Last month, a UK judge ruled that Valve would have to face its day in court over a £656 million class-action lawsuit being led by Parent Zone chief executive officer, Vicki Shotbolt, over the 30% cut that the company takes from all transactions on Steam. It's not a dissimilar case to what Epic Games brought against Apple, as Shotbolt has called Valve's 30% cut "excessive" and that the company "is rigging the market and taking advantage of UK gamers." In a new report from GamesIndustry.Biz, Shotbolt further explained her case against Valve and Steam, adding that Valve is "clearly not" […]

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A new report from IGN reveals that Microsoft's gaming division and Xbox are going through a major leadership shake-up. Phil Spencer will retire this coming Monday, February 23, 2026, after first joining Microsoft all the way back in 1988 as an intern. He's not the only one departing: Sarah Bond, current president of Xbox at Microsoft, is now the former president of Xbox at Microsoft, as she will resign from her role. Lastly, Microsoft's current president of its CoreAI division, Asha Sharma, will take Spencer's place as the new chief executive officer of Microsoft Gaming. Back in July 2025, we […]

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Circana executive director Mat Piscatella has shared his first monthly sales report of 2026 for video game sales in the US, and it's Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 taking the top spot on the premium sales charts for January 2026. Overall spending in the video game industry in the US was up 3% compared to last year, with subscription services and hardware sales driving that growth. It's Call of Duty: Black Ops 7's second month in a row sitting atop the US premium game sales charts, though finishing 2025 as the best-selling game of December was not enough to […]

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Ubisoft chief executive officer Yves Guillemot has finally spoken outside of the company's financial earnings reports after kicking off 2026 by confirming a "major reset" that involved huge structural changes to Ubisoft and saw hundreds of developers get laid off, either through cuts at different branches or just full studio shutdowns. In an interview with Variety, Guillemot didn't offer any meaningful comments in response to questions about the strikes across different studios within the company or provide any further comment as to why projects like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time Remake were cancelled that we hadn't heard before. But […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/ubisoft-ceo-confirms-two-far-cry-projects-several-assassins-creed-games-single-player-and-multiplayer/

Season 2 for Battlefield 6 finally arrived earlier this week after an unexpected one-month delay. While we can hopefully trust the Battlefield Studios teams when they say the length between Season 1 and Season 2 was an isolated case, the new content in Season 2 hasn't exactly set the game's community on fire, and players still have several issues with the new content. Outside of complaints about the new VL-7 gas (which a scroll through the r/Battlefield page will show you players are either very positive on or very against), one thing that Battlefield 6 players agree on is that […]

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After MegaCrit missed its initial 2025 release goal for Slay the Spire 2, the beloved indie developer confirmed today that the long-awaited sequel to the popular roguelike deckbuilder will arrive on March 5, 2026. Announced during the Indie Fan Fest, its Early Access release trailer includes a few sneak peeks at gameplay mixed in between some high-quality animations. Back in September 2025, when MegaCrit confirmed that Slay the Spire 2 wouldn't arrive in 2025, it gave a release window that was vague and specific at the same time. The studio confirmed the game would arrive on "a secret Thursday in […]

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Toronto-based developer Hilltop Studios has just revealed its second major project, Curse of Resthaven, a narrative-driven roguelike that studio director Scott Christian calls "a radical shift" from the team's award-winning debut game, Lil' Guardsman. Announced during the Indie Fan Fest, you'll enter the dark and gloomy island colony of Resthaven with seven days to discover the mystery behind the cursed island and save its inhabitants from the time loop. While the colourful presentation of Lil' Guardsman can make you feel like the stakes are relatively small, deciding whether or not to let people into the kingdom with its comedic twist […]

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Embark Studios has just revealed the next update and map condition coming to ARC Raiders, with hurricanes arriving next week on February 24, 2026, in the game's new Shrouded Sky update. The short teaser doesn't show any gameplay, but it does make it clear how disruptive and dangerous the hurricanes will be for raiders who choose to brave the weather while the condition is in effect. A blog post on the ARC Raiders' official website digs further into what raiders will have to deal with, and it's a little more than some high-speed winds. "The climate is damaged and unpredictable, […]

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We've been surprised by video game studio closures before, like when Xbox shut down Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks, but this latest studio closure is arguably the most shocking one we've seen in a long time. Bluepoint Games, the studio responsible for the Demon's Souls Remake and decades of remakes and remasters across several iconic franchises, is being shut down by PlayStation. It was Bloomberg's Jason Schreier who broke the news that just five years after the studio officially joined the PlayStation Studios family, its remaining 70 developers are losing their jobs in what is yet another baffling decision by […]

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The Ubisoft Toronto team is at the helm of what is arguably one of Ubisoft's most significant projects, the long-awaited Splinter Cell Remake, and they're also the most recent team to get hit by the mass layoffs that Ubisoft has been conducting as part of its recently revealed "major reset." This is Ubisoft's fourth layoff announcement in 2026. First reported by MobileSyrup, Ubisoft confirmed the layoffs to Wccftech in a statement that marked this layoff as part of a "final phase" of the company's global cost-saving efforts. The company also confirmed that development of the Splinter Cell Remake continues at […]

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Last week, we reported that the popular sci-fi action RPG looter-shooter Warframe would make its worldwide debut on Android devices on February 18, 2026, after arriving first in Canada. That was, of course, true at the time. But a last-minute, one-day delay pushed the release back by, well, a day. So as of today, February 19, 2026, developer Digital Extreme's game is now officially out on Android mobile devices across the globe, and it still has another platform to hit, as it'll be coming to the Nintendo Switch 2 "soon." This new version of Warframe almost rounds out the full […]

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When you start your journey in ARC Raiders, certain ARCs, like Rocketeers and Bastion's, can send a chill down the spine of any new Raider. You'll eventually learn how to take these machines down, but there's always something bigger waiting in the wings, and in this new extraction shooter, that 'something bigger' is the Matriarchs. They're the closest thing ARC Raiders has to a boss encounter. You can't take them down yourself (not without some serious luck and know-how), and they're arguably the most deadly machines you'll face as far as the game's PvE elements are concerned. But that hasn't […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/embark-gave-arc-raiders-players-too-effective-abilities-take-down-matriarchs/

NVIDIA's popular GeForce NOW cloud streaming service is celebrating its sixth anniversary this month, and for this week's GeForce NOW Thursday, 12 games are getting added to the service, which has expanded to include over 4,500 games. The only unfortunate aspect of this week's batch of games is that only two of them are arriving as RTX 5080-ready titles, but at least both of those titles are brand new releases. The games in question are Styx: Blades of Greed and Star Trek: Voyager - Across the Unknown, both of which you can check out reviews for on Wccftech. On top […]

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Just as things were starting to look up for Bungie, with some positive buzz building around Marathon as we inch closer to the new extraction shooter's arrival, the tides take a turn for the worse once again. In a statement shared on its social media channels, the studio has announced that the next major update for Destiny 2, the upcoming Shadow and Order update, which was supposed to be out on March 3, 2026, has been delayed by three months and will now arrive on June 9, 2026. A lack of promotional marketing for the update this close to its […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/destiny-2-shadow-and-order-update-gets-last-minute-3-month-delay-bungie/

Bethesda Game Studios boss Todd Howard spent an hour today talking about some of Bethesda's biggest franchises, including both Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, in an interview with Kinda Funny Games. While Howard didn't share too many details about upcoming projects, like refusing to elaborate beyond saying the team has "multiple" Fallout projects in the works, we did get some insight into how he prefers to approach game reveals, how the studio operates, and a tease that more Starfield news would be coming "soon." That said, Howard did add that there is no "Starfield 2.0" coming. Starting with The Elder […]

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The new State of Video Gaming 2026 Report from Matthew Ball, chief executive officer at Epyllion, is now available, and as usual, there are more than a few solid insights and takeaways to make note of. Like how software sales for the global video game market in 2025 rose by 5.3% to a staggering $195.6 billion, but at the same time, funding from private investors hit another major dip, dropping by 55%. Console software sales also hit an all-time high, recovering from the post-COVID slump to hit $41.6 billion in spending, a 2.3% increase compared to the highs of the […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/global-video-game-content-sales-grew-to-195-6b-in-2025-while-private-funding-took-a-massive-dip/

Earlier this week, developers RocketWerkz and GRIP Studios announced that the console release for the popular survival game, ICARUS, would be delayed by one month, from its initial February 26, 2026, release date to March 26, 2026. Along with announcing the delay, the studios also confirmed that the team would host a Reddit AMA on r/Survival Gaming, during which DayZ creator Dean Hall (who is also the creator of ICARUS) called on consumers to help "normalize delaying games." The statement doesn't come in the form of an answer from Hall, but rather as a preface before the AMA even kicks […]

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Highguard has become one of the most talked-about games to kick off 2026, but all for the wrong reasons. After its maligned reveal at The Game Awards, despite its launch drawing 97K concurrent players on Steam alone, those players didn't stick around, and it lost the vast majority of its player base almost immediately. It was review-bombed on Steam, and barely two weeks after it had arrived on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S, "most" of the team at developer Wildlight Entertainment had been laid off. After one of the laid-off developers took to X (formerly Twitter) to call out […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/ex-highguard-staff-share-concept-art-and-videos-of-unreleased-in-engine-characters/

Publisher Nacon and developer Big Bad Wolf have debuted a new gameplay trailer for Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss, just ahead of when players will get a chance to try out the game themselves when a demo is released as part of Steam Next Fest on February 23, 2026. The trailer digs into one of the game's core mechanics, investigations, as the player character Noah investigates an underwater mining station that, at least at first glance, seems to be abandoned. The trailer showcases the dark corridors of the mining station and shows Noah exploring the hallways, scanning and analyzing clues, before […]

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An ad for Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 has been banned in the UK after the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) deemed that it was "irresponsible and offensive" for centring around humour that was "generated by the humiliation and the implied threat of painful, non-consensual penetration" of a man in the ad. Spotted by the BBC, the ad in question is part of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7's 'Replacers' ad campaign, which featured Hollywood actors like Terry Crews, Nikki Glaser, and Peter Stromare. While there are several 'Replacers' ads, the one that got banned depicts Glaser and Stromare's characters […]

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REPLACED, the 2.5D platformer from Sad Cat Studios that we've been waiting for since 2021 has been delayed once again, though it seems like this delay will be its last one ahead of its release. Now, instead of arriving on its previously set March 12, 2026, date, it'll hit PC and Xbox Series X/S on April 14, 2026. Earlier this month, ahead of the upcoming demo-fest of the year's first Steam Next Fest, Sad Cat Studios put out a demo for REPLACED (which you can still go play now), and according to the studio's statement, part of this delay is […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/replaced-delayed-a-few-more-weeks-sad-cat-studios-cyberpunk-platformer/