The first is a turn-based strategy take on the classic Dave Theurer-developed arcade game Missile Command; one that shouldn’t work in theory, but genuinely does. The second is a misguided attempt to add context to the strategy gameplay by placing you in an underground bunker with a group of friends, forced to unlock its mysteries via first-person perspective. Frankly, I wish this second half had been left on the cutting room floor.
Activision has pulled Call of Duty: WWII on Xbox PC offline just days after it was added to Game Pass, amid reports of hacking via Remote Code Execution (RCE).
This isn’t about PC players cheating in-game via wall hacks and aim bots. Rather this is about unsuspecting Game Pass players losing control of their PCs through a security exploit.
According to Cloudflare, a remote code execution (RCE) attack is where an attacker runs malicious code on an organization’s computers or network: “The ability to execute attacker-controlled code can be used for various purposes, including deploying additional malware or stealing sensitive data.”
Activision failed to provide any further details in its brief statement, below, instead simply confirming Sledgehammer’s 2017 shooter was “brought offline” on PC while it investigates reports of “an issue.” However, players in the comments of the message, published on July 5, are reporting that their computers were accessed due to a security vulnerability that lets hackers take control of remote PCs, suggesting these reports and Activision’s action are linked.
📢 Call of Duty: WWII
Call of Duty: WWII on PC Microsoft Store was brought offline while we investigate reports of an issue
That was two days ago now, and there’s been no update since. IGN has asked Activision for comment.
The issue hit the headlines after X / Twitter user @wrioh75753 published a viral clip, below, appearing to show their game of Call of Duty: WWII suffering from a hack during a livestream. The post has so-far been viewed 2.3 million times.
The reports emerged in the wake of Microsoft’s sweeping layoffs, which hit its gaming business hard last week. Call of Duty developers were among the many Microsoft-owned studios to suffer job cuts, although Microsoft has so-far failed to detail exactly how many employees were affected. Black Ops 7 is due out later this year.
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.
“Celebrating 25 years of Final Fantasy 9 today,” said a tweet posted to the game’s official X/Twitter account yesterday, July 6. “When a theatre troupe set out for a royal kidnapping, Zidane and Princess Garnet are thrown into an emotional adventure that’s never left the hearts of those who’ve played it. What does FFIX mean to you?”
Then, in a follow-up message posted today (July 7), Square Enix invited players aged 13 and up in selected countries to submit their FF9 fan art between now and the end of October. If selected, it will then be used on the Final Fantasy portal site, as well as official social network accounts.
The X/Twitter account of passion project Final Fantasy 9: Memoria Project further stoked speculation earlier today by quote-tweeting Square’s post, adding: “When are we going to tell them, Square Enix?”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the game’s social media and Reddit communities have been full of shocked players commenting on the lack of news. “This CANNOT be it bro,” said one. “The remake. Announce the remake,” while another said: “At least confirm or deny the remake rumors plz.”
“The 25th anniversary is a big milestone and announcing it would be the best right now. My hopes are gone,” added another disappointed fan. Interestingly, though, some fans have taken this lack of announcement as a sign there may still be news to come.
“October is the month, boys,” said this excited player, while another added: “Cutoff date is the end of October because y’all will reveal the FF9 Remake in November, right?”
In a Reddit thread entitled, “You’ve reached a checkpoint. How are you doing given the so far disappointment of no announcement?”, one fan replied: “At this point I’ve played myself more than I’ve played the actual game. Just call me Zorn & Thorn ’cause I’m a certified resident of Clown Town.”
Even Domino’s Pizza can’t believe we haven’t had an announcement yet…
Final Fantasy 9 remake rumors have swirled around Square Enix ever since the unannounced game emerged as part of a 2021 Nvidia leak of upcoming titles. The list, confirmed legit by Nvidia but potentially outdated, includes a number of Square Enix games the company has either announced or released since, such as the Chrono Cross remaster, Kingdom Hearts 4, the Final Fantasy Tactics remake, and of course the Final Fantasy 7 remake for PC. However, Final Fantasy 9 remake has yet to materialize. Just a few months before the Nvidia leak, in June 2021, a Final Fantasy 9 animated series was reported to be in development, although we haven’t heard anything about it in the years since, either.
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.
Evacuate your Deep Desert tents, Dune: Awakening‘s latest patch enacts a timer tweak aimed at eliminating cheeky PvP zone border camping. It’s also added some extra rewards to the Landsraad and switched up how goodies are distributed to PvE players.
This patch comes as Funcom continue to respond to player feedback about the endgame loop, having already moved to split the Deep Desert between PvP and PvE in order to placate folks who aren’t a fan of the latter. Griefing’s also been a big topic of debate, with ornithopters proving just as deadly as those big worms.
Intrepid fans have been doing some serious detective work on Nintendo’s N64 trailer from May and they think they’ve identified several as-yet-unannounced releases for Nintendo Switch Online.
As highlighted by @ImakuniVT (thanks, VGC), the section of the trailer showing off the app’s new CRT filter has the blurred game selection screen shown below the settings screen. Playing around with layers and a little Gaussian Blur, fans have been busy identifying potential games in the background, including Donkey Kong 64, Forsaken 64, Glover, Super Smash Bros., and Rayman 2.
Pokémon Go has teased the arrival of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’s Paradox creatures within the hit smartphone game.
Paradox Pokémon are new versions of familiar creatures from alternate past and future realities, and debuted in the series’ most recent mainline games, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet for Nintendo Switch.
Artwork for Pokémon Go’s 9th anniversary shows the primordial Great Tusk, which looks like it’s wandered off the set of Jurassic World Rebirth, and the neon-coated Iron Treads, which could have rolled straight out of Cyberpunk 2077. Both are versions of the classic Pokémon Donphan — and now fans are debating how Paradox Pokémon will debut.
In Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, players can encounter Paradox Pokémon in the wild — though in Pokémon Go, there’s an expectation that these powerful creatures will likely pop up in raids, similar to how the Ultra Beasts from Pokémon Sun and Moon debuted.
Paradox Pokémon originally being spotted in Scarlet/Violet’s “Area Zero” crater has meanwhile led some fans to suggest the species would be a good fit for this year’s Pokémon Go Wild Area event, which is designed to feel like something of a safari.
22 Paradox Pokémon species exist, with a selection of more common and Legendary Pokémon remixed. Jigglypuff gets a billion-year-old variant named Scream Tail, for example, while the Legendary Terrakion gets a new variant, Iron Boulder, that looks like an anime robot. Regardless of how some of the Paradox species are introduced, these new versions of Legendary creatures seem most likely to be found in raids.
One note of caution about Pokémon Go’s anniversary artwork is that the game has, on occasion, not always followed through with what these images have set up. Fans have been quick to point to past teases for Mega Mewtwo and fan-favorite Ghost critter Mimikyu in previous annual artworks, only to not materialise. But Pokémon Go’s developer has seemingly become wiser to these expectations — and indeed Paradox Pokémon are the logical choice for the next big selection of creatures to join the game, after the recent debut of Gigantamax creatures, the fully-launched Ultra Beasts and almost all Mega Pokémon now being available.
Other teases in this year’s artwork include Gigantamax Butterfree, which fans expect to debut soon, Mega Metagross, one of the game’s last remaining Mega species yet to turn up, and a player avatar receiving a virtual thumbs up (which some fans are taking as a sign that remote communication or even remote trading might be arriving).
And then there’s Zygarde, star of the upcoming Pokémon Legends Z-A for Switch and Switch 2. While already in Pokémon Go, fans are currently limited to having just one of the creature. Could we see more become available, and potentially through Mega Raids, if Zygarde does get a Mega in Z-A? As with the temporally-divergent Paradox Pokémon themselves, time will tell.
Are you pretty happy right now? Well, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2, the follow-up to that Cyberpunk 2077 Netflix anime, will make you nice and miserable when it arrives.
CD Projekt revealed this past weekend that the upcoming series, which’ll deliver a fresh standalone tale set in Night City, is currently in production. Animation studio Trigger have returned to work on Edgerunners 2, with Kai Ikarashi directing and Bartosz Sztybor wearing many hats as writer/showrunner/producer. Right, from here on there’ll be spoilers for the first Cyberpunk Edgerunners series, so you’ve been warned.
The closure has affected 100 workers, writer The Journal, with one anonymous staff member calling it “a big shock” – especially since they’d had meetings with “the publisher” the day before. While the publisher aren’t named directly, former staff have mentioned Microsoft cuts in their announcements.
Hot on the heels of the layoffs that have swept through Xbox, the founder of Microsoft-owned Arkane Studios has hit out at Game Pass, whose subscription model he called “unsustainable.”
Raphael Colantonio, who founded the Dishonored and Prey developer and served as its president before leaving in 2017 to start Weird West maker WolfEye Studios, took to social media to ask: “Why is no-one talking about the elephant in the room? Cough cough (Gamepass).”
When asked to expand on his thoughts on Game Pass, which Weird West launched straight into as a day one title in March 2022, Colantonio said: “I think Gamepass is an unsustainable model that has been increasingly damaging the industry for a decade, subsidized by MS’s ‘infinite money,’ but at some point reality has to hit. I don’t think GP can co-exist with other models, they’ll either kill everyone else, or give up.”
Colantonio’s comment sparked a vociferous debate about the pros and cons of Game Pass in industry terms as well as for the customer. Microsoft’s subscription service has been called many things over the years: the death of the video game industry; the savior of smaller developers who benefit greatly from payments made by Microsoft to secure their games; and everything in between. During the great Xbox FTC trial to decide the fate of Microsoft’s $69 billion aquisition of Call of Duty maker Activision Blizzard, then PlayStation boss Jim Ryan claimed that he had talked to “all the publishers” and that, unanimously, they all hated Game Pass “because it is value destructive.” He also said Microsoft “appears to be losing a lot of money on it.”
Back in 2021, Xbox boss Phil Spencer countered Game Pass doomsayers, saying: “I know there’s a lot of people that like to write [that] we’re burning cash right now for some future pot of gold at the end. No. Game Pass is very, very sustainable right now as it sits. And it continues to grow.”
That was four years ago. What about now, in the wake of cuts that have seen Rare’s Everwild, the Perfect Dark reboot, and an unannounced MMO in the works at developer behind The Elder Scrolls Online all canceled?
Colantonio’s comments were backed by a number of industry peers, including the former VP of biz dev at Epic Games. Michael Douse, publishing director at Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian, said that the biggest concern right now revolves around what happens when all that money runs out. This, Douse added, is “one of the main economic reasons people I know haven’t shifted to its business model. The infinite money thing never made any sense.”
(It’s worth noting that Baldur’s Gate 3 has so far not launched in Game Pass or PlayStation Plus.)
Colantonio then ridiculed Microsoft’s insistence that launching games into Game Pass did not impact sales, only to later admit the contrary.
Douse responded to to say he prefers the Sony way of doing things. Sony’s PlayStation Plus policy is to keep first-party games off the subscription service at launch, only adding them some time later. That’s why you won’t see this year’s Sony’s Ghost of Yotei launch straight into PS Plus, but you will see Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 as a day one Game Pass launch.
“The economics never made sense, but at the same time I do recognize that for smaller teams with new or riskier IPs it helped derisk,” Douse said. “Much prefer Sony’s ‘lifecycle management’ strategy.”
“Yeah, the only way GP can co-exist without hurting everyone is for the back catalogue,” Colantonio concluded.
He then went on to insist that “the maths don’t work for most publishers/devs nor for Xbox once they stop investing.”
Colantonio was also asked why Microsoft would continue to push Game Pass if it were unsustainable, even now, eight years after it launched. He responded to say that Game Pass isn’t profitable, Microsoft is still in the “customer acquisition phase”, and the company hopes that one day, subscription revenue will make its significant investment pay off.
Colantonio explained that Game Pass on its own cannot be considered profitable because you need to factor in the billions of dollars Microsoft has spent acquiring content for the subscription service, and he includes Bethesda owner ZeniMax and Activision Blizzard in that equation. “It’s a spreadsheet trick where they don’t put that detail in a profit and loss section, but instead in the amortization over time,” he claimed.
Game Pass is of course an incredible deal for the gamer that lets subscribers dip in and out of a long list of games for a fraction of the cost of buying those games standalone. Game Pass is often said to be too good to be true because of how cheap it is relative to what it offers. When you throw in every game Microsoft has on its books as a day one Game Pass launch (Call of Duty included), the deal feels even better.
For Colantonio, though, the Game Pass deal is “too good.”
“What *might* happen once MS has won: the games will start to suck and your sub will go up,” he added. “Why? Because the current amazing deal you have is subsided by MS bleeding money into it with the hope they’ll kill the competition, but once they manage to do it, things will get real.”
He added: “… it’s a long game that involves throwing a tsunami at the entire ecosystem of the industry. Only the gamers like it because the offer is too good to be true, but eventually even gamers will hate it when they realize the effects on the games.”
Microsoft does not report on the success of Game Pass either way in financial terms. Indeed, its reporting on its gaming business is vague at best. In its last financial report (for the quarter ending March 31, 2025), Microsoft said Xbox content and services grew 8% year-over-year, which was in part due to growth in Xbox Game Pass. PC Game Pass revenue increased 45% year-over-year. But we don’t have an updated figure for how many subscribers Game Pass has, nor how much money it brings in.
In an April interview with Variety, Microsoft gaming boss Phil Spencer was asked how he views Game Pass’s ongoing role in the larger Xbox business. Spencer replied to say he thinks about Game Pass as “a healthy option for certain people,” but admitted “it’s not for everybody.”
“Our biggest areas of growth right now are PC and Cloud, which makes sense, since consoles, all up, are a good business, they’re an established business, but they’re not really a growing segment in gaming,” he said.
“So we’ve got good growth on PC, we’ve got growth on Cloud, in terms of users and hours. And console continues to be a really healthy part of Game Pass. But there isn’t a unique need for Game Pass to be the only way for people to play. If everybody who’s a Game Pass subscriber instead decided to buy their games, that’s good for the business as well.
“For me, I look at Game Pass as a healthy option for certain people. It’s not for everybody. If you play one or two games a year, Game Pass probably isn’t the right business model for you, you should just buy those two games, and that would make total sense. But I want you to have the choice. So we remain focused on everything that’s on Game Pass is also available to buy. We’re making those games available to buy in more places.
“And I look at the overall hours of people who are playing on Xbox, playing our games, and that’s a number that continues to grow fairly substantially, and that’s really the metric I think about for success. And Game Pass has been an important part of that, but I don’t try to solve for Game Pass specifically on its own. It’s kind of part of the equation for Xbox finding new players.”
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.
Well well well — one month with the Switch 2, and we’re still swimming in eShop games. Yep, it’s time for eShop Selects for June 2025!
Who needs Mario Kart World when you’ve got backwards compatibility, eh? Just because we have a new console, doesn’t mean we’re just looking at Switch 2 games. And going forward, eShop Selects will be looking at eShop games on both consoles.
