Rebekah Valentine

Microsoft's gaming revenue climbed significantly year over year, according to its Q3 earnings report. But the massive jump in takings is deceptive — most of it is just reflective of the addition of Activision Blizzard (and King!).

Take-Two hasn't shut down Roll7 and Intercept Games, CEO Strauss Zelnick said in an interview.

Grand Theft Auto 5, an 11-year-old game that's been released on three generations of consoles and which continues to sell roughly five million copies every three months, has at last surpassed a big milestone: over 200 million copies sold in its lifetime.

In its quarterly earnings presentation, Remedy Entertainment shared an update on its remake of Max Payne 1 and 2, as well as the news that Tencent has nearly tripled its investment in the studio.

Blizzard has announced it will not hold its annual BlizzCon event in 2024, but promised the event will return in future years.

The developer of Garry's Mod has announced it is in the process of removing all Nintendo-related content from Steam Workshop after receiving a takedown request from Nintendo.

For 20 years, World of Warcraft has dominated the online role-playing games space by providing its fanbase with frequent updates to gameplay and content, such as the popular Wrath of the Lich King and the imminent The War Within expansions.

The $70 release day price for standard AAA titles is both unsustainable and on the way out, claims Saber Interactive CEO Matthew Karch, via an interview with IGN reporter Rebekah Valentine.

World of Warcraft's grand nostalgia tour of old content is going strong, with Blizzard announcing that in addition to World of Warcraft: Classic adding the Cataclysm expansion, it's running a new event that will send players back to 2012's Mists of Pandaria expansion.

Saber CEO Matthew Karch has entered a no-holds barred interview with IGN about his company’s experience with Embracer Group. But what he has to say is probably going to surprise you.

Deck Nine, currently responsible for heading up the Life is Strange series having handled spin-off True Colours and remasters of the first two games, have been accused of fostering a toxic workplace home to sexism, mismanagement, crunch and abusive treatment of staff left to linger by the studio’s higher-ups.

A new investigation into developer Deck Nine — best known as the current steward of Life is Strange, a series celebrated for its diversity and inclusivity — has painted a picture of a studio where toxicity, hate speech, harassment, crunch, bullying, and abusive leadership has been able to fester as a result inaction from senior management.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Remake is one of gaming's most elusive projects. Announced in 2021, the long-awaited remake has changed hands multiple times, seemingly stopped development and restarted again, and after six years of development has yet to manifest. Fortunately, we finally have a real, concrete update on what's going on. Saber Interactive is still working on it, and according to the CEO, it's "alive and well."

Embracer Group has officially divested Gearbox Entertainment, selling the division to Take-Two Interactive for $460 million.

Dragon's Dogma 2 is simply enormous, and players are still discovering wild secrets days after launch, such as a terrifying Pawn plague that makes your minions murderous. But on the slightly goofier side, the community has recently figured out how to use the numerous catapults scattered around the world, and some of them are useful for revealing secret areas.

Developer Heart Machine has announced that its upcoming co-op rogue-lite prequel to Hyper Light Drifter, Hyper Light Breaker, will launch in early access this summer on PC.

A group of roughly 600 quality assurance (QA) workers at Activision under Microsoft have successfully voted to unionize with the Communication Workers of America (CWA), becoming Activision Quality Assurance United.

Amid mass layoffs, studio closures, and general industry uncertainty, today began with a handful of studios and companies reclaiming control of their own destinies. We learned this morning that Saber Interactive and Gearbox are reportedly breaking free of Embracer Group. And now, it looks like Crash Bandicoot developer Toys for Bob has sprung free of Activision and Microsoft.

The sequel to seems to have already learned an important lesson from its predecessor and, with it, is hoping to avoid the first game’s biggest and worst mistake. The release of CD Projekt Red’s open-world RPG was a reputation scandal, despite the large sales figures. At launch, the product was plagued by bugs and other technical problems, mostly on the past-gen consoles. Aside from the technical issues that affected customers, the game was wrapped in problems with development, such as the crunch imposed on employees to deliver the title on time – when it was clearly not ready.

If you're a Baldur's Gate 3 modder who's been frustrated with having to uninstall, reinstall, update, and re-juggle your mods every time a new patch is released, fear not: it sounds like developer Larian Studios has your back, and official mod support is on its way.

Bungie has been uncharacteristically generous as of late. At first glance, it seems that Destiny 2 players are eating well. But Bungie’s change of pace doesn’t read like its usual exchange for goodwill — something that especially rings true when looking at the state of the studio. 

Today, The Sims 4 developer Maxis has announced a free update to the game that will add a Vitiligo skin feature in Create-a-Sim.

The next game from Ori and the Blind Forest developer Moon Studios, entitled No Rest for the Wicked, was expected to debut in early access in the first quarter of this year. But per publisher Take-Two Interactive, it looks like it's been delayed.

Content Warning: This piece contains some descriptions of sexual assault.

Ruiner developer Reikon Games has reportedly laid off 60 to 70 people, or roughly 80% of its workforce, according to Kotaku.

Baldur's Gate 3 has taken home Game of the Year at this year's New York Video Game Critics Circle 2024 New York Game Awards, as well as an award for Best Writing.

Netflix Games is doing better than ever, says Netflix. But that may not be saying much, given past data on the streaming service's gaming offering.

Nintendo fans have been spoiled in the last several years with love from the Persona series, which after a long history married to PlayStation consoles has finally been creeping onto the Switch, game by game. Which is why fans felt snubbed after Persona 3 Reload, a remake of Persona 3, was announced for basically every major platform except Switch. But while a Switch announcement still hasn't happened, the game's director and producer are hinting that the idea hasn't been fully abandoned.

Skull and Bones, Ubisoft's repeatedly-delayed multiplayer pirate game, finally has a release date. Again. After being delayed six times.

The Game Awards' favorite personality, Josef Fares, was back again this year to announce a new project. Well, sort of. In spirit, in the pre-show. Because it's not a brand new game, as many may have expected. Rather, it's a remake of Fares' very first directed project that kicked off his notoriety for emotionally impactful, cooperative play. Yup, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is getting a remake.

Destiny 2’s Season 23 started strong, featuring the new Warlord’s Ruin Dungeon and activities like The Coil. But beneath the surface, it’s possible Bungie and Destiny have received a blow that’s impossible to recover from.

Back in October Destiny developer Bungie shocked many industry watchers when they enacted a deep round of layoffs, although the move became more understandable when it was revealed Destiny 2 missed its 2022 revenue targets by a whopping 45 percent. Clearly, things are not going that well over at Bungie, but a new report from IGN’s Rebekah Valentine paints an even more dire picture.

Big as Baldur's Gate 3 is, fans of Dungeons & Dragons know that the expansive world of the game is only a tiny, tiny fraction of the massive world of D&D. But one intrepid fan thinks they've found exactly which tiny fraction of the world some of the game's key moments take place in.

The next Call of Duty game, set for release in 2024, may be another entry in the Black Ops series of games and set in the Gulf War, according to a new report.

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This coming January, Naughty Dog co-president and head of creative Neil Druckmann will be honored by the New York Video Game Critics Circle with the Andrew Yoon Legend Award at the 13th annual New York Game Awards.

With SAG-AFTRA video game actors and major video game companies still negotiating over a new union contract amid a year packed with major labor actions, the possibility of a video game actor strike continues to loom. But one major gaming executive isn't worried about the possibility: the CEO of GTA 6 publisher Take-Two Interactive.

With World of Warcraft: Classic beginning to wind down its Wrath of the Lich King expansion, many players have been wondering where the game would go from here. The answer is...not going to shock anyone, as Classic will be adding the next expansion in line, Cataclysm.

It's Ubisoft earnings day, which means we're due yet another update on the six-time-delayed pirate game Skull and Bones. And while the news is not explicitly another delay, the latest update is that we can expect Skull and Bones to launch sometime between January and March of 2024.

So, Xbox owns Activision-Blizzard now, right? So why are Call of Duty and Diablo not on Game Pass yet? That's been a question on many people's minds lately now that Xbox's massive acquisition has finally closed. And today, Xbox head Phil Spencer showed up on the Official Xbox Podcast to try and answer it.

Paradox Interactive and developer Harebrained Schemes have announced they are parting ways on January 1, 2024, following the commercially disappointing release of The Lamplighters League.

It sounds like the Bloodborne-like, dark Pinocchio fantasy Lies of P might have DLC on the horizon, according to a recent job posting.

Narrative adventure developer Telltale Games, the studio currently working on The Wolf Among Us 2 and which just released The Expanse: A Telltale Series, has undergone layoffs which one former employee says impacted "most of" the studio.

As reported today by IGN, a former HR manager at Destiny developer Bungie is suing the studio for wrongful termination and retaliation. The manager in question alleges that she was laid off when she brought a case of potential racial discrimination to her own supervisor. The plaintiff, Ingrid Alm, was reportedly asked to investigate the only black employee on his 50-person team. The employee apparently told Alm that he felt unfairly singled out.

Three years after Xbox and CD Projekt Red partnered to release a limited edition, Cyberpunk 2077-themed Xbox One X console, many of those who bought it are beginning to regret the purchase. Why? Because they're still waiting, years later, for any information at all regarding a refund for the recent Cyberpunk 2077 DLC release: Phantom Liberty, which was originally supposed to be in the bundle.

Publisher Devolver Digital and developer Croteam have announced today that The Talos Principle 2 is launching at last on Nov. 2, nearly nine years after the initial release of its predecessor.

Konami has unveiled new information about the expected resolution and framerates of the three games in its upcoming Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1. But fans aren't happy with what they're seeing, particularly regarding Metal Gear Solid being locked to 30fps across all consoles.

Ascendant Studios, the developer behind the recently released Immortals of Avenum, has laid off nearly half its staff. The news was first reported by Polygon, and confirmed by CEO Bret Robbins shortly after.

Bethesda Softworks publishing head Pete Hines has reassured players that Arkane isn't giving up on Redfall, despite its lukewarm reception on launch earlier this year. In fact, he's confident it will be a good game people want to play on Game Pass ten years from now.

Since the reveal of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, many veteran fans of the series have been perplexed by the decision to bring back long-time series protagonist Kazuma Kiryu as a dual protagonist. However, Like a Dragon series producer Hiroyuki Sakamoto claims that Kiryu's return has been in the cards for a long, long time.

Baldur's Gate 3 DLC when? It's a question fans have been asking over and over, even as the base game itself is stuffed with enough content to suck up hundreds and hundreds of hours of our lives. But even as the game's success continues to grow, Larian Studios isn't quite ready to commit to anything yet, even subtly.

After years of serving as a support studio for major projects such as Halo Infinite, Doom, and Perfect Dark, Certain Affinity is once again striking out on its own with an original project, codenamed Project Loro.

Earlier today, there was a flurry of confusion about the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, and whether or not it will release on PS4 and Xbox One as well as current-gen platforms. Well, CoD fans who don't have a PS5 or Xbox Series console yet can calm down, because yes, it's coming to the previous gen too.

Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian Studios has revealed a number of statistics from the game's launch weekend, including the most popular player character class and race choices.

Baldur’s Gate 3’s Karmic Dice have become a hot topic of discussion, particularly after Larian’s role-playing game left Steam Early Access and enjoyed a massive launch.

As players delve deeper and deeper into the full launch of Baldur's Gate 3, certain companion characters are standing out as especially beloved to fans. There's problematic faves Asterion and Shadowheart, who players are convinced they can "fix." There's (of course) the bear everyone wants to bang. And then there's Karlach, who early access players are discovering has gotten one heck of a glow-up in the full release:

Rockstar's original Red Dead Redemption can seem rather humble next to the rootin' tootin' excellence of Red Dead Redemption 2, but it looms larger in my memory, albeit not for the best reasons. The original Xbox 360/PS3 game launched with a tidal wave of bugs, some of them game-ending. One particular collection of technical gremlins trapped me on a farm during the prologue. Having sat through some cutscenes, I found myself at the centre of a strange spacetime distortion redolent of the other world in Neil Gaiman's Coraline. If I tried to leave the farm the simulation slowly broke down, with movement consisting of weird fragmentary teleports.

Recently while playing Baldur's Gate 3, I've noticed that sometimes after multiple very good or bad rolls in a row, my luck on the dice would suddenly seem to swing the other way. Was this randomness? Probably? But then a friend told me to turn off something called "Karmic Dice" in the game's menu, and everything suddenly made sense.

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is coming to even more consoles. But we're not talking about the Nintendo Switch, or some unannounced next-gen thing. Instead, Respawn is working on dedicated versions for last-gen systems, the Xbox One and PS4.

The recent releases of the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters have at last given a new audience the opportunity to play the original six Final Fantasy games on modern consoles. But while the games are currently available on PlayStation and Nintendo Switch, Square Enix would really love to get them working on a third platform, and no, I'm not talking about the Xbox. I'm talking about Final Fantasy 14.

With the announcement of a brand new Final Fantasy 14 expansion that's giving everyone massive Final Fantasy X vibes, fans are clamoring for the addition of Final Fantasy's favorite sport: Blitzball. Unfortunately, game director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) has a message to everyone begging for the weird, underwater soccer game: "No Blitzball!"

Congratulations to the Destiny 2 game community, which after several days of hard work and enthusiasm has managed to make Glorbo happen.

Over the weekend, fans of Ubisoft games underwent a minor panic as a rumor spread that Ubisoft might be spontaneously deleting inactive Ubisoft accounts, permanently destroying digital game libraries if users aren't logging on often enough. However, Ubisoft has now clarified that this is false, and users' digital game libraries are safe, even if their accounts are inactive.