Pride Month arrived and Apogee Entertainment put a rainbow on their logo. Gaming influencer Yorch Torch Games noticed and posted: “Apogee Entertainment is now sporting a Pride Month logo. Terribly, terribly disappointing, especially considering that much of Apogee’s fan base consists of fathers. The home of Commander Keen, Duke Nukem and Raptor has now officially been hijacked by the woke mob.”

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Jeron Moore, who heads development at Apogee, responded publicly: “As a gay man who heads up development here at Apogee, I love that we take this month to celebrate the broad spectrum of differences that make our games what they are. Our queer employees and contractors — yes, we exist — bring invaluable perspectives to our titles, enjoyed by all walks of life. My own father isn’t with us anymore, but if he were, I know he’d be incredibly proud of me, and what we’re doing as a studio. I rest easy knowing plenty of fathers stand in our corner. But hey, hang in there, June will be over in no time.”

When it was then pointed out that Pride Month is fundamentally about sexual identity and lifestyle, Moore responded: “Bruh… I think you’re the only one equating a rainbow logo with bedroom talk… that’s just goofy. Let’s stay focused on the actual talking points of the thread rather than the discourse you’re imagining. Have a good one.”

The dismissal is a standard deflection. A Pride logo is explicitly a symbol of sexual and gender identity advocacy. Describing it as simply “celebrating differences” and then mocking critics for noticing what the symbol represents is the rhetorical move every company makes when its audience pushes back on activist branding. The symbol means exactly what it means. Calling the audience goofy for reading it accurately does not change what it means.

On top of it, he then further replied by doubling down to virtue signal to pretty much every minority demogrpahic, “Ask any minority how the struggles of navigating the world have sharpened their perspective, expanded their worldview, and brought unique value to their work. Overcoming challenges breeds resilience and innovative problem-solving. To minimize or discount that lived experience is the real hollow perspective here. @BlackinGamin @gaygamingpro @AsiansInGame @LatinosinGaming”

The context of who Apogee is, and where their money comes from, makes the posture more interesting.

Apogee Software was founded in 1987 by Scott Miller in Garland, Texas. The company developed and published Commander Keen, Duke Nukem, Shadow Warrior, and Raptor: Call of the Shadows, and served as publisher for early id Software titles including Wolfenstein 3D. This was the shareware era — Apogee pioneered the model of distributing the first episode of a game for free and selling the rest by mail order, a commercial innovation that funded the entire early PC gaming industry. The games were hard, fast, violent, and aimed squarely at the teenage boys who were the demographic backbone of PC gaming in the early 1990s. Nobody was putting rainbow logos on the Duke Nukem press materials.

The company went through multiple ownership changes and identity shifts over the decades. It relaunched as Apogee Entertainment in 2021, repositioning as a publisher of indie games. In January 2022, the company took a $5 million Series A investment from eWTP Capital. eWTP Capital is headquartered in Beijing, China. That is Apogee’s only confirmed institutional investor. The company that made its name publishing games for American teenage boys is currently operating on Chinese capital.

The recent publishing track record reflects a studio that is not finding commercial traction. Apogee’s post-relaunch catalog includes Turbo Kid, Batora: Lost Haven, Ripout, Rauniot, and several smaller titles, a lineup of modest indie releases that have not generated the kind of cultural presence the original Apogee name once commanded. The 2022 announcement framed the eWTP investment as funding to “expand staff and business portfolio” and to support “discovering new indie studios and nurturing their international success.” The international success has not materialized at a scale that would justify the nostalgia attached to the brand.

This is the pattern. A company with legacy credibility built on games that spoke directly to a specific audience rebrands for a new era, takes investment from a Chinese fund, staffs up with activists who publicly tell the legacy audience their concerns are “goofy,” and then wonders why that audience has moved on. The original Apogee did not need a Pride logo to build its fanbase. It needed Commander Keen and Duke Nukem. The new Apogee has the logo. The games are not in the same conversation as what built the name.

Moore’s response to the criticism is confident. That confidence might be easier to maintain when the games are selling. June will be over in no time. The audience that built Apogee will remember whether the games were worth coming back for, regardless of what logo was on the website while they were waiting.

What do you think about companies with legacy gaming brands using activist branding on their audience? Let us know in the comments.

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NEXT: Bungie Is Killing Destiny 2 To Fund a Game Nobody Wanted An Players Are Review Bombing It In Protest

Bungie announced the final content update for Destiny 2 on June 9, 2026. Active development ends that day. No Destiny 3 is planned. The studio is pivoting entirely to Marathon, its new PvP extraction shooter, which launched in March 2026 to approximately 12,000 concurrent Steam users at peak.

The anger from the Destiny 2 community is the story.

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Players are flooding Marathon’s Steam page with negative reviews as a direct protest against Bungie’s decision to kill Destiny 2 while redirecting the studio’s resources to a game the community did not ask for. One review read: “Destiny Series is better.” Another: “Destiny Died for this game to fail.”

Destiny 2 launched in September 2017 and ran for nearly nine years. The final update, called “Moment of Triumph,” is styled as a love letter to the playerbase. After June 9, the game enters maintenance mode: no new story content, no seasonal activities, no crossovers. Servers remain online indefinitely in a legacy state similar to the original Destiny, which still runs today.

Sony Interactive Entertainment recorded a $765 million impairment loss related to Bungie assets. No Destiny 3 is in development. Staff who worked on Destiny 2 have no confirmed new project to move to. Sources told Bloomberg that some developers pitched new concepts and received no green light.

The trajectory of Bungie under Sony ownership is the fuller context. Sony acquired Bungie in 2022 for $3.6 billion, valuing it on the strength of Destiny 2’s live service revenue and the studio’s ability to produce future titles. Sony has not disclosed Marathon’s sales figures since its March 2026 launch, which is not the behavior of a company proud of its numbers. The $765 million impairment loss is a formal accounting acknowledgment that Sony paid significantly more for Bungie than the studio turned out to be worth.

The Destiny 2 players bearing the cost of that corporate miscalculation are the ones who spent years grinding raids, purchasing seasonal content, and building characters in a game that vaulted content they had already paid for when it no longer served the engagement model. Bungie’s 2023 content vault removed entire paid expansions from the game’s playable catalog, reducing the game’s content without reducing the price of admission. The players who stayed through all of it are now watching the studio kill their game to fund an extraction shooter that peaked at 12,000 concurrent players.

A petition calling for Destiny 3 has gathered over 285,000 signatures. Sources say there is no chance of reversing the shutdown or initiating a sequel.

The review bombing of Marathon is not a productive act. It will not change Bungie’s decision, and it punishes a product for the business decisions of its parent studio. But it is an accurate expression of what happens when a live service game spends years training its audience to invest time and money into an ecosystem, then dismantles that ecosystem to fund a replacement the audience rejected.

What do you think Bungie should have done differently to preserve the Destiny community’s trust? Let us know in the comments.

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NEXT: Gaming’s Biggest Annual Event Has a Gayming Pride Parade This Year

Summer Game Fest 2026 runs June 5 through 8, broadcasting from the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. Around 40 games are expected at the main showcase on June 5, with confirmed or rumored appearances including GTA 6, Marvel’s Wolverine gameplay, Gears of War: E-Day, Phantom Blade Zero, The Witcher 4, Naughty Dog’s Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, Blood of the Dawnwalker, and Lara Croft: Legacy of Atlantis. The main broadcast will run approximately two hours, hosted by Geoff Keighley and Lucy James.

The games being shown are the games the audience came for. The programming architecture built around them is a different conversation.

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The full Summer Game Fest weekend schedule includes: Black Voices in Gaming on June 2, PlayStation State of Play on June 2, Women-Led Games Showcase on June 4, Latin American Games Showcase on June 4, Access-Ability Summer Showcase on June 5, Day of the Devs on June 5, Southeast Asian Games Showcase on June 6, Wholesome Direct on June 6, Story Rich Showcase on June 6, Green Games Showcase on June 6, Gayming Pride Parade on June 6, Future Games Show on June 6, and the Xbox Games Showcase on June 7.

The Gayming Pride Parade is described as “a virtual experience featuring LGBTQ+ games and the talented people behind them,” produced by the Gayming Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to uplifting LGBTQ+ workers and communities in the games industry. Robin Gray, Executive Director of the Gayming Foundation, described the showcase’s purpose: “At a time when LGBTQ+ causes and arts organizations across the country are seeing support and funding disappear, it’s more important than ever to uplift queer voices and creativity.”

The timing of that statement is worth noting. Gray’s framing explicitly positions the Gayming Pride Parade as a response to what she describes as disappearing LGBTQ+ funding support, suggesting the showcase carries a political argument alongside its game announcements. The Gayming Foundation is also partnering with the Gayming Awards on June 8, creating what the organization calls “a full week-long celebration of LGBTQ+ excellence in gaming” wrapped around the industry’s biggest annual event.

None of the identity-segmented showcases are the main event. They are the programming surrounding the main event. But their presence as official SGF programming, growing in number year over year, reflects how the gaming industry has structured its public-facing infrastructure. The showcase that shows players GTA 6 and Marvel’s Wolverine is also the showcase that treats identity-based programming blocks as standard operating procedure for its surrounding weekend.

The contrast with what players are actually waiting to see is not subtle. GTA 6 leads the most-anticipated reveals. Gears of War: E-Day has its own dedicated Xbox Direct. Marvel’s Wolverine is the confirmed PlayStation State of Play headliner. These are games built around violence, action, and masculine protagonists that have driven gaming’s commercial engine for decades. The showcase wraps them in a week of identity programming and calls the combination a celebration of the industry’s diversity.

The gaming audience knows what it came for. The question is how long the industry’s events infrastructure keeps treating the audience’s actual interests as a delivery mechanism for messaging the audience did not ask for.

What are you most hoping to see at Summer Game Fest? Let us know in the comments.

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Return to the World of John Carter with this pulpy action epic by Batman writer Chuck Dixon. What happens to Barsoom a thousand years after John Carter? Find out by reading today.

NEXT: 007 First Light: When 88 Metacritic Isn’t Enough

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Dragon Quest XII was originally announced in 2021 with a different subtitle: The Flames of Fate, and a logo in a much different, darker style. It was promised at the time to have a “darker, more mature game” aimed more at adults, a clash of style compared to the series usual light-hearted tone. Since its initial announcement, news about the game went completely silent until Wednesday, May 27th, 2026.

On the 40th anniversary of the series, a nine-minute announcement video dropped with series creator Yuji Horii and executive producer Yosuke Saito thanking fans for supporting the series over the course of the past 40 years. However, they acknowledge that the production of Dragon Quest XII: The Flames of Fate was “hit a lot of hurdles along the way.” Part of this is development team restructuring and realizing that the original vision for the game did not meet what they felt a mainline Dragon Quest game should look like.

It cannot be overstated that part of the issues with the development team were the deaths of series composer Kochi Sugiyama and series artist Akira Toriyama (creator of Dragonball). Due to team restructuring and the belief that the game was not in line with the vision for what a mainline game in the series should be, development was scrapped and restarted, though Horii states that the designs by Akira Toriyama and the music by Kochi Sugiyama will both be present.

As said by Executive Producer Yosuke Saito, “It was a major decision, but I believe it was the right one to ensure the next Dragon Quest game will be one that all you fans of the series will really love.”

Part of the change resulting from the restart was a new logo and subtitle: Dragon Quest: Beyond Dreams.

The announcement from the creators was followed by a short trailer showcasing the game’s world, character designs, and visual aesthetic that greatly resembles Akira Toriyama’s signature light-hearted fantasy designs. All the while, the classic Dragon Quest theme plays. No gameplay was shown, as we now know the game has returned to the early stages of development.

Series creator Yuji Horii divulged about Dragon Quest XII: “It's the story of a young hero who’s haunted by strange visions in their sleep. What lies beyond dreams? Surely not a world of darkness, but a bright and exciting future. The game has gone in a different direction than the one we originally announced.”

No release date has been announced, nor which systems the game will be for. Another installment of the Dragon Quest side series “Dragon Quest Monsters: The Withered World” was also announced with no release date, though the developers hope to release it before Dragon Quest XII.

LINK TO ANNOUNCEMENT TRAILER:

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NEXT: 007 First Light: When 88 Metacritic Isn’t Enough

Critical praise doesn’t guarantee commercial success.

The games industry recently experienced a shocking lesson when Mixtape, heralded by IGN as an indie ‘masterpiece’ and earning a 10/10 review couldn’t even reach 5k concurrent players on Steam.

The new James Bond game after 13 years of interactive hiatus was also met with glowing reviews.

Vice called it “The best James Bond game since GoldenEye”

Video Games Chronicle called it “a bona fide 007 Classic” and it “might just be the best James Bond game ever”.

GameSpot celebrated with “007 First Light Could Be 2026’s Game Of The Year And The Best Bond Game Ever”

This is the part where, in any normal release cycle, the publisher gets to take a victory lap. That isn’t what’s happening.

I even called it on my Substack:

And here’s why IO Interactive missed the mark…

What Analysts Started Seeing

Two days before launch, Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad posted a single observation on X that should have stopped every conversation about the game’s critical reception:

“Opening sales aren’t tracking well atm so they’re trying to market it in unique ways. They’ve run an old school marketing campaign so far that wasn’t getting much traction outside of people who grew up with Bond.”

He then added 007 First Light is tracking closer to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle than to Uncharted.

Yes, 007 First Light is tracking closer to Indiana Jones adapted for the modern audience than Uncharted.

The marketing pivot tells you IO Interactive saw this coming. In the final week before launch, the studio voluntarily spoiled a TikTok influencer cameo, Khaby Lame, followed by the reveal that YouTuber Jacksepticeye plays a nightclub employee.

That’s evidence of a studio lacking confidence in its opening bookings.

That’s IO Interactive trying to manufacture reach with whatever tools are still available at launch.

James Bond Is Not Pokemon

Here’s what no one in the games press is willing to say: the James Bond IP is not the asset IO Interactive/Square Enix Europe’s financial and marketing teams assumed it was.

The Bond franchise is one of the most valuable IPs in entertainment history. It has run for 60+ years. It has crossed generations.

But all of this may lead to a mistaken assumption, that the Bond audience exists as a unified, transferable consumer base ready to buy whatever Bond product gets put in front of them.

The market just demonstrated, in real time, that this assumption is wrong.

Bond’s audience is fragmented across three groups, and IO is making a different bet on each one:

Group one: The core Bond fans. They know the franchise inside and out. They are older, which in consumer goods analysis means they have more disposable income. This is the cohort that buys a $70 game without thinking about it. They would buy a Bond game on reflex, especially since it’s been almost 14 years since the last one. But an origin story with modern undertones is precisely the one variant of a Bond product they have no interest in. That’s a massive problem because IO Interactive built the exact configuration of Bond this group would never buy.

Group two: Bond film viewers under 40. This is the group IO Interactive needs and is failing to convert. They watched Bond with their parents. They saw the Craig films. They do not feel a standing relationship with the franchise, but they will buy a Bond game if it looks essential. First Light does not look essential to them, because First Light is a reboot promising something yet to come. The Bond this audience already knows… finished, lethal, fully formed, is sitting on the shelf in the films. Asking them to invest in a Bond who hasn’t arrived yet, when the Bond they recognize is already available, inverts the value proposition.

Group three: The action-adventure audience that doesn't care about Bond at all. This is the audience that buys cinematic third-person action games on the strength of the genre, not the brand. The fact that First Light isn't reaching them tells you the Bond brand is functioning as a filter, not an amplifier… it's narrowing the addressable market, not widening it.

When one of the most valuable IPs in your category is making your total addressable market smaller instead of larger… you have a liability.

The Origin Story Problem

There is a deeper structural error underneath the marketing problem, and it’s the one that should worry IO Interactive most.

This distinction is one of the most important questions in franchise economics, and almost every studio gets it wrong eventually.

Some characters earn their commercial power from the journey toward who they will become. Spider-Man’s origin works because Peter Parker’s powerlessness is the engine of the story. Luke Skywalker’s origin works because the audience wants to watch him become a Jedi. Harry Potter’s origin works because he’s discovering the Wizarding World while learning magic. Neo works because he takes the red pill to find out how deep the rabbit hole goes, even if he’s not sure he’s the One.

These are characters whose narratives are formed by the gap between who they are and who they will become.

Bond is the opposite kind of character. The audience does not show up to watch a young man learn to be competent. The audience shows up because Bond is already the most lethal, most charming, most composed operator in the room. The tuxedo is on. The Martini has been served shaken, not stirred. The woman has been seduced.

Bond’s value to the consumer is the power fantasy of unflappable mastery… and an origin story is, by definition, the fantasy of not having that mastery yet.

The Casino Royale defense is the one every executive reaches for here, and it doesn’t survive inspection. Casino Royale was a tonal reboot, not a literal origin. Craig’s Bond was already a fully formed lethal operative in his first scene. The film’s ‘origin’ was earning the double-O, a credential, not learning competence.

First Light is the literal version. A reckless recruit in MI6’s training program. According to IO Interactive’s own marketing director, this is a Bond who “is good at fighting, and he’s good at guns, but he still needs to train on those things.”

That’s a brand dilution event.

Add to that a cast of characters that looks more like an HR diversity checklist, where every scene resembles every other modern entertainment product, and you end up with a James Bond game suffering from a severe lack of identity.

Closing Thoughts

What makes this situation remarkable is that IO Interactive may have learned a painful lesson that prestige reviews, legacy IP, and cinematic production values are no longer enough to guarantee mass market appeal, yet alone conversion.

The modern games market is brutally efficient at identifying what consumers actually want versus what the industry assumes they should want.

And right now, consumers are signaling something very clearly:

They do not want a vulnerable Bond.
They do not want a Bond in training.
They do not want the fantasy of someday becoming 007.

They want James Bond.

Not the process.
Not the blueprint.
Not the internship.

The finished man.

That is why the late-stage influencer pivot feels so revealing. It was recognition that the traditional marketing campaign failed to expand beyond aging Bond loyalists and failed to convince younger players this was a must-play event.

The irony is that IO Interactive probably had the right studio for the wrong interpretation of the character. Hitman works because Agent 47 already embodies total professional mastery. He enters every room as the most composed and dangerous man in the building. That fantasy aligns perfectly with Bond’s core appeal.

But instead of adapting Bond at the height of his myth, they attempted to reconstruct the myth itself.

And consumers looked at it and asked the most dangerous question any entertainment product can face:

“Why would I want this version?”

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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007 First Light releases May 27, one week from today. It is the first major James Bond video game since 007 Legends in 2012 and is published by Amazon MGM Studios — the same company that owns the Bond film IP and just announced its casting search for Bond 26. The game has been in development since 2020. It is built by IO Interactive, the makers of the Hitman franchise. And in the week of its release, its cinematics director told the press that classic Bond behavior would be “tone deaf” in the modern era.

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The quotes came from Martin Emborg, IO Interactive’s cinematics director, in a pre-release interview. “He’s evolved through the decades, and obviously, we reflect modern values. So it’s not going to be your old school Bond, which would just be tone deaf in this day, right? He’s a modern guy.”

And on what specifically falls away from the classic character: “It’s been going on for 60 years. So it’s our time to look at this character and see what does it take to save the world in 2026? And some things fall by the wayside and some things are more important than ever.”

The PC Gamer article covering this framed the headline as: Bond “(probably) won’t be a sexist, misogynist dinosaur.” The subheading: “Don’t expect any ‘Christmas only comes once a year’ cracks in this one.” The author described classic Bond’s treatment of women as “furniture from Ikea” and approvingly summarized Emborg’s comments as confirmation that the game would sand down the character’s edges for contemporary sensibilities.

Emborg hedged his statement with reassurances. He confirmed “beautiful women are there” in the game, that Bond is “a young man, he’s got game, and he’s very cool,” and that he knows “people are worried about that kind of thing” but urged them to wait and play before judging. The game will not be entirely stripped of Bond’s identity. But the framework Emborg chose to describe the creative decisions is the framework of removal — old-school Bond behavior is “tone deaf,” certain things “fall by the wayside,” and the character now “reflects modern values.”

Fandom Pulse covered the Bond franchise’s trajectory earlier this month. The official 2023 Bond novel On His Majesty’s Secret Service framed a room full of competent men with no diversity quotas as evidence of villainy. Amazon’s casting search for Bond 26 is underway. The Bond IP across every medium is moving in the same direction: the confidence, the sexuality, the masculine self-assurance that defined the character across six decades are being systematically reclassified as problems to be managed rather than features to be celebrated.

The game stars Patrick Gibson as a 26-year-old Bond described as “a young, resourceful and sometimes reckless recruit in MI6’s training program.” Lenny Kravitz plays the villain, a character described as “a wild, unpredictable pirate ruler of Africa’s biggest black market hub.” The game was delayed from March to May 27 for additional polish. It launches on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC, and Nintendo Switch 2. Amazon MGM Studios is publishing it.

The Steam community’s response to the “modern values” comments was immediate. Multiple users removed the game from their wishlists and posted cancellations of planned purchases, with one writing: “Removed from wishlist, no pre-order, no day 1, no full price ever.” The game’s Steam discussion forums have run active threads on the controversy since December 2025 when Emborg’s earlier “modern values” comments first circulated.

Ian Fleming created James Bond in 1953 as a specific kind of man: cold, precise, sexually confident, and operating entirely outside the moral framework of civilian life. The character’s relationship with women was not incidental to his identity. It was part of the portrait of a man who lived without attachment, without sentiment, and without the social constraints that governed ordinary people. That portrait has been complicated, softened, and interrogated across sixty years of films and novels. Daniel Craig’s era made it the explicit subject of the story. None of that required a cinematics director to call the source material “tone deaf” in a press interview the week of release.

Emborg’s language is the tell. Not “we made different creative choices” or “we wanted to explore a different side of the character.” The old Bond would be “tone deaf.” Some things “fall by the wayside.” The framing is not neutral creative evolution. It is the same language used to describe the elimination of content deemed unacceptable rather than the transformation of content into something new.

Amazon owns the Bond IP. Amazon published this game. Amazon is casting Bond 26. The official Bond novels have been staffed with writers who frame conservative men as villains. The gaming adaptation has a cinematics director who calls classic Bond behavior “tone deaf” in the release week press cycle.

The character Ian Fleming created is being disassembled across every medium simultaneously. The game releases in seven days.

What does Bond need to be in 2026 that still earns the name? Let us know in the comments.

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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: Amazon Confirms Bond 26 Casting Search As A Recent Official Novel Treats Conservatives As The Villain

Warhorse Studios confirmed today on X what the rumor mill had been circulating for months. The studio behind Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is developing two new projects simultaneously: an open world Middle-earth RPG and a new Kingdom Come adventure. The announcement was brief by design. “You might have heard the rumours, it’s time to reveal what we are working on,” the studio posted. “We’re excited to tell you more when the time is right.”

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CI Games announced today that it has signed a separation agreement with Epic Games Publishing, dissolving the exclusive PC distribution deal the two companies struck in June 2024. Lords of the Fallen II will self-publish across all platforms on launch, with PLAION continuing as the global physical distribution partner. The game remains on track for release in 2026 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.

The full announcement from CI Games reads:

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“Independent developer CI Games today announced that it has signed a separation agreement with Epic Games Publishing. As a result, CI Games has regained full open distribution rights for the PC version of Lords of the Fallen II, moving away from the previous PC-exclusive publishing arrangement signed in June 2024. Lords of the Fallen II remains scheduled to launch later this year on PC via Epic Games Store and other PC storefronts, as well as on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. CI Games will self-publish the title across all platforms, while PLAION continues as the global physical distribution partner. CI Games will continue to utilise Epic’s technologies, including Unreal Engine 5 and Epic Online Services (EOS), powering cross-platform play, matchmaking, friends list, and seamless shared-progression co-op.”

“Like many in the industry, CI Games faced challenging market conditions in 2023 and 2024, and Epic Games provided significant funding and strategic support that helped ensure Lords of the Fallen II could fully realise its ambitions. This partnership enabled CI Games to meaningfully expand upon community feedback from the original Lords of the Fallen, while substantially advancing the sequel across gameplay, technical performance, world design, and online functionality. ‘Epic was there for CI Games exactly when we needed them most.”

“Their support and belief in the project made a real difference, and for that we are truly grateful,’ said Marek Tymiński, CEO of CI Games. ‘Epic has been an outstanding supporter of Lords of the Fallen II. With Unreal Engine, EOS and the rest of Epic’s world-class technologies, we’re going to ship a performant game in a massive world that players can explore together across PC and console.’ With the new agreement now in place, Lords of the Fallen II will launch with open PC distribution on day one, including the Epic Games Store.”

The announcement is diplomatic. The timeline is not. The separation agreement was signed on April 14, 2026. CI Games disclosed it to the public on May 18. The company justified the delay by stating that immediate disclosure “could have prejudiced the Company’s legitimate interests” during the period when the agreement was conditional. What changed between April 14 and the public announcement is not specified.

The practical outcome is straightforward: Lords of the Fallen II is now expected to launch on Steam alongside the Epic Games Store on day one, which is what the game’s PC audience wanted from the moment the Epic exclusivity deal was announced in 2024. Epic’s exclusivity arrangement had granted the company worldwide distribution rights for the PC version across the “entire product lifecycle,” terms that would have locked Steam’s substantially larger PC player base out of the game permanently at launch.

The reversal sits awkwardly alongside CEO Marek Tymiński’s public statements. As recently as December 2025, Tymiński posted on X that the “majority of PC players who want a specific game will buy it on Epic if it’s exclusive there.” Four months later his company tore up the exclusivity deal.

The numbers tell the story. The original Lords of the Fallen shipped in 2023 and reached 2.5 million sales worldwide as of March 2026, finally recouping its $80.45 million development and marketing budget after two and a half years. CI Games needed the sequel to perform faster. Locking the PC version to the Epic Games Store for its entire commercial life was a direct obstacle to that goal. Epic’s platform does significant volume on Fortnite and free game giveaways. Soulslike RPGs from mid-tier studios are not its traffic drivers. Steam is where the Soulslike audience actually buys games.

A CI Games designer’s portfolio inadvertently suggested an August 2026 launch window, with Summer Game Fest on June 5 the likely venue for a formal release date announcement.

The Epic Games Store exclusivity era for third-party titles appears to be contracting. Several high-profile exclusivity arrangements have ended or failed to renew in 2025 and 2026 as developers assess whether the funding offset justifies the audience limitation. CI Games took Epic’s money when it needed it in 2024, shipped a better game because of it by Tymiński’s own account, and then walked out the door the moment the contract permitted.

The FP audience playing Soulslike games on Steam should mark their wishlists now.

Does day-one Steam availability change your plans for Lords of the Fallen II? Let us know in the comments.

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NEXT: Japan Rejects Nintendo’s Touchscreen Monster-Catching Patent as the Palworld Case Keeps Costing Nintendo Millions

The Japan Patent Office this week rejected Nintendo’s latest patent application targeting touchscreen monster-catching gameplay, the third time the office has pushed back against Nintendo’s effort to wall off fundamental game mechanics through the patent system.

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Subnautica 2 sold two million copies in its first twelve hours of Early Access and peaked at 651,000 concurrent players across Steam, Epic, and Xbox, one of the largest Early Access launches in gaming history. Days later, the conversation has shifted entirely to the game’s End User License Agreement, and Unknown Worlds has confirmed it is reviewing player feedback on the terms.

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The backlash started with a single Steam review. A user going by Spexceptional posted a detailed breakdown of approximately 40 clauses in the EULA before refunding the game. The review went viral across Reddit, Steam discussions, and social media, with players accusing Krafton of including overly aggressive and anti-consumer terms. Negative reviews flooded Steam. EU players filed reports with consumer protection agencies. Steam discussion forums ran dozens of active threads dissecting specific clauses.

The most inflammatory terms, drawn from Steam reviews and the actual EULA text, break down as follows. Streamers and content creators cannot publish recordings, screenshots, or gameplay footage without a disclaimer that the content is not supported by Krafton. Monetized content is prohibited outright. Krafton reserves the right to revoke access to the game at any time for any reason without prior notice. The publisher claims the right to remote access the game at any time without direct user consent. The agreement covers collection of personal data including full legal name, email, physical address, phone number, and date of birth, with clauses permitting transfer of that data to third parties including marketing agencies and cloud services. There is no guarantee that collected data is protected or anonymized. Players waive the right to participate in class action lawsuits against Krafton. Dispute resolution runs through arbitration in California exclusively. Using a VPN is prohibited. Playing the game on more than one device requires purchasing an additional license. Any action that “tarnishes the reputation of Krafton” constitutes grounds for license termination.

The industry-standard defense exists and is not wrong. Every digital game sold on Steam operates on a license basis, not an ownership transfer. That clause is enforced by Valve’s own storefront terms, not invented by Krafton. Forced arbitration clauses appear in tens of millions of consumer agreements every year, including home appliances and mobile phone contracts. The streaming disclaimer requirement is restrictive but not uncommon among publishers who want their Early Access messaging controlled. Some of the more alarming-sounding data provisions are boilerplate that courts in democratic countries have consistently declined to enforce.

That defense does not hold for the full document. EU players filing consumer complaints have identified specific GDPR violations. The EULA requires blanket consent to data collection, including postal addresses and phone numbers, as a mandatory prerequisite to play, with no granular opt-in mechanism and no alternative for players who refuse. Under GDPR Article 7, consent obtained under these conditions is not legally “freely given” and is therefore invalid. The clause claiming automatic, royalty-free, exclusive ownership of all user-generated content including modifications sits in direct conflict with EU copyright law. The European Court of Justice’s ruling in UsedSoft v. Oracle established that a digital purchase made via one-time payment cannot be reduced to a revocable license under EU consumer protection law. Several of these terms are likely unenforceable in Europe regardless of what the EULA says.

One detailed technical review found four parallel telemetry pipelines active at launch, with silent account creation occurring at Krafton, Epic, and a proprietary player service simultaneously. Players who purchased Subnautica 2 during Early Access received an opened Krafton account, an active Epic session, and a numeric player ID generated without being informed or asked.

The Krafton context makes all of this land worse than it would from a neutral publisher. This is the same company that fired the Unknown Worlds leadership team to avoid paying a $250 million contractual bonus, used ChatGPT to strategize around the payment, lost in court, and was subsequently removed from the game’s own Steam publisher listing. Krafton is not a company that has earned the benefit of the doubt on its intentions toward players. When a clause prohibits any action that “tarnishes the reputation of Krafton,” the response from players who watched the CEO lawsuit unfold in public is not going to be charitable.

Unknown Worlds has noted it is reviewing player feedback on the EULA. That is the right response. The game itself is receiving strong reviews. The core experience holds up. The EULA is a separate problem, and it is a problem the studio did not create. This document arrived with Krafton’s fingerprints on it, in a game that Krafton tried to sabotage and still legally owns despite losing operational control. ScreenRant

The players buying Subnautica 2 are rooting for Unknown Worlds. Most of the negative EULA reviews say it explicitly: the game is good, Krafton is the problem. One Steam review captures the sentiment directly: “Negative review is more of a message towards Krafton than it is towards the game. I hope Unknown Worlds all the best.” Thegeek

Unknown Worlds should revise the EULA, strip the terms that exceed industry standard, and publish a clear statement on data collection practices. The game deserves to be judged on what it is, not on the legal document Krafton attached to it.

Did the Subnautica 2 EULA affect your decision to buy the game? Let us know in the comments.

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NEXT: Subnautica 2 Sells 2 Million Copies in 12 Hours After the CEO Krafton Tried to Fire Got His Job Back

Subnautica 2 launched into Early Access on May 15 and sold one million copies in its first hour. By the 12-hour mark the number had reached two million. PC Gamer noted that the scenario Krafton humiliated itself to avoid now appeared to be coming true very quickly.

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The backstory is one of the cleaner corporate villain narratives in recent gaming history. Krafton, the South Korean publisher that acquired Unknown Worlds Entertainment in 2021, fired CEO Ted Gill and co-founders Charlie Cleveland and Max McGuire in July 2025. The timing was immediately suspicious. The terminations came just before Subnautica 2’s planned Early Access launch, which would have triggered a $250 million performance bonus tied to the acquisition agreement. Gill, McGuire, and Cleveland alleged that Krafton had deliberately delayed the game and removed them from the studio to avoid paying the earnout.

The case went to trial. A particularly damning detail emerged during proceedings: Krafton’s CEO had explicitly sought to avoid paying the earnout and had consulted ChatGPT for a strategy to do so. The Delaware Court of Chancery found in favor of Unknown Worlds on Phase 1, ruled all three terminations invalid, ordered Gill reinstated as CEO, and extended the earnout window by 258 days. Krafton was subsequently removed as publisher from the Subnautica 2 Steam page, with Unknown Worlds listed as both developer and publisher. Krafton still owns Unknown Worlds but issued a statement saying it was “supporting the early access launch.”

The game launched under the studio’s own name. It sold two million copies in half a day. The earnout bonus that Krafton spent a year engineering its way around is now almost certainly triggering anyway.

The legal case moves to Phase 2, which will determine financial damages from Krafton’s conduct on top of the earnout. Krafton fired its own developer’s leadership to avoid paying $250 million, asked ChatGPT how to do it, lost in court, watched the game launch without its name on it, and may now owe the earnout plus damages regardless.

The players sided with the developers throughout. After Krafton’s name was removed from the Steam page, fans flooded social media with wishlist additions as a show of support for Unknown Worlds. When the game launched, they backed it up with purchases.

Does the Subnautica 2 situation change how you think about publisher-developer relationships in the gaming industry? Let us know in the comments.

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NEXT: Amazon Cancels Its Lord of the Rings MMO, And Tolkien Fans Should Be Relieved

Amazon Game Studios has officially confirmed the cancellation of its Lord of the Rings MMO. The confirmation came not through a press release but buried inside a statement to Eurogamer, which was investigating the separate cancellation of Project Trident, an Amazon generative-AI game. Amazon’s vice president of games Christoph Hartmann stated: “Our creative team continues to explore this universe, seeking compelling gaming experiences that do justice to Tolkien; we are working closely with Middle-earth and remain excited about the IP.”

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This was effectively known since October 2025, when Amazon’s wave of layoffs gutted large portions of Amazon Game Studios. A senior gameplay engineer, Ashleigh Amrine, confirmed in a since-deleted LinkedIn post that her entire team had been laid off and the Lord of the Rings game “would never be finished.” Amrine added: “Y’all would have loved it.”

This is not Amazon’s first failure with the property. The company announced a Lord of the Rings MMO in 2019, canceled it two years later, then announced a second one in May 2023 after striking a deal with Embracer Group and Middle-earth Enterprises. That second attempt collapsed before it reached active development.

Tolkien fans should not mourn this.

Amazon’s record with the IP is the record of a company that does not understand what it owns. The Rings of Power launched on Prime Video in 2022 and immediately drew fan backlash for deviating from Tolkien’s established lore, collapsing the Second Age timeline to compress thousands of years of history into a single narrative, and inventing characters and relationships with no basis in the source material. The show treated Tolkien’s world as a setting to be borrowed rather than a mythology to be respected. Nothing in Amazon’s gaming output suggests a different approach would have been applied to an MMO.

The replacement option floating in the rumor mill is not obviously better. Warhorse Studios, the Czech developer behind Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, has been reported as potentially working on a Middle-earth open-world game. Warhorse was already enmeshed in a culture war controversy ahead of KCD2’s February 2025 launch, when preview footage revealed a same-sex romance option for protagonist Henry and a Black African character named Musa, a nobleman from the Kingdom of Mali introduced as part of the invading army. The game’s forums were flooded with backlash. Director Daniel Vávra issued a statement defending the inclusions as historically grounded, noting that the KCD2 setting was a major European trade city rather than an isolated village, and that the player is not required to pursue the same-sex content. The studio’s publisher rolled out a new forum code of conduct banning expressions of homophobia and transphobia, which drew a second wave of anger from players who felt their concerns were being censored.

Whether Warhorse’s rumored Middle-earth project is real has not been confirmed. The studio has not officially announced any Lord of the Rings involvement.

What the cancellation leaves is a franchise with no active gaming footprint of consequence. The LOTR MMO that does exist, Lord of the Rings Online, is decades old and in slow decline. The best-reviewed recent Lord of the Rings games, the Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War series, are a decade behind as well. Amazon had the IP, the budget, and the platform infrastructure to build something that could have served the Middle-earth gaming audience. It announced the project twice and failed twice.

The next confirmed Lord of the Rings gaming move is a Crystal Dynamics third-person action title, reportedly backed by around $100 million from the Abu Dhabi Investment Office and described internally as aiming to compete with Hogwarts Legacy in scale. That project also has not been officially announced.

Tolkien’s world deserves a serious game built by people who read the books. What it keeps getting is corporate IP management dressed up as fandom.

What do you think: is the Lord of the Rings gaming space beyond repair, or does it just need one developer who takes the source material seriously? Let us know.

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NEXT: Peter Jackson Is Coming For The Silmarillion Now That Christopher Tolkien Can’t Stop Him

Best Buy accidentally sent a promotional email to its affiliate network revealing that Grand Theft Auto 6 pre-orders go live on Monday, May 18, 2026. The campaign runs through May 21 and offers affiliates a 5% commission on physical copy sales.

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Insider Gaming received the email directly from two independent Best Buy affiliates and verified it is legitimate. The emails originate from Impact, one of the leading affiliate partner marketplaces. YouTuber Frogboyx1Gaming was the first to post about it live on stream, followed by multiple other affiliates confirming they received the same message.

Rockstar and Best Buy have not officially confirmed anything.

The timing points in one direction. Take-Two Interactive’s next earnings call with investors is scheduled for May 21, the final day of the pre-order affiliate campaign window. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said at the end of April that GTA 6 marketing would ramp up “soon.” A Trailer 3 release alongside the pre-order announcement, timed before the earnings call where Zelnick can discuss results with shareholders, is the obvious structure. Rockstar’s official website database was also briefly taken offline on May 11, which fans noticed and interpreted as backend preparation for new marketing material.

Grand Theft Auto 6 has been a story of escalating expectations and missed dates. The game was originally targeted for Fall 2025. Take-Two moved it to May 26, 2026, then delayed again to November 19, 2026. The studio cited a need for additional polish both times. Rockstar issued an apology to fans: “We are sorry for adding additional time to what we realize has been a long wait, but these extra months will allow us to finish the game with the level of polish you have come to expect and deserve.”

The delays have not dampened the hunger for the game. Trailer 2 has surpassed 160 million views on YouTube. It has been over a year since Rockstar released any substantial new footage. GTA Online is still generating significant revenue, which observers have noted removes some urgency from Rockstar’s side, but Take-Two’s investor pressure in the other direction is real.

The pre-order leak also confirms physical copies will be available at launch. Pricing remains unconfirmed. Reports have ranged from $70 to $100, with Take-Two’s Zelnick describing “full price” in terms suggesting the high end of that range. Rockstar’s hackers, who breached the studio previously, have not been able to surface any substantial pricing leaks according to published reporting.

A former GTA 6 developer added a cautionary note to the anticipation earlier this month, telling The Shortcut the game “probably won’t look as good as the trailers.” GTA trailers have historically been produced at a visual fidelity level that exceeds real-time gameplay. Whether that gap will be visible at launch is a question November 19 will answer.

If pre-orders open Monday as the leak suggests, a new trailer either same-day or within the week is the industry standard practice. The last time Rockstar dropped a GTA 6 trailer, it became the most-viewed gaming trailer in history within 24 hours. Whether Trailer 3 matches that is the week’s open question.

Will you pre-order GTA 6 if pre-orders open Monday, or are you waiting until closer to launch?

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NEXT: Stardew Valley’s Creator Said No To Infidelity In His Game

Eric Barone, the solo developer behind Stardew Valley, sparked a brief media frenzy this week when outlets reported he was “open to” adding infidelity mechanics to his farming sim. The full quote tells a more interesting story, and Barone moved quickly to correct the record.

The confusion started in a Game Informer interview published May 12. Barone was asked whether he had ever considered changes to Stardew Valley but held back out of concern for player reaction. His full answer:

“I mean, one thing I have mentioned before, which I kind of was half joking about. It was like, people want to marry Caroline or Robin or Demetrius, and in order to do that, you would have to break up families in town. And personally, I’m against that on a moral level. But I feel like in a sandbox game, you should be able to do wicked things and then face the consequences. I wouldn’t just make everyone be totally chill about it. Everyone would hate you. It would cause a lot of chaos and disaster and suffering, and people would be angry, and you would ruin the family. I would be open to doing something like that, but I wouldn’t baby people about it. There would be very serious consequences. But then part of me is like, ‘Well, maybe this is just too real.’ Maybe Stardew Valley is supposed to be, to some degree, an escape from those kinds of things. It’s too realistic, you know?”

Several outlets, including GamesRadar in its initial report, interpreted this as a sign Barone was actively considering infidelity mechanics for a future update. He was not. Barone responded on X directly:

“The quotes are taken out of context, and don’t capture the whole spirit of what I was saying. They make it seem like this is something I am planning on adding, but if you read the actual interview it’s clear that I’m not going to add it.”

In a follow-up tweet he clarified his actual position: “the only thing I had ever ‘considered’ was allowing players to break up Pierre/Caroline or Robin/Demetrius, but even that is probably too heavy and serious, and would be a ton of work to adjust all dialogue and tone of everyone in town in consequence, and Grandpa ashamed of you. It was just some theoretical idea I’ve toyed with. I don’t condone doing it either.”

The short version: Barone thought about it, decided against it on moral grounds, and said so in an interview. The internet mistook the hypothetical for a plan.

This is worth more than a correction notice. Barone is one of the most unusual success stories in gaming history. He developed Stardew Valley alone over four years while working a day job at Target, teaching himself programming, art, music composition, sound design, and game design simultaneously. The game launched in 2016 and has sold over 41 million copies across all platforms, making it one of the best-selling indie games ever released. Barone has continued updating it for free for a decade, adding content patches, multiplayer support, new characters, and new story content without charging existing players a cent.

He is also openly guided by values that most game studios do not apply to design decisions. He stated in a separate GamesRadar interview that Stardew Valley and his upcoming Haunted Chocolatier will always be AI-free because people “should take priority over a soulless machine.” He has declined to monetize the game beyond its initial purchase price in an industry that pushes season passes, microtransactions, and live service subscriptions as standard practice. He makes design decisions based on what he believes is right for the game and for the player, not what maximizes engagement metrics.

The infidelity question fits that pattern. His first instinct was moral objection. His second was a designer’s consideration of whether dark mechanics could be handled with genuine weight and consequence rather than trivialized. His conclusion was that Stardew Valley is an escape, and that certain kinds of darkness belong somewhere else.

That reasoning is not complicated. It is also increasingly rare in an industry that defaults to “the player should be able to do anything” as a design philosophy without considering what the anything communicates. Barone considered the communication. He decided against it.

In a week where gaming discourse has been dominated by IGN handing a perfect 10 to a three-hour walking simulator while players score it 6.1, Barone drawing a quiet moral line in his own game is the kind of story the industry could use more of.

Does a creator’s personal moral convictions belong in game design decisions, or should gameplay systems be purely player-driven?

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NEXT: In (Reluctant) Defense of Slay the Spire 2

I had a chat with a friend of mine who had been playing much of Slay the Spire 2, ever since its Early Access launch on March 5th. When asked how he felt about Anita Sarkeesian appearing in the credits, he replied: “I don’t feel much” adding that the game already had a bunch of hate from Chinese critics for one of the bosses being difficult.

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He was referring to the a wave of review bombing from Chinese players, primarily over balance changes that nerfed popular infinite combos and adjustments to the challenging Act 3 boss named Doormaker. Chinese Steam users, facing platform and social media restrictions, often channel their dissatisfaction through reviews.

While the Sarkeesian credit sparked a new round of negative reviews, it is worthwhile to keep things in perspective: the game itself is still a strong roguelike deck-builder.

It’s weird Anita is involved at all because the game is seemingly scant of any feminist themes at all? The woke boogieman is, apparently, non-existent here. Instead, the game remains a roguelike card game dungeon crawler where you fight all kinds of monsters. Anita’s presence might do little to sway people from purchasing the game simply because the game is still a mechanics-first experience with minimal narrative. While female characters do exist in this game, as they did in the original, there are no prominent ideological shifts or trope overhauls tied to Sarkeesian’s critiques.

Of course, some people speculate that Anita is there so the game won’t get trashed. One may compare this to the presence of Sweet Baby Inc in many game previously where people hired consultants to avoid activists from saying your game was bigoted. This risk-management view is widespread in online discussions as well. Anita Sarkeesian carries strong associations from the GamerGate era. and critics rightfully see her consulting credit (alongside others like David Von Derau and Tony Moore) as the same symbolic “insurance” against Leftist activist scrutiny.

Anita’s involvement feels very much like a ‘I put my name on it’ because they are Western developers and they think it’s political correct to involve a feminist regardless of the fact that she makes no contributions to the creative process. Seriously, what did she even do? Did they pay her to walk into the studio, look at a screen, and say ‘yep, that’s a card game’ before walking out?

For anyone who was blindsided by Anita’s involvement, what can anyone say but it sucks that they spent money on it, and one hopes that the backlash sends a message: Stop trying to involve this person who offers absolutely nothing to the creative process of the game.

Many Steam reviews echo this as well, which is tragic considering the game is (by many accounts) a genuinely good game. Yet, players with substantial playtime are leaving negatives, specifically over Anita’s credit, even while praising the game itself. The recent review score dropped sharply, though overall ratings held better initially.

Worst-case scenario, they burned a stack of cash on a person who had no reason to be involved. Best case scenario, Anita played the game and said, ‘Maybe it would be cool if you had two less card infinites in the game.’”

As of now, however, Mega Crit has not publicly detailed her exact contributions, leaving room for speculation. The game launched as one of Steam’s biggest indie successes, with massive concurrent players and sales.

Many who dislike the credit still enjoy playing Slay the Spire 2. However, this is all about leaving a bad taste in one’s mouth knowing that she was there. She was involved and got paid. In short, this is all about what the hire signals: that even a video game remains apolitical, is purely about game mechanics, and comes from a respected indie studio, the entire presence of cultural consultants is stigmatized to the point of genuine toxicity. To others, like myself, it represents soft power projection through industry norms; a voluntary but cumulative influence on creative direction and risk avoidance.

Are we to remain indifferent to minor consultant input if the game is good or support consumer pushback as a corrective force? Perhaps developers could clarify consultant contributions transparently in order to rebuild trust?

In the end, audiences make their preferences clear through reviews, playtime, and their wallets.

What do you think? Should mechanics-first games stay consultant-free on cultural matters? Share in the comments.

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NEXT: Who Will Win The Culture War In Video Games?

Game launches used to be simple.

You shipped. Magazines like GamePro or EGM gave their review. Players played.

The market decided.

I’ve been playing games since the late 1980s, and I can confidently say the era of simple, clean launches is over.

Today, every major release has become a cultural battleground. Before a single review is published, before a single player logs in, the discourse machine fueled by social media has already sorted a game into a side.

The game is either a symbol of social justice and inclusion, or a symbol of regression appealing to ‘manchildren’.

There’s no neutral ground.

The core of what defines a game, it’s gameplay, is overshadowed by cultural controversy.

Game Hunter on X mentioned this recently:

To which I replied in my characteristically candid and raw style on X:

But the phenomenon both Game Hunter and myself talked about didn’t happen by accident.

It was built and perfectly engineered.

Let’s see how.

How We Got Here

In the early 2010s, a particular strain of cultural criticism found a new target: video games. Figures like Anita Sarkeesian, funded by crowdsourced campaigns and amplified by sympathetic media and even the UN, introduced a framework that treated games primarily as political texts.

Characters weren’t characters anymore. They were symbols of systemic power and heteropatriarchal oppression. Stories weren’t stories. They were ideological statements requiring correction and sanitization.

The games industry, concentrated in western studios staffed by people who wanted cultural legitimacy and a bizarre concern that ‘there weren’t enough women in the gaming scene’, did what insecure industries always do: it listened.

As a consequence, diversity consultants entered pre-production pipelines.

Narrative teams began running scripts through ideological filters before they ran them through playtesting.

Writers even became narrative designers.

The question shifted from will players love this? to will this get us criticized?

The game industry, once defined by its creativity and irreverence, was now afraid.

Afraid of the backlash orchestrated by social justice warriors on social media.

Afraid of being ridiculed.

Afraid of… being itself.

And the results were inevitably visible in the release slate.

Let’s take a look at the output.

The Evidence

Concord launched as a hero shooter with a roster that read more like a corporate diversity statement than a cast of characters players wanted to play.

Even robots featured he/him pronouns.

The game only lasted 9 days on the market. It was one of the fastest commercial failures in AAA history. The game was not bad because it was diverse per se. It was bad because the people making it had forgotten what players truly want.

And no one wanted to play as this.

No one.

Marathon entered its marketing cycle and immediately triggered the same pattern… Screenshots of Bungie supporting BLM and Pride month were part of the game’s release discussion.

Marathon’s character designs were analyzed for ideological intent before gameplay was evaluated on its merits.

Asmongold went viral for saying this:

The cultural pre-sorting had already begun before Bungie shipped a single build.

Mixtape and Saros followed the same trajectory: games that arrived carrying political weight they hadn’t earned through the quality of play or character design.

Mixtape in particular was received with a tapestry of 10/10 reviews by major media outlets, including IGN, that felt inauthentic. Players noticed and the game peaked at only 2.2k concurrent players on Steam.

Saros, a game criticized by its character designs and motifs centered around a conflicted man who ends up being taught a lesson by a lesbian couple, underperformed in the UK sales charts at launch (sitting behind Cyberpunk 2077, a game released 6 years ago) and couldn’t make it to the top 5 digital downloads according to PS Store data in the US.

Meanwhile, Crimson Desert showed a different path. Aggressive. Visually distinct. Mechanically brutal. A game that communicated a clear creative vision to players who wanted exactly that. No apologies. No consultation about whether the tone was appropriate. Just a game made by people who believed in what they were making.

The game would sell 2 million copies in its first 24 hours, even if biased outlets like IGN gave it a 6/10.

Pragmata, a game revered by its gameplay, was praised by players selling over 2 million copies in 16 days, while activists immediately complained about the game celebrating the joy of fatherhood and mentorship.

I even created a meme to illustrate the difference between Pragmata and Saros.

Both Pragmata and Saros were part of the culture war. Pragmata won. Saros lost.

And who was the ultimate judge? The market.

The Actual Problem

Game Hunter was right to be frustrated. But the culture war isn’t the disease, it’s the symptom. The disease is that a generation of western studio leadership learned to optimize for cultural approval and inclusion checklists rather than player desire.

When you build for critics and DEI consultants first and players second, you get games that win arguments and lose markets.

The eastern studios, Shift Up with Stellar Blade, Pearl Abyss with Crimson Desert, didn’t absorb the same decade of ideological input.

They were insulated from it by geography, language, and a fundamentally different relationship with their audience.

They asked one question: what do players want to experience? Then they built that.

The Verdict

Sarkeesian and her successors didn’t destroy the games industry. After all, we wouldn’t be talking about games if they had actually succeeded.

They colonized a part of it: the part that was already insecure about its cultural status.

The games that failed didn’t fail because of politics.

They failed because the politics displaced the craft and the incentive to give players what they want.

The market ultimately cares about one thing: did this game give players something they wanted badly enough to pay for?

Every game that forgot that question paid for it at launch.

Every game that answered it correctly is still being played, shared and remembered for all the right reasons.

The culture war will continue.

The outrage accounts will keep sorting releases into sides.

The think pieces will keep arriving.

But the scoreboard is public.

And the market is already delivering its verdict, one launch weekend at a time.

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.

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Is your dream video game all about taking a short walk through stylized suburban nights, complete with a few quick-time events, an awkward kiss minigame, and twenty-eight licensed tracks from time that feels both close yet impossibly distant?

Welcome to a game called Mixtape, a 2-5 hours long video game, priced at $20, and praised to the heavens by the critics and met by many players with the familiar shrug of “it is all so tiresome.”

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Now, I have heard some voices on the digital winds declaring that this is nothing less than a nepo-backed astroturf operation. Wealth from Oracle Corporation flowed through Megan

Ellison’s Annapurna into a small Melbourne studio, allowing them to buy licensed music, induce a sea of glowing aggregate scores, and secure a quiet place on XBOX’s Game Pass.

This story sounds familiar...

The Power of the Mixtape

In earlier epochs, an entrepreneur made his mixtape by hand. He chose the songs, rewound the cassette with a pencil, labeled it with messy ink, and then handed it over to the masses with

trembling hope. There was a time when a mixtape was considered some form of dangerous, intimate speech that said: “This is who I am. These songs carry my soul!”

Ostensibly, Mixtape seeks to resurrect that crossing. It places us inside the last night of a group of friends before life scatters them to the winds of becoming proper adults in society.

Supposedly, the game is nostalgia for the ‘90s rendered in beautiful, hand-crafted stylization. The music is supposed to function as the very weather of experience: skateboarding to Devo, filming chaos to Iggy Pop, weeping to old soul. Like so many other projects that rely on these same nostalgic pulls (James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy comes to mind) the developers at Beethoven & Dinosaur are desperately trying to let old speech happen again through play and let a generation that grew up on those feeds feel, for a moment, the raw voltage of the moments that made the 90s what they were.

Now, if only the developers cared about the art of making a good video game. The “game” is naught but a short, linear, heavily cinematic experience. It is essentially a movie guided by your thumbs. Were you expecting an engaging arcade experience? Sorry, that would take effort.

The fact that so many critics hail the game’s supposed emotional truth and brevity (“it does not overstay its welcome”) should tell you that the modern “gamer” is anything but. They are movie-watchers who treat video games like movies. That’s all there is to it. Meanwhile, many real players see the slop for the trough. $20 dollars for what feels like a premium episode of television? Let’s shout it loud for those in the back:

This is not a video game.

But the deeper issue, as with all things, is the authority. Who permitted this supposed “cultural moment” into being?

Inherited Possibility

Annapurna Interactive bears the mark of inherited possibility, which is a polite way of saying “nepotism.” In plain terms this means that Megan Ellison (producer, entrepreneur, and founder/CEO of Annapurna Pictures) did not start Annapurna Pictures (and later its Interactive arm) with nothing but a good idea and a shoestring budget, as most people assume Indie titles are made. She started it with access to hundreds of millions of dollars (directly and indirectly) from her father, Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle Corporation and one of the world’s richest men.

Reports speak of a $200 million gift on her 25th birthday (with more to follow), ongoing financial backstops when the company hemorrhaged money, and the quiet power of family connections that make lenders, talent, and partners far more willing to engage.

https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/producers/megan-ellison-net-worth/

With that kind of money, you can greenlight any expensive, prestige-driven project you want to. Give it big licensed soundtracks, polished production values, and multi-platform releases.

These are things that would bankrupt or deter an ordinary indie team, but the Cinderella in this story was born with a golden parachute. She can weather any spectacular losses and keep the doors open which is something most small studios would never even dream of.

Is this really what people think of when they say something is “Indie”?

I asked the same question about Expedition 33 last year and it seems that the answer is, yes. The only influencer of note who has talked about this is the based and esteemed Lord Frogmire:

The phrase also quietly echoes Heidegger’s idea of inherited possibility, referring to the historical and cultural legacies each generation receives and must take up, repeat, or transform. But here, the “inheritance” is not primarily ancestral. Instead, it is material and temporal: a massive acceleration of what is possible in one lifetime. A young producer can play at the scale of Hollywood (or high-end interactive art) decades earlier, and with far less mortal risk than someone without that backing.

Note, this is not an insult to Megan Ellison’s taste or sincerity. I am merely recognizing that her ability to fund and distribute a cultural object like Mixtape arrives already clothed in a power most creators cannot and will never be able to achieve. The market-brained public, trained to trust prestige, smooth delivery, and consensus signals, rarely pauses to notice the difference between the homebrew “mixtape” handed over with trembling fingers and one delivered by an institution that could afford to lose millions on the gesture.

This is why it is worth bringing up Expedition 33. While that game is good or even great, the conditions under which such a game came about are not ordinary. They are inherited. And in our age, such inheritance increasingly shapes who gets to define the emotional weather of a generation. Mixtape is no different.

Larry Ellison’s family wealth, which once sustained Hollywood ventures, now sustains his daughter’s interactive art. Licensed music rights that would bankrupt most small teams have suddenly become feasible. Marketing crates appear, review scores cluster at the high end, and Steam peaks remain modest because many play it “freely” on a brief subscription.

Notice the familiar pattern: Across the arts, patronage has never died; it has only changed its name and its servers. And mark this as well, the scandal buried within a market-brained condition of the masses who receive it. We have become a people whose ears are tuned to the frequency of the feed, whose hearts beat in time with algorithmic approval, and whose very sense of worth is priced in Metacritic aggregates.

Consumers of product are low-attention-span morons who no longer know how to judge a work by the tremor of authentic speech. Instead, every work originates with pre-subscribed commands: a presupposed aura of prestige that surrounds it by merit of a brand name or a genre tag. That is precisely the susceptibility by which the new patronage exploits us: the billionaire adjacency no longer need force behaviors. They’ve realized all they need to do is speak in the polished grammar by which the masses have already been trained: glowing embargoed reviews, perfectly timed influencer unboxings, and the seamless integration into subscription ecosystems that make any and all resistance feel useless.

As a side note, even one of the greatest engines of today’s youth attention, TikTok’s American operations, has passed under the same family orbit through Oracle’s central role in the recent

U.S. joint venture. And the same hand has long given generously to the Israel Defense Forces: tens of millions channeled through Friends of the IDF, including a record $16.6 million gift in 2017 alone.

The market-brained and consent-manufactured masses mistake the ease of access and the chorus of affirmation for genuine resonance. We have been conditioned to outsource our taste, to let the machinery tell us what moves us. Thus the nepo-backed mixtape arrives not as imposition, but as pre-validated fulfillment for the attention economy. And the hungry, who are never offered anything authentic, simply consume it, forget about it, and move on to the next distraction.

Every age has its grammars of power: how speech is funded, protected, amplified, or silenced.

The tribal chieftain, the feudal lord, the revolutionary committee, the modern foundation, the billionaire’s daughter and her algorithmic amplifiers: all of these are attempts to command the future by commanding the means of resonance. Today the command flows through digital media: through influencers and aggregate sites and through the very reflexes of a public that confuses virality with vitality.

Toward a New Imperative

Friends, the real scandal is not that a wealthy publisher backed a nostalgic indie game. The scandal is that we no longer know how to make mixtapes among ourselves. We no longer know how to risk speaking what is true without the mediation of platforms, scores, marketing, or billionaire adjacency. Market-brained, we have traded the dangerous intimacy of the handmade for the safe, pre-approved glow of the sponsored.

The task ahead is not to boycott or to defend. The task is to recover the grammar of genuine creativity. To make our own mixtapes again. To speak, even if we shall be changed and to play. And we must play, not as consumers of curated emotion, but as avid, risk-willing souls.

The last track has not yet faded, and the tape is still turning. What will you put on side B?

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NEXT: From Barrel Rolls to Chicken Legs: Nintendo Completely Botched Star Fox

What we witness today in the shimmering trailer of Nintendo’s Star Fox for the Switch 2 is far more than updated pixels. What we have here is a small but piercing cry from the soul of our age, which joins the deluge of other piercing cries. This is an age in which the accountants have seized the scepter and the artists have been sent into exile. The fox who once soared through space beyond the stars with cartoonish defiance now stares back at us from the uncanny valley, his fur rendered with the meticulous cruelty of high-fidelity shaders, his eyes too knowing, and his muzzle too anatomically correct. And those legs! Those newly revealed digitigrade stalks have been planted upon the earth like the afterthought of a half-committed taxidermist.

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I remember that, for decades, the faithful had joked that the pilots of the Great Fox kept their legs forever hidden beneath flight suits and armored boots because they were, in truth, glorious metallic prosthetics. Some indeed believed Star Fox was some half-robotic marvel of Cornerian engineering, the very reason these daring aviators could barrel-roll through the cosmos without a second thought.

Now the veil is lifted, and what do we behold? Not proud adamantium limbs forged in the fires of legend, but awkward, toe-standing animal haunches that make poor Falco look as though he wandered in from a rejected poultry farm. The old jest has been answered with a punchline no one asked for.

Takaya Imamura, the very man who first gave form and fire to Fox McCloud in the distant days of Nintendo’s 90s, has stepped forward like an elder prophet. “I prefer the movie version,” he confessed, speaking of the more stylized, soulful Fox who appeared in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. The new design, he grants, has “a clear direction.” Yet the preference stands. The father of the tribe has looked upon the offspring of his loins and found it wanting. This isn’t even a question of craft, but of fidelity to the original calling — which is why so many honest and true Star Fox fans will have also found it wanting. For every true creation is a calling, a speech-act hurled into the future, binding generations in a common vision. When that speech is diluted by new tongues untutored in the original grammar, the tribe feels the fracture.

This is not the first such fracture. Recall the lamentations that greeted Warcraft III: Reforged. Cheap outsourcing to distant studios, models that no longer sang in the old tongue, a remaster that somehow diminished the soul of the original. The pattern repeats here. For even a corporation as great as Nintendo is not immune to the gravitational pull of quarterly reports and has seemingly fallen under the dominion of what we may call the Managerial Revolution. The engineers of cost-efficiency now direct the artists. The ledger has become the new scripture. “Spend the least possible,” it commands, “and the fans will devour whatever we place before them.” And devour they often do, with a loyalty that borders on the tragic.

Yet here, in this minor drama of anthropomorphic pilots and barrel rolls, we glimpse a larger historical motion. Man no longer creates worlds out of the living word of imagination spoken in love for the craft and the audience. Instead, he renders them according to the demands of hardware cycles and shareholder value. The result is a proliferation of the uncanny: things that look almost right, yet are spiritually askew. Fox McCloud’s new face is a symptom. The soul recoils because it recognizes a familiar betrayal — we have seen it turn all art into “content.”

Nintendo’s own EPD division, the modern successor to the legendary EAD, has wrought this. Unlike Warcraft III: Reforged, this is not some anonymous studio in Southeast Asia, though such hands have labored on many projects. This is the house itself, chasing the siren song of “cinematic” realism on new silicon.

Here, then, lies the deeper riddle: Nintendo possessed a perfectly realized, soulful Fox in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. There, his design held true to the living spirit of the character as utilized in Star Fox 64 and its faithful 3DS remake. The 3DS version had already carried forward that friendlier, cartoonish grammar of wonder. Yet the current stewards, unsupervised by the father Imamura, reached backward — deliberately and almost archaeologically — toward the original SNES-era promotional puppets of 1993 that once graced box art and advertisements, with their uncanny animal anatomy and puppet vitality.

While the intention was to harness the raw power of Switch 2 hardware to elevate this primal, weirder origin into a high-fidelity spectacle, we must mark a heavy blind spot toward the living community of fans. Consider the beloved A Fox In Space series on YouTube — a gritty, noir-infused fan animation which has outshone official shorts in viewership and captured the hearts of thousands through its stylized anthropomorphic charm. Consider Krystal, the vixen whose very popularity exploded precisely because of her expressive, anthropomorphic allure. Her design spoke directly to the playful, charismatic animal spirit that binds the tribe. To revert to the puppet source in this manner is to cross many channels at once. Fox’s cameo in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie also confirms the strange theory that the movies are crafted for one audience — warm, stylized, accessible — while the games pursue another, more hyper-realistic path, even as both are supposed to reinforce one another in the grand marketing symphony of the brand.

It is also worth noting that The Game Awards Show continually summons Muppet cameos. The show’s creator Geoff Keighley utilizes them with an unapologetic elder-millennial passion, infusing the show with some measure of safe, chaotic, nostalgic entertainment energy. Perhaps it is just a coincidence that Nintendo excavates its own 1993 puppet archive at the very moment the industry’s biggest awards show leans on Muppets for levity. Or perhaps this is an almost subconscious confession that authentic wonder has grown scarce, and so we must revive the oldest forms of childhood joy in order to induce any life in anything at all.

The current team, under Miyamoto and Koizumi’s oversight, made a conscious artistic decision: push for a more mature, high-fidelity, animal-realistic look to showcase the new hardware’s capabilities in a big launch title. They explicitly drew inspiration from the original promotional puppets and box art of the very first Star Fox on SNES, which had a weirder, more literal animal vibe, rather than the friendlier, cartoon-stylized versions that evolved later and appeared in the Illumination movie. Imamura, retired since 2021, was not consulted. The original grammar of the characters was filtered through newer artists prioritizing technical polish, fur-shaders, and a cinematic mandate over continuity with previous incarnations. In other words, they killed what Star Fox used to look like in exchange for flexing new hardware. The accountants and tech-demo instincts won the day, even at Nintendo. The movie Fox succeeded because Illumination had its own external vision. The game team wanted something distinctly Nintendo-game-realistic.

The revolution of the accountants is not yet totalizing. Nintendo remains, in many respects, more resistant than most other companies. Kirby’s Air Riders shows Nintendo is still capable of miracles of delight. Yet the drift is palpable.

We stand, dear readers, at a crossroads. Shall we love the living speech of the original creators and that playful defiance of the fox who barrels through the cosmos with his comrades? Or shall we resign ourselves to the smooth, expensive, soulless renderings produced by those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing?

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NEXT: Ryan Cohen Is Trying to Buy eBay With GameStop

On May 3, 2026, Ryan Cohen sent a letter to eBay’s board chairman. The letter was also filed with the SEC.

GameStop Corp., the letter said, was proposing to acquire all common stock of eBay Inc. at $125.00 per share, a 46% premium to eBay’s closing price on February 4, the day Cohen started quietly building a position in the company. Total equity value: approximately $55.5 billion. Structure: 50% cash, 50% GameStop common stock. Financing: GameStop’s $9.4 billion cash pile plus a $20 billion committed credit line from TD Securities. eBay’s board was asked to respond.

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eBay confirmed receipt of the offer and stated it had received no prior outreach from GameStop before the letter arrived. Its shares rose 5% on Monday. GameStop’s shares fell 10%.

That gap tells you what Wall Street thinks. GameStop’s market cap is roughly $11-12 billion. Cohen is proposing to buy a company nearly five times that size. Michael Burry, who has been a GameStop shareholder and whose short-squeeze battle with Cohen in 2021 made both men famous, sold his entire GME position after the announcement. His stated reason: “Never confuse debt for creativity.”

Cohen appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Monday and was combative throughout. When pressed on how a company with an $11 billion market cap finances a $55 billion acquisition, he pointed to the TD Securities credit line, the cash on hand, and the stock component of the deal. “We are offering half cash, half stock, and we have the ability to issue stock in order to get the deal done,” he said. He declined to get specific about the gap between what GameStop has and what the deal requires. Institutional enthusiasm cooled further after the interview.

The underlying business logic, however, is not crazy. Cohen’s SEC filing makes a specific case. eBay spent $2.4 billion on Sales and Marketing in fiscal 2025 and added exactly one million net active buyers, growing its user base from 134 million to 135 million. Cohen proposes cutting $1.2 billion from that marketing budget alone, $300 million from product development, and $500 million from general and administrative costs, for $2 billion in annualized savings within twelve months of close. On cost reductions alone, eBay’s earnings per share would go from $4.26 to $7.79 in year one. He points to GameStop as the proof of concept: from a $381 million net loss in 2021 to $418 million in net income in 2025, with SG&A down 47%, approximately $800 million cut from the cost structure in under four years.

The strategic piece is where it gets interesting. Cohen’s vision is to turn GameStop’s approximately 1,600 U.S. store locations into authentication, intake, fulfillment, and live commerce hubs for eBay sellers. GameStop employees already inspect and grade trading cards and hardware daily. Sellers would walk in, items would be verified on the spot, and listings would carry a trust badge. Live sales broadcasts from GameStop locations featuring eBay products. A national physical network underpinning the world’s second-largest online commerce platform as a direct challenge to Amazon.

For collectors, this is not an abstract corporate transaction. The MTG counterfeit story Fandom Pulse covered recently is a direct symptom of the peer-to-peer authentication problem Cohen is proposing to solve at scale. eBay’s collectibles market has a trust problem. Fake cards, ungraded items sold as graded, counterfeit merchandise moving through anonymous sellers with no physical accountability. GameStop’s physical authentication infrastructure, if Cohen can execute the vision, addresses exactly that vulnerability.

Whether the deal closes is a different question. eBay’s board has a fiduciary duty to evaluate a 46% premium offer. It also has no obligation to accept a proposal from a company that would need to lever up significantly to fund it. The bid is non-binding. The financing gap is real. Cohen on CNBC was evasive about details in ways that did not reassure institutional investors.

Cohen posted on X during the week’s coverage, linking to his personal eBay seller account where he was listing GameStop merchandise. “I’m selling stuff on eBay to pay for eBay,” he wrote. His username on the account: ryan_5050. A nod to the deal’s 50/50 cash-and-stock structure.

The meme stock era never really ended.

Does Ryan Cohen’s vision for GameStop as the backbone of eBay’s physical authentication network make business sense, or is this the meme economy’s last and biggest play?

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Epic Fantasy hasn’t been this hard-hitting since Tolkien. In a world where humanity is akin to a Roman legion, a great darkness arises. Read A Throne Of Bones today.

NEXT: Gaming Journalists Are Trying to Kill Lords of the Fallen 2 Before It Launches. The Developer Isn’t Backing Down.