Stray Children begins with your inexplicably dog-faced orphan being invited out at night by a peculiar, grinning man. You follow him through empty streets to a secret room in an underground train station, packed with elderly computing equipment. The man tells you that this used to be your father’s workplace. He warns you not to touch one of the computers, then shambles off theatrically for an indefinite toilet break. With no other option save heading home alone, you poke the forbidden console and are promptly sucked inside it.
Nintendo has released a new trailer to provide an overview on how Switch 2 cartridges and Game-Key Cards work (just in case the last six or seven months’ worth of discourse hasn’t already clued you in).
In it, one of the examples showcased to demonstrate the Game-Key Card is none other than Pokémon Pokopia, which has just been confirmed to launch on 5th March, 2026. The title is being published by The Pokémon Company in Japan and Nintendo in the West, which makes this the company’s first Game-Key Card release.
Following a plagiarism scandal and an indefinite delay earlier this year, Bungie’s corporate overlords Sony have reiterated again that extraction shooter Marathon is still aiming to release by March next year. Meanwhile, Destiny 2‘s struggles have seen the parent corp flatly admit that game’s not doing as well as Sony imagined when they bought Bungie.
There are all sorts of rumors floating around about potential Fallout remakes, and certainly a growing expectation among fans that Bethesda will turn to its older Fallout video games to keep fans on-side while they wait for The Elder Scrolls 6.
At the end of the Fallout Day broadcast, Howard acknowledged that Fallout fans were probably left a little disappointed by this, and promised that Bethesda was working on “even more” Fallout. Fallout 3: Remastered now seems likely a part of this, assuming it follows the naming convention set by The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered.
But what about a remaster of the beloved Fallout: New Vegas? Ahead of Fallout Day, Hollywood star Danny Trejo, who played Ghoul companion Raul Alfonso Tejada in New Vegas, called on Bethesda to remaster the game. It’s a sentiment shared by many Fallout fans, especially given the surge in interest following the breakout Fallout TV show, which heads to New Vegas for Season 2 in December.
“For other Fallout games in the future, you know, obviously I can’t talk about those right now, but I would say, sort of rushing through them, or we kind of need to get stuff out that is different than the work we’re doing in 76… we don’t feel like we need to rush any of that,” he said. “The Fallout TV show fills a certain niche in terms of the franchise and storytelling.”
The last mainline Fallout game was Fallout 4, which came out in 2015 and this week saw the release of its Anniversary Edition. The multiplayer focused Fallout 76 followed in 2018, and while fans slowly flocked to the West Virginia-set open-world RPG, it wasn’t until the premiere of Prime Video’s Fallout TV show that the Bethesda series leveled up in terms of attention.
Still, Howard wouldn’t budge when it came to fan calls for a substantial video game release. For him, it comes down to wanting to treat Bethesda’s franchises with care.
“Totally get the desire for a new kind of mainline single-player game,” he said. “And look, those things take time. I don’t think it’s bad for people to miss things. We just want to get it right and make sure that everything we’re doing in a franchise, whether it’s Elder Scrolls, Fallout, or now Starfield, that those become meaningful moments for everybody who loved these franchises as much as we do.”
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
It’s a tough time for Bungie and Destiny 2, with parent company Sony saying the studio has failed to meet its sales and user engagement expectations.
In its latest financial report, Sony said it had recorded a 31.5 billion yen (approx. $204.2 million) impairment charge as a result of Destiny 2’s underperformance. That was significant enough to drag down profits at Sony’s Game & Network Services Segment, which includes Sony Interactive Entertainment.
Sony chief financial officer (CFO) Lin Tao, expanded on the issues with Bungie in an investor related financial call:
“Regarding Destiny 2, partially due to the changes in the competitive environment, the level of sales and user engagement have not reached the expectations we had at the time of the acquisition of Bungie. While we will continue to make improvements, we downwardly revised the business projection for the time being, and recorded an impairment loss against a portion of the assets at Bungie.”
It’s certainly been a tough time for Destiny 2 and Bungie, which is working on the delayed extraction shooter Marathon for a release in 2026.
Sony, clearly, saw something in Bungie and its upcoming slate. But as the acquisition settled in, concerns began to arise about the studio’s future. Destiny 2 was struggling, and Marathon was still years away. Then the layoffs came. In 2023, Bungie laid off roughly 100 individuals and delayed Destiny 2’s The Final Shape DLC, with Parsons taking responsibility for the cuts. Developers told IGN at the time that the atmosphere at Bungie was “soul-crushing” as fears grew of a total Sony takeover of the company. In 2024, this was followed up with even more layoffs, impacting 220 people despite The Final Shape’s success. 155 people were also integrated from Bungie into Sony at this time. In the wake of those layoffs, former workers claimed Bungie misrepresented its finances and had significantly overextended itself when Sony acquired the studio. It was apparently bad enough that at least one source described as a “well-connected former worker” went so far as to claim that Bungie faced dire consequences if the acquisition hadn’t happened, saying that the “alternate history is insolvency.”
Troubles continued to rock the studio through the rest of 2024 and into 2025, with Marathon seeing a delay out of September of this year to an unknown future date. Most recently, Sony confirmed Bungie would be integrated into PlayStation Studios so the company could have more control over the developer.
Destiny 2 has seen its player count plummet as updates have failed to hit the mark. The action shooter hit a new low on Steam this month, with a peak concurrent player count of 13,497 in the past 24 hours. In June last year it hit 314,000. Recent user reviews for Destiny 2 on Steam are ‘mostly negative,’ although overall reviews are ‘mostly positive.’ Steam does not paint the entire picture when it comes to Destiny 2’s popularity, with it widely available across multiple platforms, but clearly Sony isn’t happy with how the studio has performed in the three years since it brought it into the fold.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
A beefy Battlefield 6 update has just dropped, and it aims to take care of a couple of bugs and exploits which have become infamous bugbears over the last little while. No longer will people be able to fly up to rooftops by smacking drones with sledgehammers, and no longer will lock-guided missiles cheekily ignore countermeasures.
Well, here’s a little something to make you smile. The Pokémon Company has today shared another look at its upcoming theme park, ‘PokéPark Kanto’, and announced that gates will open on 5th February 2026.
Tickets to this new section of Tokyo’s Yomiuriland Amusement Park will open for Japanese residents on 21st November and will be distributed by a lottery. There’s currently no information on how those of us who live in other countries can nab tickets, but the official English booking website currently hosts a “Coming Soon” message, so keep an eye out for updates in the coming months.
Arc Raiders has now sold over 4 million copies worldwide less than two weeks since its release date, cementing its commercial success.
Publisher Nexon confirmed the milestone in a glowing press release, which also revealed that the extraction shooter had reached a huge concurrent count of 700,000 players across all platforms.
Within a day of its release, Embark Studio’s shooter hit a Steam concurrent peak player count of 264,673, making it one of the biggest extraction shooters ever on Valve’s platform. That record was smashed again over the weekend when Arc Raiders hit a concurrent peak of 462,488 players according to Valve’s official figures. and now we know that, combined with users on consoles, the true figure is closing in on three-quarters of a million players.
Nexon added that Arc Raiders has “maintained its number one spot on Steam’s global sales rankings” ever since it released on October 30, and congratulated developer Embark, writing: “We are deeply impressed by the enthusiasm shown by our player community and look forward to building on that excitement with our content plans, including new maps, ARC vehicles, weapons, and quests, which will be available starting this month.”
“I thought I was only going to play five or six hours of Arc Raiders on launch day before sitting down to write this initial review in progress, but after just a handful of matches, I suddenly couldn’t pull myself away – and before I realized it, I’d been playing for 10 hours,” we wrote in IGN’s Arc Raiders review-in-progress.
“This is without question the most hooked I’ve found myself on an extraction shooter (and I’ve played a lot of them), with clean and tense gunplay, a progression system that’s been incredibly satisfying so far, and a loot game that has me sweating over what to put in my backpack and what to leave behind.”
Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world’s biggest gaming sites and publications. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.
Well, it could have been worse. Fallout 4‘s all-important script extender modding tool has taken less than 24 hours to be updated to work with the RPG‘s freshly released anniversary update. It joins an ever-growing list of mods which have been categorised as updated over on Nexus Mods, while Bethesda are seemingly still looking into issues around the anniversary update’s extra creations stuff not showing up properly for Steam players.
As with last year’s Fallout 4 next-gen update, this re-release playing some degree of havok with mods was guaranteed going in, with Bethesda issuing a specific warning against ones which edit the game’s main menu. As modding platform Nexus Mods predicted, the list of mods requiring updates to work with the new version has been larger than just those.
Ghost of Yotei has sold 3.3 million copies in its first month on sale, Sony has confirmed.
As part of its latest financial results, Sony said Sucker Punch’s PlayStation 5-exclusive action adventure sold 3.3 million units in the 32 days since going on sale on October 2 — so sales up to and including November 2.
Sony announced the figure without any commentary, so it’s hard to know whether the company is happy with the result. However, there is a great deal of context we can add that helps us paint a picture of Ghost of Yotei’s commercial success.
The first comparison we should make is to its predecessor, Ghost of Tsushima. It sold 2.4 million copies in its first three days after going on sale exclusively on PlayStation 4 on July 17, 2020, then hit 5 million after 118 days (just shy of four months). It’s now up to 13 million copies sold, including sales of the PC and PS5 Director’s Cut.
So it’s worth remembering that while we don’t have a figure for a comparable period of sales, it looks like Ghost of Yotei is selling about as well as Ghost of Tsushima before it, a suggestion backed up by sales data from the U.S. and across Europe.
But is that good enough? We need to consider that Ghost of Tsushima came out on the PS4, which in the summer of 2020 had a much bigger install base than the PS5 does today, and amid the stay-at-home gaming boom fueled by lockdowns. Ghost of Yotei also sold for $70, which means its dollar sales are greater compared to the cheaper Ghost of Tsushima, whose standard edition launched at $60.
The timing of each release differs also in that Ghost of Tsushima came out in the summer, and Ghost of Yotei came out in the fall. Yotei has the crucial holiday season coming soon, and it will surely be a popular pick for those buying a PS5 for the first time or upgrading to the PS5 Pro.
And finally, multiplayer add-on Ghost of Yotei: Legends comes out at some point in 2026, which will undoubtedly give Ghost of Yotei a shot in the arm next year. And we all know that Ghost of Yotei, like Ghost of Tsushima before it, will eventually launch on PC in Director’s Cut form. Perhaps there will even be a PS6 version, whenever that console rolls around.
So, Ghost of Yotei has some way to go before it matches the total sales figure of its predecessor, but is has plenty of opportunity to catch up. And, as Circana’s Mat Piscatella said last month, its launch sales were “perfectly fine… Not amazing, not bad.”
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
