Some quick Mario movie thoughts (while I’m otherwise on vacation)…

I took my kids to a 1:20pm matinee yesterday. Only one other family in the theater, but it’s spring break and lots of people are traveling.

The kids (both 9) had a good time. They tend not to be critical of the movies we see and were amused. There’s a dinosaur part that my daughter enjoyed, and she was proud of herself for predicting a revelation about a couple of the characters.

Aside from that, it was one of the most lightweight movies I’ve seen with them. We watch a lot of movies and TV shows together and it’s really striking how little either of these Mario movies accomplish in terms of character development, underlying themes, or providing any heft beyond offering piles of references to parts of Nintendo games.

Sure, there are some creative action scenes, but the kids and I have been watching through the late-2000s Nickelodeon cartoon Avatar The Last Airbender, which is just as action-packed but has something to say about people and how they relate to each other. Frozen is arthouse cinema compared to the Mario Galaxy movie.

All that said, across two Mario movies, it sure feels like the people writing these movies want to be telling Princess Peach and Bowser stories. Mario is the least interesting part of his movies (and Luigi isn’t much better).

It’ll be interesting to see how the Zelda movie compares next year. Right now, I can’t tell if these Mario movies are a byproduct of Nintendo itself wanting its films to be as void of narrative and thematic texture as possible ... or if this is just Nintendo and Illumination’s assessment of what a Mario movie should be like. After all, Mario games also are all-action and have nothing to say about people--which is fine with me when I’m playing a Mario game! But it also makes for really flimsy films, judged against other kids’ entertainment or otherwise.

My kids have spring break this week, which means Game File is mostly on break, too. Look for new editions starting the week of April 6.

My big goal for April is to dig myself out of a backlog of interviews going back to late 2025. With that, I should soon be able to show you a cool “5D” game, tell you a story about an odd piece of mail that was accidentally sent to a game studio, share some insights about the state of the global game development talent pool, and a few other pieces tied to recent interviews.

Now that I think about it, it’s quite fitting that I spend a few hours this past weekend playing through A Game About Digging A Hole.

The game what it sounds like. I liked it, but, without trying to be clever, I will say I found the game a little shallow. No dinosaur bones to dig up? No hidden cities to unearth? Just lots of rocks to mine and an end-game that triggers at 100 meters below the surface? It was basically a joke game and developer DoubleBee was probably wise to not stretch things out.

Also a bit shallow was the demo for Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, which my daughter, as expected, loved but also finished really quickly. Living the Dream is a life simulation game from Nintendo. Players create virtual people (Miis; remember them?), give them some personality traits and then watch them interact with each other. The demo lets you make just three Miis, so my daughter created herself, Avatar the Last Airbender bad-boy Prince Zuko and a cheerleader named Gabby. She’s also taught them all how to talk about “fire-bending.”

Once you’ve made your three Miis and unlocked two shops, the Miis quickly run inside and go into a loop hyping the retail version of the game…

I told my daughter that the game is coming out in April. She of course thought this meant April 1. Alas, April 16!

I also told her I had review code for a game about an octopus. She was far less interested in that.

Item 2: In brief…

🚫 Lots of layoffs/closures, unfortunately: 124 roles cut at Embracer-owned Eidos Montreal, along with the exit of studio head David Anfossi; cuts at Polyarc, developers of the acclaimed Moss VR games, after failing to secure funding for a new project; Wanderstop studio Ivy Road closed after failing to land funding for their next game.

• Here’s a timely quote that keeps making the rounds, from industry veteran Brenda Romero to GamesIndustry.biz: "I feel like the industry's in a really horrible place… I mean, we were there in the 80s for the crash, and this is definitely crashier. There are so few people that have not been affected, or their partner's affected, or they're worried about being affected. It's a really difficult time right now.”

• Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has apologized for its handling of the layoff of a programmer who has terminal brain cancer and was left without life insurance. Sweeney says Epic is now “in contact with the family and will solve the insurance for them,” Kotaku reports.

🎮 Krafton has shut down PUBG Blindspot, a top-down tactical spin-off of its popular battle royale game, just 53 days after its early access launch, IGN reports.

• As with Highguard, which was pulled 45 days after launch, games launched in 2026 are getting a very short period of time to prove themselves.

🤔 Nexon, publisher of MapleStory and Arc Raiders, told investors that it will be taking “fewer bets” but putting “more conviction behind each,” as part of a capital markets presentation to investors today.

• This comes as the company says it will miss its 2027 earnings target but believes it can build on the Arc Raiders success to strengthen its footing in the west.

• Regarding any future mergers and acquisitions, newly elevated executive chairman Patrick Soderlund, whose own Embark Studios was acquired by Nexon several years back, said: “Every deal we evaluate runs through a filter: will this result in a game or portfolio of games? Can the game build a loyal player community that lasts for years. Will the leadership team stay on. And it has to meet our margin requirements. If it doesn’t pass through those filters, we walk.”

🚨WARNING: Wednesday is April Fools Day, so be highly skeptical of any surprising gaming news that you come across.

• If it seems too good/weird to be true… it probably is.

Item 3: The week ahead

Tuesday, April 7

• Musical role-playing game People of Note (PC, PlayStation, Xbox) is released.

• Bethesda’s once-Xbox/PC-exclusive Starfield (PS5) gets a PlayStation port and some updates.

Wednesday, April 8

• Visually intense side-scroller ChainStaff (PC, console) and Pokémon Champions (Switch, coming later to mobile) are released.

Item 4: An interview with me

Earlier this month, I was interviewed by Kalie Moore for the Naavik Gaming Podcast. We talked plenty about games reporting and my transition from exiting Axios to launching the reader-supported Game File newsletter that you’re reading right now.

It was a fun chat that you can watch above or listen via Apple, Spotify, etc.

This story, perhaps appropriately, goes on a bit longer than you might expect, past what may feel like the conclusion.

And it ends with a surprise.

This was not by design. In my business of reporting, you can’t plan surprise endings. But it is what delightfully happened.

This story is merely an accurate account of my absurd endeavor from earlier this month, when I tried to finally play through 2025’s most acclaimed video game, the role-playing phenomenon Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, in a sudden rush.

I had a deadline: a date when I expected to have a chance to chat about Clair Obscur with some of its creators. We would perhaps discuss the game’s ending, which, in their business of making video games, they could plan for.

I will get to all of that. I will get to Thursday night, March 12, when I spoke to two of Clair Obscur’s creators, discussed the ending and got myself an in-person consultation about my characters’ builds.

But I must start this story on an airplane.

It’s Sunday, March 8 and I have downloaded Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 to the portable ROG Xbox Ally X, a Switch-looking device that can run games offered via Xbox Game Pass. At this point, I have only played a little past the prologue of Clair Obscur, back on an Xbox in my house. Cloud saving has transferred my progress to the portable. In the game, our protagonist Gustave and his sort-of sister Maelle have set out on Expedition 33, the latest annual beach landing of adventurers who hope they will be the ones to take down the distant and mysterious paintress, who somehow, magically annihilates everyone of a certain age each year.

I know I’ve given myself barely enough time to play through this game ahead of Thursday, when Clair Obscur is likely to win another pile of awards at the former Game Developers Conference (now GDC Festival of Gaming) and when I’ll be backstage with an opportunity to interview the winners.

In the weeks prior, I’ve been busy writing and reporting and, in terms of actually using a controller, playing through Resident Evils.

Just back in February, I had been backstage at a different gaming awards event, where I’d met some of the makers of Clair Obscur and where I’d not spoken to them about the game, because I had other coverage goals for my chats with the winners.

For the Game Developers Choice Awards on March 12, though, I want to talk about the games. My friend urges me on. You should try to finish Clair Obscur, he says. They haven’t spoken about the ending all that much, yet it’s all the game’s fans talk about. You gotta find out what happens, he says, even if you just have to watch a video. Perish the thought.

So I’m on United Airlines flight 1777 from EWR to SFO, comfortably seated in window seat 39A. My Ally X is in my hands, and Clair Obscur is running, well before takeoff. I’ve boarded fairly early. Soon, a man with long curly hair takes the middle seat next to me. There is still plenty of elbow room for me, and I start playing. Best I can tell, the man in the middle seat soon starts a nap.

Gustave, alongside a magically powered woman named Lune, are fighting enemies called Nevrons in dramatic turn-based fights. They reunite with red-haired Maelle. As the plane takes off and begins to cross the United States, things are going well. I’m loving the combat and the look of the game’s world.

Before my plane lands, I reach the end of Clair Obscur’s first act. Big twist! I’ve been rushing, avoiding sidequests, and, wow. I did not see that coming. I’m stunned, but I don’t think anyone on the flight notices. I make sure not to disturb the curly-haired guy next to me, who I think at this point is watching a movie?

After my flight lands, I text my friend to confirm that I have not seen Clair Obscur’s wildest turn. I have not.

I have flown to San Francisco for work. I file a newsletter and then, on Sunday evening, I go to an indie gaming showcase. Later, I play Clair Obscur well into the night.

On Monday, I have a business breakfast, a panel to cover, a panel to be on, and a business dinner. I am busy, but I am also on a mission. I return to my hotel and resume playing.

A pattern develops: I fall asleep quickly, then wake up at some strange post-midnight hour, play some more and go back to bed ahead of my morning appointments.

Tuesday is similar. I’m digging into Clair Obscur’s Act 2, which feels slower. I’m learning about a new character named Verso and am expanding my party some more. I start getting lost a lot, perhaps because I’m rushing and playing at stupid hours, or because Clair Obscur’s developers refused to include a mini-map.

On Wednesday, I’m writing about Nintendo’s Donkey Kong developers and taking notes about PlayStation fonts, but I can’t stop hearing Clair Obscur’s lovely soundtrack in my head.

I consider that what I’ve been doing is unhealthy. But the costs have been sunk and I’m going to pay them. That night, I try to get to the end of Act 2. I conk out. I wake and play on. It seems that I am nearing the game’s finale. Clair Obscur does what many RPGs do. It pulls my characters through a series of remixed battles with all the enemies I’ve encountered until this point. It builds to a showdown against a powerful boss, which I can see will lead to another, probably with multiple phases. I’ve rushed too much and am not powerful enough. I drop the game to “story” difficulty and beat these bosses.

Then, I clear it. Lengthy cutscenes play. Characters reunite. Meaningful glances are exchanged. The music swells. And okay, some very shocking things happen. The title card that announces I’m in an epilogue might as well announce that I’m in a sequel, because I can tell that, actually, there’s a whole lot of game left.

It’s 3AM on Thursday morning. I have no time left.

I look online to find out what remains. There’s an endgame, an ultimate battle and a choice of two endings. I read what they are. Wow. Even wilder. I am interested enough to want to play to that choice someday, but I need to sleep, and I’d prefer to savor the remaining sections.

On Thursday, I file another GDC dispatch, go to some panels, attend some meetings, and then hit the awards.

That night, Clair Obscur cleans up at the awards. Each time they win, members of the development team from Sandfall Interactive come backstage. Reporters in the green room are told when we can interview them and when they need to swiftly take an official trophy photo and go right back to their seat in time for the next possible win. At one point, they win an award for sound, and I find myself briefly complimenting them about the crack of Renoir’s cane.

Then Sandfall wins the big award. Game of the Year. A gaggle of developers from the game are backstage. I get the attention of Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, the game’s lead writer, and Tom Guillermin, its lead programmer.

I explain that when I saw them at a prior awards show, a month ago, I had not yet played much of Clair Obscur. But I have played most of it in the past week, I explain. I cleared Act 2 this morning at 3AM.

And I have done it so we can discuss the ending. They are some mix of amused and horrified, best I can tell.

“Nobody’s talked to us about the ending,” Svedberg-Yen says. I can tell she is joking. I also realize that, in all my manic playing, I had not thoroughly checked for if and when the developers had spkoken about the ending and what they said about it.

(At this point, I’ve been vague, but PARTIAL CLAIR OBSCUR ENDING SPOILERS NOW. I’ll also mark when the spoiler part of this piece ends.)

Act 1 of Clair Obscur concludes with a surprise character death. Act 2 ends with the revelations that the paintress was not the true enemy, that the world our Expedition lives in exists inside the painting of a boy who has died. The conflict within that world is a manifestation of his Parisian family’s struggle to mourn him. The game’s actual ending involves the player choosing to side with one of two characters, Verso or Maelle, to determine the fate of the world in the painting.

I ask Svedberg-Yen and Guillermin about their twist-filled game and why they made an adventure that keeps changing the player’s sense of what the game is even actually about.

“We actually came up with the entire concept together as a whole,” Svedberg-Yen tells me. “And it was a question of how best to unfold that story. It wasn’t like we were purposefully thinking, ‘We’re gonna hide it towards the end.’ Although, we do also love twists, from a dramatic effect perspective… Ultimately, it was about the journey of the Expedition and uncovering the truth.”

Svedberg-Yen also tells me she liked the idea of focusing on a small number of people who have dramatic effects on an entire world. “When we look at the conflicts in the world, often it boils down to individuals making choices,” she says. “And one of the things we wanted to explore in this game was: What are the costs of some of those decisions? Things that seem very large-scale have a very human cost. At the end of the day, we have to think about: ‘Whose happiness are we prioritizing?’ ‘What is the cost?’ Very rarely can we find a happily ever after.

She says they always planned for multiple endings: “From the very start, there would always be two, and they need to be understood together.”

Players keep asking about them, she says. “They want to know: ‘What is the right ending?’ There is no right ending. You have to understand them together as a duality.”

She tells me she’s heard from players who are upset, who interpret the ending as just saying the action of the game was a dream and doesn’t “matter.” But, she considers, if players are upset about the deaths of virtual characters, then don’t those dream worlds matter?

I ask both of them if Sandfall has any data about which ending people preferred. “We have no way of knowing,” Guillermin says.

Svedberg-Yen tells me she’s polled players on Instagram but assumes that there could me a skew based on platform. In one poll, with about 1,000 people responding, 54% said they’d sided with Verso, 26% with Maelle. 20% chose the poll’s joke option of a “secret Clea ending.”

Even if there’s no “correct ending,” people ask if there’s a canon one. I wondered that, too. A week later, I would check in with Svedberg-Yen about that. What if you want to make more games in this world? Or in some other way continue the story? Are you prepared to pick one? Or make accommodations in sequels (a la Mass Effect) for players who chose different endings? “We knew from the start there would be two,” she reiterated. “We know the ramifications of that, and there is NO canonical ending, full stop. That is intentional.” She had no comment about what this could mean for any future games.

(End of Clair Obscur ending spoilers)

Back there, on that Thursday night, I ask Svedberg-Yen and Guillermin a bonus question: Never mind the best ending, what is the best Picto—the best perk to have equipped on one of my characters? Which one should I have been using the most?

Guillermin mentions “roulette,” a Picto that gives you a 50/50 chance for your attacks to land for half damage or double damage.

“Roulette is really quite a lot of fun,” he says.

“Really?” I reply. I had avoided it. “I’m not a gambler.”

It is good to use, on average, he says. “It’s adding randomness to your run, which can also get a bit addicting.”

I tell him that I’d been using Pictos that give my characters extra Action Points (AP), which are spent on moves. My copy of the game is nearby, on the portable Xbox Ally X that’s in my bag.

“We can judge your build!” Guillermin says.

“If you’re into it,” I reply. “I would love for you to judge my build.”

Guillermin and Svedberg-Yen answer some other reporters’ questions. And Svedberg-Yen excuses herself from any build talk. Somehow, it seems she might have better things to do.

I boot the game up and hand Guillermin the system. He pokes through the menus.

I explain that my battle strategy is to light enemies on fire with Lune, then use their burning status to bring Maelle into her “Virtuose Stance,” where she hits harder.

Guillermin approves of this: “Burning is key in triggering many things.”

As he peers at my Pictos, he questions why he isn’t seeing one of them in my loadout. “No AP gain on parry?” he asks.

“I’m terrible at parrying,” I say. (I mean, am I? Or am I just terrible at parrying when I’m playing past midnight?)

“That makes sense,” Guillermin says. “The game is also built to accommodate people who love parrying, and people who just don’t feel like it.”

He mentions that skills that apply “defenseless” are “undervalued” by players. Noted.

He likes that I’d pushed Maelle’s luck stats high. She’s got a weapon that scales well when you put points in luck.

How was I doing overall?

“I think you will manage,” he says.

“Is there anything I can be doing better?”

He politely tells me that I was overdoing it “maybe a little bit” on Pictos that beef up my Action Points.

He also encourages me to look more closely at the stats each Picto grants my characters. The Pictos apply special powers but also can boost basic stats like health. I should look into swapping out low-level Pictos that only add low stats. He shows me that I have a “Longer Shell” Picto that has an irrelevant perk but offers really high stat boosts. He notices I have a Picto called “Painted Power” that lets me exceed the game’s initial damage limit of 9,999. We both realized that I must have just obtained it, possibly at 3AM. “Okay, let me just put it in there,” he says, as he changes one of my character’s Pictos and gives her Painted Power. This was great! The maker of the game was updating my loadout.

Stepping back, does he approve of my main battle trio of Sciel, Lune and Maelle?

He says he liked to keep Verso and Maelle in the party together and use their synergy with powers tied to “marking shots.” He’d used that strategy throughout the game.

I ask if I was missing out by not using the character Monoco. He is really strong but “harder to control at first,” Guillermin says. I conclude that I did not need the hassle.

And that is about it. I got my interview about the ending. I also got in-person gameplay tips from the lead programmer.

All that playing was worth it.

The end, right?

This story has an epilogue.

On Friday, March 13, I take one last swing through GDC and head to the airport. I decide I will do other things for the flight back: maybe watch something or do some reading. For this flight, at least, I am on a Clair Obscur break.

To get home, I am flying United again. SFO to EWR, UA 2626. I had again booked a window seat, though in a different row and on the other side of the plane. Seat 37F.

I board fairly early and settle into my seat. Soon, a man approaches to claim the middle seat. The man has long, curly hair. I recognize him right away.

In four decades of flying, I don’t think this has ever happened to me before.

I ask: You sat next to me on the flight here on Monday, right?

Yes, he says. He also seems amazed.

Had he just been to the Game Developers Conference? No. He’d been to Yosemite.

But he recognized me, too, he says. He remembers me from the first flight: “You were playing that video game.”

Item 2: In brief…

😮 Sony is raising the prices of the PlayStation 5 by at least $100, starting April 2, the company said today.

• The base PS5, which launched in 2020 at $500, will now cost $650; the disc-drive-free PS5 digital, which launched at $400, is up to $600; the PS5 Pro, launched in 2024 at $700, will cost $900.

• Sony had already increased PS5 prices once last year.

• From today’s announcement, which confirmed price hikes globally: “We know that price changes impact our community, and after careful evaluation, we found this was a necessary step to ensure we can continue delivering innovative, high-quality gaming experiences to players worldwide.”

• Just yesterday: I wrote about how rising RAM prices, which have spiked due to the AI industry’s rush for components, led to a price hike for the Nex Playground console.

🤔 Pearl Abyss CEO Heo Jin-young told shareholders during a financial update that he’s aware of criticisms of the storyline in his company’s hit new game Crimson Desert, Forbes reports.

• As he is quoted in the report: “I partially empathize with the disappointment users feel regarding the story. I believe it would have been better if we could have handled it better… The development team tried to fill in the gaps in the remaining time, but ultimately, we focused on strengthening the gameplay, which is what we do best.”

• Crimson Desert has sold over three million copies since its March 19 release, making it one of 2026’s breakout hits.

Item 3: The week ahead

Monday, March 30

• Puzzle Spy International (PC) is released.

Tuesday, March 31

• Raccoin: Coin Pusher Roguelike (PC) and Super Meat Boy 3D (PC, console) are released.

Wednesday, April 1

• The Super Mario Galaxy movie premieres.

Thursday, April 2

• Octopus side-scroller Darwin’s Paradox (PC, console) and I Am Jesus Christ (PC) are released (In 2022, I previewed the latter, which is indeed a Jesus Christ simulator).

• Temtem Swarm(PC, PS5), think Vampire Survivors meets Pokémon, gets its 1.0 update.

Two weeks ago, as we were mostly discussing the uncommonly good news that his video game company was experiencing, David Lee and I briefly discussed a looming pothole.

Lee is CEO of Nex and he’d been regaling me in a hotel suite in San Francisco with upbeat news about his company’s upstart motion-controlled Playground game console. The family-oriented machine launched in 2023, had a hot holiday (outsold the Xbox in the U.S. on Black Friday!) and is expected to reach 1 million units sold next month.

But what about the RAM shortages that have been wreaking havoc for so many electronics makers?

Tom Kang, the company’s president chimed in. “We have secured supply for this year,” he said, “But we ran out the last two years. So, if there are signals that there’s going to be excess demand, then we’re going to have to find more supply.”

They’d have to explore all options, Lee said, potentially raising the Playground’s price.

Lee even floated an intriguing change to the Playground. The system uses older DDR4 RAM. But AI companies are placing so many orders for newer DDR5 RAM that supply lines for the older type are closing down in order to spin up more production of DDR5. That could lead to more DDR5 supply, which would be an opportunity for Nex to make a shift. “There’s also technology advancements we could leverage as well, if we move to more highly available memory,” Lee said.

“We want to be a responsible business,” he added. “It’s very important that we manage things really well and continue to service our customers for the long-term. This is the most important thing for us.”

Yesterday, Lee announced to Nex customers that the company was raising the Playground’s price, from $249 to $299, effective April 1. He cited rising costs of “key components — especially memory (DDR) and storage (eMMC)” and said the added expense is “no longer something we can sustainably carry on our own.”

In at least that regard, the Playground is typical. Everyone’s raising prices or warning that they might have to.

But during our chat in SF, I learned plenty about how extraordinary this system and its parent company—with its tiny but growing first-party studios and its six-figure game budgets—has been.

Read more

Here a Game File, I am skeptical that ChatGPT can make me a better writer or reporter. But I am an open-minded sort, and I’ve had people recommend I try the tech to enhance my journalism.

So, perhaps this quick example might be instructive for everyone.

Less than an hour ago, I was marveling at the length of the title for Nintendo’s Switch 2 release tomorrow: Super Mario Bros. Wonder – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Meetup in Bellabel Park

I wondered: Is this the longest title Nintendo has ever used for one of its game?

I Googled for a list of Nintendo game titles. I found one, dating back to the 1980s.

As I started scrolling past the likes of “Sin and Punishment: Successor of the Earth” and “Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3-e Series 1”, I realized this was an idea I did not have the bandwidth to turn into reality.

A thought flashed. Could AI help me?

I loaded ChatGPT and asked for an assist:

“list the 10 longest video game titles on this page, from longest to shortest https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_games”

Quickly, ChatGPT produced an answer:

Great, right? 10 titles by length, cool trophy emoji, some methodology notes that assured me that “I considered full visible titles exactly as written.”

There was just the wee little problem that ChatGPT’s list did not include “Super Mario Bros. Wonder – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Meetup in Bellabel Park”

I asked:

why does your list not include "Super Mario Bros. Wonder – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Meetup at Bellabel Park"?

It answered, providing three possible excuses and three actual excuses:

“The list I gave was incomplete, not correctly exhaustive”

Really!

I asked ChatGPT to re-type its list with character counts at the end. It could confidently miss game titles, but surely it could count numbers good.

It replied with this list, complete with apologetic footnote for excluding the Mario title.

Notice how ChatGPT was now offering to create a “fully accurate” list? I mean, sure, that’s what I wanted in the first place. I get more helpful first-time answers when I’m asking my kids what they want for lunch.

I asked the AI for an accurate list using all the game titles on the page.

The result:

See that game up top?

“Super Mario Bros. Wonder – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Meetup at Bellabel Park — 96 characters”

“Your example is now correctly #1 by a wide margin,” ChatGPT told me.

It even offered to “export the entire page parsed + sorted programmatically (so it’s 100% reproducible).” Very nice of it to do so.

There I had it. A full list. My pre-publication instincts proven correct. What more could a hard-working journalist ask for?

Just one other problem.

While ChatGPT was thinking (or whatever passes for thinking), I had counted the characters for “Super Mario Bros. Wonder – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Meetup at Bellabel Park“ by hand.

I counted 78, not ChatGPT’s 96.

I pasted the Mario title into Google Docs and hit the word count button: 78 characters there, too.

I returned to ChatGPT once more, though, full disclosure, I typed 79, not 78. But who cares, right? Just numbers…

“The earlier numbers (including 96) are not reliable.”

Ha ha. Oh, silly ChatGPT.

“If you want a truly correct result….”

I did double-check with ChatGPT about the 78 vs. 79 thing. You see how it had told me that its “key takeaway” was that my count of 79 was “correct”?

Well, after I double-checked, it gave me a “verified count” of 78.

It offered to provide me with a “character-by-character index breakdown so you can verify it independently.”

No, ChatGPT, I think you produced enough results for this one.

“You probably don’t like us,” Troy Batterberry said to me in a reasonable tone, when I introduced myself a couple of weeks ago at GDC.

I had identified myself as a member of the media, as someone from the other side of the kind of situations he’d spent the last half hour talking about: leaks.

I told him there were no hard feelings. I was just interested in people doing interesting things.

Batterberry’s session had been one of my most-anticipated of GDC. I’d been looking forward to it for weeks, since I’d combed through the show schedule and found, predictably, dozens of talks about the wonders of AI. My eyes had been drawn to a more surprising talk—his—that was about how AI could somehow help video game companies with “stopping insider leaks.”

We’ve all seen some insider leaks: memos from gaming CEOs announcing policy changes or layoffs, trailers and screenshots for unannounced games, official fact sheets for games not yet made official.

Was AI coming for some of my peers’ sources? And for some of mine?

The jury is still out on whether AI can speed up a game studio’s workflow, illustrate useful concept art, help code a game effectively, lower online toxicity, and recommend good games for people to try.

But could it also create a new era of gaming in which a publisher or studio can confidently keep the news of a new Blast Corps to itself, until it is good and ready to market that news? Could AI eradicate the phenomenon of the leaked corporate memo? Could AI be so good at stopping internal leaks that attorneys for Cognosphere, Epic and other leak-minded video game legal teams would soon be bored?

By the time Batterberry was showing GDC attendees that his company, EchoMark, was developing what he called “a whole other level of watermarking,” I knew I’d chosen the right talk to attend.

Read more

I planned to ask the lead designer of 2025’s phenomenal puzzle game Blue Prince two questions, when I saw him last week at GDC.

My first question for Tonda Ros: What was the best puzzle in your game?

My second: What was the worst?

There are no major spoilers for Blue Prince in his answers, but there are some insights into what makes Ros tick.

If you don’t know Blue Prince, just be aware that it’s a first-person game full of puzzles and mysteries. You inherit a mansion from your uncle and need to work your way through its grid of rooms. As you reach each room’s doorway(s) you can choose which room will be on the other side, drafting a new layout for the mansion over the course of each in-game day. Each room has puzzles within it, some more mind-bending than others. I played Blue Prince for over 100 hours last year and loved it.

Ros quickly had an answer for my first question about his favorite:

“It is a puzzle that involves 44 letters, and that is about as much as I’d like to say,” he said.

I knew exactly the puzzle he was referring to. When I started playing Blue Prince a year ago, it was the first puzzle that had caught my attention. It was the one that hooked me, though I initially had no idea that it had anything to do with 44 letters. Discovering that is part of the fun.

Why was it his favorite?

“I really have never seen [that] in any other game, so, to me, that kind of stands out,” Ros told me. A lot of the other puzzles in Blue Prince, he said, are variations on things players have seen before.

That made sense. A puzzle designer would be proud of having created a unique puzzle.

Alright. And the worst?

When I put Ros on the spot about this last week, he said that he’d pick a puzzle from Blue Prince’s parlor room.

Whenever the player visits that room in a virtual day of the game, they will find three small boxes—Blue, White and Black—with notes attached to them. The rules of the parlor game are:

1. One of the boxes contains prize gems.

2. One of the boxes’ messages is definitely true.

3. One is definitely false.

Blue Prince contains dozens of variations of this three-box parlor room puzzle. One of them, Ros said, just might be the game’s worst.

At first, in the heat of the moment at GDC, Ros recalled that there was a parlor game that was so bad he’d patched it.

When I fact-checked that with him this week, he realized he’d misremembered. It’s not that he’d removed the puzzle, but that he wants to change it. That he still might!

He noted that his explanation was getting into the weeds, but that’s okay. Getting in the weeds is a Game File tradition.

First, let me provide an example of a Blue Prince parlor puzzle that’s pretty easy to solve.

This is not a puzzle Ros picked. It’s just one I‘m using to establish how the parlor puzzles work.

The messages on the boxes in this example are as follows:

• Blue: “One of the other boxes is false”

• White: “You will open this box and find it empty”

• Black: “The blue box is true”

To solve this, we could first imagine that one of the boxes was telling the truth. Maybe start with the Black one.

If Black is telling the truth, then Blue is also telling the truth. That requires White to be a lie and therefore White is lying about being empty. The gems are in White.

If we started by thinking Blue is true, we’d again have to believe Black is true and conclude that White was a lie. Same result. Gems in White.

If we’d started by thinking White was true, we’d need Blue or Black to be false. Blue couldn’t be a lie, because there has to be at least one false box. Black couldn’t be a lie, because, again, Blue has to be true. White can’t be true. White must be a lie. Again, the gems have to be in White.

Follow that okay?

Ros told me that there are two versions of Blue Prince’s parlor game that involve “ambiguous solutions.” These puzzles can’t necessarily be easily solved using logic. They require the solver to take an intellectual leap, or at least begin thinking about the puzzle a specific way.

To explain the puzzle he disliked, Ros first wanted to explain a parlor puzzle that he liked, despite its “ambiguous solution.”

Here are the clues for this one:

• Blue: “The gems are in this box”

• White: “This statement is no help at all”

• Black: “The gems are in the blue box”

Ros described this as “a puzzle that I actually love despite it being mathematically flimsy.”

He pointed me toward the statement on the White box. It says it’s not helpful.

If we assume that the White box’s statement is false, then one of the other ones must be true, according to the rules. If Blue is true, the gems are in the Blue box. If Black is true… then, as it says, the gems are in the Blue box. This proves that the White box’s statement actually was helpful, in an indirect way. So the decision to designate White as false was correct. That’s airtight!

If, however, we assume that the White box is true, then we need Blue or Black to be false. This, Ros said, produces “a logical web, which leads to no solution.”

Ros is fine with this, because, in the lore of the game, the man who made the puzzles, Herbert Sinclair, is kind of a cheeky guy. He likes how the clue on the White box feels like a wink from Blue Prince’s in-game puzzle maker. “The playful nature of this particular logic puzzle fits Herbert perfectly and I love it,” Ros said. “It is the only parlor puzzle with an intended ambiguous solution.”

Still with me?

We have arrived, at least, at the Blue Prince puzzle Ros dislikes.

“Unfortunately,” he told me, “A second unintentionally ambiguous parlor puzzle slipped through our seemingly inculpable years of logic testing.”

Here’s the puzzle:

• Blue: “One of the other statements is false”

• White: “One of the other boxes contains gems”

• Black: “If you replace the word ONE in the other two statements with BOTH they will both be false”

I started trying to solve this one, and, no, I would have just guessed if I’d gotten this puzzle in the parlor room.

“The above, rather messy, parlor puzzle is, perhaps, my least favorite puzzle in Blue Prince,” Ros told me. “Before the game’s final patch, I would love to revisit this and reword the three boxes in a way that eliminates the clumsy complexity and logical ambiguity.”

Whereas Ros delighted in presenting players with a 44-letter puzzle that was unprecedented, he’s disappointed to have presented players with a puzzle that’s inelegant and confusing.

Makes sense to me.

Good thing Blue Prince is loaded with plenty of other great puzzles in between.

Item 2: In brief…

🇺🇸 U.S. spending on video game hardware, content and accessories totaled $4.6 billion in February, up 1% from a year ago, per the Circana research group.

• Hardware was up, off-setting a decline in accessories. PS5 was the top-selling console in dollars and units.

• The top-ranking game among tracked publishers, was Capcom’s Resident Evil Requiem.

📱 Saudi government-funded Savvy Games is buying mobile gaming studio Moonton (Mobile Legends Bang Bang; 110 million monthly active players) for $6 billion, Bloomberg reports.

• That adds to a Savvy mobile portfolio that already includes the makers of Monopoly Go and Pokémon Go.

🥽 Meta will keep its Horizon Worlds VR virtual space online for the foreseeable future, the company said on Thursday, reversing an announcement earlier in the week to take the VR space offline in June, CNBC reports.

• But Meta said it will not be adding new games to Horizon VR as it shifts its resources toward mobile.

• Meta had once touted Horizon and the VR metaverse worlds as the future, to the extent it renamed the company from Facebook to Meta.

🎬 Netflix’s Assassin’s Creed TV show will be set in Italy in 64AD, the time of Nero and the Great Fire of Rome, Eurogamer reports.

• The show will therefore be set three decades after the execution of an extremely famous person who, per the extended Assassin’s Creed saga, was briefly in possession of one of the franchises’ fabled “Pieces of Eden” artifacts. Will they reference that deep lore?

Item 3: The week ahead

Thursday, March 26

• Life is Strange: Reunion (PC, PlayStation, Xbox), anime car-racing game Screamer (PC, PlayStation, Xbox) and Super Mario Bros Wonder’s Switch 2 add-on Meetup in Bellabel Park are released.

• The PAX East gaming show begins in Boston, running through the weekend. It’s one of the largest gaming showcases open to the public in the U.S.

Friday, March 27

• Mega Man: Star Force Legacy Collection (PC, console) and Marvel MaXimum Collection (PC, console) are released.

Lawyers for the ousted—and now partially reinstated—leadership team of Unknown Worlds, the studio behind Subnautica 2, are crying foul over news that the game will be released into early access in May.

The release announcement earlier this week was made improperly, potentially “damaging the game and sowing additional confusion among the Subnautica community,” the lawyers said in a letter sent on Tuesday to Vice Chancellor Lori Will of Delaware’s Court of Chancery.

In their letter, the lawyers also floated the idea of asking Will to find Krafton in contempt of the court’s ruling.

The letter was sent just one day after Will’s bombshell ruling that publisher Krafton had breached its contract with Unknown Worlds’ executive team, when it fired them last June.

The new issue isn’t necessarily the May early access timeframe, but how the news was announced.

The letter and Krafton’s response have not been previously reported.

A quick recap of prior events: Subnautica 2 is an unreleased, underwater survival adventure and the most-wishlisted game on Steam. Last year, longtime Unknown Worlds CEO Ted Gill, along with studio co-founders Charlie Cleveland and Max McGuire, were fired by Krafton. They swiftly sued, saying the publisher had terminated them to avoid paying out up to $250 million in potential performance-based bonuses. The studio leaders had hoped to earn that with an early access release of the game, which Krafton had blocked. The publisher argued in court that Subnautica 2 wasn’t ready, which the ousted execs disputed. On Monday, Will ruled that Krafton had violated its contract, firing the execs to avoid the performance payouts, and that it had to reinstate Gill and give him full authority over any early access release for Subnautica 2.

On Tuesday, IGN reported on a new memo issued that day to Unknown Worlds staff by Steve Papoutsis, the executive Krafton had put in charge of Unknown Worlds after the 2025 firings. In the note, Papoutsis said that Subnautica 2 had passed a key development milestone “last week” and that he and Krafton had determined the game “is ready for Early Access release in May.”

This news appeared to catch the lawyers for Gill, Cleveland and McGuire by surprise.

On Tuesday night, they sent a letter to Will expressing “serious concerns” about whether it would be possible to forge an agreement with Krafton consistent with the judge’s order.

Papoutsis’ memo was a problem, they wrote. He didn’t have the authority to declare anything about Subnautica 2’s release. As of 9am ET on Monday, March 16, the effective date of Will’s order, Papoutsis wasn’t CEO of Unknown Worlds. Gill was. And, per Will’s order, only Gill could make Subnautica 2 release decisions.

They continued:

Krafton self-servingly announced the launch without any regard to its impact on the game, the team, or the community—let alone this Court’s Opinion. Announcing the release of a game is momentous, and it is typically accompanied by significant marketing activity, fanfare, and community coordination. And most importantly, the announcement is carefully designed to maximize excitement for the game. That entire process was supposed to be driven by Mr. Gill. However, in defiance of the Court’s Opinion, Krafton has now taken that away, further damaging the game and sowing additional confusion among the Subnautica community.

The lawyers speculated that Krafton had “intentionally leaked” Papoutsis’ memo and then issued an official statement to confirm the leak.

On Wednesday, lawyers for Krafton defended their client in their own letter to vice chancellor Will, saying nothing they did violated her order nor showed contempt:

Papoutsis’s message was simply celebrating the UW employees’ efforts toward a past event: Krafton’s pre-Opinion determination that Subnautica 2 was ready for Early Access release. There was nothing improper about conveying the results of the milestone review or thanking the development team for their dedication and talent.

They added that Gill could still make his own call about Subnautica 2’s release:

In his role as CEO, Gill will be able to assess independently his views on the state of Subnautica 2 and the appropriate release schedule; nothing in Papoutsis’s message alters Gill’s authority or discretion.

Vice chancellor Will has not responded to the letters and doesn’t necessarily have to. Both parties were previously ordered by Will to confer this week and submit a proposed judgment consistent with her ruling.

The letter from Gill’s attorney’s this week doesn’t indicate whether he would or would not support a May release for Subnautica 2. But it could limit his options.

And, if Gill’s lawyers are right, the lack of marketing fanfare around the leak of the May date could dull the launch of the game. Any harm to Subnautica 2’s launch is an extra sensitive issue given the context of the legal dispute: millions of dollars of payouts are on the line, tethered to the scale of the game’s initial performance.

In her ruling on Monday, Will noted that there was obvious “bad blood” between Gill’s side and Krafton but that the two would need to work together: “They can—and must—act in good faith to navigate their remaining contractual relationship.”

Update - March 20, 10:30am ET: At 1AM Friday morning, several hours after this article ran, Gill’s lawyers filed a motion accentuating their displeasure over the May early access release and calling on the judge to force Krafton to explain why they shouldn’t be sanctioned for it:

Krafton’s actions have undermined the relief sought in this expedited phase of the litigation, in which the Founders spent nine months and millions of dollars fighting to restore their bargained-for right to determine when and how the game would launch.

Gill’s lawyers—whose clients are also known as “Fortis Advisors”—say their issue with the Papoutsis memo in IGN was exacerbated by subsequent confirmations of the May early access release window that Krafton issued to Kotaku and PC Gamer (“the timing suggests that Krafton has continued issuing confirmations even after Fortis informed Krafton’s counsel and the Court of its concerns.”)

According to the motion, Krafton announced and confirmed the May date before Gill had a chance to review the game: “Krafton put him in this position before he even had the opportunity to see the developers’ months of hard work to plan a path forward.”

They add:

While Gill is supremely confident in the skill and dedication of Unknown Worlds’ development team, they have been working for months at the direction of management that, as the Court recognized, had no prior experience with the Subnautica franchise or early access.

…

Moreover, Gill must deal with publishing agreements, launch advertising planning, and other back-end issues. He now needs to do so with the axe of fan disappointment hanging over his head if he changes the launch timing.

Gill’s team says it reserves the right to “sell all appropriate relief” including reimbursement of its legal fees.

In a separate filing Krafton’s lawyers have asked the court to resolve a disagreement over when vice chancellor Will’s ruling goes into effect. They dispute Gill’s team’s assertion that was effective 9am on Monday (prior to the Papoutis memo) and say they don’t believe it should kick in until the signing of an “implementing order” which is still being formalized.

Item 2: A new kind of couch co-op game

A highlight of GDC each year is the Alt.Ctrl showcase that features games played with extremely experimental controllers. Perusing this year’s offerings last Friday, I found a game controlled with giant scissors, another with big toothbrushes and one that amounted to dumpster diving.

My favorite was Pivot, a co-op game about collectively maneuvering a couch. It was developed by students at the University of Utah’s masters of arts and engineering games program.

Players lift and tilt the physical couch in order to control the position of a virtual one. That virtual one is moving through an obstacle course on-screen, while being pursued by a giant skull.

Developer Nishant Verma told me at GDC that the couch is made of styrofoam (this became more evident as I watched!) and that the name was a riff on an episode of the sitcom Friends.

Item 3: In brief…

🚫 Ubisoft is laying off more than 100 workers at its Red Storm studio, as the North Carolina location known for decades for its Tom Clancy games, ceases in-house game development, VGC reports.

👀 On Monday, Nvidia’s revealed its DLSS 5 AI-driven graphics technology that purports to improve game graphics… and it has been roasted about it by the media and the online gaming public for the remainder of the week.

• The tech changed the faces of characters in footage from Resident Evil Requiem, Hogwarts Legacy and EA Sports FC, drawing accusations of giving carefully art-directed games the generic look of AI “slop.”

• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had said on Monday that “DLSS 5 is the GPT moment for graphics—blending handcrafted rendering with generative AI to deliver a dramatic leap in visual realism while preserving the control artists need for creative expression.”

• By mid-week, Huang was telling Tom’s Hardware that the new tech’s critics were “completely wrong” because game-makers could still “fine-tune the generative AI” to suit their game’s aesthetics.

The people at Sony PlayStation have crafted many things, while building their multi-game Horizon franchise.

There’s Aloy, the red-headed warrior woman who leads most of the games. There’s the bevy of beastly mechs she fights. There are the actual games, of course, made primarily by Dutch studio Guerilla.

And, as PlayStation’s Matt Redway explained during a talk at the GDC Festival of Gaming last week, somewhat belatedly, Sony also made a Horizon font.

The typeface is called Machine Nova. You can see it above.

It was built, Redway said, when it came time to make a second Horizon game and the graphic design choices that had been made for a single game now had to be adapted for sequels, spin-offs and more.

Redway is a creative director at the PlayStation Studios Creative Arts team, a centralized group of designers, artists, directors and editors, who make logos, key art, trailers and more.

To make Machine Nova, Redway’s team took the letters of the original logo for 2017’s PS4 hit Horizon Zero Dawn, tweaked some letters, re-thought some kerning, and wound up with the “foundation for the entire font,” he said.

They used Machine Nova Regular when revising the original Zero Dawn logo and for crafting one for its sequel, 2022’s Horizon Forbidden West.

At GDC, no task in gaming is too esoteric to be the subject of a crowd-pleasing talk. Last Wednesday, just after Nintendo’s game designers finished discussing the making of a Donkey Kong game to a room of hundreds of game developers—and after Microsoft executive capped off another heavily attended session with a tease of the next Xbox, Project Helix—Redway and his PlayStation Creative Arts colleague Alanna Cervenak were giving a lower-key talk.

Their topic was not simply about making game logos but about making a game franchise’s second and third logos, about designing systems that support logos for sequels, spin-offs, seasons and expansions.

“You really want to ask yourself: ‘What happens if they need a second logo?’” Cervenak said. “What happens if this gets adapted into a board game?”

Franchises need recognizable visual standards but also need to be flexible, Cervenak said. “Style-guide fundamentals drift, logos get distorted, and over time it becomes unrecognizable to your core player. So, what we want instead is a system that behaves like a rubber band, instead of an immovable mountain.”

To demonstrate how all this works, Redway explained how his team designed a franchise’s worth of Horizon logos. Cervenak showed off Sony’s ever-evolving approach for Destiny 2.

“In both of these, we built big, connected visual systems, and we still ended up having to break our own rules,” Redway said.

Read more

At last week’s GDC, I asked the veteran game developer Don Daglow why he is so hopeful about a game industry wracked by layoffs and studio closures, an industry he acknowledges is in tough shape for many people.

Daglow, 73, has seen a lot. He developed the first interactive baseball game on a mainframe in 1971, was one of the first programmers at Intellivision, and, in the 1990s designer of the first graphical massively multiplayer online game, Neverwinter Nights. He’s still making games today.

On Thursday night, Daglow received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards and tried to turn it into a collective rally for a brighter future.

“Industries rise and fall and rise again,” he had said on stage. “I’ve been laid off. I’ve been fired. I’ve built great things with great people and then watched them be torn down. We retain our passion for games through triumph and disaster, because we know games mean something.”

He ended his speech leading the crowd in a collective chant: “Let’s build something great!”

After the speech, Daglow went backstage, where each of the night’s award winners posed for a photo and answered questions from a few reporters.

I wanted to understand where his hopefulness came from.

“I think it starts from one thing,” he said. “My parents met and fell in love during the Depression. Both of them lost their careers to the Depression, and yet they had a positive attitude out of it.”

Swiftly, he also thought of a second thing: The near-fatal collapse of the U.S. video game industry in 1983, when the home console market of Atari and Intellivision crashed, only to be reborn two years later with the introduction of the Nintendo Entertainment System.

“Going through the crash and surviving that in ‘83 and seeing the industry rebuild,” Daglow said, “If we can survive that, we can survive anything.”

The game industry crash doesn’t get discussed much these days, but amid the last few years of mass game industry layoffs and studio shutdowns, it’s relevant.

I asked Daglow to describe what it was like to experience the 1983 downturn.

“The console business completely collapsed,” he said. “It was the first generation of consoles and multi-cartridge systems. We were part of the toy industry, and all the rules of the toy industry applied. In the toy industry, if you’re a popular game and then it just starts to fade a little, then they just sell it off.”

Did he think it was over?

“I believed I was going to get the gold watch from Intellivision and be there my whole career,” he said. “So I was completely deluded and out of my mind. And, when it crashed, I thought my career was over.

“And then I was very wrong. I had to go to a little startup called Electronic Arts.”

Daglow believes he’s seen the worst, and is confident better days will follow.

Note: I spoke to some fascinating people at GDC and will be telling their stories in select editions of Game File over the next couple of weeks.

Item 2: Subnautica studio CEO gets his job back

Ted Gill, the fired CEO of Unknown Worlds (Subnautica), must be restored to that position and given full rein to release the studio’s next game, Subnautica 2, into early access when he deems fit, a judge in Delaware’s Court of Chancery ruled on Monday.

Gill, along with Unknown Worlds co-founders Charlie Cleveland and Max McGuire, sued game publisher Krafton last year for breach of contract, after the Korean giant fired the trio.

The developers maintained they’d been fired so that Krafton could avoid a performance-based payout of up to $250 million, which they hoped to come close to hitting with an early access release of Subnautica 2. The underwater survival adventure is the most-wishlisted game on Steam.

Krafton had accused the execs of being absentee and blocked the early access release. The company later accused the trio of data theft for downloading emails and files when they were fired.

Vice chancellor Lori Will’s 91-page ruling sides with the ousted execs. It details how Krafton CEO Changhan Kim felt “taken advantage” of by the earnout deal, consulted ChatGPT for advice about how to get out of it and ignored warnings that trying to end the deal would expose Krafton to a lawsuit. The result: a breach of contact that Will says will be rectified by Gill getting his old job back.

The other two executives’ roles were not restored, though the judge said Gill has the right to bring them on as advisors. The court has not yet ruled on whether Gill, Cleveland and McGuire are entitled to any financial damages.

In a statement to the press about the ruling, Krafton said it looked forward to “pushing out the newly updated version” of Subnautica 2 “as soon as possible.” The company noted it “respectfully disagree[s] with today’s ruling” and is “evaluating our options as we determine our path forward.”

The Monday decision also described the inevitable discomfort of what’s to come with Gill back working at a Krafton-owned studio. It’s the best possible scenario, Will wrote.

After Gill’s ouster, Krafton had put Steve Papoutsis, already head of Krafton-owned Striking Distance, at the helm. Papoutsis, chancellor Will wrote, “had neither played an Unknown Worlds game nor overseen the development of an early access title.” Thus, she reasoned:

Restoring as Unknown Worlds’ CEO Gill will cause tension with the parent company given the obvious bad blood between the parties. But corporate friction does not excuse a material breach of contract. Nor does it override a bargained-for specific performance clause. Krafton and Gill are sophisticated commercial actors. They can—and must—act in good faith to navigate their remaining contractual relationship.

The harm to Unknown Worlds absent specific performance is even more palpable. Unknown Worlds is being run by a part-time CEO who manages another studio and had never played Subnautica before his appointment. Key staff members have quit, and the early access release of Subnautica 2 has been put in jeopardy.

On balance, the equities heavily favor restoring Gill to stabilize the studio. Before Krafton’s intervention, Subnautica 2 was on track for its intended early access release under Gill’s leadership. Restoring his position and operational control will allow the studio to launch its highly anticipated game using the community-driven development model that made it successful.

Item 3: In brief…

👀 Jay Ong, who is still listed on LinkedIn as the head of the Disney Games Group, is suing Disney for $40 million over alleged discrimination that resulted in a lower pay bonuses, The New York Post reports.

• Per the Post, Ong claims that Disney praised his performance at the gaming division but tried to embarrass him and drive him out of the company. The outlet notes: “The 56-year-old gaming exec claims despite generating revenues of half a billion dollars his bonus was reduced to $325,000 in 2025 from $367,117 in 2024. His incentive bonus was also reduced from $770,000 to $620,000, according to the filing.”

• Neither Ong nor Disney replied to requests for comment.

🎮 Arc Raiders studio Embark is parting ways with one its chief creative officer, following allegations of sexual misconduct, though the studio also said its investigation was unable to substantiate the claims, IGN reports.

🚫 Indie studio Speculative Agency is returning funding it received from Microsoft for its upcoming game All Will Rise, in solidarity with the No Games For Genocide boycott of the tech giant’s Xbox operations, PC Gamer reports.

• The boycott was spurred last year by Microsoft’s contracts with the Israeli military and allegations its cloud tech has been used to facilitate the killing of Palestinian civilians.

• The gaming division isn’t specifically accused of wrongdoing, but is seen as a target to get the parent company to feel pressure. [Read Game File’s 2025 interview with an Xbox developer applying pressure from within]

• Last April, the developer of Tenderfoot Tactics pulled their game from Xbox in protest.

• Last September, Microsoft said it would block an Israeli military unit from using its tech for mass surveillance of Palestinians, following reporting in The Guardian.

🎬 The 1st Annual Cinematic Awards for video games were held last week and the winner for Excellence in Game Cinematics went to… Death Stranding 2. [See the full list of winners]

SAN FRANCISCO - Savvy Games, the Saudi government-funded gaming conglomerate headquartered in Riyadh, does not plan to use its newfound shares in some of the world’s biggest game companies to push for major changes in those publishers, Savvy chief Brian Ward said in a talk at GDC.

Earlier this year, Savvy assumed control of some $12 billion worth of stock in Nintendo, Take Two, Square Enix, and others major firms, per Bloomberg and Reuters reports of public filings.

Over the last few years, those stock purchases had initially been made directly by the Saudi kingdom’s Public Investment Fund, which recently transferred them to Savvy.

The stakes range from 5-10% of the companies, making Savvy one of the biggest shareholders of each.

“It gives us probably a little bit better opportunity to collaborate with those companies,” Ward said, but denied that Savvy was going to pressure the gaming giants to change their strategies.

“We’re not in any hurry to to make any changes. We haven't proposed anything. We don’t have anything on the books.”

Ward instead described the shares as an investment that gives Savvy added liquidity to help finance potential future mergers and acquisitions. Though he said Savvy didn’t “have a big target in mind at the moment.” (Savvy is already rumored to be interested in ByteDance’s Moonton mobile game studio, but Ward wouldn’t comment on that at GDC).

Savvy has previously invested in Swedish gaming conglomerate The Embracer Group, where Ward now is a member of its board of directors.

Since 2022, Savvy has had a mandate from the kingdom to invest $38 billion in gaming. It has spend much of it has on the purchase of esports organizations and the mobile gaming companies Scopely (Monopoly Go) and Niantic (Pokémon Go). I interviewed Ward in 2022 about the Savvy project and the controversies around its Saudi backing.

Ward said he did not know if Savvy would be involved in Electronic Arts, should the company’s $55 billion plan to go private, largely funded by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, clears regulatory hurdles.

Ward’s talk was featured in GDC’s new Luminaries sessions, held at a theater across the street from the big halls packed with thousands of GDC showgoers. In front of a small gathering of a few dozen people, Ward was interviewed on stage by Bloomberg’s tech executive editor Tom Giles. Giles began the session by acknowledging that many people on Ward’s team are in a region that is now the location of an “increasingly global conflict.” He said he hoped the Savvy team was faring okay.

“I was in Riyadh last week, where we’re based, for several days after the initial bombings in Iran, and Riyadh was fine,” Ward said.

He added: “Hopefully it de-escalates in the areas that have been more adversely affected.”

In a separate interview with a Bloomberg reporter that was published yesterday, Ward said: “It’s obviously not helpful for the region to have this escalation and it will change probably or cool the perception of it as being a stable and quiet place where people want to go.”

Saudi Arabia’s multi-billon dollar push into gaming has included extravagant live events in Riyadh, including the now-annual Esports World Cup, which is slated to kick off on July 6.

Item 2: In brief…

🧬 Microsoft plans to deliver early development kits for its next console, codenamed Helix, starting in 2027, the company announced at GDC yesterday.

• Xbox’s head of next gen, Jason Ronald, also teased that “we’re committed to keeping games from four generations of Xbox playable for years to come. As part of our 25th anniversary later this year, we’ll be rolling out new ways to play some of the most iconic games from our past.”

Epic Games has increased the price of V-Bucks, the virtual money used in Fortnite, with $9 getting you 800 V-Bucks, when it previously would have converted to 1,000.

• Epic said: "The cost of running Fortnite has gone up a lot and we’re raising prices to help pay the bills.”

👀 Nintendo’s lawsuit against the U.S. government over the Trump administration’s tariffs has been automatically stayed, or paused, according to an update to the case issued on Tuesday.

• Nintendo is one of hundreds of companies that sued the U.S. in the Court of International Trade. Last December, a judge on the CIT ordered that all such cases would be automatically stayed pending the results of a tariff case that had made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court then ruled in February that the tariffs were illegal.

• Two days before Nintendo’s suit was filed, a judge in the trade court ruled that companies impacted by tariffs should receive refunds. Those refunds could be issued starting in April, but many companies have yet to say if they’ll pass the money on to consumers, Popular Info notes. (A Nintendo rep did not directly say whether the company planned to pass refunds along to its customers, when asked about it by Game File last week.)

🎮 Another veteran Nintendo developer, this time WarioWare series lead creator Goro Abe, has left the company, continuing a wave of Nintendo retirements, VGC reports.

• Abe had been making games for Nintendo since 2001’s Wario Land 4 and says he plans to now teach at a university and make smaller games.

🚫 Actors union SAG-AFTRA has issued a “do not work” notice against Capcom’s upcoming Mega Man: Dual Override game, after previous Mega Man voice actor Ben Diskin said Capcom had asked him to return to the role but without a union contract.

🗽 Valve has responded to the state of New York’s lawsuit alleging that the company’s video game loot boxes violate gambling laws, in a letter posted to Steam addressed to gamers in the state.

• The Steam and Counter-Strike maker likens its in-game loot boxes to physical goods that are sold without first revealing their contents: “baseball cards, Pokemon, Magic the Gathering, and Labubu.”

• Valve characterizes itself as a responsible actor against illegal gambling: “To date we've locked over one million Steam accounts that were being misused by third parties in connection with gambling, fraud, and theft.”

• The company says it has cooperated with New York’s investigation since 2023 and says that some of the state’s suggested remedies—including making digital good non-transferable and gathering more personal information from customers—are unacceptable.

🤔 European video game rating agency PEGI will require new games with loot boxes, likely including EA’s popular FC football/soccer series, to be rated for players 16 and up, The Verge reports.

😮 A new five-hour video interview with Overwatch co-creator Jeff Kaplan, includes his horror story about quitting Blizzard after allegedly being given unreasonable performance goals, and a tease for a new game he’s working on, a survival-shooter multiplayer western called The Legend of California.

🏆 Upcoming, tile-matching, kingdom-building, comedic narrative game Titanium Court won the grand prize at this year’s Independent Games Festival Awards on Wednesday evening. Kotaku has the full list of winners.

SAN FRANCISCO - Where does a Nintendo video game come from? At GDC today, in front of several hundred game developers and other attendees in the Moscone Center, a pair of Nintendo developers gave a sort of game design origin story for last July’s critically acclaimed Switch 2 game Donkey Kong Bananza.

One stand-out moment: When Nintendo producer Kenta Motokura explained the influence of Super Mario Bros.’ iconic first underground level, world 1-2, on him when he was a kid.

Yes, Nintendo has been making classic games long enough that its most senior developers are now drawing inspiration from Nintendo games they played as kids.

Back while Motokura and his team were making the 2017 Switch game Super Mario Odyssey, he said, they were considering the implementation of a destroyable rock. The rock would crack when hit, the virtual object changing its look bit by bit as Mario smashed it with a hammer.

Motokura wasn’t sure this was good enough. He said he had recalled the iconic first underground level of Super Mario Bros., world 1-2 (pictured above)

“I’ve loved this scene since I was a kid,” he said in Japanese which was translated into English. “You can interact with almost everything on the screen, and, depending on how you go about that, there are multiple ways to proceed.”

(Players of that level know that you can smash squares of blue bricks, even crack the ceiling to help find a game shortcut.)

Mario Odyssey’s engineers, urged to come up with a more impressive approach to destruction, came up with a new way for that crackable rock to work. In the final version of Odyssey, the player can throw a hammer at a specific chunk of yellow rock and chip away at it. Cube-shaped sub-sections are destroyed bit by bit.

This approach excited Motokura.

It suggested a game design where, instead of the player character interacting with the specific spot, or point of a virtual object they could then interact with a surface, impacting multiple points.

And that helped get things rolling to make the Switch 2’s Donkey Kong Bananza.

Bananza was developed by a team at Nintendo that previously specialized on 3D Super Mario games. The new game is distinct in that it allows player protagonist Donkey Kong to rip apart the terrain of massive 3D worlds: punching through walls, digging into the ground, tearing boulders out of hills and throwing them at enemies.

Nintendo designers pack GDC conference rooms each year, often describing how their game design ideas converge with their technological engineering to enable ground-breaking games.

In this case, they were explaining how they made a game literally about breaking ground.

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SAN FRANCISCO - You can’t take a step near the Moscone Center in San Francisco this week without running into a game developer. They’re here through Friday for the GDC Festival of Gaming (previously known as the Game Developers Conference).

On line for lunch, I hear people talking about jobs at Riot Games.

Crossing the street, I spot PlayStation architect Mark Cerny.

Near the Yerba Buena park, a developer I’ve known for years flags me down and gives me an update about his career. He took some consulting jobs in recent years that paid in crypto.

On Monday, after a panel I was on about The Rise of Independent Games Journalism, there’s a developer who swings by to say hello. We spend some time talking about a poetry contest he nearly won.

On Tuesday, while I’m typing these words at a table on the second floor of Moscone West, a guy who goes by Skitch eyeballs my official GDC name tag and double-checks that I did indeed previously work at Kotaku. I did, but why’s he asking? Skitch tells me he was the winner of a contest we ran on Kotaku. It was tied to the Nintendo game WarioWare DIY, which let players make their own games. Skitch had created a role-playing game in DIY. This contest was held 16 years ago. Grand prize had included a $1,000 shopping spree at the Nintendo store in New York City (My memory about the contest is hazy, but it must have been Nintendo-sponsored). Skitch tells me he spent the money on a second Wii and a stack of games.

At the same table, coming and going, are people from Bungie, ZeniMax, Tencent, and more.

Across two days into GDCFoG (so far), I found the densest concentration of game developers at 12:45pm PT on Monday, packed into Moscone West room 2020. GDC is always full of talks, some better-attended than others. This one is standing room only, with at least 100 people turned away. The topic: The Future of Playable Worlds With Google DeepMind, presented by Google

I squeeze into the room late, only because other people leave.

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“Are we the first kids that you’ve interviewed?”

Last Monday, my nine-year old daughter was asking that question as she and her twin brother spoke via video conference to Ramone Russell, the long-time director of product communications for Sony PlayStation’s baseball series MLB The Show.

Technically she and her brother were the ones doing the interviewing. Russell was being a good sport and answering them. He had agreed to chat with my kids about next week’s new multi-console release MLB The Show 26.

“Yes, y’all are the first,” Russell said. “And I’ve been working here a very long time,”

I’d recently asked PlayStation PR if they’d be up for a kid-driven interview about their new baseball game. My baseball-obsessed son loves MLB The Show and, I figured, would have better questions about the game than I would.

PR said yes, and my son spent a chunk of the preceding week getting pretty excited. A few days prior to the interview, he dictated some questions for me to print. On the day of the interview, he was locked in—totally fine skipping his after-school cupcake-making class so that he could talk to one of the makers of his favorite sports video game (Sorry, Drag x Drive, you’re second).

At first, his sister wasn’t as into the planned interview. She’s not an MLB The Show player. I promised her I’d try to book an interview for a game she’s into, too.

But they’re twins, and I know how this one would actually go. When I dropped them off last Monday for another daily helping of third grade, she clarified that she would be fine skipping her after-school activities as well. She would have questions for the interview, though she didn’t yet know what they would be.

By interview time on Monday afternoon, my kids1 were home, munching on fruit strips. My daughter declared that she’d like to ask half the questions on our printed list. Plus, she had an extra question of her own that I wrote at the bottom of her sheet.

Ramone Russell was cheerful when we all connected via video conference for the interview. Russell was calling from his office, sitting in front of shelves of baseball paraphernalia. He had framed copies of past editions of MLB The Show. He had trophies. Even some official The Show sneakers.

He asked them both how much MLB The Show they’ve played. My son replied: “One hundred and fifty hours.”

“Oh wow,” he said. “Thank you so much for playing our game so much.” He said he hoped it was interspersed with “lots of homework and reading as well.”

Russell asked my daughter how much she played. “Zero!” she replied.

He said he was pleased that at least half of his interview panel was into the game.

“How do you guys pick the cover athlete?” my son asked, when we got past the small talk and into the interview proper. “Do you just pick, like an MVP?”

“Yeah, that's kind of how it works,” Russell said. “So, you know, every year of baseball is different, right? Like, every year there's a new story. And so, what we try to do is, we always try to focus on, ‘Okay, who has one of the most interesting stories of last year?’ And if they win a bunch of awards, that's great. It's an added bonus, but it can't just be who wins all the awards, right? There's some other things that go into it. So, we always look at who's a good ambassador to help grow the game of baseball.”

He explained that the people making The Show want to be sure the series’ cover stars, like MLB The Show 26’s New York Yankee Aaron Judge, are “human beings that have a good track record of helping out.

Russell did not speak to my kids about marketability, which I appreciated. He kept it wholesome. Frankly, he was going to have a hard enough time convincing my Mets-loving/suffering son that a Yankee should even be on the cover this year.

“We look at the charities that they do. We look at the things that they care about off the field, and all those things get weighed and then a bunch of us get in the road. And we have what we call professional arguments to decide who’s going to be on the cover.”

I thought my son was about to lobby for one of his favorite New York Mets, maybe Juan Soto, now that his old favorite, Pete Alonso, recently became a Baltimore Oriole.

“I would’ve kind of argued for Cal Raleigh,” my son said, referring to the Seattle Mariners’ all-star catcher.

“He still has a shot,” Russell said. Maybe in a future MLB The Show game.

My daughter wanted to ask the next question. We were keeping it even, remember:

She asked: “Did you change any of the modes for the new game?”

“We changed all of the modes for the game,” Russell said.

“Oh!” my son replied. I think that impressed him.

Russell wanted to elaborate. “Do y’all have a favorite cartoon or movie or film that you like?” he asked.

My daughter was stumbling on an answer. I helped her out. She likes to watch Titanic, I said.

“So, we have to make, like Titanic 2 and Titanic 3 and Titanic 4, every single year,” Russell said. “What we want to do is make sure that your brother has a fantastic time playing the game, and he wants his dad to purchase it again next year. So, to answer your question: We work on every single mode to add things to those modes to hopefully entice our fans to be like, ‘Mom and dad, you have to buy me MLB The Show 26 because they added all these features that I care about that I want!’”

“What modes did you change the biggest, and how did you change them?” my son asked.

Road to the Show got the most changes, Russell said, “because it’s our most-played mode.” This mode lets players create their own player and steer their career into the Major Leagues and, ideally, to the World Series.

“This year, we're adding more colleges, and we're trying to focus on how can we showcase you getting into Cooperstown and officially getting inducted into the Hall of Fame,” Russell said. “You'll get these objectives—kind of like schoolwork—where you'll say, ‘Hey, I need to do X, Y, and Z over the course of my career, and it increases my chance to get into the Hall of Fame.’”

My son wanted to know if they added any new modes to The Show 26.

No new modes, Russell said, but the new game does let you play in the virtual version of the World Baseball Classic, the international tournament that’s happening right now in the real world.

My son had a technical question about how often MLB The Show’s rosters are updated. He explained that MLB The Show 25 still had his longtime favorite, Pete Alonso, on the Mets this past fall, even after Alonso signed with the Baltimore Orioles.

Russell explained that the off-season player movements would be reflected in this year’s game.

“It’s my turn,” my daughter said. She looked over the list of questions. I reminded her that we’d written down a special one that she thought up earlier in the day.

“Can you change the color of the ball?” she asked.

Russell laughed.

“No, unfortunately, we can’t,” he said. “That's a Major League Baseball rule, because, if we change the color of the ball, you may give the batters an advantage and the pitchers a disadvantage.”

Russell picked up a baseball to show my daughter what he meant. He explained how the stitching has to be a certain way, how changes to the ball could make things unfair. It was a good answer and I thought we were about to move on.

Nope.

“In the Home Run Derby in real life, they usually have, during the bonus time, pink and black balls,” my son said. (I did not know this! But he was right about the pink balls.) “Do you guys have those in the game?”

He’d thrown Russell a curve.

“I don't think we do yet,” Russell said, “Because for us to change the way that the color of the ball looks in game, it's a lot of work, just for the Home Run Derby.”

I asked Russell if that’s the first time he was asked about the color of the ball. He confirmed it was. I cheered my daughter on. So proud!

New question, as my son got increasingly hardcore with his queries: “How long will it take to get to 99 overall in the Road to the Show?”

“How long did it take you last year, do you remember?” Russell asked.

“I didn't get all the way through,” my son replied. “I got into the 80s but not to the 90s.”

(For non-Show readers, you increase your player’s stats throughout their fictional MLB career.)

“It should be a little bit faster this year because we're allowing you to set more goals and more achievements,” Russell said. “As you hit those, you'll get more points to spend on your player to get to 99 faster, so a little faster than last year.”

“There’s one question that ties to it,” my son said. He was asking a follow-up!

He started asking about how the computer pitches to you when you’re playing Road to the Show on beginner mode. In MLB The Show 25, the pitches are thrown down the middle of the plate, making them pretty easy to hit. He was wondering if the virtual pitcher could sometimes aim for the corner of the strike zone, maybe a little outside.

“You want beginner mode to be harder?” Russell asked.

“Yeah, just a little bit,” my son replied.

Russell suggested he try the game’s dynamic difficulty mode, which would adjust to his skill level. “It'll start throwing things down the middle, but as your batting average gets higher and as you get better, it'll start throwing more in the corner.”

My daughter’s turn, asking the lone question I wrote for them: “Do you play baseball, or do the developers who make MLB The Show play baseball?”

“I personally did not, but I would say, at least 10 or 15 of the other developers… still play baseball on weekends,” he said.

My son was up: He noted that you can “sim” games during the virtual baseball season that you play through in The Show. That means the computer can play portions of games or entire games for you. But, he said, the CPU in MLB The Show 25 didn’t always play as well as he did. "Could they make the CPU keep track of how you play?” he asked. “When I’ve been playing in Road to the Show, I've seen that the lead kind of gets blown a lot on me. So if we we’re winning, like, five to three, then when I'm [back] up to bat, it's like seven to five or eight to five.”

“I'm so happy you asked that question,” Russell said, “Because, this year, we have a new feature that does just that.” The CPU is smarter and, when it is asked to take over, he said, it will play more like the human being who was otherwise in control of that player and team.

Russell said this was something they’d received a lot of feedback about. The developers run surveys and try to listen to players, he said. “We track all of this feedback, and, then if we're really good at our jobs, we're able to create new features that help fix issues or improve the game.”

“One more question,” my son said. “How do you decide the player’s stats?” He was talking about the game’s ratings for all of its real-life MLB players.

“We look at a three year average,” Russell said. “We looked at three total years, because you know baseball is a really hard sport, right? You can have one good year and then the next year have a bad year. And so, to make sure we don’t overrate or underrate players, we look in the past three years and we averaged them out. That’s where the player ratings start out at the beginning of the year. But, as the year keeps going on and players keep playing, we then focus more on what people are doing right now.”

I asked my son if he thought the players in MLB The Show 25 had the right stats.

He brought up Pete Alonso, to my total lack of surprise. “I just thought that he should not be kind of in the 80s,” he said. “I thought maybe 90, like maybe 90-91?”

“You wanted more power?” Russell asked? “More contact?” We were talking a couple of days before The Show 26’s player ratings would be revealed. For this year’s game, Alonso is rated 85.

At this point, my daughter was starting to get distracted. Lots of doodling and fidgeting. Totally understandable. She's not sweating the player ratings in the game.

My son wanted to know if there were any new difficulty levels in this year’s game.

No, Russell said, but he was excited about a new option for batting controls called Big Zone Hitting. He asked my son which hitting controls he used.

“I've been using the zone thing where you move the other stick to, like match the ball,” he said.

“Is that hard or have you figured it out?” Russell asked.

“It’s easy for me,” my son replied.

“It's easy for you. Oh my god, that's incredible!” Russell said. “That's like the hardest way to play. You found it easy. Good for you.” He and my son then chatted about the new Big Zone Hitting controls. At this point I had no idea what they were talking about, but Russell and my kid seemed to get it, so all good.

My son then had a question about the MLB team standings that are shown when you play a quick one-off game of baseball in The Show. On any given day, you can play a virtual game between two teams, but could the developers make it so that the teams are in the same place in their division in the game as their real life counterparts are at that point in the season? “If you're playing quick mode and you jump into the game, will it have the actual standings [from] before that game?” he asked.

“Oh, the actual standings from real life,” Russell said. “No, it'll be like it was last year.”

“I don’t even understand that one,” I said.

Didn’t matter, because Russell seemed to. He was writing it down. “That's actually a good idea,” he said. “That's a really good idea!”

“Hey, he's taking a note!” I exclaimed to my son. “Maybe you'll have an influence on MLB The Show 27.” I paused. “We assume they're making one,” I told the kids, “but they can't say if they're making it.”

“They are!” my daughter said.

We moved on…

“Does it take a long time to make the game?” my son asked.

“Oh yeah, it's a lot of hard work,” Russell said. “It takes us every single second that we have throughout the development cycle to make the game. Yes, 100%, it's lot of work.

“How many people make the game?” my daughter asked.

“I can’t give out the total number, but it’s a lot,” Russell said.

I noted that it was probably more than 100 people.

“Oh yeah, it's definitely more than a hundred. You can say that.”

I let my kids know that we were out of time. I commended them for asking good questions and getting good answers. Did Russell have any questions for them?

“How was I at answering your questions?” he asked.

My son said Russell “did a good job.”

“On a scale of one to ten, how good was he at answering questions?” I asked, egging them on.

“Hmm,” my daughter pondered. “A seven!”

My son laughed, then said, “Nine point nine!”

Item 2: In brief…

🪠 Nintendo of America is suing the United States government in the Court of International Trade over Donald Trump’s 2025 tariffs, joining scores of other companies that have filed lawsuits since the Supreme Court ruled the levies illegal on February 22. Aftermath had the scoop.

• “Plaintiff has been directly harmed by Defendants’ unlawful actions,” Nintendo says in its complaint, which names U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, recently-demoted Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick among its defendants.

• Nintendo increased prices of the original Switch as well as Switch 2 accessories following the April 2025 implementation of higher tariffs on goods from China and Vietnam, where much of Nintendo’s physical products are manufactured.

• It is now seeking refunds, with interest, or other monetary damages, via the suit.

• Other companies that have sued over the tariffs include FedEx, Costco and Revlon. The AP reported in late February that more than 1,000 firms have sued, many prior to the Supreme Court’s ruling.

• In February, FedEx said it would pass on any refunds to consumers. I asked a rep for Nintendo of America about the lawsuit and if they planned to also refund consumers, should they win relief. Their reply: “We can confirm that we filed a request. We have nothing else to share on this topic.”

🧬 Project Helix is the codename for Microsoft’s next generation console, new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced on Twitter/X on Thursday.

• “Project Helix will lead in performance and play your Xbox and PC games,” she wrote.

• The cross-compatibility news was consistent with other Microsoft moves that blur the line between Xbox gaming and PC gaming: 1) the pledge from Xbox’s prior leadership pledge last year to “ensure that Windows is the number one platform for gaming” and 2) the late-2025 release of an Xbox-branded handheld that plays PC games via the Steam and Xbox PC marketplaces.

• Microsoft’s VP of its next gen Xbox, Jason Ronald, is giving a talk at GDC this coming week, titled “Building for the Future With Xbox” (Description: “Join us for a conversation about the vision shaping the future of Xbox and how we’re building a more flexible, connected future for game creators and players everywhere.”)

⚔️ Slay the Spire II is Steam’s latest indie-developed smash hit. Mega Crit Games’ turn-based card-combat sequel drew over 500,000 concurrent players on Saturday, during its first weekend of early access release.

Item 3: The week ahead

Monday, March 9

• The GDC Festival of Gaming (formerly the Game Developers Conference) kicks off in San Francisco, offering a week of in-person talks about game development (and one panel about independent games journalism, featuring a reporter you might recognize).

Thursday, March 12

• Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake (PC, console) and John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando (PC, PlayStation, Xbox) are released.

Friday, March 13

• Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection (PC, console) is released.

From time to time, I find myself asking the same question to people who currently or used to work for the video game publisher Ubisoft: Why does a company that was once so prolific, so capable of releasing one massive game after another, year after year, rarely release games anymore?

What happened to the Ubisoft of annual Assassin’s Creeds, that recreated the American Revolution one year and the golden age of piracy the next? Where is the company that could turn out a big, fun Far Cry shooter a couple of times a decade and, in between, send the series to the ice age?

A company that, perhaps not wisely, once released two substantial Assassin’s Creed games on one day? That in 2020 tried to sell three big open-world adventures in the span of six weeks?

They used to make a lot of games and plenty of them impressed a lot of players.

By 2020, some fans and critics tired of Ubisoft’s output, finding its open worlds formulaic. But even in its most assembly-line era, Ubisoft and its thousands of game makers were capable of innovation, experimentation, and reinvention. Under the same CEO they have now, they would dabble in VR, quickly jump onto new platforms, sometimes produce indie-style games, and somehow find time to partner with Nintendo to sort of make a new Star Fox.

Ubisoft had creativity and spark, it demonstrated an abundance of artistry and productivity.

Then the last half decade happened. Among the lowlights:

• The culmination of a decade-long dev cycle for the pirate game Skull & Bones, released in 2024 to middling reviews.

• A Prince of Persia Sands of Time remake announced in 2020 (“set for release on January 21, 2021”), that shifted from one studio to another, and was cancelled this year.

• A battle royale that lasted less than two years.

• A Call of Duty multiplayer competitor that Ubisoft wrote off in seven months.

• A Division game announced in 2021, then cancelled.

• A Ghost Recon game announced in 2021, then cancelled.

• A Far Cry back in 2021, and zero since.

• A Splinter Cell remake announced that same year and not seen again.

• A sprawling Star Wars saga that I liked more than most, released in August 2024 with obvious flaws that needed quick post-release patches and that triggered a corporate mea culpa and a major delay to another game.

  • Basically a replay the embarrassment of October 2019, when Ubisoft released a sprawling, messy game that triggered corporate mea culpas and major delays to other games.

• A big game that had a teaser trailer in 2008 and is somehow still in development.

(Amid all of that lack of productivity, to be fair, a smaller Prince of Persia game was one of 2024’s most acclaimed releases.)

Today, it’s been nearly a year since Ubisoft released a big new PC or console game. The release date of the next one is unknown. The company’s public calendar for new PC/console games is barren.

What in the world has happened to Ubisoft?

I recently got one hell of an answer.

It comes from a trusted Ubisoft veteran whose observations squared with much of what I’ve heard from other sources over the last year, though never stitched together in quite as complete a manner. I found their answer thoughtful and complex, with the kind of nuance that I believe will help people consider the challenges afflicting Ubisoft and, perhaps, other big game studio conglomerates.

Their analysis requires some set-up, but here’s a bit of it to give you a sense:

“For years now, I think Ubisoft has repeatedly failed to create the conditions for an excellent game to be made.

“Creating a game is a hard task, even when things are going smoothly. Which means it’s very easy to disrupt the making of a game.”

As you’ll see below, they went into a lot of detail, but not in the way you might expect. They’re not authorized to speak about Ubisoft’s projects and, with one exception, they don’t name any games, nor any names.

But they assured me that it’s all based in reality. As they said at one point: “This scenario more or less happened and is still happening at Ubisoft today.” Privately, they identified some Ubisoft projects their analysis alludes to.

Their take describes the breakdown of a complex, global network of studios, where struggles on one project compelled managerial decisions about another, that had effects on a third. They describe pressure to release games for financial quarters and they lament the consequences of a project skidding through multiple short delays, instead of benefitting from one longer development extension.

Before I present their analysis—which I imagine will cause many people at Ubisoft (and elsewhere) to nod with recognition—I want to provide more context for my question and for the dramatic state Ubisoft is currently in.

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I could tell you about some exciting upcoming video games.

Or I could tell you about a depressing recent assessment of the state of the video game industry.

For a reporter on the gaming beat these days, these are common options. How about I try to do both?

Let’s cover the bad news first.

Industry expert Matthew Ball has been in the press a lot lately, after he published an “early access” version of his annual state of video gaming report. Look, those EA developers long ago pondered if a video game could make a person cry, and while I don’t know if that’s been achieved, I have no doubt that Ball’s report on the game industry can bring some tears.

Here’s one of the news headlines that came out of Ball’s report :

Video games are losing the “attention war” to gambling, porn, and crypto, according to industry report

Here’s a bleak sub-hed from another:

The industry is investing less in new game development than they have in recorded history

Across the 160 or so slides that comprise the report, you can see some rough stuff. Ball’s just the messenger here, mind you.

For example, here’s a triple-chart showing the declining percentage of people in the United States who play video games:

Here’s a chart showing how just 10 games in a given year account for half the playing time on PlayStation, Xbox and PC, year after year.

Here’s one about how gaming is just getting more expensive for players as prices go up on subscriptions, microtransactions, etc.

The running theme is that the traditional games industry, with its established publishers and developers and regional markets, its consoles and phones and PCs, is in many ways simply tapped out and everyone’s trying to squeeze more out of a player base that isn’t growing—or at least isn’t growing in most of the parts of the world where gaming’s biggest business was done.

A couple of weeks ago, Ball and I exchanged some messages about his report. Last week, he contacted me to share that he added a slide. He felt like the new one, slide 31, showed how even some recent good news about the game industry might be misleading.

Take a look. This one took me a minute to absorb.

On the left, you’ll see actual games industry revenue growth in 2025 (yes, it went up), but then Ball subtracts growth from a few sectors to see what’s left.

“The core thesis of that section is that headline growth rates cover up what has really been a shrinking revenue pool for most developers and publishers over the last six years,” Ball told me today, when I asked him about this slide.

“I had a late realization (thanks, Early Access!) that the best way to show this was not 2019 to 2025, or pre- versus post-pandemic, but just to isolate 2025.

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Call of Duty publisher Activision has blinked in a trademark dispute with Major League Baseball, after the sports league objected to the game-maker using “World Series” in conjunction with a CoD esports tournament that’s been running since 2021.

On Monday, the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball (aka the leadership team that runs MLB) officially filed a notice with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to oppose Activision’s long-running attempt to trademark the term “World Series of Warzone.”

That same day, Activision gave up, filing an express notice to the USPTO that it would abandon the trademark.

The actions by both organizations have not been previously reported.

The “World Series of Warzone” is the name of Activision’s premiere esports tournament for its free-to-play battle royale Call of Duty: Warzone. The company has run World Series of Warzone events since 2021. The most recent iteration offered a prize pool of $1 million and had its global finals last October.

Trademark applications can be disputed publicly within a specific timeframe. For “World Series of Warzone,” that window opened in the summer of 2025. Last September, the MLB commissioner’s office signaled to the USPTO that they might oppose Activision’s trademark. They formally did so on Monday.

The baseball organization said in its filing this week that World Series of Warzone is “likely to be confused” with their own trademarks to terms such as World Series, College World Series, and World Series 2000.

The commissioner’s office noted the longevity of its own “World Series” trademarks as well as the famous status of “World Series,” which has been in “use for well over a century to identify the iconic and most highly anticipated baseball events in the world.”

The commissioner’s office didn’t just object to the World Series part of World Series of Warzone. Their filing also complains about the “zone” part:

The word “zone” in Applicant’s Mark is frequently used to refer to and identify designated areas, sections or spaces associated with Opposer’s sporting events, and a strike “zone” is the area over home plate where a pitch must pass to be called a strike.

(Read the full filing here.)

This week’s abandonment filing from Activision suggests the Microsoft-owned company may not attempt to use the “World Series” labeling for future Warzone tournaments.

Call of Duty’s next esports tournament is labeled the Resurgence Series and kicked off earlier this month. It involves competition in Resurgence, a mode within CoD: Warzone.

Reps for the MLB office did not reply to a request for comment, nor did Activision comment despite multiple requests from Game File.

Item 2: Surprise GTA sales update

A trademark complaint (yes, another one!) filed earlier this month by Grand Theft Auto publisher Take Two Interactive offers a new sales figure for an old GTA.

This one emerges from, of all things, Take Two’s efforts to block a company called DT Global Investment Holdings from trademarking the term “Vice City Subs” for a sandwich and/or restaurant business.

In a filing attesting to its own claims to the term “Vice City,” Take Two lawyers explain the history and relevance of the term in Rockstar’s successful GTA series.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories, the gaming giant’s lawyers write, “has sold over seven million copies worldwide” since its 2006 release.

Take Two had previously pegged Vice City Stories’ sales at 4.5 million copies, back in 2008.

(Read the full filing here.)

This might be the only “Vice City”-related gaming news of 2026 that’s not about this year’s hotly anticipated GTA VI, which is also set in and around developer Rockstar Games’ fictional version of Miami.

It nonetheless appears to be news. And, no, the lawyers did not mention GTA VI at all.

Back in 2008, Take Two also had announced that 2002’s Grand Theft Auto Vice City had sold 17.5 million copies. Take Two’s lawyers used that same 17.5 million figure in this month’s Vice City Subs trademark complaint.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories was a spin-off open-world crime game originally released for Sony’s PlayStation Portable.

Weird fact: GTA:VCS was the first game in the series to feature someone playing themselves. Specifically, musician Phil Collins plays a supporting role, and there’s even a mission set during a concert performance of “In The Air Tonight.” (In 2006, I interviewed Collins about this for MTV News, but, sadly, I can’t find a copy online.)

Item 3: In brief…

🍎 New York State is suing Valve, alleging that lootboxes in the Steam operator’s most popular first-party games (such as Counter-Strike 2) constitute illegal gambling.

• The state faces an “uphill battle,” according to legal experts interviewed by Ars Technica. One of the potentially tricky arguments: establishing whether the outcome of opening a lootbox matches the range of experiences when gambling—in that there are outcomes that provide financial benefit and those that do not.

• Another issue: Whether Valve can be liable if it’s not directly letting people turn the digital contents obtained from the lootboxes into money.

🚫 Metacritic is banning AI-written game reviews after one for Resident Evil: Requiem appeared to slip through, Kotaku reports.

• Read the review in question for yourself.

• Noted Kotaku: “The byline appears to have no prior online history and the profile image url is titled ‘ChatGPT-Image-Oct-20-2025-11_57_34-AM-300×300.png.’”

👀 Amazon continues to pull back from its video game efforts, dropping plans to publish a racing game from Maverick, a start-up helmed by the former creative director of Forza Horizon. The Game Business had the scoop. (Maverick said it is in “active dialogue with partners” for new backing.)

• Amazon has also announced the cancellation of battle royale King of Meat, less than six months since its release, after it failed to attract many players.

• This follows major layoffs in Amazon’s gaming division last year, the end of new content development for its once-thriving New World massively multiplayer online game, the departure of the executive in charge of Amazon Game Studios and the sale of the free-to-play strategy game March of Giants to Ubisoft.

• Amazon is still the publisher of record for two upcoming Tomb Raider games. (Amazon is also producing an upcoming live-action Tomb Raider TV show.)

🟥 Netflix has dropped its bid for Warner Bros. Discovery’s film and streaming divisions, which would have included its gaming studios (Rocksteady, TT Games, Netherrealm, Avalanche).

• Instead, Paramount/Skydance is the likely new owner, should its latest bid clear regulatory hurdles.

🇻🇳 Vietnam plans to train 5,000 developers to make video games about the country’s history, VN Express International reports.

⚡️ The Pokémon Company celebrated the franchise’s 30th anniversary today with the tease of a major new pair of Pokémon games, Pokémon Wind and Pokémon Waves that appear to constitute the 10th major generation of the mainline games in the franchise.

• The games are slated for release on Switch 2 in 2027 and will likely be some of the biggest games of next year. (Info about Pokémon games called Wind and Waves leaked in 2024. Polygon provides the context.)

• Also announced: an April release window for the Switch version of the fighting game Pokémon Champions, with a mobile release to follow; and a $70 mini Game Boy replica that’s actually a music player—it ships with 45 cartridges that each play a classic Pokémon song.

This week’s most unusual headline: “Valve’s former economist, now a member of parliament in Greece, is being put on trial for promoting drug use because he admitted to taking ecstasy 36 years ago” [PC Gamer]

Item 4: The week ahead

Monday, March 2

• World Of Warcraft: Midnight (PC) is released.

Tuesday, March 3

• Open-world horse messenger game The Legend of Khiimori (PC) is released into early access.

• Esoteric Ebb (PC) is released.

Thursday, March 5

• Pokémon Pokopia (Switch 2), Marathon (PC, consoles), and Planet of Lana II (PC, consoles) are released.

• Slay the Spire 2 (PC) is released into early access.

Resident Evil Requiem, out on Friday for PC and consoles, is an excellent Resident Evil game about Resident Evil games.

It’s the kind of game deep into the existence of a franchise where someone might try to put a newcomer at ease about the need to play anything that’s come before.

Pay no attention, they might say, to it being the ninth “numbered” RE (there’s sort of a 9 in that “Re9uiem”)... or that it’s the 11th, if your counting system includes the numbers “zero” and “Code Veronica.”

Should Resident Evil Requiem sell at least a million copies (it will), it’ll be the 36th Resident Evil release since 1996 to do so.

This new Resident Evil starts comprehensibly enough to be a standalone adventure. We are introduced to Grace Ashcroft, the United States’ most-trembling FBI agent, who will soon be skulking through the darkened hallways of a hotel (inexplicably without any back-up). Next, even scarier, Grace is kidnapped and wakes up in the unnervingly trashed Rhodes Hill Chronic Care medical facility. This place is an architectural conundrum of locked doors, shuffling zombies and barely enough bullets. Grace tries, shivering with fear, to survive. This is all played out, by default, from a first-person perspective to intensify the feeling that something bad might always be creeping up from behind.

That alone qualifies Requiem as an impeccably paced horror game that invites players to carefully search hallways and solve puzzles, avoiding zombies just enough to empower a curious Grace into an effective, if still-terrified, killer of regular zombies, one burly butcher zombie, and some singing/screaming zombies, too.

That said, Resident Evil Requiem is a far poorer game if it’s the only Resident Evil you’ve played. I say this as a previously casual Resident Evil player whose REsume as of a week ago was as follows:

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Before Friday, many of the people I speak to who have worked at Xbox didn’t know Asha Sharma. She is the new CEO of Microsoft’s gaming division and is now the business’ most important enigma.

Her world had not intersected with most of team Xbox—or so they thought; more on that in a moment—until the news hit on Friday: longtime Microsoft gaming chief Phil Spencer was stepping down (not shocking) and would not be replaced by the heir apparent, Xbox president Sarah Bond (shocking).

Most recently, Sharma was the president of CoreAI - Product at Microsoft and an evangelist for Microsoft’s AI work, promoting the part of the business that’s been the clear priority for the company’s CEO.

Before her recent Microsoft run, from 2021-2024, Sharma was the chief operating officer at online grocery delivery company Instacart, helping lead it through its transformation into a publicly traded company.

And before that: She worked the start-up Porch, an insurance and software services company for homeowners, then at Facebook/Meta where she was head of product across Messenger and Instagram Direct.

Looking for gaming connections in Sharma’s background, one might take note of her affinity for Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin’s award-winning 2022 novel about two video game designers. She told an AI-focused interviewer last summer she’s read it multiple times. But that’s just a fun aside.

More intriguing: a brief bio, circa 2018, notes that before all of those aforementioned jobs, right before Porch,“​​Asha worked at Microsoft in Windows and Xbox.” That’d be during her original stint at Microsoft from 2011-2013, which is listed as a marketing role on her LinkedIn. A Microsoft rep confirmed to me the line in the bio is accurate, though had no details to share on just what Xbox work she did at the time.

Sharma’s career trend may not have involve gaming all that much—plenty of other top gaming execs’ didn’t—but it shows a consistent focus on software start-ups and shaping teams. Her resume is that of a builder rather than someone with a track record of stripping things down, though you don’t need to click online all that much to find anxieties that she’s been placed at Xbox, if not for an infusion of AI, then for a dismantling.

Sharma is at least already building her team. On Saturday, her former Porch colleague, Craig Cincotta, announced on LinkedIn that he was assuming the role of Sharma’s chief of staff. He’s been at Microsoft communications for AI, Azure, HoloLens and other divisions for the past decade. He ran Xbox PR during a prior Microsoft stint from 2010-2013.

On Tuesday, Sharma addressed Microsoft’s gaming team during a town hall. After the event, she posted praise for Spencer:

He pushed for backward compatibility because players asked for it. He helped bring Xbox One X to life. He created Game Pass. And through it all, he re-centered our decisions around players and creators.

A lot of careers get summed up by milestones. Phil’s impact shows up in stories. In the creators who felt safe taking risks, in the teams who did the best work of their lives because someone believed in them, and in players across generations who felt like Xbox was theirs.

I’ll always remember this day. I’m proud to be part of Team Xbox. Now our journey begins

Xbox Exec meets X, and it goes as you’d expect

Sharma’s rise to the top Xbox job was meant to be announced Monday, but started leaking last Friday, shifting Microsoft’s plans, according to people familiar with the situation.

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Tencent has shut down its TiMi Montreal studio without it releasing a game in the five years of its existence.

Game File sources had indicated for weeks that a closure was coming, but I had been unable to corroborate firmly enough to publish. The rumor resurfaced again on Friday when a source told me shutdown was imminent.

And now I’ve spotted that, on Friday, a programmer at TiMi Montreal posted on LinkedIn that the studio had officially closed. Workers had been aware this was coming “for some time,” they wrote, but added that “I am genuinely heartbroken that the public will never get to experience what this team was capable of producing.”

Others affiliated with the studio also posted about the closure on LinkedIn.

Reps for Tencent/TiMi did not provide comment when contacted Friday or again today.

TiMi Montreal was announced in July 2021, with a mission “to create AAA open world multi-platform games.”

That news came amidst rapid expansion of game studios worldwide, super-charged by the pandemic-era boom in gaming and global investors’ desire to capitalize.

A significant amount of the expansion at the time was fueled by Chinese gaming giants NetEase and Tencent, firms with massive success in their home region and on mobile that saw opportunities to build studios that could succeed with more console-style games. Both firms aggressively stood up studios in the west, often with lead developers who had big-budget game releases from western publishers on their resume. But few games have come from those efforts and a retreat from that strategy has been evident over the past 18 months. (I reported almost exactly a year ago that NetEase has been pulling funding from many such studios in the west.)

Details of what Tencent’s TiMi Montreal was working on have not surfaced, but the ambition behind the studio was obvious:

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