EasyGamerNews

Tag: Industry

  • Guerrilla Games strips live-service elements from Horizon Hunters Gathering

    Bloomberg reported this week that Guerrilla Games is stripping the live-service elements out of Horizon Hunters Gathering following poor internal playtests, restructuring it into a smaller, story-focused co-op game instead. The project isn’t cancelled, but the studio reportedly has until December to prove the new direction to Sony leadership.

    This fits a pattern that’s become hard to ignore at PlayStation. Concord, The Last of Us Online, and a live-service God of War project were all cancelled before reaching release. Whether Horizon Hunters Gathering’s retooled version survives that same scrutiny is worth watching over the next few months.

  • Gamescom Opening Night Live: Witcher 3 Remastered, Path of Exile 2’s 1.0 date, and more

    Gamescom’s Opening Night Live delivered a genuine surprise this year. The Witcher 3: Remastered is a free upgrade for existing owners, launching September 29 with overhauled combat, visuals, and monster AI, alongside a new expansion called Songs of the Past coming next year.

    Path of Exile 2 finally has its full 1.0 release date: December 11. Mega Man 12 was revealed during the show, and Mega Man: Dual Override got moved up a full year, now targeting a 2026 release instead of its previously expected window. Silent Hill: Townfall also picked up a concrete release date, September 24, for PC and PS5.

    Gamescom itself runs through August 30, so it’s worth watching for further announcements before things wrap up.

  • GTA 6 leaks trigger a federal lawsuit and a wave of malware scams

    Real gameplay footage has continued leaking from an account calling themselves Cyberleek, including one clip that appears to prove the leaker has live control over an actual playable build of the game. Take-Two responded with federal DMCA subpoenas against both Microsoft and Discord, approved by a New York court, and both companies have until September 4 to comply.

    The leaker, meanwhile, has started teasing additional footage, including strip club gameplay, in exchange for donations to their cryptocurrency wallet, which tells you most of what you need to know about the actual motive behind this.

    Separately, and more urgently for players, the leaks have triggered a wave of fake “playable build” downloads circulating on Discord and torrent sites. These carry infostealers and remote access trojans disguised as leaked game files, with some listings claiming file sizes over 100GB. Fake Rockstar Social Club login pages are also circulating to phish credentials.

    The bottom line is worth repeating clearly: there is no public GTA 6 build, no beta, and no PC version right now, period. The game launches November 19 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S only. Anything claiming otherwise, a download, a beta invite, an early access key, is malware or a phishing attempt.

    If you want a general layer of protection against phishing attempts like this, we use and are an affiliate for NordVPN, its built-in threat protection blocks known phishing and scam sites in real time, before you’re able to enter a password or lose money. It’s currently offering 75 percent off two-year plans.

  • Elder Scrolls VI speculation collides with layoffs and protests at Bethesda

    Elder Scrolls VI speculation collides with layoffs and protests at Bethesda

    Elder Scrolls VI speculation picked back up this week, but it’s arriving alongside a harder story about layoffs and labor unrest at Bethesda, and the two are worth covering honestly rather than separately.

    The speculation started with Xbox CEO Asha Sharma’s own post on August 11: “Live playthrough of The Elder Scrolls VI: ********,” written after she visited Bethesda’s Rockville studio. Fans quickly matched the eight asterisks to the long-rumored subtitle Sentinel, and pointed back to a 2023 Starfield character-creation screen that reportedly ciphers out to the same word. Former Bethesda lore writer Michael Kirkbride replied “yep” when asked if Sentinel was correct, though he no longer works at the studio, so that’s him agreeing with a theory, not an official confirmation. Nothing about the game itself has been confirmed by Bethesda.

    That studio visit was met with a protest, an inflatable rat and roughly 800 red flags representing laid-off workers. Separately, lead character artist Christiane Meister, who worked on every Elder Scrolls game since Morrowind, was laid off after 27 years as part of Microsoft’s broader cuts, roughly 1,600 positions eliminated so far, with a total of around 3,200 planned by mid-2027.

    On August 18, Xbox and Bethesda union workers held coordinated “Save Our Devs” rallies across nine cities in the US and Canada, including Rockville, Austin, Dallas, Montreal, Redmond, and Irvine. One union member said the group had submitted a proposal back in February on how to handle a reduction in force fairly, and that the company sat on it for four months before proceeding with layoffs regardless.

    Worth being clear about what’s confirmed and what isn’t here: the layoffs and protests are real, documented events. The Sentinel subtitle is fan speculation with some circumstantial support, not an announcement. Both are worth watching, but only one of them is a confirmed fact right now.

  • Halo Campaign Evolved sold 351,000 copies on PS5 in its first week

    Halo Campaign Evolved sold 351,000 copies on PS5 in its first week

    Halo Campaign Evolved sold approximately 351,000 copies on PlayStation 5 in its first week, a figure that came in below what most analysts expected for the first mainline Halo title ever released on Sony hardware. The always-online requirement controversy and a mixed PC launch reception likely both played a role in softening the number.

    The game reportedly performed significantly better on Xbox and through PC Game Pass, though subscriber engagement numbers through Game Pass aren’t publicly broken out, so a direct comparison isn’t possible. For a launch that was pitched as a landmark crossover moment, a below-expectations PS5 debut is worth watching as a data point on how much platform exclusivity history still matters to buying decisions, even when a game is technically available everywhere.

  • Wolfenstein 3 is confirmed in development at MachineGames

    Wolfenstein 3 is confirmed in development at MachineGames

    Multiple sources confirmed during QuakeCon week that Wolfenstein 3 is in active development at MachineGames, the studio behind Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and the modern Wolfenstein series. This is a different project from the Wolfenstein 2009 remaster rumor that’s been circulating separately, this is the actual conclusion to the New Order trilogy that began in 2014 and continued with The New Colossus in 2017.

    There’s no release date, no official confirmation from Bethesda or MachineGames directly, and no platforms have been named. But the reporting comes from multiple outlets independently, and it lines up with Bethesda’s stated direction of investing further in its established franchises following the recent Xbox restructuring.

    If there’s more to learn, it’ll likely surface at or before Gamescom 2026, which opens August 26. Worth watching that event’s Opening Night Live for anything further.