If you’ve been (impatiently) waiting for Hades 2 to hit Xbox Series X/S and PS5, there’s some great news for you coming out of Thursday’s Xbox Partner Preview showcase. Supergiant’s roguelite action RPG is coming to those consoles (as well as Xbox on PC and Xbox Cloud) on April 14. It’ll be available on Xbox Game Pass too. The full version of Hades 2 hit PC and Nintendo Switch last September after over a year of Steam early access. It was one of our favorite games of 2025. This time around, you play as Melinoë, the sister of the original game’s protagonist, Zagreus. Melinoë has a longer dash than her sibling, a sprint ability and more of a focus on area-of-effect attacks than ranged projectiles. You can also expect tough bosses along two separate paths, animal familiars, a range of modifiable weapons and messy romances.

The Serious Sam game franchise is back with a new entry, giving the FPS series a co-op roguelite twist. Basically it's getting the Nightreign treatment in the same way Elden Ring did. The latest title is Serious Sam: Shatterverse, where teams of up to five players will take on waves of perennial foe Mental's monster goons. Each run will offer the usual roguelite approach of upgrade options to make your team more powerful. And if you're a long-time fan of the series, the trailer has plenty of the same broad, loud humor; for instance, the three upgrade cards shown are all ball jokes. Behavior Interactive, the studio behind Dead by Daylight, is helming the project. Serious Sam: Shatterverse will arrive on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox on PC and Xbox Cloud some time this year. Considering the first quarter is nearly over, the team is probably targeting the second half of 2026, but that's only a guess.

AMD just revealed the Ryzen 9950X3D2 Dual Edition desktop processor, which is a beastly follow-up to last year's 9950X3D. This is the company's first desktop processor where both chiplets have been equipped with AMD's proprietary 3D V-Cache technology, which seems like a boon for gamers. Each chiplet includes 104MB of cache, offering an incredible 208MB total on-chip cache. "208MB of cache means more game data, more assets and more working data sitting right next to the CPU cores," AMD Senior VP Jack Huynh explained in an announcement video. Just like last year's release, the 9950X3D2 features a 16-core processor based on the Zen 5 architecture. This new release has increased to a 200W TDP, compared to the 170TDP of the original. This could indicate an increase in speed and performance, but with more heat output. AMD says the chip will be great for both gaming and for creative workloads, like compiling game engines, running AI models and rendering 3D objects. The company says it can deliver a five to 10 percent performance boost when using applications like Unreal Engine, Chromium, Blender and DaVinci Resolve. Last year's 9950X3D chip was already an absolute powerhouse, so we are looking forward to putting this one through its paces. The Ryzen 9950X3D2 chip will be available on April 22, though we don't have a price just yet. The standard 9950X3D currently costs around $675.

Nintendo just announced it will soon start charging different prices for first-party Switch 2 games based on whether the content is digital or physical. This could actually be a good thing for those who like to download their games instead of heading to a brick-and-mortar store to pick up a copy, as digital titles are getting a nice discount. It starts with the release of Yoshi and the Mysterious Book on May 21, which will be $60 on the eShop but $70 at retail locations. Prior to this, most first-party games were $70 no matter how you bought them. I prefer downloading games, for convenience, and paid that much for both Donkey Kong Bananza and Pokémon Pokopia. It's yet another blow, however, for consumers who prefer physical media. They aren't getting any kind of a discount, and many Switch 2 cartridges don't even contain the game nowadays. The boxes include game key cards, which allow the user to download the title to the console but are basically paperweights after that. This isn't the first time Nintendo has participated in this kind of dual pricing structure. The digital version of Donkey Kong Bananza was cheaper than the physical version in some parts of the world, including the UK. Is this another sign that making and shipping actual things is getting to be prohibitively expensive? There are storage and memory shortages due to AI and oil shortages due to war, not to mention an ever-shifting tariff policy here in the US. It's tough out there.

Sony is shutting down Dark Outlaw Games, a first-party game studio led by former Call of Duty producer Jason Blundell, Bloomberg's Jason Schreier reports. Before leading Dark Outlaw Games, Blundell was the head of Deviation Games, which was an independent studio, but also happened to be developing a PlayStation game before it shut down, Schreier says. Dark Outlaw Games had yet to announce what it was working on, but considering Blundell's experience with the Call of Duty franchise, it seems likely the studio was developing a multiplayer project for PlayStation. Blundell was a programmer and producer at Activision before making the jump to Treyarch to work on Call of Duty 3, and he contributed to multiple Call of Duty: Black Ops games after that, including serving as the director for the campaign and Zombies mode of Call of Duty: Black Ops III and the career and Zombies modes of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. The studio's shutdown is being paired with cuts to staff at PlayStation focused on mobile development, according to Schreier. Sony has made a habit of laying off staff and shutting down studios in the last year, seemingly as a way to retreat from an earlier investment in online, live-service multiplayer games. The company shut down Bluepoint Games in February following attempts to get a live-service God of War game off the ground. Sony also closed Firewalk Studios after the spectacular failure of multiplayer shooter Concord in October 2024. And a year before that, Naughty Dog officially abandoned work on a standalone multiplayer version of The Last of Us in December 2023. That leaves Sony with at least two Horizon Zero Dawn spin-offs, a co-op game from original developer Guerilla Games and a MMO from developer NCSoft; Fairgame$, which is still in active development despite the departure of Haven Studios head Jade Raymond; Arrowhead Game Studios' Helldivers 2; Bungie's Destiny 2 and Marathon; and if you really want to stretch, Gran Turismo 7. Sony clearly hasn't given up on producing online multiplayer games, but it's not hard to characterize its attempt to expand into the space as a disaster.

At the close of a video announcing the second season of Splitgate: Arena Reloaded, the company's co-founder and CEO Ian Proulx revealed that "a small section of the team" has started work on a new game. He said that the next project will be a movement shooter in the style of Titanfall and Black Ops 3. Those two tidbits are really all that 1047 Games had to share. People can sign up to participate when playtesting begins, but considering the latest release is only just hitting its second season, it's a safe bet that we'll have a while before this project gets a title and a trailer, much less a release window. Splitgate is a well-made game with smart traversal and movement mechanics, so it's likely that they'll have good ideas to bring to this sliding and gliding subgenre of FPS. Whether players will continue supporting 1047 Games is a different question. The studio leadership bungled a lot of things in the past year, starting with Proulx's questionable fashion choices and even more questionable handling of said choices. 1047 Games also pulled a bait-and-switch with the release of Splitgate 2, yanking it back to beta after release and cutting jobs before re-releasing and reimagining the sequel as Splitgate: Arena Reloaded in December.

Pokémon Champions — a battle-focused game along the lines of Pokémon Stadium — now has a release date, and it's pretty darn soon. It will hit Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 on April 8. A mobile version is in the works with support for cross-play with Nintendo's consoles. Nintendo released a new overview video that shows how the game works. You can recruit Pokémon in the game or transfer those you've found in previous titles and Pokémon Go via Pokémon Home. Then you'll be able to take half a dozen of your Pokémon into strategic turn-based fights with other players. It's definitely a Pokémon battle game! There are ranked battles, a casual mode, private lobbies and online competitions. You'll earn victory points, which you can use to swap a Pokémon's moves, increase their stat points and make other modifications. In addition, victory points enable you to recruit Pokémon in Pokémon Champions more than once per day. Pokémon that you recruit with victory points can stay in your roster permanently instead of just a week. There's a shop too, where you can spend points on accessories, Pokéball throwing styles, victory poses and battle music. Pokémon Champions will be the second new Pokémon game to arrive this year, following the success of Pokémon Pokopia. There's more to come in the not-too-distant future, as Pokémon Wind and Pokémon Waves are scheduled to arrive on Switch 2 next year. While Pokémon Pokopia is selling like hotcakes, the Switch 2 perhaps isn’t flying out of the door as quickly as Nintendo hoped. According to Bloomberg, Nintendo has cut back on production of the console after lower-than-expected sales over the holiday season. The company is said to be making 4 million units this quarter rather than the previously planned 6 million, with the lower production rate set to extend into April.

The popular co-op heist franchise Payday is coming to VR. Payday: Aces High will release for the Meta Quest platform and SteamVR later this year. It looks like it has everything people love about the series, but with some of that VR-style immersion. Just like the mainline games, this version tasks players with planning and then pulling off elaborate heists. It offers four-player co-op, with each person filling a particular role within the group. These are your standard heist movie archetypes. There's the planner, the brawler, the gadget nerd and the silent but deadly assassin. The developer also promises plenty of gear and weapons, with "an arsenal that keeps growing." This leads to the usual Payday gameplay loop. Each successful heist lets players buy more weapons and gadgets. Rinse and repeat. Fast Travel Games is making this one, and the developer has a decent pedigree in the VR space. It helped make Cities: VR and Apex Construct, among many others. The graphics here look decent and we already know the gameplay is solid. Plus, there are clown masks. We'll find out if Payday: Aces High makes the grade later this year. This is just the latest major gaming franchise to experiment with virtual reality. There are VR versions of Half-Life, Assassin's Creed, Horizon and many more.

Epic Games has announced sweeping layoffs of more than 1,000 employees. “The downturn in Fortnite engagement that started in 2025 means we're spending significantly more than we're making, and we have to make major cuts to keep the company funded,” CEO Tim Sweeney said in a memo to workers on Tuesday. Sweeney wrote that, combined with “over $500 million of identified cost savings in contracting, marketing, and closing some open roles,” the layoffs will give Epic more stability. He added that the layoffs are not related to AI. Back in 2023, Epic laid off 830 employees. At the time, that was 16 percent of its workforce, suggesting around 4,000 employees remained at the company. If those numbers haven’t changed too much in the meantime, that means Epic is culling around a quarter of its headcount this week. Along with a dip in Fortnite engagement, Sweeney pointed out that Epic isn’t immune from systemic issues the games industry is contending with, such as a slowdown in growth, reduced spending, “tougher cost economics” and a battle with other types of media for consumer’s attention. However, Epic has some issues of its own to deal with. “Despite Fortnite remaining one of the most successful games in the world, we’ve had challenges delivering consistent Fortnite magic with every season; we're only in the early stages of returning to mobile and optimizing Fortnite for the world's billions of smartphones; and in being the industry's vanguard we have taken a lot of bullets in a battle which is only in the early days of paying off for ourselves and all developers,” Sweeney wrote. (He previously said Epic spent over $100 million in legal fees alone on its App Store battle with Apple.) The path forward for the company, per its CEO, is to create “awesome Fortnite experiences with fresh seasonal content, gameplay, story and live events,” perhaps in an attempt to recapture some of that “magic” he’s referring to. Speeding up work on developer tools amid the transition to Unreal Engine 6 is important as well, Sweeney indicated. He said that the workers Epic is laying off will receive at least four months of their base pay, though they’ll get more depending on the length of their tenure at the company. Epic will pay for extended healthcare coverage, including for six months for affected workers in the US. The company — which is not publicly traded — will speed up the vesting of stock options through next January and “extend equity exercise options for up to two years,” Sweeney said. Epic announced the layoffs days after it increased the price of Fortnite’s V-bucks currency. “The cost of running Fortnite has gone up a lot and we’re raising prices to help pay the bills,” it said. As part of the changes at the company, Epic is killing off three Fortnite modes. Rocket Racing (which was built by Rocket League developer Psyonix) will shut down in October. Fortnite Ballistic — a 5v5 tactical shooter mode — and Festival Battle Stage, which is a competitive version of the Fortnite Festival rhythm game, will vanish on April 16. “We've built a lot of Fortnite modes, and in some cases we failed to build something awesome enough to attract and retain a large player base,” Epic said on X. The company noted in its Year in Review recap last month that although the hours that players spent in third-party titles on the Epic Games Store increased by four percent in 2025, “overall gameplay hours declined year over year,” hinting at a dip in Fortnite numbers. The company said PC players spent $1.16 billion on the store in 2025, an increase of six percent from the previous year. Of that, $400 million was spent on third-party PC games. However, Epic Games Store vice president and general manager Steve Allison told Polygon in February that, factoring in first-party revenue and the 12 percent cut the company takes from third-party games, “the store is already — even with all this stuff — marginally profitable now." Here is the full memo Sweeney shared with Epic’s employees on Tuesday: Today we’re laying off over 1000 Epic employees. I'm sorry we're here again. The downturn in Fortnite engagement that started in 2025 means we're spending significantly more than we're making, and we have to make major cuts to keep the company funded. This layoff, together with over $500 million of identified cost savings in contracting, marketing, and closing some open roles puts us in a more stable place. Some of the challenges we're facing are industry-wide challenges: slower growth, weaker spending, and tougher cost economics; current consoles selling less than last generation's; and games competing for time against other increasingly-engaging forms of entertainment. And some of our challenges are unique to Epic. Despite Fortnite remaining one of the most successful games in the world, we’ve had challenges delivering consistent Fortnite magic with every season; we're only in the early stages of returning to mobile and optimizing Fortnite for the world's billions of smartphones; and in being the industry's vanguard we have taken a lot of bullets in a battle which is only in the early days of paying off for ourselves and all developers. Since it's a thing now, I should note that the layoffs aren't related to AI. To the extent it improves productivity, we want to have as many awesome developers developing great content and tech as we can. What we now need to do is clear: build awesome Fortnite experiences with fresh seasonal content, gameplay, story, and live events; accelerate developer tools with greater stability and capability as we evolve from Unreal Engine 5 and UEFN to Unreal Engine 6. And we'll be kicking off the next generation of Epic with huge launch plans towards the end of the year. This isn't our first time being here. Epic survived upheavals in 1990's with the move from 2D to 3D with Unreal 1; in the 2000's building console games with Gears of War; and in 2012 moving to online gaming with Paragon and Fortnite. Each time, we rebuilt our foundations and earned a renewed leadership position. Market conditions today are the most extreme we've seen since those early days, with massive upheaval in the industry accompanied by massive opportunity for the companies that come out as winners on the other side. That's what we're aiming to do for our players, and we aim to bring other like-minded developers in the industry along on the journey to build an increasingly open and vibrant future of entertainment together. At Epic, we pride ourselves in only hiring the industry's best, so it is very painful to part with so many talented people. The folks impacted by the layoffs will receive a severance package that includes at least four months of base pay, with more based on tenure. We’re also extending Epic-paid healthcare coverage. For example, in the U.S., they’ll receive paid coverage for 6 months. We’ll also accelerate their stock options vesting through January 2027 and extend equity exercise options for up to two years. We'll have a company meeting Thursday to talk about the roadmap in more detail. -Tim

EA has put another game on the chopping block, or at least the console versions of it. The company says it will delist the PS4 and Xbox One versions of Battlefield Hardline from digital storefronts on May 22, and shut down the online services on June 22. The single-player campaign will remain playable for those who own the game. The PC version of Battlefield Hardline isn’t affected by these changes. In its announcement on X, EA didn't explain exactly why it's ceasing support for the game on PS4 and Xbox One. It pointed readers to a FAQ on its website that lays out some of the typical reasons why it ends online support for its games. These include factors like declining player bases. Battlefield Hardline, which was released in 2015, will still be available on Steam as well as EA's own PC app. The Steam version has a peak concurrent player count of 41 so far this year. It's hardly uncommon for a publisher to end online services for games with declining player bases, but it's an issue that's come into greater focus over the last few years thanks in part to the Stop Killing Games movement. EA alone has sunsetted dozens of games. Its website has a full accounting of these, spread across three webpages.

Microsoft has locked in its second games showcase of the year. A Xbox Partner Preview stream will take place on March 26 at 1PM ET. It'll be available on the Xbox YouTube and Twitch channels. There'll be dedicated Twitch and YouTube streams with ASL interpretation, another featuring British Sign Language and one with audio descriptions in English on the main Xbox YouTube channel. The YouTube stream will be in 4K at 60fps (other channels are limited to 1080p) and have subtitle support for nearly three dozen languages. The broadcast will be available on regional Xbox channels as well. This showcase is all about upcoming games from Xbox's third-party partners. It will feature an in-depth look at Ryu Ga Gotoku’s Stranger Than Heaven (formerly known as Project Century), an update on Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl and the latest peek at The Expanse: Osiris Reborn. Along with those, expect some world premieres. Of course, many of these projects will be coming to Game Pass.

The developer behind the open-world RPG Crimson Desert has issued an official apology after players discovered several instances of AI-generated art in the game. Pearl Abyss posted on X that it released the game with some 2D visual props that were made with "experimental AI generative tools" and forgot to replace them before launch. Just a day after Crimson Desert's launch, players took to social media to post reports of potential generative AI usage. Pearl Abyss said on X that "following reports from our community, we have identified that some of these assets were unintentionally included in the final release." Now, the game's Steam page has an AI generated content disclosure, which says that, "generative AI technology is used in a supplementary capacity during the creation of some 2D prop assets" which are later replaced. Moving forward, Pearl Abyss said it will conduct a "comprehensive audit of all in-game assets and are taking steps to replace any affected content." The developer said that these updated assets will roll out in upcoming patches, and that the team would internally review how it communicates with its player base to provide more "transparency and consistency." Pearl Abyss isn't the only developer to fail to disclose the use of AI-generated assets in its games. Late last year, Sandfall Interactive was stripped of its Game of the Year and Debut Game awards from the Indie Game Awards for the use of generative AI in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 for placeholder textures that were mistakenly left in the game. Like Pearl Abyss, Arc Raiders' developer Embark Studios is going back and replacing AI-generated material in its game after some backlash from its player base.