Note: Thanks to a holiday-shortened work week and the need to get the weekend going (for me and for you!), this is an all-round-up edition of Game File. I’ll be back next week with some original stories–and with coverage of the coming avalanche of E3-style gaming events and announcements.

In brief…

👀 Colorado governor Jared Polis has vetoed a bill that would have forced gamers in the state to pay an extra 5% fee for downloadable content for video games, The Denver Post reports. The money would have been used to fund youth mental health and education programs,

• Polis said he vetoed the “Online Add-on Transaction Fee Youth Enterprise” (full text of the bill) due to “serious legal concerns about the bill’s enterprise structure and its reliance on fees on gamers to fund these important programs and enforcement functions.”

• With more nuance about video game DLC than you’d expect from a governor, Polis added: “the fee imposed on these add-on transactions means that consumers would not only be charged extra for things like character costumes and upgrades, but also for storyline content for online games. This type of content represents digital storytelling and artistic expression, and I do not support such a fee.”

🎮 Rockstar Games employees in the U.K—including in Scotland where Rockstar North historically has built the bulk of each Grand Theft Auto—have formally announced a workers’ union, Aftermath reports.

• No word yet from Rockstar about whether it will voluntarily recognize the union.

😮 Valve has significantly raised the price of its Steam Deck handhelds, citing “rising memory and storage costs.”

• The 512GB OLED model went from $549 to $789.

• The 1TB OLED model went from $649 to $949.

🇯🇵Switch 2 sales in Japan exceeded 200,000 units for the second straight week (through May 24). The surge came just ahead of a May 25 price increase to the Japanese-language edition of the device from ¥49,980 ($314) to ¥59,980 ($376)

• Just a month ago, Switch 2 was selling about 40-50,000 units in Japan each week. Then, in early May, Nintendo announced the May 25 price hike.

📱 Nintendo’s new mobile game Pictonico, which turns user’s photos into comedic, rapidly played micro-games was co-developed by Intelligent Systems, the longtime co-developer of Nintendo’s WarioWare games, which are… compilations of rapidly played micro-games.

🟩 Microsoft has delayed the role-playing game Fable, one of its biggest upcoming releases, until February 2027. The company cited a crowded 2026 calendar of its own games (Halo: Campaign Evolved, Gears of War: E-Day) and third parties’ (GTA VI, Star Wars: Galactic Racer).

• In January, Xbox Studios chief Craig Duncan told GamesRadar that releasing three games during October 2025 was a moment “where we were probably on top of ourselves.”

• The new Fable, developed by Forza Horizon studio Playground Games, was announced in 2020 and has been in development since 2017 or so (just after the studio released Forza Horizon 3; they released FH6 this month).

💥 This year’s Call of Duty is Modern Warfare 4, set partially on the Korean peninsula and coming to PC, PS5, Xbox Series and Switch 2.

• That Switch element is notable. In February 2023, Microsoft signed a 10-year agreement to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo platforms, as it tried to assuage regulators’ concerns over its planned purchase of Activision Blizzard. CoD has not appeared on a Nintendo platform since the 2013 Wii U release of Call of Duty Ghosts.

🃏 Balatro and Case of the Golden Idol publisher Playstack is expected to be sold to Integrated Media Company, the owners of gaming editorial outlets GameSpot and Fandom for $151 million, pending a shareholder vote, Kotaku reports.

⚔️ CD Projekt Red is indeed preparing a new expansion for their 2015 hit role-playing game The Witcher III.

• Called “Songs of the Past,” it’s slated for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series in 2027 and will be developed “in partnership” with external studio Fool’s Theory, the company said.

Item 2: The (eventful!) week ahead

Monday, June 1

• Event: Kicking off what used to be E3 week and now is commonly referred to as Summer Game Fest, the MIX Summer Game Showcase airs online at noon ET. It will highlight a batch of upcoming indie games.

Tuesday, June 2

• Event: The Black Voices In Gaming summer showcase airs online at 3pm ET.

• Event: An hour-long Sony PlayStation State of Play showcase will air online at 5pm ET. Sony is promising a new look at Insomniac Games’ Wolverine alongside “updates, announcements, and gameplay reveals from top studios around the world.” The PlayStation team considers the overall showcase a big enough deal that they’re organizing watch parties at movie theaters across the U.S. Shall we finally see Sony Santa Monica’s next game?
  
  (If you’re curious about Xbox’s version of this, their event will air on Sunday, June 7. And Nintendo, well, they haven’t announced a showcase yet… didn’t do one in 2025 seemingly because they’d just aired a Switch 2 showcase in April … and aired one in 2024 on June 18, more than a week after all the other SGF stuff concluded. They do their own thing, if you haven’t noticed.)

Thursday, June 4

• Event: The Latin American Games Showcase airs online at 5pm ET.

• Event: The Women Led Games Showcase airs online at 7pm ET.

Friday, June 5

• Event: The actual Summer Game Fest showcase will be held in-person in L.A. and streamed online at 5pm ET, with some two-hours of game reveals and updates.

• Event: The Day of the Devs (indie game) showcase airs right after, at 7pm ET.

(That’s not all! Even more events will unfold into the weekend; I’ll run another breakdown in next Friday’s newsletter.)

“There was a Sri Lankan place, not many in Seattle, that opened up during the pandemic,” the video game developer Chandana Ekanayake recently recalled.

“Food was excellent. I got to support this place as much as possible. They lasted a year and had to shut down, which was unfortunate.”

“There’s a Vietnamese place we would overtip,” he remembered. Ekanayake just wanted it to remain open.

“I love this place. It's close to the house. And I would make sure we're spending more than we probably should. But I want to make sure that they are also staying around, and luckily, they are.”

Hardships have shaped Ekanayake’s work as the co-founder and creative director of Outerloop Games: hardships in small businesses, in this economy, in capitalism, in the lives of people whose cultures are being mixed into the rest of North America.

The studio works to create games that empathize, sympathize, resonate, and self-reflect with the awareness of everything going on in the world, while still figuring out a sense of good, a sense of justice to aid marginalized folks who have been going through extremely tough times.

Outerloop’s latest is Dosa Divas, a role-playing game released last month for consoles and PC. It’s an interactive tale of sisters Samara and Amani and their food truck/mech Goddess, as they fight corporate lawyers and cops in turn-based combat. They gather ingredients from their surroundings to whip up dishes, while also trying to right previous wrongs with old friends, coworkers, and family members, after a decade away.

It’s a game about all those hardships and what people can do about them.

It hit me hard.

Read more

To truly appreciate Mina The Hollower, an extraordinary new throwback of a game, I sent myself to Yacht Club University.

That’s not a real institution of higher learning, but it’s the best way I can explain much of the past several weeks as I prepared to play Mina by playing the four biggest game previously made by studio Yacht Club Games.

I had expected Mina the Hollower, in development for six years for PC and consoles, to potentially be something special.

A demo I tried in March had felt great. Mina the Hollower had an old-school premise: a singular move for its hero that felt so good to control and so rich with possibilities that, in the hands of skilled designers, it could be riffed on in various ways for the length of a full game.

Mina’s core maneuver, her hollowing, made her sort of an upside down Super Mario. Nintendo’s hero jumps through the air, discovering power-ups at the apex of his jump by bonking overhead blocks, then defeating enemies by landing on them.

Mina essentially jumps into the ground, digging (“hollowing”) into the earth to fetch buried treasure, then burrows for a short distance to emerge on the other side of a wall that hides treasure or an enemy that needs some battering.

I wanted to understand how good Yacht Club was at making games. I wanted to see how far they’d come. If Mina was terrific—as I predicted it might be—I wanted to feel how they got there, one button press at a time.

On May 6, 21 days before the writing of this review, I checked with Yacht Club Games co-founder and programmer David D’Angelo, to ask which of the studio’s games I should play to truly appreciate the new one’s design.

“Hmmm all of them?” he wrote back.

“Starting with Shovel Knight definitely is helpful,” he continued, referring to Yacht Club’s first game. He gave me a link to a spreadsheet of over 400 cheat codes that could help me out, if I found the game too tough.1

“Most folks say Specter of Torment is the least difficult and quickest to finish in terms of playtime, and [it] refines much of Shovel Knight,” he told me. “King of Cards is a big celebration of everything we did in [the Shovel Knight compilation] Treasure Trove— might work for you better if you’re a fan of shorter, Mario-style courses. And it’s probably the closest to Mina in terms of polish.”

So that was that. Four games, none of which were required. Mina is a whole new game in a whole new world, best I can tell. I’d barely played that first Shovel Knight before and never the other three.

I just thought it’d help. It did. It turns out that playing a game studios major works before their latest is very illuminating.

Read more

Eight days ago, Microsoft opened up a new “Players Voice” online forum where its Xbox users can request features.

What are they asking for?

I explored the threads and can share what I found. I also spotted one request that Microsoft has already reacted to and begun fulfilling.

The top request, with over 19,000 votes and 2,500 comments, not surprisingly, has been for Exclusive Games. That request comes in reaction to the company’s barrier-breaking moves since 2024 to put Sea of Thieves, Forza, Gears of War and even a Halo game on rival consoles.

Writes user Carlos Hernandez:

XBOX was built off of great game exclusives, you cannot sell any consoles without a reason to buy the console compared to your competition or even sending your tentpole games over to your competitor. BRING THEM BACK PLEASE !!!

The second-most requested: Make online multiplayer free to access.

Other top requests include adding more games to Xbox’s Backwards Compatibility program, the addition of Game Pass family plans for households with three Xboxes (or more!), and support for disc-based games on Microsoft’s next console.

Sorting by comment volume instead of votes, the request for exclusives still tops the list. Coming in second is a request for a Ukrainian region setting for consoles. That request is followed by one for full Arabic language support on the Xbox console and in the platform’s games.

The ninth-most popular request was the first to get an Official Microsoft response: Change Playtime from Days to Hours, which would alter how the Xbox interface displays how long someone has played a game.

Microsoft posted on Friday afternoon that it would roll out this change to select users, just a few days after the tweak was requested. That’s a speedy response.

Online, I saw some fans cheer the change; others wondered if platform decisions impacting millions of players were going to be disproportionately impacted by thousands of forum voters—to which others replied, well, go vote, too.

On Friday, Xbox’s head of next gen hardware, Jason Ronald, acknowledged all the fan feedback on the Player’s Voice forums:

In the first week, we have received over 6K+ ideas and suggestions and we have already shipped our first new feature in response to your feedback. Keep it coming. We are listening!

The forums don’t allow for downvotes but do contain counter-points. Under the one about exclusives, for example, many people wanted to see games made just for Xbox (“Brand value perception isn’t built overnight”, “Exclusives are a must because you need to give people a reason to buy an Xbox”). But others said it wasn’t necessary (“Why do I care if someone on PlayStation plays the same game I’m playing on Xbox?”, “Gamepass is the reason me and my wife sold our PS5s, not Exclusives.”).

Oddly, the playing time request, which I had seen last week before Microsoft’s response, was over-written by the announcement of the change. That makes it impossible to look back at the original wording and the discussion under it.

That playing time thread is the only request that has received an official reply from Microsoft so far.

(For what it’s worth, getting an Official Microsoft Response doesn’t always make for the most edifying exchange. Over in the Excel version of the feedback forums, a user who wrote “good” got an official reply stating “We appreciate your feedback to Microsoft.” Last week, I spotted a new Excel feedback forum thread that stated: “yr6486t94w8tiydrdiygisiyglj,” and it got an official Microsoft reply stating: “There is not enough information for us to take any further action on your feedback.” That exchange has since been deleted.)

Some heavier requests show up in the forums. A handful of threads, none with more than nine votes, call on Microsoft to cut contractual ties with Israel (Xbox has been subject to a boycott for the past year over Microsoft’s contracts with Israel and reporting alleging the company’s tech has been used to attack and kill Palestinian civilians; an internal Microsoft review led to the cancellation last fall of one contract.)

Other users have called for lower console prices and/or region-specific pricing of games.

Some of the quirkier requests in the forums include a controller with a quieter d-pad, support for YouTube background playback while gaming, the return of the Xbox One “Snap” feature that ran a secondary app in a sidebar and the inclusion of patch notes for games when they are updated (“We shouldn’t be looking at Steam to get an idea of what’s the latest update even for first party games. Make the hard work of devs discoverable easily”).

The highest-voted request involving a specific game or game franchise: It wasn’t about Halo, Fable or Forza. No, coming in at 51: “New Banjo-Kazooie game.”

Item 2: In brief…

🎮 Bungie is ending development of its 2017 massively multiplayer online sci-fi shooter Destiny 2 with a final update on June 9, saying it was time for the Sony-owned studio to “begin work incubating our next games.”

• In May 2025, Bungie had said it was launching a new phase of Destiny 2, the “Fate Saga,” which was to include four expansions, the second of which released in December.

• But by February 2026, fans and press noticed that the game’s roadmap for upcoming content was MIA.

• Sales of Destiny 2 expansions have been in decline, contributing to big cuts at the studio in 2024.

• Bungie is preparing layoffs for next month and doesn’t plan to immediately start developing Destiny 3, should it makes it at all, per Bloomberg.

• Bungie’s newest game, the player-vs.player shooter Marathon, released in March, has had a mediocre start, though Bloomberg’s report says Bungie plans to invest more resources into that game.

• Destiny and Destiny 2 will remain available to play, Bungie noted.

💰 Star Citizen, the massively multiplayer sci-fi game that has been in development since 2012 or so, has now raised more than $1 billion in crowdfunding, PC Gamer reports.

• A single-player portion of the game, Squadron 42, is due for release this year, with the multiplayer version slated for 2027 or later.

🇺🇸 Nintendo’s Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, was the best-selling premium game, ranked by dollars, in the U.S. for April, according to research firm Circana.

• Circana has revised its ranking system to include projections for digital sales for publishers, such as Nintendo, that don’t share that data.

• Capcom’s Pragmata ranked second.

• Circana calculated that spending on game content, hardware and accessories in the U.S. reached $4.3 billion in April, up 3% from April 2025. Switch 2 was the best-selling hardware, ahead of PS5 and Xbox Series, in units and dollars.

• Personal note: Tomodachi Life certainly has also topped the charts in my household. It’s been my nine-year-old twins’ most-played game since its launch. They’re both hooked on getting their Miis to hang out, date, break up or all of the above.

🟩 Microsoft has hired Matthew Ball as chief strategy officer for Xbox, reporting to new(ish) Xbox CEO Asha Sharma.

• Ball is a former Amazon executive, and a long-time investor and researcher, whose annual State of Video Gaming slideshows have been must-reads.

• Earlier this year, Ball’s 2026 report explored gaming’s struggle to hold the attention of people who’ve become distracted by social media videos, gambling and crypto.

• That report identified five potential areas for industry growth: non-core markets (the likes of Mexico, Brazil, the Middle East, compared to a tapped-out U.S.), advertising, alternate direct-to-consumer payment systems (where game-makers bypass app stores like Apple’s, if possible), outsourcing game development and Roblox.

• About Xbox, Ball told Bloomberg, “Our job is to turn around the business, to grow its reach in players and player hours.”

💥 This year’s Call of Duty will be a Modern Warfare game, led by development studio Infinity Ward, per announcements rounded up by Eurogamer.

📉 Ubisoft’s headcount was down to 16,590 at the end of March, according to the company’s latest full-year results.

• Studio closures, attrition and a pullback on hiring has significantly shrunk the company since March 2022, when its headcount totaled 20,665.

• Ubisoft reported more than €1 billion in losses for the past year and predicted a “lighter new release slate” for the 12 months concluding March 2027. The only big (sorta) title announced for that stretch is July’s promising remake: Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced. (Note: In March, I broke down how severely Ubisoft’s output has slowed.)

• The company predicts major releases tied to Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Ghost Recon in the two year span between April 2028 and March 2029.

• Ubisoft recently released mobile versions of Rainbow Six and The Division. Mobile editions of its big franchises had previously been touted as a major opportunity for the company, but both releases were described as having “had a slow start.”

✂️ The Embracer Group is planning to split again in 2027, into Fellowship Entertainment (Lord of the Rings, Tomb Raider, Kingdom Come; the studios Crystal Dynamics, Eidos Montreal, Warhorse) and Embracer (Alone in the Dark, Killing Floor; publisher/studios THQ Nordic, Aspyr, TripWire).

• Two years ago, the Swedish gaming conglomerate said it would split into three, breaking off the board/card game company Asmodee into its own public company (that happened) while the other two parts would consist of a AAA-centric Lord of the Rings/Tomb Raider group and a company containing both a batch of smaller punch-above-their-weight studios such as Coffee Stain (Goat Simulator) as well as mid-level publishers/studios such as THQ Nordic.

• But, the Coffee Stain spin-out wound up only including the smaller studios, leaving the THQ Nordic-tier parts of Embracer attached to the AAA LOTR/TR group.

• The most recent split gets back to the original idea of there being a powerhouse AAA “Fellowship” group consisting of relatively few big studios—which may well become an acquisition target.

• In a letter to investors, Embracer founder Lars Wingefors wrote: “I think the assets held by Fellowship Entertainment are among the most undervalued in the industry and I feel it’s my duty as the largest shareholder to change this and create a structure to realize their full potential.”

• As part of the announcement, Embracer said that Kingdom Come studio Warhorse is working on a sequel and on an open-world Lord of the Rings role-playing game.

🇫🇷 The eSports World Cup, the Saudi government backed multi-week competitive gaming, will be held in Paris this summer, not Riyadh, where it ran in 2024 and 2025.

• In a press release, organizers said they were running a non-Riyadh location sooner than planned, “in light of the current regional situation,” which is a euphemism for the U.S. war with Iran.

🚫 NetEase-owned Quantic Dream, is shutting down its multiplayer game Spellcasters Chronicles, which launched into early access on February 26 and will be gone on June 19.

• The company cited a “particularly challenging market.”

• Some 95 jobs may be cut as a result, which led to a union blasting the studio for “catastrophic project management,” Game Developer reports.

🤔 Take Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick shared a notably specific anecdote about how his company uses AI, during the company’s latest earnings call:

“Now I’ll give you a real-world example. I was visiting one of our studios, and they showed me some advertisements that they were putting together to advertise their games. These were live-action ads, and they were funny and cute, 15-30-second ad units that you’ve seen a zillion times. They were all created with AI, licensed AI, legal AI. The script was done in-house for free. Well, by people, colleagues who work at the company already.

“The AI software was used. The entire cost of making the spot was zero. Previously, we hired third-party companies to actually create those with human beings, and those spots could cost $25,000, $50,000, $100,000. Now, please note, not only were we not interested in reducing our head count to make this happen, we didn’t have the opportunity to reduce our head count to make this happen. The entire marketing team at this particular studio is two people. They’re doing a great job. What AI has allowed them to do is be more efficient, make great stuff, and do it cheaper. This is all a benefit to our company.”

Item 3: The week we’re in

Monday, May 25

• New Releases:

  • EMUUROM (PC) is a non-violent creature-scanning Metroidvania. I really enjoyed playing its demo last year.

  • Enter the Chronosphere (PC, early access) is a colorful top-down when-you-move-the-enemies-move shooter. The demo I played in February was superb.

  • Paralives (PC, early access) is a new Sims competitor. Not many of them!

Wednesday, May 27

• New releases:

  • 007: First Light (PC, PlayStation, Xbox; out later for Switch), from Hitman studio Io Interactive, is the first new James Bond game for PC and console since 2012’s 007 Legends.

Thursday, May 28

• Event: The Thinky Direct puzzle game showcase will air online at 1pm ET, and the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase will kick off on Steam. It’s like E3, but just for puzzle games. Expect new games, demos, etc.

• New Releases:

  • Crashout Crew (PC, Xbox) is the multiplayer forklift game cooked up by the part of dev studio Aggro Crab that was not off co-developing Peak (See this Game File interview for more)

  • Map Map (PC) is a puzzle game about marking the locations of ruins and treasures on island maps.

  • One Move Away (PC, PlayStation, Xbox) looks like a 3D take on Unpacking, except you’re loading trunks of cars.

  • 868-Back (PC) is a sequel to the great 2015 strategy game 868-Hack

  • The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time (PC) is a puzzle game about a lost role-playing game and the fake history of its development. A demo of the game caught my eye back in 2024.

  • Pictonico (mobile) is a new mobile game from Nintendo, just for phones, that turns photos into WarioWare-style mini-games.

• Corporate: CD Projekt announces its quarterly earnings to investors… on the same day its developers hold an anniversary livestream for the old Witcher III expansion Blood and Wine…(and, for what it’s worth, there have been rumors of a new Witcher III expansion being in the works).

Friday, May 29

• New Releases:

  • Mina the Hollower (PC, console) is the long-awaited next game from retro specialists Yacht Club Games (Shovel Knight). This one’s a top-down adventure, a throwback to the likes of Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.

One of the game industry’s more bizarre legal sagas may be coming to an end.

Microsoft has agreed to pay $250 million to settle a 2022 class action lawsuit brought by a Swedish pension fund that originally hoped to to thwart the tech giant’s $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard.

That’s according to a notification of a preliminary settlement filed yesterday to Delaware’s Court of Chancery and made public today.

The pension fund, Sjunde AP-Fonden (or AP7), had argued that in 2021 Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick had rushed the sale of the company he’d built up for decades to avoid the threat of termination. AP7 alleged he had therefore deprived shareholders of a better stock price than the $95/share agreed to by Microsoft.

Kotick had vehemently denied this, pointing to another settlement to disprove the claims and to the state of the current game industry to argue he’d secured a good price. Microsoft also maintained it had participated in a fair sale process.

Should a judge approve the settlement, all shareholders who owned Activision stock between Microsoft’s January 2022 announcement of its Activision Blizzard bid through the closing of the deal in October 2023 will be eligible to receive another 30 cents per share.

As is the norm, no one in the settlement admitted to any wrongdoing. Language of the settlement locks such sentiments in.

“Microsoft is entering into this Stipulation solely to avoid the burden, expense, and distraction of continued litigation,” the company said in the notification about the settlement.

It continued:

“Microsoft does not substantiate any allegations that there has been systemic or widespread workplace misconduct at Activision; that Activision senior executives ignored, condoned, or tolerated a culture of systemic harassment, retaliation, or discrimination; or that Activision’s Board of Directors, including its Chief Executive Officer, Kotick, acted improperly with regard to the handling of any instances of workplace misconduct.”

In its 2022 lawsuit, AP7 had parroted claims derived from a July 2021 sexual misconduct and discrimination lawsuit brought by the state of California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing, later renamed the California Civil Rights Department, or CRD. That suit did not directly accuse Kotick of misconduct, but it excoriated his company for a “‘frat boy’ workplace culture” of alleged sexual misconduct by managers and workers at Activision Blizzard. That suit was settled in late 2023 for $54 million, with all allegations withdrawn.

With this new settlement, AP7 has backed off, now saying the CRD itself admitted its claims had never been “substantiated”:

“Plaintiff acknowledges that its original claims were based in part on media reporting and characterizations of allegations made by the California Civil Rights Department (the ‘CRD’), which the CRD itself admitted in a court-approved consent decree have never been ‘substantiated’ by any “court or independent investigation” and now have been expressly withdrawn.”

Those statements from Microsoft and AP7 are made prominently on the second page of this week’s 58-page settlement notice. Their subject matter underscores the extent to which a pension fund’s shareholder lawsuit had transformed into a potential re-examination of sexual misconduct claims made about Activision Blizzard five years ago.

That dynamic was certainly clear in January, when Game File was first to report about Kotick’s extensive efforts to use the case to present his version of the final years of his run at Activision Blizzard and the aftermath of his company’s sale.

A lawsuit about other things

In an extensive filing made public that month, Kotick alleged that AP7 had brought the lawsuit to benefit the Swedish gaming company The Embracer Group, in part to distract from bad news about a delay to Dead Island 2. He alleged that one of Embracer’s executives at the time, Emma Ihre, used her position on AP7’s board to bring a suit that could arguably weaken Activision. (Ihre did not reply to a Game File request for comment at the time; Embracer denied to Game File that it had anything to do with the suit being brought.)

Kotick’s lawyers said in January that he would use the suit “to shine a light on the gross misconduct of the activists who invented the false narrative of misconduct at Activision, and to expose the relationship between those activists and AP7.”

The former Activision Blizzard CEO also argued that the 2021 claims of misconduct at the root of lawsuits like California’s had been trumped up by labor organizers and their political allies to motivate well-compensated video game workers to join unions (and pay dues) for protection.

The Communication Workers of America, the main union accused by Kotick, had called such claims “false” and “insulting to the Activision workers who spoke out about the harassment they faced.”

(In 2021, Activision Blizzard had settled a separate sexual harassment suit brought by the U.S. federal government for $18 million; at the time Kotick said he was “grateful to the employees who bravely shared their experiences” and said “I am sorry that anyone had to experience inappropriate conduct.”)

Crucially, Kotick’s filings in the AP7 case have cited court-approved language from the 2023 California settlement that matches what appears in this week’s AP7 settlement. From the CRD one circa 2023:

“no court or any independent investigation has substantiated any allegations that: there has been systemic or widespread sexual harassment at Activision Blizzard [or] that Activision Blizzard senior executives ignored, condoned, or tolerated a culture of systemic harassment, retaliation, or discrimination.”

Those sentences about unsubstantiated allegations and independent investigations (Activision disclosed the results of one in 2022) have, in fact, been a mantra for Kotick in recent years, as he has used them to manage his reputation.

The former Activision Blizzard CEO has worked with a legal team to press news outlets that cover Kotick and/or the 2021 suits to use those California settlement words in their stories—or update them under legal pressure if they don’t.

Last October, for example, a Reuters report about the status of the AP7 lawsuit was updated to note:

In an October 7 letter sent after publication of this article, Kotick’s defamation counsel disputed claims of widespread harassment at Activision.

“Not a single investigation, court finding, verdict, or ruling ever concluded that there was any merit” to the allegations of widespread harassment at Activision, Tom Clare and Nick Brechbill of Clare Locke wrote.

Note: It happened to me, too. After I published my January 2026 piece about Kotick’s take on the AP7 suit, Clare Locke attorneys contacted me, demanding that I add that California settlement’s language to my story. When I pointed out that my article had already included those lines, they apologized.

Microsoft, which is the biggest party settling today, has kept a lower profile in the case in recent months. It did not co-sign Kotick’s claims about the origins of the suit.

Kotick had been replying to the lawsuit as a former member of Activision’s board and therefore as one of the lawsuit’s defendants. Near the start of 2026, he even counter-sued AP7 over what his side claimed was an “abuse of process” in the suit being brought in the first place (this is where the allegation about AP7 suing to help Embracer came from).

In January, the Swedish pension firm called Kotick’s counterclaim against them “rambling, bizarre and baseless.” They accused him of trying to “hijack this proceeding for the purpose of litigating a vendetta against government regulatory agencies and unions.”

Kotick’s side was no doubt casting a wide net. They had issued subpoenas to numerous current and former officials from the California Civil Rights department, showing an intent to pressure the very parties he believed conspired against him to testify under oath. By February, Activision’s former board said they wanted to subpoena a former National Labor Relations Board official who worked with a union organizing game workers. They also asked the Delaware court to apply pressure under the Hague Convention to serve discovery of Embracer chairman Lars Wingefors.

AP7, meanwhile, pressed to re-open the settled misconduct allegations of 2021. It sought access to statements, interviews, and testimony from the California and federal investigations, all to build their argument that Kotick’s leadership position in late 2021 was precarious and motivating him to move fast on a sale. Into the weeds they went in their filings, questioning what Activision’s board knew and when they knew it.

All of this meant that what had ostensibly been a shareholder payout lawsuit dragging along since 2022 could in 2026 have become a legal showdown over misconduct claims at Activision Blizzard. Such a showdown had never fully happened before. The claims of 2021 had been settled instead of going into a full trial, without a judge or jury deciding either in support of the allegations or finding them lacking.

This past February, at its most aggressive, AP7 was even ready to aim its legal firepower on a key part of Kotick’s reputational defense, that language from the California settlement. AP7’s lawyers wrote:

“The full text of the recital makes clear that it is not a finding that there was no widespread sexual harassment at Activision, but only that there was as yet no court opinion or order or final conclusion in an independent investigation making formal findings that there was such widespread harassment…”

A month later, Kotick’s team responded, saying, no, the California language was solid:

“although AP7 may quibble with the Consent Decree’s language and the settlement payments—it cannot deny that the CRD Consent Decree stated unambiguously: ‘no court or any independent investigation has substantiated any allegations that: there has been systemic or widespread sexual harassment at Activision.’”

Within weeks, as seen today, AP7 would also adopt such language in its own settlement with Microsoft and Activision’s former board.

About the board of directors, it should be noted that Kotick’s side argued in March that AP7’s approach was focusing on the wrong things:

“Paintiff’s insistence on relitigating the merits of regulatory investigations and individual allegations of harassment has no place in this Action, which concerns whether members of the Activision Board of Directors fulfilled their fiduciary duties in pursuing and approving this transaction, and therefore turns on what the Directors knew and did”

As of today, AP7 has backed off its skepticism about the board’s support for Kotick. This is from the pension fund in the new proposed settlement:

“based on the materials provided to date, there is compelling information which undermines any claim that the Board or Mr. Kotick failed to operate in good faith with respect to the matters alleged in the Action.”

A hearing on both sides’ arguments and counterclaims, much of it about discovery and just how much of Kotick’s arguments would admissible as part of the suit, had been slated for May. Pressure had been mounting for more document disclosures and more depositions of people in the orbit of any of the issues raised.

But in March, the new filings reveal, a mediator proposed a $250 million settlement.

By early April, all sides began the paperwork to agree to it.

Last week, I emailed a Ubisoft PR person some extremely specific questions about Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, the July-scheduled remake of the company’s 2013 pirate adventure.

I was curious about the remake’s location of the Voynich Manuscript.

It seemed to have moved.

Was I right?

Whether you know anything about Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag or nothing, you may correctly wonder why in the world I was asking this.

Black Flag Resynced is the remake of the blockbuster pirate (and assassin) exploits of Edward Kenway, grandfather of the main protagonist of Assassin’s Creed III. It’s set across much of the Caribbean circa the early 1700s. You’re a pirate with a pirate ship, and can sail the sea, raid rival ships, dock at cities, explore islands, get in a dinghy to spear sharks, use a diving bell to plunder wrecks and chase down wind-blown pages of shanty lyrics so that your crew can sing them.

As the original made clear, this is all experienced via a fictional memory-simulation device called the Animus, used in the modern day, by people tied up in a centuries long conflict between rival secret societies.

Collectible manuscripts are not a major feature.

Black Flag is a game from Ubisoft’s glory days that has been overhauled—however necessary or not—to help Ubisoft in one of its lowest moments, as the company’s output slows and it struggles to release a hit.

Ubisoft is spending its promotional energy for Resynced by showcasing the remake’s graphics (they’re indeed great), the game’s improved combat mechanics (definitely better; you can trip people and throw them into boxes), better stealth (you can now crouch with the press of a button rather than waiting for Edward to walk into high foliage to trigger a finicky auto-crouch) and the company wants me and you to know that there’s a big helping of new content sprinkled across the game (I found some of it).

Last week, I played Resynced for three hours in a meeting room on Manhattan’s East Side, in a space I shared with a Ubisoft PR rep, a quality assurance lead, an expert combat designer, and an IT official.

I legit got a lot out of the session, and I respect that they set up the multi-stage demo to show several exciting parts of the game. I played the revamped intro (shot-for-shot similar to the original, except there’s a moment when our shipwrecked pirate protagonist must briefly dive and resurface to reach shore—this teases that Resynced lets Edward swim below the waves, where he’ll sometimes find coral and treasure. The Ubisoft team wanted to impress press like me and engineered the demo to end with a mission involving Blackbeard. Between, I did a lot of sailing and some plundering.

Sure, that was all nice.

But I got a little hung up on the Voynich Manuscript, a very unimportant collectible that was part of a series of 20 real-life bits of mysterious writing. These papers were locked in treasure chests found on islands across the original Black Flag’s map.

The night before I played Resynced, I’d stayed up until 2 am playing the 2013 PS4 version of the original game, to be ready for a comparison. I had played the PS4 edition’s first missions, dipped into its rendition of Havana, and briefly sidetracked myself to raid a guarded courtyard where I found a treasure chest that contained the Voynich Manuscript.

When I sauntered into Resynced’s Havana at the Ubisoft-hosted preview, I approached what I thought was the same courtyard, beat up a few enemy guards, reached into that treasure chest and grabbed… the Tabulae Rudolphinae?

Whoa, whoa, whoa, Ubisoft remake team!

A different, real, mysterious manuscript?

Later I consulted Google. The Tabulae Rudolphinae was in the original Black Flag, too, but it was in a treasure chest in Nassau.

What was going on here? Just how different was this version of the game?

You see, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag is a certain type of video game remake. It is not strictly a shot-for-shot, prettier-but-perfectly-faithful remake a la Nintendo’s 2023 Metroid Prime Remastered.

I don’t think it is a a meta-adventure about being a remake, a la Square Enix’s 2020 Final Fantasy VII Remake.

It seems closest to EA’s 2023 Dead Space remake, which tells the same main story as the original with largely the same moments, some restaged for impact, but with major graphical upgrades, numerous quality of life improvements, better gameplay and a bevy of new side-quests woven in.

So what are they moving manuscripts around for?

Over email, the game’s creative director, Paul Fum told me this was the result of the team rebuilding the original game’s virtual Caribbean, adding new, more detailed locations that led to them redistributing some of Black Flag’s in-game treasures. “There are now different chest types with different rewards,” he wrote. “Food, ammo and petty loot can be found in logical spaces where we added bits of environmental storytelling, including new areas. As such, we did reshuffle a lot of rewards in the game to fit this expanded version of the Caribbean.”

Let it be known to writers and users of Black Flag walkthroughs and tips: The old guides clearly aren’t going to work.

I had an even more specific question that Fu’s colleague, game director Richard Knight, humored:

Why were there now nine climbable survey points in Resynced’s Havana vs. the original game’s eight?

Yes, I, the author of 50 Things About Assassin’s Creed III That You Should Know (2012) and Another 46 hours with Assassin’s Creed Shadows (2025), notice these kinds of things.

“Good catch!” Knight wrote, understanding the wisdom of flattering the previewer.

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What’s an impressive sales number for a video game? What’s a number big enough to cheer?

A little over one year ago, the publisher of the upstart role-playing game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 announced that the game had sold 3.3 million copies in its first 33 days of release.

That was cheeky and remarkable. Clair Obscur was a surprise hit.

Last week, the developers of Subnautica 2 announced that their game had sold two million copies in less than a day.

That was a show of confidence, too (and a sign that a major payout to the studio’s founders and CEO could be on the way).

So, what to make of the news late last week that Titanium Court, an indie, grand-prize winning comedy kingdom simulator (I mean, it’s a tile-matching war game (sorry, it’s an adventure within a play within a game))) had sold 25,000 copies in just over two weeks?

The number was smaller than the figures that dev studios and publishers usually brag about, but both parties tell Game File that it’s really good news.

“25K is more than any of my previous releases have sold, so in that way it absolutely exceeded my expectations!” Titanium Court designer AP Thomson told me over email.

“My goal with commercial releases has always been to sell enough to allow me to make my next game at my own pace, and Titanium Court's success looks like it's going to give me a significant amount of runway to that end.”

The 25,000 isn’t just great for Thomson and his $15 game but for others as well.

Chris Wright, founder of the game’s publisher Fellow Traveller, told Game File that he now believes Titanium Court “should be profitable enough for us over time to fund another 2-3 bets of a similar size.”

He broke down what he was expecting vs. what happened.

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First of all, Subnautica 2, released into early access on Thursday after a long development cycle and a lot of legal drama, is lovely.

Yes, it can be stressful when you dive a bit too deep on the ocean planet of Proteus, your oxygen running low and some sort of alien barracuda gnashing its teeth at you. But it’s viable to spend a lot of time near the surface, just drifting through the gorgeous aquatic environment. Float around up in the gorgeous shallows. Kick the flippers to chase down colorful fish. Find some text logs in mysteriously destroyed undersea bases, as you try to figure out what went wrong.

Maybe you’re the last person alive on this planet? That’s something worth investigating. Maybe that can be a pretty chill experience.

The conceit of Subnautica 2, developed by Unknown Worlds, is that your human protagonist has woken up in an undersea base on a strange planet, trying to figure out what happened to the rest of the explorers, and just how to not die.

Almost all of the action I’ve experienced so far has happened in a beautiful underwater seascape of rainbow fish, coral domes, and deep caves filled with ore and strange plants. At night, the bioluminescent flora and fauna illuminate the sea floor like it’s the Vegas Strip.

At the start of this survival adventure, you can catch the local fish with your hands, but you can’t digest them. That’s the developer’s way of teaching the player to seek out biological adaptations—peculiar, glowing plants, of course—that transform a hero’s body to make it more in sync with the surrounding ecosystem.

Early gameplay in Subnautica 2 involves comfortably meditative loops: diving into the ocean from whichever base can print your body after your most recent death, grabbing some fish, using a newly crafted scanner to identify odd plants, managing your oxygen level to not dive too deep (and die), eventually gathering enough resources to build a base, learn some recipes, craft extra gadgets, and explore some more. So far, there’s nothing revolutionary and nothing all that different from the brief moments of earlier Subnautica games that I’ve played, but it makes for an appealing experience nonetheless.

Subnautica 2 benefits from its relative non-violence. Sure, there are fish that butt heads and some menacing ones that’ll chase you down. But distraction and evasion are more the order of the day than direct conflict. The game is, most often, peaceful, at least in the hours I’ve played. That vibe is partially due to a decision made by Unknown Worlds co-founder Charlie Cleveland over a decade ago, when he decided to leave guns out of the original Subnautica. It’s easy to picture this first-person game giving players a gun. It doesn’t. Appalled by the scale of mass shootings in America, Cleveland said back in 2016 that the world might benefit from one less piece of art glamorizing guns. ”I’ve never believed that video game violence creates more real-world violence,” he said at the time. “But I couldn’t just sit by and ‘add more guns’ to the world either. So Subnautica is one vote towards a world with less guns.”

It’s a PC hit, but there’s also a console angle: Unknown Worlds and publisher Krafton have already announced that Subnautica 2 has already sold two million copies, in less than one day of release. The game’s numbers on Steam, more than 467,000 peak concurrent players on launch day, verify that Subnautica 2 wasn’t just the platform’s most-wishlisted game but now a widely-purchased hit.

Subnautica 2 is also on Xbox, its lone console at the moment. The game is in “Game Preview,” which is Microsoft’s jargon for what Steam calls “Early Access.” Microsoft, moreso than rival Sony and certainly more than Nintendo, has supported the early access release for games on console (the principle, if you’re not aware, is that users pay for an incomplete version of the game, with the promise that developers will add to it over time and potentially charge other players more, once the game reaches its full release 1.0 version).

Subnautica 2 is not just in Game Preview on Xbox but in Game Pass. And save files from the Steam or console version can be uploaded to the cloud and then accessed on any device. I brought my Steam Deck save to the Xbox, so I could play the game on a big screen. It looked great.

Ahead of release, I joined a media call with the game’s developers and asked about Unknown World’s approach to early access on consoles, noting that the previous Subnautica, Below Zero, had also been out early on Xbox.

“The studio actually was one of the very, very first participants of the Game Preview program on Xbox, and at that time they developed a really good relationship with the people over at Microsoft,” Subnautica 2 lead developer Anthony Gallegos told me. “So when it came time for us to do Early Access, it was really important for us figure out if there was a console partner that we could do that with.”

Gallegos said that Unknown Worlds plans to keep Subnautica 2 in early access for at least two years, and he promised feature parity between PC and console throughout that time.

“Every patch that goes out will go out on Xbox and Steam and the Epic Games Store, all of our store platforms at the same time, because we have cross-play,” he said. “We’re even looking at trying to figure out like, are there ways that we could do different branches with the Xbox? But that’s still sort of the discussions we’re having. Because we typically always run experimental branches [on PC.]” The goal, he said, is to give players on all platforms as early a view of the game as possible.

Things are still kind of awkward. Subnautica is the rare video game that is releasing in the midst of an ongoing lawsuit brought by the dev studio’s former leaders against the studio’s relatively new ownership. A partial decision in the suit restored one of Unknown Worlds’ leaders, Ted Gill, to studio CEO just two months ago. But the legal battle over whether parent company Krafton tried to deprive the leaders of a chance to earn a nine-figure payout as a result of the game’s performance is still ongoing. Note that the two other ousted studio leaders involved in the suit are Charlie Cleveland and Max McGuire. (Remember those names, as you read on!)

During the pre-briefing, Krafton’s host encouraged reporters to ask Gallegos and a colleague about the game’s development, but she shut down a question asked by Dean Takahashi of Games Beat about what it was like for the developers to be building this game during a lawsuit.

“That’s not something this session is set up to cover,” the host said. “Anthony and Scott are here to talk about Subnautica 2 in depth, so happy to take any questions on what’s inside the game.”

That wasn’t a big surprise. But I was surprised when I was reading the press release sent out today to trumpet Subnautica 2 selling two million copies.

As recently as March 12, right before Gill’s reinstatement, press releases about this game, from the firm Berlin Rosen, described the game like this:

Subnautica 2 is latest entry in the genre-defining Subnautica series. The game takes players to an entirely new alien world within the Subnautica universe, introducing new ecosystems, modular vehicles, and cooperative gameplay while bringing the series’ signature exploration and survival experience to life using Unreal Engine 5. The game is scheduled to enter Early Access on PC and Xbox Series consoles in 2026.

And the the beginning of a similar description from April 2, two weeks after the ruling about Gill:

Subnautica 2 is the official sequel to the Subnautica series, which helped define the ocean survival genre and has sold 18.5 million copies worldwide.

Since then, things have changed. The description in Berlin Rosen’s most recent press releases has been much more overt about just who is behind this game:

Here’s one from April 30th:

Created by Unknown Worlds, founded by Charlie Cleveland and Max McGuire, Subnautica 2 is the official sequel to the Subnautica series, which has sold more than 18.5 million copies worldwide and helped define the ocean survival genre.

And here’s one from May 8:

Developed by Unknown Worlds — founded by Charlie Cleveland and Max McGuire — Subnautica 2 is the official sequel to the Subnautica series, which helped define the underwater survival genre.

Today’s name-checked the studio, Cleveland and McGuire, too.

I asked a Berlin Rosen rep today if they could share any insight about the change. They said they checked with Krafton and that the publisher had nothing to share.

Item 2: In brief…

📈 ARC Raiders, one of the biggest games of 2025, remained hot this year, selling 4.1 million copies in the first three months of 2026 and subsequently passing the 16 million lifetime mark, according to Nexon’s latest financial results.

😮 Capcom sold more than 59 million video games in the 12 months the ended March 2026, a record for the company, per the company’s latest annual financial results.

• Capcom’s stated long-term goal: “100 million units in annual sales.”

• The Resident Evil and Street Fighter maker emphasizes a global strategy, driven by PC sales and doing business in 244 countries or regions (eight of those locals are now responsible for more than a million copies of games sold per year; up from five regions just four years ago (check page 27 and 28 here)

• Capcom’s headcount rose from 3,766 at the end of March 2025 to 3,976 at the end of March 2026, with forecasted growth to 4,230 by March 2027. (By contrast, Square Enix, which has been struggling to release hits, cut its workforce from 4,604 to 4,290 in the past year, according to its latest financial results).

🇻🇳 A Bloomberg report about a government-supported Vietnamese video game showcase and recruitment drive included this stand-out anecdote:

“You have to constantly innovate,” says Nguyen Van Khiet, a 22-year-old developer, whose all-black attire looked subdued compared with the cosplayers milling around. “We don’t have enough developers, programmers and artists.” He received five job offers after networking at the event, underscoring the demand for coders.

Item 3: The week ahead

Tuesday, May 19

• New release: Forza Horizon 6 (PC, Xbox; PS5 later this year) brings the series’ open-world racing to Japan, after recent games set in Mexico and Great Britain. (People paying for the deluxe edition could start playing it on the 15th).

Wednesday, May 20

• New releases: Thick as Thieves (PC) is a heist game overseen by Deus Ex/Thief veteran Warren Spector. Until April it was bring promoted primarily as a PvP game, which made this release date for what’s now a PvE game surprising. Phonopolis (PC) is an avant-garde adventure game about resisting an oppressive leader, from the always-interesting studio Aminata Design (Machinarium, Samorost)

• Corporate: Ubisoft and the Embracer Group both report their full annual financial results to investors.

Thursday, May 21

• New releases: Yoshi and the Mysterious Book (Switch 2) is a new Nintendo-published sidescroller whose dev studio is as yet unannounced. Zero Parades: For Dead Spies (PC) is a new role-playing game from the same studio, if not the same exact people, that developed the renowned 2019 detective role-playing game Disco Elysium. (Another game to keep an eye on: cute puzzler Walk the Frog.)

• Corporate: Take Two Interactive reports its full annual financial results. As always with them, there’s the question of whether they or Rockstar will make any GTA VI-related news, such as saying how much the game will cost.

Friday, May 22

• New release: Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight (PC, PlayStation, Xbox; Switch 2 later this year) is the first new Lego game from core franchise team TT Games since 2022’s Lego Star Wars the Skywalker Saga. (People paying for a deluxe edition can start playing on the 19th; and some others accidentally already got it). Bubsy 4D (PC, console) is a slick new 3D platformer in a year that’s been rich with them.

• Event: Japanese indie game festival BitSummit begins in Kyoto, running through Sunday.

The PR pitch to entice a reporter to interview Mitch Patterson, founder of Wolfjaw Studios, is that he runs what may “be the most important studio you’ve never heard about.”

To back this claim, when I met him, Patterson was able to rattle off a past or present client list that included Sony PlayStation and Bungie, Riot, Wizards of the Coast, Innersloth and Take Two Interactive. Recently, they added Krafton.

Wolfjaw, based in Troy, New York, doesn’t make video games.

They make the infrastructure for online games. They do the work of getting online account systems and in-game shops to function correctly for a given game. They smooth out inventory management for cross-platform online titles. They keep voice chat working when players hop servers mid-game. They do unglamorous online backend stuff.

“The problem is no one at those studios actually wants to do this,” Patterson told me, when we met at the DICE conference in Las Vegas earlier this year. Well, it might be a problem for the studios. It’s an opportunity for Wolfjaw, which for about a decade has been specializing in this kind of work.

“We’re the backend team for Destiny 2,” Patterson told me, referring to Bungie’s multiplayer online shooter. “We are the backend for Marathon,” he said, name-checking their newest one.

Not just Bungie. “If there’s a piece of backend software Among Us, we’ve done it,” he said, citing tiny Innersloth’s massive hit.

Not just Among Us. Wolfjaw worked on Transformers: Reactivate, Tencent’s multiplayer robots-in-disguise game that was in development at Splash Damage before it was cancelled early last year. (Patterson had played it; said it was kind of like Destiny with Transformers.)

Not just Transformers games. He said Wolfjaw worked on games for Take Two? “Yeah.” NBA 2K is listed on Wolfjaw’s website.

And he said that Wolfjaw worked with multiple studios across Take Two. Did that mean what it sounds like? “Probably yes,” he said.

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Sega has cancelled development of its “super game,” a mystery endeavor previously promoted to investors as a crucial future money-maker that could bring in $600 million in lifetime sales for the gaming giant.

The company’s announcement, delivered in its report to investors this morning, was succinct:

“Decided to cancel Super Game”

*No additional costs associated with the cancellation

This afternoon, Game File received a more substantial explanation from a Sega rep about the Super Game’s demise. The company chalked it up to competition, the moment and the state of Sega’s own business:

“When we launched the initiative in 2019, we positioned 2 major pillars of our growth strategy; 1) to focus on our major IP and expand them, and 2) develop a triple-A online title to achieve significant growth in mid- and long-term, and we named this project ‘Super Game’ to reflect our strong commitment to pursuing this ambition. Leveraging the expertise of developing and operating online games that we cultivated through Phantasy Star Online 2 and our extensive IP portfolio, we worked to create a new form of entertainment that goes beyond the concepts of conventional games.

“Given the ambitious nature of the project, we adopted a long-term R&D phase for technical validation and related activities. We proceeded cautiously, with the intention of moving to full-scale development only after we can confirm sufficient feasibility. However, in light of intensifying market competition, the emergence of competing titles based on similar concepts, and our business conditions, we made the decision to discontinue the development of Super Game during the fiscal year ending March 2026.

Close observers of Sega’s perpetually tantalizing and consistently vague teasing of the Super Game might have seen this one coming.

In late 2023, Sega’s president at the time, Yukio Sugino, said the company was “conducting R&D activities to create a “Super Game,” a major title that scales globally, by the fiscal year ending March 2026.”

That deadline passed six weeks ago, leaving Game File at the time to ask Sega what happened to the project. Or, somehow, could the Super Games had already been released or at least announced, just without being called Super Games.

(Sources had speculated previously that Sega’s retro revival projects around Crazy Taxi and others might have been the Super Game. Doesn’t seem like it, as they’re still in development. Or perhaps the big-budget multiplayer game Hyenas, which was cancelled in 2023.)

If you’ve read this far and are still not sure just what a Super Game even was, you’re probably not alone.

The Super Game mystery dates back to 2021, when Sega revealed the project and, months later, a partnership with Microsoft.

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The two biggest first-party video game companies in the world issued multiple jaw-dropping announcements to wrap up the week, as Nintendo and Sony provided updates on Friday about the past year of sales and their expectations for the year ahead.

Nintendo announced no less than 20 price changes to its products, including increases to the cost of the Switch 2 in the U.S., Canada and Europe, effective September 1 and the increase in various Switch 2 and original Switch models in Japan, effective May 25.

In the U.S., the Switch 2 price will increase from $449.99 to $499.99. The latter is what Nintendo previously charged for a Switch 2 bundle that included the launch game Mario Kart World.

Nintendo also announced changes in prices for Japanese memberships to its Nintendo Switch Online service and to various lines of physical playing cards.

“We sincerely apologize for the impact these price revisions may have on our customers and other stakeholders, and we deeply appreciate your understanding,” the company said in a statement alongside the list of new charges.

Nintendo competitors Sony and Microsoft already raised the prices of their current-gen consoles last year, around the time when Nintendo raised the price of the original Switch and on Switch 2 accessories.

Nintendo blamed its rising console prices on changing “market conditions.” It said it expected to incur ¥100 billion ($638 million) in costs this year, due to “higher prices for components such as memory, as well as the impact of tariff measures.”

Electronics makers in gaming and beyond are grappling with soaring prices for computer memory chips, as the supply is gobbled up by firms that want to use them for computing-intensive generative AI.

During a Sony briefing to investors in Tokyo this morning, the company’s chief financial officer, Lin Tao, said that sales of its PlayStation 5 in its 2026 fiscal year (April 2026-March 2027) would likely be constrained by the chip shortages

“We plan to base our PS5 hardware sales in FY26 on the volume of memory we can procure at reasonable prices, and we expect hardware profitability to be essentially the same as FY25,” she said.

Having just been ahead of the memory issues, Nintendo did have a huge first year with the Switch 2. Nintendo said today that it sold a whopping 19.9 million units of the hybrid console/portable in its first nine months of release, between the machine’s June 5, 2025 launch and March 31, 2026.

But it announced this morning that it expects to sell just 16.5 million—more than three million less—Switch 2 systems across the 12 months spanning April 2026 and March 2027. It attributed the expected drop to aggressive player adoption of Switch 2 in year one and “price revisions.” (For what it’s worth, Nintendo likes to set its forecasts low and revise upward, but it’s still notable that they’re stating an anticipated drop.)

Nintendo also had some big news of another sort.

In a rundown of “personnel changes of company officers,” the company revealed the retirement of Takashi Tezuka, a game creator whose early Nintendo resume, per Moby Games, includes:

• Super Mario Bros. - assistant director

• The Legend of Zelda - director

• Super Mario World - lead director

• The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past - director

• Super Mario 64 - assistant director

Tezuka’s retirement follows those of other multi-decade senior Nintendo game directors and producers, as tracked by VGC.

There were some other notable Nintendo bits of news, but let’s get to the big Sony one.

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In 20 years of covering the video game beat, I’d probably not spoken more than 20 words with Take Two chairman Strauss Zelnick, who’s been running the company behind NBA 2K, Grand Theft Auto, BioShock and Red Dead Redemption for, you guessed it, nearly 20 years.

Last week, though, ahead of a panel I was hosting at the iicon event in Las Vegas, I had about 20 minutes to interview Zelnick.

I could ask one question for each year, I joked, as we settled into our seats on opposite sides of a conference table. Take Two’s longtime head of corporate communications, Alan Lewis, was seated at Zelnick’s side.

I didn’t quite conduct our chat that way, but we wound up going through a lot, including…

• The state of BioShock

• The ramifications of the rising costs of game development

• The fate of Take Two’s recent multi-game deal with the NFL

• Some hints about Take Two’s mobile plans

• Whether Zelnick’s answer to me about Civ VII was a good one

• The do’s and don’t’s of NBA 2K microtransactions

• Take Two’s take on the Switch 2

• Oh, and GTA VI (Spoiler: if Zelnick had spilled the beans on the price of the game or a release date for a PC version or whether there will be a polka radio station, that would have been this article’s headline).

Before all of that, I would learn what it’s like to interview Strauss Zelnick, who is confident, calm and focused on delivering precise answers.

To wit, I thought I’d start our chat with something fun, a bit insidery but maybe safe for him to share. The team at Take Two’s Rockstar label delays their games a lot, I noted. Of course, those delays, however painful, tend to be worth it. So, I was wondering how Zelnick finds out about them. Take the most recent postponement back in November 2025, when Rockstar said that GTA VI would not hit its May 26, 2026 release date (just 20 days from now!) and would instead come out on November 19, 2026. Was that news delivered via a call? An email? How does it work?

“I work super closely with my team,” Zelnick said. “It's a very thin team at Take Two. The entire senior management team is six executives who sit in one hallway and share two assistants. And then, basically, there are two people who head up each of our labels.”

They meet weekly to discuss their business, he said.

So no one emails him about a delay? Nothing like that?

Zelnick craned his neck to look at my left hand. He asked if I was married.

I am, I said.

“Does your partner email you to give you information?” he asked.

Fair enough. I didn’t get the sense Zelnick was going to read me the minutes of the management meeting where the GTA VI delay was discussed.

Slight pivot, maybe I could get some personality insights about one of the most successful gaming execs of the last 20 years, before getting to my big list of questions about specific Take Two games, franchises and policies.

I asked: How do you deal with delay news like that? Go for a run? Meditate?

“I tend to default to being very calm,” he said. “I’m not a person who freaks out easily.” He noted that he has a daughter with special needs due to an illness, and he shared that that situation had gotten him worked up. It was a personal, family emergency.

“But, you know, business is not that,” he said. “I have no trouble distinguishing between, like, a business challenge and an emergency.”

He turned to his left to ask Lewis, his colleague of 17 years, a question.

“Have you ever seen me freak out?”

“Never,” Lewis replied.

“You’ve seen me upset,” Zelnick told Lewis. “Have you seen me raise my voice? Maybe how many times? Be honest, because we might as well be.”

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I think I really liked 2022 indie breakout Vampire Survivors. But I have long wondered if the game just made me think I liked it. Playing it felt great. Maybe too great?

In Vampire Survivors, you’re a hero warrior guy or a magician lady or maybe even an old man with some repellent garlic. From a top-down perspective, you see your hero swarmed by skeletons, bats and very annoying preying mantis-like creatures (but no vampires, of course). You cannot manually attack your foes. The attacking is automatic, and you just move. As enemies are killed for you, they drop blue gems. Collecting them fills a bar. Filling the bar unlocks a selection of upgrades. Those upgrades can make your attacks more powerful or more frequent. Maybe they give you a second attack, perhaps some spinning books to supplement your whip or your lightning.

If you’ve played it, you know how smoothly Vampire Survivors draws you in and how tightly it keeps you from doing anything but play it. It chirps with slot-machine sounds. It fires off virtual fireworks as you crack open a treasure chest. That progress bar keeps filling up, and the rewards keep on coming. Where once you were weak, soon you’re strong.

Did I like Vampire Survivors? Or did I just like how much it felt like a constant celebration of mindless, near-endless winning?

(The one thing I was sure was genuinely good about the game was that my kids, my wife and I could easily play it together. That was indisputably wonderful.)

My too-many hours enraptured by Vampire Survivors led me to approach its first big spin-off, April’s Vampire Crawlers, with great caution.

Crawlers is played solo in a first-person perspective, one turn at a time, as your warrior man or magician lady dungeon-crawls through forests, bridges, libraries. I presume there eventually is, an actual dungeon but I haven’t spoiled myself. Each region is filled with enemies and the occasional treasure chest.

As I dove in, I heard the familiar slot machine sound effects and saw a progress bar that kept filling up as I killed skeletons, bats and very annoying preying mantis-like creatures (but, so far, no vampires).

Here we go again, I thought. Another seductively mindless game that I better be ready to tear myself from. Actually, I was wrong about the mindlessness.

I knew that combat in Vampire Crawlers is not automatic. Each attack or item is represented as a card, and battles are a matter of randomly drawing cards from a tiny deck into your hand, then playing them, registering their effects on the enemies, discarding them, earning more cards for your deck, shuffling and playing through it again. With each hand, you can choose which cards to play or play all of them in a single button press. I mistakenly thought the latter was the preferred action. After all, Vampire Survivors didn’t even want me to press a button to attack. Surely the gameplay joke of Crawlers is that I should just play all of the cards in my hand at once?

Incorrect!

I was initially playing Crawlers by spamming the all-cards-at-once option and the action was feeling as mindless as Survivors. But, as would be obvious with any other card-based game, Vampire Crawlers players are best served by choosing the right card to play each time. The key to the combat system involves card combos. The game’s attack cards, hero cards and item cards cost different amounts of magical mana points to play. The potency of those cards increases if you play card in the order of their mana cost. For example, you’d ideally first play a card that costs zero mana, then a card that costs one, then a two card, to keep the combo going. If you’re clever, you’ll work in wild cards, maybe turn a card’s value negative. Perhaps there are other tricks I’ve yet to discover to keep the combo going.

Once this combo system clicked, I realized that the gameplay in Vampire Crawlers is meant to be thoughtful, not mindless. When playing, I need to think about how I’m building my deck to increase the chance that my randomly drawn hand will contain cards I can combo consecutively. As I’ve been playing, I’ve needed to think about which new cards to grab, which ones to trash, all to build the most potent deck. I need to be strategic. If Vampire Survivors was a slot machine, maybe this is at least poker or craps.

As with Vampire Survivors, Crawlers is proving hard to quit. This time, I don’t feel as guilty when the minutes (or hours) stack up.

Bonus game recommendation: Combolands (PC demo)

A demo for Combolands was quietly released last month. It’s fascinating.

Combolands, formerly called Tiny Towns on itch, is a city-building game that is also played using a deck of virtual cards. In this game, cards represent the things you can build. A card will let you place huts, woodcutters, towers, farms, docks, fishing boats and more, across an island map.

The structures operate on timers that tick down the virtual days. Farms will yield crops after a certain number of days. The fishing boats will fish in a certain timeframe, at a specific range. Structures modify each other, adding range or, say, making the fishing boats cast their nets more frequently.

The goal is to get these things you’ve constructed to pay out more and more points by a specific deadline date. Mastering the layout and the timeline unlocks more cards and perks, as a low-scoring town becomes a high-scoring city.

Combolands takes a few rounds for it to click, but once it does, the demo proves to be terrific.

The game’s got a promising pedigree, too. Once of its two developers designed the great reverse-city-builder Terra Nil, which was all about turning landscapes that were spoiled by humanity back into unspoiled nature. I think they’re on to something special again.

No release date for the full game yet. Just “coming soon.”

Item 2: In brief…

🚫 French game studio Spiders (GreedFall, Steelrising) is shutting down. “We're sorry that it's come to this and would like to thank each and every one of you for your support over the years,” the studio stated on social media.

• Regional video game union STJV blamed the shutdown on Spiders publisher/owner Nacon, alleging that poor business decisions will result in 71 workers being out of a job.

• One day after Spiders’ announcement, Nacon announced that its delayed showcase of upcoming games will be held next week. Back in February, Nacon filed for insolvency.

🤔 Workers at Wizards of the Coast‘s Magic The Gathering Arena development team is unionizing, Aftermath reports.

🚀 Pearl Abyss is selling CCP Games (Eve Online) back to that studio’s management for $120 million, Inven Global reports, based on a regulatory filing.

• Pearl Abyss scored a big hit this year with the role-playing game Crimson Desert. It purchased CCP back in 2018.

📉 Microsoft earlier this week reported a 7% decline in gaming revenue for the first three months of 2026, a drop of $380 million. The company cited a 5% drop in revenue from content and services and a 33% drop in hardware revenue, due to selling fewer consoles.

• New Xbox CEO Asha Sharma took the unusual step of acknowledging that performance on social media, posting: “While we have made progress expanding the business and our margins, player and revenue growth has not yet met our ambition. We know we have work to do to earn every player today and into the future.”

• Microsoft also forecast that Xbox content and services revenue for April-June 2026 will show a “decline in low-teens,” compared to the same months last year.

• Last week, Sharma told me she wants to see the Xbox division “return to growth next year.”

👀 Roblox has reported 132 million daily active users for its platform for the first three months of 2026, up 35% from the year before. It also recorded revenue of $1.7 billion in bookings (player spending), up 39% from a year ago.

• But the company’s stock plunged as much as 20% at one point on Friday.

• A likely culprit: In its quarterly earnings report this week, Roblox cut its estimated bookings for 2026 by about $1 billion, down to $7.3-$7.6 billion. The company cited “the continuation of safety headwinds.” They’re referring to Roblox’s roll-out of mandatory age-checks that it says “will result in continued short-term headwinds to user acquisition and engagement.”

• The age checks are kicking in as Roblox attempts to address the platform’s child safety concerns, which have spawned over 100 lawsuits. (Last month, Roblox agreed to pay $36 million to settle safety lawsuits from West Virginia, Alabama and Nevada.)

📈 Krafton has reported record revenue for the first quarter of 2026, at 1.4 trillion South Korean won ($932 million), driven by the performance of its long-running battle royale PUBG on PC and mobile.

• Krafton is preparing to port inZOI, its PC-based Sims competitor, to consoles (it’s announced for PS5).

• Through its Unknown Worlds studio, it will release Steam’s most-wishlisted game, Subnautica 2, into early access on May 14. That recently announced date, which the studio seems happy with, may explain why lawyers for Unknown Worlds’ reinstated CEO recently told a judge they are no longer upset about Krafton’s possible role in a March leak of the game’s May release timeframe.

💬 Here’s a fascinating game developer quote given to my former Kotaku colleague Joshua Rivera, writing for The Verge. This is from Housemarque’s Gregory Louden, co-writer and director of new, action-packed PS5 sci-fi game Saros, which tells much of its story through vague cinematic cutscenes:

“We’re also gonna make our cinematics about questions. The gameplay is the answer. So a lot of the time the cinematics are about setting things up or giving you questions to ask, and through the game experience, you answer them.”

😮 The five-year difference. Back in 2021, I interviewed developers at FuturLab who made the then newly-released Power Wash Simulator. The game’s producer revealed his dream filthy object to clean in the game: “That would be a wonderful thing to have six people running around cleaning the Millennium Falcon together… It would be a dream.” As I wrote at the time, there was no deal with Disney/LucasFilm to do any such thing. PWS was still very much an upstart game about cleaning dirty cars and buildings.

• This week: FuturLab revealed a summer-slated add-on for PowerWash Simulator 2, a Star Wars Pack.

• The trailer shows players cleaning a dirty X-Wing fighter, but, come on…surely the dream is about to come true? (Though, to be clear, the sequel supports up to four players, not six.)

Item 3: The week ahead

Tuesday, May 5

• In the Black (PC), a “realistic space combat simulator with a serious respect for science,” Wax Heads (PC, console), a record store puzzle game, and Motorslice (PC, PlayStation, Xbox), a sci-fi parkour game set in “the ruins of a megastructure,” are released.

Thursday, May 7

• Alabaster Dawn (PC, early access), a new role-playing game from the makers of CrossCode, and Mixtape (PC, console), a stylish interactive 80s teen drama, are released.

Saturday, May 9

• The NYC Video Game Festival is held in downtown Manhattan..

LAS VEGAS — Sonic The Hedgehog was great, but that’s not the Sega gaming franchise that Hollywood producer Dmitri Johnson most wanted to adapt into a movie when he started courting the Japanese game giant years ago.

“Sonic was the gateway drug to get Streets of Rage, and we’re finally making that come true,” he said during a panel in Las Vegas at the inaugural iicon event.

Johnson is the co-founder of video-game focused TV/movie production house Story Kitchen. On stage, he raved about the classic Sega brawler series as he explained to an audience of gaming executives (and some non-gaming ones) how Story Kitchen tries to turn video games into shows and films.

“When people ask us now, like, ‘How do you find [video game intellectual property] that you go after for any projects?,’ we selfishly say, ‘We’re trying to make stuff for ourselves,’” he said.

Streets of Rage, Johnson said, was a prime example. When he was pitching Sega years ago on the first Sonic movie, it was rooted in his love for Sonic but also his hopes to make a Street of Rage movie.

Musical aside: During the panel, Johnson also raved that Streets of Rage–the second one, he later emphasized to me–has “the greatest video game soundtrack of all time”. Judge for yourself…

“I almost broke news,” Johnson added, as he discussed the Streets of Rage movie project. But he caught himself. “There will be news,” he said, soon. It’ll involve some “exciting talent around that one.”

Attendees of this iicon event might be forgiven for assuming Story Kitchen is trying to turn every game into a movie or show, because they sure have a lot of ongoing efforts to mention. There’s their hit Sonic movies, upcoming projects involving Sega’s Shinobi and Toejam & Earl and efforts around breakout Roblox platform hits Grow a Garden and Steal a Brainrot. Story Kichen’s official list of projects also includes Sleeping Dogs, Vampire Survivors, Sifu and many more. Some will actually get made, but it’s Hollywood, so keep those expectations in check, of course.

For their talk, the Story Kitchen team wanted to emphasize the extent to which they try to work with writers, directors and actors who really understand the games—and how they’ve tried to normalize getting game-makers themselves involved in the process.

To underscore those points, Story Kitchen co-founder Mike Goldberg brought up his team’s efforts this very week to get a live-action movie going based on the beautiful 2023 post-robot-invasion side-scrolling game Planet of Lana.

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PlayStation fans and gaming preservations have been alarmed since late last week that a new 30-day timer attached attached to newly-purchased digital games for PlayStation 4 and 5 might render those games unplayable if the system they’re on is offline for longer than a month.

But a rep from Sony told Game File today that new system will require only a single online check before it functions as a perpetual license for the digitally purchased game. That is consistent with a newer theory that emerged by gamers testing the 30-day timer over the last two days.

“Players can continue to access and play their purchased games as usual,” a rep for PlayStation told me over email. “A one-time online check is required after purchase to confirm the game’s license, after which no further check-ins are needed.”

The rep’s explanation squares with the current understanding among players about what’s happening.

A multi-day mystery

A post last Friday by YouTuber Lance MacDonald spread awareness over the 30-day timer. Quickly, players began stress-testing the system, removing a battery within their PlayStations and checking what would happen if their systems were offline past the timer window. They noticed that setting a PS4 or PS5 to be the “primary” console—a common Sony-authorized method to retain rights to a digital game—wasn’t overriding the 30-day limit.

On Tuesday came the breakthrough: A gamer called Andshrew on the Resetera forums posted the results of some tasting. They found that digital games purchased on PS4/PS5 after some time in mid-April would get a 30-day timer that could then be removed and replaced with a perpetual license that would allow the game to be played offline. The transition to the perpetual license occurred some number of days after the digital game was purchased and the system was connected to the internet. They believed that a PlayStation’s online check-in would trigger the license change no sooner than 15 days after the user had purchased the game. This synced with the theory that Sony’s new system is related to the 14-day window that PlayStation users have to request a refund for digitally purchased games. The new timer/check-in system could be a way to defeat some exploit in that refund system, some users theorized.

In a follow-up, I asked the Sony rep if the 15-day timeline is accurate or if the perpetual license can be activated sooner after purchase. If they share more, I’ll update this post.

Sony has not said why they’ve introduced the timer and whether it is designed to stop people from exploiting the refund system.

But their explanation suggests that this new DRM method should not result in long-term loss of access to digitally purchased games, just because a PlayStation is offline for a month or Sony’s servers are down.

Xbox flashback

For many some gamers, the initial reporting of the 30-day timer conjured memories of Microsoft’s disastrous May 2013 announcement of the Xbox One, which was going to require an internet-connected check-in once a day, lest your games become unplayable.1 After widespread backlash, Microsoft abandoned that plan, ahead of the Xbox One’s launch.

LAS VEGAS — Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson repeatedly downplayed the idea that AI might take the jobs of workers at the maker of Madden and Battlefield, during a talk this morning at the new iicon gaming event in Las Vegas.

“I saw some data recently, I think, now almost all—like 85%—of our quality assurance [work] is done with some kind of machine learning or AI-driven algorithm,” Wilson told Fox Business Network’s Liz Claman, who interviewed the EA boss on stage in front of hundreds of industry attendees in a conference room at the Fontainebleau Resort.

“Yet as a company, we hire more QA people than we ever have.”

AI is being used for rudimentary QA work, Wilson said, giving examples of it being tasked with “the simple stuff: turn the box on, turn the box off, boot it up, shut it down, does it crash, all these things.”

But, he said, droves of QA hires are needed to analyze the AI’s findings.

Asked by Claman where she might see AI replacing jobs at EA, instead of augmenting them, Wilson said, “So far, it’s been almost entirely augmentation.”

Wilson’s panel kicked off iicon, a new event operated by the Entertainment Software Association, the former organizers of E3. That big trade show in Los Angeles, used to provide the peak moment of hype in the game industry’s calendar each year. At E3, the world’s biggest video game companies showed off their most important upcoming releases in a cavernous convention center. The ESA last held an in-person E3 in 2019 and officially got out of the E3 business in 2023.

Iicon is comparatively much lower profile and is focused on convening the heads of the game industry with leaders from tech, entertainment and sports to discuss gaming and the other fields with which it does or could overlap. An executive at an ad firm who I rode the elevator with en route to an iicon mixer last night told me he’d been pitched that iicon could be the “Davos of gaming.” (It was unclear who he heard that from.)

The attendance list is dazzling.

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The hero of Saros, the new game from Finnish studio Housemarque, is living in a loop. He wakes up in a base on the planet of Carcosa, a bit confused, a bit unsure of what is going on. He is driven to go into the wilderness to shoot strange foes and dodge their incredibly abundant bullets (or sometimes use a shield to absorb them). Most of the time, he dies, revives back in the base, and does it again.

The hero of 2021’s Returnal, Housemarque’s prior game, also lived in a loop. She would wake up in a crashed spaceship on the planet of Atropos, a bit confused, a bit unsure of what was going on. She was driven to go into the wilderness to shoot strange foes and dodge their incredibly abundant bullets. Most of the time, she’d die, often revive back at the crash site, and do it again.

Housemarque, a studio behind many dazzling shoot-em-up games over the last 30 years, appears to be in a loop of its own with a new game that is distractingly and at times disappointingly similar to its last one, even if it is ultimately a blast to play.

I had to venture through many loops of Saros to come to grips with that. The new PS5 exclusive is the first Housemarque game in a long time that I had trouble getting into.

One thing that helped were the bullets. The mesmerizing, enemy bullets.

Look at this…

And this…

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I’m trying something different today: offering all Game File readers a free write-up of a big interview, while also offering the interview transcript to paying readers.

If you want to get the essence of my conversation with new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty, with context around their comments, check out the free piece. If you want more depth, this transcript is for you.

I’ve lightly edited the conversation for clarity and flow, but you’ll still get plenty of Sharma and Booty’s thoughts, my questions, and a good sense of how our conversation progressed—complete with follow-ups, some conversational detours, and the best quotes that made it into the free piece.

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In a memo to Microsoft’s video game team yesterday, the company’s new CEO of Xbox, Asha Sharma, along with Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty, laid out some goals.

The Xbox platform “will be built to be affordable, personal, and open,” they wrote.

Their team would be called “Xbox” again, dropping the “Microsoft Gaming” moniker of recent years.

That Xbox team would, among other things, work to “fortify Game Pass” with “sustainable economics,” “strengthen our 5-year slate” of games and “stabilize Gen9” (their Xbox Series consoles) “as a healthy and high-quality base.”

The memo even briefly addressed some of the biggest questions around Xbox since Microsoft announced in February that Sharma would be replacing Phil Spencer, Xbox’s boss of the past 12 years: whether to continue Microsoft’s recent effort to bring more Xbox/PC-centric games and franchises to rival PlayStation. The Xbox team “will reevaluate our approach to exclusivity, windowing, and AI, and share more as we learn and decide,” they wrote.

So, what’s that all mean?

Yesterday afternoon, I connected with Sharma and Booty via a video call. Over the course of a 28-minute interview, I asked if they could elaborate.

Note: This article is free for all Game File readers, but I’ve also published the interview transcript for paying Game File subscribers, if you want to read about our exchanges in greater depth. Not a subscriber? You can sign up directly via the article or on Game File’s subscription sign-up page.

Fortifying Game Pass, Sharma told me, meant that, “to grow a subscription business, you need more players who love the subscription, that are staying longer and that are happy.”

She pointed to Monday’s announcement of a price reduction on the recently price-hiked Game Pass subscription service. With that came the change that new Call of Duty games will now be excluded from the service until they’re out for a year.

“We think that this decision is going to give us all three of those,” she said.

Sharma’s desire for Game Pass subscribers to stay longer suggests to me that, however many people as Call of Duty may have brought in when Black Ops 6 launched in 2024, those new subscribers just might not have stuck around.

“We've been thinking about Game Pass in two steps,” she said. “One is just: let's make sure it's affordable, which we addressed. The second is: what does value look like eight years later after the advent of Game Pass and the world changing around us and the next generation coming online? And so we're exploring a number of different things.”

Shortly after we spoke, one of those explorations appeared to leak, per The Verge: A 50-game Game Pass “Starter Edition” bundled with Discord’s Nitro service.

Strengthening the five-year slate, Booty told me, meant building on some fundamentals for Xbox’s games and game studios: “Predictable cadence, robust roadmap, aim for quality.”

I pressed him on whether Microsoft, which had recently seemed to solve its gaming drought problem, was aiming to improve game quality and create more bona fide Game of the Year contenders. Other game publishers keep claiming those trophies, I said. Nailing those fundamentals, he said, could “create the conditions for the lightning in a bottle of winning Game of the Year.”

And what exactly did an effort to “stabilize Gen 9” Xbox Series consoles involve?

“We have formed a team [and] we’re investing in console features,” Sharma said. “We are standing up the muscle to make sure that all of our performance and reliability and quality is great. We are investing in it as a first-class experience again, and we want to make sure that all the players who want to be on Gen 9 are on Gen 9 with a great console with regular updates.”

She teased that there were more updates coming, but didn’t want to get ahead of their announcements. “I think that the Gen 9 is a great piece of hardware, and we want to make sure that gameplay and the platform experience is excellent. We know we just haven’t invested as much there and so we’re getting back to that.”

As for those hottest of topics, Sharma and Booty had no additional info to share with me about exclusivity. No calls made yet. Choices around Xbox’s approach to exclusive games are “long-swinging decisions that have decade-long impact,” Sharma said.

“We’ll take a data-driven approach and a strategic-driven approach, and then we’ll look at our principles and we’ll make some calls. So we’ll share more when we’re ready,” she said.

I specifically asked if they had a timeframe for making a decision. “Nothing we’re ready to commit to,” she said, pointing out that she was in her role for only about 60 days.

She wasn’t going to rush it: “I want to make the right decision, not the fastest decision.”

A deliberate pace is what you might expect from the new leader of a sprawling gaming division that is responsible for Xbox, Halo, Call of Duty, Candy Crush, Minecraft, World of Warcraft, Fallout, Forza, and much more.

But Sharma, with Booty, a 16-year Xbox veteran at her side, has made her mark quickly.

On the 14th day since Microsoft announced she’d be running its game team, Sharma announced Project Helix, the codename for Microsoft’s in-development next-gen console.

On day 35, Microsoft confirmed that Sharma had retired the company’s controversial “This is an Xbox” ad campaign that de-emphasized the centrality of playing Xbox games on an Xbox console.

On day 60, she announced the Game Pass price cut and the removal of Call of Duty from its day-and-date offerings.

The memo (and our interview) was on day 62.

I was curious if Sharma had been given a mandate when she took the job.

“The big things that we’re thinking about are we want to make great games,” she said, pointing out a Peabody Award win this week for South of Midnight, the release of Double Fine’s multiplayer pottery brawler Kiln that day as well.

“The ‘’Return of Xbox’ really came from an ethos of: We have to restore the core,” she continued. She was referring to a phrase she used in her note in late February when she introduced herself to her team and the gaming world. “We have to restore the core fundamentals of our product and console. We have to restore the core and increase our strength on PC. We need to overhaul discovery and search, etcetera.”

Before taking the Xbox job, Sharma was a top executive at the start-up Porch, then Meta and Instacart, then re-joined Microsoft in 2024 to run an AI team. She said she’d meet regularly with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and that, during a session in his office, the possibility of the Xbox job came up.

“What he shared was, as we are looking out for, you know, 10 years, this is a very critical audience and category to the company. And we have one of the most incredible brands and portfolios in entertainment. And so he thought this would be a great opportunity for me to learn, a great opportunity for me to partner with Matt with my consumer background. He’s obviously got a longstanding history in content and gaming. [Satya] said that this was really important to the company’s future, and so I thought that was an incredible experience.”

She also liked the idea of working on something consumer-facing, with the broader public as your potential customers. “You have to earn every player every day, every hour,” she said. “And so it’s been really awesome getting back to that energy.”

(A mystery solved: In March, I reported that Sharma had done some Xbox work during her original 2011-2013 stint at the company. What’d that involve? “I was there for a short moment doing some sports and influencer marketing at the time,” she said.)

Plenty of Sharma and Booty’s memo is optimistic and meant to inspire the company’s games team, but it’s not all positives. And some of its terms are certainly open to interpretation.

“Players are frustrated,” they state in the memo. “Our presence on PC isn’t strong enough. Pricing is getting harder for people to keep up with.”

They describe Xbox as a “challenger,” an acknowledgment that, however mighty some parts of its business are, its competitors have the lead.

From the outside, I could appreciate the words of support for Gen 9 Xbox Series consoles, but I noted to Sharma and Booty that Xbox console sales have been in decline. Microsoft’s quarterly earnings updates have shown years of hardware revenue drops. Did Sharma expect Series console sales to go back up?

“I can’t share guidance on what’s going to happen in general,” she said. “We are wanting to see Xbox return to growth next year, and so we’ve got work to do.” (That’s the Xbox division returning to growth, she’d later clarify.) “There’s no silver bullets, and our focus is going to be: how many players are playing every single day in the Xbox ecosystem?”

The memo also talks about Xbox being built to be “open,” which tripped me up. I initially took it as a reference to the kind of approach the public saw last year for the Xbox-branded portable, the ROG Xbox Ally. That device, made by Asus in partnership with Microsoft, includes the Xbox PC marketplace right next to Valve’s dominant Steam service (as a result, it’s an Xbox-branded device on which I can play the Steam version of PlayStation’s God of War). The Ally hinted at a more open-platform approach for Xbox.

Then there was a line in Sharma and Booty’s memo about the next-gen Project Helix and how it would “play your console and PC games.”

In early February, a few weeks before Microsoft announced Spencer’s exit and Sharma taking over, Epic’s Steve Allison, who runs his company’s PC marketplace, told me he expected the Epic Game Store to be on Microsoft’s next console: “Unless their policy or stance on it changes, they are telling us they’re going to welcome that,” he said at the time.

I wasn’t sure if that was the kind of “open” thing the memo was hinting at, and, I’d been scratching my head for some time about how it would be economically viable to let other storefronts operate on its hardware.

Sharma pulled me back a bit from all of this.

“So what we shared with our team is that we want the platform to be open for more people to create on the platform and more players to participate in customizing and extending that,” Sharma said.

But an open platform approach as with the Xbox Ally as well? I cited Allison’s comments about what Microsoft’s plans for the future Xbox hardware had been, at least under the prior regime.

“I wasn’t part of those conversations, so we’ll make those decisions going forward as a team and with our partners,” Sharma said. “We’ll share more when we can.”

And then there’s Sharma and Booty’s intriguing pledge in their memo for Xbox to be “affordable.”

This week started with a Game Pass price reduction. That’s part of Microsoft’s Xbox gaming business. So, too, is Xbox hardware, which, as with rival consoles, has had price increases.

“I think that there’s a lot of different people around the world that have different needs,” Sharma told me, as I prompted her about what affordability looks like at Xbox, especially given that one of its products is a console, which can be expensive.

“I think, historically, our pricing hasn’t been as flexible,” she said. “And I think that’s the big thing we want to go work on. You saw that with Game Pass. It had become too expensive. So we took a step to address that.”

She added: “I want to continue to make sure, as we build hardware, software, services, we’re spending just as much time on performance and play time as we are on making sure that we can innovate to offer more affordable devices and hardware and services. And so, look, there’s a reality to the market that we’re in, so there’s no promises around what the price points are or anything like that. But I want to make sure that people around the world are able to play.”

The gaming business is changing radically these days. Signs of stress are everywhere, as studios are shut down, developers are laid off, the plug is pulled on faltering games quickly after they launch.

In their memo, Sharma and Booty talked about competition for players’ attention. The mentioned hit games emerging from tiny teams of developers and even from bigger teams outside of traditional markets, but whose work competes with “the most established Western studios.”

They described an industry that is reshaping.

“Players have access to more games than ever, even as the cost and time to build blockbuster titles continues to rise, putting pressure on what gets made and how risk is taken.”

Given that, I wondered if Sharma and Booty felt there were any hard truths that they thought Xbox fans needed to understand about where gaming is going.

“I would just turn around and say it’s on us to understand the fans,” Booty said. “Our job is to…build what the fans want to play and create places for them to play, and worlds to explore.

“So the understanding is for us to think about how the expectations have changed around how social games are, around the approachability, how easy they are to get into, about the balance between satisfying the core that wants really sweaty, hard games, but making sure we don’t lock people out that want to join for the first time.”

He added: “I think player habits, competition for attention, expectations about where and how they play, these are all changing. And we’re putting a lot of energy across our teams into really understanding and delivering what players want.”

So, what does success at Xbox look like?

“Xbox will be where the world plays,” Sharma said. “And we’re going to do that across our full stack platform.”

Correction - April 24, 7pm: Xbox dropped the price of Game Pass on the 60th day after Sharma was announced Xbox’s new boss, not the 59th.

Two gamers have filed a class action lawsuit against Nintendo, alleging that the company will be unjustly enriching itself with any refund it secures from the U.S. government over widespread tariffs last year that, among other things, hiked the prices of Nintendo hardware and accessories.

“Unless restrained by this Court, Nintendo stands to recover the same tariff payments twice—once from consumers through higher prices and again from the federal government through tariff refunds, including interest paid by the government on those funds,” the suit states.

Nintendo sued the U.S. government to secure a tariff refund in March, after the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs a month prior, saying they were illegally implemented by President Donald Trump..

The gamers who have sued, California-based Gregory Hoffert and Washington-based Prashant Sharan, both say they purchased Nintendo goods that had increased in price due to tariffs, according to the complaint.

They filed their suit in the Western District court of Nintendo of America’s home state of Washington and are seeking class action status to represent all people in the U.S. who purchased price-hiked Nintendo goods between February 1, 2025 and February 24, 2026.

They allege that Nintendo’s recovery of any tariff refunds would constitute unjust enrichment and violate Washington state consumer protection law.

Similar class action lawsuits pressing companies to pass on tariff refunds have been previously filed against FedEx, UPS and eyeglass importer EssilorLuxottica.

The tariffs were announced in early April, and by mid-month, Nintendo had announced $5 price increases for controllers for the then-forthcoming Switch 2. In August, it raised the price of the original Switch.

In their suit, the gamers cite comments from Nintendo executives connecting the tariffs to price increases. In May 2025, a month after the tariffs were imposed, Nintendo CEO Shuntaro Furukawa told investors “Our basic policy is that for any country or region, if tariffs are imposed, we recognize them as a part of the cost and incorporate them into the price.”

Nintendo’s March lawsuit, along with tariff-recovery suits from hundreds of other companies was immediately put on hold pending the implementation of a refund system.

The U.S. government announced the beginning of the refund process earlier this week. Companies could receive as much as $160 billion, per CNBC.

In March 2026, after Nintendo filed its lawsuit to recover the cost of the tariffs, I asked the company if they planned to pass their refund on to customers who’d paid increased prices.

The company’s response acknowledged the existence of the lawsuit but avoided answering that question: “We can confirm that we filed a request. We have nothing else to share on this topic.”

Even a promise to consumers may not have spared Nintendo this week’s lawsuit. FedEx previously promised to pass its tariff refunds on to consumers. They’ve been sued over them anyway.

Update - 5:55pm: I asked Don McGowan, former chief legal officer for The Pokémon Company who now runs a consultancy called Extreme Grownup Services, what he made of the class action suit. His take: “I have exceptional difficulty seeing how this is a valid lawsuit. There’s nothing distinct between raising prices because of tariffs and raising prices because you just want to make more money. There’s no legal obligation to keep your margins low. Nintendo didn’t receive tariff funds as a fiduciary or with any legal obligation to return them to the consumer.” He added that he was sympathetic to the plaintiffs who he thinks may not realize that, to him, they don’t have a case.