Xbox and PlayStation console sales in the United States have fallen to the lowest levels Circana has recorded, according to year-to-date figures through August posted by analyst Mat Piscatella. Xbox hardware units are down 33% from a year ago, the lowest in the platform’s history. PlayStation units are down 25%, the lowest since 2013. The average price paid for a new console reached an all-time high on both platforms, and Piscatella placed the US hardware market in its most precarious position “since the early 80s.” The rest of the games business has not fallen at anything like that rate.

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The Hardware Numbers

Circana’s US retail tracking puts hardware spending at $2.5 billion through August, down 11% from the same stretch of 2025. The platform figures:

• Xbox: units down 33% year over year, an all-time low. The average price paid for a new console was $529, up 26%.

• PlayStation: units down 25%, the lowest since 2013. The average price paid was $597, up 20%.

The monthly figures show the same pattern. In August, hardware units fell 15% to 559,000, the weakest August since 2013, when 423,000 units sold. Hardware spending fell only 3% to $302 million because buyers paid more per console: the average price for new hardware hit a record $541, up from $476 in August 2025. Xbox units fell 31%, its lowest August since 2020. PlayStation units fell 11%, its lowest August since 2013. Nintendo units fell 15%.

Dollar sales split by platform. Switch 2 led the market in both units and dollars for the month and the year to date. PS5 ranked second, with dollar sales up 17% on units down 11%. Xbox Series dollar sales fell 13%.

July was worse. Hardware spending fell 29% to $282 million, the lowest July since 2020, and units dropped 39% while the average selling price rose 16% to $542. Piscatella noted that year-over-year comparisons remain skewed by the record Switch 2 launch in June 2025. Circana’s September report is due October 22.

Prices Climb Again

Piscatella tied the slump to price. “Both prices are at all-time US highs. Price sensitivity is becoming a real problem,” he wrote. The reported cause is a shortage of memory and storage chips driven by AI data center demand.

Sony raised PS5 prices on April 2. The standard PS5 went to $649.99 and the Digital Edition to $599.99. The PS5 Pro went to $899.99, up from $749.99 after Sony’s August 2025 increase and $699.99 at its 2024 launch. The original PS5 launched at $499.99.

Microsoft followed on August 1, less than a year after its October 2025 increase. The Series S 512GB went from $399.99 to $499.99, the Series X Digital to $749.99 and the Series X to $799.99. The Series X launched at $499.99 and the Series S at $299.99. Microsoft said “console storage and memory prices have increased by more than 2.5x” and expects another doubling by fall 2027. Nintendo raised the Switch 2 price on September 1, and early October listings show $499.99 against the $449.99 launch price.

The pricing has now reached the strategy room. On October 14, Microsoft surveys sent to Xbox Insider members who own multiple consoles came to light. The surveys asked how likely they would be to stay with or buy an Xbox if games became timed or fully exclusive, naming Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, DOOM, Diablo, Minecraft and Hideo Kojima’s PHYSINT. A final question covered every Xbox franchise except Call of Duty. Microsoft has made no public statement on the surveys.

The Wider Market

Hardware is the weakest part of the business, but it is a small part. Circana puts US content spending, which covers software, subscriptions and mobile, at $32.2 billion through August, down 2% from 2025. Hardware at $2.5 billion is about 7% of the two combined.

Inside content, the picture splits. Console content fell 7% in August and mobile fell 18%, the largest drag on the month. PC content rose 13% and subscriptions rose 3%. Spending on new physical software rose 5% for the year to $738 million, even as July’s new physical sales hit an all-time July low of $85 million. Accessories were one of the few growing segments in August, up 3% to $176 million. Total US spending in August fell 9% to $4.3 billion, after a 10% drop to $4.5 billion in July.

That sits below the forecast Circana made at the start of the year. It projected 2026 US spending would rise 3% to $62.8 billion, which would pass the all-time high of $61.7 billion set in 2021, after $60.7 billion in 2025. The forecast rested on Switch 2 and on Grand Theft Auto VI, which Circana said had the highest purchase intent in its tracking history. The release is November 19.

The global forecast leans on the same title. Newzoo projects 2026 worldwide revenue of $213.9 billion. It puts console at $46.9 billion, up 5.1%, PC at $45.9 billion, up 5.3%, and mobile at $121.1 billion, up 6.8%. Newzoo expects console game sales to grow 17.5%, the fastest of any business model, with GTA VI behind the number. Piscatella said the November release “will help ease at least some of these declines.”

Where the Gap Leaves Each Platform

The split shows who is exposed. Nintendo holds the top of the hardware chart with Switch 2 even after a price rise. Sony is selling fewer PS5 units at higher prices, and the dollar total is up. Microsoft has the steepest unit decline, the largest price increase and an internal debate about pulling its franchises off other platforms. Piscatella has also said Sony will stop producing physical software for new games starting in January 2028.

People are still spending on games, and most of that money does not pass through a console purchase. PC content grew 13% in August while console content fell 7%. A Circana consumer survey on tariff-driven price increases found 38% would buy fewer full-price games at launch, 34% would wait longer for sales, and 27% would spend more time on free-to-play games. Circana lists younger players moving toward PC and mobile as a risk to the console business.

The next data point arrives on October 22 with the September report. The one after that covers GTA VI, which launches on a $650 to $800 hardware market.

If the most anticipated game Circana has ever tracked cannot move consoles priced between $500 and $900, what does the console business look like in 2027?

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PlayStation is selling the God of War Laufey Collector Box for $149.99 with the game sold separately, and fans are lining it up beside Rockstar’s $399.99 GTA VI Collector’s Edition, which also ships without the game.

Pre-orders for the box opened Tuesday at 10 a.m. local time, according to the PlayStation Blog. Within hours, posts on X were calling it a scam.

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What $149.99 Buys

The Collector Box lists at $149.99 in the U.S., €149.99 in Europe and £129.99 in the U.K. It holds a light-up Faye statue, a 51-card Oracle Deck and a physical mini artbook. The listing is labeled “(game sold separately).”

The statue is eight inches tall and shows Faye, Phranque and Rue fighting Begtse’s soldiers. PlayStation says the box comes in “highly limited quantities” and “exclusively direct from PlayStation (where available).”

God of War Laufey launches on PlayStation 5 on Feb. 16, 2027. The post lists no price for the Standard Edition or the Digital Deluxe Edition.

Fans: “A New Level of Scam”

Bad Leroy Brown (@Levonaxper) posted at 7:15 a.m. on Oct. 13: “Collector Edition without game is a new level of scam from Sony and Rockstar.” The post shows about 48,000 views and 1,500 likes.

Rino (@RinoTheBouncer) wrote: “Collector’s box without a game 😅💿 What a joke your company have become.” It shows 29,000 views and 1,100 likes.

CaptainUSATX posted a “NO DISC?? NO BUY” meme with the line “Another scam like the GTA VI ‘Collector’s Edition’.” It shows 3,200 views and 124 likes.

TBAG (@TBagGamingYT) posted the PlayStation listing and wrote: “”Game sold separately” are you kidding me!?!?!? You pay $150 and you dont even get the game???” It shows 6,900 views and 219 likes.

The GTA VI Box Set the Template

Rockstar announced Grand Theft Auto VI: The Goodtime State – Vice City Collection in late September at $399.99 in the U.S., £350 in the U.K. and $559 in Canada. Dexerto reports it holds a six-inch Macca the Gator figure with a stash compartment, Oakley Frogskins sunglasses, a New Era snapback, a crossbody bag and other merchandise, and that “You don’t get a copy of the game with that, however.”

The Red Dead Redemption 2 Collector’s Box cost $99.99 and also left out the game, which makes the GTA VI box roughly four times the price. Pre-orders ran to GTA VI‘s Nov. 19 launch. Neither report includes a Rockstar statement on the price or the missing game. Fans objected within days and there’s still a boycott going.

PlayStation’s box is cheaper by $250. The structure is the same: a collector’s package, no game, and a second purchase needed to play. CaptainUSATX’s post draws that line directly, and Bad Leroy Brown’s names both companies. The GTA VI fight had been about one publisher’s price. This one makes it a pattern.

With Rockstar’s $399.99 box and now PlayStation’s $149.99 box both asking collectors to buy the game again, will a collector’s package without the game become the industry’s new default, or the point where buyers stop paying?

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Scott Bakula is going back to CBS to star in and executive produce a new detective drama, and the man writing it is Mike Sussman, the Star Trek: Enterprise producer who developed Star Trek: United with Bakula. Sussman has confirmed his role himself. The production company behind the show has never made a broadcast series before, and its founder knows his way around science fiction.

A Detective Show Set in Los Angeles

The series is an untitled, high-concept detective procedural set in Los Angeles, and it is in early development at CBS. Bakula is set to star and executive produce. Sussman is writing it and executive producing, and it comes from Dean Devlin’s Electric Entertainment. According to a Deadline exclusive, Bakula’s character is described as quite a “leap” from the one he played on NCIS: New Orleans, a nod to his years on Quantum Leap.

Bakula is returning to the network where he spent seven seasons leading NCIS: New Orleans. His other series work includes Quantum Leap on NBC, Star Trek: Enterprise on UPN and the TNT comedy-drama Men of a Certain Age. He has five Emmy nominations, four for Quantum Leap and one for the HBO movie Behind the Candelabra. His next project to arrive is the Netflix hockey drama The Sticks.

Sussman and Devlin Bring Trek and Sci-Fi Credits

Sussman co-created Perception and his series credits include The Last Ship and 12 Monkeys. His Star Trek record is 10 episodes of Voyager and 22 of Enterprise, where he also produced more than 70 episodes. He wrote “In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II,” the late fourth-season episode in which Bakula played Archer’s Mirror Universe double. He confirmed on X that he is working on the new series. In August 2025, he said he and Bakula were working together on a separate non-Star Trek project even as they kept United alive.

Devlin co-wrote Independence Day. His Electric Entertainment finances and distributes its own programming and has supplied basic cable with The Librarian and Leverage. The CBS drama is its first broadcast show. Devlin also created The Ark for Syfy, a space survival series that premiered February 1, 2023 and is in its third season, with the finale set for October 14. He mentioned the Bakula project publicly as well.

Bakula has seven seasons of CBS procedural work behind him. Sussman co-created a crime drama in Perception. Devlin’s company built Leverage, a weekly caper series that ran for years on basic cable. Fans have reason to be optimistic about this lineup.

What Star Trek: United Is

Star Trek: Enterprise ended in 2005 after four seasons on UPN, and it was the franchise’s last network series. A background detail in the show established that Jonathan Archer, Bakula’s captain, would retire from Starfleet, go into politics and become President of the United Federation of Planets, serving from 2184 to 2192. Sussman wrote that detail himself. It appeared on a Starfleet database screen in “In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II,” and he wrote it knowing the franchise was heading for a long break.

Star Trek: United is built on that screen. Sussman described it as a political thriller and a family drama set in the early years of the Federation, in the mold of The West Wing and Homeland. His stated goal was an adult series about adults:

One of my aspirations would be that the series could do for Star Trek, what Andor did for Star Wars.

Sussman gave Archer four adult children, mirroring Bakula’s own family. One serves in the diplomatic corps, one in Starfleet and one in Federation Intelligence, and another is an adopted Vulcan son. The series would open on a scene from the Romulan War that Enterprise never showed. The setting later moved from Earth to the planet Babel, a diplomatic hub first seen in the original series.

Sussman and Bakula took the idea to Secret Hideout, the company that produces Paramount’s streaming Trek shows, about two years before the pitch became public. Secret Hideout liked it and took it to higher levels at Paramount. Paramount passed while it was cutting streaming spending, and the Earth-based Starfleet Academy was in development. The pitch resurfaced in August 2025 when Sussman and Bakula decided the arrival of Skydance made it worth raising again. Bakula addressed it on stage at Star Trek: Las Vegas that month:

There’s nothing I am going to say about United, at this point. There’s a great writer [Mike Sussman] and I have had conversations about the possibility... I’m just going to say, and we will close on that, you never know.

On Today last fall, he was asked whether he wanted to play Archer again. “Of course, I would love to do more of it,” he said. In July 2026 he told TV Insider the pitch had not moved: “Nothing is on my radar right now. But I know better than to say never.”

What the CBS Deal Could Mean for Trek

Bakula and Sussman are now set to work with the company that passed on United. Nothing announced connects the two projects, and neither man has said what the CBS commitment means for Archer. Sussman called United “just a delightful little fantasy” last fall and said that if Paramount’s plans involve expanding Trek on streaming, “perhaps something like this could be a part of it.”

The timing leaves room for it. Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy are burning off their final episodes, and no new live-action Trek series is in production behind them. The last time the franchise ran out of shows, in 2005, it took ten years to announce a successor. Bakula said in July that new people run the franchise and the studio, and that it “benefitted from a rest after Enterprise.” A working relationship at CBS puts the star and the writer of United in the building with the executives who decide what comes next.

If Paramount is willing to put Bakula and Sussman on CBS, will it give the same two men a chance to put President Archer on screen?

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Asha Sharma has run Xbox since February, and this week she gathered the whole division to tell it the comeback has begun. The financial filings Microsoft sent to investors say the business is still shrinking. So does the trail Sharma has left since she took the job: thousands of layoffs, studios handed to other publishers, a Game Pass price cut and a Call of Duty reversal.

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Jacob Geller is an American video essayist with a channel of about 1.5 million subscribers. He interned at Game Informer, wrote for Polygon, and became a regular on MinnMax. His essays are long video pieces about art in video games, movies, and architecture.

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Jacob Geller has said he was raised Jewish, and he treats that upbringing as part of how he writes. In a 2021 JewishBoston interview, he tied his first M-rated game to his bar mitzvah, telling his parents the Torah had deemed him mature enough for Resident Evil. He described Judaism as a culture built on study, examination, and argument, and said media criticism felt continuous with that: everyone has an interpretation, and the text is never only the text. Those beliefs show up in the work. “Judaism and Whiteness in Wolfenstein” and “The Golem and the Jewish Superhero” use Jewish history and legend as the frame for the games and stories he is reading.

Geller has had the privilege of being one of the few YouTube critics the mainstream games press has treated as a peer. In 2024 he published an annotated collection of his work and, for the most part, that is where his public biography stopped.

The rest surfaced on September 30, 2026, when a former manager at UNC Chapel Hill’s student station, WXYC, posted that Geller had been fired from the station in 2016 during a Title IX investigation and suspended for a semester. The post alleged he had sexually assaulted an ex-girlfriend while she was unconscious. The record shows, in documents UNC was ordered to release after a 2020 North Carolina Supreme Court public-records ruling, Geller’s name under the policy heading “Sexual Assault or Sexual Violence,” with the sanction “definite suspension for one semester.” The entry leaves the incident undescribed and withholds the woman’s name. No criminal case was recorded.

On October 1, 2026, Geller confirmed the finding on Bluesky. He wrote that the records had been shared without the woman’s permission, and that he would withhold any further detail that might identify her. Then he stated: “She and I spoke about it the day after and agreed: I had assaulted her.” He called the one-semester suspension “very mild, I concur,” and the assault “the greatest regret of my life.” He said he had traumatized someone who trusted him, that he thinks about it every day, and that he had also told people close to him, including his now-wife, early in their relationship.

MinnMax removed him the same day and pulled that week’s show. Nebula dropped him from its creator roster and pulled his catalog. Lost in Cult cut ties. Cane and Rinse deleted 23 episodes he had appeared on and said the games would be re-covered later.

Geller’s record matters beyond podcasting because he was also a paid consultant. In October 2024 he posted that he had consulted on Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 2 remake. On both the PlayStation 5 and Windows versions he is listed under Hit Detection, LLC, in the consultants line, alongside Julie Muncy, Kristan Reed, Suriel Vazquez, Anthony Gallegos, Ashley Esqueda, and Steve Haske. Hit Detection is a narrative and sensitivity consultancy of the same general type as Sweet Baby Inc. Geller’s name is in the shipping game. Silent Hill 2 is a loaded title to have that name attached to. In 2024, Geller even said Bloober’s choice to credit outside consultants was unusual.

The story of Silent Hill 2 is built around a man’s concealed guilt. Sexual violence is one of the materials that guilt is built from, and it is spread across more than one character. In the remake, Bloober softened the sexual charge of the 2001 game at the same time it rebuilt the women.

Maria, the sexualized double of James’s dead wife, lost the bare midriff and the short skirt for a long dress and a belted jacket. Angela Orosco, the character whose story is rape by her father, was given a wide, square jaw. Players called her new model ugly, mannish, and a departure from the gaunt, haunted woman of the original game.

Team Silent shipped the original Silent Hill 2 with no consultancy line and no Jacob Geller. The remake shipped with Hit Detection on the consultant roll and Geller’s name on it, a man who has now confirmed a university finding of sexual assault. The merits of the 2001 game and the remake can be argued over forever, but the remake is doomed to carry Geller’s name.

One final bit worth mentioning. On July 17, 2019, Bijan Stephen, then a writer at Compulsion Games, asked: “what’s the dumbest idea you have that you nevertheless believe will, if implemented, make the world a better place.” Geller replied, from @yacobg42: “no gamers.”

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“Snaptic” hit its $60,000 Kickstarter goal in six hours on September 29, pulling in $60,936 from 1,342 backers before the first day was even over. Then, it did the unthinkable, and the game had climbed past $100,000 from more than 2,068 backers with 29 days still left on the clock, putting the project at roughly 240% of its original ask within two days.

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The game drops players inside an old, offline laptop built around the aesthetic of early-2000s instant messenger culture, down to a character design that echoes AOL Instant Messenger’s “Running Man” mascot, though the project has no official connection to AOL. Players control Anon, a featureless humanoid who can transform into a marble and magnetize himself to surfaces to navigate the machine’s digital interior, a physics-based puzzle-platformer built around that single mechanic.

The goal of the game is to find the laptop’s Wi-Fi password, and getting there means digging through cache files, old chat logs, and camcorder footage left behind on the machine. The developers describe the stakes directly: “If the mystery is not solved, Anon’s friends could be lost forever as the files around them are destroyed.” The campaign promises what the team calls “a surprisingly emotional story,” populated by characters players meet across the laptop’s digital landscape, each with their own reason for wanting the network back online.

The visual style draws from PS1-era graphics, Frutiger Aero design, and the look of home camcorder footage from the period, built around motion graphics choices meant to recreate a specific slice of early-2000s internet culture rather than a generic retro throwback.

With the base goal cleared in hours, the campaign has moved into stretch-goal territory. Planned additions include filming real camcorder footage with live actors rather than relying entirely on in-engine recreation, expanded language localization, console ports beyond the current PC-only plan, and an animated opening sequence. The game is currently slated for PC release through Steam, with no release date announced yet.

The project comes from a developer who built an audience through short-form meme videos before turning “Snaptic” into a full game, a path increasingly common among indie developers who build a following on one platform before converting it into funding on another.

A $60,000 ask clearing in six hours, then nearly tripling within two days, is the kind of number crowdfunded games rarely hit without an existing fanbase behind them. This one did it on concept and aesthetic alone.

What do you think is driving the appeal here, the Y2K nostalgia, the puzzle mechanic, or just a pitch nobody else is making right now?

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The video game industry has eliminated more than 3,700 confirmed jobs globally in 2026, with the real total likely running past 4,000 once unverified cuts and quiet studio closures are counted. Tracking site Game Industry Layoffs puts the number of shuttered studios at 22 through the year, affecting an estimated 4,600 employees when every closure is included.

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The cuts have hit nearly every corner of the industry. Epic Games eliminated more than 1,000 roles in March following declining Fortnite engagement, the single largest reduction of the year. Bungie cut roughly 300 to 400 employees in June, continuing a pattern of repeated layoffs at the Sony-owned studio. Ubisoft spread 680 job losses across multiple studios, including roughly 100 in Belgrade, 93 in San Francisco, 71 in Halifax, 65 in Winnipeg, and 40 in Toronto, on top of 105 more at its RedStorm Entertainment subsidiary. Eidos-Montréal lost 124 positions in March after Embracer Group canceled a major AAA project the studio had been building.

Smaller studios absorbed damage throughout the year as well. Playtika cut roughly 500 mobile gaming staff in January. Meta’s VR division closed Sanzaru, Twisted Pixel, and Armature Studio in a single stretch of January layoffs totaling around 235 employees. Keywords Studios eliminated 128 positions at its San Francisco publishing division in June, the same week Strikerz, an online gaming platform under XTEN Limited, cut around 250 employees and Queen Digital Entertainment shut down entirely, affecting roughly 25 staff.

The Cuts Kept Coming Into Fall

The layoffs did not stop when the midyear numbers were tallied. Microsoft cut more jobs from its video game division in late September, continuing cuts Bloomberg reported as part of a broader restructuring that folded additional Xbox studios under Activision’s management. World’s Edge, the studio behind Age of Empires, had roughly half its staff eliminated and its next unannounced project canceled outright as part of that same move. A separate Xbox studio that had just gone independent reported what outlets described as “significant” layoffs within hours of the spinoff taking effect.

Geographically, the United States absorbed 58.2% of the global total, with 2,153 confirmed job losses. Canada recorded 257 confirmed layoffs, and France saw hundreds of cuts spread across four separate game companies.

Record Revenue, Record Layoffs

The layoffs are not tracking with industry revenue. Tracking data cited by the report notes the industry posted record revenues in 2026 even as the job cuts mounted, a pattern that points to correction from pandemic-era overhiring rather than financial distress at the companies doing the cutting. The video game sector’s numbers sit inside a broader tech contraction that has eliminated more than 143,378 jobs across the industry this year, including 31,900 in cloud and SaaS, roughly 21,000 in e-commerce, and more than 16,700 in IT services.

For an industry posting its best revenue numbers in years, the headcount reductions tell a different story about where that money is going and who gets to keep a job while it comes in.

Does record revenue alongside record layoffs tell you these companies overhired during the pandemic, or that the money just isn’t reaching the people making the games?

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It’s no secret that Insomniac’s Wolverine has been a commercial and critical disappointment.

The game failed to beat the remake of a 13-year-old game (Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced) and Crimson Desert, a brand new IP, during its first 72 hours after launch. That shouldn’t happen to a game with the Marvel tag slapped on it and one of the most popular comic book characters in history, especially since Insomniac delivered an extraordinary gaming experience in 2018’s Spider-Man and a competent one in Spider-Man 2 (despite the Sweet Baby Inc. association).

I’ve previously written about why Wolverine underperformed from a business and marketing perspective, but this time I want to share with all of you, great Fandom Pulse readers, why Wolverine failed miserably from a gameplay and story perspective.

Let’s get started.

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The Gameplay

Wolverine is the kind of game that drags on for too long with the mechanics you already mastered by the 30-minute mark.

Slash, jump, dodge, barrage, ad infinitum.

I’m sure many players wouldn’t mind this, especially those of us who grew up playing classics like X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse on the SNES, Konami’s extraordinary X-Men Arcade or Wolverine: Adamantium Rage on the Genesis. The problem is when a game that’s obsessed with cinematic presentation interrupts the rhythm every 10 minutes, for over 12 hours.

Cutscenes, tutorial snippets, handholding messages, quicktime events, walking and even stealth sections get in the way of what the vast majority of players would expect from a Wolverine game: brutal action.

And to make matters worse, the game features an experience system where you unlock special skills as you make progress because… what would a Western AAA gaming experience be without some good old RPGification just to bloat up gameplay time.

The walking sections in particular are everything you’ve come to despise about ‘Sonyslop’ games like God of War: Ragnarok, The Last of Us 2, Ghost of Yotei and even Horizon Forbidden West.. they serve as ‘connecting tissue’ between the next action stage and a story that seems to take priority over everything else.

And this is where writing about all of this starts to make my blood boil.

Why did Insomniac literally waste over $305 million to develop a game that’s obsessed with becoming a movie or a Disney+ TV series instead of a memorable experience driven by gameplay?

Every 5-10 minutes, there’s dialogue you’re supposed to be paying attention to, or a cutscene, or a walking section filled with lines that by the 45-min mark you’re no longer interested in.

Oh but there’s Sabretooth, and now there’s Toad, and now there’s Tyger, and there’s Omega Red, and then you’re arm wrestling Sabretooth while having a conversation… It’s the kind of MCU-influenced chore that leaves you drained, expecting to play only to be hammered by Netflix quality scripting and the neverending promise of a huge payoff that never delivers

Yes, the presentation is impeccable and you can clearly see that in the attention to detail of every location, but the photorealism gets in the way of a game that could feel like a classic X-Men comic book with everything that we love about games…. more gameplay, less narrative and environmental distractions.

Speaking of photorealism, the uncanny valley and disproportionate facial features of female characters that have come to define modern Western gaming are all here.

Just look at Sabretooth,

And Tyger…

And Mystique…

And Lady Deathstrike…

And Jean Grey…

Superhero characters became popular by being inspiring and having near perfect physical features, so when DEI, design and narrative consultants try to make them ‘represent everyone’ and do a technically poor job at that… well, the result is uninspiring, leading to the kind of underperforming sales Insomniac’s Wolverine is apparently doing.

The Story

Without spoiling too much, and to respect your time the way this game doesn’t, I’ll keep it brief to expose the modern obsession with ‘origin stories.’

You know, the kind of origin stories that try to retcon and reinvent established lore to adapt source material for ‘modern audiences’… 007: First Light, Saints Row Reboot, that Uncharted movie no one remembers, Star Wars Episodes VII-IX, Terminator: Dark Fate… you get the idea.

The X-Men don’t exist in Insomniac’s Wolverine, no Professor X and no School for Gifted Youngsters.

There’s only Team-X, a black-ops mutant squad led by Nathaniel Essex, the guy who finds feral Logan in the woods and gave him a purpose. Then there’s Bolivar Trask, the billionaire who thinks mutants are a threat to mankind, and must be studied and disposed of.

The game tries to tell an interesting, compelling story full of references to former disappointments and betrayals, but the problem is that everything feels disconnected even convoluted… spread through dialogues, walking conversations and missions where you explicitly have to ‘talk to people’ to gain experience.

It ends up being the kind of serviceable story that you can let roll and then come back without missing anything, with yelling to stress tension and calm, ‘reflective’ scenes for ‘character development’ that… no one really cares for in a Wolverine game.

Oh, and Mystique bosses you around… every single minute you’re next to her.

Closing Thoughts

The problem with Insomniac’s Wolverine is that it tries too hard to pander to an imaginary theater crowd who is supposed to carry the game’s revenue and word-of-mouth, instead of X-Men and seasoned players who have the budget to pay the $70 price of admission.

The result is a game that looks spectacular and brutal, but that fails to live up to the legacy of the X-Men franchise. I’ve said before that photorealism, and an obsession with ‘narrative design’ and RPGification is destroying Western gaming.

And Insomniac’s Wolverine is, sadly, the best (or worst) example of that.

One More Thing

The Forge by Yorch Torch Games is the #1 source for game recommendations, game design analysis, financial insight and market intelligence for the games industry.

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Weekly articles on business strategy for the gaming industry, with the kind of insight that legacy media and shills are too afraid to discuss.

Weekly game recommendations, from retro to indies, Eastern titles and the few Western AAA games worth playing today.

Game design deep dives of your favorite games.

And much more!

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Xbox eliminated 268 roles across Halo Studios, other first-party studios, and the Xbox Game Studios management layer this week, and handed development of the next mainline Halo title to a newly formed team inside Activision.

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Microsoft did not break out how many of the 268 cuts came from Halo Studios specifically. The move is part of a larger restructuring plan Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced on July 6, 2026: roughly 3,200 Xbox jobs eliminated through fiscal year 2027, about 20 percent of the division. That July wave cut 1,600 positions on its own and was bundled with a broader Microsoft layoff of about 4,800 employees company-wide. Sharma cited weak margins, investment that failed to produce growth, and a hardware-component cost crisis as the reasons behind the cuts.

Xbox executive Tim Booty said the actions taken between July and September, including this week’s studio divestitures, put the division “roughly three-quarters of the way through” the plan announced in July.

Halo Studios itself is not closing. The studio, rebranded from 343 Industries in October 2024, will keep “a small team” in place to support the community and titles already on the market, including Halo Infinite and the July 28, 2026 remake Halo: Campaign Evolved. That remake shipped only about eight weeks before this round of cuts. Development of the next full Halo game moves to a new team inside Activision built specifically for the project, separate from the Call of Duty organization.

Activision president Rob Kostich framed the handoff as a fresh start for the franchise: “For Halo, our goal is clear: make the greatest Halo game ever, worthy of its universe and legacy, while staying true to what made players love it in the first place.” He said a team is already being assembled.

The Xbox memo detailed a wider reshuffling of first-party studios beyond Halo. Activision also takes over Rare, developer of Sea of Thieves, and World’s Edge, developer of Age of Empires. Bethesda takes Obsidian, which will continue its current projects alongside a new Fallout collaboration. King takes over Microsoft Casual Games. Playground Games and Turn 10 are merging into a single studio focused on Forza and Fable.

Compulsion Games and Double Fine already returned to independence in August, and Undead Labs completed a similar transition while remaining committed to shipping State of Decay 3 day one on Game Pass. Two separate sale agreements for Ninja Theory fell through, and that studio is now entering consultation on a proposed closure. Arkane Lyon remains in consultation as well.

Halo Studios has been the sole steward of the franchise since Bungie departed after 2010’s Halo: Reach. The 2024 rebrand and the studio’s switch to Unreal Engine 5 were pitched as a new chapter after Halo Infinite underperformed and the studio abandoned its in-house Slipspace engine.

Video game commentator Yorch Torch Games did not credit the restructuring as a fix. “Years of progressive pandering,” he said. “Years of antagonizing Halo’s fan base. Years of not giving players what they want. And now Halo Studios is part of Activision. What did Microsoft do for an entire decade with its game studios? Nothing. These layoffs? They won’t change a thing.”

Xbox has scheduled an all-staff town hall for October 6. Still unknown: exact headcount at Halo Studios before and after the cuts, whether any current Halo staff will move over to the new Activision team, and any timeline for the next mainline game beyond Kostich’s statement of intent.

If Activision is starting over with a purpose-built team outside Halo Studios entirely, is that an admission that the 2024 rebrand and engine switch already failed, or a reset with different odds?

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Double Fine is the San Francisco studio behind Psychonauts and Brütal Legend. Microsoft owned the company for years. Then, in 2026, the Xbox marriage ended. After the staff got cut, Tim Schafer’s team went independent again and they brought back Amnesia Fortnight, their old in-house game jam, and put it on Kickstarter. Backers funded the jam and a documentary in addition to voting down a pile of pitches into four game prototypes. One small game would be released for real under a new label: Double Fine Action Labs. The base goal was $400,000 with the campaign launching on August 31 and closing on September 30.

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A nine-year-old Minecraft creator named Mighty Mike woke up famous for a bill his father discovered at work. David Sarkisyan, a marketing employee, sat in a room with managers and finance staff while a laptop showed a $118,000 bill in YouTube advertising charges on a company card assigned to him. The charges pointed at his son’s channel, Mighty Mike Plays.

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For readers who treat YouTube as a magic box, here is the machinery:

YouTube promotions run through Google Ads. A Google Ads campaign is one paid job you give YouTube: show this video to an audience you pick and charge the card per view until the budget runs out. The ad then appears as a pre-roll before the video or as a unit in the feed. The public view counter on the video climbs the same way organic traffic climbs, so there’s no way to tell whether the channel bought an audience from a earned one.

Once a credit card lives inside a Google account, every new campaign can charge it. The screen says approved, right? So, a child who watched a parent run a $20 test learns that more money = more eyes. Mike caught on quickly. His father bought Robux with a company card, left the details in the shared login and walked his son through it. Mike copied the lesson and repeated for for the next three weeks. Three Minecraft uploads soaked up most of the spend and landed in the low six-figure view range. Cost-per-view sat near $0.17 if you do the math:

Claimed spend ÷ views on the three big promoted videos About $118,000 ÷ about 690,000 views ≈ $0.17 per view.

The internet’s first reflex was to call the confession a stunt. The timing looked tidy. The father spoke in a flat, tutorial cadence. The channel’s subscriber count exploded after the apology, which made the disaster look useful. Some voices framed the family as operators hunting cash.

What do you think? Household accident: a nine-year-old chasing views on a company card and running up a six-figure receipt? Or a family turning a finance mess into subscriber bait?

And while we’re at it, has buying YouTube ads really become a normal way for kid channels to get viewers? Does showing a child how to do that make the dad’s $20 lesson look reckless even if his tears are real?

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Jon Del Arroz’s Fandom Pulse piece on the BlizzCon show laid the dates on the table: Diablo V in spring 2029, a StarCraft open-world shooter in spring 2030, a Netflix Diablo cartoon still “in development,” and a Warcraft III campaign that shipped on the spot. The slate looks fat. The calendar says come back in three to four years. Jon is right about the stagecraft. Announcing StarCraft as a shooter four years out, on a franchise whose last mainline game sits about sixteen years behind us, is the speech of a company that needs an escape route for investors while Microsoft’s gaming arm eats layoffs, a fresh harassment suit five years after the “frat boy” settlements, a $250 million shareholder payout over the Kotick sale, and hardware revenue falling off a cliff. Rockstar has been on GTA VI since roughly 2018 and still needed two delays. This is a punt dressed as vision.

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The delay is the business story. The older story is why Warcraft stopped being a war for a kingdom and became a long seminar on why the kingdom deserved to fall. The YouTuber Frank the Fox made that case in two videos this summer, “How Blizzard Declared Warcraft on Millennial Men” and “How World of Warcraft Destroyed the White Man.” The argument below follows his, with credit.

Warcraft on Millennial Men

Fox’s first video treats the RTS trilogy as formative culture work. Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1994) inherited a Western picture millennial boys already knew from paperbacks, arcades, and religious foundations they had only half noticed: castles, knights, peasants, clerics, kings. The Horde arrived as a force of pure evil, not refugees with a list of grievances. The orcs came through the Dark Portal to burn everything to the ground.

So click the footman. He said yes, my liege. That is an entire moral universe in one sentence. The footman is cheap infantry, sword and shield, but he still answers to you. Liege is an old word. It means the one to whom you owe faith and the one who owes you protection in return. To click the unit is to command him, and his reply is his consent.

That was the engine of the early RTS games. Warcraft I was built so a young man would feel like a leader. You were a commander of men, each of them waiting on your word. The pleasure of the genre was the responsibility: spend your troops well and hold the line against the forces of evil. Men are supposed to want that. They are supposed to take a place above other men in a chain of command and answer for what happens to the men beneath them. The game made that hunger playable.

Frank the Fox is right that the early human faction sounded like a remembered Europe. The game even put a church on the build menu, as if worship of Christ were simply part of the world’s infrastructure.

Warcraft I had one clean idea: humans defend the kingdom, orcs are the enemy, stop them.

Warcraft II made the good side bigger: dwarves, elves, and gnomes fighting alongside the humans. The war felt larger and far more exciting. At the same time, it added a new idea that quietly ruined the old one: the orcs were monsters only because demons had twisted them. They were victims first, villains second. Nature versus nurture.

That second idea is the seed. Once you accept it, “kill the Horde to save your people” stops being a simple duty and turns into a story about an abused enemy, and maybe about your own side as the real problem. Warcraft III grew that seed until it blossomed. Former enemies are now victims, and, hey, maybe your own people are the distrustful ones.

Warcraft III completed that inversion. The Alliance, Christendom in fantasy, fell to rot inside its own house. Terenas died at the hands of his son. Gilneas shut its gates. Stromgarde walked away. The coalition you had spent two games building lost to desertion rather than to a greater army. It quit. It splintered. It treated the old bonds as optional right as the real enemy arrived.

Arthas is the blond-haired, blue-eyed prince of Lordaeron: pale, European, paladin-trained, son of the king, and the face the first two games taught you to defend. He is what the West looks like when it still believes it produces heroes. Blizzard handed you the ideal and then, mission by mission, walked you through his undoing.

That is the deconstruction. A generation that had spent two games defending a civilization was trained to play as the hero who burns his kingdom to the ground. You watch Christendom fall, and you play the golden-haired son who brings it all down. By the time Wrath of the Lich King lets ten million people put him in the ground, the lesson is already installed: the tragedy is the corruption of the best man. The civilization he ruined stays in ruins. Meanwhile, the exile who sailed west keeps his eyes on the horizon.

Thrall is the replacement myth. Raised among humans, he sheds their internment camps, recovers shamanism, and sails west for a new world. He is young, clean of the old bloodlust, spiritually plugged into earth and ancestors instead of cathedral and crown. The game wants you to feel the wind at his back. The future belongs to the exile who found a truer god than the one in the human churches.

So the inversion is personal, and it is racial-coded in the old fantasy sense, even when later writers stay quiet about that coding. The Horde receives sympathy, spirit, and a new land. The Alliance receives a beautiful corpse: Arthas, the man who becomes the Lich King. That is what “went woke” means here, if the word is going to mean anything exact. What happened to Warcraft is not as blatant as a Pride Month event and a rainbow mount. Woke, in this case, is the transfer of moral authority away from those who ought to inherit it and into the hands of those outside the system. The old story said evil is real and comes from beyond. The new story said your own people are corrupt, while the displaced orcs and their shamanistic powers are only misunderstood victims.

How World of Warcraft Destroyed the White Man

Fox’s second video chronicles what happens when the early games’ sermons become a place you pay to live in. World of Warcraft launched in 2004, a year set inside a hangover. The World Trade Center towers had fallen three years earlier and, for a brief season, the country sounded like Warcraft I again. There was an enemy at the gate, a weapon that needed picking up, and a job only a man could name. Then the war in Iraq stretched on, and the weapons we were searching for stayed missing. The briefings soured. The men who had not died came home broken. The feeling of a clear war with a clear command faded into noise and distrust. The people who said “charge” no longer had the moral authority they had on day one.

At home the other pillars were already thin. Trades that once turned boys into men had been talked down for a generation. Shop class gave way to the university brochure. Manufacturing jobs left for cheaper shores. Everyone was told the upgrade path was in his credentials. So we collected the debt and trusted the science. After graduation we walked into a labor market short on the jobs the brochures had promised. Work still existed. Work with meaning was scarce.

Effort in the real world landed in opaque hierarchies where the rewards felt arbitrary and the ladder to success disappeared into fog.

The family unit followed the same delay. Marriage receded. Children receded. The ordinary sequence—job, wife, household, sons—stopped looking available on any honest timeline. A man in his twenties with no shop, no church, and no household is a man with time to fill and no one who will notice if he vanishes for six hours after dinner. The churches noticed less and less. Plenty of buildings still opened on Sunday. Fewer of them spoke to young men as if those men actually mattered.

So the moment was ripe. A generation formed on the early Warcraft games had been trained to want a kingdom, a chain of command, and a fight that made sense. Then Azeroth opened its doors. The guild noticed you. The raid required you. The ladder was visible. Twelve million people stepped through the WoW login screen into a new destiny.

This was a migration. A digital one, but a migration nonetheless.

Just as the orcs had sailed for Kalimdor with Thrall, young men logged into Azeroth with a name and a password. For a people whose inherited world had stopped commissioning them, they found a world that still would, all for the price of a subscription. Where the RTS campaigns had ended, the MMO kept going. World of Warcraft arrived in time to absorb the men left adrift by yesterday’s society. A Molten Core raid was the more available form of purpose. And Wrath of the Lich King is the homily at scale. Ten million people finally stood in front of Arthas and received grief in place of a clean kill. They got a tired son asking his murdered father if he could rest.

The game asks you to mourn Arthas as a fallen son, but it does not rebuild the civilization he wrecked. The lesson you walk away with is no longer that evil must be opposed, or that Christendom is worth defending. It is that the greatest tragedy is the corruption of the best of us. If that becomes the only idea you internalize, you are left without the capacity to defend anything. You can grieve a fallen hero and understand him completely, and still be unable to answer how you ought to rebuild.

Same Hunger, New Packaging

Cataclysm tore up the original map so the Azeroth you first loved could be cleared from the shelf and replaced with a new model. Mists of Pandaria offered a calming import: an isolated, balanced, Eastern-coded cure for what Frank the Fox calls “Western civilizational exhaustion.” Every new expansion and patch thins the Light and lengthens the login menu. Modern retail is a flavor catalog in which some new conflict is announced, processed, and sold to an ever-dwindling mass.

WoW Classic and WoW Forever exist because a slice of the audience wants a sealed product line, a time bubble in which new stories cannot contaminate the live game with “problematic situations.” When your own designers have to wall the past in glass so the present can keep selling both versions, the present has already admitted it is a store. Stores do not answer to their dead. They rotate stock.

WoW has also picked up that modern dialogue curse some people call Millennial writing. It sounds like a conversation around the corporate water cooler: bright, careful, a little quirky. Very Reddit. If conflict appears, it gets named and then soothed. Nobody talks like a king or a commander. The tone gets processed through female leads and group-therapy cadence. A good example is the meeting between Faerin Lothar and Danath at Thoradin’s Wall. She prompts the heritage talk and the worry about outsiders. He answers that pride in Stromic legend breeds superiority, and that the Sons of Lothar promote “tolerance and mercy.” That is a war story pausing for a brand-safe moral. It has no bite. Blizzard’s first question is whether anyone will be offended.

The men taught to pity a people without a home became that people. They did not pour through the Dark Portal as conquerors, they logged in as refugees. The strategy games capitalized on a feeling and the MMO fulfilled it. In a generation whose West had already shrugged off the old kingdom as meaningless, World of Warcraft farmed the empty space. Inside it, work counted.

Rank was visible and a guild noticed when you were gone. That can quiet the hunger for a while, but it cannot finish it.

Did Azeroth ever offer you more meaning than the life you were supposed to build? Were you actually part of a real community, or just buying a feeling that resets every expansion?

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The new StarCraft trailer left a bad taste in my mouth. While many were well aware that some kind of StarCraft shooter was arriving after years of rumors, the sour part is how Blizzard chose to sell it.

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The cinematic, titled Dominion dropped at BlizzCon 2026 and follows a Terran recruit named Holt through his training, his suit-up, and first drop. He is shown to be competent and motivated and another point of interest is that the training montage even puts him across from another cadet with a knife. However, after he and the other marines are dropped, Holt’s weapon malfunctions and the Zerg are on him in an instant and the combat knife from the training floor never comes out. So, the cutscene teaches him how to use a weapon and then forgets he learned it? Later, the camera cuts to a hangar where a mechanic hoses the pulp out of his CMC armor, supposedly in preparation for the next unfortunately body.

The trailer’s voiceover (the sons and daughters of the Dominion, their sacrifice bought us another day, carry their strength forward, no matter the cost) is the same speech the Confederacy and the Dominion have been giving cannon fodder since 1998. The difference this time the marketing is reveling in it. In the RTS, while your marines are disposable in the abstract, they were still precious in practice. You walled them into bunkers or parked Medics behind the line to keep them sustained. Then you rage when a Zerg baneling deletes a squad that you spent three minutes assembling. A barracks drop (supposedly what we see in the trailer) is a tactic, but the trailer treats it like a meat grinder.

Lately, I have been playing a lot of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. That game is boots-on-the-ground science-fiction infantry. You are in the armor and you experience the weight of the bolt rifle as part of the grimdark fantasy. In the story mode, the character Titus is tool of a rotten Imperium and an oppressive God-Emperor. But the fantasy is still an ideal: you are the man inside the ceramite armor, supported by a brotherhood that is bound by honor and duty. Even the Imperial Guard, ordinary human soldiers who are basically treated as expendable cannon fodder, get stories that focus on individual soldiers and their experiences. Even though these troops are thrown into battles where millions can die, the universe still has room to recognize that each soldier is an actual person, not just a disposable body.

The Dominion trailer wants you to detach, and it does so in a way that is almost... Reddit. Holt is introduced so you can watch him get thrown away, and there is nothing heroic he does in the cut. The cinematic almost has the temperature of a post-Vietnam commercial, where the institution eats the infantryman and the camera is in on the joke. I remain unsure whether they know which joke they are telling. Is this nostalgia for the old StarCraft grimness, or a subversive read on Mengsk’s machine? Or is it simply a modern marketing habit of treating the player-character as disposable: Someone you put in the spotlight for the trailer and throw away when it’s over? Again, it feels very Reddit.

The second sour note is worse. Blizzard devs just stood on a stage, showed a cinematic with zero gameplay, and locked a StarCraft shooter to spring 2030, four years out. President Johanna Faries told Bloomberg the early dates exist “to convey confidence in some of our biggest bets.” Dan Hay, the former Far Cry lead now running the project, said the team has been working “for a little bit,” feels good about it, and wanted to share “an inkling.” The official line is that this is a new Blizzard: one that ships, ships big, and ships on time.

Anyone who lived through StarCraft: Ghost heard that and felt a spasm.

What Ghost Was Supposed to Be

On September 20, 2002, at the Tokyo Game Show, Blizzard announced StarCraft: Ghost. It was a third-person tactical action game for the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube. You would play Nova Terra, a psionic Ghost operative. The game involved cloaking, stealth, and calling down nukes with a laser designator. It was supposed to be the boots-on-the-ground fantasy every

RTS player had already been running in their head every time they selected a Ghost and hit the cloak hotkey.

The developer was Nihilistic Software, a small studio founded by former LucasArts developers who had shipped Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption. The original target was late 2003, and for a company that had just finished defining PC real-time strategy, a console stealth-action game starring a new face in the Koprulu Sector seemed like a promising new direction.

Instead, Ghost would spend the next several years trapped in development hell.

The Identity Crisis

People who worked on the game later described the train wreck from three sides: Nihilistic, Swingin’ Ape, and Blizzard.

As mentioned before, Ghost started as a stealth game. Started. Chris Millar, who produced it on the Blizzard side for a stretch, put it plainly: It began stealthy, and a large contingent inside Blizzard decided it should be more action-oriented. James Goddard, an action-game veteran brought in as an external producer, said the quiet part: “The game had an identity crisis.” He pushed for a stealth game that stopped short of hardcore stealth. That was a compromise that satisfied nobody.

Feature lists ballooned with whatever was selling that quarter. Splinter Cell shipped in 2002, and suddenly wall-climbing was on the list. Co-op multiplayer, absent from the original design, became a demand. Rob Pardo’s early involvement appears to have provided some of the direction the project needed, but as producers changed and responsibilities shifted, Nihilistic developers felt that Blizzard no longer had a single person clearly steering the project. Chris Millar, whom Huebner later described as the most positive and productive producer they worked with, was eventually replaced, and gaps between feedback sessions became longer. Robert Huebner later described the meetings as a gradual shift away from refining a game they already had and toward constantly experimenting with new ideas. The problem was that the target kept moving. Huebner recalled that each time the Nihilistic team came in with a new build, they would half-jokingly wonder which game Blizzard would want them to imitate next.

Huebner’s complaint was essentially that Ghost was being redesigned faster than it could be finished. The team could produce playable demos, which encouraged Blizzard to keep asking for another variation, another feature, or another interpretation of what a StarCraft shooter should be. However, instead of polishing a settled design, development became an extended process of figuring out what the game actually was.

The contract skipped a hard ship date. By 2004, the game was playable, but it was also largely unfinished. At E3 2004, in a conference room a few feet from a booth full of people playing the demo, Blizzard and Nihilistic effectively ended their relationship. Nihilistic would later go to Electronic Arts and make Marvel Nemesis. And the story Blizzard told the press was that Nihilistic had “completed their work.”

That was the first lie of omission.

Swingin’ Ape, the Buyout, and the Generation That Closed

In July 2004, Blizzard handed Ghost over to Swingin’ Ape Studios, the team behind Metal Arms: Glitch in the System. Unlike Nihilistic, Swingin’ Ape decided to rebuild the game from scratch and put a much greater emphasis on multiplayer. The team looked to Halo for inspiration, treating Bungie’s shooter as the benchmark for what a console action game could be. One former Swingin’ Ape developer, Mike Schweitzer, later recalled that they regularly measured themselves against Halo 2, which he described as the gold standard for console action shooters at the time. He felt they were genuinely competing for that top spot. The result was a multiplayer mode that leaned heavily into the fantasy of playing StarCraft at ground level.

Players could take control of units from all three races, with different character classes translating the RTS factions into a third-person action game. Vehicles and other elements of the RTS series gave the matches a distinctly StarCraft flavor.

And, for a while, it seemed to be working. James Goddard remembered the moment multiplayer was running across multiple consoles, with players jumping onto speeders, as a genuine “holy shit” moment. The multiplayer was becoming the part of Ghost that everyone could finally see working. The problem was what happened to the other half of the game. The single-player experience, the part of Ghost that had originally been sold as Nova’s stealth-action adventure, was still struggling to come together.

Meanwhile, time was ticking away, and the video game industry was moving on without Ghost. The game had originally been designed for the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube, which were all part of the same generation of consoles. But by 2005, that generation was already being replaced. Microsoft had launched the Xbox 360, while Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Nintendo’s Wii were on the way. The GameCube version was already dead by 2005. Blizzard canceled it because the console did not have a readily available online service, while so much work had gone into the online portion of Ghost that releasing only part of the intended game would have required additional work. It was a small detail that revealed just how important multiplayer had become to the new version of Ghost.

The timing was getting worse. Ghost had started life near the beginning of a console generation, but by the time Swingin’ Ape’s version was taking shape, that generation was nearing its end. Blizzard was now looking at the much more powerful Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii. The longer Ghost remained unfinished, the harder it became to justify releasing it on hardware that was already on its way out.

On March 24, 2006, Blizzard announced an “indefinite postponement.” The company said it was shifting its console-development efforts toward the next generation and wanted to evaluate how it could use the additional power of the new systems. Official language kept the word “canceled” off the page. At the DICE Summit in 2008, Blizzard executives explained that Ghost was not technically canceled, but it was no longer a focus because the company had a finite amount of development resources. World of Warcraft had become a massive success, while StarCraft II was also in development. Blizzard had to decide where those resources were going.

“We have to choose, we can’t do everything.”

It would not be until 2014, while discussing the cancellation of Titan, that Morhaime finally said the word. Ghost had been canceled. Twelve years after the TGS stage. Eight years after “indefinite.” The vaporware lists had been calling it for a decade. Wired ranked it fifth in its 2005 Vaporware Awards. Morhaime later described canceling Ghost as difficult and said that, like Warcraft Adventures, the cancellation ultimately resulted in better-quality work. Both things can be true, but neither one ships the game you announced.

What Survived

Keith R.A. DeCandido’s novel StarCraft: Ghost: Nova finally came out in November 2006. It had originally been scheduled for April, with the intention of releasing it alongside the game, but the game had already been indefinitely postponed by the time the book reached stores. DeCandido later explained that roughly half of Nova’s backstory came from material he created for the novel, while the rest was built around the character and story Blizzard had already established for Ghost.

The strange thing is that Nova survived even though the game that created her did not. She eventually appeared in StarCraft II, and Blizzard later gave her an entire campaign in Nova Covert Ops. Blizzard’s own announcement described Nova as one of StarCraft’s most memorable characters and brought her back as the star of a new StarCraft II mission pack. Even parts of Ghost itself survived in StarCraft II. Assets from the canceled game, including installation artwork, were later reused in the game. The canceled project had effectively become a source of material for the franchise that continued without it.

Then, in February 2020, something even stranger happened. A playable Xbox development build from Nihilistic’s version of Ghost leaked online. The build contained playable sections of the game, including levels, character and unit models, and other development material. For the first time, people outside Blizzard could actually get their hands on a substantial piece of the game that had been sitting in development limbo for nearly two decades. People weren’t just watching an old trailer anymore. They were playing the game’s corpse.

And that is the part younger players need to keep in mind when they watch today’s trailers: Ghost was a public product. It had trailers, playable E3 builds, a novel, and a character who became part of the wider StarCraft canon. Blizzard had spent years presenting it to the public as a real game that people would eventually be able to buy. Then, after the 2006 “indefinite postponement,” it simply remained in limbo until Blizzard finally acknowledged the cancellation in 2014.

They Tried Again

Yes, they tried again.

Around 2017, Blizzard began work on another StarCraft shooter, this one internally known as Ares. The project was reportedly built as a first-person shooter using the same engine technology as Overwatch. The basic idea was StarCraft from the ground level again, but this time with the scale and battlefield feel of a modern military shooter. Early prototypes reportedly put players in the role of Terran Marines fighting Zerg, with the team also experimenting with the possibility of letting players control Zerg units. Blizzard had apparently spent about two years developing it. By 2019, there were working prototypes and enough development behind the project for employees to have spent years on it.

Then, on June 5, 2019, Blizzard animator David Gibson announced that he was leaving the company. He wrote, “Unfortunately you’ll never see what we made over the past 2 years.” He did not name the project, but the timing quickly became significant. The following day, reports identified the canceled project as a StarCraft shooter called Ares. Blizzard’s response did not deny that the project had existed or that it had been canceled. Instead, the company gave its familiar explanation that Blizzard sometimes decides not to move forward with projects, even after substantial development work has been done.

The cancellation also came with a reshuffling of Blizzard’s development teams. Reports at the time said developers from Ares were being moved onto Diablo IV and Overwatch 2. By October, Blizzard confirmed that Dustin Browder, Eric Dodds, and Jason Chayes had left the company. Browder had previously led StarCraft II and Heroes of the Storm, while Dodds and Chayes were veteran Blizzard developers. Their departures came only months after the StarCraft shooter had been canceled.

In October 2019, Blizzard president J. Allen Brack also acknowledged that the project had existed and that Blizzard was not moving forward with it. Blizzard’s public statement at the time was the house special. They declined to comment on unannounced projects and emphasized that development is an iterative process, where a game can be abandoned even after years of work. The company also said that the work put into canceled projects can still lead to useful ideas and technology elsewhere.

Read that last clause again. That is the company that had just spent years developing another StarCraft shooter, only for the project to disappear before the public ever got to play it. That matters when you look at Blizzard’s latest StarCraft shooter announcement. The history is no longer just one abandoned project from 2002. Ghost was publicly announced, demonstrated, promoted, novelized, and eventually left in limbo. Then Blizzard spent another two years developing a completely different StarCraft shooter, only to cancel that one too.

Two tries. Zero shipped games. Now Blizzard is asking the audience to believe in a third attempt, with a cinematic trailer and a release window that stretches years into the future. The difference this time is that Blizzard is showing us the movie first and asking us to wait for the game.

Third time is the charm, we are told. Only this time, the charm is a four-year runway and a trailer is about hosing a kid out of a combat suit.

The Pattern Under the Pattern

While Ghost is the game most people remember, it shares the graveyard. Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans was shown, delayed, and killed in 1998 because quality fell short. Titan burned seven years and became Overwatch. Nomad died so World of Warcraft could live. A Civilization-style StarCraft 4X flickered and went out. The house culture has always been “done when it’s done,” which is admirable when the thing that ships is StarCraft or Diablo II, but corrosive when it’s a magazine-cover project that drops from the vine.

Faries’ line, “we ship, we ship big, we ship on time,” is a repudiation of that old Blizzard culture, sold as confidence. Maybe it is. The important thing is that Blizzard is explicitly asking the audience to believe that this is a different company, one that can put a date on a game years in advance and actually deliver it.

Dan Hay’s pitch for the game is, at least on paper, encouraging. Hay comes from the Far Cry school of big, self-contained action games rather than Blizzard’s traditional seasonal model, and he has described this StarCraft as a “box product.” You create a character, give them a name, and follow their story. He specifically said that, at least in its current form, it is not a seasonal game. That is probably the most encouraging part of the entire reveal and fits Hay’s background. He spent years working on Far Cry, a series built around standalone, story-driven releases, and the structure he describes for StarCraft sounds much closer to that model than to World of Warcraft or a seasonal Diablo loop.

Even so, all we have is a cinematic. While the trailer establishes the kind of story Blizzard wants you to imagine, it does not demonstrate the actual gameplay systems, combat, exploration, progression, or even the perspective you will use to play the game.

And finally, there is the release date: Spring 2030. Four years.

In video game development, four years is an enormous amount of time to put between a public reveal and a finished game. A four-year runway means Blizzard is asking the audience to wait through an entire console generation’s worth of technological change, several holiday shopping seasons, and enough development time for a game to change engines, directors, mechanics, scope, or even its entire identity.

For a studio with StarCraft: Ghost and Ares already sitting in its history, four years is a very long time to ask the audience to take the promise on faith.

Why the Marine Thing Sticks

Go back to Holt. Then go back to Titus.

Space Marine 2 understands the contract of a boots-on-the-ground game. You inhabit the role. The Imperium can be ugly and grotesque at times, but you fight to keep the brother next to you standing. That is true of the Astartes fantasy and, in a different register, of the best Imperial Guard fiction. Expendability is a condition those stories put on a person. There is no punchline involved.

StarCraft Marines were never Space Marines. In truth, they’re closer to the Guard. The old StarCraft games never leaned into their expendability. You were incentivized to keep them alive as long as you could, holding the line against Zerg and Protoss alike. The cruelty of the Dominion was diegetic. Mengsk threw men into the grinder, and the campaign made you feel the lies of the Dominion. But Raynor’s whole arc is what happens when you stop believing those lies. The player’s hands, down in the RTS, were the opposite of Mengsk’s speeches: bunkers, medics, defensive lines, and the desperate effort to keep your forces alive. You were complicit in the machine, but you were also the only person on the battlefield trying to stop the machine from eating your squads.

The new trailer recites the speech with a straight face and frames the recycled armor as the whole atmosphere. That move fails to honor the lore. This new Blizzard is lifting the aesthetics the story was about and using them as brand tone. Are we really expected to enlist at StarCraft.com after watching the last guy get poured down a drain?

As I said before, the register is post-Vietnam, and it is oddly late. That mode, irony as the “adult” way to look at infantry, had its run. That’s why it feels so Reddit. Helldivers 2 still runs a version of it, but Helldivers lets you be in on the satire while you dive. Dominion detaches you from the marine you are about to play, revels in the texture of his death, and asks you to come back in 2030.

So, does Blizzard finally have something to prove with this StarCraft shooter? Or has the history of Ghost and Ares already made the promise impossible to believe?

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Blizzard opened BlizzCon 2026 in Anaheim with what the company billed as one of its biggest announcement dumps in years. Diablo V is coming Spring 2029, picking up after Sanctuary has already fallen and Diablo has won, with the first three confirmed classes being Demon Hunter, Monk, and a new Plague Knight. StarCraft is returning too, but not as the real-time strategy game the franchise built its name on, it’s an open-world shooter set in the Koprulu Sector, targeting Spring 2030 and confirmed for console alongside PC. Blizzard President Johanna Faries also announced an animated Diablo series in development with Netflix, plus teased possible Overwatch and Warcraft adaptations down the line, alongside a new WoW Forever mode, Overwatch’s tenth-anniversary Season 5 content, and a Warcraft III campaign launching immediately.

That appears to be large slate on paper. It’s also, when you actually look at the dates attached, a company telling its audience: come back in three to four years.

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Marvel’s Wolverine launches September 15, and five days before release, Insomniac narrative director Walt Williams handed critics of the game its most damning quote yet, on the record, to the Washington Post.

The scene happens during an assault on a military base. Sabretooth grabs the back of Logan’s head. Washington Post reviewer Gene Park described what follows as “a brief moment of yearning.” Williams confirmed to the Post that reading is exactly what Insomniac intended, walking through the beat in detail: “Logan feels that yearning and he gets scared and pulls away. Sabretooth feels that yearning and it makes him hurt and want to lash out to exert that hurt outward. Hate and love are so hand in hand. You hurt me so I’m going to hurt you, and we’re still going to be linked because now the pain is shared.”

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That’s Insomniac’s narrative director explicitly framing Wolverine’s most violent, longest-running rivalry as romantic yearning, described in his own words as “hand in hand” with love. The internet went crazy immediately. “Wait Wolverine and Sabretooth are gay? I thought they were brothers,” one widely shared post read, referencing X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the 2009 film where Victor Creed was written as Logan’s half-brother. That specific sibling relationship comes from that film continuity, not mainstream comics canon, and Insomniac hasn’t confirmed the game treats them as blood relatives. But the sharper point fans raised cuts deeper regardless of the sibling question. As one fan put it: “Are they aware their rivalry started with Victor raping and murdering Logan’s lover?” That’s established comics history, not exaggeration. Sabretooth’s decades-long feud with Wolverine in mainstream continuity traces back to Victor Creed murdering Silver Fox, a woman Logan loved. Reframing that history as a relationship with “room for love” is a direct, quoted description from the writer himself of a character whose canonical history includes murdering Wolverine’s partner.

This new controversy piles right on top of a fight that’s been building around the game for over two years, not a controversy invented in the last week. It starts with Sweet Baby Inc., the narrative consulting firm confirmed on the project since 2021, when the company’s own account posted excitedly about joining “the amazing folks at Insomniac” on both Spider-Man 2 and Wolverine. That confirmation resurfaced publicly in early 2024, and it mattered because Sweet Baby is the same firm attached to Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, a $200 million commercial disaster for Warner Bros.

Jean Grey became the flashpoint almost immediately after. Leaked test footage from the game’s early development showed Jean fighting alongside a Patch-costumed Wolverine in a Madripoor casino, and former World of Warcraft team lead Mark Kern posted the leaked model next to later development art, writing: “Look at what happened to Jean Grey from Insomniac Games’ Marvel’s Wolverine from these leaked early screenshots of the first, beautiful model, to the masculine, world weary version we have today. They are ruining Marvel.” When Jean’s in-game look debuted properly at the June 2, 2026 State of Play, the backlash reignited immediately. 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?” Another account, @Kachinkastic, drew a direct east-west 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.” A third, @JohnnyMassacre, tied it directly to the game’s own marketing structure: “LMFAO DEI quota detected. We must give significant run time to female ugly Jean Grey in a WOLVERINE game.”

Mystique got hit with the same criticism when her design surfaced later. One widely shared post asked outright, “I’m cautious about Wolverine. How much Sweet Baby STINK is still on it? Because they turned Spider-Man 2 into dog shit.” The launch trailer, which opened Sony’s September State of Play twelve days before release, reignited the fight a third time. God of War creator David Jaffe, someone with no track record of reflexive culture-war commentary, posted his own reaction video calling the female character designs “ugly and disgusting,” directing his criticism specifically at Marvel Games VP Bill Rosemann and pointing out that Marvel Rivals and Marvel Snap depict these exact same characters as conventionally attractive without any apparent difficulty. Insomniac’s response to the mounting criticism, according to reporting at the time, was a clown emoji pointed at critics. Throughout all of it, Insomniac’s own narrative director publicly defended Sweet Baby Inc. as “one of the finest in the biz.”

Now the reviews are in, and they give the critics of all of this even more ammunition. Marvel’s Wolverine landed at 77 on Metacritic, Insomniac’s lowest-rated game to date, below both Spider-Man titles and below Ratchet and Clank. OpenCritic has it at a similarly soft 79 to 81 depending on when the aggregate was checked. Metacritic’s own critic consensus reads: “Unfortunately, the shallow combat, repetitive enemies, inconsequential stealth, and overreliance on linear cinematic sequences exhaust their surprises far too quickly. Insomniac created one of Wolverine’s finest stories, but placed it inside a game that is ultimately more spectacular than deep.” IGN gave it a 6 out of 10, writing that its “slick and satisfying combat wears thin well before its conclusion.” But Why Tho? called it “too safe,” citing “repetitive combat, unanswered narrative questions, and uneven pacing,” and noted that despite coming from the studio behind Ratchet and Clank and Marvel’s Spider-Man, the game “doesn’t live up to Insomniac Games’ previous work.” Multiple outlets independently flagged the same core problems: enemy variety is thin, combat encounters blur together across simple arenas, and exploration outside of fights offers limited player choice. This is a studio with a genuinely excellent track record producing its weakest-reviewed game yet, in the same stretch where its own narrative director is publicly defending design and story choices a large chunk of the fanbase has been rejecting since 2024.

None of this happens in a vacuum, and it isn’t unique to Wolverine. It’s the same pattern that’s now played out across nearly every major AAA release of the last two years. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II’s director admitted outright that the game’s same-sex romance option with Hans Capon was added, in his own words, partly “to avoid accusations of sexism against us,” a decision made for optics rather than organic storytelling, by the studio’s own admission. Dragon Age: The Veilguard leaned hard into identity-driven character writing and pronoun selection as central mechanics, and became one of BioWare’s biggest commercial disappointments, with even sympathetic critics conceding the identity focus came at the expense of the dark, grounded storytelling the series built its reputation on. Assassin’s Creed Shadows gave its Black samurai protagonist Yasuke a nonbinary love interest, Ibuki, sparking a controversy large enough to reportedly draw formal concern from Japanese government officials over historical distortion, layered on top of the game’s separate backlash for depicting violence inside real, active Shinto shrines.

Why do studios keep repeating this pattern?

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Marvel’s Wolverine released to a Metacritic score of 77, and even Kotaku, an outlet that’s spent two years defending nearly every decision Insomniac made on this project, had to write the headline straight: “Marvel’s Wolverine Is Currently Sony’s Lowest Scoring Game Of The PS5 Era.” That’s not hyperbole from a critic outlet. That’s the actual math. A 77 puts Insomniac’s game below Sackboy: A Big Adventure, a PS5 launch-window platformer for children, and below every other first-party Sony release across six years of the console’s life. The high-profile outlets that usually carry the most weight in that average, Eurogamer, VGC, IGN, GameSpot, GamesRadar, all landed around a 6 out of 10. Giant Bomb went lower still, a 5. Even Kotaku’s own framing gave the game away: “a resounding ‘fine.’” When the most sympathetic coverage in gaming media has to describe your PlayStation exclusive as “fine” and spend the rest of the piece finding ways to spin that as somehow still a win for Sony, the game has already lost the argument.

This didn’t come out of nowhere. Marvel’s Wolverine has been fighting a two-front war since the moment fans first saw it, and the second front is exactly the one gamers have been warning about for years: character design decisions that seem to prioritize an ideological checklist over the actual source material.

Jean Grey has been the center of this fight through three separate design iterations. The first version leaked in December 2023, after a ransomware attack dumped early Marvel’s Wolverine development material online. Fans generally liked what they saw. Then the redesign happened, and the reaction flipped completely. Fandom Pulse covered this directly back in June, documenting how the character went from her original concept to what critics called an off-model, world-weary version stripped of anything resembling the character readers have known for decades, a woman comic readers have watched Cyclops and Wolverine fight over for sixty years, redesigned into someone nobody online was fighting over anymore. One widely shared comparison joke put it bluntly: it looked like “the devs put the lady from Ghost of Yotei in a red wig.” Mystique got the same treatment in a September 2025 trailer, redesigned off-model enough that fans called it unrecognizable. Insomniac’s official response to that backlash was to post a clown emoji pointing at the critics.

The design fight escalated again just twelve days before launch, when the official launch trailer opened Sony’s September State of Play and immediately reignited the exact same argument. A viral post laid three faces side by side, Jean Grey, Mystique, Lady Deathstrike, and declared all three hit with what got called “the AAA ugly stick.” God of War creator David Jaffe, someone with no reason to pile on reflexively, posted his own reaction video calling the designs “ugly and disgusting,” directing his criticism specifically at Marvel Games VP Bill Rosemann and pointing out that Marvel Rivals and Marvel Snap manage to depict these same characters as conventionally attractive without any trouble at all. Jaffe was careful to clarify his issue wasn’t diversity itself, it was that these specific designs strayed from decades of established source material for no clear creative reason. He said he’d still buy the game if reviews came in strong. They didn’t.

Underneath the design fight sits the piece that actually explains it: Sweet Baby Inc.’s confirmed involvement with the project, surfaced in early 2024 through the narrative consulting firm’s own project listings and Insomniac’s own development communications. This is the same consulting firm attached to Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, a game that cost Warner Bros. Games an estimated $200 million and became one of the most notorious commercial failures in recent AAA history. An Insomniac narrative director publicly defended the firm’s involvement, calling it “one of the finest in the biz,” while the studio’s own marketing kept structuring a game literally titled Wolverine around extensive female character screen time at the expense of, you know, Wolverine. Fans online were blunt about naming what they saw happening: “LMFAO DEI quota detected,” as one widely shared post put it. “We must give significant run time to female ugly Jean Grey in a WOLVERINE game.”

None of this happened in a vacuum, and it isn’t an isolated case. It’s the latest entry in a string of AAA games where studios prioritized ideological consulting and design choices over craft, and paid for it with the actual product. Suicide Squad cost Warner Bros. $200 million and got remembered as a disaster. Concord got pulled from shelves entirely within two weeks of launch after similar criticism about its character designs and creative direction. Now Marvel’s Wolverine, from a studio, Insomniac, that built its reputation on genuinely great, beloved Spider-Man games, lands as Sony’s single lowest-rated first-party PS5 release, in a year where the company is already dealing with fan revolt over killing physical discs entirely by 2028. Insomniac’s own community director, James Stevenson, admitted weeks before launch that criticism online had gotten bad enough that he was reconsidering whether developers should even engage with fans on social media at all, calling it a “relentless onslaught.” That’s not an outside observer’s read. That’s the studio’s own team acknowledging the temperature of this backlash before a single review had even gone live.

A 77 Metascore isn’t a catastrophic failure by raw numbers alone. But context is everything, and the context here is a studio with an excellent track record producing the worst-reviewed first-party game Sony has published in six years, immediately after two years of very public fights over character designs tied to a consulting firm with its own history of tanking a $200 million game. The gameplay reviews landing around “fine, if dated” would have been a forgettable mid-tier release on its own. Paired with everything that led up to it, it reads like exactly what critics warned about: another AAA studio that let ideology steer decisions the source material and the fans never asked for, and produced a worse game because of it.

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Grand Theft Auto VI has been in some form of development since Rockstar wrapped Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018, following years of early conceptual work stretching back to GTA V’s 2013 launch. That’s roughly eight years of active production for a single game, one of the longest development cycles in the industry’s history, and it’s produced exactly the kind of scrutiny you’d expect from a project this size. The game has been delayed twice, first from a Fall 2025 window to May 26, 2026, then again to its current November 19, 2026 date, both times with Rockstar citing the need for additional development time. It survived a massive 2022 security breach that saw a hacker leak 90 unfinished development clips, an incident that ended in an arrest and years of tightened internal security. It’s weathered a second leak campaign in August 2026, this one from a group calling itself Cyberleek that ran an eight-day unauthorized footage drop timed to undercut Rockstar’s own marketing. No official development budget has ever been confirmed by Rockstar or Take-Two, but Business Insider’s widely cited analyst estimate puts cumulative spending somewhere between $1 billion and $1.5 billion, which would already make it the most expensive game ever made even before the higher, unverified $2 billion figures that have circulated online.

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Against that backdrop, Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson sat down with Kinda Funny Games hosts Andy Cortez and Greg Miller during a preview visit to the studio’s Edinburgh headquarters and gave flat, on-record answers to two of the most contested questions in modern game development. Asked whether players would be able to spend real money inside GTA VI’s single-player campaign, Nelson’s answer was a clean no, no monetization of any kind. Asked whether generative AI played any role in building the game, Nelson was equally direct: none. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has echoed the same line publicly for months, telling GamesIndustry.biz that generative AI has no place in what Rockstar is building and that the game’s world was constructed street by street rather than generated.

The no-microtransactions confirmation deserves real, unqualified credit. GTA Online has run on Shark Card purchases for well over a decade and remains one of Take-Two’s most consistent revenue engines, reportedly pulling in something in the range of $8 million a week even this deep into its lifespan. For the mainline single-player campaign, the one 13-plus years of fan anticipation has actually been about, to ship completely clean of that system is a genuinely consumer-friendly stance, and it’s landing at a moment when the game is already tracking toward the strongest pre-order campaign gaming has ever seen. Sensor Tower reported pre-orders surged 436% the day the Netflix Extended Look aired, with PlayStation pre-orders specifically up 606%. One caveat worth flagging: when Kinda Funny asked about the next iteration of GTA Online specifically, Rockstar went completely silent, leaving the door open for exactly the kind of monetization this announcement seems to rule out, just parked in a different game mode.

The no-generative-AI line is where the framing gets strange. GTA VI reportedly contains well over 600,000 individual animations, according to New York Times reporting from the same preview week, compared to roughly 55,000 in GTA V and around 300,000 in Red Dead Redemption 2. That’s a genuinely staggering amount of handcrafted production work, built by a studio with the budget, headcount, and eight years of runway to do it entirely by hand. Rockstar has every right to be proud of that achievement. But turning “we chose not to use a modern production tool” into its own press talking point, in an industry currently racing to figure out how AI-assisted workflows can help smaller, less-resourced studios compete with AAA budgets, treats the absence of a technology as a moral accomplishment rather than what it actually is: a production choice available to a studio with more money and more time than almost anyone else in the industry.

This is the same reflexive anti-AI posture that’s shown up across entertainment and publishing all year, where any use of the technology gets treated as an automatic red flag regardless of whether the actual output suffers. A tool is a tool. If AI-assisted animation cleanup, procedural texture work, or pathfinding systems had shaved real time off an already eight-year production cycle without making the final game worse, that would have been a genuine win for a fanbase that’s been waiting since 2013 for a new entry in this franchise. Instead, Rockstar is marketing “we avoided a useful technology” as a selling point, the exact inverse of how efficiency gains get treated in virtually every other industry. It’s a virtue signal aimed at an online audience currently primed to reward “no AI” branding on reflex, regardless of whether the alternative would have actually served players faster or better.

None of this changes the fact that GTA VI is shaping up to be a genuinely massive release, built by a studio that clearly has the resources to do things the hard way. The no-monetization promise deserves real credit. The no-AI announcement deserves a shrug, and maybe a raised eyebrow at why a studio confident enough to hand-build 600,000 animations over the better part of a decade felt the need to frame that choice as a culture-war talking point at all.

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Nintendo unveiled a full gameplay trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake during today’s Zelda 40th Anniversary Direct, confirming a November 5, 2026 launch exclusive to Switch 2. This isn’t a remaster or a straightforward visual bump the way past re-releases have been. Nintendo has completely rebuilt the 1998 classic from the ground up, with reworked environments, modernized controls, and fully voiced cutscenes, while clearly working hard to preserve the tone and feel that made the original a landmark game in the first place. The trailer runs through Young and Adult Link, Young Zelda, Ganondorf, Sheik, and the Great Fairies, giving longtime fans a proper look at how Hyrule has been reimagined nearly three decades later.

The reaction has been enthusiastic. Kangmin Lee said, “The Ocarina of Time remake looks incredible. I’m excited to play it.” One user on X put it even more bluntly: “The best looking remake I have ever seen. I’m so impressed, it’s insane.” Nintendo Life’s own comment section lit up in the same direction, with one fan writing, “It’s been a long time since a trailer made me feel this much hype,” and another calling it “freaking amazing exceeding all my expectations,” adding that Nintendo “translated the OG artstyle to modern graphics in such a beautiful way.” Another fan specifically singled out Castle Town’s redesign as a highlight, saying it left them “more hyped than i thought i would be going into the presentation.”

What makes this remake notable is the care in the rebuild itself. Ocarina of Time has been ported and touched up multiple times before, on GameCube, 3DS, and Switch Online, but this marks the first time Nintendo has undertaken a full-scale ground-up remake of the game rather than a port with a new coat of paint. Producer Eiji Aonuma personally introduced the extended footage during the Direct, a signal of how much weight Nintendo is putting behind this release. The decision to keep the world’s original zoned structure rather than opening it up into one continuous overworld has already sparked some discussion among fans, but Nintendo’s framing, that it’s a deliberate choice to preserve the feel of the N64 original, is exactly the kind of restraint longtime fans have been hoping for from a remake of a game this beloved. Too many remakes chase modernization for its own sake and lose what made the original special in the process. Based on the reaction so far, Nintendo appears to be threading that needle well.

The timing is a fun wrinkle too. Ocarina of Time launches November 5, a full two weeks ahead of Grand Theft Auto VI’s November 19 release, giving Switch 2 owners a real window to fully experience Link’s quest before GTA VI eats the rest of gaming’s attention for the following two months. For a franchise celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, sending one of its most beloved entries back out into the world, rebuilt with real care rather than rushed out to hit a marketing date, feels like exactly the right way to mark the occasion.

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Final Fantasy VII Revelation, the third and final chapter in Square Enix’s decade-long remake trilogy, is shipping April 8, 2027 with a disc in the box and a catch buried in the fine print: that disc alone won’t run the game. Square Enix confirmed at Sony’s September State of Play that Revelation will ship on a single Blu-ray across PS5 and Xbox, but a mandatory download is required before the game will launch at all. Every physical buyer needs a live internet connection just to play for the first time, regardless of whether they bought a disc specifically to avoid exactly that requirement.

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The reversal stings because of how loudly Square Enix marketed the opposite decision just eighteen months ago. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the trilogy’s second entry, shipped across two full physical PS5 discs in early 2024, and the studio treated that as a genuine selling point, proof the game could be played disc-to-disc without eating into a buyer’s hard drive or requiring an internet connection at all. Revelation is reportedly a larger game than Rebirth, which already ran around 145GB. Rather than expand to two or three discs to match that growth the way Rebirth had, Square Enix went the opposite direction: one disc, plus a required download estimated around 130GB to fill in the rest.

Fan reaction has been exactly as pointed as you’d expect from an audience that remembers the marketing. A ResetEra thread captured the whiplash in real time: “From ‘On Two Discs!’ with Rebirth to this, oof,” one user wrote. Another called it “worst of both worlds. Digital only future cannot come soon enough to save people from this nonsense.” A third didn’t bother softening it: “Made the cut to release on disc only to do this. What a f***ing waste.” Reports indicate some fans have already cancelled pre-orders for the game’s collector’s edition specifically over the change, a real signal that this isn’t just forum noise but actual lost sales on a title that hasn’t even entered its marketing push yet.

There’s a specific irony sitting underneath all of this. FFVII Remake Part 3 director Naoki Hamaguchi has been publicly vocal about game preservation as a value he personally holds, and reporting around Revelation’s announcement indicates he specifically pushed to keep any physical release option alive for the game at all, rather than the trilogy’s finale going fully digital-only. That advocacy produced a real, physical disc in the box. It just doesn’t function the way physical media has historically been understood to function. A disc that can’t run its own game without an active internet connection isn’t preserving anything in the way that phrase usually implies, it’s a download code wrapped in nicer packaging, sold under the same “physical edition” label that used to mean something more concrete.

This didn’t happen in isolation, and treating it as a one-off Square Enix decision misses the bigger picture. It’s the latest data point in a fight that’s consumed the entire console industry for months. Sony announced in July that it will stop manufacturing PlayStation discs entirely starting January 2028, ending an era of physical console gaming that stretches back to 1994. That announcement produced a Change.org petition, “Don’t Kill the Disc,” that grew from roughly 12,800 signatures to over 200,000 within a single week. Organizer Jade Pearce, CEO of a small Canadian retailer, wrote in the petition text: “A disc is a real game you own. You can lend it, trade it, resell it, gift it, collect it, or pass it down to your kids. A box with only a download code is not the same thing. It is a digital license in plastic packaging. You do not own it. You are renting access that can be revoked.” Sony’s response to 200,000 signatures has been total silence, and the company’s own disc-manufacturing facility in Austria has already begun shifting staff and equipment toward other production lines, suggesting the 2028 date isn’t remotely up for negotiation.

Grand Theft Auto VI became the highest-profile flashpoint for this exact fight earlier this year. Rockstar’s “physical” edition of the game ships as a download code in a box with no disc inside at all, a decision multiple petitions specifically called out as “corporate greed” wearing a physical-media costume. That controversy hasn’t put a dent in demand: GTA VI is tracking toward the strongest pre-order campaign ever recorded in gaming history, with estimates as high as $4.5 billion in week-one sales. But strong sales haven’t translated into industry-wide comfort with the direction things are heading. Reporting from Digital Foundry’s John Linneman indicates publishers and developers he’s spoken with are “largely very upset” about Sony’s disc phase-out specifically, telling his audience there’s “a lot of resentment for what Sony’s doing” building behind the scenes, even as consumers keep buying anyway.

Nintendo hasn’t escaped this fight either, despite marketing itself as the physical-media holdout of the current console generation. The Switch 2’s Game-Key Cards, physical cartridges that still require a mandatory download before the game will run, drew heavy criticism at launch for functioning as exactly the kind of hybrid non-solution FFVII Revelation is now bringing to PlayStation and Xbox. One ResetEra commenter framed the situation as vindication for Switch 2 skeptics turned inside out: “Looks like GKCs got the last laugh for owning this collection physically,” while another pointed out the joke cuts both ways, since Switch 2 owners will still need an internet connection to play all three remake trilogy entries, not just the one Xbox and PS5 owners are stuck with.

Put all of it together and a clear pattern emerges across every major platform simultaneously: Sony killing discs outright by 2028, Rockstar shipping a code in a box and calling it physical, Nintendo’s cartridges requiring downloads anyway, and now Square Enix, a publisher whose own director has publicly championed preservation, quietly walking back the one recent release that actually delivered on the physical-ownership promise its predecessor made. Each individual decision has its own technical justification, file sizes, storage costs, manufacturing margins. Taken together, they describe an industry that’s decided “physical edition” can mean almost anything now, right down to a piece of plastic that can’t function without permission from a server somewhere else. Gamers who bought Rebirth on two real discs eighteen months ago are the ones best positioned to notice exactly what quietly disappeared in the time since.

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NEXT: The Gamer’s Gods Cannot Save Him

Herbert Schlossberg took his title from Hosea: “They made idols for their own destruction” (Holy Bible, Hos. 8.4). Idols for Destruction is not a book about literal carved images. Rather, the book is an account of what a culture worships when it still uses religious language for worldly objects that, ultimately, cannot save it. This essay applies that claim to the present-day video game industry and to the online congregations that feed on it.

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Isaiah walks through a craftsman who grows hungry and weary, shaping a god from the same wood he uses for a fire, then bows to the leftover and says, “Deliver me, for you are my god!” (Isa. 44.17). Psalm 115 adds the rule that follows: “Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them” (Ps. 115.8). Identity follows worship. Romans 1 traces the same exchange: the glory of God traded for images, until thinking itself becomes futile and God “gave them up” to what they already wanted (Rom. 1.21-28). Colossians names greed as idolatry because what you treat as ultimate begins to name you (Col. 3.5). Jeremiah’s charge is still the simplest: a fountain of living water abandoned for broken cisterns that can hold no water (Jer. 2.13). Jonah says those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs (Jon. 2.8).

The point is that people are destroyed by the things they treat as gods. This is because the things we love absorb our time, money, identity, community, hope, and meaning. In response, the one true God, who also describes Himself as jealous, judges not by throwing a bolt of lightning at idolaters but by handing them over to what they have already chosen.

What Scripture Means by an Idol

Jesus does not need the word “idol” on every page to describe the capture. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matt. 6.21). “You cannot serve God and money” (Matt. 6.24). “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” (Mark 8.36). The rich fool organizes a life around stored goods and tells his soul to relax; God calls him a fool that night (Luke 12.16-21). The pattern is labor, expense, assembled bodies, shared speech, and transferred hope. Acts 19 is the civic version. Demetrius does not open a seminar. He opens a payroll argument. The theater in Ephesus shouts “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” for two hours. That is a convention hall with better acoustics: procession, slogan, identity, and revenue fused.

Apply the list without piety theater to the video game industry and the cultures surrounding it: Time: weeks structured around patch notes, leak drops, and countdown timers.

Money: $80 and $100 editions of games, plus more spent on DLC.

Community: Discord vigils, showcase auditoriums, merch as vestments, influencers as a priesthood that interprets the industry’s secrets for you.

Hope: a release date, a trailer, any story that “this will fix the industry.”

Identity might fill its own essay. Console wars trained a generation to say “I am PlayStation” or “I am Xbox” or “I am Nintendo” the way an older world said a people or a parish. The hardware is a relic for people like these, and the launch-night line might as well be a pilgrimage. Include also “PC master race,” handheld versus living room, physical versus digital, “I don’t do live service,” “I only buy first-party,” and the rest. These are all ways of naming oneself.

The public calendar is a church year. Games Done Quick is a vigil that lasts days: bodies in a room, a game on an altar-screen, donations as offerings, commentary as midrash, chat as the congregation answering back. It is charity, and it is also a people rehearsing who they are. The Game Awards is the other feast: sermons about how great the industry is, trailers dropped like revelations, and an auditorium taught to gasp on cue. We even have entire musical segments now. E3 used to be the high mass until the building closed and the rite moved to streams. The worship service continues with Nintendo Direct, State of Play, Xbox showcase, Summer Game Fest, and more.

There are other altars people pretend are hobbies. Studio loyalty is one: Rockstar as a name you defend before you have played the game; Nintendo as your childhood, and therefore it can do no wrong. Genre loyalty is another: the boomer-shooter enthusiast or the soulslike badge. “Gamer” itself was an identity word long after it stopped being a description of someone who just played games.

The Political Grammar

A people learns who they are by what they assemble to receive. Once the self is PlayStation-shaped or Nintendo-shaped, the next question is not “Do you like games?” It is “Which story is allowed to live inside the assembly?” For a long stretch the stories that sold still ran on leftover weather: a world with a right side, a common moral thread. Nobody had to announce that weather, because the good was already assumed by a society that was mostly Christian. Even when the assumption thinned, the assemblies kept meeting anyway.

Games from that earlier weather are now remembered as “not political.” But that idea only works if “political” means a current talking point. A knight in armor killing a dragon and bringing a princess home is political in the older sense. That is the kind of language still inherent in Super Mario Bros. The language is political because it presumes there is a natural order to things: courage worth risking, a good worth taking the risk, a monster that must be defeated, and a world that must be set right. People did not call Super Mario political because the natural grammar of Christianity was still in the air: the warrior, the serpent, and the bride. That pattern is older than Nintendo.

Progressively, video games and popular culture in general started to treat Christian goodness itself as a joke. Essentially, Christianity, or Christ Himself, became a prop you kick to prove you are an adult. South Park made Jesus a call-in host who cannot run the room. A statue became a gag about bodily fluids. Family Guy, The Simpsons, and a long strip of late-night and Adult Swim comedy ran the same loop: God is incompetent and Christians are knuckle-dragging idiots who have yet to catch up with the rest of the world.

That ridiculing of Christianity, and the departure from it, did not leave a clean hole. While the church stepped back from popular culture, something else took the pulpit: a new priesthood ready to recatechize the last folk tales still standing. Feminism and other postmodern lines of critique did not invent politics in games. Instead, they treated the old Christian grammar as the offense in need of correction. In this retelling, Mario was a tyrannical patriarch, Princess Peach was only a prop, and Bowser was a misunderstood outsider. Gamers had no way to answer this, because they were already so well practiced at irreverence toward Christian things. And so, en masse, they submitted to their idols. They thought they could keep shipping what they liked forever, giving their weeks to studios and expecting a household god. But studios are people, and people have agendas. Why should they owe you your childhood when you have abandoned the God who made that childhood worth anything in the first place? Why should their moral vision bow to yours if you will not bow to theirs? You know you will not become their convert, but they know they will not restore the things you love out of kindness.

And so there stand two unconvertible religions sharing one industry. Without a mediator, a Christ who can tell both parties they are not God, there is only capture: who holds the studio and the hype press surrounding it?

“But wait!” you say. “Didn’t we get all our best games during the Satanic Panic?”

That is an admission, not a defense. Those games were made by studios and people who then hired, sold, and staffed the next twenty years of the industry. They sold video games to a public still living on leftover Christian grammar. The “panic” did not make the games good. The older moral atmosphere did. When the atmosphere changed, the same gatekeepers did not keep making the same products. If Christian irreverence were the fertile principle, the present would look like a bountiful harvest. Instead we have consultants who leverage moral messaging, hundred-dollar editions and thousand-dollar consoles, and industry professionals constantly talking down to consumers about how the world actually works. The older games the current consumer wants back were made under an umbrella they did not build, and they treated that umbrella as a joke.

Mammon Without Surplus

Schlossberg’s chapter on mammon is about what we ask money to do for us. Sometimes a dollar buys lunch, but other times it is how you prove you still belong. Fear of missing out is that second use with a marketing department. It does not say “you need this.” It says “everyone who still counts already has it.” Sit out and you are not just poorer culturally. You are late, and somehow made to feel like less of a person. Right now that trick is uglier, because even the lunch money hurts. The FOMO does not care.

Around 2012 a Chipotle steak burrito ran about $7.50 to $8.50, depending on the city. You paid it, sat down, and did not do math. In 2026 the same steak burrito averages about $12.25 before tax (higher in the expensive zip codes). Guacamole is another three dollars. Chips and a drink put the tray near $17 to $19.

The box under your television followed the same path. A PlayStation 2 launched at $300 and was the machine that sold Grand Theft Auto III, Vice City, and San Andreas as $50 games. GTA IV arrived on a PlayStation 3 that had launched at $500 and an Xbox 360 that most people bought nearer to $400. GTA V launched at $60 on a PlayStation 4 that launched at $400. The tithe back then was one console you bought once and kept for years, and one game that did not ask you to skip groceries.

In 2026 a PlayStation 5 is $500 ($450 if you take the disc-less model), and GTA VI is $80 on top of that, or $100 for the edition they want you to want. The household that bought San Andreas on a high-school wage is not the household staring at a $20 steak burrito and a $500 brick. But your favorite influencers on social media are still performing the old scripts: drop day, Ultimate Edition, setup tour, and a brand-new console as if it were your entire personality.

So is the surplus part of the identity now?

Mammon’s trick is to keep the liturgy at the old volume while the offering doubles. A $50 vice you could hide in last week’s a paycheck 20 years ago is not the same as an $80 game on a $500 altar. The idol still wants your tithe and you will tasked to continue worship as if you still have a surplus somewhere. This is proletarianization without the scenery of a manifesto: a life spent as a buyer of other people’s products and a culture that treats your continuous moral wounding as normal, no matter how much you hurt.

Grift

Yet, the congregation will not leave the sanctuary. Telling people they have an addiction is the easy part, and you see it on social media all day long. It has even become its own market. That is how grift works. An addict can nod along and still need the next hit. Your favorite anti-woke YouTuber names the problem and then sells another video about the same wound. But there is never any exodus. Instead you are tasked with waiting for the next video, and the next one, and so on. The machine that sells you your game-idols has also created its own anti-idols. Spend the week in righteous outrage as the algorithm delivers some new flavor of commentator who pretends to oppose whatever it is you oppose.

This is self-medication. These videos are cope pills people swallow so they can feel as if they have resisted something. Worse, the ritual often feeds the thing it claims to starve. Studios hear the outrage and receive a gift: a visible enemy. Now they have a reason to push their ideology harder. They can tell themselves they are brave when all they are doing is the opposite of what the commentariat is doing. One side swallows videos and calls it resistance, while the other ships its sermons and calls it courage. Each congregation keeps the other in work, continually naming the foe so tomorrow’s disease has a new face. And if the only prescription is to come back tomorrow, again and again, you have not left the sanctuary. You have only changed the vestments.

Judgment as Being Handed Over

Schlossberg’s thesis is that much of what a late culture calls crisis is better read as judgment on its idolatries. Romans 1 is the mechanism in one sentence, three times: God gave them over.

Israel trusted Egypt, then Egypt became the whip. Hosea’s lovers and wages become thorns. The golden calf was turned into powder and the people drank it. Judgment is the thing you already chose. God did not have to do anything other than give you exactly what your heart desired.

The games industry demanded devotion while catechizing irreverence toward Christ. What inevitably followed was a hatred for all good things. The machinery eats itself dry as it matures. That is what idols do.

Christians were supposed to be the people who still remembered the old language. But now the consumer who laughed and ridiculed Christ watches the thing he loved in exchange fail to love him back. The things he used to love have stopped loving him. His future is $100 games and $1,000 consoles, all woke, and all ridiculing him for being a man in a woman’s world.

So here is the question, dear “gamer.” You already know the product cannot love you back. You already know the outrage channel will still need you sick tomorrow. You already know the other side is using your anger as fuel.

What are you still doing on your knees?

If the answer is habit, say so. If the answer is that you have no other god, say that too. Hosea does not end on the smashed idol. It ends on a door. After the lovers, the empty cisterns, the calf, and “they made idols for their own destruction,” the last chapter is a call to come back.

“O Israel, return to the Lord your God, For you have stumbled because of your iniquity.” (Hos. 14.1, NKJV)

God says He will heal their apostasy and love them freely. And then: “Ephraim shall say, ‘What have I to do anymore with idols?’ I have heard and observed him. I am like a green cypress tree; Your fruit is found in Me.” (Hos. 14.8, NKJV)

The new leaks will keep coming, and the newest showcase will keep you hyped for what is in the next box. And of course your favorite YouTube channels will keep describing the same disease when the next product inevitably disappoints. The cycle does not love you. It always ends in the same place: a thinner wallet, a heavier sorrow, and a life spent kneeling to things that cannot keep you alive.

The verse still stands. Ephraim shall say, “What have I to do anymore with idols?” You can take that sentence into your mouth. You can also pretend you never heard it and remain sick.

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