Gaming

The Xbox CEO, who announced mass layoffs at Xbox this week, will assess “the economic impact of new general-purpose technologies, including artificial intelligence, to inform the Federal Reserve’s policy judgments.”

As noted by Push Square, the games also have separate season passes that cost $29.99, meaning the total for both titles with all of their content is just under $140. Oof. However, if you subscribe to PlayStation Plus, you can buy the games and their passes at a significant discount ($19.99 per game, $9.89 per season pass) until August 6th.

After first teasing them last November, months before the Steam Machine was released, Jsaux has shared updated designs for its screen-equipped front plates for the console. Pricing and availability haven’t been announced, but the accessory will come in three versions with E Ink, color E Ink, or dot matrix displays.

That includes “key, high-performing people in the trenches” working on The Elder Scrolls 6, IGN reports. One Bethesda staffer told the publication that the layoffs have had “a crushing effect on morale,” and one said that the QA department was “decimated.”

Bloomberg reported on Chris Barrett’s firing in August 2024, and Barrett sued Sony and Bungie that December. On Wednesday, Barrett said he is “very satisfied” with the settlement, and a joint statement noted that Barrett has been added to Marathon’s credits as the original game director, as reported by Kotaku.

$799.99 is how much Alienware’s AW3426DW costs at Dell’s site. It’s the successor to its original 34-inch curved 1440p QD-OLED gaming monitor from 2022 that debuted at $1,299.99. The new model has a Penta Tandem QD-OLED panel to make text look sharper and less aliased, plus other improvements (but the same 110 pixels per inch).

After announcing plans to end sales of the Switch in Europe starting next year, Nintendo tells IGN that “We plan to continue selling Nintendo Switch outside of regions where Nintendo of Europe conducts business.”

The trend isn’t new, but the only thing cooler than catching Nemophila’s performance last week at The Meadows in Brooklyn was seeing and capturing a shot of this person recording on their Nintendo 3DS.

96 of the layoffs were at the id Software office in Richardson, 40 of the layoffs were for remote workers that reported to that office, and 22 of the layoffs happened at the Bethesda Game Studios office in Austin, according to a WARN notice obtained by Game Developer.

Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis, an FFVII spinoff game on mobile and Steam, will reach end of service status on October 6th, Square Enix says. The company also shut down the short-lived FFVII mobile battle royale game back in 2023. At least there’s the final remake trilogy game to look forward to next year.

According to Retro Dodo, the G02 is “officially dead” and has been removed from “every marketplace it was originally sold on.” The $60 handheld was spotted earlier this year, shipping preloaded with thousands of copyrighted retro games from Nintendo, SEGA, and others.

That’s the sound of Wario Land being added to Nintendo’s lineup of classic games available to Switch Online subscribers. It’s out now alongside shooter Fortified Zone, dungeon crawler The Sword of Hope II, and Dr. Mario & Puzzle League (if you pay for the more expensive tier).

The company is continuing to retreat from the mobile game space (with a few strange exceptions), this time by ending support for Mario Kart Tour in September. However, unlike Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, the game won’t be getting a microtransaction-free offline mode after support ends.

The Doom developer is reportedly the latest Xbox studio to be hit by Microsoft’s ongoing layoffs, prompting a new variant on an age-old question.

Today, from Summer Games Done Quick 2026, I’m recommending that you watch this race of Hey You, Pikachu! on the N64 — which, if you didn’t know, is a game where you talk to Pikachu with a microphone. It’s very silly.

I missed this yesterday, reported by Kotaku. The studio will apparently keep working on Grounded 2 and DLC for The Outer Worlds 2, but “plans beyond that are up in the air,” Kotaku says.

The Wall Street Journal reported the number on Monday. Bloomberg corroborated it on Tuesday, adding that the subscribers figure is “4 million fewer than it did when the company last publicly shared data in 2024.” At one point, Microsoft had hoped that the service would have 100 million subscribers by 2030 — it seems unlikely it’ll meet that bar.

The RPG Project Phoenix initially raised over $1 million in 2013, when it was slated to launch in 2015. As Kotaku reports, after seven years without any updates, the game’s director now says production won’t be finished until “the end of 2031,” when a release date will be revealed.

Following the 12 new sets announced last month featuring Smart Brick interactivity, Lego is once again expanding its Pokémon collection with five new sets. They range in price from a $69.99, 757-piece Munchlax to an elaborate $299.99, 2,386-piece Poké Ball that opens to reveal a battle scene and Professor Oak’s laboratory.

As Windows Central reports, Valve has released Windows drivers for the Steam Machine, like it previously did for the Steam Deck, so you can replace its Linux-based SteamOS if you want. However, the Steam Machine still doesn’t support dual-booting, so you can only have one OS installed at a time.

The $69.99 HyperMegaTech! Super Pocket Activision Edition! comes with 34 retro games pre-installed that were all available on Atari consoles decades ago. Bundled titles include Pitfall!, Chopper Command, and River Raid, but the handheld is also compatible with Evercade’s ever-growing collection of multi-title cartridges.

The 007 First Light studio previously confirmed it would be hit with layoffs after a “finance partnership” on its upcoming title Project Fantasy ended. Now the studio says it has regained ownership of the game, but will also be closing its Istanbul office and parting ways with an unspecified number of staff.

From Summer Games Done Quick, here’s a 15-minute run of Rail Heist, one game from the massive game collection UFO 50. Can’t ask for much more from this one: I learned about a game I hadn’t played before, the runner does some cool tech, and there are some unexpected shenanigans.

The total number of jobs impacted “could be as much as half the development team,” and a community manager has already shared that the game’s roadmaps “will be shifting,” according to Kotaku.

That’s no secret, and the demise of physical media isn’t helping things. Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa recently reiterated this sentiment during a shareholders meeting, explaining that “there are certain challenges in preserving and exhibiting past games as they are, particularly in keeping them in a playable state.“

Catch the event over the next week on Twitch, though my preferred way to watch is to catch VODs after the fact on YouTube.

According to Game File, in private communications, Sony told developers that games released before the January 1, 2028 cutoff could still get reorders of physical copies in 2028. So expect a glut of unfinished games to hit shelves in December 2027, just to ensure companies can still get discs.