"Perhaps no group of fans, industry workers, and consumers is more intense about AI use than gamers...." writes New York magazine's "Intelligencer" column: Just this month, the latest Postal game was axed by its publisher, which was "overwhelmed with negative responses" from the "concerned Postal community" after fans spotted AI-generated material in the game's trailer. The developers of Arc Raiders were accused of using AI instead of voice actors, leading to calls for boycotts, while the developers of the Call of Duty franchise were called out for AI-generated assets that players found strewn across Black Ops 7.Games that weren't developed with generative AI are getting caught up in accusations anyway, while workers at Electronic Arts are going to the press to describe pressure from bosses to adopt AI tools. Nintendo has sworn off using generative AI, as has the company behind the Cyberpunk series. Valve, the company that operates Steam, now requires AI disclosures on listed games and surveys all submitters. Perhaps sensing the emergence of a new constituency, California congressman Ro Khanna responded in November to the Call of Duty backlash:"We need regulations that prevent companies from using AI to eliminate jobs to extract greater profits," he posted on X....

AI is often seen as a tool for managers to extract more productivity and justify layoffs. Among players, it can foster a sense that gamers are being tricked or ripped off, while also dovetailing with more general objections to generative AI. It can sometimes be hard to tell whether gamer backlash is a bellwether or an outlier, an early signal from our youngest major creative industry or a localized and unique fit of rage. The sheer number of incidents here suggests the former, which foretells bitter, messy, and confusing fights to come in entertainment beyond gaming — where, notably, technologies referred to as "AI" have previously been embraced with open arms.
And now "the price of the sort of memory PC gamers most want to buy has skyrocketed" (per Tom's Hardware). "The rush to build data centers is making it much more expensive to game. Nobody's going to be happy about that."

Insider Gaming shares another example of anti-AI sentiment in the gaming industry: The Indie Game Awards took place on December 18, and, as many could assume, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 took home the awards for Game of the Year and Debut Game. However, things have changed and The Indie Game Awards are making a big decision to strip the Clair Obscur and developer Sandfall Interactive of their awards over the use of gen AI in the game.

In an announcement made on Saturday afternoon, Six One Indie, the creators of the show, said that it's removal comes after the discovery after voting was done, and the show was recorded. "The Indie Game Awards have a hard stance on the use of gen AI throughout the nomination process and during the ceremony itself," the statement reads. "When it was submitted for consideration, representatives of Sandfall Interactive agreed that no gen AI was used in the development of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
Polygon notes the award-stripping is "due to inclusion of generative AI assets at launch that were quickly patched out." Quotes from earlier in the year from Sandfall Interactive's FranÃois Meurisse made the rounds on social media last week amid a news cycle caught up in the use of generative AI in games... In June, the Spanish outlet El País published a story including an interview conducted around Clair Obscur's launch, in which Meurisse admitted that Sandfall used a minimal amount generative AI in some form during the game's development... Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 launched with what some suspected to be AI-generated textures that, as it clarified to El País, were then replaced with custom assets in a swift patch five days after release.

"In the lead up to its Switch 2 console release, Nintendo updated its user agreement," writes the Free Software Foundation, warning that Nintendo now claims "broad authority to make consoles owned by its customers permanently unusable."

"Under Nintendo's most aggressive digital restrictions management (DRM) update to date, game console owners are now required to give Nintendo the unilateral right to revoke access to games, security updates, and the Internet, at its sole discretion." The new agreement states: "You acknowledge that if you fail to comply with [Nintendo's restrictions], Nintendo may render the Nintendo Account Services and/or the applicable Nintendo device permanently unusable in whole or in part...."

There are probably other reasons that Nintendo has and will justify bricking game consoles, but here are some that we have seen reported:

— "Tampering" with hardware or software in pretty much any way;
— Attempting to play a back-up game;
— Playing a "used" game; or
— Use of a third-party game or accessory...


Nintendo's promise to block a user from using their game console isn't just an empty threat: it has already been wielded against many users. For example, within a month of the Switch 2's release, one user unknowingly purchased an open-box return that had been bricked, and despite functional hardware, it was unusable for many games. In another case, a user installing updates for game cartridges purchased via a digital marketplace had their console disabled. Though it's unclear exactly why they were banned, it's possible that the cartridge's previous owner made a copy and an online DRM check determined that the current and previous owner's use were both "fraudulent." The user only had their console released through appealing to Nintendo directly and providing evidence of their purchase, a laborious process.

Nintendo's new console banning spree is just one instance of the threat that nonfree software and DRM pose to users. DRM is but one injustice posed by nonfree software, and the target of the FSF's Defective by Design campaign. Like with all software, users ought to be able to freely copy, study, and modify the programs running on their devices. Proprietary software developers actively oppose and antagonize their users. In the case of Nintendo, this means punishing legitimate users and burdening them with proving that their use is "acceptable." Console users shouldn't have to tread so carefully with a console that they own, and should they misstep, beg Nintendo to allow them to use their consoles again.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: At this point, most competitive online multiplayer games on the PC come with some kind of kernel-level anti-cheat software. As we've written before, this is software that runs with more elevated privileges than most other apps and games you run on your PC, allowing it to load in earlier and detect advanced methods of cheating. More recently, anti-cheat software has started to require more Windows security features like Secure Boot, a TPM 2.0 module, and virtualization-based memory integrity protection. Riot Games, best known for titles like Valorant and League of Legends and the Vanguard anti-cheat software, has often been one of the earliest to implement new anti-cheat requirements. There's already a long list of checks that systems need to clear before they'll be allowed to play Riot's games online, and now the studio is announcing a new one: a BIOS update requirement that will be imposed on "certain players" following Riot's discovery of a UEFI bug that could allow especially dedicated and motivated cheaters to circumvent certain memory protections.

In short, the bug affects the input-output memory management unit (IOMMU) "on some UEFI-based motherboards from multiple vendors." One feature of the IOMMU is to protect system memory from direct access during boot by external hardware devices, which otherwise might manipulate the contents of your PC's memory in ways that could enable cheating. The patch for these security vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-11901, CVE-202514302, CVE-2025-14303, and CVE-2025-14304) fixes a problem where this pre-boot direct memory access (DMA) protection could be disabled even if it was marked as enabled in the BIOS, creating a small window during the boot process where DMA devices could gain access to RAM.

The relative obscurity and complexity of this hardware exploit means that Vanguard isn't going to be enforcing these BIOS requirements on every single player of its games. For now, it will just apply to "restricted" players of Valorant whose systems, for one reason or another, are "too similar to cheaters who get around security features in order to become undetectable to Vanguard." But Riot says it's considering rolling the BIOS requirement out to all players in Valorant's highest competitive ranking tiers (Ascendant, Immortal, and Radiant), where there's more to be gained from working around the anti-cheat software. And Riot anti-cheat analyst Mohamed Al-Sharifi says the same restrictions could be turned on for League of Legends, though they aren't currently. If users are blocked from playing by Vanguard, they'll need to download and install the latest BIOS update for their motherboard before they'll be allowed to launch the game. Riot's new anti-cheat change could create problems for older PCs if the new anti-cheat change is expanded, notes Ars.

The update relies on a BIOS patch to fix a UEFI flaw, and many older motherboards, especially Intel 300-series and AMD AM4 boards, may never receive that update. If Riot flags a system and the manufacturer doesn't provide a patched BIOS, players could be locked out of games despite having otherwise capable hardware.

U.S. video game hardware spending fell 27% year over year in November to $695 million, according to market analyst company Circana. "This is the lowest video game hardware spending total for a November month since the $455 million reached during the November 2005 tracking period," Circana says. Furthermore, only 1.6 million units of hardware were sold in the U.S. in November, which is "the lowest total for a November month since 1995 (1.4 million)." The Verge reports: The rising costs of consoles probably didn't help. The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series of consoles both turned five in November, but customers looking to pick up one of the consoles brand new are having to grapple with higher prices following price hikes this year. Those hikes have led to an "all-time November high" for the average price paid for a new unit of video game hardware of $439, Circana says -- a number that's up 11 percent from 2024. (In November 2019, the average price was $235, according to Circana analyst Mat Piscatella.)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Netflix on Wednesday said it will add a soccer simulation title to its gaming portfolio, as the streaming giant looks to leverage the FIFA World Cup 2026 tournament to deepen its video game push. The soccer title will be developed and published by Delphi Interactive, which is also helping create a premium James Bond game called "007 First Light," and in association with the sport's governing body, FIFA. Netflix said the game will launch in time for the world's most-watched sporting event, scheduled to start June next year in the U.S.

A veteran games journalist claims Half-Life 3 is real and still planned as a Spring 2026 launch title tied to Valve's next Steam Machine push. Ars Technica reports: On the contrary, veteran journalist Mike Straw insisted on a recent Insider Gaming podcast that "everybody I've talked to are still adamant [Half-Life 3] is a game that will be a launch title with the Steam Machine."

Straw -- who has a long history of reporting gaming rumors from anonymous sources -- said this Half-Life 3 information is "not [from] these run-of-the-mill sources that haven't gotten me information before. ... These aren't like random, one-off people." And those sources are "still adamant that the game is coming in the spring," Straw added, noting that he was "specifically told [that] spring 2026 [is the window] for the Steam Machine, for the Frame, for the Controller, [and] for Half-Life 3." [...]

Timing specifics aside, Straw said his sources have him convinced that the long wait for Half-Life 3 is coming to an end in the near future. "The game's real," he said. "At the end of the day, the game is real. There's no denying it. It's just a 'when' and not an 'if' at this point."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Several dozen people protested on Sunday in the Siberian city of Tomsk against Russia's ban on U.S. children's gaming platform Roblox, a rare show of public dissent as popular irritation over the ban gains some momentum. In wartime Russia, censorship is extensive: Moscow blocks or restricts social media platforms such as Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and YouTube while distributing its own narrative through a network of social media and Russian media. Russia's communications watchdog Roskomnadzor said on December 3 it had blocked Roblox because it was "rife with inappropriate content that can negatively impact the spiritual and moral development of children."

In Tomsk, 2,900 km (1,800 miles) east of Moscow, several dozen people braved the snow to hold up hand-drawn placards reading "Hands off Roblox" and "Roblox is the victim of the digital Iron Curtain" in Vladimir Vysotsky Park, according to photographs provided by an organizer of the protest. "Bans and blocks are all you are able to do," read one placard. The photographs showed about 25 people standing in a circle in the snow, holding up placards. In Russia, the ban on Roblox has triggered a debate over censorship, child safety in relation to technology and even the effectiveness of censorship in a digitalized world where children can bypass many bans in a few clicks.

id Software employees voted to form a wall-to-wall union with the CWA, covering all roles at the Doom studio. "The vote wasn't unanimous, though a majority did vote in favor of the union," notes Engadget. From the report: The union will work in conjunction with the Communications Workers of America (CWA), which is the same organization involved with parent company ZeniMax's recent unionization efforts. Microsoft, who owns ZeniMax, has already recognized this new effort, according to a statement by the CWA. It agreed to a labor neutrality agreement with the CWA and ZeniMax workers last year, paving the way for this sort of thing.

From the onset, this union will look to protect remote work for id Software employees. "Remote work isn't a perk. It's a necessity for our health, our families, and our access needs. RTO policies should not be handed down from executives with no consideration for accessibility or our well-being," said id Software Lead Services Programmer Chris Hays. He also said he looks forward to getting worker protections regarding the "responsible use of AI."

The Game Awards, which broadcasts tonight on Twitch, YouTube, and Prime Video, has become the biggest night on the video game calendar since launching in 2014, but the show's treatment of developers has drawn increasing criticism. At the 2023 ceremony, acceptance speeches were often cut off after roughly 30 seconds while Hideo Kojima received five minutes to discuss his upcoming game OD -- enough time for 13 acceptance speeches, Aftermath calculated. That year's show also ignored the industry's mass layoffs entirely; host Geoff Keighley acknowledged the labor crisis only at the 2024 ceremony.

The show's Future Class program, launched in 2020 to celebrate game makers representing an inclusive future for the industry, has quietly ended. No new class has been named for two years. "At this time, we are not planning a new Future Class for this year," organizer Emily Weir told Game Developer.

The Pokemon Trading Card Game has quietly transformed into something its creators never intended: a speculative asset class dominated by adults hunting for profit while children struggle to find a single pack on store shelves. The resale market has climbed so high that the latest set, Phantasmal Flames, had a rare Charizard illustration valued at more than $800 before anyone had even pulled one from a pack -- a pack that retails for about $5.3.

Ben Thyer, owner of BathTCG in Bath, has watched his shop become a flashpoint. His staff have received threats from customers, and he's heard reports of attacks and robberies at other stores. He stopped selling whole boxes of booster packs and now limits individual pack purchases. On Amazon, customers can only enter raffles for the chance to buy cards at all.The Pokemon Company printed 10.2 billion cards in the year ending March 2025 and still cannot meet demand. The company shared a seven-month-old statement saying it is printing "at maximum capacity." Thyer sees signs of a correction -- prices on singles and sealed products are falling -- but expects renewed frenzy around Pokemon's 30th anniversary in early 2026.

Microsoft's Xbox consoles were conspicuously absent from Black Friday's winners, failing to crack the top three in U.S. sales during one of the retail calendar's most important weeks. According to Circana analyst Mat Piscatella, the PlayStation 5 captured 47% of Black Friday week console sales ending November 29, followed by the Nintendo Switch 2 at 24% and -- somewhat remarkably -- the NEX Playground, a Kinect-like Android device aimed at children, at 14%.

Microsoft ran no promotions on its consoles during the period. The Xbox Series X currently retails for $650 following this year's price increase, up from its $500 launch price in 2020. Sony, by contrast, discounted the PS5 by roughly 40% at some retailers. Piscatella noted on Bluesky that products without price promotions typically see no seasonal lift. Costco has removed Xbox consoles from its U.S. and UK websites.

"People in their teens and early 20s are increasingly turning to old school tech," reports the BBC, "in a bid to unplug from the online world." Amazon UK told BBC Scotland News that retro-themed products surged in popularity during its Black Friday event, with portable vinyl turntables, Tamagotchis and disposable cameras among their best sellers. Retailers Currys and John Lewis also said they had seen retro gadgets making a comeback with sales of radios, instant cameras and alarm clocks showing big jumps.

While some people scroll endlessly through Netflix in search of their next watch, 17-year-old Declan prefers the more traditional approach of having a DVD in his hands. He grew up surrounded by his gran's collection and later bought his own after visiting a shop with a friend. "The main selling point for me is the cases," he says. Streaming services like Netflix and Disney+ dominate the market but Declan says he values ownership. "It's nice to have something you own instead of paying for subscriptions all the time," he says. "If I lost access to streaming tomorrow, I'd still have my favourite movies ready to watch."

He admits DVDs are a "dying way of watching movies" but that makes them cheaper. "I think they're just cool, there's something authentic about having DVDs," he says. "These things are generations old, it's nice to have them available."
The BBC also writes that one 21-year-old likes the "deliberate artistry" of traditional-camera photography — and the nostalgic experience of using one. They interview a 20-year-old who says vinyl records have a "more authentic sound" — and he appreciates having the physical disc and jacket art.

And one 21-year-old even tracked down the handheld PlayStation Portable he'd used as a kid...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge's Sean Hollister If you wrote off the Steam Frame as yet another VR headset few will want to wear, I guarantee you're not alone. But the Steam Frame isn't just a headset; it's a Trojan horse that contains the tech gamers need to play Steam games on the next Samsung Galaxy, the next Google Pixel, perhaps Arm gaming notebooks to come. I know, because I'm already using that tech on my Samsung Galaxy. There is no official Android version of Hollow Knight: Silksong, one of the best games of 2025, but that doesn't have to stop you anymore. Thanks to a stack of open-source technologies, including a compatibility layer called Proton and an emulator called Fex, games that were developed for x86-based Windows PCs can now run on Linux-based phones with the Arm processor architecture. With Proton, the Steam Deck could already do the Windows-to-Linux part; now, Fex is bridging x86 and Arm, too.

This stack is what powers the Steam Frame's own ability to play Windows games, of course, and it was widely reported that Valve is using the open-source Fex emulator to make it happen. What wasn't widely reported: Valve is behind Fex itself. In an interview, Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais, one of the architects behind SteamOS and the Steam Deck, tells The Verge that Valve has been quietly funding almost all the open-source technologies required to play Windows games on Arm. And because they're open-source, Valve is effectively shepherding a future where Arm phones, laptops, and desktops could freely do the same. He says the company believes game developers shouldn't be wasting time porting games if there's a better way.

Remember when the Steam Deck handheld showed that a decade of investment in Linux could make Windows gaming portable? Valve paid open-source developers to follow their passions to help achieve that result. Valve has been guiding the effort to bring games to Arm in much the same way: In 2016 and 2017, Griffais tells me, the company began recruiting and funding open-source developers to bring Windows games to Arm chips. Fex lead developer Ryan Houdek tells The Verge he chatted with Griffais himself at conferences those years and whipped up the first prototype in 2018. He tells me Valve pays enough that Fex is his full-time job. "I want to thank the people from Valve for being here from the start and allowing me to kickstart this project," he recently wrote.

"There are times when World of Tanks feels less like a videogame and more like a giant ad budget looking for something to be spent on," writes PC Gamer. This year, all those huge sacks with dollar signs on them have been thrown Benedict Cumberbatch's way, making him the game's newest "Holiday Ambassador" and the star of an absolutely bizarre Christmas advert. The story has very little to do with Christmas and, frankly, not much connection to tanks either, featuring Cumberbatch as a sort of chaotic, supernatural therapist trying to bring a meek nerd out of his shell with the help of a chaotic crowd of his other patients. It's a good watch, shedding the usual hard man action star vibe of past celebrity trailers in favour of something that feels more like a mischievous one act play.
Cumberbatch also portrayed Smaug and Sauron in The Hobbit films (2012-2014), Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), and Dr. Strange in six Marvel movies. And now Amazon has also hired Cumberbatch for what its calls its "Cannes-winning '5-Star Theater' campaign... performing real Amazon customer reviews as theatrical monologues." Cumberbatch performed over 15 reviews, including popular holiday gifts like the Bissell portable carpet cleaner, Toto bidet, and SharkNinja blender — showing that Amazon truly does have something for everyone on your list.
Last year Amazon produced a similar campaign starring Adam Driver ("Kylo Ren" from the final trilogy of Star Wars sequels). "The humor comes from the juxtaposition between Cumberbatch's gravitas and the text itself," reports Adweek, adding that the reviews were curated "using internal AI tools, to find the most oddly specific reviews on the platform."

Amazon will stream Cumberbatch's bizarre ads on major platforms including TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, Lyft, Uber, Disney/Hulu, Paramount, and Roku, and on several NFL football games.

I remember when Amazon just chose the best funny fake reviews from customers, and then posted them on the front page of Amazon...

The CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, has argued that platforms like Steam should not label games that are made using AI. From a report: Responding to a post on Twitter from a user who suggested that storefronts drop this tag, the industry exec said that it "makes no sense" to flag such content. Sweeney added that soon AI will be a part of the way all games are made. "The AI tag is relevant to art exhibits for authorship disclosure, and to digital content licensing marketplaces where buyers need to understand the rights situation," Sweeney said. "It makes no sense for game stores, where AI will be involved in nearly all future production."

Ubisoft has revealed Teammates, a first-person shooter built around AI-powered squadmates that the company is calling its "first playable generative AI research project" -- not long after the publisher went all-in on NFTs and the metaverse only to largely move on from both. Built in the Snowdrop Engine that powers The Division 2 and Star Wars Outlaws, the game features an AI assistant named Jaspar and two AI squadmates called Pablo and Sofia. Players can issue natural voice commands to direct the squadmates in combat or puzzle-solving, while Jaspar handles mission tracking and guidance. The project comes from the same team behind Ubisoft's Neo NPCs, demonstrated at GDC 2024.

Adam Marshall spent more than a decade developing Kingdoms of the Dump while working as a custodian at a school in suburban Philadelphia, cleaning floors and hauling trash bags from 3 PM to 11 PM before coming home to work on his turn-based role-playing game until 5 or 6 AM. The game, which Bloomberg has called "one of the year's most charming RPGs," came out on Tuesday after Marshall and his childhood friend Matt Loiseau -- also a janitor -- built it using RPG Maker alongside a small team of hobbyists who mostly worked for free.

The pair launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2019 that raised $76,560, but the pandemic disrupted their plans and forced them to lose contractors and rethink their approach. Marshall maintained this schedule for five years straight before quitting his custodial job last year to finish the game full-time. Kingdoms of the Dump has sold about 7,000 copies since its release. The game stars a walking trashcan named Dustin Binsley who adventures through landfills and sewers in a world made entirely of garbage.

Roblox is rolling out mandatory facial age-verification for chat features to prevent children from communicating with adult strangers. The platform will restrict chat to verified age groups, expand parental controls, and become the first major gaming platform to require facial age checks for messaging. The BBC reports: Mandatory age checks will be introduced for accounts using chat features, starting in December for Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, then the rest of the globe from January. [...] Rani Govender, policy manager for child safety online at the NSPCC, said action had been needed because young people had been exposed to "unacceptable risks" on Roblox, "leaving many vulnerable to harm and online abuse."

The charity welcomed the platform's latest announcement but called on Roblox to "ensure they deliver change for children in practice and prevent adult perpetrators from targeting and manipulating young users." The platform averaged more than 80 million daily players in 2024, about 40% of them under the age of 13. [...]

Matt Kaufman, chief safety officer for Roblox, told a press briefing the age estimation technology is "pretty accurate." He claimed the system can make close estimates of "within one to two years" bracket for users aged between five and 25. Currently it can be used voluntarily by anyone in the world.

Microsoft has released the source code for Zork I, II, and III under the MIT License through a collaboration with Team Xbox and Activision that involved submitting pull requests to historical source repositories maintained by digital archivist Jason Scott. Each repository now includes the original source code and accompanying documentation.

The games arrived on early home computers in the 1980s as text-based adventures built on the Z-Machine, a virtual machine that allowed the same story files to run across different platforms. Infocom created the Z-Machine after discovering the original mainframe version was too large for home computers. The team split the game into three titles that all ran on the same underlying system.

The code release covers only the source files and does not include commercial packaging or trademark rights. The games remain available commercially through The Zork Anthology on Good Old Games and can be compiled locally using ZILF, a modern Z-Machine interpreter.

Nvidia and Google announced today a new cloud gaming plan called GeForce Now Fast Pass that is exclusive to Chromebooks. Anyone who purchases a new Chromebook will receive a year of the service included with their device at no additional charge. Fast Pass allows Chromebook owners to stream more than 2,000 games from their existing Steam, Epic or Xbox libraries.

The service removes ads and lets users skip the queue that typically adds two minutes or more of wait time on GeForce Now's free tier. Users get 10 hours of cloud gaming each month. Up to five unused hours can roll over to the following month. Nvidia offers other paid plans starting at $9.99 per month that support higher resolutions, faster frame rates, RTX ray-tracing, and access to a larger game library that includes thousands of additional titles. The companies did not announce pricing for Fast Pass after the first year ends.