Big upcoming video games often leak, but not quite the way it’s been happening to Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto VI for the past several days.

Earlier this week, a person or group going by the online handle CyberLeek posted two gameplay clips from the game. That was just the start:

• Tuesday: The first two clips, each about a minute long, showing co-protagonist Jason Duval driving on a highway and tossing a basketball into a hoop

• Wednesday: Two more clips leak

• Thursday morning: Another leak, this one ending with Jason shooting bullet holes into a wall to spell out the word “LEEK”— strongly suggesting the leaker has access to a build of the game

• Friday: And another

The leaked footage was overlaid with links and messages, including a solicitation for people to buy a memecoin and a threat to conduct similar hacks and leaks against video game companies that didn’t follow a set of “commandments.” Those demands: offer offline modes for online games, refrain from “fake single-player DLC” and don’t solicit digital pre-orders for games “before release and independent review,” according to a Kotaku run-down of the manifesto.

If those demands are at all meant earnestly—and not simply leaking for profits and thrills—it’s the last one which would apply to GTA VI. Take Two and Rockstar released trailers and started pre-orders for the game without showing any gameplay, nor previewing the game to the press (which they’d done for prior big Rockstar games by this point). The company still hasn’t shown any gameplay, as its November 19 release date approaches.

Regardless, some of the very parties that would sympathize with the manifesto’s goals condemned then leaks. On Tuesday night, the head of the Stop Killing Games movement, wrote on Reddit that the leaks were wrong:

“Using illegal means to make a point is unacceptable to us and does nothing to protect our right to keep using what we paid for. No matter how strongly you disagree with the decisions of upper management at these companies, there are still thousands of developers who worked hard on this project, and they’re the ones being hit the hardest.”

GTA publisher Take Two quickly moved to wipe the footage from the internet, but copies of the videos have persisted and lengthy descriptions have been posted online as each new one has appeared.

Common takeaways are that the game looks impressive, though also what you’d envision a modern GTA set in virtual Florida to look like. Some fans are debating the possible need for gas in cars, which some of the leaked clips appear to indicate. Among the unknowns about the leaks are whether they’re from a recent build of the game and therefore whether details seen in the clips are even still in the game.

There have been signs of a crackdown. Website URLs included in the leaked clips stopped working by mid-week.

On Thursday, Take Two asked a court in New York to subpoena Discord and Microsoft to try to get details on accounts the company believes are associated with the leaks.

On Friday, a judge gave the go-ahead for the subpoenas. About an hour before the judge’s order regarding the Microsoft request hit the case’s official docket, Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet posted to X: “We are working closely with Take-Two and Rockstar Games to support efforts to protect creative works and intellectual property.”

(Take Two has ample experience dealing with game leaks, among them a prior 90-video GTA VI breach in 2022 that resulted in an arrest and a pending retrial, as well as a set of Borderlands 3 leaks that led it to send investigators to a YouTuber’s house.)

Rockstar and Take Two reps did not reply to requests for comment about the leaks nor the age of the footage shown in them.

Rockstar will premiere an official “extended look” of GTA VI on Netflix next Thursday.

Item 2: In brief…

🇺🇸 Spending in the U.S. on video game content, hardware and accessories totaled $4.5 billion in July, down 10% from a year ago, according to sales tracker Circana.

• The top-charting game was an updated version of Call of Duty: Black Ops II, with EA Sports College Football 27 second (but college football would take the top slot if an “MVP” bundle with the then-upcoming Madden were counted.)

• Console sales had their worst July since 2020.

• Physical game sales update: While game content sales in the U.S. totaled $4.1 billion in July, just $85 million was spent on new physical copies of games, an all-time low back to when Circana first tracked such data in 1995. The firm noted that, year-to-date, 63% of spending on physical games happened on Nintendo platforms, 32% on the soon-to-be-disc-ditching PlayStation (and 4% for Xbox).

🚫 Riot Games says it is discontinuing active development for fighting game 2XKO in December. The free-to-play game will remain available to play online and offline.

• The League of Legends maker cited a failure to gain traction with the broader fighting game fanbase.

• After years of development and months of early access on PC, 2XKO officially launched on PC and console in January of this year. Like Riot’s other games it was meant to be sustained through regular content updates. But by February, Riot announced via a “difficult update” that it was reducing the size of the game’s development team.

👀 Sony is rebooting development of Horizon: Hunters Gathering, a multiplayer game set in the typically single-player futuristic franchise, following poor player feedback during private player tests, Bloomberg reports.

🇸🇦 The Esports Nations Cup, a competitive gaming event set to be held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in November will be postponed until November 2027, organizers at the Saudi government-backed Esports Foundation said this week.

• The group cited “uncertainty created by the wider regional situation,” (which is code for: The U.S.-Iran war) but added that “Saudi Arabia remains fully capable of hosting events, with major sporting and entertainment events continuing as planned.”

🎮 Compulsion Games (South of Midnight) is fully independent, having completed its management buyout from Microsoft, according to a Gamesbeat interview with studio CEO Guillaume Provost.

• Provost, who acknowledged that some workers had left the studio earlier this year as a threat of closure loomed, predicted a healthy future for the studio: “I’m fairly confident we can get to that place if the team’s heart and priorities are aligned with running a profitable business.”

🎮 DoubleFine (Keeper, Psychonauts, Broken Age), having completed its management buyout from Microsoft, is launching a crowd-funding campaign at the end of the month for a game jam that will produce a new game, along with a documentary that will film the process.

• All of these elements—a Kickstarter, an Amnesia Fortnight game jam, a behind-the-scenes doc made by 2 Player Productions—went very well for the studio in the past.

💡 Harvey Smith (Deus Ex, Dishonored, Redfall), an award-winning specialist in the immersive sim genre of video games, has announced a new studio, Black Pony Immersive, with the hope to make a new game in the genre:

“…there’s just so much bad news and it’s shocking, the state of the world, beyond video games. So, it feels like to do something optimistic in the face of that is to be a dark horse. We’re going to fall back on what we love. We’re going to work with the people we love. We’re going to have fun doing it.

“So, Black Pony Immersive is tongue-in-cheek for that, but also ‘immersive’ is right there in the title. We want to make immersive sims. We want to make single player, narrative driven, first person games where you explore and solve problems creatively. Think Deus Ex, think Dishonored, that’s what we’re doing.”

💡 Warren Spector (Deus Ex, System Shock, Epic Mickey), a pioneer of the immersive sim genre of video games—look it up on Wikipedia and you get a photo of Spector—has announced his retirement from game development, after 40+ years making tabletop and digital games:

“I definitely have mixed feelings about this. I mean there are three games in particular I’d still like to make. (One is very big... one is very small... and one I don’t know how to make which scares me.) But the game business has changed and it’s just not as much fun for me anymore. Plus there’s a new generation of developers coming up who deserve their time in the sun.

“To all of you reading this I want you to remember that games are not a solved problem yet -- there is, I hope, plenty of experimentation and innovation to come. And to all you young developers out there, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, your job is to make people forget people like me ever existed.”

Item 3: The week ahead

Monday, August 24

• Game release: Combolands (PC) is a roguelite city builder from one of the makers of the terrific reverse-Sim-City game Terra Nil (I really enjoyed Combolands’ demo).

Tuesday, August 25

• Event: At 2pm ET, Opening Night Live, a livestreamed event featuring game announcements, kicks off the massive Gamescom public gaming show in Cologne, Germany.

Wednesday, August 26

• Game releases: 1666: Amsterdam (PC, early access) is the first new game from Panache Digital and lead Assassin’s Creed creator Patrice Désilets in six years (Read my recent chat with Désilets); Blood Dungeon (PC, console) is a 2D platform survival game from the makers of Nidhogg; Sokogram (PC) is a puzzle game that combines block-pushing Sokoban with Picross-style Nonogram logic grids (another demo I really enjoyed)

Thursday, August 27

• Event: An extended look at Grand Theft Auto VI—the game’s first official preview, basically—premieres on Netflix at 3pm ET and then will be on Rockstar’s YouTube channel six hours later.

• Game releases: Star Wars Zero Company (PC, PS5, Xbox) is an XCOM-style tactics game set during Star Wars’ Clone Wars; Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy (PC, PS5, Xbox) is a prequel to the well-regarded action-adventure series; Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 (PC, console) features 2008’s Metal Gear Solid 4 and 2010’s Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. Suddenly I’m thinking about frying eggs.

On a Monday morning in Los Angeles earlier this year, I was reminded how exciting it is to hear Raph Koster talk about a new video game, even when he is just talking to me about digging holes in the virtual ground.

Koster is a veteran game designer, former lead developer on seminal massively multiplayer online games Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies.

That morning, he’d welcomed me into a high-ceilinged hotel room where the latest vessel for his big video game ideas, the MMO Stars Reach, was running on a PC.

I took a seat and took control of a character who descended onto one of Stars Reach’s galaxy of planets. I was armed with some sort of terraforming beam. Koster encouraged me to point to a rocky part of the planetary surface and shoot.

“If you tunnel through this rock, it could cave in on you, because there is over a dozen kinds of soil with different pH.”

Stars Reach, he told me, had all kinds of rocks, some 200 types of materials and minerals. “And they all behave physically correctly,” he said.

I could liquify rock into lava with my laser. It would flow, then it could cool and congeal.

Koster then explained the game’s “chronophaser” to me. I could use it to advance a rock’s “geological time,” speedily eroding it. Or I could turn back the clock and liquify it.

“If you erode, for example, marble into limestone, into chalk, into sand and then you melt the sand, it’s going to turn into glass,” he said.

This, I recalled from a couple of decades of occasionally crossing paths with Koster, was what it os like to talk to him about video games: One wild detail after another, from a man whose dream is… well, I told Koster that the great game designer Hideo Kojima once told me that the thing he was chasing in video games was the rendering of a perfect sunset.

Amid this mind-blowing demo for Stars Reach, I asked Koster what his version of Kojima’s sunset was, and he had a good answer for that, too:

Read more

The headline says it all. Today, Friday, August 14, is your final chance to sign up for a Game File subscription at 23% off.

That’s $77 a year, down from the standard $100, to get full access to my reporting for the next 12 months.

Use this special sale link to take advantage of the deal. (Offer applies to new subscribers and gift subscriptions.)

On the micro level, I’d encourage you to subscribe to access any one of the paid pieces I run on Game File.

• Maybe you’ve never read my double-feature investigation into a wild false advertising lawsuit that revolved around a Star Wars video game, which is one of Game File’s most popular stories? Or my exclusive interview about the origins of Fortnite? Or my scoop about the high nine-figure budgets for Call of Duty games and the unlikely place where I found those numbers?

But $77 may feel steep for any one article or any three. People have subscription fatigue. Inflation’s a thing. Some of you are allocating your $77 for the purchase of an upcoming $80 Fire Emblem game.

On the macro level, this sale is a handy way for you to help ensure that I can continue to do the kind of reporting that Game File is all about.

I have no outside funders, just readers like you. Readers make it possible for nearly every edition of Game File, at least three times a week, to include original news that you haven’t seen anywhere else.

• This week alone, I brought Game File readers scoops about two Netflix game studio closures and about a CEO vs CEO potshot in a game trailer (that then detoured into one of the more bizarre game industry dramas we’ve seen in some time). Plus: I crunched soooo many Nintendo sales figures to get a bead on how the new Mario Kart is actually doing. And I unearthed some of my 20-year-old coverage of Rockstar Games and re-shared the highlights relevant to our GTA VI era.

• By the way…. Most of the above isn’t even what I planned for this week! Earlier this year, I conducted one of the most interesting interviews I’ve ever done with the head of a famous video game company. It’s not time-sensitive, so I held off for a bit, prioritizing other pieces. I decided it would be a strong article to run it during this sale, but I could not carve out the time to do it justice. Too many pieces of breaking news. Too many tall charts to suddenly make! It’ll run soon, I promise, but “soon” will extend beyond the sale week.

That’s the pitch. Game File’s first big sale of the year ends tonight.

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Netflix is sticking with video games but once again reducing the number of studios it owns making games.

The streaming giant is closing Los Angeles-based Night School studio, which it acquired in 2021 and plans to close Helsinki-based Moonloot, which was founded in 2022.

Just six weeks ago, Night School had released Unhinged, a novel 30-minute first-person horror game, streamable on TVs to Netflix users. The game was hailed by Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters in a call with investors, citing “really solid numbers.”

Six weeks later, Night School is closing.

Prior to its Netflix tenure, Night School had developed the award-winning supernatural thriller Oxenfree. A second Oxenfree game followed after the purchase, as well as a mobile game designed to tie in to an episode of the Netflix show Black Mirror.

Netflix attributed the studio closures to a prioritization around kids gaming, party games, story-driven fare and games with mainstream hooks, such as a recently released FIFA game.

“We see an opportunity to be more focused in our execution, so we are making organizational changes to the business to match those priorities,” a Netflix spokesperson told Game File.

Netflix is also cutting jobs from its internal games team. A rep declined to say how many jobs were being lost by these cutbacks.

“We are incredibly grateful to the talented colleagues we’re saying goodbye to today. We thank them for all their contributions to Netflix, and wish them the best,” the rep said.

Netflix started releasing video games, initially on mobile as a free bonus to subscribers, in 2021. By 2023, Mike Verdu, then the head of Netflix’s game operations, was telling me that the company was committed to growing carefully, as it offered more games and built up internal game studios. At the time, it hadn’t made any gaming job cuts.

Since then, Netflix has altered its approach. In 2024, it shut down Team Blue, a start-up studio led by ex-Call of Duty and Halo developers that was exploring making a high-end first-person game for the service.

Last October, Netflix shut down another studio, Boss Fight, shortly after Peters praised the team’s Squid Game game to investors. (One of Boss Fight’s main developers now works on the Netflix FIFA game for outside studio Delphi.)

And in December, Netflix sold cozy game studio Spry Fox back to its founders.

Amid all of this, Netflix has shifted from emphasizing mobile games to offering games through TVs and PCs, via streamed connections, with phones used as controllers. That’s how Night School’s Unhinged worked, along with games such as Boggle and Party Crashers that have collectively helped the Netflix game controller app chart well on mobile app stores.

The studio cuts leave Netflix with a central gaming team that works with external developers, and a dedicated first party studio in, Helsinki-based Next Games, which produced many of the company’s couch-centric party games.

The move away from having a roster of internal game studios aligns with Netflix’s own approach to shows and movies, which are largely produced externally. The company owns few TV/film production studios of its own.

The gaming industry overall is seeing large holders of multiple studios cut back, with Sony, Ubisoft, Embracer, Microsoft and other giants closing or selling off studios. Cuts in California-based studios, where costs often run relatively high, have been particularly acute.

Netflix has faced skepticism about its gaming plans for years. The moves today are likely to fuel them, and the company has few upcoming projects to counter the narrative. Among the few hinted, acclaimed independent studio Don’t Nod said last year it was working on a game tied to a major Netflix franchise.

“Games continue to be an opportunity for us to expand the variety of entertainment we offer Netflix members,” the Netflix rep told Game File.

Writers working on Saber Interactive’s upcoming driving game Rideshare Stimulator are using AI prompts to generate driver-passenger dialogues that they then edit for the game’s “experimental” side mode, the company’s CEO Matt Karch tells Game File. This is in addition to the game’s main, human authored script, Saber says.

Karch shared that explanation amid an unexpectedly acrimonious week of discussion around the game. That discussion has partially involved Saber’s initially undisclosed use of generative AI to help write the game.

To get you up to speed.

On Monday: Game File reported that Rideshare Stimulator’s July 30th debut trailer had included some digs at a rival gaming executive. That piece quoted Karch explaining the point of those digs. The piece generated some buzz online.

On Tuesday: Stella Sacco, a former writer on the game said on social media that she’d been replaced on the project in late 2023 by ChatGPT. In reference to the trailer, she wrote:

I didn’t even see this had been announced. I was lead writer on this one! And Saber replaced me with ChatGPT midway through development. All the passenger voices were AI too. Either they changed direction at some point or they’re not disclosing it on Steam

Sacco stressed this had been a Saber upper management call and that she had no grievance with Unigine.

Later on Tuesday: Saber issued a statement denying the replacement of humans for AI. They said that the game, which is about driving eccentric passengers to their destinations, used AI for an “experimental” side mode that used AI “by necessity.”

Here’s that statement, in full:

Neither Saber nor Unigine have replaced any writers with AI for Rideshare or any other game. In fact Saber’s staff of writers has tripled since 2023. Rideshare’s story was written entirely by real people. The game will also feature an experimental, free-ride mode that by necessity incorporates AI as the number of passengers in the game is infinite. We are firm believers in using AI tools to improve or enhance gameplay experiences and improve NPC behavior as we have done since Saber was founded in 2001. As the industry has continued to contract, Saber continues to hire. None of our 3000+ employees have to worry about being replaced by AI.

On Wednesday morning, I contacted Saber PR with some follow-ups about their statement.

I wanted to understand how AI was going to be used to write dialogue for an “infinite” number of passengers. Was the game going to be pinging an AI server to generate new rider dialogues on the fly? That’s how I was reading their statement, and, my understanding was that such an approach would rack up AI charges for Saber per newly-generated dialogue. I’d heard that Epic’s implementation of this approach for Darth Vader in Fortnite last year had been expensive. That didn’t seem like something Saber would do.

And what exactly did “Rideshare’s story was written entirely by real people” mean? The whole script? Just the plot?

By mid-day Wednesday, Saber PR replied, with two answers that they said came directly from Karch.

On the AI writing process he said, no, the game wouldn’t be pinging a server for new genAI-written dialogue as players were driving around.

Instead, he said, the game’s writers were using AI prompts to generate batches of dialogues that they were then editing for the game’s endless mode, with more batches planned if needed.

Here’s how Karch put it:

“The dialogues are produced offline via prompts created by our writers (and verified to ensure they are within guardrails). The prompts are intended to elicit a wide range of topics that include current events. The dialogues are then uploaded to everyone and played only once for any given gamer. We don’t allow the player to prompt dialogues. Each dialogue is a new ‘ride.’ The frequency of the generation will be highly dependent on how large the audience is, but the implementation is relatively cost efficient.”

Sacco had pointed out that the game’s Steam page doesn’t include an AI disclosure.

In 2024, Valve began requiring developers to disclose if generative AI tools were used to develop their games. This reflected concerns by some game makers and players that generative AI is not a boon for game development but a negative, that, for example, such tools may plagiarize other people’s work. Games listed on Valve’s Steam marketplace began including disclosures if genAI was used to make the game. Some fans didn’t care. Others pledged to skip such games.

Earlier this year, Valve adjusted its policy, saying that AI disclosure wouldn’t be necessary for AI tools used to improve development efficiency, such as AI writing game code, but would be needed for games that use AI to generate in-game content.

The genAI use Karch described for Rideshare Stimulator doesn’t sound like it’ll generate and inject dialogue directly into the game. But it also doesn’t seem like it could be classified strictly as an efficiency helper. A rep for Saber told me yesterday that an AI disclosure on the game’s Steam page is forthcoming.

As for my question about “written entirely by real people,” Karch’s response on Wednesday was as follows:

“Humans wrote the story, all of it. I mean it’s not Shakespeare level prose but it’s better than Claude could produce. But frankly from what I hear from my team that statement might not apply to the writer in question.”

I’m not used to gaming executives proving statements, via their PR team, that insult former employees. I’ve spoken to Karch enough previously to not be surprised that this is how he’d feel, but was surprised he’d take that approach here. Busy with other reporting yesterday, I put off deciding how I’d use Karch’s comments.

By Wednesday evening, This Week In Video Games had published their own batch of comments from Karch. In them, he attested to humans writing the game’s script and took even more aggressive shots at Sacco: “Stella who? I had to ask Claude because I have never spoken to her or seen her…As far as Stella is concerned, she was replaced by someone more talented and terminated for a variety of reasons a few months later.”

Sacco reacted on social media later on Wednesday:

“I’ve seen the statement by Matt Karch, the CEO of Saber Entertainment, and all of the truly horrendous things he said about me. I think it should be obvious to anyone who reads that statement that he’s lashing out because he did not want people to know there was AI use in the game.

“That statement is remarkably pathetic for the CEO of any company to be making, and combined with the AI use it will do far more damage to Saber’s reputation than it ever could mine. This screed will be many people’s first exposure to the Saber brand.”

On the game’s Steam page, subsequent discussions on the user forums have been scathing against Karch and Saber.

Nintendo’s nine-year-old Mario Kart 8 Deluxe remains a strong seller for the company, so much so that it just might be eating into the sales of its Switch 2 sequel, according to a Game File analysis of recent Nintendo sales data.

• The older Mario Kart game, which launched for Switch in April 2017, sold 450,000 copies—at $60/copy—between April 1 and June 30 of this year.

• Mario Kart World, the open-world sequel that launched in June 2025, sold 690,000 copies—largely if not entirely at $80/copy—in that same stretch.

That’s a lower total for the older game, but the race has been a stubbornly close between the new Mario Kart and its nearly decade-old predecessor that somehow keeps finding more people to buy it.

Platform differences alone don’t fully explain the older game’s resilience. Deluxe, like most original Switch games can also run on Switch 2 and therefore has two huge installed based to sell into, compared to Mario Kart World having just the Switch 2. But Deluxe has also facing the kind of displacement that could befall any game that gets a heavily marketed new sequel. That has not happened.

Nintendo’s newest sales figures, released last week, show both the older Mario Kart’s enduring strength and offer at least a warning of the new game’s potential weakness.

• Sales of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, relative to sales of the original Switch (this is key, as I’ll explain), have actually increased since the launch of the Switch 2 and the launch of that system’s newer Mario Kart.

• Sales of Mario Kart World, relative to sales of the Switch 2, have dropped dramatically, since the Nintendo stopped bundling it with its new hardware.

There are a lot of variables involved in this comparison. I’ll get to them below.

But, at first blush, the contest between the two games raises some key questions for Nintendo and perhaps the broader gaming industry.

• What happens when gamers can choose between two games that run on the same system, when one is polished and costs $60 and one is similar but has the more modern price of $80?

• What happens if a sequel in a mega-franchise can’t eclipse its predecessor?

• And, just for Nintendo: What happens when Nintendo has to compete with itself, as the Switch 2 line-up will have to as it faces down the mighty best-selling, backwards compatible best of the original Switch?

To sort this out, I’ve crunched Nintendo’s numbers for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Mario Kart World, Animal Crossing New Horizons, SuperSmash Bros. Ultimate. And I’ve tried to figure out just what’s been happening with Switch 1 hits on the Switch 2.

Here’s what I’ve found:

Read more

As I looked at my old MTV News coverage, two things stood out about the Rockstar of old vs. the Rockstar that’s about to debut an extended look for GTA VI on Netflix later this month:

• Rockstar was way more prolific then - I previewed three of their games in 2006 alone

• Rockstar was at least perceived as more dangerous then - their games scared people! And maybe explaining themselves to MTV News back then felt like more of a necessary thing to do

(If you’d prefer to watch this video on YouTube, it’ll be uploaded soon to my channel.)

Accompanying the video, I’ve got a batch of excerpts from you, all from my time covering video games for MTV News (2005-2009). These pieces, most of which involve previews and interviews conducted at Rockstar’s NYC headquarters, would have been lost to time, if not for the Internet Archive setting up a digital MTV News collection. I am so grateful for that…

The likes of MTV sure aren’t bankrolling my video game coverage anymore. Game File is a reader-supported publication, and it’s your backing that makes my reporting possible. Good news! I’m currently running Game File’s first big sale of 2026. You can get a one-year subscription for 23% off. Click here to take advantage of the limited-time offer. And thank you for your support!

The First Rule Of Ping-Pong Club: Talk About Rockstar’s Table Tennis Game

May 4, 2006, for MTV News [Archive link]

The second floor showcase room isn’t an office for Rockstar. It’s a 100-foot-long, high-ceiling apartment that belongs to a Dutch photographer. It’s mostly one big room, with a kitchen in the living area and a long empty glass tank elevated to eye level and big enough to hold a school of fish or one big snake. Rockstar has added three big-screen high-definition TVs and a trio of Xbox 360s.

For the past two months, Rockstar’s PR team has invited journalists, game store employees, hip-hop heads and whoever else they think can create buzz, to come in and play the game they officially call Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis. Attendees play the game tournament-style; their names penciled in on paper posted on the mystery glass tank.

Rockstar’s Controversial Bully Game Not A Schoolyard GTA After All

August 11, 2006, for MTV News [Archive link]

A year after critics said it should be banned, Bully — the new game from Grand Theft Auto maker Rockstar Games — is finally in action.

And the biggest shock so far is that the game is not exactly what the Bully opponents said it would be. In fact, it even has an advocate in the bullying-awareness crowd.

“When I saw it, I was like, ‘I want to be the first one to play the game,’ “ said Izzy Kalman, a Staten Island school psychologist and founder of Bullies2Buddies, who saw the game in action at Rockstar’s offices last week. “I think it’s wonderful.”

Dubbed a “Columbine simulator” last year by attorney Jack Thompson and the subject of a picketing campaign by a group called the Peaceoholics, the game, as demonstrated, appears to be more of a “Napoleon Dynamite” or “Breakfast Club” simulator.

…

A trio of Rockstar reps recently demonstrated “Bully” for MTV News at the game maker’s downtown office. When the company demoed “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas,” it opened with a video reel featuring clips from “Boyz N the Hood” and “Easy Rider.” This time, it was “Rushmore” and “Napoleon Dynamite” and seemingly every movie that features schoolboys wearing blazers with a patch on the chest.

Bully is the tale of squat, 15-year-old, buzz-cut-sporting Jimmy Hopkins and the rough-and-tumble halls of Bullworth Academy. By the time the Rockstar team turned off the movie reel and began running through Jimmy’s travails on a PS2, the message was clear: This concept has been shown outside of games plenty of times; we’re just joining in.

“Rockstar is often portrayed as doing a certain kind of game: guns or crime,” said Harry Allen, a Rockstar publicist. “What we do is find narratives and situations, stories, and we try to make a game out of it.”1

…

One mission has a nerd despondent over the theft of some character sheets for a game of a Dungeons & Dragons-style game called Grottos & Gremlins. Jimmy agrees to rescue them and goes on a hunt for the guilty bullies. It was at about this point in the demonstration that the Rockstar reps began to boast of the game’s nuanced relationship system that will cause members of the game’s four non-bully factions — the nerds, preppies, jocks or greasers — to provide aid if they are helped in previous missions.

The demo version of Jimmy had been good to the nerds already — too good for the demo, it turned out. During a scene that was supposed to show some dialogue between Jimmy and another bully, a nerd flew into the picture and tackled the bully. That wasn’t in the script. It was the game’s alliance system getting hyperactive. The Rockstar reps promised that the story-line scenes would be walled off from such interference by the time the game is finalized.

‘GTA: Vice City Stories’ Involves Smuggling Rings, Jet Ski Stunts — And Chocolate

September 20, 2006, for MTV News [Archive link]

…while other companies are still struggling with the basics of making a GTA-style open-world go-anywhere, do-anything kind of environment, the [Rockstar] Leeds [studio] is tinkering with advanced concerns. One is “clumping,” the tendency for every car in a game of this type to be the same make — and the same make of whatever car the player just jacked. It’s not something that happens all the time, but because of memory and processing idiosyncrasies, it’s something common enough that Leeds wants to rub it out. Another nit they want to pick? “Sometimes you carjack a Banshee [GTA sports car] and a 90-year-old lady gets out and you’re like, ‘Ah, that doesn’t really make much sense,’ “ Bennett said. Leeds is on that too.

‘Grand Theft Auto IV’ Developer Announces Release Date, Says Whether There Will Be Another ‘Hot Coffee’

Jan 23, 2008, for MTV News [Archive link]

GTA games haven’t missed their announced release dates before. When the delay was announced in August, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick told investors that “the reason it is being delayed is almost strictly technological problems — not problems, but challenges.” [Rockstar VP of product development Jeronimo] Barrera offered a little more detail to MTV News this week: “It’s really no surprise to anybody that the PS3 was definitely a contributing factor to that. Now, we’re neck and neck. That’s not an issue anymore. But back then that was something we were taking into account. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with the PS3 version. It’s awesome. They’re both identical.”

…

What about sex? For better or worse, the biggest surprise to many people about the most recent console installment in the series, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, was the unfinished interactive sex scenes left deep within the code of the game discs and accessible to hackers. That’s not coming back for the new game. “Are we going to have a ‘Hot Coffee’ situation?” Barrera asked aloud. “Absolutely not.” But the game will have romance. Unlike Rockstar’s recent schoolyard game, Bully, the main male character won’t be able to get involved with other guys , but straight relationships will continue. “Yeah, you can go on dates,” Barrera said. “Obviously it’s a mature title and there’s human relations. That’s a natural thing.”

‘Grand Theft Auto IV’ Details Unloaded In Lengthy Private Demo At Developer’s Headquarters

Jan 23, 2008, for MTV News [Archive link]

Other news about travel in GTA includes the breakthrough that cars that Niko steals now have GPS systems. A yellow route will be drawn on the player’s mini-map in the lower-left-hand corner of the screen to get them to a selected destination. Players that steal luxury cars will discover that the GPS in those vehicles can talk.

The police system has been changed. Previous GTA games always showed a “wanted” meter in the upper-right corner. This showed how much trouble the player was in with the law, based on a number of stars. The stars only went away if the player went into hiding or was taken down by the law. The new game doesn’t have a persistent “wanted” meter. Instead, crimes cause no change in the player’s notoriety unless they are witnessed by a nearby police officer.

Grand Theft Auto IV Hands-on: Less Like a Video Game Than Ever Before

March 12, 2008, for MTV News [Archive Link]

While we followed the rules of these missions, it became clear that Rockstar has tried to make GTA IV feel like less of a video game, a change that will likely excite fans and further horrify the series’ critics. Shooting a policeman, a criminal or a civilian will cause them to tumble with convincing physics. Shot people look hurt. Cars handle more realistically and more distinctly, depending on the type, making driving feel more true to life. The improved physics and animation make the game feel more real, the player’s actions more fraught with consequence. We stole a car, tried to evade police and fishtailed through an innocent crowd. Our car was damaged. The cops swarmed. And so while trying to drive up a hill, our vehicle simply stalled. The police won that one. When we stole a motorcycle in another mission, we were arrested immediately, without a shot being fired.

GTA IV has been designed with the intention to strip away a lot of its predecessors’ video-gameness. Extra guns and health packs don’t float a few inches above the ground, waiting to be walked through. They lie on flat surfaces, waiting to be picked up. A Rockstar rep told MTV News that the developers didn’t even want those found items to glow, as they do now, because that’s not realistic. But a concession was made so players could more easily identify what they could and should try to grab in this world.

…

Off its rails, the game can be cartoonish. We stood Niko at the foot of Liberty City’s Statue of Happiness and fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the statue, sending tourists fleeing and denting the statue not a bit. A tourist had dropped a jug of milk and a loaf of bread. A policeman, sensing cause for alarm, approached and dodged a few shots of the RPG right in his direction. He had a gut but was nimble, and he had a backup fleet of choppers and, across the waterway, armored vans and SWAT teams to back him up, an imbalanced cartoon dynamic of cops vs. robber that saw justice again prevail.

…

(On a more personal note to Rockstar: Our subways in the real New York City aren’t dingy and graffiti-covered anymore. And the building where this story was filed houses MTV, not Music Entertainment TV, aka Me TV. What exactly is “GTA IV” trying to imply?)

Grand Theft Auto IV Multiplayer Hands On: Experiencing the Mayhem with Rockstar

April 8, 2008, for MTV News [Archive link]

And how would he distinguish the GTA multiplayer mode from that of other games? “Not tacked on,” he said. “It fits seamlessly into the game — the variety and ultimately the freedom that players are going to enjoy for a very long time.”

The first hint that something might be up with the recent debut trailer for Saber Interactive’s Rideshare Stimulator is an unusual choice of words—aside from that second one in the game’s title.

“Don’t take your passengers too seriously,” the trailer’s narrator says, as he describes this upcoming game. It a car game about the gig work of driving eccentric people to their destinations, a riff on Crazy Taxi.

And then, he says: “When I think I’ve met the randiest of passengers, someone even stranger gets in.”

“Randiest”?

That suggests “randy,” which usually means having strong sexual desire. Yet none of the oddball backseat occupants featured in the trailer seem particularly lustful. One is an old man who considers his grandson a failure, another shares the theory that birds might control traffic lights, another says he’s banned from an aquarium.

A little later, there’s a license plate, shown 63 seconds into the trailer, on the front of an SUV:

USB DRV

It’s a Texas plate. The symbol between those letters is a cog wheel.

If you know, you know.

That’s a reference to Texas-based Borderlands game development studio Gearbox Software (their logo features a cog wheel). More specifically, it’s a reference to Gearbox’s co-founder and president Randy Pitchford, who in 2018 found himself explaining the nature of video he’d saved on a USB drive that was found at a Medieval Times restaurant before being returned to the studio: “It was ‘barely legal’ porn. This girl’s handle was ‘Only 18.’” The “girl” in the video had committed a solo sex act that Pitchford, an avid practitioner of magic, found remarkable. “I realized, this is not a sex worker…This is a fucking magician.”

Back then, the USB drive was central to competing lawsuits against Gearbox by the studio’s former lawyer and by Gearbox against him. A settlement in late 2019 “exonerated” Pitchford, per the Hollywood Reporter.

The USB story has resurfaced at times, now in a trailer from a company that not long ago was corporate brethren with Gearbox.

Saber vs. Gearbox

The head of Saber told Game File that the reference is payback.

“The dig is because Randy took shots at Embracer in Borderlands 4,” Saber CEO Matt Karch told me when I asked him about the license plate. “Without Embracer, Randy is performing magic tricks at birthday parties for a living.”

Having interviewed Karch during a cross-country flight in late 2024, I can confirm that Karch was unimpressed with Pitchford during their time both working in the Embracer group.

I’d approached him not out of surprise that there was animosity but that it was manifesting publicly now.

Gearbox was founded in 1999, worked on a port of Halo early on, and developed hit series such as the loot-based sci-fi shooter Borderlands before it was purchased by The Embracer Group in early 2021 for $363 million (with a possible earn-out of over $1 billion, if certain targets were hit by 2027).

Saber was founded in 2001, worked on a remaster of Halo early on, had a big hit with zombie shooter World War Z and was purchased by Embracer in early 2020 for $150 million, with a potential earn-out of up to $375 million.

For a few years, the Embracer group was a voracious acquirer of game studios. Then, as investment dried up, it choked. In March 2024, Embracer sold Saber to an investment company controlled by Saber CEO Matt Karch, and it sold Gearbox in an all-stock deal to long-time Borderlands publisher Take Two Interactive. Other studios were shut down. Hundreds of developers were laid off.

Gearbox didn’t say much about their Embracer experience, nothing too direct, at least. In the summer 2024, Pitchford told reporter and occasional Game File contributor Nicole Carpenter that Borderlands 4’s story was in some way thematically connected to Gearbox’s experience at Embracer: “There’s this cultural and emotional shift in me, personally, and at the studio. What does it mean to trade some autonomy for organization?”

When Borderlands 4 came out, there was something stranger: the matter of “Embracer’s Bluff,” a location in the game featuring an AI-powered toilet and a large trash dump, according to a detailed Kotaku account of the place. Gearbox never commented on it; Take Two never got back to me about it when I asked them last year.

By contrast, since Saber exited Embracer, Karch has been one of Embracer’s biggest defenders, casting their management as well-meaning and supportive despite the layoffs and studio closures that resulted from their excessive expansion.

Like others, Saber’s Karch saw Embracer’s as a shot. With Rideshare Stimulator’s trailer, he’s returned fire.

“It’s amazing to me how fast people forget those who went above and beyond for them,” Karch told Game File.

A rep for Gearbox did not comment by press time.

Game File is a reader-supported publication. Your backing makes my reporting—including any coverage of trailer-based beefs—possible. Good news! I’m currently running Game File’s first big sale of 2026. You can get a one-year subscription for 23% off. Click here to take advantage of the limited-time offer. And thank you for your support!

Item 2: In brief…

🚫 Wal-Mart has laid off the staff of Restart, a games media outlet launched in 2024, Aftermath reports.

🟥 A GTA VI preview is on the way, at last, via an “extended look” that will premiere, unusually, on Netflix at 3pm ET on August 27, then officially go live elsewhere six hours later.

• Last week, Game File noted that Take Two label Rockstar Games is overdue for showing off GTA VI, based on the timing of the initial hands-off previews of GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2.

• During a call with investors, Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said pre-orders for GTA VI were “unprecedented and astonishing,” but added the company can’t predict how many of those pre-orders represent bonus sales vs. sales that otherwise would have been made at launch.

• During the same call, Zelnick was noticeably bullish on the future of playing games over streaming cloud connections (predicting wider adoption in three or so years). He sounded unbothered by Sony’s plans to stop making discs for new games (he said the business is 90% digital already and predicted that there could still be limited edition physical editions of games “in the same way there’s still vinyl in the recorded music business.”)

👀 Take Two wrote off $43 million in their spring quarter after deciding “not to proceed with further development of an unannounced title in its pipeline from a third-party developer.”

🤔 Some rare age-demographics from a big publisher: Capcom recently told investors that “users in their 20s account for approximately half of the users of both Pragamata and Resident Evil Requiem.”

Item 3: The week ahead

Tuesday, August 11

• Game releases: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered (Switch 2; already out for PC, PS5, Xbox) continues the Bethesda strategy of putting Elder Scrolls games on everything; Royalty Free-For-All is a Smash Bros.-style fighting game featuring public domain characters such as Mother Goose brawling with Oliver Twist in a stage based on the original Little Shop of Horrors movie.

Wednesday, August 12

• Game release: Pro Jank Footy (PC, console) is an arcade-style Australian Rules Football game with increasingly ridiculous rules, the more you play (I enjoyed the Steam demo)

Thursday, August 13

• Game release: Super Mario Sunshine (Switch 2, originally released in 2002 on the GameCube) is released for Switch 2’s Nintendo Switch Online service. This game is the black sheep of 3D Mario games. It’s the successor to the breakthrough Super Mario 64 and the rare Mario game built around a single (vacation resort) theme. Mario’s got a water-spraying backpack, a Yoshi pal and a lot of blue coins to collect.

Since Sony’s announcement last month that it will cease producing discs for new PlayStation games in 2028, there’s been a lot of talk about the value and potential disappearance of video game discs.

As I reported on that news, I realized I didn’t know how video games wind up on discs in the first place. How does the process work? What does it cost?

I thought Game File readers might also like to know.

So, I started asking sources in the industry, and they started explaining the steps involved from making a video game to getting it on a disc: What Sony and Microsoft require game publishers to do and some of the quirks about how their approaches differ.

I spoke to people involved with game companies big and small, though no one was authorized to talk on the record. Once I had a list of how the sources said it all worked, I ran it by Sony to fact-check. They declined to weigh in. I wasn’t able to get anything from Microsoft either.

Nonetheless, this is how it works, according to people familiar with the process….

Read more

The chart atop this article is not Game File’s tallest chart ever.

It’s the short version, crunched down for you to see the latest comparison of the compensation earned by Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson vs. the average EA worker.

And, yes, you’re reading it right. There are two very different totals for Wilson’s 2026 compensation.

By one measure, Wilson made $39 million in 2026, via a mix of cash and stock awards (mostly the latter).

That figure was reported widely last week, based on new EA financial disclosures for the company’s fiscal year ended March 2026. (I was on vacation!)

The other figure, via a relatively new, fairly controversial U.S. government metric labeled as “compensation actually paid,” hasn’t made the rounds as much among the public, best I can tell. It puts Wilson’s 2026 comp at… $77 million.

Figures like that necessitated I update the very tall, very vital compensation comparison chart I published last year. The chart had compared several years’ worth of Wilson’s compensation to the average EA worker’s. There’s a big gap. Make your own judgments about whether there should be.

Lat year, I needed 15,000 pixels to show that comparison in a way that let readers see any ups and downs in the bottom-most line showing EA worker pay.

This year, to keep things comparable, I needed 30,000 pixels.

I’m about to show you this chart, but I need you to brace yourself.

In fact, I’m going to prep you for that chart with another chart:

You see?

New chart = way taller.

Ready…..set… scroll! And then keep reading, because this requires a bit more explanation.

Hello, again. You made it!

Here, at the bottom of the chart, we can see that the median compensation for EA’s workers went up this year, from $117,000/year to $127,000/year. The worker pay is also a mix of cash and stock awards, which can cause fluctuations. EA had used the same worker for their median pay measure for a few years, but used a new one for 2026.

Back to Wilson’s compensation: We’ve got two radically different numbers to work with: $39 million and $77 million.

Which is it?

There’s no easy answer.

Most news outlets, and the companies reporting these figures themselves, tend to prefer the traditional way of calculating compensation, which results in the $39 million figure. It’s up from $31 million the year before (easily seen in the chart at the top of this post).

The breakdown for that 2026 EA CEO compensation figure:

• $1.3 million base salary (unchanged from 2025)

• $6.5 million cash bonus (up from $2.8 million in 2025), tied to such things as “meeting all milestones for a high-quality launch of Battlefield 6”1, attracting/retaining talent, “executing a bold GenAI strategy” and selling the company for $55 billion to a consortium of investors led by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund

• $28.5 million worth of performance-based and time-based stock awards

• $2.4 million in other compensation for things such as private jet travel, which included up to 75 hours worth of personal trips—allowable thanks to the recommendation of a June 2025 “independent security assessment”

The $77 million “actually paid” version of Wilson’s compensation includes the same cash amounts for salary and bonus, but it calculates the stock awards at a much higher rate, working off of the $202 stock price at the end of EA’s fiscal year. (It was below $150 a year before that.)

The “compensation actually paid (CAP)” metric was implemented by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 2022 as a way to give investors more information about how leaders are paid vs. how a company is doing. For some companies, CAP has consistently been far higher than the old way of measuring CEO pay (hence the corporate grumbling about the stat). In EA’s case, Wilson’s CAP had been lower than his traditionally reported compensation. That situation flipped, radically, in 2026.

Game File is a reader-supported publication. Your backing makes my reporting—and all of my tall charts—possible. Good news! I’m currently running Game File’s first big sale of 2026. You can get a one-year subscription for 23% off. Click here to take advantage of the limited-time offer. And thank you for your support!

Companies have complained about the CAP measurement, saying it does not represent what their CEOs are actually paid. The SEC’s argument has been that calculating stock awards in a way that factors in the company’s year-end stock price gets much closer to showing what an executive is likely to get from their stock awards.

The reason there isn’t a definitive answer to which calculation is better is because the payouts for these awards can vary widely over time.

Each year, Wilson and other CEOs of publicly traded companies are granted millions of dollars worth of stock awards that are subject to multi-year performance goals and/or multi-year waiting periods. The idea is that the CEO’s potential increase in wealth is incumbent on them leading the company to success and on them staying in their role.

In EA’s case, there’s the added twist of the video game company having just been sold to private investors. That $55 billion deal closed this week. Among the terms of the deal is that, by default, stock awards are converted to “restricted cash awards,” subject to some performance and time-based thresholds, and paid out at a rate tied to the $210/per share final sale price of the stock. That bodes well for anyone getting stock/restricted-cash awards.

With EA having gone private, the company is no longer obligated to report the compensation of its executives. This is therefore the last we’ll probably hear from EA about its CEO’s pay or that of its workers. We just won’t know if EA suddenly closes the CEO-worker gap and starts paying each game developer millions of dollars on average.

And that, alas, means there probably won’t be an EA Tall Chart for 2027. End of a brief era…

It’s the middle of the summer, and I’m running Game File’s first big sale of 2026.

Instead of paying $100 for an annual sub, new subscribers can get one right now for 23% off. That’s $77, which divides out to less than $6.42 per month.

Click here to get it.

And if you already have an annual sub, thank you! (You can buy gift subs for others… just sayin’!).

On the fence? Let’s try this…

I think I’m a better reporter than I am a salesperson, so I want to keep this (fairly) brief and get back to the work that I love doing.

Here is how I think about it:

• You can read a lot of Game File for free. I hate having a paywall, so I place it low enough in paid pieces so that non-paying readers get the gist. Plus, at least one Game File story a week costs readers nothing.

• To read a single paid Game File article in full, you could start a free trial (then split, as some folks do), or pay $10 for a monthly sub. I love when people stick around—this one drew a lot of folks in—but I understand when they don’t. $10 to read a single article you’re curious about can feel steep.

• So what I want to emphasize today isn’t $10 for an article, nor $10 for a monthly sub nor even $100 for an annual sub.

• Instead, I want to frame it like this: Whatever you can pay makes it possible for me to deliver original news that doesn’t get reported without Game File readers’ support. Game File subscribers ensure I can land scoops, travel to get stories on the road, and just keep doing this.

One last breakdown, if you’ll indulge me

Journalism is a tough business these days, so I’m grateful that readers make it possible for me produce what I’ll humbly describe as a killer output at Game File. I do not take the opportunity Game File subscribers give me lightly, which is why I want to keep delivering months like these…

• January 2026: In just one month, I broke news about former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick’s lawsuit conspiracy theory (then fended off his lawyers), broke news about labor complaints against Nintendo, burned some shoe leather to get an exclusive on-site interview in California with ex-Blizzard developers at Dreamhaven, landed an exclusive interview with the CEO of Nexon, landed an ex-Netflix game studio’s first post-Netflix interview, scored an interview with the co-creator of viral 2025 game Peak (that led to this popular quote “eight bucks is still five bucks”), broke down two years of Sony, Microsoft and WB Games layoffs in Washington State. I also reviewed a beautiful game.

• Or let’s go with July 2026: Game File was the FIRST outlet worldwide with one of 2026’s biggest stories–PlayStation’s decision to stop producing discs for new games in 2028. I hustled to land two more exclusive stories about the news. I broke news about Epic settling its lawsuit against a Fortnite leaker and scooped Nintendo denying it legally owes gamers its tariff refunds. I covered the layoffs at Xbox, then was the first outlet to report the scale of cuts at Obsidian and the departure of ZeniMax Online Studios’ leadership team.I was the only reporter to cover a wild talk in Manhattan that featured the highly quotable former Disney CEO Michael Eisner and Delphi Interactive, the company that orchestrated new James Bond and FIFA games. Plus I reviewed the latest Assassin’s Creed and dug into the drama around a very complicated game. And more.

• I aim for every month of Game File to be packed full of original reporting, just like those above.

If you can’t subscribe, no problem. The economy is tough. There are more essential things to spend money on.

But if you can, now’s a great time. In 2026, “flat” is the new “up” for paid subs, and that’s fine. But “up” would be lovely!

Annual subs are 23% off through Friday, August 14.

Thank you for backing me. And now, back to reporting…

Sony estimates it will have received ¥80 billion ($508 million) in tariff refunds from the United States government, in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling in February that the global levies imposed by the Trump administration were illegal.

“Most” of that refund will be recouped by Sony’s gaming division, company chief financial officer Lin Tao said last week during a Q&A with press and investors.

The 2025 tariffs contributed to Sony’s decision to raise prices on hardware and accessories. It has increased the cost of the base PS5 that cost $500 in early 2025 to $550 in August 2025 and up again to $650 in April 2026.

Sony executives said last week that about 70% of the tariff refund (that’d be $356 million or so) was collected in the April-June quarter and that “most” went to the games division.

The refund has been a boon for the bean-counters at the Tokyo-headquartered giant. It’s cited as one of the key factors that compelled Sony to increase its operating income forecast for the current year by 10%. (Other factors cited were foreign exchange rates and “improvements in costs.”)

The refunds, while directly paid by the U.S. government, originally were paid by consumers in the U.S. who bought tariff-hiked goods from Sony and other companies.

Some of those consumers have sued Sony and other corporations, saying the refunds should be passed on to them.

In April, gamers filed a class action claim against Nintendo, accusing the company of illegally enriching itself, should it keep its refunds for the illegal tariffs rather than pass them on to consumers. Last month, Nintendo replied in court, saying it had no legal obligation to distribute the refunds to its customers: “Those who bought Nintendo’s products received exactly what they bargained and paid for: a console, game and/or accessory at a price to which both parties agreed.”

Multiple similar class action claims brought by PlayStation gamers against Sony were recently consolidated into one case. Sony is slated to respond to the combined lawsuit later this month.

More Sony notes:

• A mystery: Sony said that its revised forecast for operating income this year would have been even higher, if not for “adjustments to [the] FY26 first-party title roadmap.” That suggests the cancellation or delay of game(s)/expansion(s) out of the 12-month period ending March 2027. Sony’s slate for the current fiscal year includes two very big first-party games: September’s Marvel super-hero adventure Wolverine from Insomniac as well as God of War: Laufey, which recently was announced for February 2027. [see slide 9]

• Discs! Sony CFO Lin Tao was asked a few questions about the thinking behind the company’s July announcement to stop producing discs for new games in 2028. In remarks in Japanese tat were translated live into English by a Sony interpreter, Tao said the company had “put in a lot of thought” into the change, cited “digitization of content overall” as a major reason for the shift and acknowledged the “strong views” expressed by fans in response. “Games are loved by many people,” she said. “It’s a form of entertainment that’s loved by people, and it’s connected to people’s fond memories, in many cases. And so we understand those emotions.” Later, she said, “the players have attachments, and we have to think about how to respond to [their] feedback.”

Item 2: Where are the GTA preVIews?

Take Two Interactive will report its quarterly earnings on Friday (and hold an uncharacteristically early 8am ET morning call with investors). That’s as good a reason as any to spin up the speculation about the whereabouts of a third Grand Theft Auto VI trailer.

But, one might also wonder: Where are the previews for what could be the biggest video game of the decade?

As of now, there have been no previews, just two trailers from Rockstar Games and a stack of promotional screenshots and blurbs. No sign of gameplay. No details about how GTA VI is or isn’t similar to its predecessors

That’s unusual, even for Rockstar, a studio whose games generally sell themselves.

The new Grand Theft Auto is slated to come out on November 19, with pre-orders having been available since late June.

Some dates to consider, re: prior Rockstar games:

Grand Theft Auto V

• May 2, 2013: First hands-off GTA V previews

• September 3, 2013: First hands-on GTA V previews

• September 17, 2013: GTA V released

Red Dead Redemption 2

• May 3, 2018: First hands-off Red Dead Redemption 2 previews

• September 20, 2018: First hand-on RDR2 previews

• October 26, 2018: RDR 2 released

GTA VI

• No previews yet

• November 19, 2026: GTA VI planned for release

If pre-order dates are anything to go by, the initial GTA V previews preceded the availability of pre-orders for that game by a few weeks; the first previews for RDR 2 happened about a month before pre-orders began for that game. GTA VI has been available to pre-order for just over a month.

In other words, GTA VI’s previews are not following the same pattern as Rockstar’s prior big releases. They’re late.

Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has said that Rockstar would start marketing GTA VI this “summer.”

Item 3: In brief…

🇸🇦 Electronic Arts has officially gone private, as of today, having cleared regulatory hurdles and closed the deal.

• The maker of Madden, Battlefield, the Sims and SSX is now owned by a consortium led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, with much smaller stakes held by investment firms Silver Lake and Affinity Partners. The latter is run by Jared Kushner, son-in-law of U.S. president Donald Trump.

⚽️ Developers from Refactor Games, the studio behind the recently released Netflix-exclusive sports game FIFA World Cup, are out of work, saying publisher Delphi Interactive “pulled” funding for the team, Game Developer reports.

• Three weeks ago, Game File covered a panel in New York City, during which Delphi leaders and investors hailed the success of the game. At the event, Delphi CEO Casper Daugaard told Game File that Delphi had partially handled the development of the FIFA game alongside Refactor. He floated that the game would be updated and improved into next summer’s women’s World Cup, and possibly be ported to non-Netflix platforms.

• Delphi declined to comment on the Refactor cuts nor on whether it impacted any plans for the game. Netflix also declined to comment. A rep for Refactor couldn’t be reached by press time.

🎮 Xbox revenue declined by $1.7 billion in the 12 months ending June 2026 (Microsoft’s FY26), compared to that stretch a year ago, the company reported last week.

• Microsoft blamed the drop on a 5% decline in review from game content and services and a 29% slide in hardware revenue, due to selling fewer consoles.

• Alongside the financial update, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma posted the following on social media: “In FY26, over 200 million new players came to XBOX and our games, but our business did not grow with our audience. We need to close that gap by investing in what players value. That will take time, but we expect to return to growth by the end of FY27.”

• Sharma said last month that Microsoft’s Xbox gaming group would cut 3,200 jobs, divest of multiple studios and reduce spending on outside vendors throughout the FY27 stretch.

🚫 Double Fine, one of the studios Microsoft sold back to its management, announced last week that it was laying off 23 workers.

• “Only the survival of our studio would ever make us consider such a painful action,” studio head Tim Schafer said.

🚫 Tencent has laid off 80 workers associated with The Last Sentinel, a would-be GTA competitor in development at Lightspeed LA, as the project has run aground, Bloomberg reports.

• Tencent maintains the game is still in development, but, Bloomberg notes: “Last Sentinel was in the works for six years, delayed several times and had a budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars…” and yet still failed to impress Tencent brass.

📱 Palworld, which has been one of the most-played games on Steam since its recent upgrade to a full 1.0 release, is getting a massively multiplayer online mobile spin-off by Free Fire development powerhouse Garena later this year, per a press release.

👀 The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’s record-setting Metacritic average of 99 should probably be a slightly more common 98 for the 1998 Nintendo 64 classic. That’s according to an investigation by video channel Did You Know Gaming and explained in print by Kotaku.

• DYKG says the revised results, which incorporate a broader aggregation of reviews and some more accurately calculated scores, produce an all-time four-way tie between Ocarina, fighting game SoulCalbur, Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV.

I guess I don’t need color in my video games, because I’ve been dazzled this year by a trio that’s in black and white.

All are out now and well worth a look…

Helix: Descent N Ascent

• Developer: Badass Mongoose

• Platforms: PC, Switch

Helix: DNA is one of the most visually interesting games of the year, with an art style inspired by, the developers say, “1980s indie comics, 1990s manga, and 1970s Franco-Belgian comics.”

You can admire it up top and in the screenshots below:

Helix is cleverly designed, but its excellence snuck up on me.

When I started, I thought I was a basic top-down exploration/puzzle game about a strange bipedal character walking through a starkly stunning world. My guy quickly gained the power to conjure blocks into existence. This ability is represented by a square that can be seen in the game’s user interface and in symbols in the game world. I used the power to drop blocks into watery gaps, forming bridges where old ones had crumbled. I explored a small world, using that power to solve some puzzles, found an exit and returned to the hub world where I’d begun.

Soon, I found a new symbol that gave me a new power: an ability represented by smile-curve (with a horizontal line under it) allowed my hero to summon and control a drone. This power replaced the ability to conjure blocks. Back into the main game world I went. I could no longer cast blocks to cross gaps, but I could send my drone into pipes to activate remote switches. Different puzzles solved.

Okay, I figured I’d keep finding powers that would swap with the previous one I’d collected.

Not quite.

Back in the hub world, I noticed a pedestal marked with a strange symbol. The light bulb went on. The strange symbol was a combination of a square and a smile-curve (with a horizontal line under it). I activated the symbol and, sure enough, I now had the block-making power and the drone-summoning power. Even better, I discovered I could combine those powers: I could make a block, fly the drone into it; the drone would posses the block, allowing me to move the block remotely.

That’s what this game actually is: not finding a small number of puzzle-solving powers and using one of them at a time, but repeatedly diving into a world equipped with different combinations of those powers, discovering what each combo can do.

I have a long way to go, but the interface—and the game’s promotional copy—indicate there are 25 different ways to play. I’m excited to find out what they make possible.

Towers of Scale

• Developer: Makiki

• Platform: PC [free demo available]

There might be some purple in this game, but the levels I’ve played have been black and white (with shades of gray).

Towers of Scale is a math game about directing a warrior through a dungeon filled with stationary enemies and locked doors. Your warrior starts at a power level designated by a specific number: say, 5. Every enemy also has a number: say, 3. If you’re a 5 and they’re a 3, walking into them eliminates the enemy and turns you into an 8.

That’s pretty much the game.

Some enemies have negative numbers that lower your total. And those with higher numbers than yours won’t budge. You might have to pass through a gate that halves your power. Try to do that when your number is low. Be sure to drink a power-doubling potion when your number is high.

All you need to do is find a numerically feasible path to the next staircase.

Easy, right?

Towers of Scale is tough!

Even as you scale up to defeat enemies marked 100, 500, 10,000 and beyond, your climb is easily stymied by bad mathematical decisions. I’ve gotten stuck a lot, keep hitting undo, and then I try again to find a good route. It’s a captivating challenge.

What’s the Password?

• Developer: Trampoline Tales

• Platform: PC [free demo available], mobile

This puzzle game features over 100 challenges, each of which is solved by inputting a four-digit password.

I’ve solved 14 puzzles so far, some easier than others.

This one wasn’t that tough: the solution is 4371

This is the next one. What’s the password? I’m not sure yet.

Those are my top three.

Have you played any great black-and-white games this year? Let me know!

Item 2: In brief…

🚫 Blizzard has fired a QA tester who helped a group of players cheat to complete a World of Warcraft dungeon in record time, Kotaku reports.

• In a very different kind of speedy feat, WoW developers say they’ll soon add a virtual version of the viral raccoon Jimothy as a collectible pet, GameSpot reports. Jimothy became a social media phenomenon earlier this month.

💬 Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot is the first AAA publisher to be on the record about Sony’s plans to stop producing discs for new PlayStation games in 2028, thanks to an analyst asking him about it during the company’s earnings call on Thursday.

• Asked about the plan’s potential impact on Ubisoft’s business, Guillemot said: ‘“What we saw on the PC is that it helped to grow the market. There’s also some pressure, for the future, on the cost of machines, so being able to be only digital will help to have a more accessible machine, I would say. As you said, there are plus and minus, but we think it will not disturb too much the industry.”

• Unpacking that a bit, Guillemot is anticipating a PC-like future for consoles, where discs are all but gone and almost all games are obtained digitally. And he’s speaking vaguely about the potential increase in component costs for future game consoles, which could drive a company such as Sony to avoid the expense of including disc drives in their consoles.

• (For a smaller publisher’s take, check out Game File’s interview with the CEO of Serenity Forge.)

🎮 Cuts among Microsoft workers and contractors who worked on accessibility—ensuring video games are accessible for people with disabilities—have raised concerns about the scale of such work going forward at Xbox, Aftermath reports.

• Accessibility has been a signature Xbox initiative over the past decade.

👀 Microsoft is testing a program that will allow Xbox users to play cloud-streamed versions of games they own for one hour at no added cost, as long as they sit through up to two minutes of pre-roll ads.

• Normally, gamers would need to pay for a monthly Xbox subscription to stream games. Watching ads could offer an alternative way for “paying” for that.

• Mobile gamers are used to being offered ads to watch in exchange for playing time and other perks. That approach is largely unexplored on consoles.

🎬 Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto says the company greenlit recent Yoshi and Star Fox games to capitalize on those characters being featured in the latest Mario movie, per an interview with Famitsu covered by VGC.

🗓️ February 2027 is filling up. There aren’t many confirmed video game release dates for 2027, but the few that have been announced are clustering in one month:

• Tomb Raider remake Legacy of Atlantis (Feb 12)

• Role-playing game remake Persona 4 Revival (Feb 18)

• Microsoft’s recently-delayed role-playing revival Fable (Feb 23)

• Newly announced, Sony’s major spin-off God of War Laufey (Feb 16)

• First-person shooter Metro 2039 is also slated for Feb 2027, no specific date yet

Item 3: The week ahead

Tuesday, July 28

• Game release: Halo Campaign Evolved (PC, PS5, Xbox) is a remake of the original Bungie-developed first-person shooter, and the first (last?) Halo game to ever be released for a PlayStation.

Wednesday, July 29

• Game release: The creatively named Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World?! (PC) is an anime-themed game about driving a magical delivery truck and helping fight monsters in another world.

• Event: Microsoft presents their quarterly earnings for their first quarter (July-August). That should provide at least a brief update about the state of the Xbox business.

Thursday, July 30

• Game releases: Kick (PC) is a sidescrolling game built around kicking a soccer ball; Rita (PC) is a 3D puzzle game in which using words to solve crossword puzzles and word searches then manifests those words as helpful objects in the eponymous chicklet’s world.

Early last month, while playing the Switch 2 version of the big, upcoming puzzle game Order of the Sinking Star, I stumbled across a surprising piece of text.

The game is developed by a studio called Thekla for PC, PS5 and Switch 2 and is played from an overhead view. In the center of its massive map, players control a queen. She moves across a strange land filled with over 1,000 block-pushing puzzles, one grid square at a time. I’d made her venture to the greenery in the east, a portion of Sinking Star’s map called The Mirror Isles. That region is full of clever puzzles about reflections, and it is based on a 2014 puzzle game called Mirror Isles.

At the entrance to the zone, I’d found a sign rendered in the fashion of a slab you might see in front of artwork at a sculpture garden. As the queen approached, text appeared on the screen: “Instigator: Hazelden, A.”

I understood this to be a reference to Alan Hazelden, the puzzle game designer who in 2016 had given Sinking Star lead creator Jonathan Blow, himself an acclaimed puzzle game designer, permission to base a portion of the new game on Mirror Isles.

Four big chunks of Sinking Star are based on small indie-developed puzzle games, all licensed with permission. The south of the map is based on another Hazelden game, Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes. Sinking Star’s north and west are based on two other designers’ games, Jonah Ostroff’s Heroes of Sokoban trilogy and Sean Barrett’s Promesst series.

By the time I was playing Sinking Star, all four had publicly distanced themselves from Blow over comments he’d made in the past. That made the appearance of Hazelden’s name so prominently in the version I played interesting and unexpected.

Two weeks later, when I played another version of the game, Hazelden’s name was gone from that spot.

A bold game’s unusual debut

Back in December, at a less controversial moment, I’d spoken to Blow about Order of the Sinking Star, ahead of its unveiling at The Game Awards. He’d described the game’s origins, first as a project he’d intended to be tiny, just a proving ground for a new programming language he was creating. “I should have known that it would turn big,” he said. “But for some reason I was like, ‘No, we’re gonna make a small game.”

The math behind Sinking Star’s concept had forced it to become immense. The game’s conceit is that players learn the rules of the puzzles in each of the four areas and then discover how each areas’ rules mix with the others, where they share borders. In the northeast, for example, the gameplay systems based on Heroes of Sokoban cross over with the rules governing The Mirror Isles. Across the map, at the six borders where the regions touch, the combinatory effects produce a multiplicity of puzzle game ideas.

Back then, ahead of the announcement, Blow told me that the four source games he’d chosen years ago were “made by some of the best designers in the world, who nobody really knew at that time.”

When I realized that two of them were by Hazelden, I was delighted. Just two months earlier, I told Blow, I’d become enamored with Spooky Express, which Hazelden had designed alongside a puzzle maker Hazelden admired named Lucas Le Slo. Between that and my introduction to Order of the Sinking Star, I was coming to appreciate how puzzle game designers share their talents with each other and intermingle their expertise.

Blow and I briefly discussed A Monster’s Expedition, a lovely puzzle game Hazelden had led. It’s about rolling logs and making bridges across a scattering of islands. Solving one of its puzzles leads to a memorable epiphany about something else the logs in the game can do. Blow recalled this moment. “That is definitely one of the features of his games, is they have those surprises,” he said.

Three days after Blow and I spoke, just before 9pm ET on December 11, Order of the Sinking Star was revealed via a Game Awards trailer.

Within a few minutes, Hazelden posted about it.1 He called it “a great concept” and listed the source games’ creators, linking to their work, emphasizing that Sinking Star was made by a team—though he did not work on it—and then distancing himself from Blow.

He wrote that: “…in recent years it has become increasingly clear that Jon’s beliefs/priorities and mine are not aligned.” Hazelden said Blow was “adversarial to people talking about privilege and representation, is dismissive of diversity efforts.” He labeled him “pro-MAGA.”

(Blow did not respond to the thread, as far as I can tell.)

Soon, the designers of the two other games sourced for Sinking Star said on their social media feeds that they agreed with Hazelden’s praise for the game and criticism of Blow.

It’s remarkable enough to see a whole game based on the idea of polishing, expanding and then intersecting four existing games, all used with permission.

It’s all the more unusual to see the makers of those games separate themselves from the recognized lead creator of the project.

Initial coverage of Order of the Sinking Star didn’t cover this. Reporters had seen the game ahead of The Game Awards reveal, and many published their coverage when the embargo lifted, without plausibly knowing of the source developers’ dissent.

In late January, Bloomberg wrote about the controversy, citing Blow’s mocking of someone on Twitter/X for using pronouns in their bio, for calling Donald Trump, in early 2025, “the best President we have had in my entire life, by far.”

Blow declined to comment on the controversy to Bloomberg. Instead, that article quoted the head of Sinking Star’s publisher, Arc Games, saying Blow’s political views “were not taken into consideration” when they signed the game. Arc had simply considered the game to be promising, they said.

Hands-on in LA

This past June, I was playing a development build of Order of the Sinking Star on a Switch 2 at Nintendo’s section of a Summer Game Fest showcase in Los Angeles Summer Game Fest. It was the last game I’d be able to see, as the three-day event was minutes from shutting down. Each game at Nintendo’s event had its own space, most of them set up to feel like small living rooms, with chairs and couches near a TV.

I was impressed with what I played. The Mirror Isles levels were challenging but fun. I learned how I could position my character on one small island, several squares below a mirror angled at 45 degrees. I could then teleport to a spot on another island, where the mirror was reflecting. I later tried Hazelden’s original, playable in a browser, and had a terrific time with it, too.

I ventured to Sinking Star’s north, where I was playing Hearty Heroes of Hauling, Thekla’s variation of Jonah Ostroff’s Heroes of Sokoban. I learned how a Warrior character could push blocks and how a Thief could drag them. A Wizard was able to swap places with the blocks. Some of these puzzles were tough, too, but also delightful to solve. I felt the most stress from a room that placed me as the Wizard amid a crowd of eight big crystal blocks. Through a lot of trial and error, I successfully found my way out.

Not long after I saw “Instigator: Hazelden, A” on the screen, I looked up. I’d been sitting in a chair situated at one end of the demo area’s coffee table. Other people had sat on the couch near the table. And, in the chair across from me, Blow had taken a seat.

I said hello and apologized for not yet publishing a write-up about his game, despite us having spoken about it back in December. Other stories had gotten in the way, but this hands-on would give me a new reason to get to it, I said.

Time to rewind

I have my own unusual history with Blow and the games he is known for.

In late 2008, while I worked at MTV News, the rapper Soulja Boy made a video laughing about how the Blow-developed time-bending puzzle game Braid was “stupid as hell.” That somehow led to me engaging in a video game battle with Soulja Boy in the MTV News offices in Times Square. (I beat him in Geometry Wars 2’s multiplayer mode; he beat me in Gears of War 2; he narrowly beat me in the world’s worst-played match of Street Fighter II).

In 2010, while I worked at Kotaku, I spotted an unattended demo station at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle. I saw Blow standing against a wall nearby, trying to not be noticed, and I realized the game in front of me was secretly his next project, The Witness. He wanted to see how people played it. I believe my coverage of that mysterious demo amounted to the game’s first press preview.

In 2023, while at Axios, I interviewed Blow about his post-Witness project, a remake of Braid. By that point, Blow had drawn controversy, not just from his occasionally cantankerous demeanor but from the ideas and politics he was expressing on social media. One batch of tweets from 2017 involved his belief that there were “biological factors” that played a role in what he believed were statistics showing women to be less interested than men in programming. Back in 2017 he took umbrage with backlash to his posts: “this constant insistence on suppressing speech is a big part of what turned me away from current ‘progressive’ politics.”

I’d seen Blow criticized for his statements, but could not recall seeing him questioned about them in interviews. So, six years after he’d made those tweets, I brought them up for the Axios piece. He didn’t sound happy about it, said he felt misunderstood. To the extent he wanted to address the topic, he told me this: “When we hire people, I very much believe in just hiring the best person for the job, because it’s just so hard to make games,” Blow told me at the time. “And we’ve hired quite a few women because they were the best people for the job.” He also told me he was trying to refrain from making a lot of non-gaming comments on social media.

Last December, Blow and I spoke about what his latest project was, this grand puzzle game with more than 1,400 puzzles, borne from a desire to create a new programming language. As he solved some of the game’s block-pushing puzzles over a video feed, we spoke of puzzle design. He talked about his team shaving the tedium out of the puzzles they were making for Order of the Sinking Star. He’d noticed they kept requiring a lot of busy work before players got to the fun part of the solution. “Now the set-ups are such that you’re really only a few moves away from doing the cool thing,” he said.

Meeting Patrick

I knew that playing Sinking Star in Nintendo’s booth in June meant it was likely I’d see Blow. As interested as I was in the game, I’d also need to ask him about what was happening around it.

So, at the distance of a coffee table, in the final minutes of Summer Game Fest, with, by that point I’d realized, at least one PR person for the game seated on the couch between us, I asked Blow if he wanted to talk about the pushback to the game. What did he have to say about these developers, upon whose work Order of the Sinking Star was built, all criticizing him and distancing themselves from the project?

Blow threw his head back, thinking about what to say. The silence was awkward. He gestured toward the PR rep nearby, told me they didn’t want him talking about it.

As Bloomberg noted in January, and as comes up in Reddit threads and other forum posts about the game, discussion around Order of the Sinking Star involves a perennial question about if, how or when to separate the art from the artist. More accurately, though, it’s about art and artists, plural.

Hazelden’s critique last December wasn’t simply about Blow’s politics but about the tendency to associate some games with a single creator:

“I hope the game will get a more nuanced label than ‘new Jon Blow game.’ While the creative vision is his, he didn’t make any of the original games and there are a lot of talented people at Thekla who also deserve credit.

“I was disappointed to see the store page description put his name front and center while not mentioning any of the creators of the original games. This industry’s obsession with auteurs is not healthy.”

Blow himself had not hidden the contributions of Hazelden and others from the game when we’d spoken in December. Press materials provided at the time named the other developers and their games. Blow had also told me about other esteemed game developers who were actively working with him on the game, including Patrick Traynor, the designer of a wonderful, recursive puzzle game called Patrick’s Parabox, which came out on Steam in 2022.

But a look at, say, Order of the Sinking Star’s Steam page shows a game listed as coming from Thekla, the studio Blow runs, and promoted as a Blow creation:

“From legendary director Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness) comes Order of the Sinking Star, a massive puzzle adventure featuring more than one thousand hand-crafted puzzles designed to put your intellect to the test.”2

After Blow’s no-comment on the controversy, and to cut some of the tension, I remarked that I had struggled with that puzzle room involving the teleporting Wizard and the crowd of eight big crystals.

But you did it, enthused one of the men who’d sat down on the couch near me. I didn’t recognize him, and I asked if he’d worked on the game. He had. He’d worked on the very puzzle I was talking about. What was his name? Patrick, he said.

The lightbulb went on. Blow wasn’t the only top puzzle game designer sitting near me.

This was Patrick Traynor, the Patrick of Patrick’s Parabox, sitting feet away as I’d played some of his portion of the game. I’d nearly not known.

The text disappears

Shortly after I played Order of the Sinking Star in early June, Thekla released a PC demo. Many players were impressed, excited about the nuances of the puzzles and the obvious depth of the project.

On the 16th of June, one player started a discussion thread on the game’s Steam forums. They liked the game, they said, and they had a request: “Blow, please credit the original games and creators!” Blow did not reply, but other players did. They discussed the relevance and virtues of crediting the source games’ creators and the likelihood of bringing attention to those developers’ criticisms of Blow. Some mentioned that, in video streams, Blow has named the source games and even played parts of them.

Downloading the demo to my Steam Deck, I once again walked the queen to the Mirror Isles, where I’d solved puzzles on the pre-release Switch version two weeks before. I made the Queen approach the slab that had produced the words “Instigator: Hazelden, A,” but this time they did not. Instead, a large red square with symbols on it appeared. It was some sort of puzzle, kind of a vague map of the game’s overworld, I thought. It didn’t seem to be a game credit.

This week, I contacted Hazelden and asked about the credits. He said that his thread back in December was never about getting credit.

“My intent with that thread was to talk about how the game is discussed and viewed by its audience, not how my work is or isn’t acknowledged,” he said. “When I wrote my statement, my understanding was that the authors of the original games would be credited in-game at the start of each corresponding section, which I appreciated and considered to be appropriate.”

But he expressed disappointment with how credits were handled in the demo and was aware, before I’d mentioned it, that an earlier build of the game had had more prominent credits. “I’ve communicated with the Thekla team since they released the demo to let them know my expectations.”

Hazelden was concerned that the credits would now not appear until a player completed the game, rather than accessible at least from the main menu, which has become more of an industry standard. But he has seen one change he considers positive.

“Since I raised my concerns earlier this month, the website has been updated to include an FAQ entry which mentions the original games,” he said. That new portion of the website update says Sinking Star’s foundation “is built upon four brilliant titles,” links to them and names their developers, along with those such as Traynor who are making the new game.

I reached out to the Sinking Star’s PR reps about all of this earlier this week, noting that the “instigator” credit for Hazelden that I’d seen in the Switch version didn’t appear in the PC demo. Could they share anything about how credits would be handled in the final game?

They replied with a statement from Blow: “Contributors to the game will be credited.”

If you’ve read the piece, you’ll have heard most of this already, but the first few minutes also cover details about the event where I did my reporting. The final minutes revisit the Kingdom Hearts anecdote that a lot of people got into.

I’m still experimenting with how these videos complement the written pieces, how much they overlap, what kind of material readers and viewers will find most interesting and most valuable. Please keep the feedback coming!

(If you prefer to watch via YouTube, you do so at this link.)

New York City — I’m at the Paley Center for Media in midtown Manhattan, several flights up on a sweltering day. I’m wearing a blue suit that I’d tracked down the day before, after accidentally leaving it at the dry cleaners for two years (that’s a long story).

I’m eating some free lunch, ready to listen to a talk about an intriguing new video game company.

It’s about an hour before I’ll ask the former CEO of Disney about green-lighting Kingdom Hearts.

I’m here with low expectations for Michael Eisner, the head of Disney from the mid 1980s to 2005, because I’m a gaming reporter, and Eisner, to the best of my knowledge, doesn’t figure much into gaming history. There’s just this one anecdote I found from the early 2000s about a Disney executive who had to get Eisner’s approval during a trip to Tokyo for Square to keep making its not-quite-authorized mash-up of Final Fantasy characters with Mickey, Donald and Goofy.

I’ve arrived at Paley with higher expectations for Casper Daugaard, whose video game company Delphi Interactive has come out of nowhere this year to suddenly be a major force in the industry. They’re the talent matchmakers behind a critically acclaimed new James Bond game 007 First Light, and they’re the reason there’s a splashy if simplified FIFA World Cup game available on Netflix via a streaming connection.

What’s Delphi’s deal? Where did they come from?

Conveniently, that’s a big part of the panel that Daugaard is on at Paley. He’s up there with Eisner, who is a Delphi investor, taking questions from Moritz Baier-Lentz, an Open AI advisor who is also a Delphi investor.

To avoid over-hyping I will briefly skip past the conclusion of the panel to the moment Eisner steps down from the dais and I approach him, identifying myself as a reporter. I ask him if he can recall saying okay to a game called Kingdom Hearts.

No, he replies.

You were pitched the game in Tokyo, I tell him. It was Final Fantasy plus Disney characters.

Oh, I remember now, he says.

Do you recall why you said yes?

I don’t, he tells me.

Later, I realize I should have shown him some character art. Maybe Sora with a keyblade. Perhaps I could have jogged his memory. What a mistake.

But let’s rewind to the beginning of the mid-day panel, to Daugaard talking about Delphi’s origins, about contacting the James Bond rightsholders over five years agoafter a decade-plus drought of any big new Bond games.

“It turned out that the owners had sort of soured on the partnerships they had with big corporations like Electronic Arts and Activision and some of the games they had made,” he explains to an audience dining on fancy lunch, dressed in suits and dresses. (The invitation called for business attire, hence my blue suit).

Daugaard, who hadn’t previously worked in gaming, has a good story. He says he tried to intern for IO when he was a teen, but they said he was too young. He made some tech start-ups, says Delphi came into existence to get a Bond game made.

Some Delplhi skeptics I’ve spoken to figure the new company as a bunch of middlemen. I’m not sure Daugaard would entirely disagree. He explains on stage and later to me during a sitdown interview that Delphi’s purpose is to work outside of the traditional game studio system, to match elite game development talent with popular intellectual property.

It’s interesting. Delphi’s FIFA stuff is interesting, too, as Daugaard tells the audience about reading in The New York Times a few years ago that FIFA and longtime gaming partner Electronic Arts were breaking up. He describes how he audaciously emailed FIFA to see if, on the strength of Delphi already getting Bond, perhaps they’d like to make a deal, too.

But I have underestimated Eisner.

Dauguard is on stage talking about some of the principles of the FIFA game, one of which is to make it pretty easy. Just let people have fun.

And here’s Eisner, sitting next to him, with a killer Disney anecdote that is partially related:

“We learned…at Walt Disney World: make our golf courses easy. People come down there for a week. Fathers are not that interested in It’s A Small World. Playing golf, they want to think they did well. So we’re always saying the opposite of what most courses say. You know what? We don’t need quite as many sand traps, right? So the idea of making something easier resonates with me.”

I take mental notes about all the interesting things I’m hearing about Delphi during this panel that I will share with readers.

But, wow, here’s Eisner getting awfully blunt about Disney’s bungling of the video game business in the 1980s:

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Nintendo is asking a court to dismiss a proposed class action suit that was filed this past spring by gamers who say the Mario maker is breaking the law if it doesn’t pass on its U.S. tariff refunds to consumers.

Those consumers “received exactly what they bargained and paid for” when buying price-hiked Nintendo goods last year, the company said in a filing on Monday in the case of Hoffert et al v. Nintendo.

“Plaintiffs are not entitled to a rebate simply because of intervening legal developments related to tariffs.”

Nintendo increased the price of Switch 2 controllers and the original Switch last year, following the imposition of globe-spanning U.S. tariffs (tariffs described by Nintendo’s lawyers on Monday as “sweeping” and “constantly changing”).

This past February, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the tariffs were illegal.

A month later, Nintendo sued the U.S. government to get a refund. And in April, gamers filed the class action claim against Nintendo in Washington, saying it would be illegally double-dipping if it made money from tariff-hiked sales and then from a refund. The gamers sought relief for anyone in the U.S. who bought price-hiked Nintendo items between February 2025 and February 2026.

“The common thread among Plaintiffs’ claims is that it is somehow ‘unfair; that Nintendo has not retroactively adjusted its prices for completed sales in response to the outcome of the tariff litigation,” the company’s lawyers wrote in today’s motion to dismiss.

“But that is not how commercial transactions work.

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I was inspired by a Kotaku article I saw this morning, covering a fun bit from the latest installment of the Kit & Krysta Show, which often includes stories from the co-hosts’ lengthy stints working for Nintendo. In the new one, Kit Ellis explains how he was one of fewer than 10 people at Nintendo of America who was aware of Nintendo’s plans to announce the Zelda sequel at that E3.

Ellis tells his end of the story at the 54:14 mark of their newest episode, which covers the biggest secrets the pair kept at Nintendo.

As Ellis explains it, Nintendo wants to keep the news from leaking and even excluded mentions of the Breath of the Wild sequel from the official E3 marketing plans…. until the last minute.

My video is about the press end of things: In the era of all-digital Nintendo Direct E3 showcases, Nintendo would invite a select number of reporters to screen the Direct a couple of days ahead of its airing. In this case, I watched the Direct on Sunday, June 9, 2019. In each prior year, Nintendo had shown us the whole thing. The version they showed us on June 9 ended with the reveal that the classic Nintendo 64-era characters Banjo-Kazooie, now owned and controlled by Microsoft, would return to Nintendo platforms as fighters in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Fun stuff.

Just watch this video and imagine it ending at the 40:40 mark. That’s what I saw. I thought it was the whole Nintendo E2 Direct!

On Sunday, June 10, Nintendo even sent reporters an embargoed “final” press release of their E3 announcements.

And on Tuesday, June 11, the Nintendo Direct aired. Except, when it aired, it included an extra 80 or so seconds of trailer footage that they hadn’t shown to the press: the teaser for Tears of the Kingdom.

I checked Nintendo’s official E3 2019 press release and, sure enough, it has only a brief mention of the Zelda teaser. That now makes a lot of sense, given Ellis’ explanation that even much of Nintendo didn’t know they’d be revealing it. Down in paragraph three, right at the end, after the mention of Banjo-Kazooie, there’s just this one line (that i’ve bolded):

Nintendo also revealed two new paid downloadable fighters coming to the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate game: Hero from the DRAGON QUEST series to be available this summer, and Banjo-Kazooie for this fall. The Nintendo Direct presentation concluded with the reveal of the sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which is currently in development for Nintendo Switch.

Game companies keep secrets from the press all the time. It’s their right. I can’t recall any other instance, though, where they told the press everything except their one-more-thing. Given the scale of Nintendo’s news that E3, though, I get it.

If you’d rather watch the video on YouTube, check out my channel, where it should be live shortly after this version of the post is published.

In the wake of Sony’s surprise announcement that it will not produce discs for any new games as of January 2028—even as fans flood Sony with negative feedback online—most game publishers aren’t talking.

No comment from Take Two. Nor from EA. Nor Ubisoft. Capcom hasn’t said anything, nor Square Enix, nor Bandai Namco. Microsoft’s been mum, as well.1

About a week ago, I reached out to Zhenghua Yang, founder and CEO of mid-sized game publisher Serenity Forge, to get his thoughts. I’d featured the disc copy of one of his company’s games, the Dear Dream-developed Cooking Companions, in the the photo I used atop Game File’s coverage of the Sony news.

Yang told me that he and his team had noticed disc copies of the Serenity Forge-published Doki Doki Literature Club making the rounds as part of the debate, too.

Unlike the other publishers, Yang was happy to talk.

Over the course of an email interview, Yang was diplomatic about Sony’s move but also very clear about the importance of disc games to a publisher like his.

“For us, physical publishing has actually never just been another sales channel,” Yang told me.

“It's actually an important part of our mission to bring meaningful games to as many people as possible globally.”

“Physical games help us reach audiences that digital often can’t.

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How did I get that story? That’s what today’s behind-the-scenes video is about. You’ll hear a bit about the actual reporting…. where the info came from, how I got more details and wound up with an unexpected scoop. You’ll also hear about the realities of working as an independent reporter and being a parent, where the work of breaking a story must live alongside the more important duties of picking up the kids from camp, making dinner, and so on. This saga includes a side quest: the hunt for a blue suit that I’d lost.

As I mention in the video, I can’t tell the behind-the-scenes story of every article I run. Some back-stories might be too boring, others too sensitive and secret. But occasionally there are some that I think Game File readers might get a kick out of. This is one of those. And I’m doing it via video.

Please let me know what you think!

(Note: Among the experiments here is using Substack’s option to simultaneously publish to YouTube. If you’d like to watch the video there, go to my channel, where it should be live soon, if it’s not already up).