Valve now requires developers to launch their game through the Steam client and run it for at least five minutes before submitting it for review, as part of several new additions to Steam's pre-release checklist. It doesn't have to be the developer playing, since anyone's playtime counts, as long as it was logged within the past seven days, or since the last build upload if that's older. Apparently, Valve keeps getting builds that were never run through Steam at all, which is how games end up with broken launch options or missing depots.

The changes are meant to cut down Steam's review backlog. Valve says store page and build submissions have jumped over the last few months, and it's quite obvious why that would be. For Valve, build reviews that usually take three to five days are now taking up to 12 business days, largely because games that fail basic checks have to be reviewed again. Other new checks include at least five screenshots tagged as gameplay, a test save written to Steam Cloud for games that support it, a list of required redistributables like DirectX or Visual C++, and complete achievement setup.

As usual, generative AI appears to be splitting the gaming industry in half. While Valve recently acknowledged the issue of AI-generated clones on Steam—although declined to actually do anything about it—Roblox just published a shareholder letter in which it boasts that "AI-enabled game creation, automation in code generation and AI supported asset creation are leading to an explosion of content" since it launched its AI assisted game builder tools.

The letter adds that over 80% of its top 100 games by hours played in the month of September were AI assisted, while the raw number of games created with its Build generative AI platform topped 70,000 since Q2. Usage of Roblox's AI tools for game development more than tripled among top creators. It also notes that in Q3, two games "created almost entirely with AI" managed to break into the top 20 Roblox game ranking by concurrent player count.

Epic Games has more and more leaned into AI to accelerate game development, with the gaming giant recently announcing that it was switching to AI-first development and adding a slew of new AI-powered features in Unreal Engine. Now, Epic Games's Tim Sweeney has responded to a Kotaku article about Epic Games issuing a DMCA take-down of an AI-created Fortnite clone, effectively explaining that the studio will soon allow AI training on "outputs of Unreal Engine and MetaHuman."

Sweeney explained in the post on X that, while it currently restricts AI training on outputs from Unreal Engine and MetaHuman, the company is "working to remove this restriction from EULA terms, though each game using these tools is released under terms of the developers' choosing, which can allow or restrict AI training." This has largely been met by backlash from the gaming community, who reject Sweeney's framing it as a copyright issue and describe it as hypocritical for Epic to take down an AI-generated Fortnite clone but also train its AI models on output created by Unreal Engine developers. It's not currently clear if the training data will be kept for Epic's own AI models alone or if it will also be sold to third parties for AI training.

Embark recently concluded a short test of a new PvE mode in Arc Raiders, which may have been partially behind a six-month player count high, and the game studio has now started to reflect on the data it gathered from the PvE mode test. In a recent interview with MP1st, Embark's Aleksandar Grøndal has effectively explained that the test has been somewhat divisive and that it will be a while before there is any concrete decision about the future of PvE in Arc Raiders.

What it comes down to for Embark is how PvE integrates into the game alongside the mainline PvPvE game mode, and the studio has expressed skepticism about PvE, "for historical reasons," since Arc Raiders was previously developed as a PvE game, but Embark pivoted to the current extraction shooter gameplay because it made more sense from a gameplay standpoint. At the end of the day, though, the studio acknowledges that, while there has been a substantial outcry for the PvE game mode, it cannot simply add it to the game, so it will take its time in analyzing the data and feedback and make a decision sometime in November about how it plans to implement PvE to Arc Raiders, if at all.

Konami Digital Entertainment president Hideki Hayakawa doesn't expect generative AI to shake up the games market much. In Konami Group's Integrated Report for the fiscal year ended March 2026, first spotted by Dengeki Online, Hayakawa responds to the popular view that AI will make game development far easier to break into. His argument is that general-purpose game engines and user-generated content have already lowered those barriers, so AI probably won't change much on that front. Hayakawa also made it clear where Konami's priorities lie.

Hideki Hayakawa (machine translated)I don't think the market environment will change drastically. Entry barriers have already been lowered by the advancements of generic game engines and the spread of user-generated content. Even if AI use does lead to improvements in production efficiency, I believe that the most important factors in producing entertaining and innovative video games are people and creators.

In the weeks leading up to publication, a number of software engineers and modders have decompiled and recompiled games, unlocked mods, and accelerated game emulation, resulting in everything from a browser-based Fallout: New York game to full PlayStation 5 game ports using AnyPS5. It seems as though Microsoft has now taken notice of the uptick in these AI-accelerated game mods and unofficial port projects and launched Xbox Labs in response.

In a recent email shared by Xbox CEO, Asha Sharma, she explains that the rapidly accelerating pace of game and mod development that has been a result of these AI "experiments challenge long-held assumptions about our industry," and that "it is easy to see the possibilities in making great games easier to access, giving old games new life and allowing more players to become creators and co-creators." The motivation behind Xbox Labs appears to be to get out ahead of these AI projects and "turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience."

Despite launching in early access in 2013, RimWorld's developer, Ludeon Studios has just started a switch away from the Unity game engine to its own in-house Waylith engine with update 1.7. In a new blog post, the developer notes that the switch away from Unity could result in performance improvements of "2-4×," while claiming an identical gameplay experience.

In the studio's in-house testing, game load time, startup time, world and map generation, and general tick-per-second performance all saw significant performance improvements. A stress test with a "late game colony" saw a performance improvement of 2.2×, although the studio didn't exactly share test parameters beyond that. Load times of a mod pack with 1,500 mods also improved from 14 minutes to 6 minutes. The studio notes that individual performance improvements on the new engine will depend on PC specs, but those are promising improvements if scaling holds up.

Epic Games has long been supportive of putting more generative AI into its game development processes, with the gaming giant previously revealing an ever-increasing number of generative AI features in Unreal Engine, as well as plans to create Fortnite characters with AI—which resulted in Vampire Survivors developer, Poncle, pulling out of a Fortnite collaboration with Epic Games. More recently, a report by Bloomberg's Jason Schreier claims that insiders at Epic Games say the studio will be transitioning to an AI-first game development workflow.

Reportedly, the staffer was told by a senior that there would be "no more handwritten code," and that all art would be "generated with full AI workflows." Epic's shift to AI-first coding and game art will start with an unannounced Disney shooter that was delayed but was originally planned for a March 2027 launch, according to the publication. The shooter is slated to feature characters from both Marvel and Star Wars franchises, and it will now be produced largely with Anthropic's Claude AI suite, with humans reviewing work. Jake Jones, communications director at Epic Games, told Bloomberg that "we're embracing AI-accelerated development, led by Epic developers who are the visionaries and creative drivers for everything we do."

The recent Silent Hill franchise revival, which gained momentum with Silent Hill f and more recently Silent Hill Townfall, appears to have been a risk worth taking, and Konami has no plans of stopping or slowing down, according to producer, Motoi Okamoto, in an interview with Famitsu (via Game Observer).

[Editor's note: Our in-depth review of Silent Hill Townfall is now live]

Okamoto explains that the studio is satisfied with the performance of the three Silent Hill releases since the revival's announcement in 2022, which was a "relief," since the studio took some convincing on his part to let him release the first three games—referring here to the Silent Hill 2 remake, Silent Hill Townfall, and Silent Hill f. Now, thanks to the success of what he calls the first wave of Silent Hill games, Konami is already planning both a second and third wave of games, although he declined to give further details on what those games would be, other than that Konami is working on "a number of projects."

Xbox has hired a social media product veteran to run Mojang. In a memo to staff on October 8, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma said Maria Angelidou-Smith, most recently chief product officer at Reddit, will join as CEO of Mojang and Minecraft. She starts on October 19 and reports directly to Sharma. Angelidou-Smith replaces Kayleen Walters, who moves over to lead XP, the new Xbox division for film, TV, merchandise, and live experiences. Walters had run Mojang since February 2025, and Xbox says Minecraft went from 350 million copies sold to more than 425 million in that time.

Angelidou-Smith's background is in community products, with no game studio role mentioned. According to the memo, she spent nearly a decade at Meta, where she led Facebook Groups along with Events, Creators, Search, Profile, and Monetization. She later led product and technology at HR software company Personio and joined Reddit in November 2025. Sharma wrote that Mojang already has an exceptional game development team, so Xbox went looking for someone who has "built products for communities at enormous scale" and understands how creators, technology, and monetization come together. Her first order of business, apparently, is to learn from the teams and the community.

Microsoft says "hundreds" of AAA and indie games will run on NVIDIA RTX Spark PCs from day one, though Call of Duty will not be one of them. Windows and Devices head Pavan Davuluri made the claim at Microsoft's Windows and Surface event on October 7, where he also said Call of Duty support is coming in 2027. Apparently, no reason was given for the wait, and Microsoft didn't say which Call of Duty title they meant. That is an awkward gap, since Activision is a Microsoft-owned studio and the RTX Spark-equipped Surface Laptop Ultra starts at $2,599 with shipping set for October 16.

Anti-cheat is probably the holdup, although Microsoft hasn't confirmed that. RTX Spark uses an Arm-based CPU, so games run on Windows on Arm, and kernel-level anti-cheat drivers have to be rebuilt for it. Call of Duty relies on Activision's own Ricochet anti-cheat, which, as far as we know, only works on x86 systems today. Davuluri did show Gears of War: E-Day running at 60 FPS on the Surface Laptop Ultra. However, the resolution and upscaling settings were not disclosed, so the figure says little about real performance. It also isn't clear how many of those "hundreds" of games are native Arm builds and how many run through emulation. NVIDIA released its RTX Spark toolkit for Windows-on-Arm game development in July, and EA, Embark, and Ubisoft committed titles such as Apex Legends, ARC Raiders, and Anno 117: Pax Romana at Gamescom.

Gravity Well Studio, a young indie game studio founded and headed up by several Apex Legends and Titanfall veterans, has just announced that it has had to lay off a majority of its staff, totaling over 40 workers, according to a recent LinkedIn post by the game studio. The studio executives explain in the post that the layoffs were necessary because Gravity Well lost its funding and has not managed to secure a new partner.

The studio notes that Gravity Well will continue to "fight for survival," but adds that the future is uncertain. Gravity Well calls itself an "independent AAA game development studio," and the layoffs come before the studio has even managed to launch its first game, which has been in development for six years but has yet to be revealed publicly—aside from two concept images shared on the studio's site.

The use of AI-generated art to accelerate video game development is becoming more and more common, with massive game studios like EA and Capcom openly acknowledging that they will be using AI to streamline their game development workflows, despite public outcry about quality and concern for the human cost in an industry already rife with layoffs.

Addressing a question in a recent interview with Nikkei regarding how game production will change in the face of AI, SEGA's senior executive officer and deputy chief business officer, Tsuyoshi Saito, said that the company is already using AI to improve efficiencies at the company, specifically when it comes to business idea generation and publishing processes, but that it will not be using AI for creative aspects of game development.

In early 2026, Valve started giving developers more information about the systems playing their games, starting with optional frame rate reporting for games on the Steam Deck and system specifications in user reviews. It now seems to be expanding that program, according to a new blog post on the Steamworks developer news blog. The update expands Steam Deck frame rate data to show player experience.

With the new data, developers who publish on Steam will be able to access frame rate data as a distribution, effectively showing developers what percentage of the game runs at certain frame rates. Valve says that it is starting with the Steam Deck as a known system configuration, which makes the data easier to interpret and gives Steam a basis to start iterating on the sort of data it collects about game performance. The data itself will be anonymized averages and distribution, in conjunction with the previously available Steam Verified feedback.

Almost a year ago, to the day, Valve revealed a new Steam Store UI, which cleaned up much of the storefront's UI and presented an overall more cohesive design that is better suited to the variety of PCs, handhelds, and consoles that Valve now caters to. It appears as though Valve's next upcoming update to the Steam Store UI is more subtle, but may have a more meaningful impact on game discovery, for both developers and gamers, alike. This update also comes shortly after Valve overhauled the Steam handheld and Big Picture mode with the optional Big Art mode.

According to a new post in Steamworks news—Valve's developer news feed—Steam will soon lose the curated Discounts & Events section that appears at the top of users' Steam Store Home pages, which currently shows deal and event placements scheduled by developers or directly by Steam. In its place, Valve will introduce "something more dynamic and personalized for each customer," which Valve says will give more sale and game events a chance at being featured on the Store homepage and throughout Steam. Valve says that, in previous tests of this new methodology, it has been able to show games to 10 times more Steam users than using the old model.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered just dropped to significant fanfare and a massive boost in the game's peak concurrent player count. It was previously revealed that CD Projekt Red wanted The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered to be comparable to "any other game which is launching these days," which suggested combat and gameplay overhauls for the 11-year-old game. In a new interview with VGC, Fool's Theory's Karolina Kuzia-Rokosz and CD Projekt Red's Paweł Sasko detailed some of the inspiration and challenges involved with updating the ARPG for modern audiences. Sasko explains that CDPR decided to address the combat and gameplay aspects of The Witcher 3, because the story and characters still held up, but the aging combat stood out as common complaints from gamers and journalists, alike.

Together with some of the old members of The Witcher team, we looked into how The Witcher 3 plays out, the common complaints from our players, and which areas hadn't aged that well. The story is still relevant, you can play it, and it's beautiful, and the characters are fun, but when you look at the gameplay side, it was obvious that this was almost the weakest side. And when you look at the opinions of the journalists and the players, everyone's kind of saying the same thing, which is that gameplay is the weakest part of The Witcher 3.

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.

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.

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.

Mere hours after it was leaked that Xbox would be continuing its recent slew of layoffs, Xbox Wire published an internal email, officially confirming those layoffs and providing a glimpse into the future of the Xbox game development landscape. As a result of the layoffs, which will see 268 employees out of work, there also will be changes to several studios at Xbox, including Activision, Bethesda, King, Playground, and Turn 10.

It seems as though all of the layoffs this time around came out of the Halo Studios team, and Microsoft has left Activision in charge of the next Halo game as a result. Xbox says that a small team at Halo Studios will remain in order to support Activision in the franchise's development. Meanwhile, Ninja Theory, which was previously in negotiations on deals to exit Xbox's ownership, will officially close down instead of being bought. The Hellblade/Senua franchise will seemingly be developed by another studio at Xbox, following the closure of Ninja Theory. Xbox claims that two separate buyout deals had fallen through. For the time being, it seems as though Blizzard has escaped its anticipated layoffs.

It seems as though gamers excited to hop back into the shoes of a young Geralt of Rivia will have to wait a little longer than anticipated. According to recent comments from CD Projekt Red to Gamespot, the remake, announced in 2022, has taken a back seat, due to the development teams shifting focus to both The Witcher 4, and Songs of the Past, the latest expansion for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

Fool's Theory team is focused mainly on the development of Witcher 3: Songs of the Past, while a relatively small part of their team is supporting the development of The Witcher 4. As we have previously announced, the development on The Witcher Remake has been temporarily integrated with The Witcher 4 due to production process dependencies. As The Witcher Remake will be built on the foundation laid by The Witcher 4, we need to have the necessary assets, tools, and pipelines ready for efficient development.

Since the launch of Borderlands 2, the game's modding scene has been very active, adding a bunch of quality of life improvements and fun tweaks to the genre-defining looter-shooter. One such modder, who goes by Enderkiller124 on X, has been working on implementing some features and characters from Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel in Borderlands 2, since both games take place roughly around the same time, and The Pre-Sequel was built on much of the same underlying tech and engine as Borderlands 2.

The mod, known as Project Moonshot, started out as a way to play The Pre-Sequel characters and laser weapons in Borderlands 2, which has already shown promise, per clips shown off on the modder's X account, but it has since morphed into a full-scale port of The Pre-Sequel into Borderlands 2. Conceivably, this would allow players to play The Pre-Sequel's quests as Borderlands 2 characters and with Borderlands 2 weapons, and vice versa. The mod is not yet complete, but you can follow the development progress on the developer's X account. The modder has already shown off several The Pre-Sequel areas with Borderlands 2 characters and in-game features, like the Grinder crafter in Concordia, The Pre-Sequel weapons working on Pandora, and the full Concordia model and materials rendered in Borderlands 2.

Doom: The Dark Ages Revelations is the only story expansion ever launched for The Dark Ages, and it was well-liked by the community, scoring a "Very Positive" review rating on Steam. However, as revealed in a new Insider Gaming interview, the expansion's quality came at a cost to its developers.

According to former Id Software developer, Andrew Willis, "There were two months where I was working something like at least 12 hours every day. I know I hit 17 a couple of days. It was brutal, and the majority of the game got made in three or four months." He adds that the crunch affected everyone on the team, however, he explained that the crunch wasn't mandated by company policy, but that developers were given a workload that was impossible to complete without the crunch.

As expected, there has been a lot of chatter online about The Witcher 4 since it was announced that the game was in full development at CD Projekt Red. Now, as per an interview Game Developer, CD Projekt Red's Michał Nowakowski has revealed what he meant when he said that the studio had learned from the launch of Cyberpunk 2077: The Witcher 4 already runs on all of the target systems—PlayStation 5, PC, and Xbox Series X|S.

Michał Nowakowski, co-CEO of CD Projekt RedYou come to the studio, you launch Witcher 4 right now. You can launch it on PC. You can launch it on PS5. You can launch it on Xbox Series X, and it's going to run...

It's no secret that 1047 Games has had a rough time of it lately, with the launch of both Splitgate: Arena Reloaded and its most recent movement shooter, Empulse, marred by low player turn-out. Apparently, things haven't improved, according to a new post on social media from 1047 Games itself revealing that the studio will soon end development on both Empulse and Splitgate: Arena Reloaded.

The studio explains that "neither game is generating enough revenue to support the ongoing cost of dedicated servers," and says that it has "continued covering those costs because we wanted to give both games every opportunity to grow, but we have reached the point where that is no longer sustainable." This news comes after the studio laid off a number of staff following the launch of Empulse. On the bright side, this doesn't necessarily mean players of Empulse or Splitgate: Arena Reloaded will be locked out of their games.