Now she's just showing off. Princess Peach: Showtime puts everyone's favorite pink-draped mini monarch under the spotlight on March 22, 2024. Nintendo debuted the new game during today's Direct showcase, and it features Princess Peach in a variety of roles, including a swordfighter, a detective, a pastry chef and a kung-fu master. 

Princess Peach: Showtime is a platformer, puzzler and brawler, and it's set inside the Sparkle Theater, which has been overrun by the evil Grape and the Sour Bunch. Along with some friends, Princess Peach uses her transformation abilities to beat the baddies and save the theater. Nintendo teased a new game starring Princess Peach earlier this year, and these are the first details about it.

"In this adventure, the gameplay changes depending on Peach’s role, and even more surprising transformations are waiting to be revealed," Nintendo said.

Princess Peach: Showtime is heading exclusively to Switch on March 22, and pre-orders are open today.

It's September, which means the air is thick with the promise of fall, school is back in session, and Apple just revealed a new Apple Watch. This year, the company is showing off the Apple Watch Series 9. The Series 9 features a new processor, the S9 chip, and a quad-core neural engine, which promises 18-hour battery life and overall performance boosts. On the software side, watchOS 10 is poised to be the biggest UI overhaul in Apple Watch history, with a renewed focus on widgets, and a slew of app and input updates.

The new neural engine enables offline Siri access and powers new gestures.

With watchOS 10, Apple is returning to its wearable roots. The original Apple Watch UI revolved around Glances, which offered a carousel of widgets and other features, but the company eventually transitioned to an app-first UI. WatchOS 10 puts widgets front-and-center once more, in a style similar to the existing Siri watch face. Rotating the digital crown opens a smart stack of widgets, and apps like timers, stopwatches and podcast players will populate as widgets when they're in use.

Other watchOS 10 upgrades include the ability to view FaceTime video messages and join Group FaceTime audio, track power and heart rate data during cycling sessions, and update your emotional state in the Mindfulness app using the digital crown. The software update also adds useful features to the Compass app, including a pin that will automatically drop near the last place you had cellular connection, which will be particularly useful while hiking and camping. Physical controls are changing with watchOS 10, too — press the side button to open the Control Center and double-press the digital crown to see recently used apps.

Of course, you won't need a shiny new Series 9 to take advantage of these new features. The watchOS 10 update will be available on Apple Watch Series 4 and later models.

The Apple Watch hasn't seen a significant design update in years, with incremental hardware and software changes in each new model since the Series 6 in 2020. This makes the S9 processor upgrade in the Series 9 notable. Bundle that with the rollout of watchOS 10, and it's a mildly exciting year for Apple Watch wearers.

Follow all of the news live from Apple's 'Wonderlust' event right here.

I’ll admit that, between Forza Horizon and Forza Motorsport, I’m more of a Horizon player. I’m interested in driving and crashing beautiful cars in exotic locations, and occasionally entering a low-stakes race, rather than perfecting my times on professional tracks with top-tier equipment. Despite this predilection, I’ve had a lot of fun tinkering around in the first few hours of Forza Motorsport’s serious, car-obsessed world.

I played a near-final version of the new Builders Cup Intro Series, which features three tracks and three cars — a 2019 Subaru STI S209, 2018 Honda Civic Type R, and 2018 Ford Mustang GT. On top of the actual races, the Builders Cup career mode includes a robust vehicle-customization system and the Challenge the Grid betting module. Developers at Turn 10 Studios have discussed this section of the game at length, but the preview marks the first public playtest of these roads, cars and systems.

Put simply, they feel fantastic.

Turn 10 Studios

Turn 10 knows how to build a smooth, responsive racing game with dynamic vehicles and tracks. Forza Motorsport is the ultimate showcase of these skills. Each car in the intro series handles differently, but none of them feel unwieldy. The Ford can’t cut corners as sharply as the Subaru or Civic, but it’s a powerhouse on the straightaway; the Civic is more floaty than the Subaru; the Subaru can handle quick braking better than the other two. These unique features are baked into each vehicle, but the customization screen also allows for fine adjustments that truly affect the way they drive.

The beginning of Forza Motorsport is inviting in numerous ways. It offers a difficulty slider, three modes of play, a bounty of training and real-time assist options, and a rewind button (my absolute favorite feature). In Driving Assists, I turned the Global Presets down to light, set the Suggested Line on for braking only, and I kept ABS on, with automatic shifting. This configuration helped me feel in control on the tracks, and the customization made me comfortable experimenting with new angles and turn speeds in practice laps.

Turn 10 Studios

This is also where the rewind button became my best friend. If you’re new to Forza, rewind might seem like a silly feature for a game that takes racing so seriously, but it’s absolutely necessary for the pacing of practice rounds specifically. Rewind allows racers to mess up and quickly reset without leaving the track, and it encourages players to try, try again. It encourages play, and it’s a lovely feature — one you can turn off at any time, if you think gaming should be pure punishment.

One of the main reasons Forza Motorsport feels so great is its framerate. Motorsport runs at 60 fps on all platforms, including Xbox Series S, and I didn't notice any dropped frames during my playthrough on that console. This is vital for a racing sim, but feels especially notable when many AAA games today are either locked at 30 fps or fail to hit 60 fps on Series S. Microsoft requires feature parity between the Xbox Series X — the most technically powerful console on the market — and the Series S, Microsoft’s less powerful, cheaper and most popular option this generation. In the case of games like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Redfall and Starfield, developers have prioritized high resolutions in big, dense worlds over framerate, often to the detriment of combat and animations on the cheaper console.

Responsiveness is paramount in a racing game, and Turn 10 clearly knows this. The studio prioritized the proper things in order to hit 1080p and 60 fps on Xbox Series S, and the result is a game that looks pretty, but plays beautifully. Ray-traced global illumination and dynamic lighting make the cars and roads sparkle, and the environments along the tracks are busy without being distracting. So far, Forza Motorsport offers a strangely serene, high-octane experience, and I’m eager to dive into the full game.

Turn 10 Studios

There was drama recently over some features that won’t be in Forza Motorsport at launch, namely spectator mode, AI racing in featured multiplayer, and splitscreen — and that last one is a sensitive topic for Xbox owners. In August, Baldur's Gate III creator Larian Studios had to delay the game's Xbox versions because they couldn't make splitscreen work on Series S, despite it running fine on Series X. Larian eventually worked out a deal with Microsoft and it plans to release Baldur's Gate III on Series S without the feature later this year, but Xbox players still remember that sting.

After playing Forza Motorsport's Builders Cup intro series, I’m finding it hard to be concerned about the missing features. Turn10 is crafting a solid racing sim that nails the basics of responsiveness, customization and accessibility. It's a clean, polished foundation for years of DLC to come, and there’s already plenty to mess around with in the game’s first hours.

Forza Motorsport is made to be replayed. After 18 years and seven installments, 2023’s Motorsport is the final game that Turn 10 plans to release in the series, and it’ll serve as the foundation of a live-service system. The goal is for Motorsport to be a hub for regular content drops (new maps, vehicles and challenges) over the coming years, with social and sharing features built into the experience. It makes a lot of sense for the franchise.

In the game’s introductory stages, Motorsport strikes a compelling balance between customization and complexity, making each track bingeable off the bat. The game’s forgiveness stems from its malleability; nearly every setting is customizable, from vehicle upgrades, to AI difficulty, accessibility options and actual driving mechanics. This means that, when something goes wrong during a race, it doesn’t feel like the game’s fault. Forza Motorsport offers a true, repeatable test of player skill. Plus, it’s really pretty, even on Xbox Series S.

Forza Motorsport is scheduled to hit Xbox Series X/S and PC on October 10.

Patience. Starfield is a huge game set in a universe of newly inhabited planets, and it combines interstellar travel with furious gunplay, alien exploration, spaceship management, character customization and interpersonal strife, and it takes a moment for all of these layers to merge into a coherent experience. But, give Starfield time, approach its systems with grace, and you’ll be rewarded with a big, generic sci-fi RPG.

Starfield has moments of beauty, but it features just as many instances of drudgery and disconnection in its main quest line. Playing on pre-release code on Xbox Series S, these issues are only exacerbated by chugging framerates, low-resolution set pieces and roughly one hard crash every five hours. Starfield is big and largely bland, and while it gets some open-world gameplay aspects right, it doesn’t offer anything new for the sci-fi or RPG genres.

Bethesda

That said, there are plenty of classic cosmic environments to enjoy in Starfield, and chances are, every player will find a gameplay aspect that resonates with them. Bethesda claims it will take hundreds of hours to interact with everything in Starfield, and I can say that 40 hours and one New Game Plus later, this doesn’t feel like a lie. I've barely scratched the surface of some late-game systems, like outpost building and in-depth ship customization, but I got a sense of these mechanics while completing the main storyline and related side missions, which featured exploration, mining, social manipulation, resource management, crafting, cooking and combat — both on the ground and among the stars.

Combat is one of Starfield’s weak points, unfortunately. Gun battles are central to the game’s core loop, but they often feel unnecessary. Some encounters are straightforward, but some act as a literal roadblock, with too many enemies, robots and turrets to destroy, no opportunity for stealth, and random drop-ins from high-level bullet sponges. My advice is to pay attention to the level of each foe you’re shooting, and if you’re overwhelmed, run straight past the bemused enemies to unlock the next step in your mission. (This tactic works in a surprising number of encounters, and it never feels great).

My issues with Starfield’s combat largely stem from its homogenous weaponry. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by Borderlands, but the guns in Starfield all feel incredibly similar to each other, and they generally aren’t satisfying to shoot. This situation improves with time — players have the option to modify their arsenal and there are a few guns with elemental effects scattered around the galaxy — but overall, combat feels like something tacked on to appease FPS players, despite being central to progression.

Bethesda

There are no VATS here, just items to upgrade your stats and a secondary ability tree that eventually gets added to your loadout. The boost pack is a nice touch, allowing players to fly in short bursts without expending precious oxygen. These features help make fighting more dynamic, but even in the final battles of the main mission, gunplay doesn’t feel consistent or compelling. Starfield’s combat isn’t awful, but the experience maxes out at meh.

Being sneaky was never really an option for me — I placed a point in my Stealth skill, but even with a crouch meter, security guards and space pirates always spotted me instantly, and they all chose violence. Sure, I could’ve focused on upgrading my Stealth tree, but I was busy maxing out my Persuasion skills and adding tools like Thrusters to my ship (which I recommend doing early on).

It’s not just the weapons in Starfield that feel repetitive. Regardless of which planet they’re on, buildings come in three flavors: bright utopia, gritty cyberpunk, and industrial laboratory. Combat environments tend to blend together, with metallic platforms, staircases and vents in factory-like bases. Sometimes these are built into an extremely dark cave system, but they’re often filled with the same containers, doors and enemies. The cyberpunk city of Neon — I bet you can guess what it looks like — is essentially an expanded version of the underground marketplace at New Atlantis, your character’s headquarters. The main commercial districts are recognizable across planets, with clean white architecture.

Bethesda

Not only are these set pieces similar to each other, but they’re also stereotypical in sci-fi. Starfield offers nothing new from a visual standpoint. This isn’t too surprising, considering the game’s retrofuturistic angle, which limits its design to specific aesthetics that have been mined by Blade Runner, Star Trek, Star Wars and other incredibly popular franchises. On top of this, there are missed opportunities for unique worldbuilding — there is no intelligent alien life in the game, and even generations removed from Earth’s rigid borders, humans speak English with distinct regional accents. Across the solar systems, from ships to skyscrapers to clothing, Starfield is filled with drab.

Despite its familiarity, I had a good time hanging out in Neon specifically. When building my character, I chose to affiliate myself with the Street Rats of Neon, and this trait helped me feel at home under the prismatic lights of the city, providing valuable dialogue options and insights. When it came time to grind, I chose to spend my time on Neon, completing tasks for various citizens and shop owners, and eventually landing a job in corporate espionage at a massive technology company. Anyone who enjoys Bethesda’s dialogue trees and Persuasion mechanics will be happy here, but be aware that combat has been shoehorned into most of these missions, too.

When I needed a break from stealing trade secrets, I explored a handful of planets from the main missions, following distortions on my scanner, surveying the landscape and growing in strength along the way. These were some of the most peaceful and deeply enjoyable moments of Starfield, for me: wandering along the ruins of a lost settlement while a soundtrack of simple piano music echoed like interstellar radar, notes building slowly, teasing adventure beyond the next bend.

Engadget

This was the loop that I liked in Starfield. Other players will be drawn to quests outside of Neon; others will spend hours customizing their ships, gear and outposts; some will stick to interstellar combat and completing their Starmap. There’s enough variety in the planets to justify exploration, though there remains an abundance of gray and brown in the terrain overall. Ship combat is tricky at first, but it quickly becomes a delightful challenge of resource management and target prioritization, as long as you’re not suddenly bombarded by overpowered enemies.

There is a lot to do in Starfield, and a lot to enjoy. The Digipick lock-picking mechanic is so satisfying that I’d play it as a standalone game. The end of the main mission line introduces a compelling twist that messes with the player’s sense of reality in the middle of a frantic gun fight, and it was the most fun I had in combat. Though I would’ve loved to meet some extraterrestrials, it was fantastic to see so many women, LGBT folks and people of color in leadership positions throughout the game.

Starfield is a classic Bethesda RPG from toot to snoot, and this includes a litany of technical issues. I saw problems with facial and movement animations, I encountered dialogue and persuasion trees that barely made sense, and I had multiple conversations with characters who were rudely facing the wrong way.

I played on Xbox Series S, and I attribute a handful of additional glitches to that hardware specifically, including the fact that my game crashed 10 times in 40 hours. There are generous auto saves, so I only lost significant progress twice, but that was more often than I’d like. The game also has lengthy, static loading screens, and consistent framerate issues. In one scene, a character was describing how I should sneak into a rival’s headquarters, and an image of the building’s layout filled the screen, pixelated beyond recognition.

“As you can see…,” the character said, driving home the visual insult.

Engadget

The story that unravels in Starfield is mainstream sci-fi fare, and while it’s not revolutionary, it’s perfectly serviceable for an RPG. It establishes a universe of items to collect and knowledge to gain, with mysteries, danger and new characters emerging along the way. The game is at its best when the main narrative falls to the wayside, and players are free to mess around on new planets, play with their spaceships, find settlements or simply explore the galaxy.

Starfield is huge, and it contains a mission or mechanic that every player can enjoy — they just might have to get through 40 hours of a game they don’t really like before discovering that loop. Todd Howard, the head of Bethesda Game Studios, said in a letter to reviewers that there are 3 million words in the game; he noted the amount of text, but that figure says nothing about quality.

Overall, Starfield is fine. It’s a Frankenstein monster of other sci-fi games and references, and it doesn’t do any of these things better than the existing products. Combat? Cyberpunk 2077 is smoother. Mining and exploration? That’s all No Man’s Sky. Ship management? FTL still reigns. RPG storytelling? Look no further than Outer Worlds.

Digipicks, though? That one goes to Starfield.

Panic is an odd little company. It started out in the late 1990s as an app developer, and in 2016 it pivoted to video game publishing with Firewatch, followed by Untitled Goose Game in 2019. Both of these were breakout indie hits, resulting in significant success for the developers and Panic itself. And then, in 2022, Panic debuted the Playdate, a tiny yellow game console with a crank on the side and a monochromatic display. Playdate was a verified hit and its library is still being updated today.

Now it's mid-2023, and Panic just unveiled a fresh slate of projects it's publishing in its first-ever games showcase. Panic showed off five games and teased new titles from the makers of FAR: Changing Tides (Okomotive) and the team behind Untitled Goose Game (House House).

Nour: Play with your Food is what happens when high art meets a food fight, and honestly, it looks delicious. Nour lays out a bright and colorful landscape where players can mess around with bubbly, 3D versions of doughnuts, burgers, boba tea and other foodstuffs, creating strangely beautiful scenes or simply exploding noodles everywhere. It's all set to music and there are tiny challenges to complete, but Nour is mostly about making digital edible art. It all comes from Missouri studio Terrifying Jellyfish, helmed by designer and digital artist TJ Hughes. Nour is due to hit PC, PlayStation 4 and PS5 on September 12th, and it features DualSense-specific interactions — like slurping soup through the controller's microphone — on PS5.

Thank Goodness You're Here! got center-stage treatment during Gamescom's Opening Night Live showcase last week, and developers Will Todd and James Carbutt offered additional, sheep-laden context for the game during Panic's event today. Thank Goodness You're Here! is a slapstick platformer reminiscent of Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, but in a hand-crafted Gumball or Adventure Time art style. It's a silly romp through a Northern English town, starring a traveling salesman who picks up odd jobs from the equally odd people of Barnsworth. Thank Goodness You're Here! comes from Yorkshire studio Coal Supper and it's set to come out in 2024 for PC, Switch and PS5.

Arco is a complex archery game masquerading as a pixelated, top-down adventure, and it comes complete with a rich original soundtrack. Arco is the product of an international team of developers: Polish pixel artist Franek Nowotniak, Australian game developer Max Cahill, Spanish composer and sound designer José Ramón "Bibiki" García, and Mexican industry veteran Antonio "Fayer" Uribe. Arco is a tactical turn-based RPG with a unique combat system that has players plan moves in real-time, dodging incoming shots and taking aim in the moments between seconds. It's heading to PC and consoles (no specifics yet) in 2024.

There were no specific updates for this next game, Despelote, but its segment was powerful regardless. Despelote comes from Ecuadorian developers Julián Cordero and Sebastián Valbuena, and they use childhood memories of playing football around the city of Quito to tell their country's story of economic ruin and resurgence in the early 2000s. Panic's showcase highlighted personal stories from Cordero and Valbuena, and dove into the making of the game: Its dialogue is based on recordings of conversations they've had with family members and friends who lived through Ecuador's economic downturn in the late 1990s, and those who witnessed the country unite ahead of the 2002 World Cup. The backgrounds of the game, covered in static and color, are photographs of real places around Quito, and interactable objects, like the soccer ball, are highlighted in black and white. Despelote is coming to PC, Xbox Series X/S and PS5 in 2024.

The final confirmed game in Panic's lineup is Time Flies. This one has been generating buzz for a while now, and we had a great time with the preview at Summer Game Fest in 2022, but the big news today is that Panic has signed on to publish it. Time Flies is a simplistic, black-and-white game about the short life of a fly — and, in effect, the person playing as the fly. With mere seconds to live, players get to choose how a lonely housefly will live out its existence, completing a series of small challenges or just buzzing around, enjoying the scenery. The game comes from Michael Frei and Raphaël Munoz, it's produced by Frei's studio Playables, and is now being published by Panic. Time Flies will land on PC, Switch and PlayStation 5 in 2024 (a delay from its initial 2023 window).

The final two projects in Panic's lineup are just teases, for now. The Swiss team behind FAR: Changing Tides and FAR: Lone Sails, Okomotive, is working on a new game that will be published by Panic. Additionally, the developers of Untitled Goose Game, House House, are building something new, and they're pitching it as a totally different experience than the honk-fest that put them on the map. Panic published Untitled Goose Game, and the studio is on board to handle whatever comes next from House House.

Not only does Little Nightmares III exist, but it's also bringing two-player co-op to the series for the first time. Little Nightmares III is due out in 2024, and it's heading to PC, Switch, PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. Developers from Supermassive Games announced the new entry in the horror franchise at the very beginning of Gamescom Opening Night Live today.

Little Nightmares III looks like the stuff of dreams, if you're a twisted horror fiend. The game's reveal trailer showcases two shrunken, puppet-like characters named Low and Alone navigating an oversized world filled with terrors — it's kinda like the grimdark version of It Takes Two, at least in this initial video. Players have to make their way past vicious creatures and murderous monsters, and finally make their way out of The Nowhere.

Here's how publisher Bandai Namco describes the new game on the PlayStation Blog: "Low and Alone are each equipped with their own iconic items that will allow you to solve various puzzles and defend yourself against the new and dangerous challenges that await you. You’ll be able to interact with the world using Low’s bow and arrows and Alone’s wrench, but you’ll also need your wits, tenacity, and creativity to survive your trip across the Spiral."

The game isn't co-op only — it also has a single-player mode, complete with an AI companion. The co-op is online, specifically (sorry, couch pals).

Imagine a game that might be described as the opposite of Half-Life 2, Left 4 Dead or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. These are first-person shooters set in wartorn, post-apocalyptic cities, so their inverse might be a third-person game with no weapons at all, set in a warm, buzzing metropolis of friendly characters, maybe starring an adorable cat. Weirdly, the result could look a lot like Little Kitty, Big City, the first project from former Valve designer Matt T. Wood.

In nearly 17 years at Valve, Wood helped build and ship the company’s most notable titles, including Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, Portal 2,CS:GO and both episodes of Half-Life 2. He was a founding member of the CS:GO project and worked on that series for six years; he was pivotal in crafting Portal 2’s co-op mode, and he created choreography and combat scenes in Half-Life and Left 4 Dead. Level design was one of his specialties.

Wood left Valve in mid-2019, and today he’s the head of his own game development company in Seattle, Washington, Double Dagger Studio. He didn’t plan on starting his own studio post-Valve, and he certainly didn’t think he’d be building and self-publishing a game about an adorable cat. But, he is, and it's called Little Kitty, Big City.

“It really is more about cozy exploration,” Wood told Engadget. “The game has aspects of platforming, but it's very light platforming. It's more about exploring vertically, and exploring nooks and crannies. I've done a lot of things throughout my career, but one of the things I spent a lot of time doing was level design in video games, so I have a lot of personal interest in creating spaces that feel fun to explore, to sort of poke around in.”

Little Kitty, Big City has Saturday-morning-cartoon vibes, with hand-animated scenes and a clean, friendly art style. The main character, Kitty, has wide green eyes, inky fur and batlike ears, and they’re on a mission to find their way home to an apartment complex in the center of a bustling downtown. However, procrastination is highly encouraged. Little Kitty, Big City is an open-world game filled with adorable animals to befriend, people to pester, quests to complete and hats to wear.

The hats are embellished bonnets that come in various forms, including a fish head, a half-shucked corn cob, little devil ears, a cowboy situation, a hedgehog and even some root vegetables. Kitty’s face endearingly pokes through the center of each hat, and they can be equipped at will throughout the game. Aside from a few unique cases, there are no stats attached to the hats — wearing the ladybug head doesn’t grant Kitty movement speed, and the construction hat doesn’t add bonus armor. Mostly, they exist to be cute.

“As a game designer, you kind of sit down and go, what is the purpose of this thing that you're doing?” Wood said. “You always need a function, a purpose, a reason for doing the thing. I think 10 years ago, I would have said, OK, hats are gonna give you this ability, or, like, there's going to be all of this gameplay tied to all this stuff. And while that is true for some things regarding the hats, largely, they're cosmetic. It was refreshing to come to that conclusion to say, no, these are just for fun.”

Double Dagger Studio

Wood’s long history at Valve contextualizes his current role as the founder of an independent studio, and his years inside the insular company have helped shape his approach to game design.

Valve is a unique behemoth, even in the AAA space. It owns Steam, which functions as a bottomless bank; it’s a private company, so it doesn’t have shareholders to appease; and it’s the steward of iconic franchises including Portal, Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress and Dota 2 (many of which are on Wood’s résumé).

“Valve is not a typical large game studio,” Wood said. “You have a lot of autonomy and freedom to do things there. But, you still sort of live within that direction that Valve goes in.”

Valve’s internal structure has long been the subject of myth and legend among video game fans, with the company’s founder Gabe Newell in the role of messiah and the Valve Handbook for New Employees as its sacred text. The handbook made its way online in 2012 and went viral for its Libertarian-inspired corporate ideals — it outlined a flat hierarchy at Valve, suggesting employees had the ability to manage themselves and work on their dream projects at any given time. This cemented Valve’s reputation as an ultra-rad, super-cool video game company in the public eye, and this perception persists today.

In practice, this structure has resulted in an incredibly rich company that doesn’t produce much. It’s a running joke that Valve can’t count to three: Half-Life 2: Episode Two and Team Fortress 2 came out in 2007, Left 4 Dead 2 came out in 2009, and Portal 2 came out in 2011. In 2020, Valve debuted Half-Life: Alyx, a VR game exclusive to the studio’s Index hardware, and after ignoring an extremely disruptive bot invasion, the company rolled out an update to TF2 this summer, largely comprising community-made maps and assets. Meanwhile, Steam has been printing money while maintaining Valve’s deathgrip on the PC marketplace.

Double Dagger Studio

When Wood talks about the fun and freedom he feels building Little Kitty, Big City, he compares it with a top-down rigidity and complacent bureaucracy he experienced in Valve’s production line. Here’s how he described it:

“Valve talks a lot about, like, you can do anything you want. And it's like, well — that's never true. You know, Valve has a direction and they have a trajectory. And so, for me, it was realizing that the direction that Valve was going in was not a place that I wanted to be long-term. Because I’d been there for a long time and they were sitting on their laurels a little bit, and it's like they weren't really challenging themselves, taking risks or doing anything. Steam’s making a lot of money so they don't really have to, but I was not OK with that. And after many years of trying to figure out how to manage that, I decided, you know, it's important for me to go and make my own decisions for a while.”

Wood made it clear that he appreciated the opportunities and stability that Valve provided him, and overall he called it a “great company.” It’s easy to see why so many talented game developers are drawn to Valve, a studio with unlimited resources, a laissez-faire management style and a library of prestigious IP. Working at an established studio also means there are plenty of experts around to check your progress and offer advice, and these are fail-safes that Wood doesn’t have any longer as an independent developer.

“That can be a bit scary,” Wood said. “But it's been great. I love working with a small team focused on a game where, to us, it's different. To me, it's a challenge.”

Double Dagger Studio

Wood said that even though he likely works more now, he also has more energy and passion for his projects than he did in his final five years at Valve. Little Kitty, Big City represents a litany of game-design firsts for Wood, including the fact that it’s a mini open world and it has zero combat. There are now seven full-time team members at Double Dagger Studio, plus a few contributors, and they all found each other naturally, by Digital Age standards — Wood shared early ideas of Little Kitty, Big City on Twitter, and interested developers got in touch.

“At first I did reach out to some of my co-workers who had left Valve already and they were interested, but like — this was a common theme about reaching out to people who used to work at Valve, is that most people when they leave Valve, they're kind of done,” Wood said.

Despite the current surge of indie-focused publishers like Annapurna Interactive, Devolver Digital, Private Division, Humble, Netflix and Raw Fury, Wood is self-publishing Little Kitty, Big City under Double Dagger Studio. That’s not to say he didn’t explore a potential partnership — he actually made it all the way to final contract meetings with one publisher in particular, but in the end, he turned the deal down.

“It didn't make any sense,” Wood said. “Because what they were able to do, for me, absolutely did not justify the money that they were gonna take. And so it was really hard to find a publisher that made sense. I think that the difference between where I was in my career, and where someone maybe right out of school would be, is that I walked away from Valve with a chunk of money that I said, ‘I'm gonna invest that into a company.’ And so I didn't have to rely on a publisher to spend $100,000 on a year of development or whatever. I did have that freedom and space to say no.”

Double Dagger Studio

This year alone, Little Kitty, Big City was announced for Switch, it had a successful showing at Summer Game Fest, and it’s getting some fresh swag in the form of a Makeship campaign offering an exceedingly cute Kitty plush and a salmon-shaped, zip-up catnip toy. The Double Dagger team is finishing the game while Wood oversees it all, no safety net in sight.

When we first started talking, Wood described Little Kitty, Big City as something like Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz, a game about a lost soul trying to find their way home and meeting a colorful cast of characters along the journey. This may be Kitty’s story, but at this stage in his career, it feels a lot like Wood’s, too.

Little Kitty, Big City is on track to come out in 2024 for Switch and PC — via Steam, of course.

Call Devolver Digital whatever you want — except a liar. The indie publisher's inaugural Devolver Delayed showcase delivered on its promise, featuring five games whose release windows have been pushed out of 2023 and into 2024. Which, of course, kind of means Devolver was lying when it initially announced these games, but let's live in the now.

So, here's the list of Devolver games that are now due out next year, minus the maniacal corporate joy that underpinned the actual showcase: Skate Story, The Plucky Squire, Stick it to the Stickman, Anger Foot and Pepper Grinder.

Skate Story is the hardest delay to swallow, personally speaking. Developed by Sam Eng, Skate Story is a highly stylized skateboarding game set in a dark, neon-streaked hellscape and starring a demon made of glass. It looks trippy and fast-paced, and I was very much looking forward to playing it this year. Skate Story is now coming to PC in 2024 and it's available to wishlist on Steam.

Stick it to the Stickman and Anger Foot are both products of Free Lives, the studio behind Broforce, Gorn and Genital Jousting, and a longtime Devolver partner. Both Stickman and Anger Foot are coming to PC next year and are available to wishlist right now.

The Plucky Squire looks to be an extraordinarily cute platforming adventure that swaps between 2D and 3D visuals. This one comes from All Possible Futures and it's heading to PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Switch (in 2024, of course). Last on the delay list, Pepper Grinder is a 2D platformer featuring a character with a big drill, and it's being developed by Oregon-based studio Ahr Ech for PC and Switch.

The Devolver Delayed showcase also provided some relief, in the end. A handful of the publisher's games have decidedly not been delayed and are still targeting 2023 release windows, including Gunbrella, Wizard with a Gun, KarmaZoo, The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood and — most notably, in my book — The Talos Principle II. A sequel to the 2014 award-winning game from Croteam, The Talos Principle II promises more first-person laser-based puzzles, philosophical pontification and existential dread, and it's all still coming out in 2023 for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is actually due out on August 16, just over one week from today. It's the latest game from Deconstructeam, the Spanish studio behind Gods Will Be Watching and The Red Strings Club, and the preview had me happily building tarot decks and flirting with immortal beings.

Baldur’s Gate III is available right now — partially. To be clear, the game itself is complete, but its rollout is fragmented, with different release dates for each of its planned platforms. Following a lengthy Early Access period, the PC and Mac version of Baldur’s Gate III went live today, August 3, while the PlayStation 5 version is due out on September 6. The game’s developer, Larian Studios, hasn’t provided a release date for the Xbox Series X and S edition.

This isn’t a wholly unprecedented situation. After all, plenty of games come out at different times on various platforms, determined by licensing and exclusivity deals, or simply developer priority. In the case of Baludr’s Gate III, though, something went wrong — specifically with the Xbox version.

“We have no exclusivity deal that prevents us from launching on Xbox,” Larian Studios director of publishing Michael Douse said on X in July. “The issue is a technical hurdle. We cannot remove the split-screen feature because we are obliged to launch with feature parity, and so continue to try and make it work.”

Larian Studios

Larian is having trouble fitting Baldur’s Gate III on the Xbox Series S, the lower-priced and lower-powered console in Microsoft’s ninth-generation lineup. Microsoft requires all games to run, feature-complete and without changes in quality or mechanics, on both the Xbox Series X and Series S. With Baldur’s Gate III, this parity rule means the game will be console-exclusive to the PS5 for four months, at least.

“We have quite a few engineers working very hard to do what no other RPG of this scale has achieved: seamless drop-in, drop-out co-op on Series S,” Douse said on X. “We hope to have an update by the end of the year.”

Baldur’s Gate III is a highly anticipated role-playing game set in the Dungeons & Dragons universe, offering familiar classes and abilities in an expansive high-fantasy world. The original Baldur’s Gate landed in 1998 to critical and commercial acclaim, and Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn followed in 2000. The series spawned spin-offs and enhanced editions, but Baldur’s Gate III is the franchise’s first mainline installment in more than 20 years. Reviews for the PC version are already rolling in, and they’re looking good overall.

PS5 players will get to try out the console version on September 6, but Xbox Series X/S players will have to wait. Though Microsoft’s parity requirements have been in place since the Xbox Series consoles came to market in November 2020, Baldur’s Gate III is the ecosystem’s highest-profile loss directly attributable to these restrictions.

Larian Studios

Larian's issue is likely to be related to RAM. While both the Xbox Series X and PS5 have 16GB RAM, the Series S has just 10GB, running at a slower speed than the other consoles, which dramatically lowers its total memory bandwidth. (The Series S’ GPU is also significantly underpowered compared with the PS5 and Series X, but it’s much easier to “turn down the graphics” than to recode your game.) Clearly, there is potential for Microsoft’s parity requirement to limit the availability, scope and quality of games on the Xbox Series X.

The debate over this potentiality hit a fever pitch last year, with players asking whether the Series S was “holding back” the ninth console generation overall. There weren’t a ton of concrete examples to prove this theory, and the Digital Foundry team argued against the idea, citing the existing variance in the PC market and saying that lower targets could actually help games run even better on higher-powered consoles. Still, a handful of developers from the indie and AAA space went public in late 2022 with their frustrations around the parity rule.

“MANY developers have been sitting in meetings for the past year desperately trying to get Series S launch requirements dropped,” Bossa Studios VFX artist Ian Maclure tweeted at the time. “Studios have been through one development cycle where Series S turned out to be an albatross around the neck of production, and now that games are firmly being developed with new consoles in mind, teams do not want to repeat the process.”

Rocksteady senior character technical artist Lee Devonald similarly tweeted about his experience building Gotham Knights — a game that shipped on consoles with a framerate locked at 30 fps and no performance mode. According to Gamerant, Devonald said that multiplatform developers had to “optimize for the lowest performer,” and, “we have a current-gen console that’s not much better than a last gen one,” referencing the Xbox Series S.

"[An] entire generation of games, hamstrung by that potato," Devonald tweeted.

Larian Studios

With the Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft pivoted away from the traditional console-upgrade cycle and instead focused on establishing its wider gaming ecosystem, which centers cloud play in a post-hardware future. Sony, meanwhile, stuck to tradition — its pitch for the PS5 is more power, faster loading, better graphics and smoother animations than the PS4. This has largely worked out for Sony: It’s leading in console sales, with more than 40 million PS5s in homes around the globe. Xbox said at a Brazilian game festival in June that it has over 21 million players on Xbox Series X and Series S consoles.

Regardless of whether the Series S is restraining the entire video game industry, Xbox parity requirements are literally holding back Baldur’s Gate III, and this system has accidentally created another console exclusive for the PS5, for now.

For anyone with an eye on video game news, it’s been hard to ignore the recent rise of names like Annapurna Interactive, Devolver Digital, Private Division, Humble, Epic Games and Netflix tied to independent projects. The distribution process for indie developers has shifted over the past few years from a self-publishing-first model, to one that prioritizes deal-making and acquisitions. For the moment, this shift is powering a small but highly visible boom in the world of indie games.

“I don't think I ever want to self-publish again.”

Ben Ruiz has been a game developer since 2005, and in that time, he’s pretty much done it all. He founded two studios, he did contract work on titles including Super Meat Boy and Overland, and he independently published a tentpole original project, the monochromatic brawler Aztez. Nowadays, Ruiz is running a five-person studio called Dinogod and he’s building Bounty Star, a game that blends mech combat with life-sim mechanics. Bounty Star is being published by Annapurna Interactive and it’s due out in early 2024.

Annapurna Interactive

“Everything favors a publisher relationship, seemingly, because self-publishing has become this extraordinarily difficult thing,” Ruiz said. “It’s possible, but without help, I just don't know how anyone's doing it … I got a lot of friends in the same boat.”

Ruiz’s career is a microcosm of the shifting landscape for indie developers over the past 10 years. He began working on Aztez in 2010, when Steam was a curated marketplace where Valve employees hand-selected individual games for the platform. This system had fully imploded by 2012: On the heels of breakout hits like Braid, Super Meat Boy and Fez, the indie market was overrun by new games and developers, and Steam dropped its curation efforts. It shifted to a community-voting approach called Greenlight, before eventually landing on the everything-goes Early Access model we know today.

Ruiz and his business partner built Aztez in between contract projects, and by the time it was ready to debut on Steam in 2017, the indie market was saturated. There were 309 games added to Steam in 2010; in 2017, there were 6,306. Even with a hefty amount of hype behind it, Aztez had trouble standing out, and that was the last time Ruiz tried self-publishing.

Ruiz did contract work for a while after Aztez, and in 2018 he pitched Bounty Star to people he knew at Annapurna. The game has a complex premise — it stars Clem, a desert bounty hunter with plenty of baggage, and it involves mech battles, emotional narrative scenes and home-management mechanics, including some light gardening. Annapurna bit, and Ruiz landed a publishing deal.

Annapurna Interactive

Annapurna Interactive is one of the most prominent publishers of indie games today, with titles like Stray, Outer Wilds, Neon White, Donut County and What Remains of Edith Finch on its books. It was founded in 2016 as an offshoot of Annapurna Pictures and quickly established its brand as an arthouse publisher, focused on visually innovative and emotionally driven experiences. Its showcases are now a staple of the gaming calendar.

Annapurna is handling the marketing for Bounty Star, and it’s also financially supporting Ruiz’s studio, Dinogod. When Ruiz pitched the game, he was clear that he’d need a team of five or six people to bring his vision to life, and Annapurna gave him the funding to hire up.

“The fact that Dinogod has five full time people, that was a part of the partnership,” Ruiz said. “When everything was greenlit, that was the first step, to bring in these five or six people…. If [Annapurna is] into a thing that they think is a good move, and it needs more people, that seems to be fully okay. Like, they're not averse to scale.”

It’s not just Annapurna making these types of deals with indies nowadays. Devolver Digital is the granddaddy of indie publishers, and since 2009 it’s released hits including Hotline Miami, Hatoful Boyfriend, The Talos Principle, Gris, Fall Guys, Inscryption, Weird West and Cult of the Lamb, all in collaboration with small development teams. There’s also Humble, Private Division, Raw Fury, Epic Games, Finji, Gearbox, EA and Netflix, all of which have stepped up their indie publishing efforts in recent years. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s strategy is to simply acquire the studios it likes, and today it has 23 developers under the Xbox Game Studios banner. Sony is taking a similar approach, though it owns fewer studios than Microsoft. Microsoft and Sony are also signing hundreds of one-off deals with indies as they attempt to fill their streaming libraries — Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus Premium — with a steady stream of new experiences.

This is the new standard for indie developers: Identify the publisher that best matches your game’s tone, pitch it, and pray. Even established studios, such as Device 6 creator Simogo, have swapped to a publisher-first model. Simogo’s latest projects, Sayonara Wild Hearts and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, are the result of its partnership with Annapurna.

Annapurna Interactive

“I think for us as a studio, the biggest change is working with a publisher, something which we would see as completely uninteresting and impractical ten years ago,” Simogo co-founder Simor Flesser told Engadget earlier this month.

And then there’s Netflix. The streaming company officially entered the game-distribution business in 2021, and it’s on track to have 100 titles in its library by the end of 2023, all freely available to anyone with a Netflix subscription. It’s already brought a number of high-profile titles to mobile devices, including Kentucky Route Zero, Poinpy, Into the Breach, Spiritfarer, Lucky Luna and Oxenfree II, and it’s purchased a few studios outright — notably, Alphabear developer Spry Fox and Oxenfree house Night School Studio. The first of these purchases was Night School, which Netflix acquired in 2021.

“Consolidation — I didn't really have my finger as much on the pulse of that, because when we joined Netflix, it didn't feel like that was happening so rapidly,” Night School co-founder Sean Krankel told Engadget. “And now in the last few years, literally, it's non-stop.”

The acquisition allowed Night School to move into the Netflix offices and it provided stability for the studio overall, Krankel said. With Netflix’s resources, the Night School team was able to add day-one support for 32 languages in Oxenfree II, and they were able to fly in remote collaborators as needed.

“All that's really exciting,” Oxenfree II lead developer Bryant Cannon said just ahead of the game’s July 12th release. “I think the game is going to be better because we have this battery in our back.”

Netflix

Outside of acquisitions, Netflix is also signing individual deals with developers. Snowman is best known as the name behind Alto’s Adventure and Alto’s Odyssey, and its latest project is Laya’s Horizon, a serene wingsuit experience exclusive to Netflix. There are two big benefits of working with Netflix, according to Snowman creative director Jason Medeiros: The instant access to an audience of more than 230 million people, and the freedom to build a game without worrying about monetization.

“You'll notice real quick that the game that you've been playing can't be free-to-play,” Medeiros told Engadget in April. “Like, where would the ads go? It’s this fantasy world with no currency, even, and all that’s intentional. As the creative director, I didn't want any of that stuff. Because I mean, I liked games before all that stuff happened. So having a platform like Netflix, it's just like, none of that matters. You don't have to do that stuff. It's a breath of fresh air; we jump on opportunities to make games that way.”

Of course, there are still developers self-publishing their projects — Vampire Survivors, Phasmophobia, Celeste and Among Us are all standout examples — but there’s a murkier path to success with this model, one based on timing, trends and a hefty amount of luck. There are more than 90,000 games on Steam today; Xbox Game Pass and PS Plus Premium libraries each have more than 400 titles (and counting). In this marketplace, it’s hard to stand out without a little help.

It’s taken 10 years to get here, but it’s now a solid, quantifiable fact: There’s a lot of money in indie games. So much money that outside companies are popping up and trying to get a piece of the pie — and for now, it’s created a shiny bubble of pretty PR packages and bespoke showcases dedicated to small teams and their games.

Devolver Digital

It’s difficult to ignore the potential for exploitation down the line, especially with Netflix in the mix. Amid the ongoing writers’ and actors’ strike, the company is facing accusations that it instituted wildly unfair compensation deals for creatives, paying out one-time, minimal wages even as projects became massive hits on the streaming service. Annapurna, for its part, was accused of mishandling claims of abuse at three prominent studios on its publishing roster — Mountains, Funomena and Fullbright — in a March 2022 documentary by People Make Games. Meanwhile, the current consolidation craze is shrinking the video game industry overall, even as the market caps of the biggest companies continue to rise.

For now, bespoke publishing is the name of the indie game. This system has already distributed innovative and important games to huge audiences — Tchia, Tunic, Sea of Solitude, Gris — and it’s offered stability to a lot of independent artists. Like, for instance, Ben Ruiz.

“I hope Annapurna’s success means more Annapurnas in the future,” Ruiz said. “It doesn’t feel like they’re just trying to grab a thing that will make money or collaborate with people that are just going to make them money. They clearly have a brand and an aesthetic directive … if I can keep making games for them for a long time, I will.”

The new normal works for Ruiz — and Flesser, Krankel, Medeiros and plenty of others. For now, it’s a functional system, even if it ultimately leaves publishers, rather than independent developers, with most of the power.