Category: IGN

Yakuza creator Toshihiro Nagoshi’s new game is now in doubt after investor NetEase warned the studio that it plans to cut off funding.

Gang of Dragon was meant to be the debut game from Nagoshi Studio, the developer formed by Nagoshi in 2022 under NetEase after he departed Ryu Ga Gotoku a year earlier. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it looks an awful lot like Yakuza.

Bloomberg reported that Chinese megacorp NetEase told Nagoshi Studio employees that it will stop financing the studio from May, which in turn will likely mean Nagoshi’s studio will have to shut down. NetEase is currently in the process of cutting its video game investments, which have already led to studio closures and layoffs.

According to Bloomberg, NetEase made the decision to cut Nagoshi’s funding after it learned Gang of Dragon needed at least another ¥7 billion (approx. $44.4 million) to be completed. Nagoshi is apparently trying to find new investors to help buy the studio out, without much luck.

The news comes just a few months after Gang of Dragon enjoyed a flashy reveal at The Game Awards in December. Now, it looks like it may never see the light of day.

Photo by Daniel Pearce/Edge Magazine/Future via Getty Images.

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.

Magic: The Gathering’s crossovers get harder to predict, and the second set of the year takes us back to New York City – not for Spider-Man, but for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

On its Early Access launch day, before I’d unlocked anything, I was struck by how much Slay the Spire 2 felt more like a remake of the original Slay the Spire than a sequel. The tutorial didn’t tell me – someone with over 1,000 hours in the original – anything I didn’t already know. The map where you choose your path and whether to aim for riskier battles with higher rewards or potentially lower-stakes encounters (which can still turn wild on you) is exactly the same, and the turn-based combat follows basically all the old rules of how you spend your allotted energy points to play cards that build up your armor and hack away at the enemy’s defenses and health until one side or the other is dead.

That’s not a bad thing when your starting point is one of the all-time greats – just a few months ago I lavished praise on another deckbuilding roguelike sequel, Monster Train 2, for a similar approach. And as I’ve progressed and unlocked some of the new content over the first eight or so hours of runs, this follow-up has come more into its own: Two entirely new characters – the Regent and the Necrobinder – join three revamped ones, and loads of new enemies, bosses, artifacts, and random events make Slay the Spire 2 feel worthy of being called a sequel, even if it’s extremely familiar in its opening hours. It also has a new art style that’s very quickly won me over with its larger characters and less subtle animations (including more elaborate enemy deaths) that make it a bit more lively even though everybody’s holding still most of the time.

Since we’re still so early, I’ve been concentrating my progression efforts on my old favorite character, the Defect. This faulty robot is a lot chunkier-looking this time, but his orb-summoning and evoking mechanic is carried over almost unchanged. However, balance is different enough that as someone who routinely blasts through Daily Climbs in the original, I’ve only managed to win a couple of runs thus far – my first, as the Ironclad (which is probably kinda rigged to make us feel powerful), and one more since as the Defect. Part of that is that there are quite a lot of new cards to unlock that will certainly make things a bit easier than when I’m working with just the basics, and part of it is me cockily charging head-first into battles with elites and bosses I’ve never seen before and getting my butt handed to me as a learning experience. But it’s not like I go into a roguelike of any type expecting to win runs early on – losing and then improving is a big part of the fun.

One area developer Mega Crit has definitely gotten a little more inventive is with special events, some of which can give you a sort of quest that can span across acts (think a more formal version of the first game’s Red Mask interaction). I’ve gotten a map in Act 1 that led me to a huge treasure pile in Act 2, and a key in one act that opens a chest in the next. There’s also a bird egg that must be hatched at a rest site (so it comes at the opportunity cost of not healing yourself or upgrading a card). Those are represented by unplayable cards until their quest is resolved, so there’s at least a minor consequence to carrying them with you because they take up space in your deck and hand that could’ve gone to something useful in the moment.

I’ve also seen a bit more willingness to let us tweak how cards work beyond simply upgrading them. A few new modifiers like letting you re-use a card, making defense cards exhaust but gain +1 after use, giving you an extra energy the first time you play a card, making a card retainable, etc. – these all have the potential to make builds a lot more flexible than in the original.

The big feature that truly sets Slay the Spire 2 apart is the up-to-four-player co-op mode, and in the couple of runs I’ve done with others, it’s been more than a little chaotic. Within each turn of combat, it’s a real-time free-for-all where everybody plays their cards at once, so if you’re not coordinating your attacks over voice chat it gets crazy extremely quickly as the cards stack up and wait their turns for their animations to play out. If you plan on getting anywhere as a team you’ll definitely want to make sure you’re working together, because Slay the Spire 2 balances out the presence of multiple players by dramatically increasing enemy hitpoints (and their attacks hit everybody at once), so you’ll need to focus fire to take out priority targets quickly. Given there’s no matchmaking to find random people to play with, though, it’s safe to say you’ll be in some form of communication with your teammates.

Things are made a little more forgiving in co-op in that downed players are automatically revived to 1HP after a battle and you can use your rest site action to heal a teammate instead of yourself. You also get the same number of random artifacts as you have players each time they’re handed out, which lets you choose the best fit for each of your builds (with any disputes settled randomly). I can see that giving you a major leg up over simply taking whatever pops out of a chest. I’ve also gotten a few co-op-specific cards that allow me to boost my teammates, such as giving them a random card to play in combat.

Of course, I expect that the difficulty will ramp up pretty dramatically as well, and require even more planning of your order of operations than you have to do alone. It’s deliberately designed to make you and your teammates hash things out in conversation: You can’t see a teammate’s entire hand, but they can mouse over one card at a time and it’ll be displayed over their character’s head so you can see what they’re talking about. I also love how you can draw on the map now, plotting out where you’re going or just doodling. (That works in single-player as well, if you want to leave yourself a note.)

I will say that it would be great if Mega Crit could find a better solution for what happens when someone in your party has to bail mid-run, because right now that person’s character just stops and you have to abandon your game with nothing to show for it. To be fair, a typical run isn’t going to go more than an hour and everybody should know what they’re getting into before setting out on a group adventure, but things happen.

After just one day of playing there’s certainly a lot more here to cover, especially since it at least appears to be largely “complete” in terms of how much content is here (though who knows how much bigger Mega Crit plans to make it before 1.0). Outside of the balance changes we’ve been told to expect, the only real indication that this is an early access game is the goofy MS Paint-style placeholder art you’ll see on a handful of cards and in the progression tree that serves up bite-sized bits of lore as you unlock new cards, potions, and artifacts.

So how long will it take me to wrap up this review? Hard to say: this isn’t really the kind of game that you ever fully “beat,” and if the first one is any indication I’ll likely still be doing the randomized Daily Climbs in Slay the Spire 2 well into the 2030s. But I expect I’ll be able to form some coherent thoughts about its new ideas within the next week or so of bashing my head against its various bosses and figuring out how to generate the star currency the Regent uses to cast his spells and how to manage the Necrobinder’s pet skeleton hand. So check back next week for more impressions, and tell us how your early runs have been going so far in the comments.

This week has been historic for Pokémon, as we celebrated the franchise’s 30th anniversary with a Pokémon Presents that gave us our first look at Pokémon Winds and Waves.

With the reveal of a new region based and our first look at the Generation 10 starters, we bid a fond farewell to Paldea.

This ‘see you later’ to Generation 9 has definitely been reflected in the Pokémon TCG, as Scarlet & Violet – 151 has become the market’s hottest focal point this week.

Using data from TCGPlayer, the gold standard for secondary market pricing, we’ve analyzed the biggest movers of the week to see which cards are capturing the anniversary hype.

7. N’s PP Up – 262/217

If it’s Wrestlemania season, that means it’s time for a new WWE 2K game. 2K26 came in hot, a little too hot to get a comprehensive look at the entire thing before the “pay more to play early” period opened up today. But I’ve spent a good chunk of time running the ropes in this year’s ring, and so far it’s been a solid next chapter in what has been this series’ most impressive run to date. That said, with another milquetoast showcase mode and the growing presence of monetization wrapping itself around the experience like an anaconda vise, it’s starting to feel like the golden age for 2K wrestling games might be coming to an end.

2K26 hasn’t learned many new moves since last year, mostly just tweaking existing base mechanics. The biggest slam to the system is an adjustment to stamina, adding a condition called “winded” to superstars who run out. While winded, your stamina wheel turns from yellow to purple, and you can no longer run or use reversals until it empties and goes back to normal. This adds more risk-reward to all of the offensive and defensive actions you do in the ring that cost stamina.

It also creates a solution to the 2K series issue of how powerful the reversal system is (you are basically unstoppable if you’ve become the Tribal Chief of pressing one button on time, every time) by making it cost stamina to do and penalizing you for running your stamina into the red. However, it doesn’t address the problem of how the reversal prompts are unintuitive and sometimes at unpredictable points during a move’s animation, making picking the system up feel impossible without hours of ring time and muscle memory development. You win some, you lose some.

Other adjustments are nice to have but don’t change the flow or feel of matches significantly. Harkening back to the series’ pre-Visual Concepts days, collision physics have been changed slightly, so throws and bumps are less trapped in canned animation sequences and interact with objects around them. A body suplexed into the ropes will actually bounce off them in a more appropriately reactive way instead of attempting to clip through them. Throw an opponent onto the ring stairs, and they’ll properly crunch around their hulking metal block. Does this allow objects laying on the ground to do a significant amount more damage if you drop someone on them, an ever-present trope of professional wrestling of all forms? More testing is necessary, but it’s unclear right now.

Another blast from the past are the additional match types added in 2K26: I Quit, Dumpster, Inferno, and Three Stages of Hell. That last one is essentially a gauntlet match where you choose three different match stipulations and you wrestle through them, two-out-of-three falls style. The Dumpster match is functionally no different than the Casket or Ambulance matches, where you have to weaken opponents enough to shove them in a box they don’t want to be in. The Inferno match returns from the Smackdown vs Raw series with a more straight forward play path: Doing moves increases the temperature gauge, and once it’s at max, you must expose the enemy to the flames to win. This was cool, but also isn’t that special once the new car smell has burned away.

I Quit is arguably the best of these new options, basically elaborating on the submission match, but instead of the normal mashing minigame, players that are being forced to say I Quit must pass a series of checks hitting the right spots on a gauge enough times to continue on. These spots get smaller as you take more damage, and opponents can add blockers to make the task that much harder, which they can earn the same way they earn finishers. This is a really clever idea, just complex enough to be engaging and tactical without being too much to deal with.

I dabbled in The Island, the weird, Street Fighter World Tour-esque multiplayer hub world that lets players create their own wrestlers, participate in open world RPG-style quests while also competing with each other on leaderboards, and it’s at least a more coherent game mode out of the gate this time. It embraces the fantastical nature of last year’s version, leaning into mysterious powers of The Island of Relevancy, now being divided up by three different factions all fighting to gain its magical powers. This sort of pro wrestling RPG nonsense is something that I would be all over on paper, but the original Island’s poor writing and janky pacing put me off. This year at least seems to be attempting to address that. I’m not sure it’s a better written project yet, but it’s at least fully voiced and easy to navigate. I haven’t gotten deep enough to see just when the cold grip of monetization starts to strangle this mode into submission, but if it’s anything like last year’s, it will be early and often.

Battle Passes make their debut in 2K26, and they leave a lot to be desired. There is a lot to earn split between free and premium pass tracks. Many of the free rewards are arenas, superstars, championships, and cosmetics you would have otherwise earned a free currency to buy from an in-game store in previous games, while the premium track features a lot of MyFaction related goodies and a handful of extra wrestlers, with this first season themed around the stars of AAA. These replace the wrestler DLC drops of old, and I can see them being a frustrating replacement – not simply because it means you’ll need to grind matches in order to unlock things you’d just buy previously, but also because unlocking new tiers seems to take a lot of work. I spent around five hours between random exhibition matches, showcase mode, and The Island, and have only made it to tier four of 40. At the end of the track are unlockables, like what would have been the late Bray Wyatt’s last costume and a really cool move that I would have loved to give to a custom wrestler, but I fear I simply don’t have the endurance for that grind, or the patience to accept that I even have to.

I’ve spent most of my time so far with this year’s Showcase, themed around the highlights and lowlights of CM Punk’s two-pronged WWE career. It suffers from most of the same problems that these modes always have, like its gaping holes in history that it has to ignore for corporate reasons, or the awkward ways it tries and fails to recreate major moments in real matches as gameplay moments. I’m a little bit more than halfway through it, so I won’t comment specifically on what’s absent or not until I see it all, though I can be confidently disappointed that his matches with Bryan Danielson won’t be among the playlist since he’s with a rival company these days.

The 10+ year gap he’s had in his career is already a spectre that really haunts this mode, as it makes the pickings for memorable moments to relive slim. They try to address this with a little kayfabe, Punk engaging in a little metanarrative between matches to use the “Slingshot Technology” that Showcase employs to meld matches and real footage as a sort of time machine. That allows him to both undo some losses in his own career, embody Bret Hart to prevent the Montreal Screwjob, and indulge himself in a bunch of “what if” dream matches. These definitely feel more like busy work than cool experiences, even though they are right in line with the toybox nature of wrestling games to begin with.

So far, WWE 2K26 is proving that this solid five-year run the series has been on was built on a great foundation. One that has barely had to change, but continues to in ways that are starting to hurt more than help. The smaller gameplay tweaks and match types are at best great and at worst irrelevant, and there are still large bugaboos that show no real sign of improvement, like the centerpiece Showcase mode. And some changes, like the addition of the battle pass, make growing your collection of cosmetics, moves, and wrestlers worse and more expensive. This isn’t a knockout blow for the series, but its certainly a threat to the champion. Hopefully, when I sink more time into other modes like MyRise and MyGM, they’re good enough to help rally this heavyweight to a win.

The second Magic: The Gathering set of 2026 is here, and it’s Turtle Time! The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have emerged from the shadows in cardboard form, but despite coming from the sewer, there’s treasure to be found.

Below, you’ll find the priciest cards from the set so far, thanks to our friends at TCGplayer, with the caveat that these are pre-launch prices and subject to move around more than a backflipping reptile.

Some values with rise, some will fall, and there’s every chance that this list looks completely different by this time next week – we’ll update it in the coming days in any case.

10. Turtles in Time (Showcase Fracture Foil)

Warning: this opinion piece contains spoilers for Resident Evil Requiem.

For three decades, players have been going toe-to-toe with zombies and other monsters in the Resident Evil series. This year’s latest mainline entry, Resident Evil Requiem, marks the beloved franchise’s 30th anniversary by being a love letter to the series’ entire past, from its early days of creepy, puzzle-filled survival horror to its adrenaline-fuelled action horror era. But while this approach has been praised almost unanimously across the board – we awarded Requiem 9/10 and its Metacritic score stands at 89, the highest of any modern, non-remake Resident Evil – I feel that its attempt to mix both of the series’ historic styles together creates a clash, rather than cohesion. Rather than a game that knows exactly what it wants to be, it feels to me like Resident Evil Requiem has a bit of an identity crisis.

Over the past decade, Resident Evil has reformulated itself as a slow-paced survival horror game, returning its mainline entries to the style of the 1996 original where every shot counts and everything around you is a threat. You’re not a larger-than-life hero, instead you’re an everyday person thrown into a nightmare scenario and you have to somehow find a way out alive. Seemingly inspired by indie hits like Amnesia and Outlast, Capcom opted for a first-person POV for Resident Evil 7: Biohazard and its sequel, Village, which anchored you in the terrifying experience of their everyman protagonist, Ethan Winters. This new formula worked well, garnering critical acclaim and reigniting many people’s interest in the franchise, myself included. This was an especially important victory for Capcom because of how poorly 2012’s Resident Evil 6 was received, which almost entirely abandoned the series’ survival horror roots in favor of horror-themed action.

But with the release of Resident Evil Requiem, it feels as if some of the work that Capcom has been doing over the last few years with Biohazard and Village has been thrown out the window. It is, for sure, a great game that’s engaging from start to finish, but its big swings from terrifying survival horror to relentless action set pieces makes it feel as if Capcom couldn’t pick a lane for Requiem’s overall tone. While playing through the campaign, I couldn’t help but feel that it was suffering from an identity crisis. And because of that, I found that many key plot points missed the mark for me. A prime example of this occurs towards the campaign’s midpoint, when Grace’s child ward, Emily, transforms into a giant monster. It’s a moment that’s supposed to create a cocktail of emotions – shock and upset over what’s become of your friend, fear for what will happen next – but before any of that really comes into play, Leon rushes in, guns blazing, to save the day.

While playing as Grace, Requiem is a slow-burning survival horror – the exact style of game I’ve come to expect from the series. Similar to when playing as Ethan Winters, I was forced to think carefully about how I wanted to approach each situation, and I often would ask myself, “Is this fight worth the ammo?” Every time I ran into a creature that would tower over me, I’d often scream out in real life, then proceed to run for my life in-game. The fear was only amplified by the fact that Grace’s sections employ the series’ traditional labyrinthine level design, and so I was often forced to revisit locations I’d previously barely made it out of alive in search of hidden treasure pieces needed to move the plot forward. The puzzles those treasures are used to solve aren’t exactly the hardest, but their presence is appreciated, and it made playing as Grace even more enjoyable.

Ultimately, a lot of Grace’s gameplay is grounded in reality – yes, a reality where zombies tear off faces and doors are unlocked by gemstones – but the oppressive atmosphere, overwhelming odds, and vision-limiting first-person perspective makes playing as her truly scary. Even though she is employed by the FBI, she’s essentially a pencil pusher who has next to no combat experience in the field. It makes you feel truly vulnerable, and so this was the strongest part of the game for me.

Leon’s sections, meanwhile, feel like a complete 180 from everything you experience as Grace. Replicating the approach of 2005’s Resident Evil 4, Leon’s most famous mission, most, if not all of the horror elements are removed from his sequences and story beats, which undermines much of what you played through as Grace – once again, Leon’s brutal gunning down of the monster Emily transforms into feels like it’s from a completely different story than the one Grace was experiencing. This is where the identity crisis really kicks in. Ammo is not as scarce anymore, and you’re encouraged to run headfirst into battle. Rather than search for helpful scraps, Leon has access to a shopping and weapons upgrade system that rewards you with currency based on how many zombies you’ve killed. The only way to get better gear is by racking up a high kill count, a system that goes against everything the game’s Grace-centric first half was building towards. As Grace, I’d learned to be fearful of pretty much everything coming my way, especially the larger monsters that stalked the corridors of the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center. Leon, on the other hand, could solve such issues with a few shotgun shells and a grenade.

Unfortunately, the same can also be said about the puzzles (or lack thereof) Leon has to solve in his portion of the game. A lot of them mostly involve running to site X just to open location Y, which feels a notable step down compared to the more sophisticated problems facing Grace. This huge shift in approach between the two characters means it almost feels like playing an entirely different game during Requiem’s second half. Leon and Grace’s parts feel like two sides of a strong coin, but they are underdeveloped because they’re so split. Rather than complimentary halves, they feel like mandatory reflections of the series past to honor the series’ 30-year milestone. As I played, I began to wonder if Capcom was trying to directly appease its many generations of fans – those who loved Resident Evil 7 and 8’s old school-influenced gameplay and those who liked the more action-packed style of RE 3-6 – rather than finding a new formula that combined elements of both.

It seems strange that Capcom has tried to do this multi-style catering, as such an approach was widely unpopular when the studio first tried it in 2012 with Resident Evil 6. Much like Requiem, that game was split into distinct sections that delivered different gameplay styles. Leon’s storyline, while admittedly still action heavy, was focused on more traditional horror goals, while Chris and Jake’s campaigns were almost Call of Duty-like in their approach to action. Granted, this time around, Capcom has done a much better job of both sides of the coin – Grace’s side of things is genuine survival horror, while Leon’s is a good tribute to the style of RE4 – but it’s nonetheless odd to see it take such a massive swing towards a campaign structure that had already done a lot of damage to the franchise. Towards the end of the game, it almost feels like you’re playing a more polished version of Resident Evil 6 rather than the successor to Resident Evil 7 and 8.

What really makes all this frustrating is that Capcom has shown with Resident Evil Village that you can still have these over-the-top action moments without undermining the horror and tension built up throughout the game. A key example can be found at the tail end of the campaign, when the perspective switches from Ethan to Chris Redfield – the classic Resident Evil hero who’s a proficient soldier at this point in the timeline. You play his sequence as an FPS, killing everything that stands in your way. But because this is a single sequence, rather than half of the game, it feels like a refreshing vignette rather than a case of split personality.

With it being the 30th anniversary of Resident Evil, it’s clear that Capcom’s goal for Requiem was to pay respect to and celebrate the many different things this series has been. And when it’s exploring those things in isolation, it’s undeniably compelling. I loved creeping around Rhodes Hill as Grace, and I loved ripping through the streets of Raccoon City as Leon. Together, though, these elements make for a campaign that feels fractured. Its lack of commitment to one style really hurts Requiem’s overall big picture, and in its worst moments the clash between horror and action undermines much of the tension built up as Grace and inflicts tonal whiplash. There’s a lot I like about Resident Evil Requiem, but I wish the game belonged to either Grace or Leon, not both of them.

Luis Joshua Gutierrez is a freelance writer who loves games. You can reach him at @ImLuisGutierrez on Twitter.

The Witcher franchise has always been a natural fit for the comic book medium (see our review of 2014’s The Witcher #1 for more). Now those stories are being brought to an entirely new audience, as WEBTOON reveals it’s acquired the rights to Dark Horse’s back catalog of The Witcher comics.

This is the latest collaboration between WEBTOON and Dark Horse, with the latter’s Cyberpunk 2077, Critical Role, and Avatar: The Last Airbender comics also appearing on the platform. Check out the slideshow gallery below to see how the series will look in the WEBTOON format:

WEBTOON is kicking things off with The Witcher: House of Glass, which was written by Paul Tobin, drawn by Joe Querio, and colored by Carlos Badilla. House of Glass is set in the world of the Witcher games and follows Geralt of Rivia as he makes his way through the titular haunted mansion.

Here’s the original logline for The Witcher: House of Glass:

Traveling near the edge of the Black Forest, monster hunter Geralt meets a widowed fisherman whose dead and murderous wife resides in an eerie mansion known as the House of Glass – which seems to have endless rooms, nothing to fill them with, and horror around every corner.

WEBTOON will begin serializing The Witcher on Monday, March 9 at 5pm PT. These stories will be adapted from the original Dark Horse graphic novels and modified for WEBTOON’s vertical scrolling format. New installments will be added weekly.

In other The Witcher news, reports suggest that The Witcher 3 could be getting another expansion. You can also check out our comprehensive timeline of all The Witcher books.

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on BlueSky.

Saber Interactive’s long-running development of its Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic remake is confirmed to still be underway.

In a recent interview with IGN, the chief creative officer of Saber, Tim Willits, answered our question regarding the project’s future with a short but simple: “Yes, it is still in development. That’s all I can say.”

The news will be of relief to the hordes of loyal fans of the now-classic RPG originally developed by Mass Effect and Dragon Age studio, BioWare. The modern reimagining was first revealed way back in 2021, but nothing has been officially seen or heard of it in the five years since.

A report in December 2025 from Game File revealed that Aspyr was no longer leading development on the remake, but that the reins had reportedly been handed over to Mad Head Games, the team behind the upcoming Hellraiser: Revival.

That same article also claimed that plans are not only in motion for the KOTOR reimagining, but a remake of its sequel, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2, had also been discussed.

“Juliet was the codename for a project where we were going to do a full remake of KOTOR II with modern art, modern gameplay, you know, keep the story and the characters and the general — the general content of KOTOR II, but remake it for modern hardware and modern machines with updated graphics and all those kind of things,” said Douglas Reilly, Lucasfilm Games vice president. “It was something we were discussing with Aspyr.”

Whether those full plans for remakes of the Knights of the Old Republic series ever come to fruition is yet to be seen; however, it looks like development is still pressing on when it comes to Saber’s work on the original.

This all comes after the reveal of Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic at the 2025 Game Awards, a brand new single-player RPG set in a galaxy far, far away, led by former KOTOR director, Casey Hudson. Do you think we’ll be playing this new game before the Knights of the Old Republic arrives? Let us know in the comments below!

For more from our interview with Saber’s Tim Willits, you can find some new details about the upcoming John Wick game, and the news that extreme horror game Hellraiser: Revival has secured its ESRB rating.

Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.

Bungie’s Marathon is out now, which means players can finally see how its microtransactions actually work and, crucially, how much everything costs.

The $40 extraction shooter is monetized in a number of ways, including via a premium battle pass and direct microtransactions for cosmetic items, such as playable character skins. As Bungie had signalled before Marathon went live, gameplay-affecting items are not available to buy, only cosmetics.

Still, some players have responded negatively to Marathon’s monetization, criticizing the price of the skins and the digital sales tactics Bungie has in place.

Straight off the bat, on launch day, Marathon has $15 cosmetic packs (they cost 1,500 Lux, Marathon’s premium virtual currency). These packs include a runner skin, a weapon skin, a cosmetic trinket of some type, and a player banner and profile pic. Runner skins are sold separately for around $12’s worth of Lux.

This alone has irked some who believe that Marathon, as a $40 game, should not be monetized in a similar fashion to free-to-play shooters like Fortnite or Apex Legends. Others, however, are unsurprised by these cosmetic packs, and have pointed out that they’re more expensive in other premium games, such as the more expensive mainline Call of Duty games.

But what has caused more of a stink is the denominations of Lux available in the store. A runner skin costs 1,120 Lux, but of course you can’t buy 1,120 Lux exactly from the store. Instead, you have to spend $10 to get 1,100 Lux (just 20 Lux shy of what you need), and then another $5 to get 500 Lux on top, which in total dollar terms matches the same price as the $15 bundle.

This is a common tactic in video games that not only forces you to spend more money than you want to get a particular item, leaving you with virtual currency spare that may encourage you to buy some more so you can buy another item. Call of Duty does this. FIFA does this. And now Marathon does this.

“I’m tired of these Bungie scummy tactics,” one fan said. “Even if I love the game, this store and season pass in 2026 is a shame.”

“Dude I look at the shop to find that if you spend 10 you’ll get 1,100 coins or LUX but these people set every character price to 1,120, so you’ll have to spend another five dollars,” said another player. “I hate this type of greed. I love the game but this is shallow.”

“Yea that’s dumb af,” said another. “And after spending $15 you’ll have 1,600 Lux so might as well get the entire bundle for 1,500. (Is what Bungie probably wants you to do) at that point why even sell the skin separately.”

Within the debate are a significant number of people who believe Marathon isn’t doing anything particularly outlandish here when it comes to monetization. They point to the fact that only cosmetics are for sale and that no-one is forced to buy anything extra to compete out on the battlefield as evidence that Bungie is doing things well enough for its new shooter. Others say that anyone who played Destiny 2, Bungie’s previous release, will find nothing here surprising.

And it doesn’t look like Marathon’s monetization has impacted the sentiment around the game at launch, either. At the time of this article’s publication, Marathon had a ‘very positive’ user review rating on Steam.

It’s also worth noting that Marathon Reward Passes do not expire, so you can buy a previous season’s Reward Passes if you miss out. You unlock rewards in your Rewards Passes using Silk, which is earned by playing the game. You can also earn cosmetics via the Codex, with others available for purchase.

We’ve got plenty more on Marathon, including one Bungie developer’s commitment to “fontslop,” and Bungie’s words of reassurance on Marathon’s difficulty curve. Check out IGN’s Marathon review so far to find out what we think.

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.