National

Axios Gaming

Developers of some of the world’s most popular video games are expanding the tools players use to create characters: downplaying gendered terms and untethering options for body types, voice and other characteristics from gender selection.

Why it matters: The shift is part of a trend by the industry to be more inclusive to a wider set of players by letting them see themselves in the games they play. 

Such changes are making these games more welcoming to trans and non-binary players and those who want to have such characters.

They also allow more deviation from gender stereotypes.

Details: A pre-release update for next week’s World of Warcraft Dragonflight, which expands the Activision Blizzard massively multiplayer online game that launched in 2004, renames “male” and “female” terms in its character creator for “body type 1,” and “body type 2.”

Earlier this year, EA’s The Sims 4, which plays out like a virtual dollhouse, began to let players customize pronouns — ”she/her,” “he/him,” “they/them” — for the Sims characters they create. 

SquareEnix’s Harvestella, a recently released game that mixes farming with sword-fighting, gives players three options for their character’s gender: male, female or nonbinary. 

The upcoming Harry Potter game Hogwarts Legacy is in the spotlight for its association, however distanced, with Potter author J.K. Rowling, who has repeatedly made transphobic comments. The game has such open-ended character customization tools that players can create trans wizards or witches. Its character creator, shown publicly earlier this month, lets players choose body types and voices independently of each other, then lets them select, without restriction, whether their character dorms with “wizards” or “witches.” 

What they’re saying: “It’s undeniable that there has been a recent inflection point in the way developers approach character creators, particularly in games with higher fidelity graphics and character models,” Blair Durkee, the associate director of gaming at GLAAD, tells Axios. 

She attributes this to “the growing recognition of gender diversity in society, led by younger generations” and cited a 2022 Gallup poll that found that one-fifth of Gen Z Americans identify as LGBT.

“A game that requires players to choose between rigidly binary gender options [man or woman] simply no longer reflects the world that we live in,” Durkee said. 

Durkee, who consults with game creators, has seen the changes driven within studios by a spectrum of developers, including more senior developers who value diversity and believe more character options broaden their games’ reach.

The big picture: Video game character creators are often considered the measuring tool for how inclusive a game is.

For decades, some games have let players choose at least some basic options, often coded as male or female, with limited choices for body size, skin color or hairstyle.

Customizable hairstyles have historically lacked options for Black characters, prompting one Twitter user to track whether new game releases do.

Nintendo’s Animal Crossing series had long supported flexible clothing options for characters of different genders. But the series originally only offered players light color skin, forcing those who wanted their villagers to have darker skin to exploit the games’ system for suntans. (When Nintendo offered darker skin tones in the series’ Switch installment, a GameSpot critic wrote:  “Finally I can be me.”)

Flashback: Game designers have faced challenges and opportunities of representing their players since the medium started. 

The text adventure Zork, developed in 1977, intentionally didn’t state the player’s gender or any other characteristics, co-creator Dave Lebling said in a 2014 postmortem.

Character creators in games loosened restrictions about bodies, clothes and voices in fits and starts. Durkee said the 2014 game Sunset Overdrive, from Insomniac Games, was influential, giving players a wide range of non-gendered body types and letting them wear any type of clothing without limitation.

Yes, but making games more inclusive requires work and a commitment at all levels from game makers.

“Adding more diversity takes not only rethinking but also reengineering,” Durkee said.

That could involve crafting a storyline that better accounts for how the player’s character is identified or making sure animation systems can support a wider array of body types and clothing. 

For game producer Daisuke Taka, the work his team did on Harvestella was worth it. “Using gender-neutral pronouns takes a relatively small amount of effort,” Taka told Eurogamer. “Yet the positive impact is huge, as it means you are making the effort to include everyone — and our game is for everyone."

The bottom line: The goal for developers isn’t to remove options, but to add more, Durkee says, and build a character creator that “understands all aspects of gender diversity.”

“We'd like to see an approach that continues to recognize men and women while including authentic options for trans men, trans women, and nonbinary characters at the same level of customization and quality,” she said.

Sign up for the Axios Gaming newsletter here.

Big video games are dropping old gender restrictions on character creation

World of Warcraft, The Sims and even a Harry Potter game shun rigid approaches.

Video game screenshot of the character creation tool in Hogwarts Legacy. Options on display allow for changes to the character's voice and whether they will dorm with witches or wizards

Hogwarts Legacy. Screenshot: Avalanche Software, Warner Bros. Entertainment

Video games

Gaming

From the Valley to D.C., Big Tech players like Facebook, Google and Amazon are under more scrutiny than ever as new technology develops and privacy and antitrust concerns grow in lockstep with companies’ ambitions.

Technology

Top esports team TSM found itself in the midst of two of tech's biggest storms as it suspended its $210 million naming rights deal with failed crypto exchange FTX. 

Driving the news: TSM announced the deal's suspension today, but initially said it was unable to remove one of the core things FTX paid for, the exchange's name in the team's Twitter handle.

As it announced the deal's suspension, that handle still read as "TSM FTX" to the esports organization's 2 million followers.

Asked by Twitter users why it hadn't dropped "FTX" from the display name, the main TSM account replied: "Unfortunately at this time with the changes to Twitter verification, we're not able to."

Two hours later those letters were successfully dropped. The team's social media manager attributed it to a workaround: spamming the save button. 

Between the lines: TSM and FTX were one year into an eye-popping 10-year deal largely tied to the team's social media presence and its jerseys.

All of that is being removed as quickly as possible.

"We forecast profitability this year, next year and beyond," the team said in a statement, saying the loss of the sponsorship was survivable.

The org also confirmed that it does not have any cryptocurrency on its balance sheet, and has not possessed any of FTX's FTT token since the second quarter of this year.

The big picture: Groups tied to FTX are rapidly trying to create distance, while those reliant on Twitter are grappling with Musk's volatile approach.

Last week, the Miami Heat and Miami-Dade county announced they were ending their $135 million arena naming rights deal with FTX. 

Musk has said name changes should work properly by the end of the week. 

Esports team TSM's FTX exit complicated by Twitter chaos

The esports team initially said it was unable to remove one of the core things FTX paid for.

Screenshot of a tweet from TSM stating, in part: "We've suspended our partnership with FTX effective immediately."

More people in the world will play video games this year than ever before, but the amount of money spent on gaming will decline, according to a new report from leading research firm Newzoo.

Why it matters: After video games boomed during the first two years of the pandemic, Newzoo calls this the first drop in revenue since it began tracking the industry more than a decade ago. 

But Newzoo and other analysts predict a return to growth in the coming years.

3.2 billion players (up from 3.1 in 2021)

$184.4 billion in revenue (down from $192.7 billion in 2021)

Newzoo's survey size: More than 75,000 people in 36 countries

Between the lines: The research firm says mobile gaming, which constitutes half of the global market, is the “primary driver” of the unusual revenue decline.

The mobile drop more than offsets slight growth in PC gaming and a smaller dip in console gaming, where the pandemic has wreaked havoc with development schedules and hardware supply.

There are many suspects for the dip in mobile, including the easing of pandemic lockdowns giving people more spending options, as well as inflation pressure spooking people from spending.

Last week, Take Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick, whose company bought mobile behemoth Zynga for $12.7 billion earlier in the year, noted: “At times when consumers are feeling the pressure of higher prices for fuel and food, for example, they may be less likely to spend money on entertainment, especially when you can have the experience anyhow.“

Yes, but there are still bright spots for the games industry.

Player numbers are soaring in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, all mobile-centric regions where improved infrastructure is enabling more people to play games, Newzoo notes.

And the market overall is expected to grow again soon, reaching 3.5 billion players and generating $211 billion by 2025.

The bottom line: Newzoo calls 2022 a “a corrective year for the games market following two years of lockdown-fueled growth.

Report: Video game revenue shrinks in 2022, snapping growth streak

More players than ever, but less money was spent.

Photo: Ina Fassbender/AFP via Getty Images

God of War games are known for epic combat and blockbuster set pieces, but the series’ newest release demonstrates its innovations in how a video game can tell its story.

Why it matters: Technological approaches can lead to fundamental innovations in storytelling, even in a game where players are busy swinging an axe through Norse mythology. 

State of play: God of War Ragnarök, released last week for PlayStation, depicts the weary titular God of War Kratos, his teenage son Atreus and a cast of allies on a quest to defy the schemes of Odin and maybe avert Ragnarök.

Though much of the sequel’s story is offered through a traditional mix of cinematic scenes, quests and menu text, the developers greatly expanded a system introduced in the series’ 2018 release, which triggered extra conversation between Kratos and Atreus that would play during travel sequences.

The new game has been programmed to detect a player’s pace and anticipate more potential down moments, often just 20 seconds long, when combat or a major plot moment isn’t expected. Those spots afford a chance for more chatter among whichever characters are running around.

“We can pull from this bucket of dialogue that is less than 20 seconds to fit in there,” Ragnarök’s narrative director Matt Sophos tells Axios. 

The characters may wind up talking about recent events in the game, reveal more of their pasts or even ponder riddles they’re stumped on. 

All of this chatter involves much more than the interruptible lore dumps offered while Kratos and Atreus were rowing a boat in the last game. The extra dialogue in the sequel greatly fleshes out the cast and the game’s world and elaborates on key parts of the main story. 

It's also deployed with greater flexibility. It can play at different times and at  radically different locations from one player’s game to another. Some of it expires as the player goes through the game's 30+ hour quest, so completionists might want to wander a lot to catch all of it. 

What they’re saying: “If we know there's something that someone absolutely has to hear, then we'll figure out a way to get that on the critical path," Sophos tells Axios.

"But then we flesh it out a lot through those vehicle stories, road stories, that players may or may not hear. We hope they hear it, just to kind of give them a little bit more breadth."

The system supports the development team's overall goal to have story feel like it is emerging naturally in the game, Sophos says without the need for players to manually press buttons to always trigger the next moment of character development.

Between the lines: Sophos and many other writing teams working on action-packed games have to cope with a core storytelling obstacle that players are often too distracted by actually playing the game to absorb story and dialogue. 

"We kind of have to work within the spaces between combat events,” Sophos says.

His team of a half dozen or so writers worked closely with the game’s level designers to add moments of non-combat — a narrow gap for the characters to squeeze through, a wall to climb.

Contrary to some players’ beliefs, Sophos says, those squeezes and climbs aren’t necessarily there to mask loading times for the next area of the adventure: “A lot of times it's like, ‘Hey, we've just had a bunch of combat and we need space to have them reflect on it.'”

One thing Ragnarök players won’t hear much, no matter how far they wander, is “boy!,” Kratos’ recurring bark toward his son that was a signature of the last game.

He says it just once in the new game, at a dramatic moment best not spoiled. Instead, he usually calls his son by his name, Atreus.

“That was a very conscious choice,” Sophos says, noting that Kratos has mostly dropped nicknames for the series’ cast this time, in favor of their real names. He calls it a "representation of him being a little bit more open than he was in the last game.” 

Programming tricks help God of War Ragnarök tell its story

The game anticipates down time and fills it with more story.

Video game screenshot of God of War protagonist Kratos with his back to the camera, facing his teenage son

God of War: Ragnarök. Screenshot: Sony Interactive Entertainment

Red-hot mobile game Marvel Snap is riding a wave of praise — with the card-battling game drawing kudos as one of the most fun releases of the year as well as for its infrequent requests for players to spend money.

Why it matters: So-called “free-to-play” mobile games, popular as they may be, are notorious for nickel-and-diming players. 

How it works: Players collect cards based on Marvel characters, building competitive decks based on those cards’ stats and special powers and then battling other players.

The conventional free-to-play approach: lure a player in for free and then constantly cajole them to pay to play longer, progress faster or win more.

Marvel Snap’s approach: Players can easily play repeatedly for free.

Snap users can spend money to accelerate a system tied to improving the look of cards and can pay $10 for a season pass that unlocks a specific card. But players otherwise can’t buy cards or even packs of randomized cards, a common option in the genre.

State of play: Since its launch in mid-October, Snap has been downloaded more than 8 million times and has been the third-most popular game on iOS and Android, according to data.ai. What they’re saying: “We're not doing the normal monetization approach,” Marvel Snap chief development officer Ben Brode told Axios.

He’s aware of criticisms from some industry observers that Snap could be asking players to pay for more. “That’s the word on the street,” he said, with a laugh.

But he argues that Snap’s approach, praised by its players for its restraint, is better for sustaining the game’s growth and good for the morale of his team that keeps working on more content for the game.

“We want to be really proud of the work that we're doing,” he said. “We feel like people want to play a game that they feel is responsibly monetizing. Some people would like it to be no-monetization, but that's actually not good for players, because then we can't afford to keep making the game.”

Flashback: Snap’s developers honed their monetization approach the hard way.

In July, the team added and then quickly abandoned and apologized for a system called Nexus Events that encouraged players of a beta version of the game to pay for the random chance to get cool cards.

Players hated it, and Brode promises that nothing similar will be tried again.

Quick game facts: Marvel Snap is the debut game from Second Dinner, a studio co-founded by Brode and Hamilton Chu, who were both leaders on Blizzard’s card-battler, Hearthstone.

Publisher: Nuverse, which is part of TikTok parent ByteDance.

Behind the studio name: Brode and Chu would wrap work at Blizzard, head to their homes for family time, then meet up over a second dinner to plot going indie.

What’s next: Snap is a “live service” game, so there’s more to come, including a “battle mode” late this year or early next. 

Data-miners have spotted an Uncle Ben character scheduled for the game, and Brode confirms that the team will do some “dabbling” with cards based on Marvel civilians, but mostly focus on heroes/villains. (About Uncle Ben, Brode notes: "He's going to be super, super rare.")

An upcoming patch will also add artist credits on the cards.

Marvel's mobile gaming hit doesn't nag players to pay

"We want to be really proud of the work that we're doing."

Marvel Snap. Illustration: Second Dinner/Nuverse

Square Enix, Sega and Konami, three stalwarts of the Japanese gaming scene, are making risky bets that will change how they do business.

Driving the news: In reports to investors over the past two weeks, the keepers of Final Fantasy, Sonic and Castlevania have made it clear that the status quo is not working well enough.

They cite a mix of rising development costs and a need to find financially prudent ways to create global hits.

The boldest moves are underway at Square Enix, where the publisher is courting outside investors for its development teams, potentially leading to a day when external firms have a stake in the creation of the next Kingdom Hearts or Final Fantasy.

What that means for how projects are greenlit and budgeted is unclear, but it’d be an unprecedented approach for a big game publisher.

Square Enix’s old model of fully owning studios has “begun to produce side effects of a scale that we cannot ignore,” company president Yosuke Matsuda said in the company’s recently released annual report, citing swelling costs.

The company's risk avoidance explains its decision earlier this year to sell most of its Western studios and franchises, including Tomb Raider and Deus Ex.

Square Enix is also pushing hard into blockchain gaming. In a presentation to investors on Monday, it promoted its newly announced interactive NFT art project Symbiogenesis and new investments in a blockchain payment platform, a blockchain medieval strategy game and a collectible NFT trading card game.

Sega’s big swing will be a “super game,” a mysterious project promised by the end of March 2026.

The company wants to create “a game so revolutionary that it attracts far more active users than any of the group’s games to date,” Sega president Haruki Satomi said in a recent note to stockholders, projecting lifetime sales at ¥100 billion, or $683 million.

This comes amid a concern that the company’s “profit margins are still relatively low vis-à-vis the competition,” as noted by co-COO Shuji Utsumi.

Konami, which had pivoted away from making sequels to globally popular franchises in favor of a focus on Japan is now getting back to its old ways a bit, with recent plans for a slate of new Silent Hill games.

Between the lines: All of these companies are searching for growth amid a stagnating Japanese market.

Mobile gaming had been a lifeline for some time, but growth in that sector has slowed partially due to increased competition from Chinese game makers, MST Financial analyst David Gibson tells Axios: “The Japan mobile rivers of gold are no longer growing.”

That is forcing Japanese game companies to develop plans to generate global hits in console and PC, Gibson says.

The bottom line: It’s telling that another long-time Japanese publisher-developer, Capcom, got through earnings season without having to promote any pivots.

That’s likely because Capcom is already where its Japanese peers want to be, with its regular cadence of releases for its globally popular franchises Resident Evil and Monster Hunter — the latter of which even U.S. publisher EA now wants to compete with.

On Tuesday, Capcom announced the development of a Monster Hunter mobile game, in partnership with TiMi, which is part of the globally successful Chinese gaming company Tencent.

Japanese video game giants plan pivots

Everyone's got a plan to deal with rising development costs.

Video game screenshot of a man with a sword and cape looking out at a sunset

Final Fantasy XVI. Screenshot: Square Enix

A new pay transparency law in New York City is offering an unprecedented, if narrow, look at what people in the video game industry make and how different companies pay.

Driving the news: As of Tuesday, any company in New York City with at least four workers is required to post “good faith” salary ranges in its listings for jobs in the city.

Affected companies include NBA 2K publisher Take-Two Interactive, GTA-maker Rockstar Games and a slew of other notable gaming outfits that have some presence in the city.

The only catch is that the game industry has a small footprint in the region.

Why it matters: Pay rates in the gaming industry are rarely made public, despite efforts by some developers and indie studios to make compensation more transparent.

Details: A sampling of NYC gaming jobs reveals pay ranges for roles tied to making games, marketing them or managing teams.  

Rockstar Games’ NYC listings — the most extensive that Axios found — include a product lead for the Rockstar Games Launcher ($163k-$184k), a voice-over director ($123k-$144k), a physics programmer ($121k-$142k), a cheat software analyst ($103k-$120k) and an associate dialogue designer for its games’ open worlds ($50k-$57k).

Take-Two’s NYC listings include a senior systems engineer working with its Ghost Story Games studio ($121k-$142k), a director of people ops ($170k-$198k) and a director of marketing for its Private Division label ($170k-$198k).

Epic Games’ NYC listings — the highest-paying that Axios found — include an operations manager for content policy and escalations ($159k-$206k) and a senior product manager on Unreal Engine ($187k-$242k).

Twitch’s NYC listings include a developer advocate ($145k-$195k) and a software engineer for proactive safety ($158k-$214k).

Activision lists a “measurement lead” role for its sales team ($77k-$114k).

Ubisoft lists a part-time job running game demos at events ($15/hr plus overtime).

Between the lines: The game companies listing salaries in NYC jobs largely don’t for their open roles in places where laws don’t require them to.

The listings tend to note that role’s salary will vary based on regional cost of living. Twitch publishes alternate, lower ranges for NYC jobs that might be filled in other regions.

What’s next: Similar pay transparency laws will go into effect in California and Washington state at the start of the new year.

That’ll relegate NYC’s listings to just a sneak preview.

Those states include thousands of game industry jobs and large offices for the likes of Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Activision, EA, Riot, Bungie and more.

Go deeper: Pay transparency shakeup could mean salary pushback

Video game companies start listing salaries for jobs in NYC

Similar laws will go into effect in California and Washington state in 2023.

Video game screenshot of a man parachuting over what looks like New York City

Grand Theft Auto IV. Screenshot: Rockstar Games

Sony's PlayStation VR 2 headset will cost more than the PlayStation 5 required to run it when it launches on Feb. 22, 2023, the company revealed today.

Why it matters: Despite mountains of hype and investment behind it for the past decade, VR tech has struggled to go mainstream, in part because of the cost of entry to use it.

Details:  PSVR 2, which Sony priced at $550, is a high-end virtual reality system with better specs than the current market-leading headset, Meta's Quest 2 ($400-$500).

Sony has promised at least 20 games for the PSVR's launch, including a spin-off to its popular robot-animal-hunting action adventure series Horizon.

But the exact line-up hasn't been set and several games announced by Sony today are or will be available for other VR platforms.

Between the lines: Sony's original PSVR for PlayStation 4 launched in 2016 for $400 (almost $500, if adjusted for inflation). 

In 2020, Sony said that headset had sold five million units, at a time when the PS4 itself had sold 106 million units.

Today's PSVR 2 will enter a hot, but smaller PS5 market, as Sony struggles to  produce enough of the newer console to keep up with demand. The company says it has shipped nearly 29 million PS5s through the end of September.

What they're saying: "By setting a price for the headset above that of the PS5, Sony is likely in for a rough start with PSVR 2 at the very least," Mathew Olsen, the author of the VR/AR newsletter Virtual Vector told Axios.

"We know that pricing as aggressively low as Meta's was never going to be likely, but even considering how advanced the PSVR 2 hardware is, selling it for more than the cost of the console needed to use it will set an absurdly high bar for the VR experience it'll be expected to deliver."

Sony to launch its PSVR 2 headset for $550

It'll cost more than the PS5 needed to run it.

Image of a white PSVR 2 headset and its controllers

PSVR 2. Image: Sony Interactive Entertainment

The 2008 evolution-simulation video game Spore would have worked as multiple-interconnected games, its lead creator, Will Wright, tells Axios. 

Why it matters: Spore is one of the industry’s most notorious misses, as the game failed to measure up to its pre-release hype. 

What they’re saying: “I think Spore had some great tools in it for creating content,” Wright says, referring to its interface for making creatures and buildings.

“I think it didn't hang together as a game. It probably would have been better to be released as three games or four that, if you wanted to, you could intersect them.”

Between the lines: The game plays out in evolutionary phases, first shown in a stunning talk at the 2005 Game Developers Conference.

Initially, Spore plays like a sort of Pac-Man as players steer a single-cell organism through primordial ooze. Then, as the player’s creature evolves, Spore advances into a third-person action game, a city-builder like Wright’s Sim City, a game of global strategy a la Civilization and eventually a game of interplanetary travel.

It got the oh-so-rare feature-length pre-release preview in The New Yorker.

But it reviewed poorly and EA moved on after a small number of spin-offs, putting the game and any potential franchise on ice for the past decade.

The bottom line: “It was much more of a toy than a game,” Wright says.

“For 10-year-olds, the whole thing was great.”

“But for hardcore gamers that were expecting Civilization or Command & Conquer or whatever, it felt like each level was way too light.”

Will Wright: Spore should have been multiple games

“It was much more of a toy than a game,” Wright says.

Video game screenshot of space aliens standing on grass

This year’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II is making a massive impact, with Activision Blizzard announcing that the new game earned $800 million in sales in its first three days of full release.

Why it matters: It's a sure sign of recovery for gaming's biggest annual franchise, after an uncharacteristically poor performance of last year's Call of Duty Vanguard, which drew blame for softer game sales worldwide throughout 2022.

A booming Modern Warfare II could push momentum the other way.

Details: Activision didn't share unit sales, favoring the opening weekend revenue approach it has trumpeted nearly every year since the series' inception.

The previous high mark was the $775 million set for 2011's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, across the five days of its launch. Note that, adjusted for inflation, that total would exceed $1 billion today.

Modern Warfare II is likely benefitting from some contemporary factors, including the newly elevated $70 price point for the game and Activision's unusual decision to offer MWII's single-player mode for eight days prior to the game's official launch, for those who pre-ordered.

It also helps that Modern Warfare is the most popular of Call of Duty's sub-franchises, featuring its most popular characters and a setting that appears to be better received than last year's World War II.

Bear in mind: Even last year's slumping Vanguard has ranked as the second best-selling console or PC game in the U.S. in the last 12 months.

But Activision was visibly unhappy with its performance, refraining from issuing a launch-weekend press release and telling investors the game missed its mark.

The plotlines launched by Modern Warfare II, beyond its huge sales, are plentiful: 

The game’s use of skill-based matchmaking, which links players of similar proficiency in CoD’s popular multiplayer modes has thrilled some gamers. But it’s infuriated top streamers who complain that it makes playing the game too stressful (and, presumably, less entertaining for their viewers to watch).  

Shock moments in the game’s globe-trotting special forces story mode, like when the player is tasked with pointing a gun at concerned civilians to “de-escalate” a situation, have stirred numerous pieces on the messages this top gaming franchise sends about guns and the deployment of military power.

The discovery that the PlayStation 5 disc version of the game contains just 70MB of data — requiring a download of more than 100GB to play the whole game — turned heads. Publishers have shown an increased willingness to tie physical copies of games to digital downloads, stressing players with limited bandwidth and making it harder for games to be preserved offline in the future. 

The game’s graphics have dropped jaws but infuriated owners of a hotel in Amsterdam who are upset about their establishment’s inclusion. 

Looming nearby is the specter of Microsoft’s $69 billion bid for Activision, still waiting on approval of regulators who are, in part, factoring in the value of Call of Duty.

In a filing to the U.K. competition regulator a few weeks ago, Microsoft floated the possibility that Vanguard’s struggles proved Call of Duty might not be mighty forever.

Activision's Call of Duty rebounds with $800 million launch weekend

It has topped Modern Warfare III's five-day launch, but there's a catch.

Sections

Axios Local

Axios gets you smarter, faster with news & information that matters.

About

Subscribe

Gaming

The big picture

Esports team TSM's FTX exit complicated by Twitter chaos

Study: Playing lots of video games may benefit kids' brains

The unlikely success of “Outer Wilds”

"Free Guy" gives new hope for video game movies

Exclusive: Sony’s PlayStation boss moves past console wars

Meet the Black developers making your new favorite games

All Gaming stories

Big video games are dropping old gender restrictions on character creation

Esports team TSM's FTX exit complicated by Twitter chaos

Report: Video game revenue shrinks in 2022, snapping growth streak

Programming tricks help God of War Ragnarök tell its story

Marvel's mobile gaming hit doesn't nag players to pay

Japanese video game giants plan pivots

Video game companies start listing salaries for jobs in NYC

Sony to launch its PSVR 2 headset for $550

Will Wright: Spore should have been multiple games