Video games
fromEngadget
1 day agoSuper Meat Boy 3D, coin-pushing chaos and other new indie games worth checking out
Indie game showcases are thriving, with new games and updates announced regularly.
Physical media sales, DVDs especially, are experiencing a new burst of popularity. After a decade of freefall, enthusiasm among Gen Z halved a 20 percent sales decline in 2024 to just 9 percent in 2025. Stores have noticed. The Times' Karla Gachet spoke with staff at cultural hubs like Cinefile and Vidiots to discover why 2026 is already shaping up to be their biggest year, with the latter renting a surprising 1,000 DVDs a week.
Players who spent money on the free-to-play shooter's battle pass or skin shop were greeted on March 17 with emails from Sony notifying them that money they'd spent on the game had been returned to their accounts. It's unclear if everyone who ever spent money on is getting it back or only those players who invested after Wildlight Entertainment announced layoffs just a few weeks after launch.
The big new addition in the upcoming season is Grom, an island that players can visit and skate around on. However, the island, which is a slightly updated version of the tutorial island, is essentially locked behind a paywall, which goes against a promise EA made before launch. On February 19, EA and Full Circle posted a blog talking about some of the changes coming in Skate's third season, which goes live on March 10.
Publisher Konami and developer Bloober Team confirmed Thursday on their social media channels that Silent Hill 2 remake had reached 5 million players. The number doesn't strictly represent unit sales as it includes players accessing the game through subscription services.
Last year saw the highest vinyl record sales since 1984, signaling a strong desire among music enthusiasts to return to a simpler time of physical media. Even cassette tapes are making a comeback, with major artists including Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift releasing their material on the iconic plastic, four-inch audio reels. Now, self-described "party slam" metal band Party Cannon is taking the nostalgia play - often framed as an act of defiance against greedy and AI-slop-infested streaming platforms - to a new level.
The Rare Super Pocket is a $70 retro gaming handheld that ships in June 2026, pre-loaded with 14 Rare classics, including Banjo-Kazooie. It's the latest portable gaming device from HyperMegaTech that features games from the Evercade ecosystem, offering one of the best official ways to play a classic N64 platformer on the go.
As part of our strategic evolution to focus on projects that leverage Amazon's unique strengths and scale, including the recent re-launch of Luna and our Tomb Raider franchise partnership with Crystal Dynamics, we have decided to release Maverick Games from their publishing agreement with Amazon Game Studios.
These shifts mean making changes to our team structure, and some roles will be impacted. The teammates affected are talented colleagues and friends who helped build the foundation of skate. Their creativity and dedication are deeply ingrained in what players experience today. This decision is not a reflection of their impact and we're committed to supporting them through this transition.
EA FC 26 improves upon the previous version in a number of key ways. Players now have two gameplay options Authentic and Competitive. Authentic is a more realistic mode where the play is slower, weather and fatigue are factors, and using the right tactics is vital to break down the opposition, just like real football. Competitive is faster-paced and player actions are more dynamic; this is ideal for online play.
January is often a quiet month for big video game releases. So this cold, wintry month becomes a perfect time to evaluate your ever-growing backlog of video games and start chipping away at it. That's what many of us at Kotaku are doing right now, and so we figured hey, let's turn our lives into content for the website. Welcome to the start of Backlog Week, a way to celebrate, critically evaluate, and document those massive lists of games we all have.
30 years ago chronicled a generational conflict between an old-timey pull-string doll and a fancy new one with buttons. The two toys learned to get along. This week a trailer for showing both toys enacting a against tablets. While I agree on the potential detriments of excessive screen-time, it is telling how the creators and intended audience now identify less with the kid playing with toys and more with the adult who just spent all of dinner hearing about ' butlerian jihad looksmaxxing.'
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).
Why does Hasbro keep shutting down studios instead of releasing games? Project Windless was the surprise hit out of last week's PlayStation showcase and its developers have been using genAI for the early development phase. And would it kill publishers to stop delisting old versions of their games? It's the latest edition of Morning Checkpoint, Kotaku 's daily roundup of gaming news, rumors, and culture.
AI-driven authoring is our second major area of focus for 2026. At the Game Developer Conference in March, we'll be unveiling a beta of the new upgraded Unity AI, which will enable developers to prompt full casual games into existence with natural language only, native to our platform - so it's simple to move from prototype to finished product.
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.