Valve's Deadlock update increased pre-match conversations between new and existing heroes from over 700 to 1500, and added a voice line viewer to the game. The update also brings over 10,000 non-ping voice lines, five new heroes, and new environments.
Former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida told The Verge that Sony and Nintendo should keep the current hardware generation going as long as possible, since players are happy with PS5 and Switch 2 and rising component prices make them reluctant to replace their systems. He said Xbox faces a different situation, as the Xbox Series X/S trails the PS5 and the company is pushing ahead with its next-gen Project Helix console.
A developer who moved from AAA studios to solo projects posted in an overseas community that "the game itself is almost secondary," saying publishers want trailers, screenshots and key art validated and wishlists built before real production begins. Hundreds of replies split between those who call this the standard path to publisher funding over the past 10 years and those who insist the game itself still comes first. One commenter's breakdown of 7,000 wishlists leading to about $10,000 net showed that good data does not guarantee players stay.
Wang Hongxian, product lead at NetEase Leihuo's Fuxi AI Lab, spoke at the Alibaba Cloud AI Game Industry Forum during the 2026 Yunqi Conference, outlining three directions for AI in games: rebuilding the R&D pipeline, refreshing gameplay experiences, and exploring AI-native games. He presented a full-process AI Native solution connecting character, scene, GUI and video toolchains, and showcased the AI Copilot teammate in Naraka: Bladepoint plus long-term-memory AI NPCs and the "film crew mode" in Justice Online.
Tencent is reportedly running a secret beta for an AI game companion product called "Eciyuan," offering digital human characters, voice chat and real-time screen recognition. Players can pick male or female companions with different personas and enable a game companion mode, with the beta free for now. The product also includes a desktop pet feature, and its interface shows an energy system tied to conversation turns or companion time, though launch timing and final pricing remain undisclosed.
Diablo 4 director Brent Gibson responded to fan concerns about the game's lifespan after Diablo 5 was revealed at Blizzcon 2026, saying Diablo 4 will continue to receive support well after Diablo 5's release. He said the Amazon class is coming in the first half of 2027 and that seasons will continue as long as the community keeps showing up, citing ongoing support for Diablo 2 and Diablo 3. Diablo 5 director Joe Shely said Diablo 4 remains fully supported by its team and announced the game is coming to Switch 2.
PC Gamer's FOV 90 column is running a single-elimination tournament to decide the greatest FPS mode, with readers casting the votes. Round 1 pits 16 modes against each other, including Team Deathmatch vs FFA, Battle Royale vs Extraction, and Bomb Defusal vs Hostage. Voting closes Saturday, October 3 at 11:59 PM PDT, with results and Round 2 to follow next week.
Former games journalist Alanah Pearce said on a live stream that GTA 6 likely has a poor chance of sweeping The Game Awards this year because its release timing falls near the show's nomination cutoff. Last year's cutoff was November 21, two days after GTA 6's release date this year, but questions remain over whether jurors could finish the game before voting. If GTA 6 is ineligible this year, it could contend in 2027, when its online mode is heavily rumored to launch.
The author liked Battlefield 2042 and No Man's Sky at launch even as both were widely criticized, enjoying their eerie solitude and odd physics. EA overhauled BF 2042's maps and refocused on 64-player modes, while Hello Games spent a decade turning No Man's Sky into a redemption story. Hello Games founder Sean Murray says he still has a soft spot for the original 2016 version.
Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer acknowledged in a video responding to YouTuber JbowenDaMan that Wardogs' endgame is "a bit sh*t" right now, while saying the studio is fine with something being overpowered for a season and underpowered the next. The 100-player FPS has been in early access for almost three weeks and has a serious XP grind. Bulkhead also plans Tarkov-style skills that improve through repetition and persist across seasons, plus a future "intel" resource for unlocking gun parts and attachments.
Remedy Entertainment's Control Resonant director Mikael Kasurinen explained on the Dropped Frames podcast why the team deliberately avoided "yellow paint" visual signposting. Players navigate an open-world Manhattan by running, flying, and changing gravity, and Kasurinen said the choice was conscious even though it risked making the game feel "impenetrable," so players feel they found their own path.
Unfrozen founder and Nova Assembly head Denis Fedorov lays out a six-part manifesto for indie survival, urging studios to abandon the single-project model and avoid relying on publishers. He recommends keeping a financial runway of at least 12–18 months and using multi-project development, peer collaboration, and early player feedback to reduce risk. The piece also notes that indie games accounted for around $4.5 billion of Steam's revenue in 2025, more than a quarter of the platform's revenue.
Arc Raiders executive producer Aleksander Grøndal told Game Developer at Gamescom that Embark Studios has struggled to balance serving over 16 million players with its own workforce, which he says is "super tired." He said the studio confirmed around four months ago that it would drop monthly updates to ease pressure on the team, and that constant overshooting of capacity plus maintenance work forced content plans to be cut. Grøndal also described taking five months of sick leave from burnout during his 15 years at EA.
In EA Sports FC 27's new open-world mode The Grounds, 100 players share one room and match into minigames ranging from 1v1 to 5v5, with 1v1 and Rush drawing the most players while other activities sit nearly empty. The author argues the core problem is the physical "waiting zone" design, where players must stand in a small area doing almost nothing until enough people join. Drawing on David Maister's 1984 essay "The Psychology of Waiting Lines," the piece suggests letting players queue for several minigames at once or boosting rewards for unpopular activities.
Game Informer staff have picked the 10 games they consider the absolute best on PlayStation 5. The list is unranked, presented in reverse chronological order, and will be updated over time with new releases. Titles bumped from the list remain at the bottom as previous entries.
At BlizzCon 2026, Blizzard announced an open-world shooter set in the StarCraft universe with a release date in 2030. The article recounts how StarCraft: Ghost was shelved in 2006 and confirmed cancelled in 2014, and how the Overwatch-engine project Ares was cancelled in 2019, while also reviewing the state of StarCraft 2, Stormgate and ZeroSpace. The new game is led by creative director Dan Hay, a former Far Cry producer, and is built around a single-player story set 70 years after the events of Legacy of the Void.
A studio owner with 30 years of software development experience, 10 of them using Unity, posted that AI has caught up with Unity development, boosting speed 5x without quality loss, but listed eight downsides including no sense of achievement, a cliff-like revenue drop, and shutting down within a month if AI use stopped. Other developers replied that coding is no longer tiring, yet people are left with the most mentally draining top-level design and architecture decisions all day. Some also questioned the 5x claim, noting that study after study has failed to reproduce results close to that number.
Rock Paper Shotgun's The Sunday Papers rounds up the week's games writing, including a critique of Final Fantasy XVI's shallow handling of Middle Eastern and North African cultural influences and a piece on violence and empowerment in Armored Core 6. It also features AI researcher Michael Cook on how AI papers now just ask an LLM to do something, plus writing on Microsoft layoffs and Bobby Kotick.
Chuapp interviewed Urban Games senior 3D artist Manu Oehler at Tokyo Game Show 2026 about Transport Fever 3. Oehler said the game leans further into tycoon management, with cargo now routed by the player and storable in warehouses, and that map terrain shapes how each map plays; he said playability wins over realism when the two conflict, and that Paradox handles publishing, marketing, translation and testing. The game launches September 29 on PC, Mac, Linux, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, with development spending of about 24 million.
Eurogamer's weekly column rounds up what its editors have been playing this week. Bertie continues Blood of Dawnwalker on PC, Kelsey breeds battle cats in the Switch 2 version of Mewgenics using its touch screen, and Mat digs into Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave. Marie helps a goose cause chaos in Untitled Goose Game on Switch 2, while Connor is hooked on the World of Warcraft: Forever beta, a level 1-20 slice featuring the new Zephras Isle starting zone.
Game Informer interviewed the StarCraft team at BlizzCon 2026 about the open-world shooter and asked its biggest questions about the game's production. Lead developers Dan Hay and AnaLee Haertling shared new details about the project and the themes and plot points Blizzard considers important as it works to ship the game in 2030.
On GDC Side Quest, content marketing manager Beth Elderkin and XDS Spark co-founder Steve Carlisle discuss the nuances of co-development and external development. As game productions grow larger, hiring outside studios to work alongside the main team has become one solution for shipping games without blowing up budgets. Treating co-dev and ex-dev colleagues as glorified contractors can lead to disaster.
Resident Evil Requiem has earned over $500m according to estimates from Alinea Analytics' Rhys Elliott, outpacing every other Resident Evil game and nearing Resident Evil 4 remake's $600m over three years. PS5 is its most popular platform with 4m copies sold, 30% physical, while Zach Cregger's film opened to over $108m worldwide but did not boost game sales as much as Capcom's discounts. During the film's opening, Resident Evil 2 remake saw 48% more players and Resident Evil 3 remake 25% more.
Rock Paper Shotgun's James Archer argues that Microsoft's failure to find a buyer for Ninja Theory leaves the studio facing closure and strips Senua's Summer Game Fest reveal of its only possible upside. The piece notes that the studio was put up for sale about four weeks after the reveal, and roughly eleven weeks later Microsoft executive Matt Booty devoted two sentences to two failed deals and a proposed closure. The author says the show-then-sell approach looks callous whether or not staff were told in advance, and that the reveal ultimately produced nothing.
Rob Fahey argues that Xbox's so-called hundred-day reset has stretched past its original window, with another 268 jobs cut this week on top of roughly 1,600 already gone, no buyer for Ninja Theory, and Arkane's fate still unclear. The piece also notes Obsidian moving under Bethesda and Halo coming under Activision, and says Microsoft has yet to outline a clear vision for what Xbox becomes after the reset.
Touch Music editors recommend six games for the Mid-Autumn holiday, including the Steam detective puzzler The Roottrees are Dead at 76 yuan and Ubisoft's open-world extreme sports game Riders Republic at a 90% discount, now 16.8 yuan. Digital Extremes' new title Soulframe, from the Warframe developer, is still in early testing. The list also includes the free short visual novel The Thief, the Witch, the Toad, and the Mushroom, the 2015 release Life is Strange, and the web-based sudoku puzzler Murdoku.
Dex, a game industry veteran, retired early at 44 this Spring Festival after heart problems. R plans to save 2 million yuan and leave before turning 35, with progress at 68%. Both say the game industry's long hours and frequent project cancellations make real retirement rare.
Chuapp Talk discusses the possibility of turning investigative reporting into video games, citing Predatorgate, which draws on the Greek spyware scandal and puts players in a situation where their phone is under surveillance. It also mentions Gone Gitmo, built in Second Life in 2007, Fort McMoney from 2013 about Canada's oil sands town Fort McMurray, and Rebuilding Haiti from 2014. The author notes that reporting, production costs, timeliness and journalistic ethics remain obstacles.
Gulong Qunxia Lu launched its full-platform open beta on September 23, pitching a "wanderable jianghu" built around open 3D exploration and turn-based strategy combat. The game uses ink-wash visuals to evoke Gu Long's settings and gives original side characters like Qin Shuang their own storylines, with free horseback exploration and random encounters. Special stages such as Jiguan Island and Guiying Cave let combat break out of turn-based mode into real-time resolution.
The EU Commission published a draft of the proposed KIDS Act on September 17, which would impose restrictions on all online games sold in the EU, covering login bonuses, contact between minors and other users, AI companions and content control tools. The draft mentions virtual currency and loot boxes only in its recitals rather than its operative text, and the final text still needs approval from the EU Parliament and member states, with fines of up to 6% of total worldwide annual turnover for infringements.
Alinea Insight estimates WARDOGS sold 2.2 million copies and earned about $70 million on Steam in its first week after entering Early Access on September 10, outpacing ARC Raiders and Helldivers 2 over the same period. It reports roughly 11% wishlist conversion, with the highest player overlap in sandbox tactical games such as Arma and Gray Zone Warfare and only 9.3% with ARC Raiders. The game sits at about 74% positive reviews, with complaints centered on server queues and streamer priority, rising above 86% among players with more than five hours.
Xbox is consolidating its studios and moving the Halo series to Activision with 268 team members, aiming to push out its biggest franchises like Fallout and Halo more quickly. The article argues that chasing an annual Call of Duty-style release pace wears down individual studios' quirks and flattens innovation, as Ubisoft's years of annual Assassin's Creed releases showed before the publisher dropped the yearly cadence.