Last June, Jagex - the developers of medieval MMO Runescape - found themselves at odds with players after deciding not to create any new content for Pride Month. Disputed internally at the studio before the discussion then leaked online, the decision appeared to be a retreat in the face of a world turning on minority groups.

Following up in September, Games Industry asked Jagex CEO Jon Bellamy if he stood by the call to simply re-run existing Pride-themed quests and events. "Ultimately, my job is governance and protection as much as anything else, and so sometimes those kinds of harsh decisions have to be made to protect the imminent future of the game," he told them. "If there are tough decisions to be made next year, we'll make them. If the world has changed a bit and the environment is different, we will react accordingly."

Five months on and with this year's Pride Month on the horizon, we've asked if the environment is different.

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This is probably a sentence that could be said literally any day of the week, but a new cosy farming sim is on the block, this time taking the form of Starsand Island. The flavour on this occasion is of the anime variety, with some slightly goofier farming mechanics (i.e. turning your watermelon patch into one singular, 10 foot tall watermelon), some very Pokemon Legends: Arceus looking combat, and some appropriately cute animals to hang out with. And there's skateboarding! But never do launches go all that smoothly, as developer Seed Sparkle Lab have had to do a dash of damage control regarding some concerns over the game.

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Pokémon Pokopia is almost here, and we're confident it might be a hit, especially after learning Minecraft-like persistent servers are part of the game. Now we're just hoping it delivers on all its promise when it launches on 5th March. Wanna get more hyped tho?

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So, we know Pokémon Pokopia is looking impressive so far, and we've also been told it's a pretty long game even if you aren't planning on sticking around after the credits roll. With so much to do and a multiplayer option that's promising one of the most relaxing experiences of the year, how do its online functionalities work exactly?

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Though it may seem like we just had a big life sim release in Heartopia, 2026 actually has more than one highly-anticipated release in that particular subgenre of cozy game. The next big one on the horizon is Starsand Island, the life and farming sim from Seed Sparkle Lab.

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Arknights: Endfield developer Gryphline has a good reason to celebrate, as the upcoming free-to-play action RPG has achieved yet another milestone. The developer announced today that Endfield already has over 35 million pre-registrations.

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The Game Awards 2025 ceremony brought us yet more gacha game news, this time a big announcement for Arknights: Endfield. The free-to-play game set in the the universe of Arknights has been in various forms of closed tests for a while, but it finally has a release date.

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New games performed really well on Steam last year - notably better than the year before.

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Microsoft has revealed the first batch of games coming to its Xbox Game Pass subscription service this January.

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It's been another strange, difficult, and yet somehow also brilliant year for video games in 2025. Triple-A releases have been sparse again, compared to the boom times of old, with a great big GTA 6-shaped hole left in the final few months of the year. And yet once again, every gap left by the established order has been filled twice over with something brilliantly new.

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In a loud world where everyone is battling to be heard, it's easy to forget that the quiet and smaller moments of kindness hold the most power. A lot of the time, it's easy to think that keeping to yourself is the easiest way to deal with things, whether you're dealing with your own pain or trying to find the right way to navigate someone else's. It's never easy to know what to do, we're all trying our best - after all this is all our first time being human. But one truth remains:a little kindness goes a long way. Winter Burrow, the intrepid little mouse game, shows this more than anything else I've played in 2025.

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Right, get ready for some chatter about where the contents of our collective wallets have gone over the past year. Valve's list of the highest-grossing games on Steam in 2025 has emerged from the great mists, and in a nice revelation, features a larger number of fresh releases than last year's ranking. That's alongside all of the moderately to quite old stuff which more folks keep hopping on the train of with every passing 12 month period.

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As the Bob Dylan song goes, how many lush alien planets must a Man presumptuously land on and turn into poorly optimised Toyota plants before he finally decides he’s sick of being an extractivist piece of shit? Dylan was being rhetorical, but I studied at the school of Homer Simpson, and want you to give me an actual figure. I’m going to say: four and a half. If you’ve yet to hit your personal quota, well, here’s StarRupture out now in early access.

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Oodles of games are coming out in 2026, and many look impressive. There's the new Resident Evil, yet another reimagining of Tomb Raider 1, and a 007 game that reminds me of the often-forgotten cartoon series James Bond Jr. All will probably be decent, and some might even dictate my guide writing duties.

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A recap: of the seven hopefuls I slipped into our bulk 2025 list of "Oh, that looks alright" games, only three actually released in 2025, and one of them wasn’t very good. If it’s the hope that kills you, I am therefore dead four, arguably five times over. Real Necron shit, honestly.

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There are two Brendan Greene's (or PlayerUnknown's, however you prefer to refer to the game dev). There is the Brendan Greene who wants to listen to the feedback offered up by those partaking in the early access period of his current game, Prologue: Go Wayback. And there is the Brendan Greene who doesn't, for quite reasonable reasons. Both of these are still him, and both show up in a recent interview.

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When I first caught a very quick glimpse at Into the Fire, the kind of glimpse where you more just see a character design amidst a bunch of fire, I thought it was a new simulation game. A fireman sim, that kind of thing, the kind of game I'm sure exists already without needing to Google it. Into the Fire is not that at all. There is fire, and there is rescue, but there are also ancient mysteries amongst natural disasters, fiery, destructive jellyfish-esque spirits, and a tantalizing mix of science-fiction, folklore, and the supernatural.

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Tencent has agreed to halt all promotion and public testing of Light of Motiram - the post-apocalyptic open-world survival game Sony previously accused of being a "slavish clone" of PlayStation's Horizon series in a lawsuit - as the two companies battle it out in court.

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Surprise! Chris Redfield, Excella Gionne, and an adult version of Sherry Birkin are all on their way to Resident Evil: Survival Unit.

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An upcoming Pokémon game may have a darker story than you'd expect given its cheerful look and typical Nintendo vibrancy. With links to the original Pokémon game trilogy and hints at older lore, what appears to be a quirky spin on the franchise might actually have a sadder side if fan theories are spot on.

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