标签：#gaming

Microsoft is spinning off four of its Xbox game studios - Compulsion Games, Double Fine Productions, Ninja Theory, and Undead Labs - as part of the restructuring announced today. However, two that are going independent, Double Fine and Compulsion, will get to keep their franchises and games catalogs, according to Xbox CEO Asha Sharma. "Compulsion […]

Move affects ~20% of the gaming division, which will refocus on its biggest franchises.

Nintendo is making a new version of the Switch 2 with a replaceable battery in Europe - but its predecessor has a very different future. As part of an updated FAQ about revisions to Nintendo hardware in Europe, the company confirmed that it will stop selling all iterations of the original Switch on the continent […]

Microsoft is laying off 4,800 employees today, and more than 30 percent of the job losses are in the company's Xbox division. The significant gaming cuts will affect nearly every part of Xbox and also involve four game studios being spun off to be run independently from Microsoft. Today's layoffs, which are being described as […]

A year after cutting around 9,100 employees, Microsoft is making further layoffs today as it begins its new financial year. The software maker is laying off around 4,800 employees today, approximately 2.1 percent of its workforce. Most of the employees affected by today's cuts are in Microsoft's commercial sales business or the company's Xbox division. […]

Whether you’re looking to boost your productivity or your Fortnite stats, these are the top keyboards for the job.

Rockstar's long-awaited Grand Theft Auto VI is launching November 19th, 2026 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X consoles. The game will be available digitally at launch, with physical cases containing codes, not discs, so your options for preordering are straightforward. The preloading phase for the game begins on November 12th, which should give you […]

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the bleak state of the video game industry, follow Andrew Webster. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started Microsoft closed out Summer […]

I have been building a small Honor of Kings Global site called HOKMeta: https://hokmeta.com/heroes/ At first, I built it like many game sites: hero pages, counters, tools, and a tier list. But after working on the site for a while, I removed the tier list as a main page. The reason is simple: a tier list looks useful, but it does not always match how players actually choose heroes. A Marco Polo player will still play Marco Polo even if people say he is weak. A Hou Yi player usually does not search for “is Hou Yi S tier?” first. They search for things like: Hou Yi build Hou Yi arcana Hou Yi counter what to build against tanks what to change against assassins best build for ranked That made me rethink the site structure. Instead of making the tier list the center of the site, I moved the focus toward: hero build pages counter pages item pages damage calculator build compare counter picker For a small SEO site, this feels more useful too. A tier list is one page. Hero builds and matchup questions create many real long-tail pages. For example, “Hou Yi build 2026” is a clearer search intent than just “Honor of Kings tier list”. The current direction is: hero page -> build, arcana, counters, FAQ counter page -> who beats this hero and why tool page -> test builds instead of guessing item page -> understand what the item actually does It is still early, and the data is still being cleaned up, but this direction feels closer to what players need before a ranked match. If you build content/tool sites, this was a useful lesson for me: Do not blindly copy the obvious page type. Look at what users are really trying to decide.

Every game jam lives or dies by its theme, and this year's June Solstice Game Jam handed developers something deceptively simple: the longest day of the year. What emerged from that single prompt wasn't a wave of near-identical sunrise simulators — it was a scattershot of genres, mechanics, and emotional registers, all orbiting the same core idea of light and time. One Theme, a Dozen Interpretations The solstice lends itself to more than one reading, and jam entrants leaned into that ambiguity. Some treated "longest day" literally, building puzzle games where a slowly arcing sun becomes a physical obstacle — light that reveals hidden platforms, burns away fog, or casts shadows players must dodge or exploit. Others went abstract, using the solstice as a metaphor for endurance, building narrative pieces about characters pushing through their hardest, brightest, most exhausting day. Sci-fi submissions reframed the concept entirely: distant planets with artificial suns, space stations timing their orbits to a 24-hour light cycle, or crews racing against a ship's failing life-support "day" before darkness means death. Meanwhile, a handful of more grounded, historically-minded entries used the solstice as a backdrop for ritual and tradition, drawing on centuries of human fascination with the year's turning point. Light and Time as Game Mechanics What makes this jam interesting from a design standpoint is how consistently teams turned an atmospheric theme into an actual mechanic rather than just window dressing. Light became a resource to manage, a weapon, a timer, or a stealth tool. Time compression and dilation showed up frequently too — some games squeezed an entire day-night cycle into a five-minute play session, forcing players to make fast decisions as shadows visibly crept across the map in real time. This is a common jam trick: constraints breed creativity. When a 48- or 72-hour deadline collides with a theme built around a literal clock, developers naturally start

Sony shared an announcement with the console market: physical disc production for all PlayStation games will completely stop in January 2028. You can read the official announcement on the PlayStation Blog . From a pure engineering perspective, modern internet infrastructure has rendered physical distribution redundant. We no longer need plastic circles to transport megabytes. The gamer community response isn't about data transfer speeds. It is over true digital ownership, consumer rights, and software preservation. In this article, we break down the details, look at the history leading to this moment and explore why console makers would pursue this direction. 🔍 The Announcement Break Down The 2028 Deadline: The mandate strictly applies to new games launching after January 1, 2028. Legacy Back Catalog: Discs pressed before this date will still function (assuming future hardware maintains optical drive compatibility). "Code-in-a-Box" Retail: Stores will still sell physical cases on shelves, but they will contain a paper download voucher instead of a disc. I am no sustanability poster boy, seems wasteful to preserve retail shelf presence. 🛑 The Illusion of Ownership: "Buying" vs. "Renting" When you hit "Buy" on a digital storefront, you aren't purchasing a game. You are purchasing a conditional license to stream or download it—a long-term rental agreement that can be unilaterally altered or revoked. No Secondary Market: Players completely lose the ability to resell, trade, or lend games to friends. Monopoly Pricing: Eliminating discs removes competitive pricing from retailers like GameStop, JB Hi-Fi, or Amazon, leaving users locked to a single proprietary storefront. Delisting Vulnerability: If a publisher loses IP rights, the software vanishes instantly. 🎮 Case Study: My Close Call with Digital Erasure Look no further than Star Trek: Resurgence for proof of how fragile digital stores are. In April 2026, the publishers suddenly lost their IP distribution rights. Within

The latest week-long speedrunning marathon starts on July 5.

C:\ArsGames takes a look at the time Chris Roberts more or less made a whole movie.

The video game disc is dead, and Sony's been planning to kill it for some time, according to a report out of Austria. The man who leads Sony's discmaking operations, Sony DADC president Dietmar Tanzer, told ORF Salzburg that the company's Thalgau plant produces 600,000 discs every day, half of which are for PlayStation. But […]

Meta has quietly launched Pocket, an experimental AI app that lets users generate and share interactive mini games using text prompts.

For decades, to be a gamer was to accumulate a lot of stuff. Consoles, controllers, accessories, weird VR gloves that never worked properly, but mostly the games themselves. Over the years, games have come in every shape and size you can imagine. And now that era appears to be ending. On this episode of The […]

Capcom is trying to get Onimusha: Way of the Sword out the door before the fall release calendar gets really crowded.

Cody Spencer, the co-owner of the small games retail chain Pink Gorilla Games, put it well when I asked about the impact of Sony's recent announcement that it will stop making discs for new games starting January 2028. "It's sad to see. This decision is only a negative for gamers. We're losing the ability to […]

Xbox is making some big changes — again. On June 10th, a few months after Asha Sharma took over as CEO, she and newly-promoted chief content officer Matt Booty sent a memo to staff warning of an “Xbox reset.” The business, they said, is facing significant challenges, including a 3 percent “accountability margin,” massively higher […]

“We will own nothing, it's truly sad.”