The author looks back at the many Early Access games in their Steam library, noting that Tale of Immortal: Tianmu Weixin took 8 years to reach 1.0 while Project Zomboid remains in Early Access after 12 years. The piece argues that Early Access turns player communities into near co-creators, and that buying games during Early Access is a way of supporting the industry's future.
Peter Molyneux explains the origin story of Black & White's creatures https://www.pcgamer.com/games/strategy/peter-molyneux-explains-the-origin-story-of-black-and-whites-famous-creatures-it-was-originally-a-monster-it-wasnt-a-cute-creature/
Peter Molyneux revealed in an interview that Black & White's iconic giant animal creatures were originally designed as monsters, not cute creatures. His final god game, Masters of Albion, just received a major update that added mysterious colossal structures, though the game currently lacks Black & White-style titanic creatures.
NieR franchise creator Yoko Taro said he is "done with working" and has considered retiring, as his savings and pension would be enough, but a fear of developing dementia in old age keeps him working. He said he already achieved his life goal with his first directorial project, the 2003 PS2 title Drakengard, and views everything after that as "the remainder of my life." Taro also said competition in the Japanese games industry will spread from younger to older developers, and he is currently writing an as-yet untitled Neon Genesis Evangelion TV series.
Wuthering Waves version 3.7, "Mirror-Locked Illusions, Heart Illuminates the Mortal World," has launched, bringing the Xuanfang Realm chapter to its conclusion. The new map Mengshu Tianluo centers on Mengxuan Creek Mountain, while the Chaoyue Festival presents Xinyuehu and the Moon-Chasing Festival as part of its Eastern cultural narrative. An animated PV titled "Seeking the Heart" was also released, alongside a "Chaoyue Festival Special Performance" co-hosted with Shanghai Yu Garden.
Blade of the Shadow music director Bo Caisheng said in a Gcores interview that the melody for heroine Xiaokui was written 18 years ago when he was in high school for Rain Blood, and that the series' melodic lineage continues in this game. He described his role this time as more like a "music director," using level footage to feel the player's flow before doing sound design, and blending rock, electronic, metal and Chinese folk instruments. The game launches on October 29, 2026.
Smile 2 star Kyle Gallner says he wants to play V in Paramount's live-action Cyberpunk 2077 movie. Hours after Paramount announced the project on October 8, Gallner posted a photo of himself with a close-shaved haircut similar to V's and captioned it "Take me to night city." CDPR co-CEO Michał Nowakowski said more details will be shared at the appropriate time.
Street Fighter 6 producer Shuhei Matsumoto revealed that during the Street Fighter V era, he and director Takayuki Nakayama realized the Street Fighter IP would likely die in 10 years if they didn't act. With SFV's player base roughly 35 to 45 years old, they decided to act as if the current generation didn't know the franchise, adding the Modern control scheme and other approachable features. As of summer 2026, Street Fighter 6 has sold more than seven million lifetime units.
A new GTA 6 screenshot released alongside Rockstar's radio station news has players questioning whether it's actual in-game footage. Digital Foundry's Oliver Mackenzie suggested it may have been captured on a PS5 Pro devkit using a debug menu, noting visual flaws like dithered reflections and missing pedestrian shadows. Rockstar has historically used real in-engine footage for its marketing.
Grand Theft Auto VI has a new mechanic called Criminal Profiles. The system tracks what kind of criminal you're playing as, and could have some interesting ramifications.
A PC Gamer editor manually sorted through the 1,213 Steam games carrying the Vampires tag and found the number and share of vampire releases has been trending upward for years: only four launched in 2016, while 65 have released so far in 2026. The highest number of vampire launches in a single quarter rose from six in 2020 to 24 in 2026, and first appearances in SteamDB's archive grew from nine in 2016 to 99 last year. Steam's overall releases also climbed from 9,634 in 2020 to 21,263 in 2025, but the percentage of vampire games still trended up.
Vampire games on Steam are a recession indicator and I have the charts to prove it https://www.pcgamer.com/games/vampire-games-on-steam-are-a-recession-indicator-and-i-have-the-charts-to-prove-it/
Microsoft has announced Xbox XP, a new division tasked with turning its intellectual properties into movies, TV shows, and theme park attractions. IGN argues its first order of business should be a big-budget Halo movie, rather than another TV adaptation like the two-season Paramount Plus show. The piece notes that Activision is now responsible for developing the next mainline Halo game.
BC.Game CEO: "Our Asian players are actually the ones with longest contracts, so we are here to stay"
The latest edition of the DF Direct Q+A show is live, tackling all the questions we had about QSSR upscaling on the standard PS5 - and the options open to Microsoft in delivering similar technology: https://youtu.be/UsFBZjdrh8Q
Amazon's game streaming platform Luna is offering Star Wars: Galactic Racer for free to any Amazon Prime subscriber, yet almost no one has heard of the service. On this week's Point It Out!, Patches and Simone discuss whether adding big-name games like Star Wars and Hogwarts Legacy can make Luna take off, or whether it is headed for the bargain bin like Amazon's previous gaming attempts.
When GTA IV and V were coming out, the worry was that Fox News and its ilk would use it to create a culture war about violence. For GTA VI, dog-breath, incel losers are going to create a culture war about women because they are the new panicky Joe Liebermans and Tipper Gores.
Roughly 35 percent of Marvel's Wolverine sales were disc versions, according to estimates from Ampere Analysis shared with The Game Business. The same data put The Blood of Dawnwalker at about 36 percent physical and Silent Hill Townfall at around 45 percent, with physical sales particularly strong in parts of Europe. NYU professor Joost van Dreunen said people still have a need to collect, keeping physical sales relevant to the consumer market.
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has created a new XP division, overseen by former Mojang Studios president Kayleen Walters, covering the "four investment areas" of pictures, products, places, and partnerships. The announcement revealed no new film or TV investments or game adaptations, instead highlighting projects like the Call of Duty movie and Fallout: Season 3 that were already in the works. Xbox chief strategy officer Matthew Ball acknowledged on Xbox Wire that these capabilities have existed across various teams at Xbox for years.
IGN traces how MMORPGs pioneered live-service gaming before losing that crown to modern live-service titles. Roblox's 123 million daily players now dwarf the combined historical peaks of World of Warcraft, RuneScape, EverQuest and their peers, while Aion 2 launched this week and landed on Steam's Most Played list, with Guild Wars 3 on the horizon. The piece includes interviews with Ultima Online creator Starr Long and EverQuest co-creator Bill Trost.
IGN traces the history of live-service games, noting the battle royale market was valued at $11.2 billion last year and is expected to reach nearly $30 billion by 2035. Norwegian YouTuber Dennis Vaeride is credited with launching the first Minecraft Survival Games server in April 2012, while Brendan Greene's shrinking-circle concept led to PUBG's Steam Early Access launch in March 2017 and Fortnite's free-to-play battle royale mode later that year. Ex-BioWare producer Mark Darrah says you have to believe you can dethrone one of the top two players in the genre, or you shouldn't be doing it.
15 of the 19 major live-service games launched in 2025 had lost over 80% of their initial playerbase by the end of January this year. PlayStation has halted or cancelled over a dozen live-service games in the last decade, and Naughty Dog cancelled The Last of Us Online. Veteran developers say enough cancellations and shutdowns have created a trust issue among players.
Veteran developer Glen Schofield has retired from the games industry, with his last project being The Callisto Protocol at Krafton's Striking Distance Studios in 2022. He says Krafton's decision to launch the game in December 2022, months before the March 2023 date he had been promised, forced the team to ship a pared-down version amid COVID disruption. Schofield added that he finished all the DLC and put out 86 patches, while Krafton was not interested in a pitch for a second Callisto Protocol game.
Kotaku's new Kingdom Hearts book club, Guiding Key, will go through every game in Square Enix's Disney/Final Fantasy crossover series until Kingdom Hearts IV launches in late 2027. Square released the Kingdom Hearts I~III Collection on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Switch 2 on October 8. In the first entry, the author recounts his history with the series and hopes to pinpoint when its story began to grow so complicated.
An IGN reporter clarified that a shower scene featuring naked protagonist Jason Duval in GTA 6 did not include full-frontal nudity due to carefully positioned camera angles. The leaked European PEGI rating had already confirmed nudity, intercourse scenes and sexual fetishes in the game, but stopped short of confirming full-frontal nudity. Whether Jason has a fully rendered penis remains unknown.
Fuse Games CEO Matt Webster and creative director Kieran Crimmin said Star Wars: Galactic Racer was prototyped using a board game covered in Post-It notes, which the team used to map out upgrades and meta progression systems. Crimmin said the team picks whichever prototyping tool validates the intended emotion and game-feel fastest, then gets it into players' hands. Eurogamer previously gave the racing game five stars.
Mental health charity Safe In Our World has launched Four Billion Players, a campaign to raise awareness of mental health support for gamers
"A creative idea can save more money than AI can right now" – Glen Schofield on his retirement, Callisto Protocol's development, and the state of AAA https://bit.ly/47HMj0U
Knife kills are rare and risky, but that doesn't stop some players from going for them anyway 🗡️👀
Reverse: 1999 held its first concert, "Night of Wandering Voices," at Shanghai Indoor Stadium. The two-hour show spanned five chapters and 38 tracks, starting with music from the game's 1.0 version. It featured live performances of songs including "The Door," "Goodbye, Lyashki," "Green Orange," and "1987 Cosmic Suite."
"What's the point of this if you're not feeling something?"
Chuapp Talk explores why players grow attached to fictional characters. A veteran anime fan explains, using Patchouli from Touhou Project as an example, that time invested and finding like-minded fans deepen affection, and that such love stems from companionship and reliance rather than spending money. The piece also cites attachment theory and the concept of "parasocial interaction" coined in 1956.
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.
Starting from the Golden Tree in Elden Ring, the author places it alongside the No. 1 bronze divine tree at Sanxingdui and the fusang and jianmu records in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, discussing how a tree links a scattered world into one whole. The Golden Tree both grants blessings and connects to the dead underground, while Deathroot spreads along its roots until players burn it; the bronze tree's restoration records note its trunk broke into three sections and its branches into eighteen.
Sony and Hideo Kojima have abandoned their collaboration on the new game Physint, stirring discussion in the industry and raising more doubts about the PlayStation brand, now over 30 years old. The podcast Second Read, hosted by event planner Blindlight and indie developer Chensheng, invited guest Jacknight to discuss PlayStation's current crisis.
The 405 Youju podcast invited Shao Yun of Magic Find Ventures, Wen Tian of Monolith, and Xue Yao of Qiming Venture Partners to review AI interactive entertainment in Q3 2026. They discussed models gaining tool-calling and long-horizon task abilities, AI-generated 3D assets, the high premium of AI companions, and why generative game platforms still struggle with retention and distribution.
Tokyo Game Show 2026 expanded to five days for its 30th anniversary, running September 17 to 21, but organizers canceled the September 21 on-site events as Typhoon No. 25 approached, leaving the show at four days with 257,642 attendees. SEGA/ATLUS brought 16 games and 27 stage events, CAPCOM held the world's first on-site demo of Monster Hunter Wilds: Iceborne-style expansion content, and SQUARE ENIX opened public demos of Final Fantasy VII REVELATION.
With Grand Theft Auto 6 poised to rule the world, I emailed Jack Thompson and it did not go well
With Grand Theft Auto 6 nearing console release, the ESRB has rated it M while PEGI rated it 18+. PC Gamer reached out to former attorney Jack Thompson, who expressed displeasure over Florida's GTA 6 promotional partnerships and accused the journalist of dishonesty. The piece traces how GTA went from the Hot Coffee scandal to mainstream entertainment.
Critics attacking Gears of War: E-Day over its inclusion of women are ignoring that the series has featured female characters since the very first game on Xbox 360. Fans on the Gears of War subreddit point to Anya Stroud, Queen Myrrah, Bernie, Sam, and Sofia Hendrick as examples spanning nearly 20 years of the franchise.