Deadlock, Valve's MOBA that has been in beta testing for nearly two years, has just received another major update, building on its previous UI refinements and adding six more heroes into the mix, to boot. The update is called City Never Sleeps, and Deadlock's development team says that many of the new features and updates in this latest update have been in the works in parallel for several months.

The new heroes are Nurse Harrow, Rat King, Solomon, Deadman Danny, Baba, and Violet, although not much else has been revealed about them other than their tags. As with previous hero drops, the new heroes can be voted on from within the game, but there is a now a double hero vote for your first win of the day, and voting takes place in the pre-game lobby, where you can argue about who to vote for with your teammates.

Since its launch in late 2025, Arc Raiders has been a commanding presence in the extraction shooter genre, at one point peaking at over 480,000 concurrent players. Embark has earned its player count partially by listening to its community's needs and by issuing frequent updates to fix issues, introduce fresh gameplay mechanics, and update content—until a recent change to the development cycle that will see less frequent updates. In a recent interview with Game Developer, Arc Raiders executive producer, Aleksander Grøndal, expanded on the studio's justification for the change in update frequency and how the game's dev team now approaches updates.

The team is super tired. We're putting out content as fast as we can, but it's not enough, and perhaps it wasn't necessarily interesting enough as well. I'm proud of what we achieved during the first four months of this year, but at the same time, I think we have to be honest at looking at some of the impacts of that.

Control Resonant launched on September 24 to a rather positive reception, and less than a week after launch, Remedy, the studio behind the game, is promising an October update that makes sizeable changes to gameplay, including adding what it calls "New Game++" mode, which is likely the most interesting part of the blog detailing the upcoming update.

At the time of writing, Control Resonant has a New Game+ mode, which allows players to play through the story once more before needing to start a new savegame. With New Game++, Remedy will allow players to "start NG+ run after NG+ run, without needing to erase all your progress," and thoroughly explore the world and lore. New Game++ is slated to land in Control Resonant sometime in October, although no specific launch date has been announced yet.

An unofficial port of the Eden Nintendo Switch emulator is now running natively on jailbroken PlayStation 5 consoles. Developer BlackBearReloaded released ProsperoEden, which adapts Eden, itself a fork of the now-defunct Yuzu project, to run directly on Sony's hardware as homebrew rather than through Linux or another layer. The developer also shared compatibility results from the latest v1.000.010 build, and the numbers look better than expected for something still in alpha. Cuphead reportedly hits 60 FPS, Metroid Dread runs at around 40 FPS, and Super Mario 3D World is playable in tested sections. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe now boots into actual gameplay too, though it doesn't hold a steady 60 FPS just yet.

Some caveats apply, though. The port only supports OpenGL so far, with no Vulkan backend built for the PS5 side. Several of the frame rate numbers come from menu and title-screen testing instead of full playthroughs, and games like Pokemon Legends Z-A are still described as very slow with crashes on shutdown. Even so, going from nothing to playable 2D titles in one alpha release is a fast pace. Nintendo has shut down emulation projects before, Yuzu being the clearest example, so how long ProsperoEden lasts probably depends on how much attention it draws and how fast it progresses.

A federal court in Washington has ordered Reddit moderator James "Archbox" Williams to pay Nintendo $4.5 million in damages over alleged Nintendo Switch piracy. US District Judge Lauren King granted Nintendo's motion for default judgment in full on September 23, along with a permanent injunction barring Williams from distributing pirated games or circumvention tools. Nintendo filed the lawsuit in June 2024, accusing Williams of running a network of so-called "Pirate Shops" offering libraries of pirated Switch games to the public.

According to the complaint, Williams promoted these shops through the r/SwitchPirates subreddit, where he served as lead moderator, and allegedly solicited eShop gift card donations to fund additional pirated titles. Williams never responded to the lawsuit. The court noted he had hired an attorney at one point to contest a Google subpoena, but he did not answer Nintendo's claims. Since he failed to respond, the court treated the complaint's allegations as true, which is standard for default judgments rather than a ruling on contested evidence.

The situation at Xbox and Halo Studios has been in the news a lot recently, starting with an announcement by the former that it would be gutting Halo Studios and putting Activision in charge of the next Halo game, with a "small team" at Halo Studios assisting Activision with development of the next Halo. It was later revealed that the small team left at Halo Studios was just 20 employees, and that Activision would be rebooting the Halo franchise with little to no semblance of the franchise's original history slated to be in the next game.

Now, thanks to a report by The Verge, it seems as though we have the justification for Activision starting from scratch on the new Halo game. According to the report, the next Halo being developed under Halo Studios was years away from shipping. Reports from ubiquitous leakers in the Halo scene report that several internal projects have been cancelled at the studio, including Halo 2 and three remakes and Halo 7. Despite the fact that Halo 7 appears to have been in-development already, Activision has decided to start from scratch, assembling a specialized team that will be in-charge of the next Halo game. However, by it also appears as though the earliest we can expect a new Halo game is 2030.

Bungie has been in the news a lot lately, first for pulling development efforts for Destiny 2 and then because of the impacts the recent PlayStation layoffs have had on the game studio's capabilities and structure. Most recently, however, it seems as though Bungie is returning to the fan-favorite Destiny 2 in order to claw back some consumer trust after Marathon's middling reception. As it turns out, according to recent comments by Jason Schreier on YouTube, there was a game in the works at Bungie in 2024 that could have already served as "the future of Destiny."

According to the game journalist, the topic of Destiny 3 was repeatedly brought up in team meetings at Bungie, which were often rebutted with complaints about the potential cost of developing Destiny 3. As an alternative, Bungie was working on a game internally referred to as "codename Payback," run by Destiny veterans, Luke Smith and Mark Noseworthy, until it was cancelled in 2024. Before the game's cancellation, Payback was seen internally as the future of Destiny, even though it took a different approach to the Destiny formula.

Intel's Foundry chief, Naga Chandrasekaran, spoke with investment bank KeyBanc Capital Markets about Intel Foundry and the future trajectory of its nodes. One of the most intriguing insights is that Intel expects its 14A node to be within 5% of TSMC's A14 node, with both competing in the same sector. What this means exactly is unclear, as there are many factors by which a node is measured. These include transistor switching frequency, power efficiency, and density. The "within 5%" figure could imply a 5% advantage, a 5% disadvantage, or a mix of both, so the technical specifics remain uncertain. Intel's recent nodes, like the shipping 18A, are proving to be efficient and high-performing, but TSMC's nodes are also strong, with both companies continuing development.

Intel plans to start 14A node risk production in the second half of 2027, with high-volume production expected in 2028. The company has processed tens of thousands of 14A wafers in pilot production runs and is now working on yield improvements and minor node adjustments before beginning risk production next year. The 14A node is designed to offer a 15-20% performance improvement at the same power level compared to Intel 18A, or it can be optimized for a 25-35% power reduction at the same performance level. This will be accompanied by up to a 30% improvement in chip density compared to Intel 18A, though it is unclear if this refers to logic or SRAM scaling, as the latter has been challenging for the industry.

The Witcher IV has long been in development at CD Projekt Red, with the studio expecting to launch the game in 2028, however it seems as though much of the game's scope and general philosophy has already been figured out and set in stone. In a recent panel appearance at the International Festival of Comics in Poland, CDPR joint CEO, Adam Badowski commented on the game's story and morality system, suggesting there would be a focus on both when the upcoming game launches.

As reported by entertainment site, Wiedźminlandia, Badowski explains that the long development times on The Witcher 4 are largely due to the repeated rewrites that are made in order to develop a narrative that resonates with players and doesn't feel hollow. One way in which The Witcher IV will do this is with its nuanced, often ambiguous choices-matter gameplay, which Badowski says will "make a lasting impression on the player." Judging by what the CEO said, we can seemingly expect subtle choices to affect character interactions and potentially even change story beats when the game launches in 2028.

Rumors and speculation about the future of the Halo franchise abound since Xbox announced its latest restructuring that resulted in Halo being under the purview of Activision. The latest in the rumors surrounding the Halo franchise is that the game series will be rebooted under Activision. This is according to insider sources cited by Halo leaker, TechnicalHalo on X.

In a series of posts on X, the leaker explained that Activision would be rebooting the Halo series, and that "the lore is not going to be continued." However, the leaker rebuffed the suggestion that Halo under Activision would be a multiplayer-only game, stating that it would have a campaign and multiplayer. This is supported by a recent statement from Activision president, Rob Kostich, who told The Game File that Activision wants to make a game that honors "what made players love it in the first place.

NVIDIA has rolled out RTX Kit 2026.3 alongside version 2.0 of its RTX Mega Geometry SDK, giving game developers a fresh batch of neural rendering and path tracing tools. The headline feature is support for streaming continuous level-of-detail clusters for high-density meshes, shown off in a new textured glTF version of the Zorah demo. The rest of the RTX Kit update covers RTX Character Rendering 1.4, RTX Dynamic Illumination 3.1 with DLSS Ray Reconstruction integration, RTX Neural Shading 1.4, and RTX Texture Filtering 1.3, which adds Collaborative Texture Filtering.

RTX Neural Texture Compression 0.10 is still in beta, but it now supports the DirectX 12 Agility SDK preview with Linear Algebra, letting Tensor Cores accelerate neural texture decompression in DirectX shaders. It and RTX Texture Filtering 1.3 also gain Windows ARM64 support, which seems to be groundwork for the RTX Spark PCs NVIDIA says start shipping in October. NTC was already running on Windows on Arm back in August.

When Xbox confirmed the latest round of layoffs to come from its year-long Xbox Reset, it said that "a small team" would remain at Halo Studios in order to support Activision in the development of future Halo games. It seems as though "small" might have been the most apt description possible, as notable Halo influencer and occasional leaker, LaSinity, claims that, per an insider source, less than 20 employees remain at Halo Studios after the layoffs.

In addition to Halo Studios, several studios under Xbox have been subsumed or merged into other studios, with Age of Empires developer, World's Edge, being one notable example, having been placed under the purview of Activision, alongside the Halo franchise. One ResetEra user who goes by Tempus Chaoti, posted that "just under half the studio was let go," referring to World's Edge. The now-former Studio Creative Director at World's Edge, Adam Isgreen, also shared a message on LinkedIn confirming layoffs at the studio, and Andrew Martz, a Senior Software Engineer at World's Edge, also corroborated the layoffs and revealed that the layoffs and restructuring had resulted in the studio's next project being cancelled.

It was recently confirmed that Undead Labs, the game studio behind the State of Decay series, had successfully split from Microsoft's Xbox in what appears to be a management buyout of some sort, leaving the studio to fend for itself and with creative control over the upcoming State of Decay games. Unfortunately, as was the case with Double Fine Games, Undead Labs has not come away unscathed.

As announced in new post by Undead Labs on LinkedIn, the studio is now "an independent, employee-owned studio," but the announcement also confirms that Undead Labs will be laying off a "significant number" of staff following the Xbox split. The announcement did not specify which departments would be affected, and it seems as though the layoffs won't affect the upcoming launch of State of Decay 3. The studio also did not specify how many employees would be affected. The full statement continues below.

Despite the immense popularity of LLMs and AI coding agents in software development, the open-source community seems to be quite divided on the topic at times. On the one hand, you have projects like GIMP banning AI from its codebase entirely, while other projects, like Nobara Linux and Omarchy, are very much all-in on AI coding. There is, however, a middle ground, like the Linux Kernel project, which allows AI-assisted and -generated code in the codebase, but all code requires human review and a proper merge request write-up that demonstrates an understanding of the actual code submitted. This appears to be where KDE Plasma will land as a project, if the recent proposed KDE LLM guidelines are anything to go by.

The draft of KDE's LLM guidelines was submitted for discussion by project lead, Nate Graham, and it outlines rules that effectively summarized by the golden rule: "Don't be lazy." In the KDE LLM guidelines discussion post, the proposed draft explains that "contributions with obvious and lazy LLM usage may be ignored or closed," and that "nobody should know if you use an LLM," because the output should be indistinguishable from what you could produce yourself without an LLM. It also places rules on AI-generated text, forbidding AI-generated text for merge requests, commit messages, or replying to a question or comment. The current draft also seeks to prevent additional work being placed on maintainers by limiting vibe-coded changes to that maintainers are expected to clean up and implement—an issue faced by Godot maintainers not long ago.

Bungie's new management has apparently suddenly seen the massive fallout that has come from its effective cancellation of Destiny 2, with a new video titled "The Next Chapter for Bungie" announcing several changes coming to the studio in the near future and seemingly suggesting that Destiny might not be over, after all.

Bungie's studio head, Poria Torkan, and Josh Deane, Marathon's new general manager and head of product at Bungie, effectively opened the video by admitting that Bungie "lost sight of" its heritage and of the communities that have formed around its games—Destiny being a perfect example of such a game. Torkan goes on to say that "we lost trust, we lost incredible colleagues, and our ambitions as a studio stalled."

The Blood of Dawnwalker reportedly cost around $40 million to make, according to a new Bloomberg report. Rebel Wolves director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz self-funded the first year in 2022 to build a prototype, and NetEase stepped in by the end of that year. The Chinese company took a 26% stake in the studio and supplied the $40 million budget. Hiring took most of 2023, and full production started toward the end of that year, with Bandai Namco publishing the game. Apparently, the team originally planned to cap headcount at 90, but the studio has since grown to around 160 people.

Rebel Wolves also seems to have picked a September release over June to avoid overtime, and it kept the game's foundations the same as its original pitch deck. That puts the game in AA territory, close to the roughly $41 million reported for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. It looks like the figure covers development funding only, so it probably doesn't include marketing and publishing costs. Still, to make a game as well-received as The Blood of Dawnwalker on this budget is a great achievement. The game sold over 1 million copies within days of launch, and Rebel Wolves has already started hiring for a sequel. It's safe to assume that plenty of larger publishers will be looking at that ratio.

Following the official launch of the Steam Frame, Valve has finally made Lepton, its compatibility layer that enables the Steam Frame to run Android games, open-source. Lepton was formally announced in March 2026, when Valve also revealed the Steam Frame Verified program requirements. The project is now hosted on Valve's GitLab repository, where Valve details the tool's basis and how it differs from Android itself.

Lepton being open-source has a number of implications for gaming on the Steam Frame and on SteamOS in general. As Valve notes, "Lepton is intended to help game developers bring their VR Android games to the Steam Frame. Other use cases are possible, but were not the focus of development and may lack polish." The project itself uses components from Waydroid, Anbox, Halium, and Hybris, combines Valve's own code with parts of the AOSP, mounts host system libraries—graphics drivers, Steam libraries, and Vulkan layers—and strips away some of the fat on Android in the name of efficiency.

CXMT, China's largest DRAM maker, is reportedly getting ready to enter the NAND flash market. According to a Reuters report citing people familiar with the matter, the company plans to set up a NAND R&D production line at its new plant in Beijing. CXMT has also set up a research institute in the capital, and NAND development is apparently among its projects there. That would put it up against Samsung and other global players, and against domestic rival YMTC, which already ranks third in NAND shipments. One of the sources says CXMT has already discussed its plans with customers, including a newly established startup that wants to buy the chips for AI and supercomputer storage products.

We also don't know when the R&D line will start running, or whether CXMT intends to go past R&D and trial production into large-scale manufacturing. CXMT and YMTC are often called the "twin stars" of China's memory industry, and they have mostly stayed in separate lanes. That seems to be changing, since Reuters reported in April that YMTC had sent low-power DRAM samples to customers. Both still trail the bigger foreign rivals, but the shortage has given them some pricing power, and CXMT was reportedly charging more than Samsung for 64 GB DDR5 server modules in July. TrendForce expects NAND supply tightness to ease only in the second half of next year, and I doubt one R&D line would change that.

A developer going by Uzbekunknown on GitHub has gotten NVIDIA's DLSS 5 Neural Rendering running on the Arc 140V integrated graphics of an Intel Lunar Lake system, as Tom's Hardware reports. The project, called dlss-nr-on-intel, is an independent reimplementation of the 71-block network that runs on Intel's XMX units through Vulkan. It has apparently been shown working in Tekken 7, Dead or Alive 5 Last Round, and Mortal Kombat 1. For now it only runs on Linux, and users must supply their own copy of NVIDIA's DLL. As far as performance goes, the developer says Tekken 7 ran at around 10 FPS at 640x360 resolution, and the frametimes are absolutely abysmal too. The author calls it a research port, not a finished product, so photo mode use looks like the only realistic scenario right now.

Perhaps even more interesting is how this port came to be. Apparently, the code was written almost entirely by AI. The developer credits Claude Opus 5 and OpenAI's Astra, saying they themselves only supplied the hardware, the binary, and the direction. They also state they cannot defend the code line by line, and that a driver bug one of the agents hallucinated shaped three development phases. This mod effort follows DLSS 5 reaching RTX 30-series and AMD RDNA 4 cards within weeks of the leak, as well as the technology reaching web browsers. I think whether this is clever or a step too far depends on how much you trust code nobody fully reviewed. It's a fine technical demo, but I don't think we really needed DLSS 5 on Intel integrated graphics.

TrendForce's latest research into advanced semiconductor packaging reveals that GPU suppliers and hyperscale CSPs are continuing to develop increasingly powerful and versatile AI chips, making larger package sizes a key development priority for 2.5D packaging. Although TSMC's CoWoS-L faces competition from Intel's EMIB-T, its advantages in technology maturity and yield are expected to keep it the mainstream packaging solution for AI chips through 2028.

TrendForce notes that strong AI demand continues to support NVIDIA's push toward integrated GB/VR rack-scale solutions, which incorporate large numbers of chips. NVIDIA's high-end GPU shipments are expected to grow approximately 30% YoY in 2026. AMD, meanwhile, is aggressively promoting its MI400/MI450 series beginning in the second half of 2026, providing further momentum to overall shipments.

The PlayStation 2's last big hardware secret has finally been cracked open after 26 years. Canadian retro hardware enthusiast DiscoStarslayer has successfully reverse-engineered the CXP102064 MechaCon chip, the security chip inside the original PS2 that governs the console's optical drive and its anti-piracy protections. It took four years of chemical decapping, optical dumping, and reading silicon circuitry under a microscope before an exploit turned up that finally let the chip's data be pulled out through software. DiscoStarslayer shared the milestone on X, crediting a collaborator named Libby with finding the actual exploit that unlocked the chip's contents.

The MechaCon also shows up in a handful of PS2-based arcade boards, including Namco's System 246 and System 256 and Konami's Python 1, so the reverse-engineering work could matter well beyond the console itself. With the chip's inner workings now documented, PS2 emulation projects and homebrew development should get noticeably easier going forward. Moreover, there's a decent chance this eventually enables a proper optical drive emulator (ODE) for the console, something fans have wanted for years.

AMD's next-gen RDNA 5 architecture might get its own neural rendering feature, something in the same ballpark as NVIDIA's DLSS 5. That's according to Kepler_L2, a well-known AMD leaker, though it's worth being clear that this is a single-source claim and should be treated as a rumor for now. Posting on the Anandtech forums, Kepler_L2 said AMD will have its own version of "Neural Lighting" comparable to DLSS 5 with its next-gen hardware. Asked whether this would be limited to RDNA 5, the leaker said it's probably going to be the case, since this kind of workload is apparently pretty heavy. That's about as far as the concrete part of the leak goes.

Kepler_L2 also shared thoughts on how AMD's approach should differ from NVIDIA's. He thinks the model should have direct access to raw game data like geometry and depth buffers instead of having to guess at scene details, plus splitting lighting and shading into separate models instead of one pipeline. It's worth stressing that this part is the leaker's own wishlist, and not a description of what AMD is actually building. AMD hasn't confirmed RDNA 5 by name yet, and launch estimates currently range from mid-2027 to early 2028 depending on who you ask. Therefore, even if this pans out, we're probably looking at something that's early in the development pipeline.

Valve has confirmed that the ongoing DRAM shortage hasn't changed anything about its plans for a Steam Deck 2, even though the crisis has driven up prices on the company's other hardware. Speaking with IGN's Jacqueline Thomas, Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais was asked directly whether the memory shortage had affected the next handheld's development. Here's what he told IGN:

"We've talked before about how we want to make sure there's a very delineated performance improvement for something like a future Steam Deck, and I think we're still looking at it in the same way. It's just a matter of looking at the current conditions and seeing how and when we can deliver something like that. But from what we're working on, as far as the user experience goes and what the product that we're trying to build goes, it's very similar goals."

Blizzard has confirmed a new StarCraft game during the BlizzCon 2026 Opening Ceremony, thus ending a wait that stretched back to StarCraft II's last expansion in 2015. The game is simply called StarCraft, not StarCraft III, and it drops the series' real-time strategy roots entirely, pivoting to an open-world, story-driven shooter. It's set in the Koprulu Sector roughly 70 years after the events of Legacy of the Void, with Blizzard describing it as a fresh story. The project is led by Dan Hay, previously creative director on several Far Cry games at Ubisoft. During the reveal, Hay said the game would be fought "not from above, but down in the mud, in the fire," which signals clear changes in gameplay mechanics.

The announcement trailer leaned entirely on cinematics, showing Dominion soldiers training and eventually fighting the Zerg, with no gameplay footage shown yet. A 2030 release is a long way off, and Blizzard has been upfront that the game is still early in development. That gives the studio plenty of room to reveal actual gameplay before launch, though it also means specifics on combat systems, world structure, or platforms are still unknown. Given how quiet the franchise has been since 2016's Nova Covert Ops, it's honestly a bit of a surprise Blizzard chose to reinvent StarCraft as a shooter rather than return to its RTS format, though I suspect that's exactly why it's getting attention now.

Following previous reports that Kojima Productions had split from PlayStation on the production and publication of Physint, with the studio eventually landing at Xbox for the upcoming stealth action game, new insider reports claim that there were behind-the-scenes issues that pushed PlayStation to cancel Physint.

According to notorious insider, Jason Schreier, at Bloomberg, insiders at PlayStation say that the game was behind schedule and projected to be over budget. Kojima Productions had allegedly already missed deadlines during the game's development. The journalist explains that another major factor was the commercial performance of Kojima's Death Stranding games, which apparently did not meet PlayStation's expectations. The report also confirmed that, as TechPowerUp theorized in our previous reporting on the Physint drama, there was no platform exclusivity guarantee for Sony.