February 2025

Bobby Kotick, the former CEO of Activision Blizzard, made a recent appearance on the Grit podcast discussing his career in videogames. One of the threads is Blizzard Entertainment, a studio that Kotick clearly feels is capable of best-in-class entertainment but also one that was in some respects mismanaged: This is, of course, from the perspective…

Valve has announced the full roster of Steam sale dates and Next Fests for the second half of 2025, and it’s made one big change: This year’s Steam Autumn Sale is going to kick off nearly two full months earlier than it has in past years. In practical terms, the advance list of Steam sale…

There’s no end to the lore-driven theorizing that the most devoted FromSoftware fans can spin out of the characters, item descriptions, and cut content of Dark Souls and Elden Ring, and the developers know it. As I detailed in my big Elden Ring Nightreign explainer after playing the game in December, the new roguelike spin-off…

Rockstar Games has quietly launched an official Discord server, complete with a dedicated Grand Theft Auto 6 channel, and if you’re looking for information on the next GTA, well, you might want to brace for turbulence. There was initially some question as to whether this is actually an official Rockstar Discord, but it is: There’s…

Laura Bailey is one of those prolific videogame actors whose voice you’ve probably heard whether or not you’ve heard her name. A few of Bailey’s recent credits include Marvel Rivals, World of Warcraft: The War Within, and Spider-Man 2. For that reason, Naughty Dog studio head Neil Druckmann says the developer almost didn’t cast Bailey…

At least one of Avowed’s companions can be romanced by the player character, flying in the face of multiple pre-launch warnings by Obsidian that we shouldn’t expect that from them. We’re not talking a full-on Baldur’s Gate 3 or Mass Effect multipart courting with premium cable nudity at the end of the rainbow, but the…

Here’s a simple question for you: What do Black Myth: Wukong, Frostpunk 2, Palworld, Stalker 2, Tekken 8, Silent Hill 2, and Avowed all have in common? Yes, that’s right, they were all made using the game development package Unreal Engine 5 (UE5). Something that they also have in common is variable and somewhat confusing…

Hazelight founder Josef Fares, known for his work on games including Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, A Way Out, It Takes Two, and the upcoming Split Fiction (plus that whole Oscars moment at The Game Awards a few years back) doesn’t care what Electronic Arts thinks: He’s not a fan of live service games,…