Microsoft’s July 6 announcement of 3,200 Xbox job cuts and five divested studios did not stay contained to a single press release. Across Bethesda, id Software, ZeniMax, and the wider Communications Workers of America membership inside Microsoft, the reaction has turned into a running record of an industry watching itself get gutted in real time.

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The Bethesda Game Studios union put it bluntly, “In what is becoming a stressful annual routine, Microsoft has decided to lay off thousands, including MANY of us at Bethesda Games Studios,” the union posted. “With over 10k developers already cut from previous rounds, those at the top have deemed that insufficient in fixing their mistakes.” Reports to IGN said the cuts hit “key, high-performing people in the trenches” on The Elder Scrolls VI specifically, while ZeniMax as a whole lost 379 positions, with the Elder Scrolls Online team alone down more than 60 percent of its staff over the past year.

Id Software took a similar hit, losing roughly half its headcount at 136 roles. Studio co-founder John Carmack, who left id in 2013, addressed the cuts directly on X. “My ‘Microsoft will probably be a good steward of the brand’ statement isn’t aging well,” Carmack wrote, “and this is certainly going to dampen the mood of the founder reunion at QuakeCon next month.” He added that he could not “muster anger or outrage” without access to the studio’s books, but said he believed reports that Minecraft revenue had been propping up other Xbox studios for years. A laid-off id VFX artist named Best was less measured on LinkedIn: “Great job Microsoft. Nothing says business success like nuking a team into the dirt and relegating them to support studio size while also throwing out massive technological achievements.” Former id animator Skai Chow’s message was shorter: “I hope our pain was worth it.”

Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reported that the cuts have left surviving staff in a holding pattern rather than relief. “Knowing that a second wave of job cuts could come at any time has led to panic and anxiety among the thousands of people who work for the company,” Schreier wrote, adding that remaining employees are “being asked to do more with less” and fear that failing to do so “could be used as a reason to be fired in the next round.” Blizzard staff were reportedly told they would not learn how the reorganization affects them until “further communications,” according to Schreier’s reporting.

The union side of Microsoft’s workforce, which has organized more than 3,500 employees across the company since 2022, says the pattern predates this specific round of layoffs. ZeniMax Online union representative Morgan Goin told a press call that Microsoft’s own bargaining commitments have collapsed alongside its headcount. “I have been entrusted with the responsibility to advocate for my coworkers. I cannot do my job when Microsoft refuses to do theirs,” Goin said. “We’re being treated as expendable, valued one week and cut the next.” CWA District 9 vice president Frank Arce said bargaining hours with the union had dropped from around 12 hours a month to around four. Another union member, Veneto, described being moved into the office of a laid-off coworker and finding a child’s name bracelet left behind among ten years of packed-up belongings.

Reaction outside the company has run from bleak to sardonic. Screenwriter Craig Robert Cargill posted that Xbox executives “believe most of us will be out of work in the next 5 years, drawing from UBI. What will we do with all that time? XBox hopes we’ll spend our time and money with them.” One laid-off Xbox commerce and AI product manager, Kevin Flynn, had told LinkedIn followers weeks earlier that he had raised “PM AI adoption from 12% to 91% in 3 months” before he was cut alongside everyone else.

Xbox Gaming CEO Asha Sharma framed the cuts in a memo titled “Resetting Xbox,” writing bluntly, “Our business today is not healthy. We are operating at margins that are 3-10x lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses. We must reset Xbox.” That statement arrived from a division that, per PC Gamer’s reporting, spent more than $80 billion on AI investment last year while cutting a fifth of its own workforce. Community response has organized around the United Videogames Union’s Game Worker Hardship Fund, open to any US or Canadian worker laid off from Xbox since January 2024 regardless of union membership, alongside an itch.io charity bundle organized by Necrosoft Games.

Five studios changed hands or shut down in the process: Ninja Theory, told its Hellblade franchise was ending just nine days after showing new footage at the Xbox Games Showcase; Compulsion Games and Double Fine Productions, both released to find new ownership; Undead Labs, placed under review mid-development on State of Decay 3; and Arkane Lyon, facing closure alongside the cancellation of its Marvel’s Blade game. When the people who make the games and the people who fund them can’t agree on whether the business is healthy, unhealthy, or simply mismanaged, who is actually supposed to trust Microsoft’s numbers?

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NEXT: Sony Just Ended Physical Game Discs

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma told her own staff the division’s business is broken. In a memo posted to X on July 6, Sharma wrote that “our business today is not healthy” and that fixing it will require “painful” changes, starting with roughly 3,200 job cuts across Microsoft’s gaming division through fiscal year 2027. Half of those cuts hit immediately. Four studios left Xbox for new management the same day.

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Sharma didn’t stop at “not healthy.” She told employees Xbox operates at margins three to ten times lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses, a gap she attributed to years of bets that failed to pay off. Chief among them: Xbox Game Pass, the subscription model Microsoft has leaned on for growth since 2017. In her own words, that bet “created meaningful value, but did not grow at the pace” the company expected. A multi-platform release strategy and a wave of studio acquisitions fared no better, according to her memo.

The layoffs land on top of what Sharma called the most severe hardware crisis in Xbox’s history, driven by a DRAM shortage tied to AI infrastructure demand that has pushed console component costs to multiples of their 2025 levels. Microsoft is on pace to spend more than $100 billion on AI and cloud infrastructure this fiscal year, with roughly two-thirds of that going to AI chips. Xbox’s own workforce is paying the price for a division Microsoft’s leadership admits it can’t run profitably, while the parent company pours record capital into unrelated AI spending.

That contrast is exactly what set off the backlash spreading across X. Critics have been circulating Microsoft’s H-1B visa filings alongside the layoff numbers, framing the story as Sharma cutting 3,200 American jobs while Microsoft simultaneously files for thousands of H-1B visas. Xbox employees have not been shy about their own view of her leadership either. One told The HR Digest, “We went from Phil Spencer, who actually loved games, to someone who treats Xbox like just another P&L to optimize.” Another comment aimed at her track record before Xbox put it more bluntly: “It feels like she’s here to downsize, collect her package and move on.”

Sharma closed her memo with a promise that Xbox will return to growth next year and that these changes serve “a bigger future for Xbox, not a smaller one.” The math she laid out in the same memo says the current one isn’t working. Microsoft shares closed at $373.02 on June 30, down 19% for the month and near a 52-week low.

Xbox has cut thousands of jobs, closed or spun off five studios, and lost a chunk of its own workforce’s trust in a single week. If the business Sharma inherited was already unhealthy, why is the fix landing on American employees first while the visa filings keep coming?

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NEXT: Retailers Are Refusing to Sell GTA 6 Because the Physical Edition Has No Disc

Nine days after Ninja Theory appeared on stage at the Xbox Games Showcase to announce Senua, the third entry in the Hellblade franchise, the Cambridge studio’s employees were called into a meeting and told they were done. The announcement of a new game and the announcement of the studio’s closure arrived in the same two-week window. Nobody who bought a ticket to the showcase knew that the studio presenting its next project would not exist to finish it.

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Ninja Theory, the Cambridge studio behind the Hellblade series, was confirmed closing on June 15. Compulsion Games, the Peabody Award-winning Montreal studio behind South of Midnight and We Happy Few, and Double Fine Productions, the San Francisco developer founded by Tim Schafer in 2000 and home to the Psychonauts series, are both in closure or buyout negotiations. Undead Labs, which employs around 110 people and has been developing State of Decay 3, is under review. Arkane Lyon, the studio behind Dishonored and Deathloop, is reportedly facing both closure and the outright cancellation of Marvel’s Blade, a superhero action game that had already slipped from a planned 2026 launch to late 2027.

Xbox Game Studios head Craig Duncan resigned on June 15, the same day the Compulsion closure was first reported.

The five studios share a profile that explains why they are the ones being cut. All are critically acclaimed. All produced mid-tier games rather than Call of Duty-scale releases. And all of them were entirely dependent on Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription model to reach their audiences. That dependence is what killed them. When a studio’s games launch on Game Pass on day one, subscribers play them without purchasing them. The studio gets a licensing fee. Microsoft gets the subscriber engagement data. The buy-to-play revenue that would have funded the next project never arrives.

South of Midnight drew more than one million Game Pass players within three weeks of launching. Double Fine’s Psychonauts 2 remains one of the highest-reviewed games of the current generation. Ninja Theory’s Hellblade II won multiple awards. None of that mattered when Microsoft ran the numbers. Critical acclaim and commercial performance are measured separately inside Xbox’s accounting system, and Game Pass economics do not reward the kind of mid-budget creative studios that make a publisher’s catalog worth caring about.

The Xbox Reset memo that CEO Asha Sharma and Chief Content Officer Matt Booty published on Xbox Wire on June 10 is among the most candid admissions of strategic failure by a major platform holder in recent memory. Xbox will close fiscal year 2026 at approximately a 3% profitability margin, far short of the roughly 30% Microsoft requires of its major divisions. Excluding the $68.7 billion Activision Blizzard acquisition, the division spent more than $20 billion over five years on content, platform, and hardware subsidies, while annual revenue shrank by nearly $500 million over the same period. Gaming revenue fell 7% last quarter to $5.3 billion. Hardware sales dropped 33%.

Putting Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 on Game Pass on day one reportedly cost Microsoft an estimated $300 million in buy-to-play revenue. That was a bet that subscriber growth would offset the per-unit loss. The Reset memo says it did not.

The workers facing those cuts have had enough. The Communications Workers of America held a press conference with members of various Microsoft Xbox unions in response to the layoff reports. Frank Arce, vice president for CWA District 9, condemned the cuts, saying Microsoft workers “will not be treated as disposable.” One union representative pointed out Xbox’s recent console price hikes, saying “The money is there, leadership is simply choosing where it goes and who pays.”

Andrew Snell, a QA tester at Activision Publishing, said that Xbox unions would be joining forces to fight back. “We’re done paying for executives’ failures,” he said.

Overall, market conditions make Microsoft’s collapse look less like an isolated failure and more like the accelerating end of a model. An estimated 45,000 gaming industry jobs have been lost since 2022. The 2026 Game Developers Conference survey found that one in three US developers had been laid off in the previous two years, and that half of all respondents said their current or most recent employer had conducted layoffs in the past 12 months. At AAA studios specifically, two thirds of respondents reported the same. The global gaming market reached a record $195.6 billion in 2025. The industry has never made more money, and the people who make the games have never felt less secure.

Ubisoft Barcelona walked off the job June 30, opening a three-week strike running through July 16. Their demands: a binding agreement protecting 51 affected roles, a five-year guarantee against future collective layoffs, immediate execution of previously agreed promotions. EA was acquired by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund for $55 billion. Sony closed Bluepoint Games. The industry is consolidating into a smaller number of mega-publishers, each of which has decided it can extract more revenue from fewer studios. The developers in the middle, the ones making original mid-budget creative work, are the ones disappearing.

Double Fine’s Tim Schafer built Grim Fandango, Brütal Legend, and Psychonauts across 26 years. Ninja Theory built two Hellblade games that treated mental illness with a care and craft that the industry rarely achieves. Compulsion built We Happy Few and won a Peabody for South of Midnight. These are not the studios that failed. These are the studios that succeeded at everything except being large enough to matter to Microsoft’s balance sheet.

Does the Game Pass model bear responsibility for killing the studios it was supposed to support, or did Microsoft simply overpay for too many acquisitions and someone had to take the loss?

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: Retailers Are Refusing to Sell GTA 6 Because the Physical Edition Has No Disc

Rockstar confirmed on June 24 that the physical edition of Grand Theft Auto VI, launching November 19 at $79.99, will ship with a download code inside the box. No disc. No data. A buyer who pays $80 for a physical copy opens the box and finds a piece of paper with a code on it — the same digital download everyone else gets, sold in plastic packaging.

Two retailers have refused to stock it.

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Video Games Plus, a Canadian chain operating for nearly forty years, issued a statement on X: “For nearly 40 years, VGP has been committed to supporting physical media and preserving the value of physical game ownership. Our company policy is that we do not carry physical products for video game consoles that contain only a digital download code. Based on the information currently available, the physical release of Grand Theft Auto VI for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X is expected to be a code-in-box product. As a result, VGP will not be offering it for sale under our current company policy.”

VGP added that the decision carries no grudge against Rockstar: “Should Rockstar one day release a physical edition containing a disc in the box, we would be pleased to carry and support that version for our customers.”

Loot Box Gaming, a Delaware-based physical media retailer, put it plainly: “When we started LBG, it was out of a love for our favorite form of media, gaming, as well as the preservation of said media. If a product can’t honor the people who pay their hard-earned money to purchase it, then we have no business trying to sell it to our customers, whom we value above anything else.”

Neither store moves the needle on GTA 6’s launch numbers. Circana analyst Mat Piscatella noted that at least 30 games have already sold code-in-box physical copies in the US in 2026 alone, with 146 titles featuring this format to date. GTA 6 is projected as one of the biggest entertainment launches in history regardless of what two independent retailers do. Rockstar is not losing sleep.

That is not the point. The point is that both retailers named what the gaming press has been reluctant to say directly: a box with a download code is not a physical game. It is a receipt.

Rockstar’s reasoning for the format is documented. Physical editions of GTA games have historically leaked days or weeks before launch — the GTA 6 leak in 2022, in which over 90 clips of gameplay footage surfaced online before announcement, cost the company enormous narrative control. Shipping a code instead of a disc prevents anyone from cracking the physical media and circulating content early. A European distributor told sources that Take-Two had zero disc plans for day one; a disc edition could arrive weeks or months after launch.

The secondary reason is money. Every disc sold through GameStop or other retailers with used-game programs generates a resale chain that never touches Rockstar again. The buyer plays it, trades it in, the store sells it used at a slight discount, the second buyer does the same, and Rockstar’s cut ends at the first transaction. A code-in-box cannot be traded in. Once redeemed, it exists only in the buyer’s account. The used game market — a significant revenue stream for small specialty retailers — collapses entirely around it.

This is the same logic Sony deployed when it announced in January that physical disc production for all new PlayStation games ends in 2028. The industry does not hate physical media for ideological reasons. It hates physical media because physical media allows consumers to own things, resell things, and play things without an active internet connection and a valid account in good standing. Every one of those consumer benefits represents a control variable the publisher cannot monetize.

Circana’s data confirms the normalization is already well advanced. 146 games in code-in-box format is not a protest-worthy anomaly. It is a trend that GTA 6 is about to accelerate into standard practice. If the most anticipated game in the medium’s history ships without a disc and sells fifty million copies in its first month, every major publisher reads that as the audience’s verdict on physical media.

VGP and Loot Box Gaming know they will not change that outcome. They said so clearly. What they are doing is naming the thing for what it is: a box with no disc is not a physical game. It is a $79.99 download voucher with better shelf presence.

What’s the point of even selling a download code in a box to begin with?

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: 1.3 Million People Asked the EU to Stop Publishers From Bricking Games They Paid For And The EU Said No

The Stop Killing Games movement delivered 1,294,188 verified signatures to the European Commission in January 2026 — well past the one million threshold required to force a formal response from the body. The campaign had a simple demand: when a publisher decides to end support for a game, they must leave it in a playable state. Not maintained. Not updated. Just functional. A game bought and paid for should not stop working because a server somewhere got turned off.

On June 16, the Commission responded.

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Sony announced today that effective January 2028, it will no longer produce physical game discs for PlayStation. The full statement reads:

“As consumer preferences and the broader entertainment industry continue to shift away from physical discs to digital, physical game disc production for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January 2028. Following this date, new games will be available on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only. This transition has no impact on games that already released, or will be releasing, prior to January 2028 in disc format.

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This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs. This transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today.

We’ll continue to prioritize our resources to drive innovation in how players can access games and provide choices as to where players prefer to purchase new games, whether that’s at retailers or PlayStation Store. We remain committed to delivering a world-class gaming experience to our fans and we thank you for your continued support.”

“Retailers” in Sony’s statement will still carry games. They will sell cards containing download codes rather than discs. The box, the case, the physical presence of something you can hold in your hands while the receipt remains technically accurate — all of it stays. The thing that worked, the disc itself, goes away.

The timing connects directly to the PlayStation 6’s expected arrival in 2028. The PS6 reportedly costs $960 in materials to manufacture per unit, and Sony’s disc-free trajectory was already signaled when it released the PS5 Digital Edition at a lower price point than the standard model. Earlier reports suggested the PS6 would ship with at least a detachable disc drive, similar to the PS5 Slim revision. That now looks uncertain. A console without a disc drive does not need to advertise the feature it dropped. Sony announcing the end of disc production in 2028 and the PS6 arriving in 2028 are almost certainly the same event described from two angles.

GTA 6, which launches November 19 on a budget that makes it the most expensive entertainment production in history, accelerated this conversation last week. The physical edition was announced — but when Insider Gaming reported the details, the story was that the day-one physical copy would not contain a disc. It would contain a download code in a box. Rockstar is releasing what amounts to a $70 cardboard download voucher for buyers who specifically chose a physical copy. A December 2026 disc release is reportedly in the pipeline, but the launch edition for the game that will almost certainly break all-time sales records does not contain the thing its packaging implies.

The storage crisis is the other half of the story nobody wants to discuss directly.

Modern AAA games routinely exceed 100GB. Many exceed 150. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is reportedly over 200GB. The PlayStation 5 ships with 825GB of usable internal storage. The Xbox Series X ships with roughly 800GB usable. A full library of current-generation games does not fit on a single console’s internal drive and never has. Expanding that storage costs real money. The Xbox Series X uses proprietary Seagate expansion cards — the only solution that allows games to be played directly from external storage rather than constantly transferred back to the internal drive. Those cards retail at $160 for 1TB, $260-350 for 2TB, and $550-650 for 4TB. For context, a standard 2TB NVMe SSD for a PC runs around $80. The Xbox tax on compatible storage is real, consistent, and not discussed in the same breath as disc elimination because it is less visible.

PlayStation uses standard M.2 NVMe drives for expansion, which are considerably cheaper — a 2TB drive runs $80-120 — but the principle is the same. The console ships without enough storage to house a meaningful library and expansion costs money the consumer pays separately.

The digital ecosystem that Sony is now mandating for 2028 requires that consumers own this expanded storage outright, cannot loan games to a friend, cannot resell a game they finished, cannot play it without a live internet connection during authentication, and cannot guarantee access if Sony’s servers go down, if their account is banned, or if the service is discontinued. The Stop Killing Games petition that collected 1.3 million signatures in the EU was aimed at exactly this structure — the one where the consumer pays full price for a product they do not actually own and cannot access when the company providing it decides to close the door.

Sony’s statement calls this “a natural direction.” It is natural in the sense that it is profitable for Sony and structurally terrible for consumers who prefer ownership over licensing. Those two things are not in contradiction. They are the actual relationship Sony and the consumer have had since digital storefronts became the path of least resistance, and the disc was the last mechanism allowing buyers to opt out of it.

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NEXT: The Stellar Blade 2 Controversy - How Corporate Levers Undermine Christian Order in Culture and Commerce

Supergirl opened to $37.1 million domestic and $62.6 million worldwide. Warner Bros. spent $170 million making the film and another $120 million marketing it. The studio’s breakeven sits at roughly $300-315 million worldwide. Variety now projects a final theatrical loss between $80 million and $120 million, putting Supergirl in the same financial bracket as Black Adam and The Flash, two of the biggest superhero bombs in recent memory.

Before a single ticket sold, Warner Bros. had already started lowering the bar. TheWrap reported that studio insiders quietly began framing anything above $300 million worldwide as a “win” days before opening weekend numbers landed. Puck had previously reported the studio actually wanted $500 million and would only call $425 million “good enough” with strong reviews and box office legs. The new $300 million target sits below the film’s own breakeven figure. A studio does not move its definition of success downward, in private, ahead of an opening, unless it already knows what the opening is going to look like.

The New York Times decided the explanation for the failure was misogyny.

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“Box office analysts on Sunday noted an uncomfortable truth,” the Times wrote. “Female-led superhero movies have been rejected almost uniformly over the past five years or so, perhaps reflecting a resurgent misogyny among the core fan base, which is largely male. Before its release, ‘Supergirl’ became caught up in a now-familiar cycle of online abuse, with some fanboys attacking Milly Alcock’s casting and appearance. Warner Bros. executives said they were surprised by both the ferocity of the backlash and its reach, believing the culture had evolved past that sort of campaign.”

Deadline ran a version of the same argument: “There’s a horrible reality and that’s that there is a toxicity among fanboys and critics with female-led superhero and action films.”

Both pieces skip the part where Alcock herself started the conflict, repeatedly, in her own words, on the record, months before release.

In March, Vanity Fair asked Alcock about the pressure of the role. Her answer: “It definitely made me aware that simply existing as a woman in that space is something that people comment on. We have become very comfortable having this weird ownership of women’s bodies.”

In April, Variety profiled her again. Asked about online critics, she said: “It’s from a lot of people whose profiles have no photo, who are burner accounts. Or someone’s name and then ‘Dad of four, Christian,’ which is hilarious to me. But I mean, whose opinion do you really care about? If you’re pissing the right kind of people off, you’re doing OK.”

In June, asked whether Kara’s queerness in the comics shaped her preparation, she said: “It wasn’t, but in honor of Pride month, as I’m getting all these questions... I don’t know. I think that what makes this film beautiful is that it’s not centered around a man, it’s not centered around love at all. I don’t really know. I don’t know. I don’t know. She probably goes both ways.”

None of that is in the source material. None of it appears in the marketing. All of it came from Alcock, unprompted, in interviews intended to sell tickets to a film whose target audience includes the exact demographic she spent three separate press cycles dismissing.

Grace Randolph, a film critic with no partisan dog in this fight, flagged the pattern in May before the damage was done: “If I were a publicist, I’d be like, ‘Stop talking for the love of God.’” Nobody told her to stop.

Online, the predictable defense came from Forbes contributor Paul Tassi, who posted: “You are not gonna convince me Milly Alcock saying liberal things is the reason Supergirl bombed, when harassed to living hell Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel made $1.1 billion. You guys don’t matter as much as you think.”

Set aside the Captain Marvel comparison for a moment and look at what Tassi is doing. He is telling the audience their reaction does not matter, in the same week the New York Times is blaming that exact audience’s “resurgent misogyny” for the box office failure, in the same week Warner Bros. quietly moved its own win threshold down before the numbers landed. You cannot simultaneously argue that the audience’s response is irrelevant and that the audience’s alleged bigotry is the cause of the failure. Those two positions cancel each other out. If conservative moviegoers, Christian fathers, and general audiences truly did not matter, nobody at the Times or Deadline or Forbes would need an explanation for why the film failed. They would simply note that grosses are down across the genre and move on. Instead, an entire press apparatus spent the weekend constructing an elaborate theory about fan misogyny. That is what people do when an audience’s absence costs real money and somebody needs a story other than the true one.

The Captain Marvel comparison also collapses under its own data. Brie Larson’s film opened to $153 million domestic in 2019, when the MCU still carried five years of consecutive franchise momentum and audience goodwill built by Iron Man, the Avengers, and a decade of careful brand management. Supergirl opened to $37 million, a year after Superman launched the same universe to $125 million with strong reviews and zero promotional controversy. The comparison is not apples to apples. It is a flagship franchise at its commercial peak versus a sophomore entry that immediately followed a hit, undercut by its own star’s press tour.

Variety’s own analysis names a real structural factor too: the superhero genre overall is down roughly $3.5 billion annually from its 2017-2019 peak, and female-led titles specifically have struggled since Wonder Woman ($822 million) and Captain Marvel ($1.13 billion) gave way to Black Widow, The Marvels, and now Supergirl. That decline is real and worth discussing honestly. But genre fatigue does not explain why Supergirl is underperforming Superman, released by the same studio one year earlier, by this margin. Genre fatigue affects every film in the category roughly equally. It does not explain why one film’s lead actress generated three separate viral controversies before release while the other film’s lead generated none.

Cosmic Book News noted something else worth sitting with: the marketing materials themselves featured unflattering shots of Alcock, choices “approved by James Gunn,” following the same visual pattern used in The Marvels, Madame Web, and Snow White. Whether that pattern reflects deliberate sabotage or simple carelessness is unclear. What is clear is that nobody at the studio corrected course after seeing it work against three previous films in the exact same way.

Peter Safran’s public response stuck to the standard script: “While Supergirl didn’t meet our box office expectations, it’s just one component of a broader, long-term strategy at DC Studios that we remain confident in.” That is the same sentence every studio executive reaches for after a miss. It does not explain the quietly lowered win threshold from the week before. It does not explain why Warner Bros. executives told the Times they were “surprised” by backlash that critics and analysts had been predicting publicly since March.

The press blaming misogyny while the studio quietly moves its own goalposts is not two separate stories. It is one story, told twice, by people who already knew what the numbers were going to say and needed an explanation that did not involve looking at the marketing campaign they approved.

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: Comcast Just Admitted What Hollywood Won’t Say Out Loud: The Tech Is Worth More Than the Content

In recent years, as I’ve chronicled the fractures in gaming media (including hypocrisies of online drama cycles and the fragility of consumer culture), there is one subject matter that has always remained a tricky one to explain: targeted moral pressure.

For most of my life, targeted moral pressure has often been the boogeyman of people who express that some vague notion of “Freedom” is the highest moral good attainable. Ironically, what “Freedom” is varies from one social group to another and ironically contains its own parameters for people ought or ought not be free to say or do. But rather than get caught in those semantics, I will instead talk about the recent drama surrounding the video game, Stellar Blade: Blood Rain.

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The main contention you are likely being told is that the greatest evil is that some extrinsic“authority” is denying you the ability to spend your money in a manner you deem appropriate for yourself. This is regardless of the fact that these measures of control are exhibited from earnest Christian voices or progressive advocacy groups. What you are being told is that you must “react” to some broader inversion of authority.

Meanwhile, what you are never told to think about is why various payment processors are allowed to pick and choose these things already and what that even means, existentially. Most people take payment processors as a given and never think about how commerce, once a humble servant of the household, now postures as its master.

Payment processors like Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal all act without legislative charter or public accountability. They get to decide who eats and who starves, whose voice echoes in the public square and whose is silenced. The fact that few people ever question this shows just how pervasively we have all been programmed.

But nobody is taught to think about these things correctly and in the only manner by which anyone can understand these things. That being theologically. Indeed, addressing payment processors means understanding that many of our current conundrums cannot be properly addressed or fixed without understanding that they are theological disorders. The hand of Mammon has grown long and subtle, as I explored in earlier reflections on censorship and payment processors.

Commerce is supposed to serve the common good within its proper bound. However, these days, commerce arbitrates morality. Commerce doesn’t yield to law or conscience, but to publicity campaigns and the murmurs of unseen councils (shareholder values). The whip of

economic exclusion is often wielded by those crying loudest for moral clarity. These are people who wield money as power and can bypass the slow, bureaucratic nature of legislatures.

Lessons from the Pornhub Nexus and Sphere Usurpation

As detailed in prior analysis I did of Lexorius’s The Secret War to Censor the Internet, Christian organizations like Trafficking Hub, Exodus Cry, and Morality in Media have leveraged bureaucratic tools against platforms like Pornhub. The Serena Flight lawsuit against MindGeek (Pornhub’s parent) exemplifies the cascade: RICO charges, bypassed Section 230 protections, and Visa’s complicity inferred from its on-again, off-again relationship with the company. The allegations against MindGeek are grave, including dozens of lawsuits involving underage abuse and trafficking.

While censorship of pornography is an ostensible good, the means also subtly affirm a libertarian default: that pornography should largely remain legal and available but with corporate censorship applied selectively when it crosses certain lines. This concedes the ground that such material belongs in the public square at all. Christians should instead insist on its full eradication through lawful, sphere-appropriate means (legislation and gospel transformation), not selective corporate gatekeeping that leaves the poison intact while merely relocating it. But the means betray a system that has found it necessary to use one set of principalities and powers against another without being aware of itself. In other words, nobody questions the fact that our only means of advocacy is to bypass the magistrate’s robe and preacher’s pulpit for corporate fiat. Nobody questions why that is the only power anyone recognizes.

This is because the spheres are inverted.

Here, I am echoing Abraham Kuyper’s doctrine of sphere sovereignty in which society comprises distinct realms: family, church, state, economy, arts, and education. Each sphere is endowed with God-given authority and limits. No sphere may dominate another. The state must not swallow the church or family; the merchant must not excommunicate like a bishop or wield the sword like the magistrate. As Kuyper articulated, these spheres derive their sovereignty not from the state but from the immediate kingship of Christ over every square inch of creation.

When Christian groups normalize financial deplatforming, however vile the target, they teach the mechanism to their adversaries. What is built today in the name of Christian purity will tomorrow target the Saints. Judgment begins at the house of God. We cannot redeem culture by deforming its God-ordained structure. Lawful means such as legislation, cultural persuasion, and gospel proclamation honor the spheres. Corporate bypass does not.

This manifests in the very cultural battles I dissect on Fandom Pulse and in essays applying William T. Cavanaugh’s Being Consumed. Pornography’s commodification of the body mirrors the transient consumerism that devours and discards controversies from YouTube drama feuds

to gaming patronage networks. The market, detached from any sense of higher morality, becomes a tool for soft power.

Recall Anita Sarkeesian’s consulting on Slay the Spire 2: not overt censorship, but insurance-like influence shaping what gets funded and distributed. Nepo-patronage in projects like Mixtape 2026 reveals the same: economic levers deciding cultural output absent genuine market sovereignty or artistic merit.

Humanistic Roots and the Rise of the Totalizing Sphere

Drawing from earlier examinations of humanistic anthropology (Maslow, Rogers), our current societal disorder stems from a view of man as basically good, corrupted only by “sick” institutions. The solution was to empower the state (or its proxies) to control those spheres, eroding Kuyperian boundaries. The state has now become Hegel’s “march of God through the world,” absorbing ethics, education, welfare, and now commerce. Objective truth and divine law become obstacles to be relativized or removed. In their place: procedural power plays dressed as righteousness.

Post-Enlightenment secularism assumes a neutral public square where Christianity is an optional overlay. John Frame’s normative perspective corrects this: The world is God’s world, Christian at its root; deviations are distortions. Institutions born of godly purpose (commerce included) have been repurposed for power struggles. Christian NGOs wielding economic pressure compete for control rather than reforming within bounds. This is not advancing the Kingdom; it is betraying it from within.

In gaming and media, this plays out vividly. Payment processors pressure platforms over “lacking artistic value” in adult content or politically incorrect games, as seen in itch.io campaigns and Steam controversies. Japanese developers decry Western credit card influence on erotic games. The same tools targeting pornography now police pixels and narratives.

Hypocrisy in design (toned-down female characters vs. enhanced male appeal in Resident Evil titles) meets selective corporate enforcement. Online drama cycles thrive on this fragility: selective outrage, kayfabe feuds, and market-brained susceptibility to the next transient controversy.

The Path Forward: Reasserting Christ’s Lordship Over Every Sphere

The solution is reformation. Recover sphere sovereignty under Christ’s immediate kingship. Christians must labor for moral ends through moral means. This includes constitutional order, persuasion, and faithful presence in every sphere, not usurpation.

Let the church be the church: Proclaim truth, disciple believers, form communities that model ordered liberty rather than outsourcing purity to Visa.

Let the state be the state: Pursue just laws against genuine evils without demanding corporations act as de facto censors.

Let commerce be commerce: Restore it as servant, not arbiter. Support alternative economies, decentralized payment systems, and cultural production that values beauty, truth, and human flourishing over optics and liability.

Let culture and arts flourish: As essayists, critics, and creators, reject both puritanical overreach and licentious commodification.

As Kuyper reminds us, every sphere stands under Christ’s sovereignty. When one extends into another, it deforms design and invites tyranny under reform’s guise. Procedural righteousness is integral to the Kingdom’s advance. We must work not only for the good, but through the good. This is the way of Christ: structure over chaos, reformation over revolution.

Rejecting the False Dilemma

Recent controversies around Stellar Blade 2 have sharpened a familiar trap. Activists and critics now call for payment processors (Visa, Mastercard, and allies) to kneecap the sequel to Stellar Blade over what you are told is supposed to matter to you: hyper-sexualized design. The pressure campaign mirrors earlier efforts chronicled in my writing: Economic levers once aimed at pornography now target your video games.

My contention, building on prior analyses of both corporate censorship and the original Stellar Blade, is that Christians must reject this entire framing. It presents a false dilemma. Either align with Mammon’s long hand to suppress the game, or defend a series already steeped in elements antithetical to Christian order. Neither path honors sphere sovereignty or the kingship of Christ.

As explored previously, commerce was never ordained to act as cultural magistrate. Normalizing this “Ring of Power” for short-term victories also teaches the mechanism to our adversaries. What purges Stellar Blade today may silence faithful voices tomorrow. Judgment begins at the house of God. We train the world in tools of exclusion at our peril.

Why the Series Itself Warrants Anathema

I want to make it clear that this does not mean Stellar Blade (or its sequel) merits unqualified defense. Far from it. The original game’s narrative DNA reveals a deeper corruption than goon-bait, as detailed in my earlier exegesis. The android revelation reframes ideas such as God, tradition, family, and patriarchy as oppressive lies. “True self “emerges through rejection of assigned roles and bodily autonomy is affirmed as a sacred given.

Raven, the synthetic “Lilith” drawn from apocryphal Kabbalistic and Gnostic streams rather than Scripture, embodies defiant liberation: transcend programming, fuse opposites, ascend beyond created limits. Echoes of Lurianic tikkun olam, primordial androgyny (Adam Kadmon), and

reintegration over redemption pulse through the story. This goes beyond surface-level complaints about obtrusive fanservice or Eastern distinctiveness. The game swims in

metaphysical currents (progressive mythology, Marxist anthropology of power on bodies, and esoteric synthesis) that directly conflict with Christian theology.

Christianity affirms body, sex, kinship, and categories (male and female, creator and creature) as God’s gifts to be redeemed through Christ. These are not cages to escape or transcend via gnosis and self-construction. The Gospel restores creation under the incarnate Logos. Stellar Blade courts an alternate gospel: flesh made obsolete, simulated unions, yearning commodified into parasocial and self-romance shortcuts (transgenderism as “homosexuality 2.0”).

The experience of Stellar Blade is sold to you as a replacement for covenantal intimacy, but it is a hollow facsimile that seeks to fuel an endless, unfulfillable desire (and is precisely the transient detachment that William T. Cavanaugh diagnoses). Whether intentional or osmotic, these elements render the series culturally anathema for those holding biblical anthropology. Stop clutching pearls at every Korean developer choice. Follow the metaphysics and patterns revealed in the text itself, beyond authorial press releases.

Escaping the Binary: Proper Spheres, Proper Weapons

The arts exist to image truth and beauty under Christ, not to be policed by balance sheets or activist pressure. The church disciples through proclamation, exegesis, and counter-formation, not economic exclusion outsourced to liability-averse executives.

As Christians, we labor within bounds. Critique the game’s themes rigorously (through essays, reviews, cultural commentary, and building better alternatives rooted in created order). Pursue just law where genuine evils arise, but reject bypassing the magistrate for merchant discretion. Support markets governed by theological moorings, not absolutist commodification that turns cultural identities into products.

True freedom is found in bondage to Christ, not the rebranded autonomy of self-creation or algorithmic yearning.

This applies broadly to gaming feuds, media patronage, and online drama. Reject kayfabe binaries that force alignment with corrupt people. Sphere sovereignty protects liberty by limiting totalizing power (whether state, corporation, or activist nonprofit). Stellar Blade 2 may deserve cultural marginalization on its merits, but that case must be made through faithful presence in the arts, not by handing the sword to Mammon.

Christ reigns over every square inch. Our response to disordered culture is not pragmatic power plays but reformation. Let the economy serve, the arts create under truth, the church proclaim, and each sphere remain in its place. Engaging the false dilemma concedes the inversion. We

must transcend it (working not only for the good, but through the good, under the Lord who restores rather than transcends His creation). This is the narrow way forward.

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On October 30 and 31, 2025, Rockstar Games fired 34 employees across studios in Edinburgh, Dundee, Lincoln, and Toronto. Every one was a member of a private Discord server maintained by the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain. Rockstar’s stated reason: gross misconduct for distributing confidential information in a public forum.

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IWGB president Alex Marshall: “Rockstar has just carried out one of the most blatant and ruthless acts of union busting in the history of the games industry. This flagrant contempt for the law and for the lives of the workers who bring in their billions is an insult to their fans and the global industry.”

Take-Two Interactive’s head of global communications Alan Lewis responded: “Our culture is focused on teamwork, excellence, and kindness. Rockstar Games terminated a small number of individuals for gross misconduct, and for no other reason.”

The company with a culture of teamwork, excellence, and kindness fired 34 people via phone calls, with no documentation provided of what they had individually done wrong. Fired developer Mark Neill told journalists he was terminated in a phone call with no evidence presented against him.

The IWGB’s counter to the confidentiality allegation was specific: the Discord server was private, accessible only to union members and organizers. It contained discussion of working conditions, pay transparency, crunch hours, and the internal Slack rule changes that had eliminated most personal channels from Rockstar’s internal communications. The union said no confidential game information about GTA 6 was shared there. Over 220 Rockstar employees signed a letter demanding immediate reinstatement of their colleagues.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer called it “deeply concerning” at Prime Minister’s Questions in December. “Every worker has a right to join a trade union,” he said. MP Chris Murray pledged to investigate.

The case went to the Glasgow Employment Tribunal in January 2026. Barrister John Hendy KC, a veteran labor rights lawyer who came out of retirement specifically for this case, argued the gross misconduct allegation was a smokescreen for targeted union suppression. Rockstar’s own legal team submitted the allegedly confidential information as evidence during the hearing. The judge noted Rockstar “made no effort to redact it despite repeated reminders that it would now be publicly available.” The information Rockstar fired 34 people for leaking entered the public record through Rockstar’s own lawyers.

The tribunal denied the workers’ request for interim pay. The full employment case continues.

The remaining Rockstar UK workforce did not stop organizing. They formed the Rockstar Games Workers’ Union, recruited just over 10 percent of the UK workforce, and hit one of the statutory benchmarks required to apply for formal union recognition under British law. The firings accelerated the effort rather than killing it.

GTA 6 pre-orders open June 25 and the game ships November 19. It will almost certainly become the highest-grossing entertainment product in history. It was made by a workforce that watched 34 colleagues fired for organizing a private Discord, whose lawyers then entered that “confidential” information into public court records, and whose parent company told the press the terminations were about kindness.

Dan Houser wrote the franchise’s soul across a decade and left in 2020. The company that replaced his creative direction has spent eight months arguing union-busting in British courts while finishing the most anticipated game ever made.

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Rockstar Games confirmed today that Grand Theft Auto VI pre-orders open June 25 on PlayStation and Xbox digital storefronts, with the game locked in for a November 19, 2026 release on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. No PC version has been announced. Pricing will be revealed when pre-orders go live, with speculation running at $79.99 to $99.99. The announcement came alongside the game’s official cover art, which is dominated by purple and pink tones throughout.

That color choice is not accidental, and the gaming community has noticed.

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CD Projekt Red wants you to know it cares about inclusion. Whether that extends to people who disagree with the message is a different question.

The Polish studio behind The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 posted this statement to its social media accounts in June:

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“The worlds we create are shaped by the people behind them. Bringing together individuals with different experiences, backgrounds, and perspectives helps us in our goal to create memorable stories that inspire gamers. That’s why we’re committed to building an environment where everyone feels respected, supported, and able to contribute. We believe this responsibility extends beyond our teams and into the communities around us. For several years, we’ve partnered with Kampania Przeciw Homofobii (Campaign Against Homophobia) to support grassroots LGBTQ+ initiatives across Poland. We’re also proud that CD PROJEKT RED was recently included in the sixth edition of the Diversity IN Check list, organized by Forum Odpowiedzialnego Biznesu (Responsible Business Forum). And, as in previous years, REDs joined the Warsaw Pride parade.”

The post was noticed. So were the hidden replies.

YouTuber Smash JT covering the gaming industry flagged that CD Projekt Red’s social media team had been going into the replies and hiding critical responses. His own reply was among them. “I do not feel respected when my reply gets hidden,” he said. “This is only for if you agree with the message and the ideology. If you disagree with them, then you will not be respected, supported, and you will not be able to contribute.”

The hidden replies, once surfaced, ran the full range of reader reaction. One commenter observed the workload: “The account manager is working double time. There are probably more hidden comments than there are comments in the regular section.” Another asked a question many gamers have been sitting on for a few years: “Are you a game developer or a political organization? Make a choice.”

It’s also of note that CD Projekt Red’s regional accounts in Japan and Arabia did not update their profile pictures with rainbow flags for Pride Month. Russia’s account was the same. “It goes to show they don’t really care,” Smash said. “It’s all to push the propaganda and agenda where it’s acceptable to do so. Because if they really did care for this, they’d put it everywhere. But they know that Arabia and Russia would shut down their ability to sell the games there.”

Gaming analyst Yorch Torch Games called CD Projekt Red “gaming’s biggest hypocrite,” writing that the studio “claims to bring together individuals with different experiences, backgrounds, and perspectives until those perspectives challenge its propaganda.” CD Projekt Red blocked him after the post. The YouTuber’s read on the block: “It’s not about inclusion if you’re blocking the people that are talking about your studio.”

There is a longer backstory. Content creator Endymion raised concerns about DEI influence at CD Projekt Red over a year ago and was publicly called a liar by the studio’s CEO on X. Endymion then returned with documentation, including diversity partnerships, website statements, the full paper trail. The Pride post and the Diversity IN Checklist inclusion, named in CD Projekt Red’s own statement, are now being read by critics as confirmation of what Endymion claimed. One commenter wrote: “Thank you for admitting Endymion was in fact right about your company.”

None of this exists in isolation. The Pride statement is happening at a studio that has already made the most consequential creative decision of its next decade: replacing Geralt of Rivia with Ciri as the protagonist of The Witcher 4.

Geralt built CD Projekt Red. Across three games and roughly thirty years of source material, he became one of the most beloved characters in the history of the medium. The Witcher 3 moved over 50 million copies. The studio is now betting its flagship sequel on a character swap that the lore does not cleanly support. In the books by Andrzej Sapkowski, Ciri never undergoes the Trial of Grasses — the process that creates witchers — because her Elder Blood gifts make the mutations unnecessary and potentially lethal. CD Projekt Red has stated she passes the Trial before the events of Witcher 4, which is their lore to write, but which contradicts the books their narrative director claims they are “beholden to.” Narrative director Philipp Weber told Eurogamer: “We really want to respect that.” Asked directly whether Sapkowski approved the change, neither he nor game director Sebastian Kalemba would confirm it.

The Witcher 4 follows a pattern the gaming audience has seen enough times to name it. The Last of Us Part II replaced Joel. God of War: Laufey, announced at Sony’s State of Play this month, replaced Kratos with his deceased wife. Toy Story 5 is apparently Jessie’s movie while Woody and Buzz headlined the marketing. Andrew Stanton confirmed in a recent interview that Jessie was always his focus. The audience buys the ticket for the legacy character and gets the torch-passing.

It is worth noting that many key developers who built The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 have left to form Rebel Wolves, the studio currently developing Don Walker. Whether the team remaining at CD Projekt Red can deliver without them is a real question the Pride post does not address.

Smash JT made one observation worth noting: at least one of the Rebel Wolves founders is gay. His point was simple: “No one cares. Be gay all you want. Make a good game. At the end of the day, that’s all people care about.”

That is a reasonable standard. Witcher 4 will eventually have to meet it. The replies section of a Pride post is not where that case gets made.

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If the golden age of Trek and Babylon 5 left a hole in your sci-fi diet, The Stars Entwined fills it — interstellar espionage between two civilizations on the brink of war. Read The Stars Entwined on Amazon!

NEXT: The Auteur’s Trap: How Hideo Kojima Talked Himself Out of the Genre He Invented.

Hideo Kojima is an enigma worthy of his games.

For decades, players have dissected his work, debated its meaning, and hunted for clues hidden beneath layers of symbolism, political commentary, intricate gameplay and eccentric storytelling.

The deeper enigma was always the method: the fact that no one else could fuse stealth, systems, and spectacle the way he could, and move tens of millions of copies doing it.

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But somewhere along the way, Kojima fell into the trap that catches many celebrated auteurs. He began believing his own mythology. He decided the cinema was the point and the gameplay was the constraint, that the films buried inside his games were the real art and the systems were just scaffolding.

Enigmas lose their power once they’re solved because they become… predictable.

And that’s what happened to Hideo Kojima.

Let’s dive in.

On Physint

Consider his current project. In January 2024, Kojima stood on a PlayStation stage and announced a new game called Physint, a tactical-espionage action title built, in his own words, to recapture the kind of experience he made famous at Konami.

The most celebrated game director alive, free of corporate handlers, chose for his next major statement a return to stealth espionage.

The exact genre he abandoned a decade ago.

It is the cleanest evidence yet for a thesis legacy media would rather not print: somewhere between the Konami divorce and the A24 deal, the man who fused stealth and cinematic action into the most influential design language of his era stopped being a game designer who made films and became a filmmaker who tolerates games.

The rise was earned through systems

It is easy to forget now, but Kojima’s authority was earned through mechanics. Metal Gear Solid defined a generation because it shipped a playable idea: avoidance over confrontation, patience over twitch, at a level of polish nobody else had reached. The cinema sat on top of a genuinely novel systems foundation, and players spent the cutscenes waiting to get back to playing. Every stage was a challenge. Every boss was a puzzle to be solved.

The commercial record reflects that. The Metal Gear franchise has moved north of 60 million copies since 1987, with the core Solid line accounting for the lion’s share.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Kojima's swan song at Konami, sold roughly 6 million copies within months and remains one of the most ambitious open-world stealth sandboxes ever created. Remarkably, it achieved that status despite being unfinished, something Kojima himself later acknowledged.

Then came the event that shook the gaming industry to its core.

The break that everyone misread

The 2015 split with Konami has been canonized as a martyrdom. The studio was dissolved, his name was scrubbed from the box, he was barred from collecting Phantom Pain’s awards in person.

The industry decided that the suits had strangled an artist.

But the freedom narrative obscures a structural truth.

Konami functioned as a discipline as much as a leash, a publisher with a balance sheet that forced his auteurism to remain legible to a mass audience.

Freed from that constraint, Kojima gained creative freedom but lost the only counterweight that had kept his cinematic ambitions anchored to the craft he excelled at most: designing games.

What he built next was the proof.

Death Stranding: the cinema finally won

Death Stranding is the moment Kojima’s personal priorities became evident.

The gameplay (traversal, balance management, cargo logistics across empty terrain) is deliberately ambient.

The spine of the experience is hours of high-budget cutscene featuring Norman Reedus, Mads Mikkelsen, Léa Seydoux, and a supporting cast of arthouse-film royalty including Guillermo del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn.

This was a director using a game as a delivery vehicle for film, with the systems reduced to connective tissue between scenes.

He has never hidden it.

His most-quoted line, that the majority of his body is “made of movies,” got treated as charming self-deprecation when it was closer to a roadmap.

And here’s where the data starts to bite.

Death Stranding sold around 5 million units across PS4 and PC by March 2021, close to MGSV’s number but spread across more platforms and a far longer tail.

The headline figures Kojima Productions prefers to cite (10 million, 16 million, eventually 19 million “players”) are not sales figures at all. They are inflated by free copies given away on the Epic Games Store and by Game Pass and PlayStation Plus inclusion.

This is the kind of metric that sets off alarms: when a studio stops reporting copies sold and starts reporting "players," it's often because the sales numbers are less impressive than the narrative.

Remember Assassin’s Creed Shadows?

Alongside the game came the real tell: a partnership with A24, a live-action film adaptation, animated spinoffs, and an in-house film, TV, and music subsidiary.

Kojima Productions stopped describing itself as a game studio and started describing itself as a multimedia company.

The fall is a narrowing

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (2025) earned genuine acclaim.

It landed around 90 on Metacritic, sat among the best-reviewed games of the year, drew a 95% Steam rating, and became a legitimate Game of the Year contender.

By any critical measure, Kojima is more revered today than at any point in his career.

However, the fall lives in three places the The Game Awards narrative is manufactured to make you ignore: scale, dependence, and essence.

On scale: Death Stranding 2 had moved roughly 2 million copies by early 2026 and generated something in the range of $150 million across all platforms.

For most studios that is a fine result, but for the man whose franchise sold 60 million, it is a quiet collapse of commercial reach, from the architect of a mass-market genre to the proprietor of a beloved cult… a niche.

On dependence: look at who pays. Sony funded Death Stranding, its sequel, and now Physint. Microsoft funds his horror project, OD.

Kojima no longer competes in the open market for a mass audience; he is sustained by platform-holder prestige budgets, patronage extended for the cachet of his name rather than the size of his sales.

That is a fundamentally different financial position than the one he occupied at Konami, and a more fragile one.

Prestige patronage lasts exactly as long as the prestige does.

On essence: he walked away from the genre he invented. Stealth espionage, the playable idea that made him, sat dormant for a decade while he built walking simulators dressed as films, a genre he could still execute better than almost anyone but had simply stopped wanting to make.

Which brings us back to Physint

Physint is reportedly five to six years from release, targeting roughly 2030.

The early news out of the project is all about casting: Hollywood actors, performance capture, a villain written to evoke a specific film performance.

The mechanics and systems have barely been mentioned.

The development is being built film-first, again.

But the choice of genre is the part that gives the game away.

After a decade insisting the future was cinema, Kojima’s grand 40th-anniversary statement is a return to tactical stealth, the thing he had when his art and his commercial power were one and the same.

You do not reach back for an old tool unless you have started to suspect the new ones are not cutting.

That is the auteur’s trap, and Kojima walked straight into it: the talent that mistakes the medium it mastered for a stepping stone to a more “respectable” one.

He is the most decorated game director alive.

He is also a smaller commercial force than he was in 2015, kept aloft by patronage, circling back toward the genre he convinced himself he had outgrown.

The useful lesson here runs deeper than failure.

A generational talent can win every award and still lose the thing that made him dangerous in the first place.

The cutscenes were never the engine.

Kojima just talked himself into believing they were.

ONE LAST THING: The Forge by Yorch Torch Games is the leading newsletter on market intelligence and design strategy for the game industry. Consider becoming a free or paid subscriber for more articles like this.

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Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis is a full remake of the original 1996 game, rebuilt in Unreal Engine 5 by Flying Wild Hog with Crystal Dynamics oversight, published by Amazon Games. It launches February 12, 2027. New voice actress Alix Wilton Regan plays Lara Croft, replacing Camilla Luddington who voiced the character across three reboot games.

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In an interview with IGN published June 8, Wilton Regan was asked to describe her version of Lara in one word. Her answer was “unapologetic.” Then she explained what that means in practice.

“She’s so completely confident in herself, her abilities, her brain, her body, her being. She just doesn’t question herself. And I think, particularly as women, we spend a lot of time questioning ourselves. She doesn’t.”

Then she described who the game is for.

“One of the best feedback that we’ve had about this game and the people who are playing the demo is that the men are getting this confidence. This kind of Lara Croft charisma and sheen. It’s not just one for the women. It’s the girls. It’s the guys. It’s the gays.”

“The girls, the guys, the gays” has functioned as a progressive cultural signifier for years, a rhetorical construction that positions LGBTQ identity as a primary marketing audience while leaving straight men named only by implication. The framing reads as inclusive. Its function is to signal the ideological direction of the property to the communities the developers want to reach and, equally, to signal which audience is not being named.

That signal lands differently in the context of a franchise that spent fifteen years actively revising Lara Croft away from what she was.

The original Lara Croft, introduced in 1996, was one of gaming’s first unambiguously sexually confident female protagonists, a British aristocrat who combined physical danger with intelligence, sarcasm, and an appearance that was athletic and explicitly attractive. Her iconic look, the turquoise top, dual holsters, and ponytail, defined female character design in gaming for a generation.

The 2013 reboot by Crystal Dynamics stripped that away. The survival-horror Lara of Tomb Raider, Rise, and Shadow was deliberately vulnerable, grounded, and de-glamorized. The reboot trilogy sold across three entries but generated consistent audience commentary that the new Lara felt like a different character wearing the name.

Legacy of Atlantis follows the same track, with multiple fan communities on Reddit have praised the new design for combining classic Lara’s confidence and costume with modern visual fidelity. Modern is the key here.

The franchise has also expanded in other directions. Amazon’s Prime Video Tomb Raider series stars Sophie Turner as Lara Croft, with Phoebe Waller-Bridge as co-showrunner. When Turner was cast in September 2025, the initial reaction was skeptical. A first image released in January 2026 drew more mixed responses — the gear and weapons were recognizable, the casting question remained unresolved for many fans.

The game carries an additional controversy. Crystal Dynamics confirmed that AI-generated assets were used in Legacy of Atlantis’s production. The studio stated the AI assets have been removed or “refined,” but fans remain skeptical about what was AI-generated and whether the refinement is complete. The steelbook cover art drew specific scrutiny, with fans flagging visual artifacts consistent with AI generation. Crystal Dynamics has not specified which assets were affected or detailed what the refinement process involved.

The AI confirmation and the “girls, guys, and gays” framing arrive together. Lara Croft built thirty years of audience investment because she was a character who transcended demographics. Nobody marketed her to a list of identity groups. She was just compelling and people showed up.

The choice to market her remake using that specific phrase is a signal about whose enthusiasm the production is courting. The same publishers who made Wolverine for people unfamiliar with the X-Men, Masters of the Universe for an audience that didn’t show up, and God of War Laufey without the man whose name the franchise carries are now framing Lara Croft as a property assembled for a specific constituency.

Does the “girls, guys, and gays” framing change your plans for Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis? Let us know in the comments.

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When genetic engineering nearly doomed the species, humanity made a desperate bargain: let the frontier do what nature intended. In a harsh universe, these cadets have to make impossible decisions. Read Space Fleet Academy today.

NEXT: Stellar Blade: Blood Rain Protagonist Evie Divides Fans as CEO Defends Younger Design

Shift Up’s follow-up to its 2024 PS5 hit Stellar Blade launched its first controversy before anyone could play a single level. The reveal trailer for Stellar Blade: Blood Rain, dropped at Summer Game Fest on June 5, 2026, introduced new protagonist Evie, an android operative in a cyberpunk cityscape, and split the game’s fanbase within hours.

The original Stellar Blade built its audience the hard way. Released in April 2024, it earned a 9.3 Metacritic user score, the highest for any PS5 game at that time, and hit second place on the PlayStation Store’s best-sellers chart for the month. Players backed it through a contentious launch: a day-one patch had quietly altered several of protagonist Eve’s outfits, sparking the #FreeStellarBlade petition, which collected over 80,000 signatures, and a wave of Sony PlayStation Network cancellations. Shift Up eventually reversed the costume changes. The mainstream gaming press, led by outlets like Kotaku, covered the outcry with thinly veiled contempt. The audience bought the game anyway, and Kotaku laid off four staff members in the aftermath of that coverage cycle.

That audience is now the one asking questions about Evie.

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Asha Sharma’s first Xbox Games Showcase as CEO produced one concrete answer to the question the platform’s fanbase has been demanding for two years: Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution will be Xbox console exclusives. Not timed exclusives. Not multiplatform releases. Games made for Xbox that you need an Xbox to play.

Chief content officer Matt Booty spelled out the reasoning on Gamertag Radio after the showcase: “We want people to have a reason to get on board with Xbox. We want them to have a reason to buy an Xbox. A reason to be an Xbox fan.”

Sharma posted on X after the showcase: “We want people to choose XBOX because of great games and experiences. That also means giving you something that was made for XBOX. Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution will be XBOX console exclusives!”

The reversal is a direct response to documented fan pressure. When Sharma launched Xbox’s Player Voice forum to collect community feedback, the top request arrived with over 19,000 votes and 2,500 comments. It read: “Xbox was built off of great game exclusives. You cannot sell any consoles without a reason to buy the console compared to your competition or even sending your tentpole games over to your competitor. Bring them back please.”

Six thousand users responded in similar terms. The message was uniform: exclusives or irrelevance.

The previous strategy, sometimes called “This Is an Xbox,” argued that Xbox was a platform accessible anywhere — on Smart TVs, tablets, PC handhelds, and competing consoles. Xbox games showed up on PlayStation 5. The underlying pitch was that Xbox was a software ecosystem rather than a hardware destination. That campaign page has since been pulled offline, quietly vanishing from Xbox’s website sometime after Sharma took over.

Sharma was appointed from Microsoft’s AI division earlier this year with no gaming industry background. Her first internal memo warned staff of hard choices ahead and acknowledged that Game Pass subscriber growth had stalled after price increases. Sunday’s showcase was the first concrete output of her tenure.

Two confirmed exclusives and a strategic pivot statement are what the fanbase asked for and got. Whether that slice of the catalog is large enough and compelling enough to make someone choose Xbox over PlayStation or PC is the question the next three years will answer. Booty was also clear: “Our big multiplayer games, live-service games are going to continue to be multiplatform.” Call of Duty, Minecraft, and the live-service titles that generate the most revenue continue shipping everywhere. The exclusives pledge applies to Gears and Clockwork specifically.

The fans who submitted 19,000 votes got what they asked for. Now they find out if it is enough.

Was bringing back Xbox exclusives the right call? Let us know in the comments.

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When genetic engineering nearly doomed the species, humanity made a desperate bargain: let the frontier do what nature intended. In a harsh universe, these cadets have to make impossible decisions. Read Space Fleet Academy today.

NEXT: Masters Of The Universe Bombed And They Should Have Seen It Coming

The God of War Laufey trailer just dropped, reminding everyone of the franchise’s continued pull. Not long after, influencer and former journalist Alanah Pearce took to Instagram to reflect on her involvement, noting she spent four years writing for the project. It’s an impressive-sounding milestone for a former IGN journalist turned multi-role industry figure.

But context matters. Back in 2025, in case anyone was unaware, Pearce provided the most candid window yet into how she landed some of those early opportunities.

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Marvel’s Wolverine creative director Marcus Smith confirmed to Variety on June 3 that the X-Men do not exist in Insomniac’s version of the Marvel universe. “In our world, mutants aren’t really that well known throughout the world, so they’re mostly in hiding because they’re pretty vulnerable,” Smith explained. Instead of the X-Men, the game features a group called Team X, described as a globe-trotting group of mercenary mutants protecting others from capture.

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Team X is a real entity in Marvel Comics with thirty years of documented history. It is not a heroic organization. Team X was a covert ops CIA team — the original test subjects of the Weapon X program — whose members included Wolverine, Sabretooth, Maverick, Silver Fox, Mastodon, and Kestrel. These were government black ops mercenaries who were subsequently subjected to memory implants, healing factor experiments, and ultimately Weapon X’s adamantium bonding process. The Team X of Marvel Comics history is a trauma organization, not a heroic mutant protection squad. Its members were experimented on, psychologically manipulated, and weaponized by the state. Wolverine spent decades trying to recover the memories Team X stole from him.

Insomniac’s Team X is described as something structurally opposite — a protective organization of mercenary mutants saving others from capture. The name is borrowed from a dark chapter in Wolverine’s history and repurposed as a hero team. Whether this is creative reinvention or a choice made without full awareness of the source material’s connotations is not clarified by Smith’s interview.

What the community is focused on is not the comics history angle. It is the simpler observation: the game is called Wolverine. The X-Men have been removed from it. The word “men” has been eliminated from the franchise. In a game that already features Sweet Baby Inc. consulting involvement confirmed by the narrative director herself, that carries a specific signal.

Sweet Baby Inc. is confirmed on the project. Insomniac narrative director Mary Kenney publicly defended them in a 12-post X thread, calling them “one of the finest in the biz.” The original creative director Brian Horton departed mid-development. Jean Grey’s design was redesigned from earlier leaked versions that showed a more attractive character toward what fans describe as a deliberately de-glamorized appearance. The game’s director called Wolverine’s redesigned aesthetic an effort to avoid Logan appearing like a “sadist,” a characterization of the character’s canonical violence as a presentation problem to be managed rather than a feature of who he is.

Now the X-Men have been written out of the universe entirely and replaced with a team whose name in actual Marvel history belongs to a covert CIA black ops program that was the origin of Wolverine’s trauma.

The creative director’s framing for the absence of the X-Men is that mutants are mostly in hiding, making Professor Xavier’s school a premature institution in this timeline. That is a legitimate narrative choice for an origin-era Wolverine story. The question the FP audience is asking is not whether the X-Men can be narratively absent. It is whether the decision to name the replacement organization Team X — stripping “men” from the equation entirely and substituting a name that carries no heroic weight in the source material — reflects the same editorial priorities that Sweet Baby Inc.’s involvement and the Jean Grey redesign do.

Insomniac made the Wolverine game the existing fanbase wanted to see — then systematically adjusted it in the direction Sweet Baby Inc. and its consulting philosophy points. The absence of X-Men in a Wolverine game is not a deal-breaker. The accumulation of decisions is.

Does removing the X-Men from Insomniac’s Wolverine universe concern you about the game’s direction? Let us know in the comments.

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Kohei Ikeda, game director of Tekken 7 and Tekken 8, announced on June 1 that he has left Bandai Namco after 20 years. His statement: “I have officially left Bandai Namco Entertainment after many years with the company. Being surrounded by passionate and incredibly talented mentors and colleagues, and dedicating ourselves wholeheartedly to game development together, remains one of the most cherished experiences of my life. I have entrusted those values, and that baton, to the incredible team that will continue shaping the future of Tekken.”

Ikeda gave no reason for his departure.

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He did not need to. The community already knew the shape of the story. One widely-shared X post captured the fan response: “We have dumbass suits running the company that don’t spare a second thought to their fanbase. Harada aired his frustrations in the SoulCalibur post from like 1-2 years ago.”

Ikeda’s exit is the third high-profile departure from Tekken leadership in six months. Katsuhiro Harada, the series producer who had been the public face of Tekken for over thirty years, announced his departure from Bandai Namco in December 2025 after 31 years with the company. Harada’s farewell statement included: “Harada_TEKKEN is completely dead.” In May 2026, Harada announced he had formed VS Studio at SNK as its CEO. Ikeda was Harada’s handpicked successor to lead Tekken 8’s ongoing development. He has now followed Harada out the door.

That leaves only Michael Murray as the remaining senior figure with long-term franchise knowledge. Bandai Namco has not announced a replacement for Ikeda. The community is already speculating that Murray may be the next to announce a departure.

The story is similar to what we’re going through with a lot of brands as gamers. Tekken 8 divided its fanbase on launch. The game incorporated online monetization features the community resisted, introduced new characters that drew mixed reactions, and made design changes veterans of the series found unfamiliar. Harada, in statements made in the months before his departure, had made clear his frustrations with how the franchise was being managed at the executive level — frustrations that predated Tekken 8 and extended to decisions across Bandai Namco’s portfolio. His SoulCalibur comments, referenced in the community post, were widely read as a signal that the institutional priorities of Bandai Namco’s business leadership had diverged from what the creative team wanted to build.

The pattern extends well beyond Tekken. The last two years of the gaming industry have produced a consistent story across studios: the creative founders who built franchises from nothing depart, citing varying reasons, while corporate ownership retains the IP and the brand. Harada built Tekken over three decades. Stig Asmussen built the creative credibility behind Star Wars Jedi at Respawn and his Giant Skull studio’s D&D project was canceled by Hasbro before it was announced. Cory Barlog architected modern God of War and handed the franchise to a director the community is skeptical of. The people who know what the audience wants keep leaving. The suits, as the community put it, stay.

Bandai Namco’s statement at the time of Harada’s departure promised “more fights, more updates” for Tekken 8 throughout 2026. No creative vision was articulated. No replacement was named for Harada at the time. No replacement has been named for Ikeda now.

What does Tekken look like without the two people who made it what it is? Let us know in the comments.

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The second book of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto shifts the action from the open roads and waterways of the Kamigata to the warren of Tokugawa-era Tokyo, where the conspiracy runs deeper, the villains are closer, and nobody can be trusted. Two killers strike a deal over saké: one will murder the swordsman-monk Gennojō, the other will claim the woman he has been hunting since Osaka. Underground chambers, a great urban fire, a swordfight in total darkness on a plum-scented path, a deathbed confession that transforms a pickpocket, and a midnight ambush at Sensō-ji temple — this is the book where Yoshikawa Eiji earns his reputation as the Alexandre Dumas of Japan.

NEXT: Shadiversity And Midnight’s Edge Fight Over Whether Masters Of The Universe Is Woke

Marvel’s Wolverine from Insomniac Games releases September 15, 2026 on PlayStation 5. The State of Play gameplay reveal on June 2 should have been the cleanest possible moment for a game that has been in development since 2021. Instead it reignited a controversy that has been building around the project for over two years.

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The controversy has three documented components: Sweet Baby Inc. involvement confirmed by Insomniac’s own staff, the redesign of Jean Grey generating immediate fan backlash, and the pattern of a game titled Wolverine structuring itself around female characters at the expense of its own stated premise.

The Sweet Baby Inc. connection surfaced in early 2024 when the narrative consulting firm appeared in the game’s own development communications and on the firm’s own project list. Grummz documented the connection: “We know that Sweet Baby Inc. is involved with Marvel’s Wolverine. We know this because of Sweet Baby’s own tweets, and because a Narrative Director for Insomniac’s Wolverine game ran to the defense of SBI.”

That narrative director is Mary Kenney. Her public defense was not ambiguous. In a 12-post X thread in March 2024, she wrote: “Some of you don’t seem to understand how narrative consulting on games works, but don’t worry: I do! Yes this is about Sweet Baby, because I’ve worked with that team, and they’re one of the finest in the biz.”

Sweet Baby Inc. is the consulting firm whose involvement in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League preceded a $200 million loss for Warner Bros. The firm’s founder Kim Belair stated that SBI provides “Cultural Consultation, Sensitivity And Inclusivity Reading, Risk and Opportunities Assessment.” The firm’s website previously stated it was created as a place for women and “marginalized identities.” The gaming community’s concern about SBI’s involvement is not based on speculation. It is based on the documented track record of titles they consulted on.

The June 2 State of Play reveal added Jean Grey to the documented concerns. The reaction on X was swift and pointed. Fan account @Ronsaidwhatnow posted: “I was so right from the very beginning when I talked about Jean Grey being ugly from the leaked photos of Marvel’s Wolverine. Well, here she is now in the finished product, still ugly. What is it with modern game studios and their desire to make women so unattractive?”

@Kachinkastic posted a direct comparison: “Jean Grey in Marvel Rivals, made by Asian devs: beautiful, charming, gorgeous. Jean Grey in Marvel’s Wolverine, made by Western devs: visually ugly, Karen-style, looks like a man in women’s dresses... and some people still wonder why everyone currently prefers games made by Asian devs.”

@JohnnyMassacre went directly at the decision: “LMFAO DEI quota detected. ‘We must give significant run time to female ugly Jean Grey in a WOLVERINE game.’ Same representation quota as Oscar categories. This is a Wolverine game, not X-Men.”

@JoJo98476713 put the character-specific argument clearly: “We just want to see pretty women especially when you gonna play her or if she is an iconic character who is SUPPOSED TO BE PRETTY like Jean Grey. In Wolverine, all media included, it’s the worst she has ever looked.”

The Mystique redesign from the September 2025 trailer had generated the same reaction months earlier. Fans called the design off-model and unrecognizable. Insomniac’s response was to post a clown emoji pointing at critics. The studio that is defending a narrative director’s endorsement of a DEI consulting firm responded to character design criticism with mockery.

The Jean Grey problem amplifies the design complaint. This is a game called Wolverine. The franchise’s premise is built on one of comics’ most iconic male protagonists — a short, brutal, Canadian berserker who is defined by his violence, his pain, and his isolation. Jean Grey is a significant figure in Wolverine’s history, but this is his game. The decision to give her what fans are describing as “significant run time” reflects the same priority shift that produced a God of War entry without Kratos, a Horizon game where Aloy replaced any male perspective, and a Star Wars franchise where Luke Skywalker became a background figure.

Actress Debra Wilson has been confirmed in the cast as Callisto, one of the leaders of the Morlocks. Callisto is a legitimate X-Men character with comic book history — she leads the Morlock community of mutant outcasts who live underground and serves as a recurring antagonist and occasional ally to the X-Men. The character's inclusion is not invented for this game. What the community is noting, consistent with the broader pattern across Insomniac's Marvel titles, is that the confirmed cast is building toward a structure where a Black female authority figure and Jean Grey occupy significant narrative real estate in a game whose title belongs to Wolverine. Callisto as a character has decades of comics history. Her placement in the principal cast of a Wolverine solo game, alongside an elevated Jean Grey role, reflects the same structural priority the community has catalogued across multiple Insomniac titles.

The original creative director Brian Horton, who had been on the project since its 2021 announcement, departed mid-development. The game shipping without its founding creative director, with Sweet Baby Inc. confirmed as a consultant, with a narrative director who publicly champions that consulting firm, and with a Jean Grey design that the game’s own audience is comparing unfavorably to competing titles made by studios without the same ideological infrastructure is not a random collection of events.

The game releases September 15. The FP audience will watch whether the finished product reflects all of these warning signs or whether Insomniac delivered the brutal Wolverine game its own marketing promised.

Does the Sweet Baby Inc. involvement change whether you plan to buy Marvel’s Wolverine? Let us know in the comments.

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NEXT: God of War Replaced Kratos With His Wife, And The Man Who Created the Franchise Called It “Dead”

Sony’s PlayStation State of Play on June 2 closed with a 23-minute gameplay reveal for God of War: Laufey. Kratos is not in it. For the first time in 21 years, the franchise built on the Ghost of Sparta has a different protagonist. Faye, Kratos’ second wife, Atreus’ mother, who died before the 2018 God of War even began and whose funeral pyre opens that game, is now the playable character.

David Jaffe, who created God of War in 2005 and directed the first two entries in the series, watched the reveal on a live stream and did not soften his reaction.

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