Video games
fromKotaku
1 day agoEpic Is Reportedly Making A Disney-Themed Extraction Shooter
Epic is developing an extraction shooter featuring Disney characters, expected to launch in November.
I haven't played Crimson Desert enough, but we had everything that I've seen from Crimson Desert in the plans for that game. It was signed with a big publisher that has a lot of famous IPs...And then they just changed business direction again and wanted to focus on their existing IPs instead of new ones. They broke up with us on a text message, which I will never forgive them for.
According to Rémi Verschelde, project manager of Godot Engine and co-founder of the platform's financial backer W4 Games, the never-ending wave of "AI slop" pull requests on Godot's GitHub is becoming "increasingly draining and demoralizing" for its maintainers, to the point that over 4,600 pull requests are currently open on the engine's GitHub page.
Games did not suddenly become "worse." Games adapted. Attention got tired, schedules got tighter, and competition for free time turned brutal. A ten-minute gap now has to fight against messages, videos, and endless feeds. In that environment, long-form sessions still exist, but short sessions often win because they respect reality instead of demanding a perfect evening. That shift is visible everywhere, from mobile puzzlers to competitive titles and even casino-style experiences where a quick crore win feeling is part of the appeal.
Project Genie, which is currently only available for Google's AI Ultra subscribers, uses AI to build virtual worlds. That sounds interesting, if not necessarily revolutionary. Videogame developers already model and build virtual worlds all the time. Project Genie's simple concept, though, belies the tech's potential impact. The new system, and the Genie 3 model behind it, have the potential to forever change how videogames are built and played.
Yes, vibe-coding apps like Claude Code and Replit make it possible to build games, too, but Moonlake is purpose-built for the task. It will never ask you to copy a snippet of code, offers templates to start with if you'd like, and has straightforward paths to bring in your own assets, too. It remembers your vision and constantly works to improve it alongside you.
Gault is a self-described "certified AI hater," though he concedes that LLM technology is useful in certain instances (I agree to disagree with Gault's assertion that offloading transcription to an environmentally catastrophic machine built on stolen labor saves valuable time and energy). Gault's friends were turned off by the difficulty of Escape from Tarkov , an extraction shooter which came out of early access last November. He described playing by himself as lonely.
AI-driven authoring is our second major area of focus for 2026. At the Game Developer Conference in March, we'll be unveiling a beta of the new upgraded Unity AI, which will enable developers to prompt full casual games into existence with natural language only, native to our platform - so it's simple to move from prototype to finished product.
The stock prices of some major video game companies, including Take-Two Interactive, Roblox, and Unity, had notable declines on Friday, just a day after Google announced its Project Genie tool that lets users prompt AI to generate interactive experiences, Reuters reports. Take-Two's stock price closed at $220.30 (down 7.93 percent from yesterday), Roblox's closed at $65.76 (down 13.17 percent), and Unity's closed at $29.10 (down 24.22 percent).
Because they had extremely limited computing power, they had to write their code as efficiently as possible. Consider the first-person shooter Quake III Arena, usually called Quake 3, for example: players navigated a three-dimensional world, so the programmers had to find the cleverest ways to handle 3D graphics and the associated calculations. Quake 3 released in 1999 and is considered one of the best computer games of its time.
There has been a demo renaissance in the last few years, and we couldn't be happier. Demos have been a part of video game history for a long time, but whether or not they've been good for sales has been up in the air for quite some time. Fortunately, in the last couple weeks we've gotten a Dragon Quest 7: Reimagined and Final Fantasy 7 demo for Switch 2.