Grand Theft Auto 6 fans believe its nudist resort was inspired by a real-life location, and its owners are already being bombarded with problematic reviews.

As if there was ever any doubt, GTA 6 fans are all over Rockstar Games' new video game. They've measured oxygen levels in hopes of predicting big reveals, showed up for Netflix announcements, and now, they've discovered what they believe was the inspiration for one of the many locations they'll visit in-game this November: Kissimmee, Florida's Cypress Cove Nudist Resort (via GamesRadar).

Fans tracking down the locations behind some of their favorite video game levels is nothing new; Arc Raiders fans did something similar in January. But where the sleuthing for some games has often resulted in real-world positivity, Cypress Cove Nudist Resort isn't enjoying the increased visibility brought by GTA 6.

"For anyone wondering about the suddenly recurring references to 'Jason Duval,' 'Lucia,' binoculars, a pool, firearms, and other suspiciously similar details — those are references to Grand Theft Auto VI," the site owner said in response to just one of the many reviews that have shown up on the Cypress Cove Nudist Resort Google page recently. "Yes. A video game."

The owner, which has already taken what action it can against the reviews, said the influx of reviews is a "coordinated series of fabricated posts using GTA VI references." They then allege that some posts were followed by requests that the rest "pay money to have the reviews changed or removed."

Their message continued, stating, "we will not pay" and "we will not negotiate," confirming it had "documented the reviews and the request for payment." It added, "This activity is being reported through the appropriate channels."

"For our actual guests and anyone researching Cypress Cove: please understand that these posts do not describe genuine guest experiences at our resort," the Cypress Cove Nudist Resort's Google representative said. "And to whoever is behind them: We appreciate the commitment to the GTA storyline, but Cypress Cove is located in Florida — not Leonida."

GTA 6 fans first caught wind of an in-game nudist resort not from Rockstar but from leaks that polluted the internet last month. Despite the lack of an official showing, early footage provided enough information for watchers to piece together how the developer might have pulled from the real world for its upgraded version of Vice City.

Whether this is the location Rockstar looked to or not, it seems that, for the most part, GTA 6-related reviews have been scrubbed from the Google page, but the site owner's message can still be found on a few of the more suspicious messages. These include references to leaks, such as a man who "pulled out his binoculars." One posted yesterday directly referenced GTA 6, saying, "Will be trying to book a reservation on Nov. 19th. I will be playing GTA 6 for three days straight while nude in my RV. Shout out to Rockstar for showing me this gem of a place!"

November 19 is, of course, the long-awaited release date for the new Grand Theft Auto game. The 13-year wait has led to lots of excitement, for better or worse, as players prepare to pick it up on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. GTA 6 fans were also able to track down the location they suspect inspired Jason and Lucia's apartment, although it is safe from any kind of review bombing.

Polyarc Games, the developer behind the critically acclaimed Moss games, has announced it is shutting down.

The Seattle studio announced it is ceasing operations starting today, September 11, 2026, with a post on LinkedIn. It's a shock announcement that will see the company close its doors after 12 years.

"After nearly 12 years riding the joyous rollercoaster of emotions that is making video games, our time together has come to an end," Polyarc said. "As we wind down active development, we are saying our farewells to each other.

"Working together over all of these years has been an honor. Bringing surprise and delight to those who played our games has been a privilege. Thank you to everyone at Polyarc, our work is now finished. Polyarc has been home to exceptional developers across all disciplines.

The post then signed off, encouraging game developers looking for talent to hire members of its team. The full list shared with the message totals 29 names, including artists, designers, animation experts, engineers, and more.

"Thank you to everyone who has been part of this journey," Polyarc signed off.

Polyarc developed and published its first title, Moss VR, in 2018. An action-adventure puzzle game starring a small mouse named Quill, the game was well-received by critics and fans alike. IGN gave it an 8.5/10 upon its release, saying, "Quill and her fantastical world of Moss are instantly likable. This storybook action-adventure makes stellar use of VR."

We also found 2022's Moss: Book 2 to be found similarly enjoyable. In our 8/10 review, we said it "builds upon its predecessor nicely with a captivating world and entertaining platforming, let down primarily by the PSVR’s aging tech."

In 2023, Polyarc released Glassbreakers: Champions of Moss, a more tactical take on the series. A non-VR version of both Moss and its sequel, Moss: The Forgotten Relic, was released just two months ago in July 2026. It also received an 8/10 from IGN.

"Moss: The Forgotten Relic is an incredibly charming fairy tale, and aside from a couple of minor issues, this is a very smooth remake that doesn’t feel compromised by breaking free of its VR-exclusive origins," we said at the time.

Polyarc is, unfortunately, far from the first studio closure in 2026. PlayStation's Bluepoint Games and Dark Outlaw Games were both shut down earlier this year. Ubisoft announced it was closing some of its studios in June. The list goes on, with Netflix also shuttering Oxenfree developer Night School just last month. GreedFall developer Spiders shut down in April. Microsoft announced plans to cut 3,200 staff in July.

AMC has given its Point Break TV show the green light.

A sequel series based on Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze's iconic action movie has officially received a series order from AMC and AMC+, according to Variety. AMC Studios and StudioCanal will co-produce the project, with production on an eight-episode Season 1 set to begin early 2027.

"More than three decades after the events of the original Point Break film, a new heist crew inspired by the Ex-Presidents has emerged and the FBI must rely on a mysterious ex-pro surfer with a checkered past to infiltrate them," an official logline shared by the site said.

Butterfly producer Dave Kalstein and Sugar producer Christopher C. Rogers will lead the new Point Break show as co-showrunners and executive producers. Alcon's Andrew Kosove and Broderick Johnson are executive producers, with Ben Roberts and Julia Cohen also in the mix.

Being set 30 years after the events of the original film, it's unclear if Reeves will play any part in the series. Additional plot information, including who will star in the project, has also not been revealed.

Point Break is a quintessential '90s movie. Originally released back in July 1991, the Kathryn Bigelow-directed film starred Reeves as FBI agent Johnny Utah and Swayze as a bank robber/surfer named Bodhi.

It's a Southern California-set story that has emerged as a cult classic in the decades since its release. Word of a TV adaptation first arrived late last year, with today's news confirming that the show will happen, but the AMC show won't be the first crack at someone else trying to ride its wave.

Alcon released a Point Break remake starring Luke Bracey as Utah and Edgar Ramirez as Bodhi in 2015. It failed to have the sea legs of the film it pulled from, earning lackluster reviews from critics, including a 5/10 from IGN. Our review of the first crack at the IP returned much more favorable results.

"It's fun, and it covers a lot of ground," we said in our 8/10 review. "You really get your money's worth."

Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto 6 is coming to real-life Miami after a city meeting resulted in the approval of a "discreet" – and controversial – marketing campaign.

The City of Miami Beach gave the OK for the famed game developer to bring GTA 6 to the area September 10, 2026, following a 4-3 vote in favor of the decision. The meeting saw strong arguments on both sides, with the deal promising that Rockstar will pay at least $3 million to the city as related logos and branding populate the town from October 15 – December 31.

GTA 6's Vice City setting is, of course, based on the very real Miami, Florida, and Rockstar is looking to capitalize on that. Arguments against the move touched on the violence of the Grand Theft Auto series, which, as stated by Commissioner David Suarez, allows players to "steal cars, deal drugs, commit robberies, murder civilians, and assassinate police officers."

"That's their right. They can make it, they can sell it, and they can advertise it, but that doesn't mean that the city of Miami Beach has to help them do it," Suarez argued. "We ask our police officers every day to put themselves in harm's way, protecting this community. We spend enormous resources fighting drugs, violent crime, and disorder, and we've spent over a million dollars over the past three years on a spring break marketing campaign trying to move Miami Beach away from an image of chaos and lawlessness.

"Now, we're going to take our beaches, one of the most recognizable symbols of this city, and turn them into a space for Grand Theft Auto. What kind of message are we sending to the world?"

Later, Suarez added, "I don't think that this is worth what they're offering. I don't think it's worth really anything." Commissioner Matteo-Salinas fell on the other side of the fence. Her vote to approve Rockstar's GTA 6 marketing campaign came from her desire to represent gamers – herself included.

"I play GTA," Matteo-Salinas said. "I played it in 1997 when the first game, the Vice City version, came out, and I'm going to play it again when this one comes out, and I'm not going to play the game and then go on a crime spree. That's not what this is about."

Commissioner Joseph Magazine agreed, arguing that, although "Grand Theft Auto isn't for everyone" and "there are certainly aspects of the game we likely don't want associated with the values" of Miami Beach, "we also have to deal with reality." He added, "I can walk and chew gum at the same time."

"This will be the biggest and most anticipated video game launch in global history, and whether we embrace this partnership or we reject it, millions and millions of people around the world are already going to experience a fictionalized version of Miami Beach through this game. We have no control over that. That spotlight's coming."

How exactly GTA 6 will take over Miami Beach in October was not revealed. However, commissioner Laura Dominguez did tease some of what's on the table.

Rockstar will not plaster logos on city property, such as lifeguard stands or in "iconic public spaces." She said Grand Theft Auto will be advertised "discreetly" with the city's marketing partner, the Boucher Brothers. As mentioned by X/Twitter user @GTAVI_Countdown, the Boucher Brothers is a company Rockstar has parodied before, with its in-game spin instead called "Sol Sisters."

Dominguez added that, through the October – December marketing window, Miami citizens will spot things like "Vice City or 'VI'" on things like chairs and umbrellas. It suggests the words "Grand Theft Auto" won't be visible in any official capacity, with the commissioner also saying that Rockstar will not be permitted to advertise GTA 6 during the city's Art Basel, which is scheduled to take place the weekend of December 4.

"I think the city has done our part to make sure that our brand is protected but still keeping with the importance of the massive global reach that gaming has today, and the city is going to be receiving a couple million dollars," Dominguez said.

She added with a smile, "If there's wiggle room to negotiate more, let us know."

Dominguez mentioned that the deal with Rockstar will give the City of Miami Beach money that is "critical." How exactly the $3 million will be dispersed was not detailed, but Commissioner Tanya K. Bhatt expects the total benefits to produce a number closer to $4 million. She said, "[GTA 6] is coming to Miami Beach with or without us, and to pretend that it isn't is a missed opportunity."

One item on Bhatt's mind when the money comes in is Florida's Flamingo Park. Rockstar's financial support could "in and of itself" pay for a Flamingo Park Memorial Football Field renovation project that is currently slated for next year but lacks proper funding.

"Our city manager and those of us who have engaged have been very clear that this is not to be an in-your-face marketing campaign," she added. "It is very discreet, understated, [and] mostly the Roman numeral six, which most people won't even understand. They'll go around calling it 'V' or 'VI,' probably."

GTA 6's release date falls directly in its Miami Beach marketing window with a November 19, 2026, launch. It will be available for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. IGN recently got in touch with Rockstar to learn more about how its new take on the series will be worth the wait, resulting in an interview and preview following its big Netflix extended look reveal.

Some fans have recently argued that Rockstar's latest almost looks too realistic for its own good. Others are mostly just concerned with making sure they're able to grab one of the new limited edition PS5 controllers.

Resident Evil director Zach Cregger says he's cut most of movie's jokes, after test audiences apparently found the film "too funny."

Capcom loves including the occasional quip or witty one-liner in its Resident Evil game series — typically something cheesy from Leon S. Kennedy about going to bingo — so it's not surprising that Cregger also planned to include humor in his adaptation.

Cregger himself is known for mixing horror and dark humor to great effect, as seen in his previous projects Weapons and Barbarians. But you can also have too much of a good thing, the director has said.

"I learned that people really liked the movie, but they thought it was too funny," Cregger said of the film's test screenings, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. "So over the course of my testing, I stripped out as much of the jokes as possible.

"I then found that not only did the audience enjoy the movie more, but I also liked the movie a lot more," he continued. "A little bit of humor goes a long way in a horror movie, and there's not a single joke I took out of this movie that I miss."

Ahead of Resident Evil's arrival in theaters next week, Cregger has been busy discussing his process making the film, and also dealing with fan expectations. The director has said that he feels like he's been on something of an "apology tour" after having to explain some of his decisions, particularly around his choice to focus on an original character and story. Indeed, Cregger has even suggested that this will now be the only franchise he ever tries to adapt — though after promising signs of how the film will perform, has not ruled out working on a sequel.

In the meantime, Resident Evil releases on September 18 — just don't expect too many jokes.

Rockstar Games has released its opening note in the employment tribunal to determine the fate of the 31 GTA 6 developers it fired last year, and in doing so has revealed the extreme lengths it goes to in order to prevent security breaches.

The hearing, which got underway yesterday at Glasgow Employment Tribunal, revolves around allegations made by the Independent Workers of Great Britain union (IWGB) — allegations Rockstar strongly denies. The IWGB claims the staff were unlawfully blacklisted and targeted for their union activities, and that the manner in which they were dismissed was also unlawful because it came without disciplinary process or right of appeal.

Rockstar has insisted it fired the staff because they leaked GTA 6 game features via Discord, not because they were trying to unionize. 34 members of staff at Rockstar were dismissed — 31 in the UK and three in Canada — sparking protests outside the office of Rockstar North in Edinburgh, Scotland, and parent company Take-Two in London.

Rockstar maintains that at the time of the dismissals it didn’t know that the people it fired were involved with a union. As for the Discord comments at the heart of this case, Rockstar says they had to do with GTA 6 features, overall progress and timelines to launch, as well as company IT security protocols. Rockstar believes that if the Discord comments had leaked they would have been big gaming news and might even have affected Take-Two’s share price. When Rockstar officially announced that GTA 6 would be delayed by six months to November 19, 2026, the market value of Take-Two plummeted $3.75 billion in a single day.

In its note, Rockstar goes into detail on the intense scrutiny it is under as developer of GTA 6 — predicted to be the biggest entertainment launch of all time — and how it works to prevent security breaches.

“Guarding the secrets of the unique gameplay and design are akin to Apple protecting the iPhone or Coke protecting its formula,” Rockstar said, adding that it adopts “the security posture of a Wall Street bank.”

Rockstar’s secrecy is well-known within the industry, as are the security breaches it has faced in the past. Last month it suffered one of the most high-profile video game leaks in history when GTA 6 gameplay was published online ahead of the game’s Netflix gameplay reveal. But that was just the latest in a string of leaks that have affected GTA 6 over its decade-long development.

In April 2025, Rockstar dismissed an employee in Lincoln, UK, who it alleged disclosed confidential information about GTA 6 to a third party who then published the information to social media. Rockstar dismissed an employee in the U.S. in November 2023 and another in India in November 2025 for two separate acts of information leaking.

“The standards and expectations regarding information security and privacy are exponentially beyond that of most employers,” Rockstar continued in its opening note. It said all visitors to Rockstar’s offices must sign non-disclosure agreements, and any contractors working on site are escorted, while there, by security. Remote working for employees is severely restricted. Flash drives / USB keys and other external storage devices are banned. Photography at work is strictly forbidden. Employees’ personal laptops, tablets and phones are blocked from connecting to the Rockstar systems. Rockstar staff are ordered not to disclose confidential information even to family members.

“The Respondent’s [Rockstar's] detailed Social Media Guidelines confirm that even innocuous pictures of an employee’s desk could unacceptably reveal confidential information,” Rockstar said. The company faces regular attacks on its security and systems, and was forced to put privacy films on its buildings after drones were used to try and photograph through office windows. Staff have been harassed online, Rockstar said. Rockstar employs a full-time team of five investigators and a director to monitor for and investigate potential data leaks. Its employees face phishing and social engineering attacks seeking to trick them into giving up passwords and login credentials.

“Some of those attacks have been successful,” Rockstar said, including a 2022 leak of dozens of videos of unfinished development footage of GTA 6. That was obtained through phishing, which gave a hacker access to an employee’s computer and from there, material shared on Rockstar’s own internal Slack communication channels.

“The history of leaks has made the Respondent hypervigilant to lock information down as tightly as possible,” Rockstar added. “Most recently, in the last few weeks, a hacking group attempted to blackmail the Respondent,” Rockstar said, referencing the CyberLeek breach. “If any more proof was needed that the Respondent’s sensitivity to security and confidentiality is justified, it is the wiping of $2 billion from the Respondent’s parent company’s share value within a few days as that recent hack became public.”

“The Claimants were all aware of this culture, referencing it numerous times on their own Discord posts,” Rockstar said.

Rockstar’s note goes on to discuss the extreme levels of scrutiny it is subject to, pointing out the frequency of coffee shop trips by employees and pizza deliveries to the Rockstar offices have been monitored by fans, and traffic volumes by its workplaces were allegedly tracked in a bid to get an inside track on the GTA 6 release date.

It also noted how in 2025 two innocuous tweets from employees sparked a (mistaken) fan theory that a new GTA 6 trailer would be released on December 27, 2025 as a precursor to sales of the game itself. “The theory snowballed from the backwaters of the internet to industry and mainstream coverage around the globe,” Rockstar said.

The hearing runs until October 16, a month before GTA 6 comes out. The workers want reinstatement or, failing that, compensation, as well as a finding from the tribunal that their dismissals were unfair. The IWGB alleges that on the day of the dismissals, employees were called into meetings, told they were being fired with immediate effect and escorted from the building. Workers who were not at the office allege they were informed during phone calls lasting around two minutes before being locked out of their work accounts. The IWGB also alleges that one of the dismissed workers, Will Mesilane, had to leave the UK and return to Australia after Rockstar withdrew his work visa and reported him to the Home Office, without giving him a chance to appeal.

In a statement issued to IGN, a spokesperson for Rockstar Games insisted the studio was ready to defend itself from the claims. The statement is below:

“Rockstar Games' position has been clear and consistent throughout. Individuals across the UK and Canada were dismissed for gross misconduct following the sharing of confidential company information, not because of alleged trade union membership or activity. We reject the claims and will defend them vigorously before the tribunal.”

Jason Lewis, former Rockstar employee and IWGB Union member, commented: “For almost a year, the truth about what happened to us has been buried by Rockstar and surrounded by speculation. Now we finally get the chance to put it on the record. None of us imagined that talking to each other about our working conditions would turn our lives upside down and catapult us into the centre of a global media storm. As the world prepares for the release of GTA 6, we are reliving the heartbreak of being thrown out of a project we poured so much of our lives into. We lost our jobs, our income, our community and the chance to see the game through to release after spending years helping to build it. It was devastating.

“We have fought tooth and nail to get to this point, not just to be able to win justice for ourselves, but to draw a line in the sand for any employer that thinks it can attack workers for unionising. It has been an emotional journey and it is not over yet, but we can now see the finish line, and justice at last feels within reach.”

Last month, the fired Rockstar workers told fans they shouldn’t boycott GTA 6 to protest on their behalf, but buy T-shirts launched to raise money towards their legal costs instead. Alex Marshall, president of the IWGB, said: “We believe Rockstar has tried to get away with Grand Theft Employment Rights. After a year of fighting to get answers, we hope this tribunal will finally back them into a corner and bring the truth to light. As the world gets its first proper look at GTA 6, this hearing will give people a chance to look behind the scenes at what happened to the workers who helped make it.

“That is why this hearing matters for every worker across the UK, whether their job is in entertainment, education or anywhere else. It is a moment to send a clear message to each of them: you have the right to join a union, that right is protected by law, and employers cannot punish you for exercising it.

“If Rockstar can get away with firing workers for organising, then every employer in Britain gets the message that they can do the same. We cannot let that happen.”

Meanwhile, negotiations are ongoing between Rockstar and the IWGB over formal union recognition, even amid this legal battle. The union wants greater pay transparency, protection from post-release layoffs, an end to "crunch," and improved flexible working arrangements, it’s said. If an agreement is reached, Rockstar would become the biggest recognised unionised game studio in the UK. Workers hope to secure recognition before the release of GTA 6.

Photo by Lesley Martin / AFP via Getty Images.

Sony's decision to walk away from its deal with the legendary Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima for upcoming PlayStation game Physint was reportedly the result of budget concerns and missed deadlines.

That's according to a fresh Bloomberg report that details some of Sony's thinking behind the decision to walk away from Physint, which Microsoft subsequently snapped up for Xbox.

As suggested yesterday by analysts speaking to IGN in the aftermath of the news breaking, Sony appears to be reigning in its spending after a woeful run of first-party game flops and cancellations. After wasting hundreds of millions of dollars developing the short-lived Concord, Naughty Dog's now-canned The Last of Us Online, and the still-limping Marathon, Sony is apparently enforcing stricter production milestones.

Bloomberg's report includes the direct assertion that Physint "missed deadlines and was on track to be well over budget despite being years away from release," according to the publication's sources.

The revenue performance of Death Stranding and its sequel, another factor previously mentioned by analysts, also played a part in Sony's decision, it's claimed. While the first title turned a profit for Kojima Productions, Death Stranding 2 failed to build on this success.

Analysis from Alinea Analytics previously suggested that Death Stranding 2 sales have now slowed to a trickle, that several notable discounts on the game have failed to move the needle, and that revenue for the game remains far lower than that of its predecessor.

Several other factors also came into play for Sony, Bloomberg's report continues. One is Sony's previously-reported decision to stop releasing many of its single-player games on PC — something that would have cut into Physint's potential audience further. And another reason is apparently that, while Kojima and PlayStation have enjoyed a long partnership together since the days of PS1, many of the Sony chiefs who previously worked with the Metal Gear creator have since moved on.

With Kojima cut adrift, the report closes with details on why Xbox immediately swooped in, other than to secure the obvious PR win of nabbing Kojima from PlayStation. It's claimed that Xbox's new leaders under boss Asha Sharma saw Physint as a strong investment, with plans to launch the game on PC (no surprise there) and as an alignment with Sharma's stated goal of expanding Xbox's reach beyond games to film and TV. As part of Sony and Kojima's original announcement, some form of movie studio involvement was teased — though exactly what's being planned, we're still waiting to hear.

"This doesn't look great for PlayStation among core gamers," Alinea Analytics analyst Rhys Elliot said yesterday. "Especially right now. From a strictly financial perspective, though, I can understand Sony’s position. In a vacuum, anyway.

Next up from Kojima will be OD, the PT-like project already confirmed as coming to Xbox. As of yet, there's no word on when that will arrive, let alone Physint — though the latter has been described as a next-gen game.

Image credit: Kojima Productions.

It's only been a few months since developer Double Fine's split from Microsoft, but the team behind Psychonauts 2, Kiln, and Keeper is looking ahead. With another successful Kickstarter campaign under its belt, the newly independent studio's second (or should that be third?) life as an indie is off to an optimistic start. With the current Kickstarter focusing on the developer's latest Amenesia Fortnight — a developer-run game jam where new micro games are produced — it's allowing the developers to build up some much-needed runway as they plan for their next major project.

At PAX West 2026, we spoke with Double Fine studio head and president, Tim Schafer, about the developer's current path forward. Along with talking about his return to independence following the biggest restructure in Xbox history, Schafer reflected on Double Fine's years under Microsoft's banner, and explained how Game Pass can still potentially work as a subscription service. He also reaffirmed his commitment to making Brutal Legend 2 (provided someone can front the money for it).

IGN: It's been seven years since the Microsoft acquisition, and the game industry has gone through so much change. What's it been like to return to being an independent developer?

Tim Schafer: It's been exhilarating. Like, it's scary because we've got to make our own way in the world, but we did that for 19 years before Microsoft, so we have a lot of great ideas and a lot of experience pitching them. A lot of people know it's a tough time out there. A lot of people, and now especially a lot of the older developers, are gone. A lot of the old avenues we used for funding are gone, but there are a lot of new ones. So we're just putting ourselves out there, meeting a lot of new people, and talking about who wants to make games with us.

IGN: I think what's been great to see with Double Fine is that it has a core audience of players that are invested in seeing the studio thrive. I remember the original Kickstarter campaign for Broken Age was a big breakthrough for Double Fine.

Schafer: Yeah, I mean that sort of thing was quite like a big financial impact, but it was also an awakening of just how tight we are with the community, like how dependent we are on them, and how much they're willing to participate. You know what I mean? Because they participate financially, but also creatively. Like, they really want to make art as well. I feel like that's something special about our fans, and it's because our number one thing is creativity. So I think it breeds a fan who also likes creativity, and I think it, hopefully, helps our games inspire not just players, but people to like learning to draw or program, or, you know, people who want to know how to make a game.

IGN: Now that you are an independent developer again, and with all this attention on you, do you feel there's a certain responsibility placed on you all to make it as an indie studio?

Schafer: I don't see it as a responsibility. I mean, I don't expect anybody to look at us and know what to do, because our situation always feels really unique to Double Fine and me. Like we're an indie game studio, but we have a lot of employees, and we have healthcare, and we have a lot of stuff like that. There's not a lot of companies our size anymore, like AA-size studios, kind of. So, I wouldn't say do everything that we do. I hope no one's following our example because I don't know if it works for anyone but us.

IGN: The Kickstarter for the Amnesia Fortnight is an interesting way to start this comeback, it's all about this big push to produce some new ideas and bring to life.

Schafer: It's kind of like a celebration of what we can do now that was harder to do before. Even being at PAX, Microsoft usually likes to have one big booth. So having little booths all over is not what they're into. They're not even here at the show. So being independent, we can come to PAX, we can talk to the fans, we can set the prices of our games. We can do tiny games like Thank You Bus Driver, which is a new project for us, and we made a whole special label for them called Double Fine Action Labs, where we can release smaller ideas, do game jams, and do the kind of things we like to do. So it's a celebration of both what we can do and what we like to do, which is high-bandwidth interaction with the fans, doing silly creative things, and just having a lot of fun.

IGN: I would be remiss not to say that a lot of people took notice of the Kickstarter mentioning that Brutal Legend 2 can be made if you secure $100 million. I understand it was meant as a joke…

Schafer: I mean, it was a joke, but also, it's not a joke. Sure, I mean, if we got $100 million, we would do it for sure. I would happily put everything aside and make Brutal Legend 2, as long as I could talk Jack Black into it. Yeah, but if we got $100 million, that's great. Yeah, I could do a demo for $100 [laughs]. But it's not a joke — I would do it if we hit that goal. We're probably not going to hit that, though. But any rich guys out there, if you ever want to see Brutal Legend 2, come help us out.

IGN: Now that you're back as an independent developer, how do you feel about those seven years working under Microsoft? Would you say that it was a valuable experience in the end?

Schafer: I learned a lot from it, and it was a really great experience overall. They invested a lot in the company, and their mission was to support Game Pass and other projects. So for a while, we were very closely aligned, and it was great. It was a great partnership, and then their goals changed, and so we parted ways because of that.

But I feel like, in the meantime, we had a great little collection of studios within Xbox Game Studios, like Compulsion, Ninja Theory, Obsidian, and inXile. We got to meet all the studio heads and talk to them, and our programmers got to talk. Their programmers are artists, and everyone was exchanging ideas and technology, and it was really a great learning experience about how other companies are run. So, because you're independent, you're a little more like an island. So, being an island that was temporarily pushed, hitched up to a bunch of other islands was very much, "Oh, that's a cool game right there, we could go play that game."

IGN: Game Pass was such a big part of the Xbox brand's push for a larger games audience. Do you feel that Game Pass still has value and potential as a service?

Schafer: I really want Game Pass to work. I like the idea of subscription models for companies like us, who, you know, lower the barrier to entry for everyone. We want to make games that are weird and creative, that you might not understand at first. I think that's the kind of stuff we like to do. Do people see the key art and go like, "What?" And if it's on a subscription, you've already kind of paid for the game. You'd be more likely to try it, so that sounds good.

But there are other ways to reach people like that, like lowering your prices, for example. You know, getting people to try your games like that. I think it could have worked. I don't understand why Netflix worked and Game Pass didn't, and I think that's something I just don't know enough about, but that's the way it is. So now we're taking another approach: making it really affordable.

IGN: It's been interesting to see the rise of these micro-games, ones that are fairly modest in concept, but offer variety and fun for groups of players. I know the term "friendslop" is used a lot, but I kind of see some of Double Fine's games, and experimental ones, being right at home with those styles of games – particularly Kiln.

Schafer: Yeah, I think the difference is multiplayer. We have built a ton of multiplayer, but the thing about those games kind of aligns with what we're doing with our Amnesia Fortnight, which is just trying stuff. A lot of those games came from game jams. I think the game Peak came from a game jam, and we just want to give everyone in the company a chance. Really, people feel safe to experiment and try creative ideas, and then to not spend $300 million on them, just spend like sticky bus drivers for six weeks, put it out there, and just see what you know.

The thing about those 'friendslop' games, people mostly focus on successes, but there's tons of them that don't work out. I think the idea is that you never know which one's going to take off, so don't bank the future of your company on any one individual idea for sure. But these games were called "friendjank" for awhile, you remember that? It's also about casual pacing, it's basically games where it's mostly about hanging out with your friends.

IGN: What are your thoughts on the state of the industry now? There's been a lot of reports and stories of developers struggling to stay open and some creatives having to leave the field. Do you feel optimistic that things can improve?

Schafer: It's a shitty time out there, and it's been getting worse for longer than I've ever seen it get worse. I usually try to comfort people by saying to the team, "Well, there are cycles, there are downturns, but it always turns back up again because you need people to make games, and that comes and goes." But this has been going on for at least four years, and I feel like I've never seen a cycle plunge so low.

Is it a permanent change in just the economics of it all? But people are still needed to make games. It's not like AI has replaced everybody, and for all the talk about it replacing Google, it's not effectively replacing anybody right now. So where are all those jobs going? I still see a bunch of games getting made, and people are still needed. So I wish I were smarter and knew the answer to that. But it seems like you need people to make games, and so there should be a ton of opportunities, and they're still making a lot of money.

For creatives, you have to have fun making games because they're really hard to make. A lot of these people could make more than money in a tech company, so they're here because they love games. And if you're here because you love games, then you should love what you're doing, love making games, and have fun.

Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images.

Nintendo has won a major legal victory aimed at blocking the sale of devices that enable Switch game piracy.

The Mario maker has been waging war on the makers of these devices and those who use them over the past few years, and has now turned its attention to the websites that sell them to European customers. Indeed, Nintendo recently took the matter to The District Court of The Hague (note: this is separate to the Hague's International Criminal Court that deals with war criminals) to get their sale deemed unlawful.

Commonly marketed as the MIG Switch, these devices can circumvent Nintendo's anti-piracy measures and play illegal copies of games downloaded from the internet. Nintendo made headlines last year after it began penalizing players who had used these devices on their consoles, disabling the machines' online functionality.

This new ruling makes it unlawful to sell the MIG Switch and similar devices in Europe in the first place, and specifically names a set of websites where they could be purchased previously. These sites must now cease offering the devices, the court has ordered.

In a statement to press, Nintendo said it had launched this legal action not just to protect its own intellectual property, but also "on behalf of the many video game developers globally that depend on legitimate sales of Nintendo video games.

"Nintendo promotes and fosters game development and creativity and strongly supports the game developers who legitimately create new and innovative games," the company concluded, before issuing a warning directly to fans who might use them:

"Nintendo's message to players is to avoid purchasing or using circumvention devices, circumvention software or unauthorised copies of video games, as this increases the risk of interfering with the functionality and experience provided by authentic Nintendo game consoles, video games and systems."

This is, of course, far from the first time that Nintendo has initiated legal action to stop the sale of piracy-enabling devices. Last year, a Nintendo console modder who refused to shut down his business — and who then attempted to defend himself without a lawyer — was ordered to pay $2 million by Nintendo. And then there's the infamous case of Gary Bowser, an employee of a company that sold anti-piracy devices, who served time in jail and was ordered to pay $14.5m in damages, a debt he's said he will now repay for the rest of his life.

John Carpenter's Toxic Commando’s launch came in below publisher Focus Entertainment’s expectations, but for Saber Interactive it was successful in commercial terms — and according to development chief Tim Willits, the tech work done for it will go on to benefit the upcoming Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 3.

Toxic Commando builds upon Saber’s proprietary tech to present a zombie swarm for co-op players to gun down. It’s technology used for Saber’s World War Z, for the Tyranids in Space Marine 2, and will once again be utilized for the upcoming Space Marine 3.

In its recent financial report, Focus owner Pullup issued a somewhat downbeat note on Toxic Commander, which came out in March. But in an interview with IGN at gamescom, Saber’s Tim Willits was more positive, confirming it was a profitable project for the company.

“We're really happy with it,” he began. “Focus' opinion, they're a publicly traded company, so they have to say what they have to say. We'll leave that to them. But for us, we're really excited about it. We have some new stuff coming out. We actually have a good playerbase.

“It brought more people into the Saber universe. When I say Saber universe, it's people that fall in love with one game who now start to look at us, like Space Marine 2 with our 14 million players. It's f***ing ridiculous. Just a few! And then World War Z, remember that's 30 million people that played that game. It's nuts. More people played that game than saw the movie or read the book.”

Willits went on to say that the tech improvements made for Toxic Commander will be further improved for Space Marine 3. Indeed, you can trace a line from World War Z through Space Marine 2 and Toxic Commando right to Space Marine 3.

“[Toxic] was a well-made game that was fun to play, and it shows people what we do really well,” Willits said. “It shows people that Saber games are enjoyable to experience with your friends. It's over-the-top. It built on our technology. You'll see more of that in Space Marine 3. You can see the progression with our technology moves. I feel that it was a good brick in that Saber wall.

“We're growing the company, we're growing the project, we're growing the technology. It was profitable for us. We don't lose money. We don't lose money on anything.”

I asked Willits how Toxic Commando’s tech will be improved for Space Marine 3, and while he kept his cards close to his chest on actual game features, he did hint at an expanded scope.

“It's the maturity of the technology,” he said. “You can see the bigger swarms, you can see the bigger areas, you can see the better AI. There's cars — you didn’t have cars in Space Marine 2. I'm not saying we're going to have cars in Space Marine 3. I'm just saying the technology is growing and developing and that's our technology. So we can focus on technology pillars that will support our future games like Space Marine 3 and Jurassic Park — that uses the same technology.”

One of the big questions for Space Marine fans is how Saber will expand upon the gameplay. Space Marine 2 limits squads to three characters (modders increased this), and while some of the play spaces are big, there’s nothing you’d describe as having any sort of open world design. Willits has talked about three being the magic number for Space Marine 2 because of the maximum number of enemies it’s able to throw at squads — having four Space Marines, say, would make the game too easy and “scaling enemy assaults to justify bringing a fourth player was too great of a challenge.”

But could Space Marine 3 up the player count by upping the enemy count and playspace? Could it increase the scope of the battles, which in Space Marine 2 are limited in terms of area and units? Willits says he’s not saying Space Marine 3 will have cars, but it does beg the question: will Space Marine 3 have vehicles? A Land Raider, perhaps? Maybe some flying missions in a Gunship?

As for Saber's swarm tech, I'm not sure repeating the trick with Tyranids will be enough for Space Marine 3 after fans spent so much time with them in Space Marine 2. Most believe Space Marine 3 will feature the Necrons, based on hints sprinkled throughout Space Marine 2. But what other factions would fit the bill? A return to the Orks seen in Space Marine 1? (Orks are the primary antagonist of the 11th edition of the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop game.) How about a focus on the relentless Death Guard and swarms of shuffling Plaguebearers? Saber has form when it comes to zombies after all.

As for how Space Marine 3 development is going, Willits was very enthusiastic, but again didn’t give much away. Speaking of how well Space Marine 2 had gone (he previously told IGN its success had changed everything for Saber), Willits said the development team was now working to top it.

“The Emperor loves us. We are The Emperor’s favorite,” Willits joked. “All I can say is 3's going great. 2's been really successful. Our DLC's been super successful. People love the mods. It helps the team with experience, knowing what fans actually want, making sure that we adhere to the true Warhammer 40K universe franchise.

“The success of Space Marine 2 has really made the team passionate about making sure that Space Marine 3 is even better. They feel that there's this confidence and passion and vigor, and you can see it. When you talk to the team, they're just in it. So I'm really excited about that.”

Willits recently told IGN that no generative AI was being used in the development of Space Marine 3, after a backlash online to its use in Saber’s Rideshare Stimulator. Space Marine 3 currently does not have a release window.

The inevitable Spider-Man: Brand New Day sequel already has its director, according to a fresh report.

Deadline has stated that Destin Daniel Cretton will return for Marvel and Sony's fifth Tom Holland-starring Spider-Man movie, after helming this year's box office-breaking Brand New Day.

It's easy to see why everyone involved might be keen for Cretton to return, as Brand New Day nears $2.5 billion in ticket sales and becomes the third highest-grossing film of all time. It's also the best box office for a Spider-Man movie ever, and the biggest film of 2026 — at least until Avengers: Doomsday lands this December.

Having said all of that, Cretton has plenty on his plate right now, meaning that his availability had not been assured. Marvel fans have been begging him to make a Shang-Chi sequel for years, which he previously spoke positively about still wanting to do.

But while Shang-Chi 2 may or may not happen, Spider-Man 5 seems a very safe bet. The only issue for Cretton is his own availability, amid an array of other projects he already has lined up including a Hawaii Five-O movie and a live-action Naruto adaptation. Sadly, though, Cretton will no longer be working on a second season of Wonder Man, after Disney's abrupt cancellation of the series.

When could Spider-Man 5 arrive? The earliest gaps in Marvel's release schedule are now not until 2029, when the studio has three untitled movies lined up to launch. (2027 will only feature Avengers: Secret Wars, while 2028 is already stuffed with X-Men, Ghost Rider, and Black Panther 3.) Still, Spider-Man: Brand New Day was filmed last summer for launch less than 12 months after, so it seems possible that Cretton will be able to tick off his other upcoming projects before returning to Spider-Man once more.

As for the franchise's star, Tom Holland has privately discussed returning for several more appearances, though has also said he was now thinking of how to hand over the role to a new Spider-hero. Perhaps Spider-Man 5 is when we finally see a live-action Miles Morales introduced, with Sony's animated Spider-Verse trilogy that features the same character all wrapped up by the time it arrives. Time will tell, though it seems Cretton will be there when cameras do eventually roll.

Image credit: Jeff Spicer/ Getty Images for Sony Pictures.

Maggie Robertson has said she would accept any opportunity from Capcom to reprise her breakout role as Lady Dimitrescu in the Resident Evil series, calling the character her “firstborn.”

Lady Dimitrescu, the towering face of Capcom’s phenomenally successful 2021 game, Resident Evil Village, was Robertson’s first video game role, and it changed her life forever.

Speaking to IGN at gamescom while promoting her latest video game gig — the sultry and scheming Tasha in upcoming Dungeons & Dragons game Warlock — Robertson said the last five years had been a surreal experience.

“That game, that character changed my life in every way,” she said. “There's no aspect of my life that has not been touched by that character. That was the very first game I ever did. And I had just done my graduate degree. I just came from a drama program. I lived the Hollywood dream in a surreal way. So I just graduated, moved to LA January 2019 and was throwing paint at the wall. I didn't have an agent. I was just self-submitting for things, seeing what stuck. I moved out here to pursue on-camera predominantly, but then this breakdown happened across my path and it was a day where I was just feeling like I might as well try something new. F**k it. Let's go for it. And it turned out to be this.”

Robertson said she had no idea which game or character she was auditioning for when she went in for Lady Dimitrescu, due to the secrecy that surrounds the video game industry, and even afterwards, could never have predicted the impact it would have.

“Video games also are always under NDA. So everything about the breakdown, the character names, the sides that I auditioned with, all of that was fake,” she said. “I had no idea what I was even auditioning for. I had no idea of the scope of what video games could offer me in terms of a career, in terms of acting, in terms of the roles that I would have access to.”

Such was the online popularity of Lady Dimitrescu following the character’s reveal ahead of Resident Evil Village’s release, that Capcom thrust her into the forefront of the game’s marketing. Lady Dimitrescu appeared on billboard advertising, in viral social media posts, and was in pretty much every Resident Evil Village trailer as Capcom doubled down on the vociferous fandom that emerged around the character.

Fast forward five years, and Robertson has acted in everything from Baldur’s Gate 3 (Orin the Red), to Fortnite (DJ PJ). In Warlock, Robertson plays another Dungeons & Dragons villain, Tasha, patron to the playable character. Such is Robertson’s fame within the video game industry that she appeared on-stage at Opening Night Live last month to introduce Warlock gameplay. And there are more video game roles to come.

“Ultimately, I'm so grateful for it because I think my type with theater, my type with on-camera, the roles that I am so right for are roles that are waiting for me when I am 50 and 60 years old,” she continued. “And I didn't have access to those at the time that I was entering the industry. And being able to become a part of this industry helped me have access to those roles now. And I didn't have to wait. I didn't have to be limited by the way that I looked. Again, it's like, if you imagine yourself, if you can imagine it, you can be it. And I find that so liberating.

“But that is the Hollywood dream. That is what they sell you, is that you never know when your big break is going to happen. You never know what opportunity is going to be your next big break. And that happened to me. I just said yes on a random thing.”

The big question for Resident Evil fans is whether Lady Dimitrescu might appear in another game in the series, or perhaps in an animation or maybe even in live-action. Capcom has yet to say either way, but Robertson would jump at the chance.

“Oh, of course!” she said. “A hundred times, yes. She's my firstborn. So anytime they call, I will say happy days.”

For now, though, the focus is on Warlock and her character, Tasha. "What I like most about Tasha is that she's neither good nor evil," Robertson said. "She's complex in that way. She can go either way depending on the day. I think that gives you a lot of fun to play with. She's so charming and charismatic, but also cunning, and is ultimately looking after number one, which is herself. And she'll help you for sure, but there's always something in it for her if she decides to help you. And you don't always know what that is. So I found her to be a nicely complex character. I always like getting to work on those."

Photo by Amanda Edwards/Getty Images.

Forza Horizon 6 has a new, dedicated drifting mode, dubbed Drift Attack. The mode functions similar to the existing Time Attack mode, and is accessed directly from the open world with no additional loading or lobby system. Just like Time Attacks, all you need to do is drive through the gantry and Drift Attack will begin.

The home of the new mode is the existing Shimanoyama Circuit. While lapping the course, points are earned the same way they are in Horizon Drift and at Drift Zones – but Drift Attack adds a new scoring layer to consider with the addition of “Clipping Zones” around the track. These zones will boost scores for drifts executed within their marked boundaries.

Drift Attack features the same in-world leaderboard functionality of Time Attacks, and has been integrated into the Horizon Festival campaign (unlocked by obtaining the yellow wristband). Knocking off Drift Attack Collection Journal tasks will score you the Drift Attack racesuit and helmet, plus a brand-new Forza Edition car: the 1990 Jaguar XJ-S Forza Edition. Pleasingly, a stock XJ-S has also been added to the Autoshow for all players to purchase at any time.

The addition of Drift Attack comes alongside the arrival of the Horizon Playlist Series 5, ‘British Automotive’, which will run from September 10 to October 8. The 10 series reward cars (three of which are new-to-Horizon) are listed below:

• 2019 Ginetta G40 Junior (earn 20 points during the Summer Season)
• 2021 McLaren 620R (earn 40 points during the Summer Season)
• 2015 Jaguar XKR-S GT (earn 20 points during the Autumn Season)
• 2021 MINI John Cooper Works GP (earn 40 points during the Autumn Season)
• 2006 Vauxhall Astra VXR (earn 20 points during the Winter Season)
• 2016 Bentley Bentayga (earn 40 points during the Winter Season)
• 2002 Lotus Esprit V8 (earn 20 points during the Spring Season)
• 2023 Lotus Emira (earn 40 points during the Spring Season)
• 2025 Bentley Continental GT Speed (earn 80 points over the course of the whole ‘British Automotive’ series)
• 2019 Aston Martin Valhalla Concept Car (earn 160 points over the course of the whole ‘British Automotive’ series)

Playground Games also confirmed the next series will be called ‘Horizon Meets’, which will feature a temporary 7-Eleven Konbini evolving world feature, plus more Eventlab content and new-to-Horizon cars.

Luke is a Senior Editor on the IGN reviews team. You can track him down on Bluesky @mrlukereilly to ask him things about stuff.

It’s no secret that handheld gaming is in a bit of a renaissance right now. Ushered in by the Nintendo Switch and carried forward by the Steam Deck and more powerful handheld PCs like the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+, there’s never been more options for playing games on the small screen, whether that’s away from home or just around the house without being tied to a console.

Alongside these mainstream offerings are another class of handhelds aimed more at the past than the future. In particular, Android-powered dual-screen handhelds like the AYN Thor look to offer hardware designed for emulating the Nintendo DS and 3DS. This week, Retroid entered the fray teasing out its upcoming Pocket Duo, and today we now know how much it will cost.

The Retroid Pocket Duo will cost $270 for the flagship model, which comes with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, though there’s a coupon to knock $20 off when pre-ordering. There’s also a cheaper Pocket Duo Lite model with half as much RAM and storage, which will cost $150. Both models come in a variety of colors, including ones reminiscent of GameCube purple, Game Boy greyish-white, and clear blue and atomic purple. Pre-orders are currently sold out.

The Pocket Duo offers a 5.5-inch 1080p AMOLED primary screen, while the second screen is 4.5 inches at 960p. It’s powered by a Qualcomm Dragonwing Q-7790 processor and runs Android 16, which offers a plethora of games via the Play Store, as well as multiple options for DS, 3DS and other retro system emulation. If going this route, games should be obtained legally, such as by dumping your own game cartridges – IGN does not condone piracy under any circumstances.

There’s no word yet when the Pocket Duo and Duo Lite will launch, but these prices make it an excellent alternative to the AYN Thor, which offers a less-powerful Snapdragon 865 in its $259 Lite model, while the Thor’s “Base” model moves up to the more powerful Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for $329. Pre-orders are currently sold out, but these handhelds tend to come available in waves, so keep an eye out for future drops if you’re interested in buying one. In the meantime, we’ll be looking to go hands-on with the Pocket Duo, so stay tuned for our review as we get closer to launch.

Hasbro has responded to the Department of Homeland Security’s recent AI-generated social media posts that used the likeness of the Hasbro-owned character, Transformers’ Optimus Prime, to promote its deportation program, stating that DHS’ posts were created without their consent.

One DHS ad is an AI-generated fake movie poster for “Transformers: Age of Deportation” featuring Optimus Prime with DHS and ICE insignia.

A second DHS post showed Optimus face to face with a Sikh man, declaring, “Self-deport or find out” and “America for Americans. Get off our roads; you don’t know how to drive Mr Singh.” That post – which the DHS has since deleted – was widely blasted as being blatantly racist.

Hasbro responded Thursday with the following statement on their Instagram account:

“Optimus Prime is a beloved character who represents humility, leadership, compassion and justice. Hasbro is aware of the recent posts using his likeness. These posts were done without permission and do not represent the Transformers brand or Hasbro.”

As Entertainment Weekly points out, the DHS’ Optimus Prime spots were also criticized for coming on the heels of the death of Peter Cullen, the actor who voiced Optimus for decades.

Cullen’s final performance as the iconic Autobot leader will be in Optimus Prime: Awakening, an upcoming short film that will be presented with 40th anniversary screenings of The Transformers: The Movie.

The Trump Administration widely uses (often AI-generated) imagery and videos that appropriate pop culture in their social media posts.

The DHS’ Optimus Prime posts come on the heels of the White House’s AI video featuring President Trump as a Green Lantern and the release of the designs for new Space Force uniforms that have been likened to those worn by the Galactic Empire in the Star Wars franchise or by the soldiers in Starship Troopers, a sci-fi film that lampoons fascism.

Brandon Sanderson, author of the beloved Cosmere series, has long been a fan of Star Trek and Magic the Gathering. These are topics he has talked about frequently over the years, but thanks to the upcoming MTG Star Trek crossover, he got to talk about both things at the same time.

Sanderson and his co-host, Dan Wells, kicked off this week's podcast by discussing a few of the new cards being released this November. In particular, Sanderson pointed out the mono red Captain James T. Kirk card featuring what they agreed was "a perfect Kirk".

"I thought their Kirk was really clever," said Sanderson about the card. "If you have no options, he gives you them, right? He draws you a card and/or you discard a card and then draw one. So if you have no cards in hand, he gives you a card. So he solves the unsolvable problems, he makes a red shirt, and he buffs your team with a rousing speech."

The specific card Sanderson is talking about here is one of multiple versions of William Shatner's portrayal of James T. Kirk from the original series. It's a card you can pull from the base set, as opposed to one of the Commander Decks up for preorder. The MTG Star Trek sets aren't releasing until later in November, so it's unclear how common of a card this will be right now.

GameStop is planning to re-open stores that it previously shut down, with one opening its doors this week.

The company announced these plans via its social media and revealed that this rollout would begin on September 11. IGN reached out to GameStop to see how many stores are re-opening, and was given the following statement from a GameStop spokesperson:

"The count is: at least one, as of tomorrow. As for the rest, stay tuned."

Your local GameStop is back.

Select closed stores are now reopening nationwide starting September 11. pic.twitter.com/OKbS0WAmy4

— GameStop (@gamestop) September 10, 2026

It's slightly amusing to make an announcement like this based on just one store, but for those who want to know the location of this specific shop, you can find it in Ohio at the following address: 4756 Ridge Rd., Suite P22, Brooklyn, OH 44144. GameStop is staying tight lipped as to how many more stores they're planning to resurrect, but hopefully there will be more news soon.

GameStop has had its fair share of struggles over the last half-decade, partially thanks to the rise of digital games. The company has closed over a thousand stores since 2020 and has been cutting costs in other ways over the years. GameStop also briefly killed off Game Informer, a gaming magazine that was owned by the retailer and sold in their stores. Game Informer inevitably found a new owner, but it took nearly a year to bring the magazine back.

Now, GameStop has another obstacle to overcome: the impending death of physical games. PlayStation announced that it is ending support for physical games in 2028, which seems to suggest the PS6 won't support discs of any kind. The jury is still out on what Xbox plans to do with its next console, but either way, physical gaming media is starting to be phased out by the industry. GameStop may be able to weather this storm, as it has been offering more collectibles and geeky items like Funko Pops for some time now. GameStop is also trying to acquire eBay, which would help diversify the company.

Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images

This article contains spoilers for Red Dead Redemption 2.

Red Dead Redemption 2 actor Roger Clark has revealed that Arthur Morgan's gnarly coughing fits were actually recorded when he was sick in real life.

I recently interviewed Roger Clark for a YouTube video about how Arthur Morgan from Red Dead Redemption was crafted. During our lengthy conversation, I was able to ask him something I've always wondered: How taxing is it to pretend to violently cough like Arthur does? According to Clark, it's actually not that bad — and in some cases, he wasn't even pretending.

"It's not as bad as you'd think, because I had five years to spread it out," said Clark. "If ever there was a really bad coughing scene, we'd always save it for the end of the day. So, it wasn't as bad as you might think. I had five years to space it out. In five years, there's plenty of colds. There was a lot of data we got that was pretty damn genuine. [...] I'd be like 'Hey, I've got a cold, let me get in there.' And they'd be like, 'Okay.' [...] Nice good bit of phlegm."

There's really no better way to act than to actually experience the scene in your real life. Arthur Morgan is almost partially defined by his coughing; the character contracts Tuberculosis early on in the story after beating a man to death for some money. It's almost a cruel karmic punishment for the life Arthur has led and, depending on the player's choices, they can attempt to redeem the cowboy by helping out others.

As the game goes on, Arthur's coughing gets worse and worse. The player isn't initially aware of why Arthur is so sick, until he starts hacking up his lungs, passes out, and is dragged into a doctor for a proper diagnosis. It's a unique direction to take a game in, and it's part of what makes the story of Red Dead Redemption 2 so memorable.

Acclaimed filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro spoke out about his thoughts on artificial intelligence and what he feels gets lost in the creative process when AI is used in art.

Del Toro popped into the r/movies subreddit for an AMA session with fans on September 9. One of these fans, going by the username ihs25ysf, asked him about some comments he’d made during a 2024 talk at the British Film Institute, where he said that AI can create “semi-compelling screensavers” and “that’s essentially that.”

“The value of art is not in how much it costs and how little effort it requires," he said at the time. "It's how much would you risk to be in its presence."

Guillermo Del Toro on AI, emotion and the value of art.

Watch the full In Conversation on our YouTube channel.@RealGDT pic.twitter.com/XxO05Fpea7

— BFI (@BFI) September 17, 2024

The Pan’s Labyrinth creator has been adamant that the human element of art be preserved — something for which he continued to advocate in his response to the fan, who asked him for his opinion on the “biggest thing lost” when a “computer generates an image instead of a human hand.”

To Del Toro, the “alchemy” of creativity and discovery humans experience when crafting a story or artwork is unachievable by a machine, and many of the best works are often elevated by "accidents" that happen during the creative process.

“The three quarters of the process that gave you the chance to think of the idea that people don't think about without that process,” he answered. “Meaning, AI can get you to the middle really fast, but there's a dialectic with the process that gets you to that top 10%.”

He went on to use the Pale Man from Pan’s Labyrinth as an example of this, describing how its design was inspired by an unlikely combination of a manta ray and artwork on a poster for Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm.

“We sculpted it as an old man, with a face," he continued. "And then I said, ‘Let's take out the face.’ This happened because I saw a photo of a manta ray and the poster for Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm. That combination, which happened at two different times during a week or a month, are not permutations that are chemically part of an equation. They are alchemy. And then I said, ‘Take out the face,’ and then I said,’ Let's put the eyes on the hands.’ This triangulation happens because I spent a month or two months living with the idea of this creature. And it's not linear.”

Del Toro brought up a conversation he had with Christopher Nolan about The Odyssey (which he previously shared with IGN), where he asked the director how he’d managed to convincingly pull off Odysseus and his crew braving Poseidon’s stormy seas.

“AI is like a super-fast engine that makes semi-sentient permutations of things that are already done," he said. "Creation is things that have never been done. Coming to exist. And the second thing is the loss of the apprenticeship that one has as an artist. You're never a master; you're always an apprentice. This is a kinship I have with, for example, Chris Nolan. When he showed me The Odyssey, there’s a scene when Matt Damon is floating in the stormy ocean and I asked him — because we were talking about practical effects, and how great it is and that we both always use a maquette or a model — and I asked him, ‘How did you do it?’ He said, ‘We put him in a storm in the ocean.’”

In another delightful anecdote, Del Toro mentioned a past conversation with James Cameron on the set of Terminator 2, describing how Cameron used “accidents” to increase audience immersion and overall believability.

“You're gonna find that 30% of a great image occurs accidentally. You know, either a drop of water hits the lens, or the camera shakes. I remember when in 1993, '94, Jim Cameron and I became friends very fast. And we were looking at Terminator 2. And he was showing me the scene where Robert Patrick is in the back of the car, and he breaks the window with his arm. And he said, ‘You see those flares?’ I said yeah. He said, ‘We put them there, because the audience thinks an image is real, if you put an accident in it.’ That's true. And I agree. The accident is vital. And the best accidents are things you don't court. They just occur from the interaction with reality,” he said.

We got the chance to speak with Guillermo Del Toro as part of our IGN30 Icons Series, where he revealed how much he loved The Odyssey’s cyclops and told us about his favorite video games — one of which might surprise you.

Image Credits: Randy Shropshire/Academy Museum Foundation via Getty Images

Cheating in video games has turned into a multi-billon dollar industry, one that has forced franchises like Call of Duty to build entire teams to combat this epidemic. One of the people leading the charge is a man named David Andrews, a former Department of Defense contractor and member of the Air Force who made the leap into the video game industry. He began this career change working at Rockstar Games, helping combat cheating in Grand Theft Auto Online. Last year, he made the jump to Activision to become the Senior Director of Game Security for Call of Duty.

IGN had the opportunity to sit down with Andrews and peel back the layers on Call of Duty's anti-cheat system, Ricochet. Andrews disspelled myths about Call of Duty's anti-cheat, offered clarity on the process of how they investigate suspected cheaters, how they've hired cheater makers to combat the problem, and much more. It's a rare opportunity, as there's a lot of caution around publicly speaking about anti-cheat in gaming. If you say too much, you could inadvertedly give cheaters a heads-up on how to evade detective, after all.

With that said, we drilled down on Call of Duty's long running issue with cheaters in an attempt to make it less mysterious. It's an important subject ahead of Modern Warfare 4's release in October and something Activision is working hard to spotlight.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

IGN: Before we dive specifically into Call of Duty, tell me the difference between working on Grand Theft Auto Online, Red Dead Online, and Call of Duty, because one's obviously hyper-competitive, while Grand Theft Auto is a completely different ecosystem.

David Andrews: I think the interesting pivot for me is that the GTA Online gameplay loop is very different. Same thing for Red Dead Online, and that's where cheat developers tend to go. They're trying to shortcut whatever that gameplay loop is for their customers. And so on GTA and Red Dead, it was much more about economic progress within the world. So we had problems with money drop lobbies and things like that in the old bad days on GTA Online, which we did eventually fix. The nature of the cheating is different there. In terms of the impact and the disruption that it can cause to the players, very similar.

[There are] persistent online sessions in GTA Online versus rolling lobbies on Call of Duty. A cheater that goes undetected for too long is going to have an impact no matter what that is. There was also lots of griefing in GTA Online powered by cheats and things like that. As different as the core gameplay loops are between the two games, and you could probably say this about anything across the industry, cheating is still just ultimately super disruptive. It's a terrible experience. It's bad for our players, and the mission is always just to try to prevent as many of them as we can from getting into the game and then get them out as quickly as we can for those that make it through.

IGN: Is there something that companies can do together to solve these issues? I saw you last night talking about Wardogs and their approach. Everyone has a different strategy, but is there anything the industry can collectively do?

David Andrews: There's a ton of overlap that we see within the industry. It is an industry-wide problem. If anybody running a live service title is going to have this kind of issue with cheating, and no matter how advanced or what your particular approach is for a particular title or whatever you're doing, cheaters are always going to get through. I thought that a really good message from that Wardogs video was that no matter how good you are at this part of the game, people are going to get through. Cheat developers are incredibly financially incentivized. It's a multi-billion dollar industry out there selling cheats, and they're all looking for their cut of it. I think in terms of what we can do as a group, we definitely all talk with each other informally, always trading war stories and maybe some approaches in terms of what's going on.

Certainly I've seen in my past at Rockstar as well as here at Activision, you'll have cheat developers and cheat resellers out there that are selling not just for one title. There's very rarely somebody who's just developing for Call of Duty. They might have their fingers in Fortnite or Valorant or some other title out there, as well. There's usually opportunities for us to compare notes a little bit whenever that's possible for us to do. By and large though, we all keep pushing forward in terms of all of the things that are available to us. Different companies have different litigation strategies and things like that, but we're all marching in the same direction as much as we can.

IGN: What have you learned about cheatmakers? What’s the motive? It’s hard to wrap my head around why someone would pay $70 for a game just to not really play it.

David Andrews: Money is totally a huge motive for quite a lot of them, but there are also a strain of cheat developers, or I even call them cheat development-adjacent folks, who are just in it for the love of the game. They just really love that title and they have a technical sort of bent of mind and they want to understand how the game is working. And then that naturally leads into this place where you might be putting together a cheat to figure out ‘How does this game actually work?’

And in that space, I've had some success in turning some of those cheat developers or cheat-adjacent people to the light side by basically, bringing them over, and hiring them into the team. They bring a huge expertise and a really unique point of view to add to the team, and it can be a really huge value add for us. We've done that successfully a few times.

I think for their users, the motivation is like you mentioned: You pay $70 or whatever it is for a title just to not play it. It's because they want to be seen to be good and they're not actually good at this game. They kind of suck, which is fair enough. I'm not the best at Call of Duty myself personally, but I wouldn't turn to a cheat to go try to do something about that. But they are in friend groups, they're in social circles that really highly prize competency at these games. And so they go out and this is their only option to be any good at them, so they go out and buy cheats.

IGN: I’d love some insight into the cat-and-mouse game, since there’s a whack-a-mole situation that likely happens with trying to stomp out cheatmakers. There will always be cheaters, regardless of the steps you take.

David Andrews: The main mission is always just to protect the integrity of that live legitimate player experience, just making sure that they're having the best possible experience the way that our game developers intended for them to have. We do that a lot of different ways. The cat-and-mouse game is absolutely part of this, and there's some balancing efforts that go in there, in terms of figuring out when's the right time to ban a cheater once you've detected them. I think in the past, quite a lot of us in the industry indexed pretty heavily towards ban waves for a variety of reasons. One of them is that if you catch enough of the cheat customers in one big roundup, you might knock that cheat offline for a period of time and you actually get more clean running than you would otherwise by just issuing bans as you get them.

That's certainly where I started out philosophically, but as the years have gone on, I don't necessarily believe that that's the most effective way anymore. I think the most effective way is shifting left, preventing cheaters from getting into the game and then once they get into the game, getting them out as quickly as possible. Every single ban that we do gives feedback to the cheat developers and it helps them troubleshoot their problem, which is how did we detect them? It gives them feedback on how to circumvent us, but then that's just a challenge for us to get better at our jobs and do a better job of creating new detections, creating new novel ways of finding cheaters, preventing them and getting them out of the game.

There are a lot of conspiracies about cheating in Call of Duty, such as maybe the perception of how bad it really is due to viral clips. From your perspective, what are some of the myths of the cheating situation in Call of Duty?

David Andrews: I think you've touched on one there. The numbers that we see internally remain really, really positive. We shared during the Black Ops 7 beta that we had a very, very low match infection rate. That's maintained over the course of the title. It's incredibly low. If you're an average player and you're in ranked or you're in Warzone, you're doing whatever you want, you're not encountering a lot of cheaters. But [if] you go on social media and [watch] content creators and pros, they're having a different experience to what you're probably having, and then you're sort of internalizing that. You're seeing, ‘Well, my favorite streamer is encountering cheaters every day.’ I go online, I see something unfair or something inexplicable that I'm not quite sure what happened there. I'm just going to assume that's a cheater as well because I've seen this around. It just doesn't tend to be true for our average players.

Our match infection rate is incredibly good still, but that does still highlight for us that there are hotspots. There are problem areas. We don't want to try to go out there and say ‘We've solved cheating, you're never going to see a cheater.’ Certainly content creators and pro players that are playing at the very tip top edge of ranked play are going to encounter more cheaters right now. We're working on it all the time to try and get them out of the game.

That's the biggest one I think right now. Perception is just quite prevalent that there's a huge cheating problem. It's not to say there is no cheating problem. Obviously Ricochet still exists. We're all still gainfully employed and we're still trying to work on this problem, but it's certainly taken a pretty giant step forward with Black Ops seven with the introduction of TPM and Secure Boot requirements, and we're looking to just keep making more steps forward in the next title.

I wanted to ask a little bit about the review process. So, say I'm suspected of cheating. I've been reported and you guys are going to take a look at my account. What does that look like? Is there a human reviewing it? Is it AI-reviewed? And how long do they spend looking at that? Because I imagine there are a lot of reports. So, how do you sift through that to make sure you guys are giving its due diligence?

David Andrews: I'll say that things come in from a variety of different directions, and the vast majority of our bans that go out are through reviewed but automated systems. So for instance, for a particular cheat, we might deploy a signature that identifies like, ‘Oh, in running memory, if you see this string, this string only exists for this cheat.’ And then we fire that back and we'll collect that data for a little bit on all those accounts that are triggering that detection, look at them en masse, and also one by one and just make sure that those really do look like cheaters. That process is pretty involved.

We look at game data, we have everything that you input into the game clients while you're in a match. All of that data is with us and so we can identify clear outliers there. We also look at trends and behavior, like what is your kill death ratio over time? Does it spike in certain circumstances? What's your win-loss ratio? Things like that. We also will look at replay renders. We have tooling internally that we can just recreate an entire match and look at it and see if it looks suspicious or not. These are just some of the tools that we have internally. So we'll apply that to that whole batch, that whole population of potentially detected cheaters. And if it passes through that validation stage, then we'll say, ‘Okay, that signature is good. People that are popping that signature are going to get banned from now on.’ There's also things that are more manual. All the same tools kind of apply.

We'll still look at the account holistically. We'll look at it per match. We'll look at it in terms of how often they are being reported. All these kinds of data points are valuable to us and then we'll make a determination. That's kind of the stuff that you might see if a social media clip is posted and they aren't already banned. These are the things that we start looking into to see, ‘Okay, well what's going on with this account? What do their last few matches look like? Let's try to make a determination here.’

IGN: There was an incident a week or two ago with a former COD pro player named FormaL, and he triggered the detection in the Modern Warfare 4 beta. Call of Duty’s social team said that wasn’t supposed to happen. Do you know what happened there? What is the percentage of people being banned that shouldn't be banned, and what's the process of making sure that doesn't happen?

Former Call of Duty pro and legend FormaL got permanently banned in the Modern Warfare 4 beta live on stream 💀

The Oris is so good it’s got pros getting their accounts flagged 🤣 pic.twitter.com/8MlHBfbH3G

— ModernWarzone (@ModernWarzone) September 2, 2026

David Andrews: So, the thing I'll say for that one is I think, obviously, we replied to that particular instance, but he certainly wasn't the only person that was caught up in that slight error there. Betas are for us, as well. We're constantly kind of tuning and testing our systems and transitioning from Black Ops 7 to Modern Warfare 4. There's a lot of tuning that has to take place there to make sure that all of our behavioral thresholds are accurate.

Also, someone like that player is quite high, and so very highly skilled players are kind of constantly brushing up against the threshold where we say ‘Beyond this, no human could achieve that.’ So they're just right there. They're quite close. And so we constantly are looking at this. The answer to the question is really, we're constantly reviewing the output of our systems. We don't just do that review one time and then we set it and forget it.

We're constantly looking back to see, ‘Is this thing still performant?’ Because also we want to know that we're still catching cheaters, but also is it overperforming? Is it catching people that it shouldn't be catching? We've built quite a lot of safeguards over the years. One of the things that impressed me coming in [is that] if there's some conjunction of events where a false enforcement is issued, we tend to catch it fairly quickly and then we will kind of identify systematically who were all the people impacted.

So in that one, it was one of about 200 people, I think, that were caught over the course of both beta weekends with that particular problem. We identified the problem, which won't happen again, and we restored all those people to good standing. So it's just constant review, constant monitoring, always looking at what's going on.

Do you have any involvement with the videos of process servers showing up to people’s houses to give them a cease and desist, or are you just enjoying them?

David Andrews: I certainly enjoy it for sure. I think that we do have a pretty comprehensive grasp on everything that's going on within the cheat community, and that extends to trying to identify devs and potentially put together actions like that. We don't necessarily initiate litigation or send cease and desists to everybody. There is some prioritization and triaging that has to happen. We do go after popular cheats obviously, but we also go after cheats that are technologically sort of more advanced than other cheats as well. And for these incredibly persistent cheat developers who are, again, just enormously financially incentivized, it kind of doesn't matter how often we detect them sometimes. And they'll gaslight their own customers into thinking like, 'Oh, it was you. It was your behavior and game that got you banned. It's not my cheat that got you banned.' And so when they're that stuck in, they're that persistent, they're that sticky, we have to do things like that and certainly the team helps contribute to that.

IGN: I would love to know your stance on how you guys are supporting older Call of Duty games, as cheaters are out there taking advantage of the fact that nobody's really watching them because they're older games.

David Andrews: Yeah, that's unfortunately one that I won't be able to answer.

Editor’s note: Activision linked IGN to a statement recently provided to Windows Central regarding an update that patched out a security issue with the original Modern Warfare 2. The statement notes that more support updates for older Call of Duty games are coming soon: "An update released this week addressed all known vulnerabilities in Modern Warfare 2. The team continues to support our legacy titles, with additional updates coming soon. We encourage anyone aware of additional issues to report them through Activision's Bug Bounty Portal."

How has cheating evolved since you started at Rockstar? We talked about the difference in games, but how have you seen the industry evolve? Has the financial incentive only increased over time, especially as free-to-play games get introduced?

David Andrews: Anytime you're dealing with a free-to-play title, the barrier of entry is just so much lower and that means a broader player population, that means more demand for that title, and more incentive. It’s definitely grown over the years. I think from my particular perspective, the sophistication of the cheat developers is definitely growing as well. [Cheat developers have] their own sort of, we call it OPSEC, operational security, in terms of protecting their identity, because they know what they're doing is not right and they know that the publisher or developer is going to come after them eventually.

So they're getting better and better at hiding themselves from us and working through intermediaries. It’s quite a complex, very interesting sort of threat landscape for us. At the end of the day, it's really evolved over the years. The other thing that's really evolved is cheats used to be pretty simplistic.

They're just hooking, running memory and doing X, Y, Z thing and figuring out what function does what, modifying those functions, and then off to the races. Everybody's anti-cheats have sort of very much pushed them out of the more traditional easy or straightforward ways of cheating. That's why you're seeing growth in other areas like Cronus and other scripted input devices, computer vision powered aim bots, DMA cheats, things that are either reduced in functionality or more expensive, or sometimes both, than what they used to be. The price of a cheat is definitely going up over the years as we all get more and more effective and fight them more consistently.

IGN: Obviously there's software, but there's also hardware like Cronus, physical things that you can purchase. I think Call of Duty has done a pretty good job of trying to stomp that one out, as well as hard platforms in general, like Xbox and PlayStation. How are you guys combating that kind of stuff? It's probably pretty frustrating to know that there's just stuff being sent out in the mail to people. They're just selling it right there. It's not even really hidden.

David Andrews: Cronus and other scripted input devices like that are a really interesting challenge for us. At the end of the day, they do have sort of reduced functionality versus a full blown sheet. So they're usually taking advantage of things like aim assist and just giving it to you all the time or more accurately or whatever.

But absolutely the fact that you can just buy one at a big box store, you can buy one off of any popular online storefront that you might think of, have it shipped to your house and plug it in, and then you're sort of off to the races is definitely frustrating. It also means we've adjusted our enforcement strategy against Cronus as well. It's not the typical enforcement strategy that we have in other places, because we know that for some percentage of these users that are buying a Cronus and plugging it in and getting the advantage off of it, they may not fully realize that that's unauthorized hardware and that it's going to get them banned.

We've actually taken an enforcement stance of, on a first strike, we'll give you a seven-day temporary suspension. We're letting you know you can't use that thing. If you use it again, you're gone forever. And then on a second strike, we catch you using it again, we do permanently suspend that account and there might be implications for your hardware as well, if it's a console or PC or whatever.

We've actually seen pretty good results off of that. We're seeing some rehabilitated behavior. We've certainly gotten some interesting support tickets in that are like, 'I promise I threw away my Cronus. I'll be a good player now. Please let me back in,' that kind of thing, which has been really gratifying to see. The numbers back it up, some percentage of them, which hopefully we can talk about in the future, but some percentage of them are sort of rehabilitating. They take that seven-day suspension and then we don't see any evidence of suspicious gameplay again, which is great. That's where we want to be. For the rest of them, they get permanent bans, they get console or hardware banned, and that's that.

IGN: Is shadow banning a real thing? And what is the argument for why shadow banning works over a permanent ban?

David Andrews: We have limited matchmaking that we will put a suspicious account into to isolate them while other checks are either running or we're waiting on other data. We're kind of doing this review process of looking at that account more holistically and seeing what's really going on here. It's kind of this stopgap measure to immediately remove them without making it be permanent [or without creating] irrevocable impact to that account and to that player, giving us some breathing room to figure out what is going on with this account and then either restoring them to the player population because it was kind of a false alarm situation."

We have also done some rehabilitation through the limited matchmaking saying, 'Hey, you can't do that behavior that you've just been engaged in and you can come back if you stop,' or whatever. We have a lot of enforcement capabilities. We have limited matchmaking, we have ranked play bans, we've got remote play bans, we've got temporary and permanent account suspensions, we've got hardware bans.

We can do all kinds of things, and each time we're dealing with a particular style or type of cheating, we're sort of evaluating which one of these kind of makes sense for this group of cheaters. Can they be rehabilitated? Are we ultimately 100% confident in this? Is more research required? Whatever the case might be, we'll figure out what to do that's appropriate.

IGN: Anything else you want to get off your chest?

David Andrews: Well, recently, we did a bit of a hiring highlight, and back to the point of hiring cheat devs, we collect people from a wide variety of different talent pools. We've got people on the team that are former malware research engineers, theoretical mathematicians. We've got people from the NSA and FBI on the team doing other sorts of work for us. It's a really interesting space to me. Something that doesn't get talked about a lot is the anti-cheat part of the video game industry, because there are no degrees in this stuff. There are no certifications. It's not been commoditized in that way yet, and so you have to reach out and find interesting talent and really bright and passionate people from different parts of different industries altogether and then bring them into games and be like, 'Yeah, now we're going to go chase cheaters around and get them out of Call of Duty now.'

It's an interesting thing. We're always looking for new, interesting talents, no matter what the background is there, constantly growing people ourselves in these roles. It's a really cool part of the industry to be in.