On October 1, Microsoft shocked Game Pass subscribers by announcing a substantial (+50%) price increase for the highest tier, Ultimate, which jumped from $19.99 to $29.99 monthly. This led some users to cancel their subscriptions in droves, but did Microsoft really make a strategic mistake? Veteran games analyst Joost van Dreunen, formerly founder of SuperData Research (acquired by Nielsen Media Research in 2018), offered a more nuanced analysis in his latest SuperJoost Playlist newsletter. To start with, van Dreunen relays a take from a former Xbox employee, who said that it's a case of 'bad optics'. Certainly, such a massive […]

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It was practically a given following the announcement of the mass layoffs at Amazon Game Studios, but we now have confirmation that New World, the MMORPG developed by the team based in Irvine, California, is effectively on life support. Amazon has clarified that Season 10: Nighthaven, which launched earlier this month, will be the last content update because further development 'is not sustainable'. The servers are, however, guaranteed to remain up throughout December 31, 2026 at the least. Complete closure of the servers will likely follow shortly after that date, although Amazon said it will notify players at least six […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/new-world-gets-killed-off-amazon-just-as-people-were-returning/

This morning, Remedy Entertainment published its Q3 2025 financial report. As expected, it's not great news for the Finnish studio. Tero Virtala, the company's CEO for nine years, stepped down earlier this month after Remedy told investors that the game FBC: Firebreak had effectively failed. This past quarter, just as the studio celebrated the thirty years since its foundation, the financial highlights were indeed very negative: However, interim CEO Markus Mäki reassured investors (and fans) that the remaining projects are on track, and the studio is still confident in its ability to achieve 'significant commercial success' by 2030. Despite challenges […]

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John Romero might not be a name that youngsters recognize, but he was a legend of the early days of the first-person shooter genre, co-founding id Software and making videogames like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Hexen, and Quake, to name a few. Nowadays, he makes smaller titles at Romero Games. The studio's most recent title was the Mafia-themed turn-based strategy game Empire of Sin, launched in late 2020 to a mixed reception. More recently, John Romero and his fellow developers signed a deal with Microsoft for their next project, but that deal went awry along with the latest Xbox layoffs. The […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/john-romero-talking-companies-finish-game-funded-by-microsoft/

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was featured in a live interview on TBPN (Technology Business Programming Network) discussing various topics, including the company's updated multiplatform strategy on the gaming front. Nadella pointed out that following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Microsoft is now the largest gaming publisher in terms of revenue. The goal, then, is to be everywhere the consumer is, just like with Office. The Microsoft CEO then interestingly referred to TikTok, or, to be more accurate, short-form video as a whole, as the true competitor of gaming. Remember, the biggest gaming business is the Windows business. And of course, […]

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With each passing month, artificial intelligence creeps into more industries. That does not exclude the gaming industry, which has long used artificial intelligence to populate its virtual worlds. Still, the generative AI that is taking root everywhere offers much more power, and also much greater risk, compared to what gaming developers were used to. Big companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and EA are already laying off (or thinking about laying off) employees to invest further into artificial intelligence. What do the actual developers think about this artificial intelligence revolution? Their takes, as you would expect, are quite varied. The creator of […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/dayz-creator-says-ai-fears-remind-him-people-worrying-about-google-wikipedia-ai-is-here/

There's little doubt that The Matrix franchise is criminally underserved when it comes to videogame adaptations, despite being theoretically a perfect fit for the medium. In the 26 years since the original movie's theatrical debut, we only got two decent games: 2003's single player action/adventure game Enter the Matrix and 2005's MMORPG The Matrix Online. More recently, the interactive experience The Matrix Awakens was released in late 2021, but it was really just a tech demo for Unreal Engine 5 and a tease at the level of quality that gaming fans of the IP never really got to fully experience. […]

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A team of modders is working on Bully Online, a modification for the PC version of Bully: Scholarship Edition that promises to allow players to roam the grounds of Bullworth Academy and the nearby town with their friends. The Wii and Xbox 360 versions of Scholarship Edition did have a multiplayer mode, but it was limited to two players and only allowed them to face off in the class minigames. According to community creator SWEGTA, Bully Online promises much more, including free roam support, solo and group minigames, and even a role-playing system. They were able to add a 'fully […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/bully-online-mod-promises-let-you-roam-rockstars-classic-with-friends/

This morning, indie Chinese developer ChillyRoom unveiled Loulan: The Cursed Sand, one of the games funded through the PlayStation China Hero Project. The game is a hack 'n' slash action RPG viewed from a Diablo-like camera. The setting is the ancient Silk Road, in China's Western Regions. Loulan: The Cursed Sand tells the tragic love story of an exiled royal guard who returns to the titular fallen kingdom amidst the chaos of war in search of his beloved princess. Players will step into the game as the skeletal warrior known as 'The Cursed Sand', mastering the power of sand as […]

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Gearbox founder Randy Pitchford was recently interviewed by Shacknews alongside a few other colleagues to discuss the making of Borderlands 4, the studio's latest game, which was released on September 12. The video runs for 73 minutes, and right toward the end, Pitchford goes into exactly what is needed to create such a big videogame like Borderlands 4. Interestingly, he then adds that the gaming industry as a whole is just getting started and 'figuring out' videogames, which haven't yet received their 'Citizen Kane' moment yet. To make a game like Borderlands 4 takes a big investment. It's a massive, […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/borderlands-boss-gaming-hasnt-even-produced-single-masterpiece-yet/

Last Friday, The Pokémon Company announced that Pokémon Legends: Z-A, the latest entry in the ever-popular monster catching franchise, had sold 5.8 million copies in its debut week. Now, Circana's Senior Director & Video Game Industry Thought Leader, Mat Piscatella, revealed that the game's retail launch was particularly big in the United States, where it registered the best performance of the last two and a half years. Pokémon Legends: Z-A had a massive US launch at retail. Launch week physical unit and dollar sales of Pokémon Legends: Z-A were the biggest for a new physical video game launch since The […]

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Following several months of rumors about a remake of Halo: Combat Evolved, the game that started one of Xbox's most successful franchises, Halo Studios (formerly 343 Interactive) announced Halo: Campaign Evolved during this year's Halo World Championship event. The remake, powered by Unreal Engine 5 visuals (with the original game's code running beneath), will be released next year on PC, Xbox Series S and X, and even PlayStation 5 for the first time in the series. As with all remakes, some fans immediately started dissecting the gameplay footage to see what was changed from the original. Even more interesting, though, […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/halo-combat-evolved-designer-likens-remake-to-dance-remix-classic-song-straight-to-chorus/

The likelihood of a roleplaying game once again getting most Game of the Year prizes after 2023's Baldur's Gate 3 is very high thanks to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. The game has already scored many nominations from the Golden Joystick Awards 2025, with the winners due to be announced in a week from today. Meanwhile, the surprising sleeper hit of the year has received two endorsements from industry figures like Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer and Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy director Naoki Hamaguchi. Speaking to Famitsu, Spencer mentioned various games as his personal 2025 highlights, but ultimately picked Sandfall […]

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As promised on Friday, the development teams working on Battlefield 6 (DICE, Ripple Effect, Motive, and Criterion) have released the patch notes for update 1.1.1.0, which is set to go live tomorrow ahead of the debut of Season 1. The update will be released at 9:00 UTC, whereas the new season will be enabled at 15:00 UTC. With this update, the developers aim to address some of the biggest pain points the Battlefield 6 community lamented in the game's first few weeks. For example, the player character's core movement and animations have been refined to provide smoother landings, faster stance […]

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Earlier this year, when Turn 10 Studios lost over 70 members of its development team as part of the latest round of layoffs mandated by Microsoft, a former employee claimed that Turn 10 had effectively been turned into a Forza Horizon support studio. This chain of events had fans fearful about the future of the racing simulation franchise. Now, at last, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer commented on this as part of a Tokyo Game Show 2025 interview with Famitsu. The Japanese magazine asked him whether the Halo and Forza Motorsport franchises were done for. Spencer vehemently denied that for […]

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Last week, a ResetEra user discovered that the new Gaming Copilot AI installed by Microsoft on all Windows 11 PCs (integrated directly into the Game Bar) was training itself by screenshotting every game played by the user and then sending everything back to Microsoft. Gaming Copilot is also enabled by default, so if you want to turn it off, you need to go to the Game Bar, and then to Settings and Privacy Settings, where you will find the option for Gaming Copilot to pull "Model training on text" or not. Needless to say, this discovery sparked a big controversy […]

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This morning, The Pokémon Company has announced that the latest installment in the monster-catching series, Pokémon Legends: Z-A, has sold 5.8 million units in its debut week, with Nintendo confirming that around half of those sales were on the Nintendo Switch 2. While still a very good sales performance, it lags a bit behind compared to the first Pokémon Legends, Arceus, which launched in early 2022 and sold 6.5 million units in its first week on the market. We recently posted Wccftech's review of the game, penned by Nathan Birch, who rated the game 8.5 out of 10. Here's a […]

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