Welcome to Video Games Weekly on Engadget. Expect a new story every Monday or Tuesday, broken into two parts. The first is a space for short essays and ramblings about video game trends and related topics from me, Jess Conditt, a reporter who’s covered the industry for more than 13 years. The second contains the video game stories from the past week that you need to know about, including some headlines from outside of Engadget.
Please enjoy — and I’ll see you next week.
If I end up reading one more story about how fantastic Death Stranding 2 is so long as you skip the cutscenes, I’m gonna hurl. At what point during 10 hours of cinematic interstitials do we collectively put the controller down and say, actually, this isn’t a great game? Not because the game parts aren’t any good — they’re pretty fabulous, in fact — but because a significant portion of the experience isn’t actually interactive at all. When does it become more accurate to describe a Hideo Kojima project as a CGI movie with moments of interactivity, rather than as a video game first?
I’m not actually attempting to solve the “video game of Theseus” riddle right now, but it’s a conversation that’s been on my mind, given recent headlines. Death Stranding 2 reviews are in, Neil Druckmann is out at HBO and returning to Naughty Dog full-time, and Emmy nominations arrived with 18 nods for video game adaptations. Meanwhile, layoffs are rocking the gaming industry yet again, with thousands fired at Xbox this month, alongside multiple studio closures and game cancellations. One of the most surprising titles to get the ax was Project Blackbird, a promising-sounding MMO from Elder Scrolls studio ZeniMax Online. Blackbird was reportedly canceled in favor of allocating resources to the development of Fallout 5, a series with mainstream clout following the success of Amazon’s Fallout TV show in 2024.
The convergence of video games and Hollywood is not a new talking point — even for me — but it’s only grown more relevant with time. Sony in particular is leaning hard into a cross-media strategy with notable investments in television, anime and film adaptations of its video game franchises, and it just published Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding 2, which serves as a lightning rod for this entire conversation.
Kojima is easy to pick on because he’s been so vocal about his desire to make movies, and fittingly, his games have only grown more cinematic over the years. Death Stranding and its sequel are stacked with mainstream Hollywood actors (and Kojima’s favorite directors) across hours of drawn-out, non-interactive cutscenes. His next two projects, OD and Physint, are both described as having A-list casts and “blurring the boundaries between film and games.”
I’m a big fan of experimental horror games, and I deeply appreciate Kojima’s eye for building tension and sneaky action sequences, but I’m hesitant to get excited about OD and Physint. The deeper Kojima dives into the world of Hollywood, the more he loses me. I don’t download, install and boot up a video game to watch a movie instead, and I don’t find it impressive when an interactive product is defined by cinematic terms. The constraints of filmmaking are vastly different than those of video game development, and it sucks to watch a talented creator try to force video games to conform to the boundaries of movies or TV, rather than exploring the mechanics that make interactive art so uniquely powerful. I feel like Kojima sees cinema as the goal, not video games specifically, and this perspective breaks my little pixelated heart.
It’s particularly painful in an era of raging instability for the video game industry. It’s difficult to see so much money and creative talent being thrown at projects that end up feeling more like movies than games, at a time when it’s increasingly difficult for fresh and original AAA projects to make it to market. Video games have not been maxed out as an art form — there’s far more to discover in terms of mechanics, visuals, haptics and immersive interaction systems, and there are more stories that can only be told with these specific tools. Viewing game development through the lens of filmmaking diminishes everything that makes this medium so powerful. The only Hollywood trait the games industry should imitate is its powerful and functional unions.
I enjoy things that exist in the gray space between definitions; in fact, I often prefer them. What I don’t enjoy is misguided emulation that’s sold to an audience as innovation. In the end, I guess what I’m really saying is… I’m still not over PT.
The news
One of the most eyebrow-raising details of Microsoft’s sweeping layoffs earlier this month was the fact that King, the studio behind Candy Crush, was included in the firings. King is historically a money-printing machine with high per-employee returns, which tends to insulate it from layoffs, but this time around at least 200 people were let go from the studio. As it turns out, a number of fired developers spent the past few years training AI systems to do their jobs, which just adds a layer of shittiness to an already crappy situation.
Has the FOMO gotten to you yet? After denying that you wanted a Switch 2 for a few noble and self-righteous weeks, have you cracked and admitted that you actually, really want one? Great — then get yourself to Best Buy on Thursday, July 17, when the company will restock its supply of Switch 2 consoles in all stores. This coincides with the release of Donkey Kong Banaza, too.
I’ve had my eye on Judas, the BioShocky FPS from Ken Levine’s Ghost Story Games, since it was revealed in 2022, and I lowkey love how little we still know about it today. That said, I’m happily devouring every bit of information about Judas, and the latest nugget comes from Levine himself in an interview with classic game publisher Nightdive Studios. With Judas, Ghost Story is focused on “telling the story and transporting the player somewhere,” rather than building live-service or microtransaction features, Levine said. As he put it, “You buy the game and you get the whole thing. There’s no online component. There’s no live service.”
There’s also no release date for Judas yet.
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The crazy kids at Summer Games Done Quick have done it once again and raised literal millions of dollars for Doctors Without Borders in a single weekend, simply by playing video games in silly ways without stopping. SGDQ 2025 wrapped up on Sunday with a total donation pool of $2,436,614. The organization’s next event is another edition of Flame Fatales, a speedrunning showcase featuring women and femmes that runs from September 7 to 14. We’ll see you there.
The well of Subnautica 2 drama runs deep. Earlier in July the heads of Subnatica 2 studio Unknown Worlds Entertainment — Charlie Cleveland, Ted Gill and Max McGuire — were ousted by the team’s parent company, Krafton, and the game’s early access release was delayed to 2026. What’s more, Bloomberg reported that the studio had been in line for a $250 million bonus if it had met certain financial goals by the end of the year, but those largely hinged on an early access release. Cleveland said on social media that Subnautica 2 was ready for early access, and Krafton responded to the whole shebang by accusing the fired developers of abandoning their responsibilities as studio heads. Cleveland and others are now apparently filing a lawsuit against Krafton. GamesIndustry.biz has a comprehensive timeline of the Subnautica 2 controversy right here.
Additional reading
