UK video games trade body UKIE has welcomed the government's decision to classify video games as being distinct from social media, as a ban on the latter for under-16s is set to be introduced.
Tech giant Microsoft is reportedly considering spinning off Xbox as a separate entity or restructuring the games division as a wholly owned subsidiary.
The general consensus on Asha Sharma's first 100 days as Xbox CEO has been largely positive. She has certainly confounded the fears of early detractors who took one look at her background in the company's Core AI division and decried her appointment to Xbox as a death knell. The primary fear seemed to be that she would turn Microsoft's gaming division into another trojan horse for getting Copilot onto everyone's devices; instead, last month she announced the cancellation of the Copilot project for consoles that had started before she arrived.
The GamesIndustry.biz Summer Party will take place Wednesday July 15, returning once again to Horatio's Bar on Brighton Pier.
John Buckley, head of publishing and communications at Palworld creator Pocketpair, says that big publishers need to get with the times. "The terms they offer and the way they structure their deals have increasingly become irrelevant to what the industry is today."
A new retrospective on Maxis' creature simulation game Spore outlines the operational challenges that shaped its nine-year development cycle.
Harvey Elliott, the CEO of Balatro and Abiotic publisher Playstack, has said the firm's sale to the owner of Fandom and GameSpot will not impact either, telling GamesIndustry.biz that new owner Integrated Media Company (IMC) had committed to maintaining Playstack separately from its media investments.
Nintendo has implemented purchase restrictions on the Switch 2 multi-language version in Japan.
Back at the start of April, it emerged that Take-Two had laid off its AI team as part of a restructuring initiative.
Xbox's newly anointed chief strategy officer, Matthew Ball, has said that the current spike in hardware pricing represents an opportunity for games streaming.
Global game content revenue increased 3.6% to $54.14 billion in Q1 2026, marking the seventh consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth, according to estimates reported by S&P Global Market Intelligence.
Singapore-based Jin Universe Studios has launched, backed by Arbitrum Gaming Ventures (AGV) and Bitkraft Ventures.
On the same day as Ubisoft announced it was closing its studios in Winnipeg and Belgrade and proposing further changes in Barcelona, it's now believed dozens of staff have been laid off from its San Francisco studio, too.
Xbox is reportedly considering major layoffs, telling staff, "we need to reassess [...] our investment priorities for the next five years" and warning "we've become too reliant on vendors to operate our systems and must become more self-reliant as an engineering culture to build for the future."
Ubisoft has carried out another round of cuts as part of its seemingly endless restructuring process, sources have told GamesIndustry.biz. It is closing its studios in Winnipeg and Belgrade and proposing further changes in Barcelona and to its global publishing team. 380 roles are understood to be at risk.
In September 2025, the news broke that a consortium of investors led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) had made an offer to buy Electronic Arts.
The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has warned that a proposed deepfake bill could hurt the games industry by failing to distinguish between AI-generated content and digital replicas.
The UK-based semiconductor and software design company Arm has revealed the game Neural Dawn, which takes advantage of Arm's neural graphics technology to allow the use of Unreal Engine MegaLights on mobile devices. Until now, the ray-tracing capabilities of MegaLights were not supported on mobile.
Frontier Developments reported its second-highest revenue to date, rising 16% to £104.8 million in FY26.
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma says the industry should prioritise reducing hardware production costs rather than focusing solely on developing the "most premium, high-performance consoles".
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