Video game retailer GameStop has reportedly closed hundreds of stores across the United States as the company continues to scale back its physical store presence.

According to social media posts tracking store shutdowns — first highlighted by Polygon — GameStop locations in numerous states have recently closed. The GS Closing blog, which independently monitors closures, currently lists 390 confirmed store shutdowns in the U.S., with an additional 10 locations reported but not yet verified.

The reported closures are consistent with GameStop’s previously disclosed plans. In its most recent filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission for the financial year ending, the company confirmed that it shut down 590 U.S. stores during fiscal year 2024. In the same filing, GameStop told investors it expected to close “a significant number of additional stores” during fiscal year 2025.

The retailer’s contraction is not limited to the United States, either. RNZ reports (h/t GamesInudstry) that GameStop has proposed closing its EB Games subsidiary in New Zealand. EB Games Managing Director Shane Stockwell reportedly sent an email to staff stating that the proposal is not final and that no decision will be made until a full consultation process has been completed with affected employees. According to GameStop’s filing, the company operates 38 stores in New Zealand.

GameStop has also continued to wind down its international operations. In recent years, the company has exited markets including Ireland, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany. It has sold its Italian subsidiary and is currently seeking buyers for its French and Canadian businesses.

While store closures continue, GameStop recently announced a new long-term performance award for CEO Ryan Cohen worth up to $35 million. To earn the reward, Cohen must increase the company’s market capitalization to $100 billion. As of this writing, GameStop’s market cap stands at approximately $9.52 billion, according to GamesIndustry.

The GameStop in my town is closing its doors forever effective 1/7/26.

This hit me in my heart… the world is changing pic.twitter.com/bXy4bCuwMl

— Sny_Tzu (@snytzu) January 3, 2026

Once one of the most dominant video game retailers out there, GameStop’s reputation has shifted significantly over the past decade. As the market moved toward digital distribution, the company has struggled to adapt its traditional retail model. GameStop has also faced long-standing criticism over its trade-in practices, which have often been viewed unfavorably by consumers.

GameStop’s long-term viability has been debated for years, but the company has managed to remain afloat to this point. In 2021, the company experienced a widely publicized stock surge driven by Reddit users on r/wallstreetbets, briefly pushing the company’s market value sharply higher as part of an effort to counter heavy short interest.

As store closures continue, GameStop remains in the midst of a broader effort to stabilize its business amid declining sales and a rapidly changing retail landscape.

Every gamer that we know uses Discord to some degree. Whether it’s coordinating offensive plays in Madden, trash-talking in NBA 2K26, or just hanging out with your online friends, the platform is the go-to hub for many gaming communities. However, recent reports from Bloomberg suggest significant changes are on the horizon. Discord has confidentially filed for an Initial Public Offering (IPO), a move that could take the company public and reshape its operations.

What Does Going Public Mean For Discord?

For the average gamer who might not follow business news, let’s look at this simply. An IPO is essentially a private company deciding to sell shares of itself to the public for the first time. It’s opening up ownership to the public, and of course, big investors. However, a public company has to report its financial results every quarter, answer to shareholders, and prioritize growth and profitability. It’s like the exact opposite of EA going private.

This allows investors to cash out, and the company raises more money. But why make this move now? Well, Discord has raised boatloads of cash, over $500 million in one round back in 2022 alone, and it was valued at $15 billion in 2021. That number is likely much higher now. Despite that, it hasn’t turned a consistent profit in the last few years. Going public gives it the capital to expand, and with investors wanting returns, an IPO is the next logical step other than selling the whole company.

Eurogamer spoke to George Osborn, creator of the Video Games Industry Memo, and here’s what he had to say about it:

“I think the most obvious impact is that the company is going to have to find ways to monetize more aggressively. The question will be how can it achieve that without aggravating its user base too much. Discord is completely reliant on those hundreds of thousands of users, and it’s going to have to strike a different balance than other social networks and media platforms that have gone public before.”

Things Are Going To Change For Gamers

Osborn further raises a great point that Discord’s value does not correlate to what people are paying for. Discord Nitro is a decent cash cow, but it doesn’t exactly translate to incredible year-on-year growth, the type that investors expect. He suspects that Discord might feature more advertising, Discord-exclusive cosmetics for specific games, or maybe even more games (Discord already has quite a few built into the app). 

Again, Discord is something that almost every gamer uses, and that’s quite the compelling target demographic for shareholders and advertisers. On a positive note, user safety might improve as those types of issues become more serious when concerning public companies. Discord isn’t exactly a safe haven for children, and I don’t think I need to elaborate on that too much. At the end of the day, time will tell what this means for Discord, but there will likely be massive changes in the coming year. 

Ubisoft, which received €1.16bn investment in 2025 from Tencent,  have closed its studio in Halifax, Canada, with the shutdown coming just a few weeks after the employees voted to unionise.  The studio had been running for over ten years.

“Over the past 24 months, Ubisoft has undertaken company-wide actions to streamline operations, improve efficiency, and reduce costs,” said a Ubisoft spokesperson. “As part of this, Ubisoft has made the difficult decision to close its Halifax studio. 71 positions will be affected. We are committed to supporting all impacted team members during this transition with resources, including comprehensive severance packages and additional career assistance.” 

Employees at Ubisoft Halifax formed a union under CWA Canada, which also includes employees from Bethesda Montreal, on December 18th, 2025. 74% of the staff voted in favour of the move.

“In an era marked by industry-wide uncertainty, studio closures, layoffs, and increasing instability, we want to make clear our commitment to one another and to our craft,” they stated at the time.

CWA Canada has not made any official comment about the timing of the two events, but is “demanding information”. “Today’s news is devastating,” commented CWA Canada president, Carmel Smyth. “We will pursue every legal recourse to ensure that the rights of these workers are respected and not infringed in any way.”

Rockstar Games was recently accused of ‘union busting’ after firing 30 employees who belonged to a union, stating that the employees were fired for sharing company information in a public forum. This has been denied by the staff.

Following the dismissals last week, the IWGB branded it as “a brazen act of illegal union busting”, with IWGB president Alex Marshall calling it “a calculated attack on workers organising for a collective voice and to improve their difficult working conditions.”

Source: GameDeveloper

The DRM-free PC game store GOG has been acquired by CD Projekt and GOG co-founder Michał Kiciński, branching it off from the CD Projekt Group and going private.

There’s no plans to change GOG’s business model, which continues to focus on providing a source for classic games, now with a dedicated preservation programme to ensure a select library continue to run on modern systems, and to sell all titles (old and new) without DRM.

While now independent of CD Projekt Group, they have immediately penned a deal to ensure that CDPR games remain on GOG going forward.

So, why the change? Was GOG in trouble? All parties say that no, it was doing well and is profitable on its own terms, but the CDPR want to focus fully on developing games.

“With our focus now fully on an ambitious development roadmap and expanding our franchises with new high-quality products, we felt this was the right time for this move,” said Michał Nowakowski, Joint CEO of CD Projekt. “For a long time now, GOG has been operating independently. Now it’s going into very good hands — we are convinced that with the support of Michał Kiciński, one of GOG’s co-founders, its future will be full of great projects and successes.”

Kiciński was a co-founder of both CD Projekt in 1994, and then also their digital storefront Good Old Games (rebranded simply as GOG) in 2008. He left the company at the end of 2010, but has remained one of its largest shareholders, with 9.99%, and his brother is a chair on the board.

In the announcement, he said, “CD Projekt and GOG share the same roots and values: freedom, independence, and a genuine sense of ownership. I believe that CD Projekt, with its exceptional AAA games, will stand, as always, behind the GOG offering — making GOG the best place on the planet to purchase The Witcher and Cyberpunk games, both existing titles and the new ones we all anticipate so much.

“GOG and Michał Kiciński are aligned by a shared belief that games should live forever,” said Maciej Gołębiewski, Managing Director of GOG. “In a market that’s getting more crowded, more locked-in, and forgets classic games at an increasing pace, we’re doubling down on what only GOG does: reviving classics, keeping them playable on modern PCs, and helping great games find their audience over time.”

Source: GOG

Update 30/12/25 – A Ubisoft spokesperson has issued a statement with some further details and reassurances over the reports of hacking affecting Rainbow Six Siege X over the weekend.

With the game back online, Ubisoft’s investigation is ongoing, but notes that actual effects were able to be rolled back and that neither personal data or game source code was compromised.

Here’s the statement:

Rainbow Six Siege recently experienced a cyberattack causing limited disruptions, including fake ban notifications and unauthorized credit grants. While we are continuing our investigation, as of this time, there is no indication that any personal data nor source code was compromised as a result of this incident. To help resolve the issue, we initiated a temporary server shutdown and rolled back the unauthorized credit grants. Rainbow Six Siege is currently back online and players are returning to the game.    

The original story follows.

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Rainbow Six Siege X is now back online after the servers were shut down for over two days while Ubisoft dealt with a massive security breach.  In the evening of 26th December players began to notice billions of in-game currency being added to their accounts and super rare skins being dropping into their inventories. Other players were banned, and some were unbanned.

Ubisoft have now rolled back all the data so players should have the correct amount of in-game credit, known as Renown. They state that players may find themselves in a queue to get back in to the game.

The event has kicked off a war of words between various hacking groups who are claiming they are responsible, and also that one groups have stolen the source code for every Ubisoft game. These claims seem to be an exaggeration and probably not true.

However, there is evidence to suggest that Ubisoft were not hacked at all. It is reported that Ubisoft had outsourced helpdesk support to a company in India and that an employee there was bribed to give “Panel Access” to a third party. This then gave the third party access to user accounts, ban functions and other facilities. If this is true then Ubisoft were not hacked, it was bribery and human corruption that caused the issues.

It is also reported that another group is contacting people on Telegram claiming they have their personal details from hacking Ubisoft, and they are demanding money. This appears to be a scam and they have no connection to the group that breached the Rainbow Six servers. Ubisoft have, so far, not stated that any user data was breached.

Ubisoft overhauled the decade-old tactical shooter in June of this year, renaming it Rainbow Six Siege X, and added a whole host of technical improvements, as well as transitioning the game to a free-to-play model.

Rainbow Six is also one of three games hived off to a separate Ubisoft company, along with Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry.

Source: thecybersecguru.com

Konami’s Motoi Okamoto, producer of the Silent Hill franchise, has said that the company hopes to release a Silent Hill game every year.

“Following the release of Silent Hill 2 in October 2024, we were able to deliverSilent Hill f  ​​in September 2025, and the Silent Hill series is now back on track,” said Okamoto (via Google Translate). “We aim to release about one title per year, including both announced and unannounced titles. We’re not sure how far we can achieve this, but we’ll do our best as the producer of the Silent Hill series. Ideally, we’d like to keep the buzz around Silent Hill constant. We’ll do our best to provide you with new updates, so we hope you’ll wait a little longer.”

The announced games are Silent Hill Townfall, which is in development at No Code, and a remake of the original Silent Hill by Bloober Team is also in the works. There’s also the new Silent Hill film that was meant to be out in 2025, but that seems rather unlikely now.  Bloober Team announced the remake of the first Silent Hill game in June 2025 and at the time said they had been working on for three years. Quite why Konami remade Silent Hill 2 first is a bit odd, but they must have had their reasons.

It seems that Konami are going to farm out the Silent Hill IP to different development teams to create games, so they may not all be in the classic Silent Hill mould.

Nick loved Silent Hill f and gave it 10/10 in his review. “Silent Hill f isn’t just a return to form, it’s a landmark entry in the series. Konami. NeoBards and Ryukishi07 have knocked it out of the park. For me, this isn’t just Game of the Year material, it’s an integral piece of Silent Hill history.”

Source: Famitsu

The new owner of the digital store will be one of the founders of CD PROJEKT, Michał Kiciński.

More details: https://gameworldobserver.com/2025/12/30/cd-projekt-announced-the-sale-of-gog-for-25-million

In September, the Ministry of Finance of Mexico proposed introducing an 8% tax on games containing “violent” content. Three months later, this idea was abandoned.

More details: https://gameworldobserver.com/2025/12/26/in-mexico-there-will-still-be-no-tax-on-violent-video-games

Dissatisfaction with Square Enix’s work does not prevent the 3D Investment Partners fund from continuing to purchase shares of the Japanese company. Recently, they increased their stake from 14.36% to 16.48%.

More details: https://gameworldobserver.com/2025/12/25/an-investor-who-criticized-the-management-of-square-enix-has-increased-their-stake-in-the-company

The gaming industry is seeing an increasing number of unions. Now, the Canadian studio Ubisoft Halifax has announced the formation of a labor union.

More details: https://gameworldobserver.com/2025/12/24/the-developers-of-rainbow-six-mobile-have-formed-a-union

Naughty Dog is notoriously known as a studio where employees periodically have to work excessive overtime. According to sources cited by Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier, the team recently faced another round of crunches—this time related to the game Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.

More details: https://gameworldobserver.com/2025/12/19/report-naughty-dog-forced-employees-to-crunch-to-meet-the-deadline-for-the-new-game-demo

The dispute over the plagiarism of the Horizon game series has been resolved.

More details: https://gameworldobserver.com/2025/12/18/sony-resolved-its-conflict-with-tencent-the-game-light-of-motiram-has-been-removed-from-stores

According to GamesIndustry, the Chinese giant has acquired a minority stake in Drama Studios. Neither the exact size of the stake nor the amount of the transaction has been publicly disclosed.

More details: https://gameworldobserver.com/2025/12/17/tencent-has-invested-in-the-developers-of-the-bodycam-shooter-unrecord

The terms and conditions of the deal are not disclosed.

More details: https://gameworldobserver.com/2025/12/16/ubisoft-acquired-the-amazon-games-montreal-studio

The French studio Sandfall Interactive mentioned this amount in an interview with The New York Times.

More details: https://gameworldobserver.com/2025/12/12/the-creators-of-clair-obscur-expedition-33-spent-less-than-10-million-developing-the-game

The issue of the dismissal of several dozen employees from Rockstar Games was raised at the latest session of the British Parliament.

More details: https://gameworldobserver.com/2025/12/11/the-uk-government-will-conduct-an-investigation-into-the-layoffs-at-rockstar-games

Last evening, December 8, a new development in the situation with the sale of Warner Bros. Discovery was revealed. Paramount announced that it does not intend to hand over the media giant to Netflix competitors and wants to acquire it itself.

More details: https://gameworldobserver.com/2025/12/09/paramount-announced-the-beginning-of-a-hostile-takeover-of-warner-bros-discovery

The transaction amount will be $82.7 billion.

More details: https://gameworldobserver.com/2025/12/05/netflix-acquires-warner-bros-discovery-including-its-gaming-studios-too

Netflix continues to divest its gaming assets, reports journalist Stephen Totilo from Game File. This time, the company has decided to sell the studio Spry Fox, a pioneer of merge games, back to its founders.

More details: https://gameworldobserver.com/2025/12/04/spry-fox-will-become-independent-again-as-the-studios-founders-buy-it-back-from-netflix

If you were among those hoping for the tidal shift of the games industry to move in favor of workers, this news is not exactly something that will fill you with confidence in that hope. Ubisoft Halifax, the studio that developed titles like Assassin’s Creed Rebellion and Rainbow Six Mobile, officially formed a union in […]