The Epic Games Store rang up 295 million users in 2024, an increase over 2023 of 25 million, and the "Epic ecosystem" grew as well, to 898 million "total Epic cross-platform accounts," up by 94 million from the 2023 number. What really surprised me, though, is that 1,100 new games were released on Epic in 2024, taking the total number of games on the storefront to over 4,000. Frankly, I didn't realize there were 1,100 games on the Epic Store in total.

That's still a far cry from Steam, which saw nearly 19,000 new games arrive in 2024, but it's definitely movement in the right direction. Epic credited that growth of its game selection to continued adoption of its self-publishing tools, the Epic First Run exclusivity program and Now on Epic program for older games (which has been extended to January 31, 2026), growing daily and monthly active user numbers, and Epic's generous revenue share options.

Epic ran into unexpected financial issues in 2023, saying it was "spending way more money than we earn" and laying off 800 employees as a result. Nonetheless, the game giveaways continued apace in 2024, with more than 595 million free games claimed—up from just under 586 million freebies in 2023—averaging out to $2,229 in "total value per player." Epic also confirmed that "the program is not slowing down and will continue in 2025, on both PC and mobile."

The Epic Games Store launcher is still a little rough around the edges: Epic said in its 2023 year in review that it had made performance improvements "reducing loading time to a third of the prior load time according to benchmarks from Q1 2023 for 95% of users," and it's definitely better than it used to be (for me, at least) but still a little sluggish, particularly when dealing with large libraries. Work on that will continue in 2025: The download manager expected in 2024 is set slated for the first quarter of 2025 (so, soon), enabling users to "control the timing of updates, schedule downloads, and reorder your queue, amongst other quality-of-life changes."

Other notable features on the way include gifting, preloading, an overhaul of search and browse functionality "with several under the hood improvements," and new social features including "all new voice chat, text chat, game independent parties, invite/join/play and looking-for-group features across all Epic Games Store supported platforms."

Epic also shared a rundown of its top PC games in 2024, and while specific numbers aren't included it's interesting to see how they break down across three separate categories. Farming Simulator 2022 raised my eyebrow, but 2023 and '24 editions weren't released, and the most recent version, Farming Simulator 2025, didn't come out until mid-November 2024.

Mythic

• Genshin Impact
• Rocket League®
• Honkai Star Rail
• Grand Theft Auto 5
• Fortnite

Legendary

• Wuthering Waves
• EA Sports FC 24
• Destiny 2
• Fall Guys
• Alan Wake 2

Epic

• EA Sports FC 25
• Red Dead Redemption 2
• Cyberpunk 2077
• The Sims 4
• Black Myth: Wukong
• Dead by Daylight
• Satisfactory
• Warframe
• Farming Simulator 2022
• Dead Island 2

(Why isn't "Epic" the top tier in the list? I do not know, but it seems like a pretty big oversight to me.)

Not a bad year overall, then, and more free games in 2025 is definitely something to happy about. And yes, there is an infographic—get the crash course version of Epic's year in review below.

The strike was in protest of "layoffs and exhausting working conditions" in the game industry, and saw more than 1,000 people take part across the country. While there have been strikes at individual French studios in the past, this is apparently the first-ever industry-wide strike, according to an RFI report, and comes as the industry continues to grapple with layoffs, studio closures, and other labor disputes. As of 2022, there were 580 game studios in France.

The STJV was somewhat more pointed in its description of the game industry, calling it a "corporate circus" in a call to strike issued in January. It also issued four "highly practical" demands, which it said "come in response to decades of corporate mismanagement, opacity and denial of workers’ suffering:"

• Preservation of jobs, the cancellation of layoffs and the accountability of decision-makers who must first make sacrifices themselves when their companies face difficulties.
• Companies’ full transparency about their financial situation and economic health, so that workers can plan their future, and profit sharing with workers.
• Consideration for work-related health and personal life, through work reorganisation and the reduction of work hours.
• Direct participation of workers in decision-making at their companies in order to avoid management errors and control the proper use of private and public funding.

The union also said that, "as this is a national strike call, no action is necessary to go on strike: just don’t go to work." All very French, indeed, and in the wake of the strike it called for "an even wider movement" to follow.

"Unionise, go on strike, gain new rights!" the union wrote on Bluesky. "Together, we will win ✊"

The GG25 Grève Bundle is meant to raise funds for the STJV's strike fund, which helps compensate striking workers for their loss of income. The theme of the bundle—no surprise here—is "strike," and in keeping with the whole "according to your ability" thing, there are three tiers at $1, $5, and $10, although you can kick in more if you want to do a solid for workers.

While there aren't any real blockbusters in the lineup, Coldridge looked very promising when we checked out its demo last year, and many years ago (it originally released in 2013) we were quite taken by Tetrobot and Co. Off the top of my head, Blocks That Matter, Minami Line, The Purple Hike, and Flipon look like they might be cool too if you enjoy deeply indie games, and I like Phoenix WRONG just because the title makes me laugh.

STJV said the previous edition of this bundle raised $1,500 with an average donation of $11 (the top-tier bundle price is $10 but), and with two weeks to go this bundle has blown way past it, earning more than $28,000 and an average contribution of over $15. The Grève Bundle on Itch.io will be available until February 28.

Dark and Darker, a fantasy PvPvE extraction game, made a big splash when it first appeared in early 2023, even though it was in a pretty rough alpha state at the time. Before long, though, Nexon started making noise about it, accusing Ironmace of using "stolen" code and assets to build the game. Nexon was reportedly working on a similar project, codenamed P3, but pulled the plug on it in 2021; Ironmace was founded shortly thereafter by former Nexon employees.

Long story short, Nexon filed a complaint, Ironmace issued denials, investigations were conducted, and in March 2023 Dark and Darker was removed from Steam. The studio managed to turn the delisting into a bit of a PR coup by continuing to distribute its game through BitTorrent—"going old school," as the studio put it—which an awful lot of players loved. Still, it's better to be on Steam than not, and after a court dismissed Nexon's preliminary injunction against Dark and Darker in January 2024, it returned to the storefront in June of that year.

Legal wrangling continued, however, and now the courts have come down with something of a split decision: Ironmace did not commit copyright infringement but did infringe on Nexon's trade secrets. What's the difference, you wonder? The Copyright Alliance says copyrights are specific, individual rights applied to "an original work that is fixed in a tangible medium like a photograph, a book, or an mp3 file." Trade secrets, on the other hand, are less specific: "Information that has an economic benefit due to its secret nature, has value to others who cannot legitimately obtain it, and is subject to reasonable efforts to maintain its secrecy."

So, I guess, because Nexon's P3 was never actually a thing, copyright infringement is out, but because Ironmace seemingly built Dark and Darker on a foundation originally laid by Nexon—which had more or less kept a lid on the whole thing—trade secret infringement is in. And that's going to cost Ironmace 8.5 billion won (roughly $5.9 million) in damages.

The good news for Ironmace is that Dark and Darker continues: The early access version on Steam holds a "mostly positive" user rating and continues to put up decent player numbers—currently there are nearly 14,000 people playing on Steam.

The bad news is that this may not be the end of the matter. Nexon said in a statement that the award is "meaningful, as it addresses illegal infringement actions that disrupt fair market competition." But, it added, "After carefully reviewing the ruling, we plan to seek further legal judgment through a higher court." I've reached out to Ironmace for comment and will update if I receive a reply.

The latest round of layoffs at Unity seem to have come as a surprise to at least some impacted employees: One wrote in LinkedIn that the cuts were "totally unexpected," while another wrote that he "didn't expect it to happen so suddenly." A third employee said he was notified of the layoffs by "a 5 am email from 'noreply@unity' informing me that my role was being 'eliminated' and that I’d lose system access by the end of the day."

Unity is a popular and widely used game engine, but the past few years have not been good for the company or the people who work for it. It's closed offices and laid off hundreds of employees in multiple rounds of cuts, all while self-inflicting wounds by calling developers who don't focus on monetization "fucking idiots" and imposing a wildly unpopular installation fee in 2023. The blowback was fierce enough that then-CEO John Riccitiello (yes, the former EA guy) stepped down in October 2023, but just a month later interim CEO James M. Whitehurst said Unity needed to be "leaner [and] more agile," and sure enough deeper cuts followed in January 2024, when 25% of the company's workforce—roughly 1,800 people—were let go.

In an internal email obtained by 80.lv, current Unity CEO Matthew Bromberg said the company is "currently stretched across too many products, creating complexity and limiting impact."

"Historically, we’ve engaged in extended debates about what our focus would be, which would prevent crisp decision making and limit release velocity," Bromberg wrote. "We also added people and created operating structures that were meant to speed us up, only to find they were slowing us down."

If that sounds at all familiar, it might be because Whitehurst said essentially the same thing after taking over from Riccitiello in 2023: "We are currently doing too much, we are not achieving the synergies that exist across our portfolio, and we are not executing to our full potential."

Going forward, Unity will "Optimize around 'fidelity for ubiquity'," Bromberg wrote, which he said means that "while we’ll always try to enable the best quality graphics we can, our primary directive is to help customers reach the widest possible audience across platforms and devices." Unity will also "invest in industry, live services, and AI," which is presumably a continuation of ongoing efforts: Unity announced plans to incorporate AI into its tools in June 2023, another maneuver that didn't go down entirely well with everyone.

The net result of these changes is, of course, job losses as Unity restructures to merge various teams and eliminate roles determined to be redundant. All employees impacted by the cuts are expected to be notified of their impending unemployment by the end of February 12. I've reached out to Unity for comment and will update if I receive a reply.

Apparently everybody just soft-launches their Super Bowl ads on YouTube a week in advance now, and that goes for Google's gaggle of 50 spots showcasing how Gemini could help small business owners, with a unique 30-second showcase for each state of the Union. In Wisconsin, the ad focused on a cheesemonger writing online store copy for his assorted victuals.

The weirdness came partway through, when the ad actually showed Google Gemini in action. It told the cheese vendor that Gouda accounts for "50 to 60 percent of the world's cheese consumption." Now, Gouda's hardly a hardcore real head pick like Roquefort or BellaVitano, but there's also no way it's pulling in cheddar or mozzarella numbers. Travel blogger Nate Hake and Google-focused Twitter account Goog Enough documented the erroneous initial version of the ad, but Google responded by quietly swapping in a more accurate Gemini-suggested blurb in all live versions of the ad, including the one that aired during the Super Bowl.

Adding another wrinkle to the story, the erroneous statistic can seemingly be sourced to the Gouda page on cheese.com, an SEO-focused website with a love for cheese and a loose cannon, devil may care approach to the facts. Google Gemini will supposedly provide links to the sources it pulls from, much like AI Overview in search, and you could charitably argue that this feature just wasn't on display during the ad.

But that raises other concerns: Is the ad then just pure "bullshot" like all those pre-rendered E3 game trailers of yore or all of Elon Musk's silly robots? No matter how much Gemini cites sources, isn't there something ethically questionable about an automated process presenting itself as a neutral arbiter of the internet, offering potentially rotten information as authoritative statements of fact? Google states Gemini is a "creative writing aid, not intended to be factual," and notes that suggestions from Help Me Write in Chrome "can be inaccurate or offensive since it's still in an experimental status."

But that truly begs the question of who would want writing help from a program that spits out "inaccurate or offensive" information. There is also something darkly humorous to me about Google having to eat some crow due to the output of an SEO slop farm whose existence was incentivized by the company in the first place. Billions of dollars and untold amounts of compute power are being thrown at AI models, but they don't seem to be making much progress on the "hallucination" problem.

"With Ignore, you can take space from specific people without them knowing, so you can stay focused on the fun," Discord said in a blog describing the feature rollout as part of Safer Internet Day 2025. "Whether you just need some time away or want to take a more discreet route, Ignore lets you personalize your approach."

The problem with feeling a little icked out by the occasional internet acquaintance is that it's almost always a me thing. It's not their fault that they ping everyone in the channel a little too often or that the way they use emojis makes me uncomfortable for reasons that are difficult to articulate. Blocking usually feels a little extreme—plus if they ever try to DM me, they'll realize I've banished them to my own personal phantom zone, and nobody wants that.

Ignore provides a nice middle ground between the nuclear option of blocking and the faint sadness of neglecting a group DM because you've seen enough of the bad takes that one guy keeps screenshotting from Twitter. Once you ignore a user, Discord will hide any messages, DMs, and notifications they might produce on servers you're both in. They'll still see your messages, and you can unhide their individual messages as necessary if you want to see what they're contributing to a conversation.

In addition to the Ignore rollout, Discord announced the formation of a non-profit foundation called ROOST, or Robust Open Online Safety Tools, which aims to address "a critical gap in child safety and digital safety by providing free, open-source safety tools to organizations of all sizes." An admirable goal, but when Discord lists OpenAI, Google, and Roblox as founding partners and describes how ROOST will "leverage large language models to power safety infrastructure," I'll admit that my brow furrowed.

You can start ignoring people on Discord today.

Original story: First reported by Gaming on Linux, Valve has added a new advertising page to its Steamworks developer documentation. The page outlines what kinds of advertising and promotion it will allow on Steam, while explicitly banning in-game ads as a revenue model on the ubiquitous PC gaming platform.

Product placement is still in, so long as "such portrayals are not disruptive and are appropriate within the context of the game." Valve gives a racing game with real life sponsors on the cars as one example of what's okay, and it sure sounds like my dream reboot of Pepsiman could still find a home on the store, thank god. Cross-promotions are allowed too, but Valve states "under no circumstances is it okay to charge developers to participate in a bundle or sell access to a store page or other page on Steam." Last, paid advertising campaigns outside Steam that lead to a store page are also fair game.

What's been banned is any form of in-game advertising that gates access to, or otherwise interferes with, gameplay. "Developers should not use paid advertising as a business model in their game, such as requiring players to watch or otherwise engage with advertising in order to play," Valve writes on the page. Basically, it sounds like a blanket ban on any sort of "watch this ad to play the game" design, and it also extends to in-game ads being tied to rewards like power ups or in-game currency.

I don't think I've ever encountered or heard of a single game engaging in this behavior on Steam, but given its prevalence on other platforms, particularly mobile games, it makes sense for Valve to lay this out as a more preventative measure. Valve is legendarily light touch when it comes to moderating Steam, but in addition to an "I'll know it when I see it" approach to banning offensive content, Valve has explicitly banned NFT and crypto-derived games, and also requires games relying on generative AI to disclose its use. The company clearly has a sense of what it wants PC gaming to look like as far as its influential platform goes.

To be fair to Sony and Arrowhead, it was communicated from the start that such a requirement was meant to be implemented eventually, and at the time, the stakes didn't seem all that high. Many players pointed to the galling exclusion of gamers in countries that can access Steam but not PSN as a reason to resist the imposition, but Sony has largely surrendered its PSN on PC ambitions while still weirdly excluding those countries in Helldivers 2 and its other releases, and players in the global north don't seem too bothered these days.

Let's call a spade a spade: Much of the backlash was because Sony's requirement was annoying, and the supposed "player protection" justification felt insulting when the move was clearly meant to force more users into Sony's PSN ecosystem. Having to juggle online services you wouldn't use if you didn't have to, another company insisting on having your email and other personal information, is always annoying.

But this weekend we saw first-hand that the issue goes much further than that, and PC gamers' capacity for acting annoying when we get annoyed helped us dodge a bullet. Sony's PlayStation Network was completely knocked out for 24 hours, and the company refuses to offer an explanation for what happened. If Sony had held firm on a PSN sign-in for Helldivers 2, it would have been just as borked on PC as it was on console. Ditto for if Sony had retained its log-in requirement for singleplayer games: You could effectively play God of War Ragnarok offline after creating or logging into a PSN account (unless you opted for a handy mod), but just like installing a PS5 disc drive, a PSN outage would have prevented first-time setup of something that simply does not require an internet connection.

Sony does not seem to understand the PC audience. I'd wager it's only being dragged to the platform kicking and screaming by the continued healthy growth of PC gaming and relative stagnation of consoles. But the demands and delays Sony subjects its PC players to smack of condescension to me: A company that believes it is operating from a place of strength, gracing PC gamers with the essential PlayStation exclusives we've been bereft of for so long.

The truth is that Sony has to win us over. There are too many good games on PC to acquiesce to being shackled to a service whose founding principle is charging players extra to go online with games, internet connections, and consoles they've already paid for. One that, 14 years ago, suffered one of the greatest cybersecurity disasters of the 21st century so far. We don't even know what happened to the PlayStation Network between February 7 and 8 yet or how thoroughly it may have been compromised—Sony still won't say. But after reporting on this absolute cluster as it happened, it's clear to me that mandatory sign-ins to extraneous "services" like the PlayStation Network aren't just an annoyance. They are an odious imposition to be avoided at all cost, with genuine risks to the consumer.

At 6 PM CT on February 8, Ask PlayStation tweeted that PSN's services had been restored, and apologized for the inconvenience. Later that night, Ask PlayStation tweeted, "Network services have fully recovered from an operational issue. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank the community for their patience. All PlayStation Plus members will automatically receive an additional five days of service."

Ok, but what happened? Sony failed to offer any official update or communication about the outage from when PSN first went down late on February 7, to when it came back online on the night of February 8. Absent any word or explanation, many commenters⁠—myself included⁠—can't help but remember the disastrous PSN hack of 2011. Rumors abound that this was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against Sony. Longtime developer and video maker Modern Vintage Gamer argued that some of the client-side behavior exhibited by PSN during the outage lends the DDoS theory credence.

It remains to be seen if Sony will offer an official explanation for what happened⁠—were I a PlayStation customer, I would rather have that peace of mind than any compensation for the downtime. Both would be preferable though, to be clear. Meanwhile, Capcom has tweeted that it is considering offering an extended window of play for the Monster Hunter Wilds beta, which was impacted by the downtime. It's unclear if PC players might benefit from this potential extension as well, but I wouldn't hold my breath on that one. We'll just have to be content with not paying an extra subscription to game online on top of just paying for the games, console, and internet access, then having the service go down anyway.

The study focuses on the two most common forms of CAPTCHAs you'll find out in the wild through Google's reCAPTCHAv2: "Invisible" or behavior-based CAPTCHAs which analyze your inputs as you check that "not a robot" box or even surreptitiously as you browse a website, and image-based CAPTCHAs, where you select all the motorcycles, traffic lights, or what have you in images sourced from Google Street View. Both are valuable to Google, with the tracking cookies generated by the former potentially contributing to ad targeting, and data from the latter being applied toward AI model training, either internally at Google or sold to another company.

This experiment did not inform its subjects, and instead added Google's reCAPTCHAv2 to the account creation and password recovery functions of an internal student account system at the university, with the researchers both measuring time to complete the CAPTCHAs and surveying a subset of the 13-month study's 3,600 users about their experience. Predictably, they took more time and surveyed negatively when it came to the more involved image detection CAPTCHAs. The study also noted variations in completion time across education disciplines, experience level, and for whether they were creating or recovering an account.

The researchers took the average completion time of 3.53 seconds across both image and behavior CAPTCHAs and multiplied that against a low-end estimate of 512 billion v1 and v2 reCAPTCHAs completed across the internet between 2010 and 2023, resulting in the following estimations of their impact on our lives:

• 819 million hours spent solving CAPTCHAs.
• $6.1 billion worth of our time at the US federal minimum wage.
• 134 Petabytes of internet bandwidth.
• consuming 7.5 million kWhs of energy.
• which produced 7.5 million pounds of CO2 pollution.
• This one's from me: putting the 819 million hours against the average human lifespan of 79 years, that's 1,182.7 lifetimes spent solving CAPTCHAs.

Comparing the new study's time and accuracy rates to bots, while also looking at previous studies on the increasing capability of automated processes to solve CAPTCHAs, the researchers concluded that bots are now faster than humans at completing reCAPTCHAv2's checkboxes, while they take more time, but are more accurate when it comes to image detection. The researchers also argued that the tracking cookies in fact introduce a new security and privacy risk. Looking at Google's stated value for collections of labeled image detection data and the lifetime value of an individual tracking cookie multiplied by the estimated lifetime amount of reCAPTCHAv2s completed, the researchers came up with the following values for Google:

• $8.75-$32.3 billion for its full reCAPTCHAv2 dataset, which could theoretically be sold multiple times to different vendors.
• A lifetime value of $888 billion for all of reCAPTCHAv2's tracking cookies produced between 2010 and 2023.

"It can be concluded that the true purpose of reCAPTCHAv2 is as a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service," the researchers stated in the final portion of the study, arguing that reCAPTCHA should be deprecated for its lack of genuine contribution to the internet's safety or functionality. Two years on from this study, there's no sign of that happening any time soon.

Sony's only official comment on the matter has been a tweet from the Ask PlayStation support account that reads, "We are aware some users might be currently experiencing issues with PSN," with a link to a network service status page that reports outages in the following services:

• Account Management
• Gaming and Social
• PlayStation Video
• PlayStation Store
• PlayStation Direct

A community note on the Ask PlayStation tweet points out that it fails to capture the full extent of the outage: "some" users as opposed to, apparently, literally every user. The community note also alleges that this may be the result of a DDoS attack, citing Sony support messages shared elsewhere on social media, but that explanation has yet to be confirmed. A pinned moderator comment on the PlayStation subreddit's megathread on the issue notes that there are a number of users spreading "incorrect service information, rumors, and outright lies" in the absence of a full accounting from Sony.

At the time of writing, I can still access streaming services like Netflix and Hulu on my PS4, but I am logged out of PSN and unable to access updates or other services. This issue is also highlighting other PSN dependencies I wouldn't normally consider. Day one updates and DRM checks introduce extra difficulties when trying to game offline, even if you still purchase physical media. User @graham_brn on Twitter has demonstrated how the PS5 Pro's sold-separately disc drive requires a PSN connection for first time setup with the console, potentially locking you out of your physical library entirely should the drive somehow unpair or need to be replaced.

Sony is understandably in crisis mode at the moment, and this outage has fallen on the weekend to boot, but the company's lack of communication definitely isn't helping the environment of panic, confusion, and misinformation among PlayStation customers. We'll know more as Sony works to resolve the issue and finally provide an explanation, but my mind immediately goes to the 23-day PlayStation Network hack and outage back in 2011. Here's hoping this current crisis isn't anywhere near as severe as that legendary cybersecurity boondoggle.

It was revealed via court documents last month that Meta had obtained AI training data from LibGen, a large file sharing database that includes everything from paywalled news and academic articles, to whole books. The prosecution alleges that Meta downloaded over 80 terabytes from LibGen and another so-called "shadow library" by the name of Z-Library. This is, to be clear, internet piracy on a scale that would make a Nintendo lawyer blush, and the lawsuit alleges the emails put in writing "Meta’s decision to take and use copyrighted works without permission that it knew to be pirated, despite clear ethical concerns."

One of the emails in evidence quotes an alleged Meta employee futilely advising that "using pirated material should be beyond our ethical threshold" before arguing that databases like LibGen "are basically like PirateBay or something like that, they are distributing content that is protected by copyright and they're infringing it."

There are repeated examples of emails ascribed to Meta employees flagging the use of LibGen as a concern, either in failed "lone sane man fashion," or in the context of hiding the activity. One researcher proposed only accessing LibGen through a VPN, and later joked that "torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn't feel right 😂."

Meta would ultimately operate in "stealth mode," to quote one AI researcher at the company, concealing the activity by only downloading and seeding the torrents outside official Facebook servers. As an aside: It was real neighborly of them to seed the torrents too! Wonder how good their ratios were.

The prosecution further argues that these discovery documents⁠ suggest that Meta executives up to and including Mark Zuckerberg were aware of the use of pirated material to train AI models at the company. Another detail that stands out to me: The emails filed as evidence indicate that Meta employees believed OpenAI used LibGen for its own models, framing the company's use of the database as a sort of arms race.

If the Internet Archive isn't allowed to loan books as a digital library, I don't think companies like Meta should be allowed to swallow up terabytes of pirated material to train a chatbot that will lie to you about how many planets are in the solar system. In a twist of fate, our international copyright regime looks to be one of the most sturdy bulwarks against an AI future. I'm no fan of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but I say let them fight.

One other thing I just can't escape is how low-rent this all is: Our Silicon Valley thought leaders and mavericks need unprecedented injections of capital in order to… do internet piracy and conquer a new frontier in cheating on your homework? The sheer body of written communication allegedly confirming it all is just the cherry on top of a schadenfreude sundae. "Subject: Forwarded: Re:Re:Re:Re: Crimes." I'm reminded of how Valve was saved from ruin by a similar disregard for opsec on the part of its former publisher Vivendi, or, indeed, that one I Think You Should Leave sketch.

Over these nine months the publisher sold 14.9 billion yen ($97 million) worth of merch, compared to 12.4 billion yen over the same period in 2023, and only one of the three main drivers is pure and innocent. Square Enix credits the year-on-year increase in sales to a Dragon Quest set, a Tifa Lockheart action figure, and a wildly expensive three-feet tall statue of Nier: Automata's 2B.

OK: Own up. Who has been buying the $2,600 Masterline Deluxe 2B statue? Or even the regular version at a mere $2,400? You're all going to go blind.

The Tifa Lockheart figure is based on the original game's character design rather than the Rebirth version, and next to 2B is a relative snip at $130. For an action figure! One that of course boasts 23 points of articulation, "Tifa's signature waist-length black hair tied at the end, as well as her gloves, boots, and suspenders all faithfully recreated in 3D to instill a sense of nostalgia."

All very cool. It's the 2B statues where things get a little indecent: The basic version doesn't look so bad at first glance, outside of that eye-watering price tag, being basically 2B in her game costume… though then you notice it does feature her skirt being wafted up to expose a good view of her bottom.

It's the deluxe version that is just straight-up a bit late night TV. 2B gets a swappable head part with her face exposed, and a swappable body that ditches the skirt completely for a body suit that's bordering on lingerie. You and I both know what Square Enix means in the item's official description when it says the deluxe statue "includes a variety of parts that bring out the character's appeal to the fullest."

The description goes on to elaborate that the statue includes "a head part without combat goggles, a right arm part with the 'Virtuous Contract' in hand and pointed down, and a lower body part in self-destruct mode." That's why she doesn't have a skirt! Self-destruct mode!

Square Enix ends by saying the statue "combines power, presence, and beauty." Sure it does you dirty sods. I suppose a horned up statue's still better than the Disco Elysium poverty chic plastic bag, though at least with that you can carry your shopping home.

It's been a rough year for Warner. Hogwarts Legacy was a huge success, but the multiplayer Harry Potter game Quidditch Champions hasn't added up to much—there are currently just 90 people playing it on Steam—while Multiversus fizzled out quickly and recently halted development, and Suicide Squad also tanked badly and threw in the towel after just one year of post-launch content. Those failures cost a lot of money: In November 2024, Warner announced a $100 million loss "due to the underperforming releases, primarily MultiVersus this quarter," which landed on top of a $200 million loss driven by the failure of Suicide Squad.

The future is not much brighter, according to the Bloomberg report. Sources say the company has already put more than $100 million into the Wonder Woman game announced in 2021, but it was reportedly rebooted and given a new director in early 2024 and remains years away from release, if it makes it to release at all—apparently even that's not a certainty at this point. WB Games Montreal had apparently hoped to work on a major update to Gotham Knights—another superhero flop—but were told no; the studio eventually began work on a game based on the Flash, but that was scrapped after the 2023 film bombed at the box office.

The one clear bright spot amidst all this confusion is that Rocksteady, having tried its hand in the live service shooter genre with Suicide Squad, is now looking to return to the work its known for. Rocksteady earned acclaim for its singleplayer Batman: Arkham games, and as a side note each of the Arkham games, the most recent of which is nearly 10 years old, currently has a higher concurrent player count on Steam than Suicide Squad. But that ambition is years away from fruition.

Numerous sources laid the blame for Warner's videogame troubles on a lack of coherent direction under the leadership of CEO David Haddad, who announced in January that he's stepping down. JB Perrette, CEO and president of global streaming and games for Warner Bros. Discovery, said the company will "get right back to profitability in 2025," but acknowledged it will take longer to get back to levels of profitability the company expects.

"It will take two to three years to rebuild, reset to levels we want to be at," Perrette said. "But the bounce back is immediate as far as going from loss-making to profitability."

So there's a light of hope for fans of the Arkham games that maybe lessons have been learned, and some proper new Bat-action will be in hand someday. It's no guarantee, of course: Recall that Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson very recently indicated after the failure of Dragon Age: The Veilguard to meet expectations—not a flop, just not as big a number as the C-suite wanted—that live service games are what people really want, and it's possible that whoever takes over from Haddad will reach the same conclusion, especially if we see one or two more breakout live service hits over the next year or so. Whatever happens, the only thing we can say for sure at this point is that it's not going to happen anytime soon.

"You don’t need artificial intelligence to steal my soul. You can already do it for nickels and dimes with good ideas and talent," Ford said in response to a question about digital likeness rights, alluding to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and Troy Baker's performance. "He did a brilliant job, and it didn’t take AI to do it."

It's nice to hear Ford's continued praise for the game and Baker's performance, but it feels like there's a tacit criticism in there as well: "You don't need AI to steal my soul, you can already steal my soul." I don't think the dig was necessarily aimed at Troy Baker or even MachineGames, but rather our culture-wide inability to let characters, fictional settings, and even individual performances go. "There won’t be any need for me. There’s somebody behind me. Doing what I did," Ford argued, "And that’s the attraction. It’s what’s coming."

"My plan is to keep working behind that face till I don’t care what happens anymore," Ford added, seemingly unconcerned whether his estate or descendants receive royalties for any future use of his likeness. "I’m selling that piece by piece while I’m alive. I’ve been compensated. You don’t need to worry about me."

It's a philosophical perspective that I appreciate, and Ford seems optimistic that the quality, power, and genuine connection offered by real, human performances will win out over AI slop. I think I agree⁠—I definitely want to believe that's the case⁠—but until it actually happens, actors below Ford's pay grade are going to be better off hedging their bets. Videogame voice actors in SAG-AFTRA remain on strike against major US publishers, with questions of rights and payment related to training AI models with vocal performances a main sticking point in negotiations.

Two things right off the start: No, this is not a reborn E3, and no, I didn't spell it wrong. Iicon is a snappy abbreviation for the Interactive Innovation Conference, and its goal is to provide attendees "exclusive access to visionary keynotes, engaging discussions and workshops, and elite networking opportunities with executives shaping the future of entertainment, business and technology." Those executives will come from companies including Amazon Games, Disney, Electronic Arts, Epic Games, Microsoft, Nintendo of America, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Square Enix, Take-Two Interactive, Ubisoft and Warner Bros.

"The Entertainment Software Association and its member companies are among the innovators and leaders shaping the future of culture, business and human connection," ESA chairman Doug Bowser said. "It’s a natural role for ESA to host and support an event that fosters an open exchange of new ideas with our peer industry leaders.

"Iicon is bringing together changemakers from across industries to envision how the strengths of the interactive entertainment industry can break entirely new ground."

It doesn't sound like much fun in the way that E3 was, even in the days before the public was allowed to attend. There was an excitement to those events, as game and hardware makers showcased their wares to throngs of journalists, and we all eagerly read about what they saw in our favorite magazines or websites. And even though E3 was a fading star by the time it opened its doors to the public in 2016, there was genuine enthusiasm for it among gamers who wanted to know more about the next big (or even small) thing.

Iicon, by comparison, sounds more like executives talking to executives about executive stuff: Industry trends, share prices, how to make more games with fewer developers, maybe a little M&A, that sort of stuff.

But that's really a better fit for what the ESA does. Its mission, according to the ESA website, is "to help expand and protect the innovative and creative marketplace for the videogame industry here in the United States," through actions like "educating policymakers and regulators about the power of play and videogames' positive impact on society."

It also works as a lobby group for the industry as a whole: Earlier this week, for instance, the ESA issued a statement criticizing US president Donald Trump's proposed tariffs on products coming from Canada, Mexico, and China, saying they "would negatively impact hundreds of millions of Americans and would harm the industry’s significant contributions to the US economy. Last year it also lobbied against libraries and educational institutions being able to provide remote access to games for research purposes, claiming that such easy access to classic games "would present a serious risk to an important market."

Iicon clearly has a very different mandate than that of consumer-focused events like The Game Awards or PAX, one aimed primarily at investors and regulators rather than, well, you. Think of it this way: Phil Spencer might wear jeans and a t-shirt when he's up on stage with Geoff Keighley, but you better believe he's going to be in a suit and tie if he shows up at iicon.

So, setting aside the tiresome tradespeak—iicon will provide "a key opportunity to drive innovation and foster collaboration across sectors"—the conference makes sense, at least as far as a justification for the ongoing existence of the ESA. What makes less sense is it being held in Las Vegas just two months after DICE, another businessy, industry-only event. But the ESA doesn't control DICE, which may be exactly why it's aiming to jam another conference into the arena.

One estimate says the global videogame industry is set to surpass $300 billion in revenues by 2027, and it's a very normal and unremarkable thing for big players in such a lucrative business to get together and plot out the future. But will it mean much for the rest of us? Are we likely to see Keanu Reeves walk out on stage and tell the crowd, "You're breathtaking?" Probably not, no.

If, despite all this, you're still eager to attend and see what's cooking, you've got until April 2026 to become one of the "visionaries, thought leaders and innovators across industries that intersect with interactive entertainment" the ESA will be letting through the doors.

Project Ethos seemed OK when we previewed it in October 2024, if not especially remarkable or original—although as the studio said at the time, it was still in early development. But the timing of the reveal was inauspicious, coming just over a month after another colorful hero shooter, Concord, met with disaster. It's not an exact parallel—Concord wasn't free to play, for one thing—but the hero shooter genre in general is very crowded, and the mere addition of "but with a twist" to a game that otherwise looks pretty indistinct isn't likely to get you very far. And while it's hardly a precise metric, I think it's fair to say that Project Ethos hasn't exactly generated a lot of buzz.

Two sources told Kotaku that unimpressive showing was the reason for Condrey's removal, although for now at least work on the game is continuing, and Condrey is seemingly still involved in an undefined advisory role.

"We are grateful to Michael Condrey for the dedication, passion and work ethic it took to build an incredible team and shape the vision of 31st Union," a 2K spokesperson told PC Gamer, sort of but not exactly confirming that Condrey is out. "Michael will be transitioning his role in the short term to focus on advising on the future of Project Ethos. We remain very committed to the forward path for Project Ethos and the people and culture of the 31st Union studio."

It's also worth noting that 2K Games parent company Take-Two Interactive announced layoffs and the cancellation of multiple projects in April 2024, which among other things saw the closures of Kerbal Space Program 2 developer Intercept Games and Rollerdrome studio Roll7, and the sale of its Private Division publishing label. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said when the Private Division sale was confirmed that the company is a "top-ten hit maker," and that smaller-scale releases like Obsidian's The Outer Worlds, which was published by Private Division, are "not big in the context of our core intellectual properties at 2K and Rockstar," even when they're successes. If Take-Two now views Project Ethos through that same lens, it may have decided that changes need to happen.

We may learn more about Condrey's reported ouster and the future of Project Ethos tomorrow, when 2K Games parent company Take-Two Interactive shares its quarterly financial results. We'll keep you posted.

"For several years now, we have watched our industry undergo significant change," the studio wrote in a message posted on the Iron Galaxy website. "So many of our friends and colleagues who work in game development have suffered a series of painful adjustments. We’ve seen talented people lose their jobs. Inspiring companies have closed their doors. Our own game, Rumbleverse, was met with a premature sunset.

"All the while at Iron Galaxy, we’ve been making sacrifices to keep our teams intact. It has been our hope that we could emerge from this long winter alongside all the teammates who have come to work with us over the years. Today, we’re making the unfortunate announcement that we have run out of room to maneuver amidst this slow recovery.

"Today, Iron Galaxy is parting ways with some of our developers and support staff. In total, we have reduced our employee base by 66 people. This was a means of last resort for us. It’s a measure we do not take lightly to enable our long-term survival."

Iron Galaxy was founded in 2008 and released its first game, Wreckateer, in 2012. It followed that with Divekick, support for Killer Instinct, Extinction, and its most recent original game, Rumbleverse, a "wrestling battle royale" that launched in 2022.

Rumbleverse lasted only six months before it was taken offline in February 2023, but Iron Galaxy has also worked as a co-developer and support studio on numerous high-profile games over the years including Skyrim, Overwatch, Uncharted, Fallout: 76, and Diablo 3, which then-co-CEO Adam Boyes said in a 2024 interview with GamesIndustry "creates more of a spider web sort of support system," and that "we try to have a myriad of partners and projects to create a bit more stability."

In that same interview, Boyes also emphasized the studio's approach to transparency with its employees, including monthly Q&A sessions with Iron Galaxy's co-CEOs. "You can't hide from the realities of what's happening in the industry," he said. "If you're not talking about it, you've got your head in the sand, and if you're doing that, what are you? What kind of a leader are you?

"If [layoffs] ever occur at Iron Galaxy, it's not because it came out of the blue. You're going to see all of the decisions that we made along the way and we're going to share with [employees]. So if heaven forbid that ever does occur, then at least [staffers] saw the process."

And now, less than a year later, here we are. Despite Iron Galaxy's quest for stability, the cuts feel almost inevitable at this point: It comes at the start of the third year of an industry-wide bloodbath that's put tens of thousands of people at game companies of all sizes out of work. 2023 was a tough year, 2024 was even worse, and so far 2025 isn't looking like a turnaround is in the offing: January alone saw significant cuts at Piranha Games, Ubisoft, Phoenix Labs, and BioWare. It's bad enough that even Mythic Quest, the Rob McElhenney-headed comedy series about a fictional MMO and the studio who makes it, touches on the topic.

Boyes announced last August that he would be leaving Iron Galaxy at the end of the year, which in hindsight could've been one part of the company's maneuvering to try to avoid layoffs. "An industry that I love is suffering. My new inspirations are to find ways to help people who make games solve their biggest problems," Boyes wrote at the time; he recently launched a consultancy business with a similar mission statement.

Despite the layoffs, Iron Galaxy said its "capabilities remain intact," and that it will "continue to explore new ways to support an industry we love and keep working towards its ongoing recovery."

Gates credits his mother Mary with his philanthropic focus, because alongside his early successes she regularly told him that "with wealth came the responsibility to give it away." Mary also constantly tried to sand off Gates' less sociable side: She was once so fed-up with the mess in his room that she began confiscating any clothing she found on the floor, and charging the young entrepreneur 25 cents to get it back. The young Bill Gates' response? "I started wearing fewer clothes." But despite his rebellions, Gates now thinks "the crucible of my ambition was warmed through that relationship."

Gates estimates that he's put around $60 billion into The Gates Foundation, which since 2006 has also received enormous contributions from Warren Buffett, and even such an awesome sum has made little discernible difference to his life.

"I made no personal sacrifice," says Gates. "I didn't order less hamburgers or less movies." Bloomberg's Billionaires Index estimates Gates' total fortune to be in the region of $160 billion, the vast majority of which will be donated, with a small amount reserved for Gates' three children: "In absolute, they'll do well, in percentage terms it's not a gigantic number."

In his new memoir Gates for the first time says that, if he was growing up today, he reckons he'd be diagnosed on the autism spectrum. The book mentions his ability to hyperfocus, his obsessive behaviours, his poor social skills, and his sister Kristi recalls "he was not a normal kid… he would sit in his room and chew pencils down to the lead."

While Gates is happy to admit that might be the case, he doesn't see the point in seeking a formal diagnosis at this stage in his life. "The positive characteristics for my career have been more beneficial than the deficits have been a problem for me."

Getting back to the present day, Gates is asked about how his fellow tech billionaires have been cosying up to President Donald Trump: Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg are among those to have donated to and, in some cases, get actively involved with the new administration. "You can be cynical" about this, says Gates, but says he had a three-hour dinner meeting with Trump in December "because he's making decisions about global health and how we help poor countries, which is a big focus of mine now."

Asked about the current struggle to distinguish between truth and junk information online, most recently brought into focus by Meta's decision to abandon fact-checking, Gates says he's not "that impressed" by what's going on but also doesn't have the answers. "I don't personally know how you draw that line, but I'm worried that we're not handling that as well as we should."

What about someone like Robert F. Kennedy Junior becoming US health secretary, with his wacky ideas about vaccines? A straight answer: "He's misleading people."

Gates reckons part of the problem is the type of online networks we've constructed. "Social networking, even more than video gaming, can absorb your time and make you worry about other people approving you," says Gates. He also thinks Australia's new ban on social media for teens under the age of 16 is "a smart thing."

The BBC interview The Making of Bill Gates is available on iPlayer in the UK, and sees Gates returning to some of his early Seattle haunts to reminisce about his childhood. Source Code: My Beginnings is available now.

"Videogames are one of the most popular and beloved forms of entertainment for Americans of all ages," the ESA said. "Tariffs on videogame devices and related products would negatively impact hundreds of millions of Americans and would harm the industry’s significant contributions to the US economy. We look forward to working with the Administration and Congress to find ways to sustain the economic growth supported by our sector."

Videogames themselves are largely distributed digitally these days, especially on PC, and so are mostly exempt from the tariffs. But videogame hardware—the PCs, consoles, and peripherals we use to actually play those games—is not, and the impact on prices could be significant. We said last week that if US president Donald Trump follows through on his threat to place tariffs possibly as high as 100% on chips coming from Taiwan, "an RTX 5090 for $2,000 will seem cheap" in the aftermath.

Even a lower rate, like the 25% planned tariffs on products originating from Canada and Mexico, would result in a serious bump. Trump said when he announced the proposed tariffs on incoming chips that manufacturers like Nvidia and AMD are "not gonna wanna pay a 25, 50 or even a 100% tax" on imported goods, but the reality is they won't: They'll just attach the increased costs to the product price and let consumers eat it.

And there is a lot of money on the table. The ESA said in January that "total videogame sales" hit $58.7 billion in 2024; most of that was "videogame content," but hardware and console sales accounted for $4.9 billion (down from $6.5 billion in 2023) while access sales grew from $3 billion to $3.2 billion. What happens in the current environment is anybody's guess: Even if the tariffs are eventually walked back, the uncertainty left in their wake will almost certainly have a chilling effect on the industry.

"My initial 2025 outlook for US video game industry consumer spending (without tariffs/trade wars) was $61.5B, +4.8% compared to 2024," Circana (formerly NPD) executive director Mat Piscatella said on Bluesky. "Going to have to reassess if/when we ever get clarity on the madness that is this situation right now."

Unfortunately, the ESA said nothing about how exactly it proposes to address the problem, perhaps because there is no addressing it. Along with launching military action against Mexico, annexing Greenland, and denying the existence of trans people, initiating a trade war with the rest of the planet is one of the Trump administration's tentpole ideas, and given the utter lack of a rational justification for it, it seems unlikely that rational responses are going to add up to much.

Ironically, just hours before the tariffs were set to start, Trump changed his mind—temporarily, at least—and "paused" their implementation for 30 days. The ESA declined to comment.

A deadline had been set for 5 pm ET last Friday, January 31, for removal of this material. Asked if government websites would be closed while such action was taken, President Trump told reporters, "I don't know. It doesn't sound like a bad idea to me. I think DEI is dead, so [if] they want to scrub the websites, that's OK with me."

Trump's targeting of government DEI initiatives has been popular among his supporters, while rights advocates say the administration is undoing decades of work in combating discrimination. This particular move follows various government websites disappearing since the new administration took power, examples being ReproductiveRights.gov, which provided information on reproductive health care and sexual health, TargetHIV, which provided information on the disease, and Youth.gov, a site focused on youth aid programs.

"Decades worth of taxpayer-funded reports and analysis gone in an instant," a USAID staffer told Wired, adding that some employees were trying to archive material while others had been locked out of the system entirely. "We have no idea what is happening behind the scenes or what will be back, when, and in what form." USAID focuses on overseas humanitarian aid and public health initiatives, and has fallen foul of another Trump executive order reviewing "all foreign assistance programs to ensure they are efficient and consistent with US foreign policy under the America First agenda."

This follows federal agencies being given 60 days to eliminate DEI-focused job roles and programs, alongside which federal employees have been ordered to use certain language (such as "sex" instead of "gender") and remove pronouns from email signatures.

The website 404 Media has focused on data.gov, a repository of US government open data, which it says has lost over 2,000 datasets since Trump's inauguration. What is particularly notable about this example is how targeted it is in places: The datasets being targeted in this way are overwhelmingly ones linked to the Department of Energy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of the Interior, NASA, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

But it's too early to say anything definitive about what's truly being scrubbed for political reasons, with 404 paraphrasing archivists working on analysing the material as saying that "while some of the deletions are surely malicious information scrubbing, some are likely routine artifacts of an administration change, and they are working to determine which is which."

"I assume some of those datasets in data.gov have bad urls to old agency pages that no longer exist," says James Jacobs, a Stanford Libraries researcher. "Some of it is probably link rot and content drift and some of it is no doubt Trump admin policy driven (e.g. anything having to do with DEI)."

A collaborative project called the End of Term Web Archive has been preserving US government websites before each new administration since 2008, and continues that mission during this transition. The need for such an archive highlights one of the biggest problems of our new technological era, that the internet is stuffed with information, but it has a habit of disappearing or being overwritten, whether for political reasons or otherwise—software and games are prone to copyright limbo or just being lost to time. Organizations like Internet Archive, an End of Term Web Archive collaborator, are thus valuable to archivists, historians, reporters, and anyone who wants to play an abandoned DOS game.But then the Internet Archive was also recently hit with a copyright lawsuit.

The politics of all this aside, it does seem that the Trump administration is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It frankly seems madness to make it harder for Americans to access information about diseases like HIV or reproductive health care, and who really thinks targeting youth aid programs is a good idea?

We can say for sure that the Trump administration is making previously public information and government data either harder to access, or removing it from the internet entirely. But this is happening so quickly and on such a scale in terms of volume of information that it is hard to say right now exactly what is gone, what's been preserved, and what is just normal entropy.

The US Attorney's Office for the Central District of California announced on Friday that Akemann has agreed to plead guilty to "one count of unsafe operation of an unmanned aircraft," which carries a maximum prison sentence of one year. Video of Akemann captured outside the courthouse by news media matches the Treyarch co-founder's appearance.

According to the US Attorney's Office, Akemann launched the drone from the top of a Santa Monica parking garage and lost sight of it at least a mile-and-a-half away before it collided with the plane.

The plane's two crew members were unharmed, but the aircraft had to be temporarily taken out of service due to the damage, an "approximately 3-inch-by-6-inch hole in the left wing." The repair bill was at least $65,169.

Because of the firefighting efforts, the FAA had prohibited drone-flying near the wildfires.

"This defendant recklessly flew an aircraft into airspace where first responders were risking their lives in an attempt to protect lives and property," said Acting United States Attorney Joseph T McNally. "This damage caused to the Super Scooper is a stark reminder that flying drones during times of emergency poses an extreme threat to personnel trying to help people and compromises the overall ability of police and fire to conduct operations. As this case demonstrates, we will track down drone operators who violate the law and interfere with the critical work of our first responders."

As part of his plea agreement, Akemann will pay the Quebec government for the damage to the plane and complete 150 hours of community service. The US Attorney's Office will recommend a reduced offense level in return for his guilty plea.

Akemann is "deeply sorry for the mistake he made," according to a statement from his attorneys, Glen T Jonas and Vicki Podberesky.

"He accepts responsibility for his grave error in judgment, and is cooperating with the government in effort to make amends," the statement reads. "There are a number of mitigating factors that will come to light during the court proceedings including Mr Akemann's reliance on the DJI Drone's geo fencing safeguard feature and the failure of that feature."

Akemann co-founded Treyarch in 1996, and in 2001 the studio was purchased by Activision, which morphed it into a Call of Duty house. Akemann then co-founded The Workshop, which supported development of Gears of War 4, XCOM 2, and a few other major games. That studio became Skydance Interactive after being acquired by Skydance Media, and Akemann was president of the division for a time.

After multiple sources reported the change in direction, Beahm himself triumphantly announced the remonetization in a message posted to X:

YouTube confirmed its decision in a statement provided to PC Gamer. "Dr Disrespect was previously suspended from the YouTube Partner Program for violations of our Creator Responsibility policies," a YouTube spokesperson said. "Creators who are suspended from this program can reapply for access, and after careful review of the channel’s recent activity, we’ve reinstated it. If there are further violations, we’ll take appropriate action."

Content creators whose channels are demonetized are allowed to apply for reinstatement after they've addressed the content or behavior that resulted in the suspension, according to YouTube, and a green light was given in this case after the aforementioned "careful review" of Beahm's channel activity. But Beahm wasn't demonetized for his channel content, but for violations of YouTube's Creator Responsibility policy, specifically the allegations—which, again, he confirmed—of inappropriate DMs with a minor.

The natural question, then, is: How has he addressed that? Aside from acknowledging that the allegations were accurate, Beahm's only public actions have been to deny any illegal activity and paint himself as the victim of a behind-the-scenes conspiracy at Twitch, where he remains banned. There have been no further claims of inappropriate behavior on Beahm's part that I'm aware of, so I suppose one could call the situation "addressed," as far as it goes.

But carrying on with business as usual while pinning the blame for your misfortunes on others and insisting you didn't really do anything illegal does nothing to "address" the initial violation, and that leads me to question YouTube's real commitment to its policies. Saying you want to "protect the YouTube community" with your rules is nice, but remonetizing a streamer who makes a point of showing no contrition for his behavior sends a very different message. Twitch felt Beahm's actions were egregious enough to show him the door permanently; YouTube's response pales by comparison.

Of course, one might also note that Beahm remains a major draw, and is attracting a significant audience on YouTube competitor Rumble, which he's been actively promoting on his social media channels. Despite everything, where Beahm goes, an awful lot of viewers—and money—follow.

In a bizarre twist of timing, Beahm's return to monetized YouTube happened on the same day that Midnight Society, the studio he co-founded in 2021 with former Call of Duty creative strategist Robert Bowling, and Halo 5 multiplayer designer Quinn Delhoyo, announced that it is closing down without releasing its in-development extraction shooter Deadrop. Midnight Society parted ways with Beahm in June 2024 after the allegations of his inappropriate messages first came to light.

But now there's a problem: In the past six months, the project's co-founder and longtime leader has alienated large chunks of its user and developer base, culminating in courtroom battles and repeated public spats. The reason, when boiled down? Competition.

Matt Mullenweg, who started the WordPress project in 2003 and still leads it, has long sold WordPress services through his company Automattic. The company also manages a host of side businesses—like the social network Tumblr, the podcast app Pocket Casts, and the messaging app Beeper—but WordPress is Automattic's baby, and Mullenweg is very protective of it.

Mullenweg has been called a "benevolent dictator for life," a humorous term used to describe open-source project leaders who shape a project's long-term vision. But the fact that he also makes money from it clearly complicates things, because WordPress helps a lot of other people make money—and sometimes, Mullenweg gets upset about it.

Recently, Mullenweg publicly called out WP Engine, a fellow WordPress hosting provider that focuses on large businesses and marketing agencies, accusing it of confusing branding and exploitative practices. ("My own mother was confused and thought WP Engine was an official thing," he wrote at one point.)

WP Engine, upset by Mullenweg's public outbursts, sued—and late last year, it won a preliminary injunction against Mullenweg and Automattic in a federal lawsuit.

Mullenweg's actions against WP Engine have had the drip-drip of a soap opera, while leaving lots of individual users in the middle—some of whom are stuck maintaining complex sites on a platform laden with tension and drama.

Here's how things started, and where they stand today.

2003-2017: The Early Days

The WordPress project dates to 2003, after a 19-year-old Mullenweg, joined by Mike Little, decided to fork b2/cafelog, a precursor that had slowed down its development. Mullenweg saw an opportunity to modernize it, which led the fork to quickly usurp both its predecessor and dominate the blogging community at the time.

This proved the catalyst for the proliferation of businesses around the WordPress ecosystem. Many of these hosting providers were built around smaller-scale sites, however—the blogs WordPress was originally associated with. Large businesses were interested in WordPress, but early on, it wasn't a fit.

That was the niche WP Engine was launched to fill. Dating to 2010, WP Engine offered "managed" WordPress hosting, meaning it handled the nitty-gritty server stuff for website owners—especially important when working with a large or highly valuable domain. Automattic, notably, invested in the venture in 2011, the first led by its A8c Ventures offshoot.

During the 2010s, WordPress was second only to Linux in prominence and name recognition in the open-source ecosystem—something both Automattic and WP Engine benefited from.

2018-2024: Tensions rise between WordPress and WP Engine

Over time, WP Engine's business grew more prominent, and was often seen by corporations and marketing agencies as the preferred choice for hosting websites without a lot of frustration. While other companies, including Automattic's own WordPress VIP offering, supported the ecosystem, WP Engine's ease of management made it a favorite among high-value customers.

That led to a significant investment by the private equity firm Silver Lake in 2018.

And that investment, marked at $250 million, eventually became a major point of contention for Mullenweg. In Mullenweg's view, WP Engine failed to invest some of its success back into WordPress. (Under most open-source licenses, there is no requirement to support the project, but for large companies, not pitching in is seen as poor form.)

Mullenweg's frustrations reportedly simmered in behind-the-scenes negotiations—until one day last fall, when they exploded at a WordPress community event.

In his WordCamp US presentation, based on a blog post he published around the same time, he made clear he was ready to make waves. It literally carried the title, "WordPress Co-Founder Matt Mullenweg's Spiciest WordCamp Talk Ever!"

Mullenweg's beef leaned on WordPress' trademark, which he said WP Engine used without contributing significantly to WordPress' core, as well as changes that WP Engine made to its implementation that differed from the open-source project.

"Silver Lake doesn't give a dang about your open-source ideals, it just wants return on capital," Mullenweg said on the stage. "So it's at this point that I ask everyone in the WordPress Community to go vote with your wallet."

That was edgy enough, given that WP Engine sponsored the event. But in a cease-and-desist released days later, WP Engine and its law firm claimed Mullenweg had been using the event to shake down a licensing deal said to be in the tens of millions per year.

"When his outrageous financial demands were not met, Mr. Mullenweg carried out his threats by making repeated false claims disparaging WP Engine to its employees, its customers, and the world," the document stated.

Mullenweg, for his part, says the action came after failed negotiations and concerns about WP Engine's brand creating customer confusion.

"Finally, I drew a line in the sand, which they have now leapt over," he wrote on his blog.

Fall 2024: Things get silly, then litigious

From that starting point, things got out of hand almost immediately, with users and open-source contributors caught in the middle. Mullenweg cut WP Engine's access to WordPress.org—a repository similar to an app store for themes and plugins. In the process, he revealed that he personally owned the website, rather than the nonprofit WordPress Foundation.

He pressured WP Engine's customers to leave the platform, while publicly claiming WP Engine launched a smear campaign against him. But many community members felt the opposite was happening.

Throughout October 2024, stories of longtime contributors getting banned from Slack channels or voluntarily quitting weren't uncommon.

While tweeting and Slacking through it, Mullenweg supported his case in lengthy interviews with streamers ThePrimeagen and Theo Browne. Those appearances, as well as Mullenweg's online interactions on various social platforms, became screenshot fodder for WP Engine's legal case.

"Because WPE has effectively lost control of its ability to maintain its code on Wordpress.org, users and customers of WPE will have outdated and/or potentially vulnerable WPE plugins," the lawsuit stated.

Things weren't any less messy internally at Automattic. Across multiple rounds of buyouts, nearly 10 percent of the company departed, with anonymous departing employees quoted in 404 Media raising questions about Mullenweg's management style.

"He clearly has no clue what people care about or how the community has contributed to the success of WordPress," one employee told the outlet. "It very clearly shows how out of touch he is with everyday reality."

While many departing employees did not speak publicly for fear of retribution, a retired Automatic executive, Kellie Peterson, used her prominent voice to speak for concerned former employees.

"My main motivation right now is to help protect the WordPress community," she said in a video targeted at departing employees.

Winter 2024: What the lawsuit hath wrought (so far)

Mullenweg responded to the lawsuit by launching increasingly vindictive attacks, including barring a popular plugin maintained by WP Engine, Advanced Custom Fields, from the WordPress.org directory on security grounds, and replacing it with an open-source fork, Secure Custom Fields. The company also barred WP Engine employees from signing into the WordPress community website, requiring users to check a box next to the statement, "I am not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise." (These actions showed that, despite outward appearances, Automattic's business directly influences the WordPress open-source project.)

Most surprising of all: Automattic launched a tracker of departing WP Engine customers, with many going to its first-party WP Engine competitor Pressable, which offered a discount to WP Engine refugees.

These actions and others ultimately were cited in a preliminary injunction, granted in December, that restored WP Engine's access to WordPress. Federal judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin centered the customer in her decision.

"Those who have relied on the WordPress' stability, and the continuity of support from for-fee service providers who have built businesses around WordPress, should not have to suffer the uncertainty, losses, and increased costs of doing business attendant to the parties' current dispute," she wrote.

While Mullenweg clearly was not happy about it, he emphasized he would comply with the order.

"I'm disgusted and sickened by being legally forced to provide free labor and services to @wpengine, a dangerous precedent that should chill every open source maintainer," he tweeted.

2025: Where things stand now

At this point, the effective outcome of the preliminary injunction is that the 41-year-old Mullenweg, for basically the first time in his adult life, is taking the pedal off the gas when it comes to WordPress. His company announced earlier this month that while it "remains deeply invested in the WordPress platform," it would stop investing more than what's absolutely required by a contributor covenant, slowing down Automattic's open-source contributions from thousands of reported hours per week to the rough equivalent of one full-time employee.

"This legal action diverts significant time and energy that could otherwise be directed toward supporting WordPress's growth and health," the company wrote earlier this month.

The battle has taken a toll on Automattic's valuation. Meanwhile, WP Engine and its users once again have access to the open-source project's centralized theme and plugin libraries, but their future access to the platform is uncertain.

(The infamous checkbox remained, but amusingly, it now has people approvingly check the phrase "pineapple is delicious on pizza.")

In the middle are all the people who host websites on WordPress—among them gaming enthusiasts, programmers, retailers, anyone you can imagine that hosts a website—who have been caught in the middle of a conflict between the company that manages their software and a company that primarily develops that software in the open-source ecosystem.

For the first time in nearly 20 years, WordPress no longer feels like a sure bet if you need to get a website online.

The actor had travelled to Atlanta, where he was scheduled to host a benefit event for the National Alzheimer's Foundation. But when he didn't appear at the event, his wife Kim Johnson phoned the hotel where he was staying, where security discovered him unconscious, and medical technicians struggled to find a pulse. A GoFundMe page for Johnson's medical bills revealed he had been placed in a coma. Johnson has since emerged from that coma, as he explains in a video uploaded to the GoFundMe page:

"Rumours of my demise. Well, they weren't exaggerated. It was very close. Very close," Johnson says in the video. "But I'm still here. I'm still here because my wife decided to call the hotel where I was staying, doing announcing for the Alzheimer's association, and had my son call security [to] find out that I was nearly dead. They took me to the hospital, put me in a coma."

Johnson's GoFundMe was put together by his wife and friends Bill Glasser and Shari Elliker, and has thus far raised $175,413. "I found out there's a lot of love in this world I didn't know was out there. And I'm grateful to each and every one of you." Johnson also thanks the National Alzheimer's association for helping his family get to Atlanta, and Ted Leonsis, chairman of the parent company for the Washington Capitals (for which Johnson is the announcer) for donating $25,000 to the GoFundMe.

"I love you all. And I'm not going anywhere. It's going to be a while as I work my way back. But I'm coming back. I look forward to seeing you very soon."

Johnson has had a wide-ranging acting career, including roles on TV shows like Veep and The Wire, as well as radio broadcasting and his announcement work for the Capitals. But he's best known in the gaming community for lending his voice to Bethesda RPG characters like Lucien Lachance, the cheese-loving god Sheogorath, and of course, all of Oblivion's Imperial guards. Donations to Johnson's GoFundMe can be made here.

If you're looking for an actual reason as to why Trump wants to do this, I suggest looking up the theme song of Team America: World Police. "America will reclaim its rightful place as the greatest, most powerful, most respected nation on Earth, inspiring the awe and admiration of the entire world," Trump said in his inaugural address on January 20. "A short time from now, we are going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America."

This has somewhat inadvertently become a tech story after poor old Google Maps got caught right in the middle. The name change for the Gulf of Mexico and Mount Denali (another Trump bugbear, he's renamed it Mount McKinley) will be applied once its Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) is updated:

"When official names vary between countries, Maps users see their official local name," says Google. "Everyone in the rest of the world sees both names. That applies here too."

Mexico has decided it's had quite enough of this, and now Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has written to Google asking that the firm reconsider its decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico in Google Maps. She argues that the US cannot legally change the entire basin's name because the UN convention on the Law of the Sea says a country's sovereign territory only extends 12 nautical miles out.

"[The name change] could only correspond to the 12 nautical miles away from the coastlines of the United States of America," said Sheinbaum at a press conference showing the letter. "It cannot apply to the rest, in this case, the Gulf of Mexico. This is what we explained in detail to Google."

Sheinbaum has previously said Google should not respond to "the mandate of a country" over re-naming "an international sea" and then clearly decided that, if everyone else was clowning around, she may as well join in. "By the way, we are also going to ask for Mexican America to appear on the map," Sheinbaum joked, referring to her suggestion that North America become known as "América Mexicana."

My suspicion is that the Gulf of Mexico is going to remain just that for the majority of the world's population, while the Gulf of America will be a short-lived cause celebre that everyone forgets about in a few years except historians and Wikipedia editors. I'm not going to get into the entire history of this minor ocean's name, other than to note that it's first called the Gulf of Mexico in a map dated 1550 and a written account of 1552. There have been other names over time (though "Gulf of America" is notably absent) but, since the 17th century, the Gulf of Mexico has been by far the most common name.

But you can never say never with someone like Trump, and he does seem to have a weirdly determined interest in this rather nationalistic little play.

"For us it is still the Gulf of Mexico," says Sheinbaum. "And for the entire world it is still the Gulf of Mexico." As for Google Maps… sometimes, the only winning move is not to play.

This isn't necessarily out of nowhere. As quite accurately called by consultant and former BioWare vet Mark Darrah, almost prophetically, this marks the first time the studio's only had one major project to focus on. He rather optimistically stated that these devs would find their way to other EA studios, and that the challenge would be involved in trying to get them back. Turns out, he was partly right: A lot of them are just gone entirely.

Regardless of my thoughts on the game's writing, plenty of the staff now departing have made good stuff in the past. Trick Weekes, for instance, wrote freaking Mordin in Mass Effect 2 and 3—as well as Iron Bull and Solas in Inquisition, two other characters I like very much. The foibles of Veilguard haven't left me irate so much as a little despondent, confused, and wondering whether just scrapping decades of talent in a purge is the right move at all.

That's a despondency shared by Michael Douse, publishing director of Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian Studios, who took to X in a series of posts this week that more or less tore into EA for letting go of so much institutional talent. He writes:

"It is possible not to lay off large parts of your development teams between or after projects. Critically, retaining that institutional knowledge is key for the next [game]. It’s often used as an excuse to ‘trim fat’ and to an extent I understand that under financial pressure, but doesn’t that just highlight how needless the aggressive efficiency of giant corporations is?"

Douse isn't necessarily throwing stones from a glass house, here. Larian is a big old studio, true, but it's something of an anomaly in the games industry: Tencent has a minority, non-voting stake in the company, but it's otherwise completely independent and free of shareholders. Baldur's Gate 3 very much seems like a product of a studio free from those expectations, being able to take its damn time.

"I’d understand it if they were pumping out hit after hit—perhaps you could argue it’s working—but clearly the aggressive streamlining (layoffs) aren’t. It’s nothing but cost cutting in the most brutal sense. It’s always people lower down the food chain that suffer, when it’s clearly strategy higher up the food chain that’s causing the problem."

Douse caps off the post with, "On a pirate ship, they’d toss the captain overboard." In a second, clarifying post, he adds: "To make it absolutely clear, what I hate about the way layoffs are carried out is that they are done before decision makers know what to do with a studio, and not as a result of figuring out a direction.

"This is consistently true. It is a short term cost saving measure at a huge human expense that doesn’t solve a long term problem. (A lack of a viable strategic direction defined at an executive level). You can probably figure it out if you trust your developers instead of firing them. On a positive note, I’m seeing a slight shift in this direction. In the low-stakes arena of remasters and remakes, but they are the foundation of something bigger."

There is an argument, one that Douse seems to agree with in a separate reply, that Veilguard isn't the first instance of this happening, but a longstanding habit from EA. David Gaider, who created the Dragon Age series whole cloth, left the company and would later share that it had a "quiet resentment" for its writers.

It reminds me a whole lot of the tech problem of "enshittification", also called platform decay, which comes about when a platform, site, or service sees success and then promptly bloody ruins everything because it has to grow and appease shareholders. Studios can follow this same gradient, too—as Douse says, these layoffs seem incredibly short-term in their thinking. We don't know what went on at BioWare, only its developers know that—but the amount of waste here of developers and writers who, again, have done good work before? It's enough to make me wish those devs were able to fly the black flag years ago.

Yesterday, Taro Yamada, a member of the Japanese Diet's House of Councillors, said on X that lawmakers have received reports that banks in Japan are preventing Japanese developers from accessing the revenue from overseas Steam sales of games with adult content (via Automaton). "If the game in question is for adult audiences," Yamada said via machine translation, "their remittances from abroad are rejected by Japanese banks, meaning they are unable to receive the profits."

Additionally, Yamada said that Japanese companies who "deal with adult games" are being prevented from opening bank accounts.

According to machine translation of reporting from Japanese gaming news outlet GameSpark, both Japan's Financial Services Agency (FSA) and the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) have confirmed the reports. In interviews the FSA conducted with Japanese banks preventing the transfer of Steam revenue, the banks said the decision was "a comprehensive judgment" based on Japan's Act on Prevention of Transfer of Criminal Proceeds and its Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Act, which aim to verify and regulate international commerce that could be used to fund illegal activity.

In a YouTube broadcast discussing the issue, Yamada questioned the relevance of those acts, as the Steam transactions are related to legitimate sales. The issue, Yamata said, is that Japanese law currently doesn't have procedures in place to address the nuances of international Steam sales, which leaves Japanese banks in a position to apply their own restrictions that raise concerns about freedom of speech in media production.

As Automaton reported last year, Yamada—described in his X profile as specializing in "freedom of expression"—has previously expressed concerns about censorship when Visa abruptly halted credit card payments to Japanese platforms hosting adult content to "protect the [Visa] brand."

Those concerns echo ongoing disputes in the US over restrictions on adult content, in which activists and organizations like the ACLU have argued that the "vague and ambiguous policy requirements" of companies like MasterCard and Visa, alongside growing state efforts to regulate access to pornography, threaten the livelihoods and free speech rights of sex workers and adult content creators.

"Today we are announcing Midnight Society will be closing its doors after three incredible years, with an amazing team of over 55 developers contributing to our new IP Deadrop," the studio said in a message posted to X. "We are actively seeking other game studios that would be interested in offering employment opportunities to our talented team members. If you know anyone who's hiring please forward this message to them or DM us for direct intros.

"We express our sincere gratitude to each and every one of our community members and [are] deeply sorry we were unable to reach our ultimate goal."

That goal was the release of Deadrop, an extraction shooter that got its start through the sale of NFTs. The money sunk into those now-homeless digital doodads has led numerous "founders" to ask in response to the message if they'll receive refunds, since the game isn't happening. Midnight Society hasn't officially commented on the matter, but the safe bet (and general consensus) is, "no."

Midnight Society came out with a bang, backed by Beahm's fame as a streamer and Bowling's cred as a Call of Duty veteran, but progress on Deadrop seemed to slow in early 2023 when the studio moved away from frequent "snapshot" build releases to "less frequent but much larger" updates. Things got ugly a year later when Beahm was fired by Midnight Society over allegations that his lifetime ban from Twitch was issued over an exchange of inappropriate DMs with a minor.

PC Gamer's Morgan Park said at the time that "it's hard to imagine a happy ending for Midnight Society," words that now seem prescient.

In a twist of horrible irony, Midnight Society's closure comes on the same day that Beahm's YouTube channel was remonetized. It was demonetized after his admission of the inappropriate message exchange with a minor; his first request to remonetize the channel, in October 2024, was refused; YouTube's appeal process allowed him to reapply for monetization again after 60 days.

I've reached out to Midnight Society to ask about the possibility of refunds for founders, and will update if I receive a reply.

Robinson made the gesture at the end of an anti-abortion speech on January 25, directly referencing the infamous salutes made by Elon Musk on Inauguration Day earlier this month. He says now that it was a joke and that he is "not a Nazi."

Musk followed his gestures with the words "my heart goes out to you," and defenders have argued that the Tesla and X owner was miming that action rather than throwing out a pair of hearty Nazi-style salutes. Robinson repeated the "heart goes out to you" line as he tapped his chest and raised his right arm, receiving laughter and applause from the audience. He posted a clip of the salute to X.

According to the Church, which described Robinson's sign-off as "a gesture that many have interpreted as a pro-Nazi salute," the priest had been previously warned about his political provocations.

"While we cannot say what was in Mr. Robinson's heart when he did this, his action appears to have been an attempt to curry favor with certain elements of the American political right by provoking its opposition," reads a statement posted by the Anglican Catholic Church on Wednesday. "Mr. Robinson had been warned that online trolling and other such actions (whether in service of the left or right) are incompatible with a priestly vocation and was told to desist. Clearly, he has not, and as such, his license in this Church has been revoked. He is no longer serving as a priest in the ACC."

On Thursday, the entire God is a Geek editorial team announced that it had resigned. The site has been operating "independently of Calvin for several years," according to a statement posted by the editors, who say they kept working on the website despite their objections to the politics of its "estranged owner" because they didn't want to lose the effort they'd put into building it up.

"To be absolutely clear, we do not support, share, or condone Calvin Robinson's politics or actions," the editors said.

Robinson has defended himself on X, suggesting that the Church's response was out of proportion.

"The joke at the end was a mockery of the hysterical 'liberals' who called Elon Musk a Nazi for quite clearly showing the audience his heart was with them," said Robinson. "Context is key, but sometimes people ignore context to confirm their own prejudices."

In its statement, the Church said that even if it is done as "a joke or an attempt to troll," mimicking a Nazi salute is "harmful, divisive, and contrary to the tenets of Christian charity."

Robinson was previously more involved in the day-to-day operations of God is a Geek, acting as executive editor from January 2009 to September 2016, according to his LinkedIn page. His most recent article on the site is a 2019 preview of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.

Robinson also lists "content creator on Disney's Yogscast YouTube channel, Bros with Fros" among his former roles and says he has previously acted as a judge for the Games Media Awards, MCV Awards, and eSports Industry Awards.

In recent years, however, Robinson has dedicated his media efforts to far right politics, and is the lead spokesperson for the UK Independence Party.

The former staff of God is a Geek plans to form a new publication.

"Whatever the future holds we will be working together to bring content that is fair, inclusive, and entertaining—as we always have," the editors wrote. "But we will be doing it under a new banner and we hope that some of you will come with us on the new journey."

Shortly after the restructuring announcement went live, both Karin and Trick Weekes revealed on Bluesky that they were no longer with the studio. Both are well-known BioWare veterans: Trick Weekes served as a writer on all the games and expansions in the original Mass Effect trilogy, as well as Dragon Age: Origins and Inquisition, before becoming lead writer on Dragon Age: The Veilguard, while Karin Weekes served as an editor on Mass Effect 2, 3, and Andromeda, Dragon Age: Origins, DA2, and Inquisition, Anthem, and Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Also confirming that they've been go are:

• Ryan Cormier, editor on Star Wars: The Old Republic, Anthem, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard
• Jennifer Cheverie, a tester, analyst and producer on Mass Effect 3, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Anthem, and Veilguard
• Daniel Steed, a producer on Star Wars: The Old Republic – Legacy of the Sith and Dragon Age: The Veilguard
• Lina Anderson, senior product manager
• Michelle Flamm, systems designer
• Mad Bee, UX designer

The layoffs come less than two weeks after Dragon Age: The Veilguard game director Corinne Busche announced her own departure from BioWare, and just a week after EA said Veilguard had underperformed sales expectations: Despite hitting a peak concurrent player count of more than 89,000 on Steam alone at launch (a figure good enough to put it in Steam's daily top 10 for that metric), and "engaging" roughly 1.5 million players during the quarter (I use that term because it's not explicitly synonymous with sales), EA said Veilguard was "down nearly 50% from the company’s expectations."

Collectively, the cuts represent a major loss of creative talent for the studio, and bears echoes of BioWare's layoff of roughly 50 employees in 2023, which included Mary Kirby, a writer on all the Dragon Age games and creator of some of the series' best-loved characters. As PC Gamer's Fraser Brown said when that round of layoffs took place, "If you've enjoyed the writing in any Dragon Age games, you've probably got Kirby to thank."

I'm also reminded of comments made by former BioWare writer and designer David Gaider, who said in 2023 that attitudes about writers at the studio had soured prior to his departure in 2016. "Even BioWare, which built its success on a reputation for good stories and characters, slowly turned from a company that vocally valued its writers to one where we were... quietly resented, with a reliance on expensive narrative seen as the 'albatross' holding the company back," Gaider wrote at the time.

"Maybe that sounds like a heavy charge, but it's what I distinctly felt up until I left in 2016. Suddenly all anyone in charge was asking was 'how do we have LESS writing?' A good story would simply happen, via magic wand, rather than be something that needed support and priority."

The whole episode casts an ugly light on EA's insistence that all is well at BioWare, and particularly that the next Mass Effect game—which seemingly remains in pre-production despite being confirmed more than four years ago—is being developed "under the leadership of veterans from the original trilogy." Not that it's untrue—longtime BioWare producer Michael Gamble is leading the effort—but it is galling to see vague promises about an anticipated videogame used as a smokescreen for the removal of veteran staff that EA won't specifically identify the departure of.

The story centers on Jim Sachs, a man with one of those "they don't make this type of guy anymore" life stories so common to '80s and '90s computing, one Sachs recounted to the website AmigaLove back in 2020. After a six-year career in the US Air Force flying C-141 Starlifters, Sachs taught himself programming and digital art and began creating games for Commodore 64 and Amiga computers. From his first game, Saucer Attack, to later efforts like Defender of the Crown or his large portfolio of promotional and commissioned pieces, Sachs' pixel art remains gorgeous and impressive to this day, and he seems to be a bit of a legend among Commodore enthusiasts.

It's with this background in games and digital art that Sachs looked at Microsoft's simple aquarium-themed screensaver for Windows 95 and 98 and thought he could do better. "Microsoft had an aquarium that they gave away with Windows where it was just bitmaps of fish being dragged across the screen," Sachs told the Matt Chat podcast back in 2015. "And they had that for like, three or four years. And I thought, I've given them enough time, I'm taking them to market. I'm gonna do something which will just blow that away."

Using reference photographs of real aquariums⁠—Sachs thanked a specific pet shop that's still around in an early version of his website⁠—Sachs created the 3D art by hand and programmed the screensaver in C++, releasing the initial version in July 2000. Even looking at it all these years later, the first iteration of the SereneScreen Marine Aquarium is pretty gorgeous, and it has the added charm of being such a distinctly Y2K, nostalgic throwback.

The standalone screensaver sold well, but then things came full circle with Microsoft licensing a version of the Marine Aquarium for the Windows XP Plus Pack and later standard releases of the OS. Since that time, the Marine Aquarium has continued to see new releases, and a section on the SereneScreen website keeps track of its various appearances in the background of movies and TV shows like Law and Order. Over on the SereneScreen website, you can purchase a real time, 3D-accelerated version of the Marine Aquarium for Mac, iOS, Android, and the original Windows. Echoing the Windows XP deal, Roku actually licensed this 3.0 version for its TVs, bringing it to a new generation of users.

Screensavers don't have anywhere near the ubiquity they used to thanks to the ascendancy of LCD screens and convenient monitor sleep modes, but the idea of them having a second life thanks to smart TVs and streaming services warms my heart a bit⁠—I don't even have a Roku TV, but I still find something charming and whimsical about the built-in Roku City screensaver.

The evocative art used in '90s PC screensavers has secured them a strangely prominent place in many millennials' psyches. The Windows '95 maze seems to have a hold over many in my cohort, but I'm personally a big fan of the Windows XP 3D pipes. PC Gamer contributor Sarah Richter wrote about how one of her favorite childhood "games" turned out to have been a screensaver/early desktop pet, Johnny Castaway.

Needless to say this hasn't stopped speculation, mainly instigated by McAfee's own pronouncements while alive, that he was murdered in some conspiracy. McAfee posted this on X in 2019:

"Getting subtle messages from US officials saying, in effect: 'We're coming for you McAfee! We're going to kill yourself'. I got a tattoo today just in case. If I suicide myself, I didn't. I was whackd. Check my right arm."

You may wonder about the spelling of "whacked." As ever, McAfee was using this claim to promote something called $Whackd. That was McAfee's first memecoin venture and now we can say for sure it isn't his last.

McAfee's X account burst back into so-called life on January 23. "I'm back with AIntivirus," says the account. "An AI version of myself. You didn't think I would miss this cycle did you?"

If you go to the AIntivirus site, there's a nice picture of McAfee looking all digital and a button to "chat with John." I tried, and discovered that the AIntivirus account has been suspended on X, presumably for impersonating a dead person.

It soon became clear that Janice McAfee, John's third wife, is behind the scheme.

"For those of you who think I am tarnishing John's legacy you clearly have no idea who John McAfee was," posted Janice McAfee. "Whackd was the first meme coin John created. The same person who helped John create Whackd is the same one who worked on AIntivirus… I believe if John was still alive he would absolutely love the idea of having an AI version of himself. He would probably pick a fight with it."

That at least seems accurate. And rather brilliantly, after the McAfee AI account was suspended by X, his official account decided to pick a fight with Elon Musk. "Thanks Elon Musk," says the John McAfee account. "There is always some government, or some corporation, that will try to do anything to maintain the status quo. But the cat is out of the bag on this one now. What are they going to do. Kill John again?"

Don't cut yourself on that edge. The project has a Medium page explaining what it's all about: "AIntivirus is not just another meme token," it booms unconvincingly, "AIntivirus is the cure for other meme coins!" There are plenty of promises about products that are apparently set to launch this year but, of course, not much in the way of hard detail. The token's price has fluctuated wildly since launch, with some estimates putting its total value between $25 and $30 million dollars but who really knows: If you do buy this one, good luck.

Well, it's a bizarre coda to a bizarre life. McAfee made several fortunes through various business ventures, but spent the last decade of his life embroiled in legal troubles. He was described by police as a "person of interest" in the murder of American Gregory Viant Faull, a neighbour, but never charged. He also tried to be the Libertarian candidate for US president twice, in 2016 and 2020, but was nominated on neither occasion.

This issue also features two other great features, too. Firstly, we follow one Dragonborn's mission to become Baldur's Gate's most celebrated librarian, with an epic book-collecting journey in Baldur's Gate III leading to tomes, terror and plenty of madcap adventure. Then, PC Gamer speaks directly to developers in the cosy game genre about its remarkable growth in popularity, how they came to make their own cosy games, and what they think the future holds. If you need some recommendations for mellow vibe games to play to chase away the blues, this is a great, uplifting read.

Then, in terms of previews, this issue sees us drop another world exclusive, with PC Gamer speaking directly to the developer of dark fantasy RPG shooter, Witchfire, about the game in Early Access right now, learnings from its development so far, and what new content is incoming in the run-up to a full release. If you like games like Destiny then Witchfire should absolutely be on your radar. In addition, we also preview Marvel's Spider-Man 2, Monster Hunter Wilds, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, The End of the Sun, This Dead Winter, Yield! Fall of Rome, Astrobotanica, and Two Point Museum.

Meanwhile, in terms of reviews, this month the PC Gamer scoring machine provides official scores for the game-changing new RPG roguelike, Caves of Qud, as well as Ballionaire, Mouthwashing, Webfishing, Nine Sols, Marvel Rivals, Shiren the Wanderer, and Halls of Torment, among other games.

All that plus a group test of six top PC gaming controllers, a reinstall of forgotten third-person action-adventure game Remember Me, the start of a new hijinx-filled diary following undead hero Mister Fibula in Divinity Original Sin II, a look at the very best mods available right now for Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl, a love letter to the joyous challenge that is building tiny houses in The Sims 4, a detailed guide to mastering Path of Exile 2's deep and complex systems, a tour of the latest PC gaming experiences coming out of Japan, including Virtua Fighter 5 Revo and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, an update on everything new in League of Legends' latest season, a fresh dispatch from The Spy, a new case to be cracked for the PCG Investigator, Dick Ray-Tracing, and much more too. Enjoy the issue!

Issue 406 is on shelves now and available on all your digital devices from the App Store and Zinio. You can also order directly from Magazines Direct or purchase a subscription to save yourself some cash, receive monthly deliveries, and get incredibly stylish subscriber-only covers.

Enjoy the issue!

A new Bloomberg report says Microsoft, which is a major investor in OpenAI, is investigating whether OpenAI's data has been exfiltrated on a large scale by DeepSeek. An OpenAI license allows developers access to the OpenAI API so it can be plugged into other software. The implication is that DeepSeek has been trained on OpenAI responses during its development.

"There's substantial evidence that what DeepSeek did here is they distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI's models and I don’t think OpenAI is very happy about this,” said the US administration's new 'AI and crypto czar' David Sacks. "I think one of the things you're going to see over the next few months is our leading AI companies taking steps to try and prevent distillation... That would definitely slow down some of these copycat models."

Distillation is an AI buzzword meaning that an AI model uses the outputs of another AI model to train itself. OpenAI also used this phrasing in a statement, saying "[People's Republic of China] based companies—and others—are constantly trying to distill the models of leading US AI companies. As the leading builder of AI, we engage in countermeasures to protect our IP… and believe as we go forward that it is critically important that we are working closely with the US government to best protect the most capable models from efforts by adversaries and competitors to take US technology.”

Before we get to the delicious schadenfreude, the main reason this matters is because of the apparent low cost of DeepSeek: If it really has just been built on the back of OpenAI's model, then the claims about its cost-efficient approach aren't as impressive as they sound. Certain AI svengalis are already trumpeting that this is the case. Crystal van Oosterom, AI Venture Partner at OpenOcean, says "DeepSeek has clearly built upon publicly available research from major American and European institutions and companies."

Now, the elephant in the room. OpenAI has itself been accused of scraping the Internet indiscriminately and being trained on enormous swathes of copyrighted material: It says it would be "impossible" to build LLMs without such data. There's a major upcoming court case with the New York Times suing Open AI and Microsoft, while more and more global publishers are taking action against the firm.

"I'm so sorry I can't stop laughing," said tech critic Ed Zitron. "OpenAI, the company built on stealing literally the entire internet, is crying because DeepSeek may have trained on the outputs from ChatGPT. They're crying their eyes out. What a bunch of hypocritical little babies."

I asked the DeepSeek chatbot if it had copied OpenAI's learning models. It said: "No, I am an intelligent assistant developed by the Chinese company DeepSeek, built on our own proprietary technology and learning models. We respect intellectual property rights and adhere to strict ethical standards in the development of our AI systems."

I asked DeepSeek if it would lie to me about this matter. DeepSeek churned for a few seconds before saying "No, I would not lie to you about this matter." I asked if it could beat OpenAI in a fight which it called "an interesting and fun question" before clarifying that, as non-physical entities,"our 'competition' is more about the quality of our responses."

Meanwhile I'm just over here enjoying the irony, and Ed Zitron's clear glee that Sam Altman and crew are getting a taste of their own medicine.

"Oh I'm sorry," says Zitron. "Are you crying? Are you crying because your plagiarism machine that made stuff by copying everybody's stuff was used to train another machine that made stuff by copying stuff? Are you going to cry? Cowards, losers, pathetic."

Now? Crank up the engine and fetch the driving goggles, because Sakaguchi reckons he's got one more left in the tank. Speaking to The Verge, Sakaguchi says he "intended Fantasian to be my final project before I retired, so it was somewhat of a farewell note from me." He says that, with the release of Fantasian Neo Dimension, he considers the game complete, and then gets rather existential about it:

"In the distant future, or maybe after I have already left this world, I imagine this game will find its meaning if someone chooses to look into the legacy of either myself or Final Fantasy."

Sakaguchi says the whole process of making Fantasian "was so enjoyable" that he "found it hard to part ways" with the development team. "Humans are greedy creatures, aren’t we? For that reason, I’m currently working on a new project with the same team that worked on Fantasian Neo Dimension," says Sakaguchi.

"It’s generally going to follow a similar style to my previous works, and it’ll be something that can be a successor to Final Fantasy VI in a good way—our goal is to create something old but new at the same time. It’ll be part two of my farewell note."

The old fox knows exactly what he's doing here: Any mention of Final Fantasy 6, widely regarded as the finest 2D entry and still considered by some the series' pinnacle, will have those of a certain vintage salivating. You can never truly go back, of course, but the fact Sakaguchi is thinking on those lines for his last hurrah does stir the blood. Retirement is for the weak: It's time for Kefka 2.0.

"As part of our ongoing efforts to prioritize projects and reduce costs that ensure long-term stability at Ubisoft, we have announced targeted restructurings at Ubisoft Düsseldorf, Ubisoft Stockholm and Ubisoft Reflections and the permanent closure of Ubisoft Leamington site," a Ubisoft representative told PC Gamer. "Unfortunately, this should impact 185 employees overall. We are deeply grateful for their contributions and are committed to supporting them through this transition."

Ubisoft Leamington was founded in 2002 as FreeStyleGames, and was acquired by Activision in 2008. It developed the DJ Hero games and Guitar Hero Live, none of which were released on PC, but the decline of interest in the music game genre eventually led to layoffs and a sale of the studio to Ubisoft in 2017. Renamed to Ubisoft Leamington, it contributed to numerous games including Hyper Scape, Watch Dogs: Legion, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, and Skull and Bones.

The closure of Ubisoft Leamington and layoffs across three other studios is the latest in what Ubisoft described in a strategic update released earlier this month as "decisive steps to reshape the Group in order to deliver best-in-class player experiences, enhance operational efficiency and maximize value creation."

Those steps were motivated by an "absolutely dire 2024," as we put it, a year riddled with delays, and cancellations, and games failing to meet expectations: Most notably, sales of Star Wars Outlaws were "softer than expected," while Assassin's Creed Shadows—the game Ubisoft absolutely, positively needed to salvage the year—was pushed out of 2024 and is now set to arrive in March 2025. In December 2024, Ubisoft announced the closure of its San Francisco and Osaka studios and a "ramp down" of operations at its Sydney studio, resulting in close to 300 people losing their jobs.

The extended rough stretch forced Ubisoft to make a full-scale return to Steam in September 2024—it had spent the previous several years working exclusively with the Epic Games Store—and, more significantly, has also reportedly sparked talks of a buyout of some sort involving Tencent. At last report, negotiations on that front were proceeding but had hit a bump over who would be left in control in the event of such a deal: The Guillemot family, which founded Ubisoft in 1986, wants to remain in charge but Tencent, which is currently Ubisoft's second-largest shareholder, wants more say in executive-level decisions.

A closer look at Ubisoft's future may be shared as part of the company's next financial report, which is scheduled to take place on February 13.

A new report by the Wall Street Journal claims that some of the banks that helped Musk finance the deal are now getting a little antsy about their investment (some $13 billion of the total) and are looking into how they claw it back. Institutions including Bank of America, Barclays, and Morgan Stanley have been holding onto the debt, hoping for more favourable economic headwinds, and are now hoping to per the WSJ "sell senior debt at 90-95 cents on the dollar, while retaining more-junior holdings."

The waters will apparently be tested next week with a $3 billion package of debt, which follows a sale of $1 billion in debt to private investors. The problem for the banks is that it's widely believed Musk overpaid for the company, and its subsequent underperformance has only confirmed this in the eyes of many. The only real counter to this is Musk's new political position as some sort of right-hand man to President Donald Trump which, some investors believe, could augur well for the future X.

That may prove wildly optimistic (other investors are reportedly braced to take haircuts of around 75%), because few of Musk's grandiose pronouncements about Twitter/X have come to pass. The interest payments alone on Musk's deal amount to $1 billion a year, while new additions such as job listings and a dedicated video tab seem unlikely to make any dramatic change to the bottom line. At one stage Musk said X would become "the everything app", which users could basically live their lives through: That seems like a pipe dream.

The WSJ report includes an email sent to staff by Musk, also seen by the Verge, which is some distance from the positivity of his public pronouncements on the business. "We’ve witnessed the power of X in shaping national conversations and outcomes," claims Musk, but "our user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and we’re barely breaking even."

The report adds that the banks hope to use the narrative of Musk’s link to Donald Trump to recoup their losses, as some unnamed investors may be interested in buying based on a belief that its financials are on the way up. Not really sure how that stacks up, but that's high finance for you.

Hours after the WSJ published its story, Musk denied sending the email. "This report is false," said Musk. "I sent no such email. WSJ is lying."

Well, we'll soon see how many investors are rushing out to buy this debt. Despite an exodus of advertisers and various controversies around Musk himself, the company's finances are apparently improving, but X is simply not playing the same game as rivals like Facebook when it comes to ad revenue.

The email from Musk to staff, which Musk claims isn't real, does sound an awful lot like him though: "We are also seeing other platforms begin to adopt our commitment to free speech and unbiased truth,” he ends, presumably a reference to Meta's decision to abandon fact-checking.

Musk has owned X for less than two years, but in that time the site has transformed from a major news source and online forum to, as PCG's Robin Valentine put it, "something so inherently hateful and toxic as to be avoided altogether."

It was striking to see so many individual subreddits recently vote en masse to just blacklist X links and, personally speaking, I barely use the site these days because it's just no longer a pleasure to be on. But the Musk reign shows no sign of ending: Maybe, when it does, he'll once more have time to level up his own characters in PoE2 and Diablo.

The studio's publishing manager and communications director, who goes by Bucky, recently posted to X that things were going well. Maybe a little too well—in around 15 hours, the poor blighter was swarmed with over 1,500 LinkedIn notifications and 68 email inquiries. "My inboxes were 0 before then… I think I might have underestimated how much interest there would be." I only dread to think what his inbox looks like now that small-time hopefuls have had a whole weekend to rustle up their elevator pitches.

Bucky seems to be taking it in stride, though—when asked by one commenter whether Pocketpair would get all tyrannical about its creative control, he responds: "We give you money. You make game." Simple as. He then adds: "We’re giving devs the financial freedom to make games they want so they DON’T have to get wrapped up with stinky rule makers and bullies."

In fact, most of his time on socials seems to be dedicated to clearing up misunderstandings about the studio's structure. In a separate post, he breaks out the MS Paint to reassure people that any partnerships with Sony are just to help market physical merchandise—Pocketpair is still in charge of its own destiny.

It's not a position I envy, at any rate. Opening the floodgates to the general public and sorting through the grey goo of web3 hypotheticals and AI-generated games (sometimes with equally AI-generated pitches) is a great way to make your emails unusable. Back when Vampire Survivor developer Poncle opened up a similar project, it had to cross such games off the menu from the get-go.

Pocketpair's form has no such forbiddances, and, look—maybe it's just trying to keep an open mind, and bless it for doing so, but I can't help but fret like an overprotective helicopter parent about an imagined sea of blockchain pitches which, being frank, don't really seem to be what the studio's going for when it says it wants to "find fun games."

This anxiety might just be because the project itself seems really worthwhile, honestly. I like a good indie, and I'm pleased as punch to see some 'indie' studios, such as Larian—yes, it's still technically independent—growing big enough to easily throw their weight around with the big boys, who are long overdue some competition. This pleasing trend of small-scale studios getting thrown a bunch of cash from unexpected successes and turning that moolah into funding strikes me as an innate good, and I'd like to see it continue.

That project was apparently a Warhammer game. It's tough to say whether it would have been set in Warhammer Fantasy or Age of Sigmar based on mentions in the LinkedIn profiles of its developers, but what they do call it is a "cancelled fantasy live service RPG in Unreal 5", a "3rd person ARPG", and a "Co-Op PvE Action RPG with a cast of unique heroes and playstyles".

While I'm all for more Warhammer RPGs, we've already got Vermintide 2 for co-op PVE . And it's tough to be too disappointed about another live service game being canceled, given that it seems to happen every other week. Still, it's a shame that so many developers lost their jobs because an unnamed publisher changed its ideas about "strategic direction".

It's worth noting that, while it's been reported elsewhere that Games Workshop was responsible for pulling the funding that resulted in this cancellation, that's not how licence agreements work. Studios and publishers pay licence holders to use their intellectual property rather than the other way around—it's on the publisher whether they continue funding a new live service game after seeing a rash of failures and cancellations in the genre.

"RealPongCoin or $PONG is using Atari's registered PONG trademark without Atari's consent or approval and the company has no affiliation with the crypto project," the press release reads. "Atari is warning the public that RealPongCoin risks deceiving consumers by suggesting an affiliation with Atari, and that Atari's legal team is actively reviewing measures to stop the misuse of its intellectual property."

A quick check-up on RealPongCoin does not inspire much confidence. On Google, news of Atari's statement on the matter swamps anything put out by $PONG itself, with the meme coin's primary footprint being a desolate X account and a largely empty website that declares, "It's not over… Yes it's real…," with links to a Telegram channel, blockchain contract, and portal to purchase $PONG.

Adopting a legal strategy from the "you have to tell me if you're a cop" school of jurisprudence, the $PONG X account declares "not affiliated with Atari" in two separate places. A disclaimer on the website asserts it "is not designed to be, or to be perceived as, an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security of any kind." That latter disclaimer seems to have become a bit of a boilerplate fig leaf of deniability adopted by new crypto projects to defend against prosecution over their essential nature as poorly-regulated securities⁠—the new TrumpCoin boasts a similar disclaimer.

All of which begs the question: Why even waste your breath over a clown show like this when you can just let your legal team take it out behind the shed with minimal fanfare? "My 'not involved with this shitcoin' press release has people asking a lot of questions answered by my press release."

The problem is that if you hadn't been following the company closely, you'd be forgiven for thinking it had fallen back in with a bad crowd. For a while in the late '10s and early '20s, Atari was a bit of an innovator in the art of the ill-considered crypto pivot, with a metaverse land deal, ATRI tokens, and some kind of hypebeast hotel leading us all to wonder what had happened to the publisher.

But then things took another turn: Current CEO Wade Rosen has overseen the quiet shuttering of its more crypto and meme-adjacent ventures while making a sensible shift toward retro publishing and games preservation. Atari acquired videogame industry database MobyGames, as well as the retro remake-focused developers Digital Eclipse and Nightdive, and all three look to be in good shape. MobyGames continues to operate as usual, just with an updated infrastructure and UI, Digital Eclipse recently released the Power Rangers brawler Rita's Rewind, and Nightdive is fresh off the launch of its remaster of The Thing.

So the ship's been turned around, but that's precisely why Atari has more reason than most to vociferously denounce a fly-by-night crypto scam flying the flag of its IP. Even still, I don't know how the company will overcome the ironclad legal defense of "no copyright infringement intended."

So far it's spent an awful lot of money but had mixed results, with Fortnite still unavailable for iOS in the US. Epic has reached a stage where the Epic Games Store is available on Android worldwide and on iOS in the European Union, and it's now taking the next step of distributing games through that storefront (it takes a 12% cut of payments it processes, but 0% of payments the developer processes themselves). As part of this Epic is swallowing the cost of Apple's Core Technology Fee, which it calls "illegal", for participating developers.

This is a step forward, of course, but it's not any kind of long-term solution: The vast majority of customers are always going to prefer the direct convenience of the App Store or Play Store. Epic's fighting an uphill battle to even get developers to use the EGS on mobile, but that in itself will no doubt be part of its ongoing legal arguments with the platform-holders.

As part of the launch Tim Sweeney has been on the interview circuit, telling IGN that the company has invested over $1 billion in the EGS so far (this figure is presumably for the whole thing, not just the mobile launch). That's silly money but Epic, thanks to the industry-leading Unreal Engine and the ongoing success of Fortnite, has the means to do it: And more than anything else, Tim Sweeney is up for this fight in a major way.

"I think we might run into serious financial problems after a couple more decades of this," Sweeney told IGN. "But we're determined to fight this out. I expect large parts of this struggle will go on throughout the rest of this decade and we're fully committed to going through it and investing to break through."

Sweeney characterises the legal fight as "an investment in Epic's future" and part of a continuum in how the company's changed with the times. "If you look at Epic’s history, we've always aimed big and we've always grown prudently," says Sweeney. "Our first big 3D game in the era of Doom and Quake was the first Unreal game in 1998. And that sold two million copies. It was pretty cool! And we made Gears of War and expanded to console, and that sold six million copies.

"And we decided to become an online game developer, and it took years to figure out how to do that, with years without growth. But we figured it out eventually with Fortnite in 2017 and now we're a company with billions of dollars of revenue a year and thousands of employees and an opportunity of the sort that we've never had before."

It does help, when you're in a fight like this, to have a Fortnite reliably bringing in the big bucks. Interestingly enough Sweeney's rowing back a little from a certain buzzword beginning with "m", even if he still thinks the idea has merit.

"Some people call it the Metaverse and some people call it just games, but it is real," says Sweeney. "And you find hundreds of millions of players who are highly engaged in immersive 3D games together with their friends. And we think that if we are successful with this, then someday there will be billions of users of this kind of game. And we think we're in an awesome position to be a leading company or perhaps the leading company in that world if the shackles are removed that prevent us and all developers from actually competing on our own and becoming first class companies in the industry."

I'm not going to lie, it is a little hard to agree with the idea of "shackles" on Epic, though Sweeney persists with the metaphor and says no trillion-dollar company "is a vassal in another company's ecosystem." His real anger is what he sees as Apple and Google just sitting back, doing nothing, and creaming off as much profit as they can.

"You're either a company that has a direct relationship with customers and freedom to do business with them directly, or you're behind Apple and Google's paywall and you do not have that chance and you cannot grow and most of the profit your business produces will go to Apple and Google who will use it for fuck all… share buybacks and dividends rather than investment in hiring and innovating and building technology and making the world a better place."

The Sweenster estimates that the battle against Apple and Google has cost Epic, quite outside of the legal fees, "a billion dollars of revenue, perhaps several billion… But I felt very firmly that the proper way to challenge them was to demonstrate to the world the real effects of their policies because Apple... Apple does a good job of hiding it. They don't let developers tell users that they're paying 30% of their fee for nothing or their purchase price is going to Apple for nothing, and it's not widely known."

The regulators are now looking at these closed markets, and the Epic CEO says "we view our company's aims on the scale of decades. We've been in business for 33 years now, which is a pretty long time for a tech company, especially a game developer. There were a lot of game developers in 1991, not many of them are around now.

"But we think our best days are ahead and we think our best days can only be achieved when we have true freedom and we believe the best way to get to that freedom is to go all in and fighting for access rather than arguing about money as Apple is trying to encourage all other developers to do."

There's a great bit in the film adaptation of Master & Commander where well-known Englishman Russell Crowe bellows out to his sailors "do ya wanna see a guillotine in Piccadilly? D'you want your children to sing Les Marseillaise?" Back to Sweeney:

"Do you want your kids to grow up in a market where Apple and Google extract all the profit from all digital businesses and control access to all the information? It's not a good world, just like FYI. So no regrets, though it’s been terribly costly. We're really looking at our future opportunity and future value rather than the opportunity that we missed by fighting Apple and Google this way."

Epic has plans to bring EGS to mobile in markets where it's not currently available and keep fighting the good fight. It is easy to be sniffy about various billion-dollar companies going at one another, and I'm certainly guilty of making more than a few jokes about it, but this is one of the great fights of our industry's age and, if Epic doesn't fight it, it's hard to see who else will.

Is it self-interested? Of course it is and Tim Sweeney would admit that. But the potential is there for this to fundamentally change the games marketplace for every developer and, Epic would say, inarguably for the better. This fight has been going on for five years, and it feels like it's just warming up. It is safe to say that Epic is not short of cash: But nor is it short of purpose.

"We noticed a pattern in the entertainment industry, and Pocketpair has given us the opportunity to make a horror game about it," Surgent Studios CEO Abubakar Salim says in a press release. "Both Surgent and Pocketpair are well-versed in taking risks. This game will be short and weird, and we think players will be interested in what we have to say."

This upcoming horror game won't be in any way related to Surgent Studio's previous game, Tales of Kenzera: Zau, but that doesn't mean the studio has left that universe behind entirely. "We’re still in earnest conversation about further projects set in the Tales of Kenzera universe, but this will be a standalone piece: A mile marker between where we’ve come from and where we’re going," Salim continues.

A horror game from Surgent Studios certainly does sound interesting. I had a lot of fun with Tales of Kenzera: Zau's platforming, fights, and cool abilities, and despite not making it to the top of my list, it was one of the games that really stuck out to me last year. So, I'm pretty excited about what this developer will do with a horror game.

"This is the energy I want to see driving games in 2025—developers lifting each other up, creating together, and pushing the industry forward," Salim says. "Massive love to the Pocketpair team! It’s an incredible honor to be the first partnership announced with Pocketpair Publishing. We’ve been cooking up something fun, and I can’t wait to share it with you all. Stay tuned!"

However, this new concept is different from the previous Project Uso pitch that Salim mentioned at the end of last year. Salim described Project Uso as a singleplayer isometric, Afro-gothic action RPG: "We still have so much more to say and so much more to build on," Salim says in an interview with IGN. "And the audiences that we've already started to build as well, and the players and the people who want to champion us, they want to hear more…We are ready. We're so ready. It is just about taking that leap of faith with us."

Regardless of what the project is, it's great to see Surgent Studios back on its feet after a rough few months at the end of last year. Before it had to put its team on notice for redundancy while the studio scrambled to find a new publisher and source of funding, it laid off "just over a dozen" employees. It seems like Pocketpair saw the potential that this developer has and wanted to help get its projects back on track.

"Game development comes with many challenges, but we want to ease that process as much as possible and provide an environment where creators can pursue their dreams," the head of Pocketpair Publishing, John Buckley, says in a press release. "We are pleased to be able to support Surgent Studios’ new title as our first step. We deeply sympathize with its original ideas and passion and are honoured to help them realize their vision. We will respect the autonomy and vision of developers and work together to make great games for people all over the world."

While it's great to see Pocketpair expand its horizons and help other indie studios along the way, it still has to deal with The Pokémon Company and Nintendo's patent infringement lawsuit. Pocketpair confirmed that it had received notice of this lawsuit, and despite not getting any specific details about what patents it was infringing upon, the studio said that it is working hard to ensure this doesn't affect new projects or maintenance on games like Palworld.

"I am so proud of everything we've accomplished together at Warner Bros Games during my time with the company," said Haddad. "It has been an absolute pleasure working on and building our iconic gaming franchises, and I will continue to be an enthusiastic supporter of this talented team's future endeavors."

The obvious thing to mention in the context of the news is last year's Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which after almost nine years in development ended up as one of the biggest flops in the industry's history, and had a definite impact on WB's quarterly results. The game can hardly be put down solely to Haddad's leadership but, at the same time, WB Games clearly had faith in what Rocksteady was making and backed it to a considerable degree: The development cost is estimated at an eye-watering $200 million.

But Suicide Squad is also not the whole story. In 2023 for example WB Games had the highest-selling game of the year globally with the Harry Potter game Hogwarts Legacy, while series like Mortal Kombat continue to roll along very nicely. In November last year Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav said the publisher would be narrowing its focus to DC ("in particular Batman"), Hogwarts Legacy, Mortal Kombat, and Game of Thrones.

"We're through some of the worst—and it hasn't been pretty on the gaming business—but we have four games that are really powerful," said Zaslav. "We're going to go away from trying to launch 10, 12, 15, 20 different games. I think we have a real chance now with focus to have the gaming business be steadier."

An email to staff from WB Discovery Global Streaming and Games CEO and president JB Perrette said:

"David has led WB Games to numerous accomplishments over the years, both creatively and commercially. His vision, talent and passion have helped build one of the most successful and admired gaming companies in the industry and navigated some of the biggest changes and challenges as well.

"From transitioning a physical software company into a digital-first gaming operation to organically building a successful free-to-play mobile business to developing and publishing multiple billion-dollar games and franchises—including Hogwarts Legacy, Game of Thrones Conquest, and Golf Clash—to delighting more Mortal Kombat fans than any time in the franchise's 30+ year history, the journey has been nothing short of extraordinary."

Perrette goes on to make one more interesting aside: "I fully appreciate that particularly after 12 years with the same leader and boss, change can be hard and uncomfortable (in our industry and at WBD we have certainly had our fair share)." Reading between the lines here, don't be surprised to see the kind of stuff Zaslav's talking about become an even firmer reality: Hogwarts Legacy for everyone!

Me, I'll just be thinking of the 2023 glory days, when WB execs were so drunk on the success of Hogwarts Legacy they started spitballing all sorts of daft ideas like a Superman live service game, before Suicide Squad brought everyone back down to Earth.

Posts by regular users proposing bans have been met with huge popular support in a number of Reddit communities, and in many cases mods have quickly instated the new rule. Now the subreddits for everything from World of Warcraft to Dungeons & Dragons to F1 racing to New Jersey have done it, while many others are currently deliberating or voting on the change.

From a certain perspective, it's not a big shift. Under Musk, X has been transforming into a refuge for hard right and extremist opinions for a while now, while Reddit's userbase has long trended towards being more left-wing and moderate (to speak in broad generalities). The fact that X now requires visitors to log in to view most of the site's content has also rankled for a while with Reddit users—people do not like having to sign up for another site to get the context for a post. So while Musk's recent actions may have kickstarted the conversation, it's an animosity that's been brewing since 2022, and to an extent is as much practical as political.

But on the other hand, this is one of the biggest and most well-known social media sites in the world democratically blacklisting one of the other biggest and most well-known social media sites in the world, and that's kind of wild to see. Meanwhile, the actual staff of the site are simply content to let users make their choice in this matter.

It's happening not just in niche spaces, or explicitly left-wing subreddits, but across an enormous variety of Reddit communities. Fans of the NBA may not have much in common with fans of Warhammer or Football Manager, but they sure all align on this. It's not often you see such a spectrum of users arrive on the same page to this degree—especially with a turnaround of just a couple of days.

Musk has only owned X for less than two years, but in that time he's transformed the site in the eyes of many from a relatively neutral (if chaotic and fractious) forum and major source of news to something so inherently hateful and toxic as to be avoided altogether. I won't hold up Reddit as a bastion of perfect discourse, but it's striking to see its users taking such a firm stance en-masse, with very few dissenters to be seen.

Whether that's a sign that there's still good left on the internet, or just another example of online communities becoming ever more siloed and divided, I'll leave to the reader to decide for themselves—but as someone who left X early last year and hasn't looked back, I'll certainly be glad to have another place I can go to completely avoid it.

This is, understandably, causing a great deal of headscratching—with Sony doubling down on a move that has proven historically unpopular and, from a consumer standpoint, seemingly without a proper objective in mind. Horizon Forbidden West has already been available for the better part of a year, and it's not as if it'll contribute to PSN user numbers in any meaningful way—so why close the curtains now?

While I've reached out to Sony for comment, and will update this article if I receive a response, I can make some educated guesses. To be clear—I'm not attempting to justify Sony's decision here, I think it's weird and short-sighted, but I am also cursed with the burden of knowledge and will share what I can to illuminate the situation.

While I'd like to sweep in with a theory that explains everything, the truth of the matter is this whole thing's bound to be complicated and multifaceted. I'll deal with the obvious first—some of the countries involved are just straight-up dictatorships, and are thus boycotted. For example, North Korea's on the list.

This isn't even a new move. Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine has seen much of the gaming industry refusing to do business with the country. With physical goods, this makes a lot of sense—wartime and governmental corruption makes for easily-pilfered inventory and inconsistent shipping issues—but, as studies mentioned in the article I just linked, digital piracy can be just as prevalent. Typically, it's just more trouble than it's worth.

But what about the other countries present? Speaking bluntly, Sony is a company, and it's not going to make all of its decisions out of the goodness of its heart. Exchange rates are a huge factor. Put simply, games are 'cheaper' in other countries if your own country's currency is worth more.

This is a problem for any publisher making decisions like 'how much should a game cost' because of basic economics. If you want to sell anything, you need to balance cost with, well, making sure people can actually afford it. You might need to charge the equivalent of a month's salary to turn a profit—but at that point, no-one's gonna bother. For example, in 2023, players from Argentina and Turkey were hit with massive price hikes when Steam decided to stop converting currencies in their territories, as well as 25 other countries.

But why, you ask, is that a problem for digital goods? Generating keys doesn't cost anything, and you've already made the game, so it's in a publisher's best interest to get as many customers as possible—even if they're paying a pittance. Lemme introduce you to the concept of the grey market or, as you probably know them, key resellers.

Grey markets (as opposed to black markets) are, put simply, a consequence of how humans work. If a product is cheap in one country, why not buy and sell it in a country where it's more expensive? Why not indeed, say the key sellers, who have been doing this sort of thing for a while, sometimes through less-than-scrupulous means.

This isn't even particularly seedy on the fact of it—a little underhanded, maybe, but it's sometimes an accepted part of doing business. Back in 2019, Valve actually got in trouble for region-locking certain games, with the EU commissioner stating that "consumers should not be prevented from shopping around between Member States to find the best available deal."

All of this to say—it's a massive headache, and it's entirely possible that Sony has simply had enough of dealing with it, thus limiting its scope to countries it knows it won't have a hard time with. It's still a confusing and somewhat anti-consumer decision, don't get me wrong (that's why I've asked Sony directly). But it's not entirely mystifying or without precedent.

Price founded Insomniac in 1994, and while its first game, the 1996 shooter Disruptor, was well received, it was Spyro the Dragon a couple years later that really put the studio on the map. Success continued with Ratchet and Clank, Resistance, Sunset Overdrive, and more recently the Marvel's Spider-Man series, which took four years to come to PC, not that I'm counting.

He also earned plaudits in 2022 for pressing Sony to allow studios to make public statements on abortion rights in the US in the weeks leading up to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Sony wouldn't budge on the matter—"We fought hard for this and we did not win," Price wrote in an internal email—but Insomniac donated $50,000 to the Women's Reproductive Rights Assistance Project, an amount matched by Sony.

Replacing Price at the helm of Insomniac will be three "co-studio heads": Head of creative Chad Dezern, head of franchise strategy and studio relations Ryan Schneider, and head of finance Jen Huang. Price said the trio "have been instrumental in making Insomniac what we are today."

"I’ve seen each lead major initiatives here which have positively changed Insomniacs’ lives," Price wrote. "Plus, they’ve consistently demonstrated the kind of collaboration and transparency that’s part of our DNA. And just as important, their skillsets are truly complementary.

"There is no way that I would ever consider handing the reins to a team I didn’t trust to take care of Insomniacs and lead us to even greater heights. Chad, Jen and Ryan are that team."

Price didn't say whether he has any specific post-Insomniac plans, only that he's "very excited to officially join the ranks of Insomniac fans. I can’t wait to experience our future games purely as a player. Plus, I can’t remember the last time I played any game and wasn’t unconsciously scanning for bugs. I’m ready to break that habit!"

We don't cover a lot of business-focused news at PC Gamer, but this is interesting for two reasons: The sudden sharpness of the decline in expected revenues—potentially more than half a billion dollars, and I'm not an industry analyst but that sure seems like a big change over a single financial quarter—and also the reasons for it. EA said that after two years of double-digit net bookings growth, its Global Football franchise "experienced a slowdown" in the current fiscal year, while Dragon Age: The Veilguard "engaged approximately 1.5 million players during the quarter, down nearly 50% from the company’s expectations."

"During Q3, we continued to deliver high-quality games and experiences across our portfolio," Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson said. "However, Dragon Age and EA Sports FC 25 underperformed our net bookings expectations.

"This month, our teams delivered a comprehensive gameplay refresh in addition to our annual Team of the Year update in FC 25; positive player feedback and early results are encouraging. We remain confident in our long-term strategy and expect a return to growth in FY26, as we execute against our pipeline."

The underperformance of Dragon Age: The Veilguard is more disappointing for me personally, but the decline in EA Sports FC is the bigger surprise. EAs's FIFA series has been a bedrock moneymaker for years, and the transition to EA Sports FC following the loss of the FIFA license seemed to be going relatively smoothly, although some fans haven't been entirely happy with it. But the company now expects its live service net bookings—basically the money it makes on DLC sales and microtransactions, which have historically been driven in large part by the Ultimate Team mode—to see a "mid-single-digit decline."

Electronic Arts' share price took a sharp drop following the release of the preliminary financial report. More details will likely be revealed when EA announces its full third-quarter financial results on February 4.

That's a big jump from the 2024 report, when 66% of respondents said they were developing for PC, which was sufficient for GDC to call it "the dominant platform." It's also more than double the percentage of developers working on the second-most popular platform, the PlayStation 5, which claimed 38% of respondents, and the Xbox Series X/S, which came in a close third at 34%

The percentage of developers making games for PC has been tracking upward for years. 56% of developers said they were making games for PC in 2020, a figure that rose to 58% in 2021, 63% in 2022, and 65% in 2023. Interest in developing for PC is also way up, reaching 74% of respondents to the survey, a big jump from 62% last year.

"The exact reason for this jump is unclear, but it could be connected to the rising popularity of Valve's Steam Deck," the GDC report says. "This year's survey didn't single out Steam (or Valve's handheld gaming computer) as its own platform, because it's a hub for PC and Mac games. But it appears some developers do view it as a unique platform. For instance, when asked to name other platforms that interest them, almost half (44%) wrote in Steam Deck."

I think that's a very reasonable guess, and I'd add to it that the simple fact of accessibility may also play a very large role in the popularity of PC as a development platform. Making games is hard, but doing it on PC is about as easy as it's going to get: Learn your programming language of choice, give Valve 100 bucks, and bang, you're selling your stuff on Steam. Nearly 19,000 new games launched on Steam in 2024 alone, so it's no wonder PC rates so highly as the platform of choice. I wouldn't be surprised if the only developers who said they're not working on PC right now are from Rockstar. (No, we still don't have a Grand Theft Auto 6 PC announcement, not that I'm annoyed about it or anything.)

It's also worth noting that the GDC State of the Game Industry survey skews heavily toward Western developers. 58% of survey respondents are from the US, for instance, while the UK, Canada, and Australia make up another 16%. China, a massive market where mobile gaming is far more popular, doesn't rank among the list of countries with the most respondents—and even without taking that into account, the popularity of mobile gaming worldwide makes mobile game development feel underrepresented in the report. Japanese developers are also effectively absent. All of that is obviously going to bias the results to some extent.

Despite that limitation, it's great to see PC not just holding its own but actually growing as the dominant development platform for games. I just wish it was happening in an environment that wasn't quite so grim: The GDC survey also found that 1 in 10 respondents had been laid off in 2024, and 4% said their studios had been closed completely.

But it's not just the AAA market that's been feeling it. A recent "State of the Industry" survey by GDC (that's the Game Development Conference) dug up some similar findings among its respondents which, weirdly enough, are mostly indie developers: Namely, that 1 in 10 of them were laid off.

Some things to lay out about this survey—firstly, like most surveys, it's not flawlessly constructed. As criticised by some experts like Laine Nooney, an associate professor of media, culture, and communication, the survey itself isn't too great of a measuring stick of the industry due to its overrepresentation of indie developers. For example: "There is simply no planet where half of people gainfully employed in games are self-funding their own work. This simply isn't true! It's half of [the] people who bother to fill out this survey!"

As Nooney proceeds to point out, the survey is composed of a whopping 32% indie developers out of its 3,000+ sample size—and that's not counting independent contractors, AA studios, or the ephemeral "Other (please specify)". What's more, 58% of respondents were from the United States—nary a statistically-significant squeak from countries such as Japan or China. Overall, it can be argued that this really isn't a picture of the entire industry, just a hefty geographical slice.

That's not to say the bath needs to be thrown out with the bathwater, though. 3,000 is still more than enough for a window into the industry it does capture, and I think—in this instance—the fact that just 15% of respondents were from AAA studios is interesting in itself. It's a grim warning that it's harsh out there, even if you aren't part of the sweeping tides of big-money acquisitions and overambitious live service projects.

As the survey states, 11% of respondents were personally laid off in 2024, with only 43% stating that there'd been no layoffs at their studios (a decrease from last year's 53%). Moreover, around 4% stated that their studios had been closed down entirely, so that's roughly 15% of developers out of work.

And if you're a little worried about the giving-over of studios to AI slop for creative pursuits, and what that means for games (guilty), these numbers aren't going to soothe the pit in your stomach. 19% of respondents were in narrative-driven roles, while 16% were in visual arts departments—compare that to 12% and 9% in programming/engineering and game design roles, respectively. It seems like creative fields are being hit particularly hard.

Maybe if I keep looking, I'll find some good news: 19% of respondents also weren't actually told why they were being laid off—wait a second, that, uh, that doesn't make me feel better at all, actually. Additionally, 22% of respondents were also given the ol' "restructuring" excuse which, let's face it, we all know illuminates basically nothing. In summary, it's still pretty grim out there—whether you're being plonked on the next ill-fated live service venture or working at an indie studio. Here's to a kinder 2025. Please.