Video games
fromKotaku
3 days agoPeak Devs Call Out Entitled Gamers Who Want Endless Free Updates
Endless support for games is not guaranteed; updates are considered a bonus, not a right.
Leonid Radvinsky's death leaves a void in the leadership of OnlyFans, a platform that has transformed the adult content landscape. His secretive management style and the controversies surrounding the site have raised questions about its future direction and stability.
The UK digital entertainment sector hit £13.5 billion in revenue in 2025, reflecting a 7.1% year-over-year growth, significantly outpacing the general economy's growth rate of 1.3%.
"We want to make the Graham Norton of video games," says Kirsty Rigden, the chief executive of Brighton-based FuturLab, which makes PowerWash Simulator. Aspiring to emulate a talkshow host who has a reputation for being affable rather than for setting pulses racing is perhaps an unusual ambition for a gaming studio.
Open World announced its acquisition of Drope.me, an influencer marketing platform that connects game developers with content creators. The purpose of the acquisition was to help Open World scale up its marketing tools for game makers interested in reaching creators' audiences.
The Chapter Voice Pack 1 presented itself as if it were going to re-enliven the experience of playing, with all-new dialogue for your favorite characters, a purported 450 new lines, though peculiarly it was not included as part of the game's season passes but only as a standalone $5 DLC.
Steam's chart was designed to communicate that more games than ever are seeing revenue of over $100,000 per year. This, were it so clear cut, would be splendid news. According to the chart, in 2020 just 3,000 games "earned" $100k, but by 2025 that number had reached 5,863. Let's call it 6,000 for ease. That means twice as many games are hitting this figure compared to five years ago.
Modern gaming platforms no longer win purely on content libraries, bonuses, or marketing spend. Competitive advantage is increasingly determined by the quality of the underlying technology stack, particularly payment infrastructure. This article examines how payment systems have evolved into a decisive moat for gaming operators, driven by massive investment, API-led architecture, advanced security engineering, cloud scalability, and the measurable financial cost of legacy platforms. Each section below explores a distinct technical pillar shaping competitive outcomes across the modern gaming ecosystem.
Steam-led PC growth will lead to PC games sales overtaking consoles' total game sales revenue by 2028. To clarify, that's not some kind of medium statistic- Newzoo projects that PC game sales will overtake the game sales of the Nintendo Switch 2, the PlayStation 5, and the Xbox Series S/X by 2028.
During my week-long binge, I played games that paused their own tutorials to run ads. I saw endless fake X icons and banners that hid the close button under the iPhone's Dynamic Island. Now, I'm not against ads, but I hate it when they feel like a penalty. I'm a gamer, and from what I've seen, PC and console games integrate ads much better. If mobile devs followed suit, mobile games might finally climb out of the mess they're in.
In the UK, 70 may not gurantee quality, but it tends to mean you are getting a blockbuster or "AAA" - a big-budget game made by a large team, built around cutting-edge graphics, sprawling worlds and dozens of hours of gameplay. In 2025 Nintendo set a new benchmark for game prices when it listed major Switch titles such as Mario Kart World at 74.99 (launching in the US at $79.99).
There has been a demo renaissance in the last few years, and we couldn't be happier. Demos have been a part of video game history for a long time, but whether or not they've been good for sales has been up in the air for quite some time. Fortunately, in the last couple weeks we've gotten a Dragon Quest 7: Reimagined and Final Fantasy 7 demo for Switch 2.
December 2025 was a record-breaking month for Steam, with approximately $1.6 billion in gross revenue during the holiday season. While that success is shared among several games, the big winner of the holidays was Arc Raiders.
Rockstar Games has just launched the Cfx Marketplace, described as "a curated digital storefront" which will allow a select group of creators "to share and sell" mods for both Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption II . Rockstar Games, and by extension its parent company Take-Two Interactive, has a harsh and often litigious relationship with its modding community. Although the developer has never truly been supportive of modding efforts for its games,
Developer tools for in-game transactions were available in Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) in a preview state since November, letting creators charge V-Bucks for digital items in their unpublished Fortnite Creative modes and games, or "islands." Epic Games has just flipped the switch, allowing for these islands to be published. The implementation of these developer tools for monetization in Fortnite Creative has raised complaints and worries, with players comparing this development to Roblox's revenue model.
But right now, of all times, feels one of the worst possible moments to reveal Hunters Gathering to a world wide web primed to make a Kombucha Girl face at everything it's doing. The last two years have been littered with the corpses of failed, cancelled, or still dying live service games. A lot of players are, understandably, tired of these things and unsure of whether they should even invest any time into caring, as so many seem to flop or shut down.
Now, keep in mind, these are not official numbers as Xbox doesn't share sales data these days. Instead, Alinea use their own magic formulas and weird rituals to estimate the numbers. So far, the company's data has proven to be very accurate, but it is not without mistakes or controversies regarding its calculation methods. The biggest success was Forza Horizon 5, which Alinea reported on last week, stating that the open-world racer sold a whopping 5.1 million copies on PlayStation.