Epic’s sale of ArtStation and Sketchfab to KitBash isn’t just a business deal. It tests whether creative platforms can change ownership without disrupting the portfolios, libraries, licences, workflows, and trust that artists have built their careers around...
Solo developer Michael Major reportedly saw his prank Steam game generate more than $1.3 million in potential sales after thousands of people bought it. Then reality arrived in the form of refunds. According to reporting, 6,717 people bought the game, but 6,707 refunded it, leaving the developer with just over $2,000...
Studios refusing generative AI are making more than an ethical statement. They’re turning human authorship, creative accountability, production culture, and player trust into visible parts of the game itself...
Hasbro’s $56 million digital-games write-down reveals a problem bigger than cancelled projects: powerful IP can’t replace experienced teams, coherent production, and the conditions that made Baldur’s Gate 3 exceptional...
A lot of companies talk about game development as if a studio is simply a container full of talent. You put enough designers, programmers, artists, producers, writers, and technical specialists into the container, give them a valuable IP, and eventually a game comes out. If costs become too high, you remove some people from the container. If production slows down, you replace them with contractors. On a spreadsheet, this probably looks reasonable. The problem is that game studios do not work like containers. They work like systems...
For years, the industry has treated the shift from physical to digital as a convenience story. No discs to swap. No shelves to manage. No midnight launches unless you enjoy standing in a queue with other people pretending they are not cold. Digital access is faster, cleaner, and easier to scale, so the direction has always felt inevitable. Now PlayStation has made that direction explicit. From January 2028, physical disc production for new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will end, with new releases available digitally through PlayStation Store and retailers...
Some games become so large that they stop being judged only as games. They become cultural events, commercial milestones, shareholder expectations, platform drivers, and industry measuring sticks. Grand Theft Auto VI is one of those games. It is not just another release on the calendar. It is expected to be one of the biggest entertainment launches in years, which makes the working conditions behind it impossible to separate from the final product...
Thomas Mahler, developer of Ori and the Blind Forest, recently criticised the Game Pass model, arguing that the service could have worked if the catalogue had been strong enough to make players happily pay every month. His harsher point was that Xbox needed to understand what players actually want, rather than pushing out mediocre content like a factory. It is a brutal criticism, but it points to a deeper design problem: content volume does not create player desire by itself...
For the past decade, Xbox has been on a spending spree unlike anything the games industry has ever seen. Billions were spent acquiring studios. Billions more were spent building Game Pass, funding content, supporting hardware, and expanding the Xbox ecosystem across multiple platforms. Now the company appears to be preparing another major reset. Following an internal memo describing Xbox as "overextended", reports suggest studios such as Ninja Theory, Double Fine, and Compulsion Games may be facing closure or independence negotiations as Microsoft attempts to reduce costs and refocus the business...
The Nintendo Direct, Xbox Games Showcase, State of Play, and Summer Game Fest delivered exactly what players hoped for. There were major sequels, long-awaited remakes, surprise reveals, and enough trailers to fuel gaming discussions for weeks. Social media exploded with reactions to Ocarina of Time Remake, Persona 6, Kingdom Hearts IV, Marvel's Wolverine, Resident Evil: Code Veronica Remake, and a host of other announcements...
