From Palworld movies to Palworld TV shows: ‘Everyone under the sun pitched us every idea you can imagine,’ says Pocketpair’s communications director

Palworld blew up big in 2024, becoming only the second game in Steam history to hit more than 2 million concurrent players (along with PUBG and, later that same year, Black Myth: Wukong). That kind of success put a big target on developer Pocketpair, drawing fraudulent claims of AI use and plagiarism, heaps of abuse…

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After 23 years of making Dwarf Fortress, even its creator is still ‘terrified’ of drowning all his dwarves with heavy aquifers: ‘Part of the problem is we are just not good at videogames’

In Dwarf Fortress, aquifers are a scourge. They’re layers of subterranean, water-bearing rock that continually, endlessly leak when breached by dwarven miners. They can be managed and even exploited with careful construction, but in my experience, their main utility is proving that—no matter how competent at Dwarf Fortress I might get—I’m only one overlooked, unsealed…

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A unique aspect of Japanese architecture turned out to be a key reason the Like a Dragon games can reuse assets so effectively—and deliver more compact, memorable open worlds than western cities

Spend enough time running errands and beating up thugs in the Like a Dragon (née Yakuza) series, and you’ll likely be able to find your way around Tokyo’s real-life red light district, Kabukichō—that’s how close to the real thing Sega got with its fictional recreation of Kamurochō. Over some 20 years of games Sega has…

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Blizzard co-founder Mike Morhaime’s new company is putting Sea of Thieves-style shenanigans in space with a new crew-based shooter

After leaving the company in 2019, former Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime announced in 2020 that he’d founded Dreamhaven, a new game publisher seeking to “reimagine the studio model.” In 2024, Secret Door—the first of Dreamhaven’s two in-house studios staffed by Blizzard veterans—revealed Sunderfolk, a tabletop-inspired tactical RPG. Today, in a showcase presented by The Game…

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Forget REPO, Monster Hunter Wilds and Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Steam’s current global top seller is an early access game about managing a drug empire

The last couple of months have been packed with massive games. Monster Hunter Wilds, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Split Fiction, and Fragpunk have all proved enormously popular with players, and let’s not forget the leftfield indie smash that is REPO. But which of these games has the fattest stacks this week—which of…

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Former Bethesda dev who quit Starfield to go solo says it’s ‘much less stressful as an indie’ without daily meetings or ‘office politics’: it’s ‘very refreshing to just care about the game’

Even if you haven’t yet played Nate Purkeypile’s most recent game, “heavy metal horror” hunting game The Axis Unseen, you’ve probably played at least one of his games at some point. Purkeypile, founder of Just Purkey Games, worked on BloodRayne 2, Aeon Flux, and Metroid Prime 3, then spent a full 14 years at Bethesda…

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