Welcome back to your monthly report of game news, where I do my best to compile everything into one convenient ad-free place, so you don’t have to worry about the pesky cracks that info can fall through at other publications.
Thanks and credit for the banner image as always goes to the Avocado’s one and only Space Robot!
November 4th: Developer ZDT Studio and publisher Konami released the second trailer for Darwin’s Paradox, providing a fuller showcase of the gameplay for this puzzle platformer starring an octopus, announcing that the game’s launch is delayed from 2025 to 2026, and announcing that the Switch 1 version has been discontinued in favor of a native Switch 2 port, making the game fully current-gen exclusive.
Nintendo earnings update: With the first full quarterly fiscal results for the Switch 2 generation, Nintendo announced that it had sold 10.36 million Switch 2 consoles after four months on the market/by the end of September 2025. Accordingly, Nintendo updated its previously conservative forecasts for the entire year, now anticipating 19 million Switch 2 consoles sold and 48 million Switch 2 games sold by the end of March 2026, plus 125 million Switch 1 and cross-gen games sold, along with a decrease to expectations for Switch 1 hardware sold. Nintendo confirmed that hardware manufacturing has been further expanded to meet the serious demand so far. Profit and other more general qualities of the fiscal year are also expected to proportionally improve. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Super Mario Party Jamboree were also highlighted as already being million sellers with 6 months of fiscal year left, the latter including its Switch 2 Edition.
Nintendo also announced that Donkey Kong Bananza has sold 3.5 million copies in its opening quarter while Mario Kart World has sold over 9.5 million copies in four months, setting the latter as the definitive title of the console so far and setting both up well for future evergreen status throughout the new console generation. As a whole, over 20.6 million units of Switch 2 software have been sold so far, Almost 2 million Switch 1 consoles and over 61 million Switch games were sold this past quarter, showing a small but stable presence for the last gen console and a very strong enthusiasm for getting Switch 1 games to play on the Switch 2, including upgrades.
During the Q&A, Nintendo suggested to the relief of all that the Switch 2 is not currently vulnerable to needing a price increase in the near future, it is already profitable enough for the publisher at current conditions and it would require significantly more change or upheaval to market conditions on top of what’s already occurred for that to change. Much has changed and been seriously harmed after the full implementation of Trump tariffs, but they appear to be settling down with less risk for more major abrupt shifts that could affect this issue.
During the presentation Nintendo also had some notable general comments, such as suggesting that their movie adaptations are now positioned for consistent annual releases, and that Switch 2 buyers so far have not been only early adopters, but customers from throughout the Switch 1 lifecycle and even some who never bought a Switch 1. Nintendo’s language about acquisitions had escalated from previous years, emphasizing it as a larger part of their strategy while underlining that it’s still about strengthening their development pipeline and keeping their preexisting external support secure and not about claiming preexisting IP or entire publishers like it was for Microsoft. This foreshadowed the announcement on November 27th that Nintendo has acquired Bandai Namco’s small Singapore-based subsidiary studio focused on support development, which has worked with Nintendo many, many times over its 12 years of existence as one of two BN divisions dedicated to Nintendo projects, along with the much larger team operating under Masahiro Sakurai for Smash Bros and Air Riders.
The developer will become Nintendo Studios Singapore after Nintendo receives shareholder approval and then moves forward with acquiring 80% of the studio’s public shares on April 1st 2026 to gain majority ownership, followed by buying the remaining shares from Bandai Namco in the subsequent near future. The soon-to-be Nintendo Studios Singapore has previously worked on New Pokémon Snap, Splatoon 3, and Mario Sports Superstars, and were also one of multiple teams who worked on two different notable canceled games early in the Switch’s life: the original pre-Retro version of Metroid Prime 4, and Ridge Racer 8. Outside of Nintendo, they most recently did support on Death Stranding 2 and were the lead developer on the recently launched 3D platformer Hirogami. Nintendo emphasized Splatoon franchise support and art asset production in its official press release about the purchase. It’s understood that Bandai Namco had targeted this studio for layoffs and closure before negotiating with Nintendo to sell it off instead.
November 5th: NetEase continued its nasty and arbitrary downsizing by shutting down the Montreal-based subsidiary developer Bad Brain Game Studio only two years after opening it. The people behind the now defunct studio are shopping around their game project, codenamed The Midnight Riders. And speaking of Chinese gaming giants making its Canadian employees suffer: Tencent announced that it has closed the Canadian office for its subsidiary support developer Atomhawk, which will remain active through its UK offices.
IGN published an in depth report by Tim Brinkhoff discussing the behind the scenes story of Dante’s Purgatorio, the canceled sequel to Visceral Games’ God of War clone Dante’s Inferno, a game better than you probably think it is.
Obsidian successfully relisted all of their games affected by the Unity security vulnerability, i.e. the Pillars of Eternity series and Pentiment, and the special editions/artbooks of Avowed, and Grounded 2.
November 6th: As part of a much larger firestorm of events, Rockstar and Take-Two officially delayed the launch of Grand Theft Auto 6 again, pushing it from May 2026 to November 19th 2026, and it is widely believed it will be delayed again to 2027 as the chaos caused by leadership’s mismanagement and abuse will further affect development.
Let’s start where we left off last time with Rockstar: at the end of October, 34 employees were laid off in an obvious act of targeted action against union organizers, which we now have new details on thanks to PeopleMakeGames as well as anonymous verified public sources. Communications were neglected and UK law on the right of union rep presence was violated during the firings. They are trying to demoralize workers into complacency but they are not succeeding.
Rockstar had recently introduced new restrictions on employee Discord and Slack communications, removing all non-work topics and emojis while intentionally neglecting to communicate to employees about the new rules: the ‘leak’ that the union organizers were punished for was simply sharing the emails announcing these new rules to workers out of office at the moment who couldn’t see the emails themselves. That’s it. The union actually maintains very strict rules to not discuss and risk leaking GTA6 info in their communication channels, they discuss working conditions and personal matters exclusively, and it’s clear that removing the latter is designed to remove the former as well.
The prospective internal union and their partner the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain moved forward with legal action against Rockstar on November 12th, formally accusing the company of union-busting and blacklisting. They launched this legal battle alongside mass protests both at the office and in an open letter by 220 workers demanding their fired colleagues be reinstated immediately, which have in turn attracted the attention of Parliament.
Square Enix announced new mass layoffs and general downsizing targeting its Western/American and European offices, firing hundreds of people while orienting the publisher back towards its native Japan and its core franchises instead of the unwieldy but diverse software slate that gave us Powerwash Simulator and Life is Strange.
Bryant Francis for GameDeveloper.com and Alyssa Mercante for The Guardian published some serious exposés on how the Game Awards has treated members of its Future Class program since its seeming end after 2023. The alumni were invited to one more event in 2024 but since haven’t received any communication other than confirmations of no new events or honorees for this year, their page has been completely removed from the website, and their attempts to reach out to Keighley or Future Class organizer Emily Weir have been ignored. They are very disappointed by this complete and abrupt no contact and feel as marginalized artists that it demonstrates how performative the program ultimately was. It clearly fits into the larger pattern of corporate disengagement or antagonism towards even the slightest progressive action in the wake of the current administration. The Future Class members also spoke out that their voices were ignored even while the program was active, as in 2023 when they urged Keighley to comment on the genocidal warfare in Gaza and call for a ceasefire.
David Ellison’s Skydance, the new owners of Paramount who have fired thousands of people and appointed one of the worst people on earth to run CBS News, have in a lower stakes moment, announced another delay for the Amy Hennig-written game Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra. The game was originally scheduled to launch this holiday and has yet to see its gameplay reveal, it was pushed to early 2026 recently, and has now been outright indefinitely delayed. I don’t think this game is doomed quite yet, I’m sure this release window was never realistic and was influenced by Skydance’s larger corporate chest-puffing.
The Pokémon Company and Game Freak had their first of multiple announcements this month by dating the Legends Z-A paid expansion Mega Dimension: the DLC will launch on December 10th 2025 and take place in Hyperspace Lumiose.
Sega announced that the Switch 2 port of Sonic Racing Crossworlds will release on December 4th 2025, detailing its performance, pricing, and more. It will cost the full current gen $70 on its own, be $10 as a digital upgrade to Switch 1 port owners, and that upgrade will be only $5 for its first week. That upgrade also allows full cross-save/progress support. The physical Switch 2 edition will come in early 2026 as a proper game card. On Switch 2, the game runs at 1440p60fps and 1080p60fps handheld.
Mintrocket and Nexon shadowdropped the Dave the Diver Switch 2 edition with 4K60 support as a free upgrade to existing owners.
November 7th: After the official announcement for the Halo Remake and more projects soon to come, Microsoft and Halo Studios also confirmed that content updates were ending for Halo Infinite after the last one arrives on November 18th.
November 10th: Indie developer Stormcloud Games, the makers of Brut@l, revealed their new game and 3D action platformer Junkster, coming to PC, Switch 2, PS5, and Xbox Series S|X in the future.
Sony’s latest financial results officially announced that Ghost of Yotei has sold over 3 million copies already and the PS5 has surpassed 84 million consoles sold.
EA announced that MySims: Cozy Bundle will release for mobile, PS5 and Xbox Series S|X on November 18th after previously releasing the remastered collection for Switch and PC. Earlier this year, after leaking Cozy Bundle the same way, EA accidentally leaked unannounced additional MySims releases by listing the titles MySims Action Bundle (likely including 2009’s MySims Agents and 2010’s MySims SkyHeroes) and MySims Beacon Bay. There is no evidence of the latter connecting to a preexisting game other than its title being a reference to Sims 3 for DS.
A major Switch and Switch 2 operating system update arrived, with more details here.
November 11th: In the wake of the recent layoffs at Heart Machine and the launch of their new Metroidvania Possessor(s), the game’s project lead Myriame Lachappelle published a lovely article celebrating the game and every member of its development team, both those still at the studio and those who departed. Highlighting this was a priority for me.
PlayStation State of Play Japan: Sony and PlayStation studios premiered a new showcase focused on its Japanese and Asian partners and audience, something that we now know for a fact couldn’t have happened under previous leadership as seen in the report that Jim Ryan’s neglect of the region was conscious and intentional and that new CEO Hideaki Nishino has actively introduced a strategy to court the Japanese audience and gain back the massive ground lost to Nintendo with how the Switch massively outperformed PS4 and PS5 in the country.
The presentation opened with a new gameplay trailer for Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined, followed by trailers for indies Inkonbini by Beep Japan and my hotly anticipated Coffee Talk Tokyo by Toge Productions. Inkonbini: One Store, Many Stories is a story-driven sim game about managing a 1990s Japanese convenience store, and it’s coming to PC, Switch, PS5, and Xbox Series S|X in April 2026. Coffee Talk Tokyo takes its mysterious player character to a new setting and characters, and is now officially launching on March 5th 2026 for PC, Switch, PS5, and Xbox Series S|X. Horror games BrokenLore: Unfollow and BrokenLore: Ascend were shown with January and Summer 2026 release dates respectively. Koei Tecmo announced that Fatal Frame 2 Remake will launch on March 12th 2026, followed by a full reveal for its Dynasty Warriors Origins story DLC. Sony itself announced that Gran Turismo 7 will receive a new “hardcore” oriented paid DLC releasing on December 4th. Genki announced that the previous PC-exclusive Tokyo Xtreme Racer 2025, the series’ first entry in 20 years, will release for PS5 on February 26th 2026.
Developer Handsum and publisher Playism announced that their recently released rewinding puzzle platformer MotionRec will be releasing for PS5 and Switch in Spring 2026. Chinese action RPG Wandering Sword is coming to PS5 on May 28th 2026. Somnium Files spinoff No Sleep for Kaname Date was announced to be coming to PS4, PS5, and Xbox Series S|X on February 26th 2026 after hitting cross-gen Switches and PC this summer. Bandai Namco had a handful of announcements, DLCs for the new Katamari and Digimon Story games, Super Robot Wars Y, and more. Witchy indie Metroidvania Never Grave: The Witch and the Curse was announced to be releasing for PS4/PS5 on March 5th 2026, published by the Palworld guys. Roguelike Blazblue spinoff BlazBlue Entropy Effect X will release February 12th 2026. ArcSys Works had a new trailer for Damon and Baby, announcing an early 2026 release window, and a new closed beta test announced for Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls.
Disgaea creators NIS showcased their brand new action RPG Kyouran Makaism, which is coming to PS5 and Switch/Switch 2 on January 29th 2026 in Japan. Saroasis Studios announced that their multiplayer tactical shooter Fate Trigger is coming to PC and PS5 in early 2026. Square had a final story trailer for Octopath Traveler 0 ahead of its recent launch. FromSoft and Bandai Namco revealed the first major DLC for Elden Ring Nightreign: The Forsaken Hollows paid expansion launched on December 4th and features brand new classes and bosses among others. Lastly, Sony had two hardware announcements, a PS5 friendly monitor and a cheaper Japan-only/region-locked digital-only PS5 console, which is explicitly a response to the Japan-only Switch 2 released earlier this year. While this PS5 model has already boosted sales in the country, it still costs more than the PS5 did in 2020, let alone the competing Japan-only Switch 2.
November 12th: After months of rumors and leaks, Valve officially made multiple new major hardware announcements in one fell swoop, most notably the Steam Machine, a small device building on the Steam Deck’s success as a Steam integrated gaming PC with console-like form factor and user experience. The Steam Machine surpasses its sister device as a mid-range experience, its tech specs are in the same ballpark as the Xbox Series S and AMD 7600, the latter of which is where its actual hardware comes from. The Steam Machine is scheduled to launch in early 2026 in all of the Deck’s current regions and will arrive alongside a refined new controller and a new VR headset called the Steam Frame. The Frame is more streamlined than its predecessor the Valve Index, most notably by being completely wireless.
The judge ruling on the court case between Google and Epic Games has delayed his final rulings in response to the new settlement proposed jointly by the megacorps. Judge James Donato is skeptical that the settlement goes far enough in addressing Google’s problematic behavior and he is suspicious of the motivations behind the two companies suddenly cooperating and settling.
Sega announced that it will be raising all Japanese employees’ salaries for the second time in three years, improving both base salary and starting salary in response to economic conditions.
Developer Evil Empire and publisher Ubisoft announced that The Rogue Prince of Persia will digitally launch on Switch and Switch 2 on December 16th 2025, and physically launch for Switch, Switch 2, and PS5 on April 10th 2026.
Ex-Telltale team AdHoc Studio confirmed its narrative adventure game Dispatch to be a financial success after its October launch and strong reception, selling over a million copies and being on track to meet its lifetime sales target in a matter of months.
Analogue 3D preorders and review units finally started to ship, initiating its launch after multiple delays and an initial 2023 announcement. The Nintendo 64-4K device will see its first restock soon, albeit at an increased price due to tariffs affecting the manufacturing and exporting of additional units.
November 13th: Tomb Raider makers and Embracer Group subsidiary Crystal Dynamics announced their third round of layoffs this year, firing about 30 people.
Many years after it was first seriously rumored/leaked, Guild Wars’ NCSoft and Sony finally officially revealed Horizon: Steel Frontiers, an MMORPG spinoff set in the American Southwest and coming to PC and mobile but not PS5 in the future. The game is focused on Monster Hunter style raid boss fights and features an ugly, plasticky, sex doll ass character creator instead of Aloy, pandering to the idiots who hate that she looks like a real woman.
Independent of all the awful rigmarole I discussed above, Rockstar announced the latest rerelease of 2010’s Red Dead Redemption after its previous Switch/PS4/PC ports, instead of the widely anticipated current gen update for its 2018 prequel. On December 2nd 2025, after previously only playing via backwards compatibility, the game will natively release for Switch 2, PS5, and Xbox Series S|X, as well as mobile devices and Netflix; this remaster supports 4K60/1440p60 on current gen consoles, mouse controls on Switch 2, and is available as a free upgrade patch for existing Switch owners.
November 14th: The launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 has turned out to be nowhere near the triumph of last year’s Black Ops 6: the game is another rushed, full price glorified DLC/half-step sequel akin to 2023’s Modern Warfare III, proving that the annualized release cycle is continuing to backfire, and it has suffered multiple controversies to its reception beyond this. The campaign is widely derided and has fully unpausable and non-checkpointed single player due to being always online. In fact it’s so unpopular that the decision to make a major game mode only unlocked by completing the campaign had to be reversed. The game is also full of genAI art that ABK showed no transparency over. We don’t have a lot of hard data yet, but all of this has seemingly resulted in the game not only suffering a huge sales drop from BO6 but actually becoming the franchise’s new biggest overall financial lowpoint/relative underperformance yet, below both previous biggest losers, the aforementioned MWIII and 2021’s Vanguard, and becoming the first Call of Duty since 2006 to be outsold by a competitor, in this case Battlefield 6.
Custom fan-operated servers emerged to make the infamous delisted live service Concord publicly playable again, only for Sony to immediately issue copyright takedowns for all videos of the new gameplay and pressure those behind the project to stop issuing play invites. So much of mass media ownership right now amounts to dragons sitting on their treasure hoards for nobody to touch.
November 16th: Yoko Taro admitted that his slow output since the success of Nier Automata hasn’t only been because he needed rest after the demands of the scale of that project, it’s also been that some projects were never able to be announced because they got canceled by their partners/publishers first. “I often get told stuff like ‘Why aren’t you making a new sequel to NieR?’ or ‘Yoko Taro isn’t doing anything,’ but that’s because recently, a lot of projects I was involved in got discontinued midway through development.” “I’ve actually been working on some stuff, it’s just that it never ended up seeing the light of day. I got paid for it, so I personally have no issues with that, but people seem to think that I haven’t been doing anything just because none of the work I’ve done is being released.” This news is likely related to established partners Square and Platinum both downsizing operations in recent years. Taro says he’d rather cancel a game than release something disappointing.
November 17th: Rebecca Heineman passed at the age of 62 in a massive loss for the games industry as a whole, for trans women in gaming, and for us all. Rebecca was diagnosed with cancer in October and saw her health go downhill very fast. Rebecca Heineman was a champion of both game development and competitive gaming, becoming the first recognized game tournament winner in 1980 before cofounding Interplay in 1983, where she helped create The Bard’s Tale and Wasteland before working on ports of Wolfenstein 3D, Baldur’s Gate, and many more. I had previously mentioned her while covering the passing of her equally iconic spouse Jennell Jaquays last year and earlier this year when she revealed that she had preserved the source code for Fallout and Fallout 2. She had warned of her imminent passing shortly before it occurred and was able to read loving eulogies while still alive.
The legal battle between Krafton and Subnautica’s creators developed as the trial began and new information was revealed in filings at the trial’s start, where the Unknown Worlds trio accused Krafton of forming a secret task force which conspired to get the creators to compromise on the contracted payout before going with the ultimate plan B of excising them and taking over Unknown Worlds. The trial has also revealed that Krafton’s CEO Changham Kim used ChatGPT for advice on how to avoid the contractual payout, which he denied in court before backtracking and admitting to it.
After years of tumult surrounding the development and launch of Cities Skylines 2, the series developer Colossal Order and publisher Paradox Interactive announced that they are ending their partnership of 15 years and the studio’s tenure on the series. Colossal Order will complete their production duties on Cities Skylines 2 by the end of this year, with Paradox subsidiary/fellow Finnish developer Iceflake Studios taking over at the start of 2026.
After several months of negotiations, Riot Games has officially sold its recently canceled survival RPG Hytale back to original cocreator Simon Collins-Laflamme, who is restarting development as a fully independent studio with more than 30 original team members already in place and more coming soon. The game suffered major scope creep under Riot and is now “returning to its original vision.” There is a very long road ahead for its development, but funding is secured for the foreseeable future and the game’s Early Access lifecycle will begin soon on January 13th 2026.
The 2025 Game Awards nominations were announced ahead of a December 11th premiere I’ll cover next time. As expected, Clair Obscur Expedition 33 has the biggest presence in the slate of nominees, actually breaking the record for the most nominated game in the show’s history by getting 12 nominations after The Last of Us Part 2 and God of War Ragnarok each got 11. It takes up three spots in Best Performance, spots in both Best Indie and Best Debut Indie, and of course GOTY among others. The other GOTY nominees are Death Stranding 2, DK Bananza, Silksong, Hades 2, and Kingdom Come Deliverance 2.
November 18th: A new problem has emerged for Japanese game development after the country’s leading company for licensing fonts drastically raised its prices and set a user cap which would likely exclude game publishers with large employee counts.
Aspyr and Embracer Group surprise shadowdropped Tomb Raider Definitive Edition, the 2013 debut of Crystal Dynamics’ reboot series, onto both Switch 1 and Switch 2. The port features gyro on both Switches, as well as mouse controls and 60fps on Switch 2.
November 19th: Avalanche Studios Group announced yet more layoffs occurring after the cancelation of Xbox project Contraband, firing 31 developers and finishing the closure of the Avalanche Liverpool office they worked at.
After being featured in the September Nintendo Direct, co op puzzle shooter Popucom was announced to be releasing for Switch on December 4th with a PS5 port forthcoming.
November 20th: Genshin Impact’s Mihoyo announced another new game alongside life sim Petit Planet: Varsapura is an open world Unreal 5 action game in early development.
Gearbox released the first DLC for Borderlands 4 two months after launch, but it did not arrive exactly as it was originally pitched: due to production resources being reallocated to addressing the game’s technical issues, the DLC is smaller in scope than initially planned and to compensate is now free to all players instead of being locked behind the premium deluxe edition. This was already a minor DLC compared to the major expansions coming in the future.
Xbox Partner Preview Showcase: The full contents of the presentation are already linked here, but I will discuss some news highlights: Dave the Diver was shadowdropped on Xbox One/Series S|X while the In the Jungle paid expansion had its full gameplay reveal and its release window updated to Early 2026. Cococumber revealed their RPG sequel Echo Generation 2 coming to PC and Xbox Series S|X in 2026. The current gen exclusive sequel to 2021’s Raji: An Ancient Epic was officially revealed as Raji: Kaliyuga. Reanimal‘s release date was officially announced as February 13th 2026. The developers of current-gen launch title Godfall revealed their new game Armatus. Most notably, after recently announcing Warhammer Survivors, Vampire Survivors creators Poncle revealed another brand new game, Vampire Crawlers. This is a radically different spinoff, a first person deckbuilding dungeon crawler coming in 2026 to PC, PS5, Switch 2, and Xbox Series S|X/Game Pass Ultimate.
One of the games featured above, Zoopunk by developer TiGames, the sequel to FIST Rise of Shadowtorch, has since been confirmed to feature in-game genAI tools for user generated content and is likely to have done AI prototyping/placeholdering based on other evidence.
November 21st: Konami and Bloober Team very quietly, unceremoniously shadowdropped Silent Hill 2 Remake onto Xbox Series S|X consoles 13 months after its initial PC/PS5 launch and shortly after its release leaked, applying a launch discount and featuring a bundle of 2 Remake and Silent Hill f. It wasn’t even in the partner showcase! Its hard to imagine this release was supposed to have such little fanfare, or that the Switch 2 port I have been personally informed of will eventually be marketed in the same way.
Ubisoft held its latest earnings report on November 21st after abruptly delaying it for more than a week and halting its stock trading in the meantime. Those actions prompted a lot of panic and speculation since they’re often done in anticipation of a major development or acquisition, but mercifully in this case Ubisoft didn’t actually announce one, these delays were the result of a mere accounting error that needed time to fix. As such, there’s no major news out of the meeting, just reconfirmation that the success of Assassins’ Creed has boosted again since the launch of AC Shadows, and that the publisher still has two more games to launch this fiscal year, as Prince of Persia Sands of Time Remake and Assassins Creed Black Flag Remake are both targeting a Q1 2026 launch.
Both mysterious projects saw new leaks right after the announcement, with 2024 gameplay footage from Sands of Time Remake briefly going public, and the title of the Black Flag Remake (Blag Flag Resynced) being accidentally left inside datamined code from the latest update to AC Shadows. Ubisoft also apologized for leaving a placeholder genAI image in RTS Anno 117: Pax Romana. Ubisoft also also abruptly canceled a previously announced second paid expansion for SC Shadows as part of the publisher’s larger downscaling of production.
November 24th: Long-promised fan remake Timepslitters Rewind has officially released (in early access) after ten years.
November 25th: Arthouse indie horror game Horses by Italian developer Santa Ragione Game Studio has become a public lightning rod ever since Steam abruptly banned the game shortly ahead of its December 2nd launch. The game was banned by the Epic Game Store as well soon after, and was almost banned by the Humble Store, being briefly delisted in a panic response to the other bans before the game was reviewed again, approved again, and relisted. The game’s ultimately only available on GOG, Itch.io, and Humble, but it is selling well on at least the first two platforms in the meantime, providing some reassurance after Pietro Righa Riva commented that losing the game’s biggest platforms put the studio at direct risk of shutdown since they were already financially vulnerable and it will be difficult to sell enough copies on the smaller storefronts. Valve gave no effective communication around its treatment of the game and the ban is understood to be in response to a scene that was already removed before the game released anyway.
While Horses and Santa Ragione haven’t been the victim of a direct reactionary activist campaign like with the itch.io incident, this is still clearly the byproduct of a larger increasingly reactionary and restrictive climate that is inherently corrosive and hostile to art as a whole, and the classification of games separately from any other artforms where the content of Horses simply doesn’t stand out, as stated in Chris Person’s definitive Aftermath piece about the game. There is also no way to access the game without seeing extensive, clear content warnings on its webpages and inside the game, and its most provocative content is already censored, it itself is simply a complete non-issue to any rational adult. The Human Centipede is a meme and I saw clips from Un Chien Andalou in fucking The Office recently, games deserve that same level of normalization.
Goodbye Volcano High developer KO_OP revealed their next game Young Suns, a story driven sci fi co op life sim playable in early access right now on Xbox One/Xbox Series S|X/Game Pass Ultimate. It’s confirmed to be coming to more platforms in the future with a Steam page already up. Young Suns is set on Jupiter and explores the work of building post-capitalist society.
After leaking earlier this year, a Far Cry TV series starring It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Rob Mac, developed by both Rob Mac and Noah Hawley, has been officially announced as a FX/Hulu production with a season 1 order in place. The TV show is planned as an anthology series where each season features a different setting and characters, akin to the games moving from South America to Africa to China to Montana.
That newspaper that helped persecute my community and endanger this country has also reported that the Saudi Crown Public Investment Fund is currently running out of cash for more actions due to taking larges on several floundering existing projects like a ski resort, a coffee chain, and an EV startup that has yet to launch a product.
November 26th: Embracer Group announced yet another subsidiary divestment, allowing two MMO-focused, linked-together companies, Arc Games and Cryptic Studios, to essentially go independent and become self-owned by selling them to their own management via the incorporated Project Golden Arc entity. Cryptic Studios is the developer of major MMORPGs like Star Trek Online, City of Heroes and Neverwinter, while Arc Games is the publisher of those same MMOs, the Remnant soulslike shooter duology, and most recently Fellowship. Embracer Group retains ownership and publishing rights for both the Remnant series and Fellowship.
After previous layoffs and a major project cancelation at the start of this year, and being sold by Tencent to private equity in September, Brink/Gears Tactics developer Splash Damage sent out a dire warning from its studio in Bromley, England: the entire studio staff will be under consultation for potential firings in advance of final decisions, in accordance with UK law and as also seen with Avalanche and Coatsink in this same report. The studio provided lots of multiplayer shooter support development to Xbox in the 2010s which escalated into a full project launch with Gears Tactics in 2020, but has been unable to ship a game since then and it lost many partnerships in the meantime.
Coatsink, a Thunderful/Atari subsidiary and codeveloper/publisher of games like Kingdom Two Crowns and Islanders/Islanders: New Shores, announced that it is laying at least half of its staff, 50-60 people, due to difficulties with attaining sufficient amounts of new co-dev projects in the larger contract and funding dry-up within video games.
Sega announced further details for the current-gen upgrades of Yakuza Kiwami, Yakuza Kiwami 2, and Yakuza 0/the multiplat release of 0 Director’s Cut. Discounted digital upgrade paths will be available for existing owners for all three games: Yakuza 0 Director’s Cut will be $15 for existing owners, Kiwami 1 will be $2, and Kiwami 2 will be free. The downside of this is that the original PS4 and Xbox One versions of these games will be delisted at the same time these new editions arrive, removing them entirely from last-gen console storefronts. Lack of preservation for the original editions of the games is unfortunate, though almost all new content in them is completely optional anyway. Yakuza 0’s new cutscenes are controversial enough though that it does add to the problems of the move by Sega.
Stellar Blade developer Shift Up announced that their upcoming projects including Stellar Blade 2 will be multiplatform at launch without further PS5 timed exclusivity, and that they have newly partnered with Tencent to publish and codevelop one of their new games, Project Spirits.
In a comment about No Man Sky’s nomination in the Steam Awards Hello Games’ Sean Murray also discussed the status of the studio’s previously announced ambitious new project Light No Fire. He specifically described the latter game as developing “in the background, [from] another tiny team at Hello Games.”
November 27th: Paradox formally announced Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines 2 as the financial failure it was inevitable to be, taking a $37 million write-down on its development costs, and CEO Frederik Wester conceded that his leadership made many mistakes in the ten years spent on the game.
Bloober Team fully unveiled their next Switch 2 release, Layers of Fear: The Final Masterpiece Edition, a bespoke port for the 2023 Layers of Fear game, an expanded Unreal 5 remake of the entire previous Layers of Fear series. It will launch on December 19th 2025 and feature new motion control and touchscreen support on top of support for the signature ray-tracing, HDR, and dynamic lighting features of the game’s other versions.
Steve Ellis and David Doak, who worked on GoldenEeye and then TimeSplitters together, have finally unveiled the non-FPS project from their new indie studio formed after Embracer Group re-killed TimeSplitters: Beyond Words is a roguelike word puzzle game with a demo out now on Steam and a projected early 2026 1.0 lunch on PC, Switch, PS5, and Xbox Series S|X.
November 28th: Let it Die: Inferno has been disclosed to feature massive amounts of AI-generated audio, music, and art.
November 29th: A new report suggests that Capcom greenlit a brand new Dead Rising game in 2023 ahead of releasing the first game’s Deluxe Remaster. The game is said to follow Frank West in a new Hollywood studio lot setting and be part of the same Capcom IP revival initiative as Onimusha and Okami 2.
December 1st: Small indie support studio Chequered Ink announced and released a new asset pack for simplifying others’ game development, one which is dedicated to the special pursuit of preventing genAI usage by affordably providing 10,000+ guaranteed human-made resources ranging from HD sprites to audio files and a font. Any future assets made and added to the pack will be no extra charge to existing buyers.
After just launching Death by Scrolling, Monkey Island cocreator Ron Gilbert sadly announced that another of his game projects, an ambitious Zelda-inspired RPG informally announced last year, has been canceled due to a lack of funding.
December 2nd: Jason Schreier published another new article at Bloomberg shortly after his Dispatch deep dive, and it’s a major follow-up to his previous report about Yacht Club Games and the delay of Mina the Hollower. He reveals that the acclaimed studio has already spent most of its available funding and is in a desperate position where Mina the Hollower’s launch could either save or kill the company, leading to many drastic actions in the past few years, not just the delay but also including layoffs, crunch, replacing the original creator and director of Mina the Hollower and essentially rebooting that game last year, and at that same time in 2024, fully pausing production for the studio’s second major project which was only publicly revealed last year, Shovel Knight 3D. The financial stakes for Mina and Yacht Club are underlined very clearly: at least 500,000 copies need to be sold quickly to fully re-secure their future, while only selling 100K copies or less in the launch window would most likely lead to the studio’s closure.
As revealed by the involved companies newest public filings with antitrust regulators, and first reported by Wall Street Journal, the proposed acquisition of Electronic Arts is now confirmed to primarily put the massive games publisher under the control of the Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman via his Public Investment Fund. That is to say, the Saudi royal family will officially own 93% of EA if the buyout goes through, with the American private equity firms having a far smaller stake than their roles in funding the deal would suggest.
Artist Fern “Antireal” Hook has newly commented on the plagiarism of her work by Bungie in its game Marathon, saying that after months of concentrated art asset removals, the issue has been resolved to her satisfaction.
Dan Grivel announced that he had returned to directing Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell Remake three years after he previously departed the same game and company.
December 3rd: Embracer Group subsidiary and Deus Ex studio Eidos Montreal is reported to be engaging in layoffs again as part of larger continuing tumult at the developer. At least a dozen employees were just fired and more are expected to be fired once current projects at the studio are finalized. Eidos has long struggled with complicated productions and expensive operations out of Montreal, its biggest current surviving game has been in development since 2019 and is said internally to have “no way of recouping its current costs.” That game appears to possibly be another multiplayer live service greenlit by Square like Avengers. Many other projects like a new Deus Ex as previously reported and a new Legend of Kain newly evidenced were canceled in favor of prioritizing support contractor work on games like Grounded 2 and Fable 4 since that’s ‘easy money’ in a sense. Microsoft didn’t renew the Fable support contract past early 2025, which doesn’t help the struggling studio any.
Netflix has now sold off yet another one of the random small game studios it gobbled up incoherently: Cozy Grove developer Spry Fox was sold back to its founders to regain full independence. Netflix will still publish their upcoming game Spirit Crossing and will allow them to release on non-mobile platforms.
December 4th: An increasingly visible problem surrounding memory hardware reached a new peak when Micron Technology announced that it’s imminently shutting down its consumer product branch Crucial in response to the shortage. A major manufacturer will be gone and thus only exacerbate this problem which is expected to last until at least 2027 or 2028 while RAM, SSD, MicroSD and GPU manufacturing slowly gets necessary expansions. In short, demand has massively spiked from the AI and cloud industries needing memory for their massive datacenters, causing shortages and price spikes which are expected to get worse throughout 2026.
Game publisher and boutique physical media company iam8bit has reportedly filed a fraud lawsuit against Robert Kirkman’s Skybound Game Studios, alleging that the latter as a four year business partner has falsified financial reports by millions of dollars and refused to provide consistent contractually required monthly reports. Skybound is also accused of interfering in iam8bit’s partnership with Annapurna Interactive, especially over the 2022 game Stray.
Beloved Japanese actor Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa passed away at the age of 75 after complications from a stroke. In the gaming community, he was best known for playing signature Mortal Kombat villain Shang Tsung in the 1995 film and the most recent game Mortal Kombat 1.
As part of the larger latest PC Gaming Show, Steve Gaynor formally announced his next game, his first as a solo dev after the rest of Fullbright left him behind: Springs, Eternal is a first person narrative adventure in the vein of Gaynor’s original breakout hit Gone Home.
PlayStation Studios/Sony announced that it has picked up a new external game project for publishing, one from Bad Robot Games, a division of JJ Abrams’ multimedia production company. The game in question is a four player co op shooter coming to PC and PS5 and directed by Mike Booth, the creator of Left 4 Dead.
December 5th: After months of developments around a potential buyout/merger for Warner Bros Studios, its third in 7 years after AT&T and Discovery, it became (tentatively) official when Netflix and WB announced that they agreed to an acquisition worth over $80 billion, which was quickly confirmed to include video game division WB Games. The deal will take 12 to 18 months to finalize and is being opposed by Paramount Skydance, the other leading bidder for WB who is considering a stock-buying hostile takeover and is encouraging the Trump administration to take its side. This acquisition has numerous terrible implications of future consequences, including but not limited to the impact on theatrical distribution and home media releases for one of the biggest film slates out there, the likely further mishandling of the legendary archival catalogue and Turner Classic Movies, inevitable mass layoffs and other devastation wrought from planned cost-cutting worth many billions of dollars, the fact that Netflix wants to leave David fucking Zaslav in charge, and yes, also taking two different equally floundering and mishandled massively expensive video game divisions and merging them under Netflix Games.
This is a danger to every corner of the already throttled media industry, and the other scenario with Paramount Skydance would be about as awful since it is three media giants under one roof and that roof is even more openly reactionary and rightwing than David Zaslav.
In a 5-Minute Direct, which proved to be more substantial than any other showcase from the studio to date, Grasshopper Manufacture and Suda51 announced that Romeo is a Dead Man will launch for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series S|X on February 11th 2026. Two more key details were discussed in and outside the video: the developer will be self-publishing the game instead of receiving publishing support from parent company NetEase, and a Switch 2 port is already being strongly explored, it’s just taking extra time for budgetary reasons and engine-optimization reasons.
Fallout co-creator and queer icon Tim Cain announced that he has returned to Obsidian Entertianment as a full time employee working on an unannounced major new project he claims fans will never guess.
Riot Games set the console launch of long gestating League fighting game 2XKO for January 2026.
December 7th: Developer Three Fields Entertainment announced that publishing partner THQ Nordic/Embracer Group had formally abandoned support for their game Wreckreation and put the studio at risk of closure after operating for 11 years. The developer has spent most of this year self-funding instead of receiving support from Embracer and is now naturally running out of money, so every employee has been put on notice for layoffs and CEO Fiona Sperry, a veteran of the Burnout games, is courting new partners to rescue them.
Thank you to everyone for your support over the years, in all its forms. I am incredibly grateful for you, all of you, for your enthusiasm, kindness, inspiration, and generosity. I will no longer be asking for your financial support, only for your shining presence in my comments. I am proud to say that this train can keep right on rolling!