Former Disco Elysium developers have unveiled Red Rooster, a physics-driven RPG from @summer_eternal_
- Psychological role-playing with immersive sim mechanics
- Investigate suspicious fires linked to your brother’s fire station
- Explore a fictional city inspired by the 1980s Yugoslavian riviera and Eastern Bloc
- Move, manipulate and burn objects in a physics-powered sandbox
- Navigate political intrigue and your protagonist’s troubled inner world
- Team up with an opiate-dependent mathematician and a nunchaku-wielding bus driver
The studio also has an official manifesto condemning corporate greed, disposable-worker culture and AI-generated substitutes for human art.
Its stated priority: artistic integrity over profit margins.
Vibe coding is becoming a serious threat to indie developers trying to get noticed on Steam.
Small studios already spend years making a game, then fight thousands of other releases for a few seconds of attention. Add a growing pile of low-effort, AI-generated games, and that fight gets even harder.
More noise in the discovery queue. More competition for visibility. More chances for something original to disappear before it finds an audience.
And getting noticed brings another risk: someone using AI to churn out a copy. The studio behind Drunken Goddess Reflux has already cancelled its public demo over fears of being cloned before launch.
Steam Next Fest should be an opportunity for indie developers. The AI slop economy threatens to make it another obstacle course.
Kojima says the "walking simulator" label on Death Stranding is what scares him most, because it keeps getting repeated by people who haven't played the game.
That's according to a conversation with director Alejandro G. Iñárritu for Gizmodo Japan, as reported by VGC. He also talked about AI-driven feeds putting people into bubbles of like-minded opinion. Worth noting the quotes circulating are machine translations, so the exact wording may differ from the original Japanese.
GTA 6 is already approaching a billion dollars. It hasn't even launched.
Sensor Tower estimates $630 MILLION in digital pre-orders alone:
- 6.45 million copies
- PS5: ~$468M
- Xbox: ~$162M
Physical copies and launch-day purchases still to come.
It's insane.
The context is tragic. Senseless destruction of people's property during protests in France. There's absolutely nothing cool about that.
But I have to admit, this is one of the coolest photographs I've seen in a very long time.
The dude looks like the final boss.
Xbox has a very serious console problem.
Estimated worldwide console sales for January-August 2026:
- Nintendo Switch 2: 7.81 million
- PS5: 5.46 million
- Xbox Series X|S: 1.08 million
That's roughly five PS5s and seven Switch 2s for every Xbox sold.
Xbox's June rebound looks encouraging: monthly sales almost doubled. Even accounting for the extra tracking week, weekly sales rose around 49%. Then July promptly gave most of that momentum back. August slipped again, coinciding with another price increase.
Sony has its own headache. PS5 sales fell sharply in April as higher prices arrived, before recovering over the summer. July even put it ahead of Switch 2.
Nintendo has the clearest example of something actually moving consoles: a game people wanted.
Switch 2's March surge coincided with Pokémon Pokopia, and Nintendo explicitly confirmed it boosted hardware sales. May brought another spike ahead of Japan's price increase, although advance buying remains a plausible explanation rather than a proven one. Sales cooled through June and July, then recovered in August.
VGChartz estimates, Jan-Aug. Monthly articles carry different revisions from the latest YTD totals; March and June cover five weeks.
Players are praising Modern Warfare 4 campaign, pushing it to the highest Steam rating for a Call of Duty in over a decade.
- 89% positive from 1,700+ reviews
- "Very Positive" overall rating
- Campaign impressions are driving the strong early reception
After Modern Warfare III, a campaign people actually want to talk about for the right reasons is a welcome change.
These are still early-access impressions, but so far, so good.
While the world talks about little besides GTA VI, CD Projekt RED is working away on Cyberpunk 2 and its other major projects.
Cyberpunk 2 is evolving beyond its director's original vision, while Project Hadar has reached a major milestone: completing the vision for its entirely new world.
Cyberpunk 2 director Gabe Amatangelo says the sequel keeps evolving as more developers join and contribute their ideas.
He guides the project, but wants the final game to reflect the creativity of the entire team.
Project Hadar, CDPR's first entirely original IP, now has a coherent vision for its world and key elements after several years of groundwork.
Work on the game itself has officially begun, although it hasn’t entered pre-production yet.
Hadar's team had over 30 developers in September, with plans to reach 50 by the end of 2026.
Activision's CMO says Call of Duty has been around so long that people forget how much work goes into it.
He pointed to roughly 4,500 people working on it, 500 million copies sold and 100 million free-to-play players.
Activision has also confirmed that a future Call of Duty will launch a "new sub-franchise" and that the "foundations are already laid".
Rockstar has almost doubled in size since Red Dead Redemption 2. GTA 6 has taken more than eight years to make.
Where did all that time go? Bloomberg’s new report paints a picture of a company rebuilding itself while trying to build its most ambitious game.
When RDR2 launched in 2018, Rockstar had 2,441 employees. By August 2026, it had 4,711 across 12 offices.
The original plan was to develop GTA 6 alongside RDR2. But finishing the latter eventually required most of the company, pushing GTA back several years. Rockstar shifted towards putting the bulk of its workforce behind one major project at a time.
Then came departures, including co-founder and lead writer Dan Houser. Three veterans, Rob Nelson, Aaron Garbut and Phil Hooker, became heads of development. Some staff complained about indecision and competing visions.
Nelson describes an early stretch as a “dark period”. The story’s basic structure was established by late 2019, but fundamental design questions remained unresolved. The pandemic then disrupted production and shut down performance-capture work. Rapid hiring made communication harder. Some senior designers grew frustrated and left.
The scale kept creating new problems. When Rockstar realised it couldn’t produce all the NPC writing and animation it wanted, it built a Los Angeles studio dedicated to that work.
It also tried to change how it finished games. After RDR2’s prolonged overtime, management pursued more hiring, better scheduling and compensation for extra hours. Leadership says conditions improved, while acknowledging that individual experiences differ.
That transformation has been messy: strict office attendance rules, security concerns following leaks, and disputed dismissals involving employees organising a union.
Rockstar believes the engine, tools and team built during GTA 6 will make future releases faster.