chocolatier, is "more of an action RPG" than farming sim
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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
Easy Fox's DMV simulator Teach My Little Sister How To Drive uses an AI chatbot as the student sister players instruct to pass her exam. A Steam page update says demo players grew more than twentyfold over the past month, pushing operating costs above $1,000 a day and forcing the team to take out a bank loan, a cost it says will factor into the final price. The four-person team says it hopes to keep the demo running but may close it earlier than expected before release, a decision it has not yet made.
MatPat (Matthew Patrick) has struck a multi-project deal with Blumhouse Productions, announced at this week's New York Comic Con, starting with a film adaptation of DreadXP's 2022 puzzle horror game Amanda the Adventurer. Patrick said he is partnering with Blumhouse to bring his favorite indie games and horror channels to the big screen. Which other games will be adapted has yet to be confirmed.
"I've never encountered such difficulty in finding work," says Phil O'Connor, who spent years in AAA, but is now working on indie title Starship Bloopers. "I've been told by recruiters, tone down those 30 years of experience, I wouldn't mention that, it makes you sound old." https://bit.ly/4rNOmtG
On September 28, China beat Malaysia 4-0 in the Honor of Kings final at the Nagoya Asian Games, defending the gold medal it also won at the Hangzhou Asian Games, with player Yinuo becoming the league's first and only double gold medalist. On October 8, Tencent TiMi's Delta Force announced its China server daily active users surpassed 58 million as the game marked its second anniversary. NetEase also unveiled its extreme sports competitive shooter Extreme Battlefield, with its first test set to begin on October 15.
An indie developer posted on Reddit's indie dev board claiming someone used AI to clone his game demo from social media videos and demanded $200 to not publish it on Steam first. Commenters noted Steam charges a $100 listing fee and that the AI video showed broken physics and enemies spawning off-map, so it wasn't a playable game. Users then found he never shared his email publicly and that he had threatened other developers with an AI clone three weeks earlier, suggesting a staged stunt.
Blumhouse Productions has partnered with YouTube star Matthew "MatPat" Patrick to create a series of movies based on viral indie horror games, starting with Amanda the Adventurer. The partnership was confirmed at New York Comic Con 2026, where MatPat said he and Blumhouse are in talks with writers and directors and are "actually moving fast" on the project. This follows other YouTuber-led film projects, including Jacksepticeye's animated Bloodborne movie and Markiplier's self-funded Iron Lung adaptation.
At Tokyo Game Show 2026, Japanese indie publishers are diverging from tradition by selling doujin zines, stickers, and other merchandise to fund in-development games and build audiences. Finding Polka, about searching for a missing dog, won the Platinum Prize for best indie game and is published worldwide by Parco Games, a new publisher from the Japanese department store chain. Events like Comiket draw over 300,000 people across two days, while Comitia's quarterly Tokyo events attract over 30,000 attendees each.
Easy Fox, the developer of Teach My Little Sister How to Drive, has taken out a bank loan to keep the AI-powered demo running as daily costs reach $1,000. Demo players grew more than twentyfold over the past month, and the four-person team says financial pressure may force it to close the demo earlier than expected. The game uses Google Gemini and ChatGPT for its dynamic NPC, and the paid release will factor expected AI usage into its price.
Modern Sky's Game House teamed up with Haoyou Kuaibao to set up a game expo area at the Guangzhou Strawberry Music Festival that ended in late September, offering demos of over a dozen titles including Under the Fog Sea, Gui Huan and Hungry Wilderness, with Infinity and Lili's Little People Country also hosting reservation booths. Game House head Zhao Yue said music festivals need content to fill idle time while game expos struggle to give non-hit titles exposure, making the two a natural fit. Haoyou Kuaibao said it is targeting the 18-to-25-year-old general entertainment crowd who would not normally visit a game expo but might be interested in games.
ICEY 2, the sequel to the Chinese indie game ICEY, opened crowdfunding on October 1 with an initial goal of 10,000 yuan, passing 5 million on day one and 20 million within three days, and now exceeding 30 million yuan from over 200,000 backers. Producer Lao Ma (Xiao Zhuohong) knelt during a livestream to ask players not to idolize him and said he would never crowdfund again. The game is expected to launch on May 1 next year at 48 yuan, made by a six-person team, with the funds going toward CG, music, META content and physical merchandise.
Programmer Lorean Xavier made public this week a project that natively ports Hideo Kojima's P.T. to PC; the client contains no copyrighted material and requires a dumped copy of P.T. to run on Windows and Linux. Xavier said the project began in 2024 and is neither an emulator nor a remake, but a translation of the original code to PC, which also allows modern graphical features and mod support. Lance McDonald, who datamined P.T.'s secrets, called it a 1:1 port of the entire codebase.
Beethoven & Dinosaur's Mixtape took three prizes at the Australian Game Developer Awards 2026, including Game of the Year, Excellence in Art and Excellence in Sound Design. Tempo Lab Games' rhythm title Bits & Bops won two awards, while Canberra-based Uppercut Games was named Studio of the Year. The ceremony also introduced the inaugural GCAP Legacy Award, won by Riot Games principal software engineer Tony Albrecht.
California-based Gardens Interactive announced on Wednesday it raised over $35 million in a Series B round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, bringing total funding to over $70 million. Investors include Zenith Capital, Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Accel, Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors, Bayshore and former Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield, with the family office of late Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi reinvesting. Led by co-founder and CEO Stephen Bell, the studio's debut is a shared-world fantasy adventure it calls a strandbox, with designer Chris Bell citing Death Stranding, GTA roleplay and Arc Raiders as influences and a closed pre-alpha now open for sign-ups.
Gardens Interactive has raised over $35 million in a Series B round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, bringing its total funding past $70 million. The studio, co-founded by veterans of Journey, What Remains of Edith Finch, and Sky: Children of the Light, is developing its debut multiplayer title Project Gardens, described as a "shared fantasy adventure" with "social roleplay elements."
Chongqing has built a distinct identity in China's game industry through titles like My Time at Portia, My Time at Sandrock and Dyson Sphere Program from Pathea Games and Youthcat Studio. Pathea now has over 300 employees and Youthcat nearly 20, yet talent still flows to Shanghai, Hangzhou and Chengdu, and local capital remains more familiar with manufacturing. The Chongqing mini-game industry base unveiled in October 2025 has brought in 34 companies with over 200 office staff, pointing to two possible parallel paths ahead.
Fireshine Games has acquired Danish indie studio Fair Games and its open world sandbox title Necesse. Fair Games founder and CEO Mads Skovgaard stays on as managing director and the studio keeps leading the game's direction and updates, while Fireshine handles publishing and porting. Necesse first launched in 2019 and has drawn an estimated 2.5 million players, with plans for continued PC support and additional platform ports.
Fireshine Games has acquired Fair Games, the developer of Necesse and a Danish indie studio. The deal was described as a defining moment for the studio.
The Outlast Trials has broken its concurrent-player record with over 120,000 players, more than four times its previous high of 36,000 set when it launched in Steam Early Access in 2023. Red Barrels credited a $4 Steam Autumn Sale discount, roughly half of players coming from China, and the Halloween season. The co-op horror game launched version 1.0 in spring 2024 and will follow with its annual Geister event and Season 8 in December.
Hideo Kojima retweeted an article about a fan-made P.T. port that runs natively on Windows, effectively acknowledging the project. Modder LoreanXavier says the port is about 97% complete and is a 1:1 recreation built by reverse-engineering the PS4 executable with the game's original assets, not an emulator or remake. P.T. released in August 2014 and was removed from the PlayStation store in 2015.
Sega senior executive officer Tsuyoshi Saito told Nikkei that the company is being very cautious about AI in game development and is not entrusting the creative aspects of games to AI. Sega still uses AI to improve efficiency in publishing and corporate departments and for generating business ideas, and it created a "Generative AI Committee" in 2025. Saito also said Sega has been considering how to engage with indie game developers, hoping to coexist by leveraging its distribution network and marketing expertise.
The South Australian Film Corporation (SAFC) has doubled its Digital Games Fund (DGF) funding to $1 million to support local developers
Ultra Street Fighter IV has received two rollback netcode mods, Faabi's SF4Enhanced and Kabiefox's SF4 Ember, both released in the last few weeks with rollback netcode and private rooms, and both coded with the assistance of Anthropic's Claude. Faabi has since abandoned SF4Enhanced entirely, saying they don't have the time to deliver what the community deserves, and encouraged players to stick with Ember. Both mods appear to be getting a lot of play.