Xbox is asking a section of its own audience a question that cuts to the heart of its platform strategy. According to a report from Windows Central, with images authenticated by journalist Jez Corden, the company has been surveying users on whether franchises such as Fallout, The Elder Scrolls and even Minecraft should be turned into console exclusives. The questionnaires reportedly went to selected Xbox Insiders rather than the wider player base. That detail matters. Insider programmes are routinely used for market research, and a survey is not an announcement, but it is a useful signal of which questions the company is currently weighing in public. Call of Duty, pointedly, is not part of that question. The report’s summary is blunt about it: it is not an alternative. Anyone reading the survey as a hint that every major franchise in the portfolio is about to be walled off should temper that expectation. Exclusivity is...
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Capcom’s Dino Crisis 2 is coming to PS5 and PS4 through the PlayStation Store next Tuesday, 20th October 2026, continuing the steady flow of PS1 classics onto modern hardware. The release will be available through PS Plus Premium from day one, and it will also be sold separately for anyone who prefers to own it outright. There is one caveat worth knowing before you clear space on your hard drive: don’t expect Trophies. Sony’s classic programme has added Trophy support to some re-releases and skipped it for others, and this one falls into the second category. For trophy hunters, that removes a familiar excuse to replay a favourite. Dino Crisis 2 originally arrived on the original PlayStation, part of a wave of Capcom titles that took familiar genre frameworks and pushed them in stranger directions. The series is built around dinosaurs rather than zombies, and that shift changes the texture of the tension: predators...
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The third part of this series on running an indie game studio arrives at the point where theory meets the daily grind. The first two instalments dealt with the foundations: articulating what a studio stands for and the values that shape its decisions, then setting objectives that give a team direction over both the long term and the immediate future. This week’s subject is less exciting, and the series says so directly. Dealing with issues is the unglamorous half of running a company, the part that rarely appears in postmortems or anniversary posts but consumes an enormous share of a founder’s attention. That is not a complaint so much as a description of the job. Small teams are exposed to every kind of problem at once: a build breaks, a contract slips, a collaborator disappears, a platform changes its rules. None of these are dramatic individually. Together they can swallow whole weeks. The temptation...
Read MoreTomorrow marks the launch of the fourth Galaxies Showcase, a milestone for an event that has carved out a specific place in an increasingly crowded calendar. Since the pandemic reshaped how games are announced, digital showcases have multiplied to the point where a single week can bring several hours of trailers. Galaxies has positioned itself in the middle of that spread. Its lineup leans on indie and mid-tier games, sitting deliberately between the smaller, purely digital indie partnerships at the bottom of the market and Geoff Keighley’s high-profile show at the top. Platform holders occupy their own tier alongside, with events like State of Play and Nintendo Direct carrying a weight that few independent shows can match. That middle ground is harder to hold than it looks. A show needs enough exclusives and reveals to justify attention, but it cannot outbid the platform holders for the biggest announcements. Its advantage is agility: a smaller...
Read MoreFuncom has begun a reorganisation that will narrow the Norwegian studio’s focus to two games. The company has decided to concentrate exclusively on live operations for Conan Exiles and Dune: Awakening, and an unspecified number of staff are affected by the change. The human cost is the first thing worth stating plainly. An unspecified number is still a number of people, and reorganisation announcements rarely convey much about who is leaving or what support they receive. Until more is known, that uncertainty hangs over the story. The strategic logic is easier to read. Both Conan Exiles and Dune: Awakening are ongoing online games that depend on a steady flow of updates, events and content to keep players engaged. Live operations is not a skeleton crew job; it is a continuous production pipeline, and it competes for the same people who would otherwise build something new. For a studio of Funcom’s size, supporting two live...
Read MoreFacepunch Studios plans to take s&box free-to-play before the end of the year, a significant change for a platform that has so far asked players to buy in. The shift comes alongside a rethink of how games are surfaced, moving away from a vast catalogue toward a smaller, deliberately chosen selection. The reasoning is captured in the studio’s own framing: Netflix for games doesn’t work. It is a blunt way of describing a real problem. Subscription-style libraries and endless algorithmic feeds are good at offering volume, but volume is not the same as discoverability, and a bottomless list can leave players scrolling instead of playing. Human curation is the alternative being proposed. Rather than presenting everything and letting the crowd sort it out, the platform intends to highlight the top and most favoured games. That puts editorial judgement back in the loop, with all the benefits and risks that implies. The benefits are obvious...
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