The Switch 2 could get a price hike in 2026, but how much more should people prepare to pay? According to Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad, Nintendo may opt to raise the price of the Switch 2 by $50 or $100. The Switch 2 currently sells for $450 on its own or $500 with Mario Kart World.

He said this against the backdrop of the impact of tariffs and increasing memory prices and how those factors could impact the Switch 2's price. Nintendo said in its latest earnings briefing that there will be no impact during the current fiscal year, but for the fiscal year that begins in April 2026, these factors could "put pressure" on the company's earnings, Ahmad said.

"Would need to reconsider pricing / strategy at that point," Ahmad said.

Bad news for PlayStation 3 owners hoping to watch Love is Blind on their CRT: Netflix is discontinuing the streaming app from Sony's legacy console a month from now.

A Reddit post from a CRT-enthusiast community shared the announcement seen on the PS3 Netflix app, which reads: "Unfortunately, Netflix will no longer be available on this device after March 2, 2026."

Streaming services phasing out support for older devices shouldn't be a surprise, but what's striking about this shutdown is how long the PS3 Netflix app was functioning. Netflix launched for PS3 in late 2009--but due to an exclusivity deal that the streaming giant had with Xbox, the service was only available through a disc that the company sent in the mail. It took until later in 2010 for Netflix on PS3 to go disc-free with a downloadable app. Netflix had a similar arrangement for the Wii, but that app was discontinued in 2018.

Blizzard executive Holly Longdale has stated that the Warcraft IP is "underutilized," suggesting that the company might have new projects or in store to help beef it up and make the most of it.

To be sure, Blizzard has already expanded the Warcraft franchise in a number of ways, including the 2016 movie and the digital card game Hearthstone, along with books and comics. But Longdale thinks Warcraft has even more room to grow.

"It's a fantastic IP. In my humble opinion, it's been underutilized and I just want to bring it to as many people as possible," she told The Game Business. "And that means evolving what Warcraft means, what it is, and where it's going. We want it to be approachable."

Epic plans to juice game sales on its PC storefront by bundling free Fortnite cosmetics with third-party titles. The first such instance of this new "official program" appears to be Resident Evil Requiem, as people who preorder the game on the Epic Games Store will receive a Grace Ashcroft skin in the battle-royale title.

The goal, according to Epic, is "to help developers sell more games on the Epic Games Store by leveraging the marketing power of Fortnite." The first partners for the program include Capcom, Genshin Impact's miHoYo, Dave the Diver's MintRocket, and Crimson Desert's Pearl Abyss. Epic has done something similar in the past with Alan Wake 2, as people who preordered the sequel years ago got an Alan Wake skin in Fortnite.

This comes as part of a year-in-review blog in which Epic acknowledged people spent more but played less on the Epic Games Store in 2025. Fortnite continues to be the most-popular title on the Epic Games Store, hence the company using its massive appeal to drive third-party sales on the platform. However, Circana senior director Mat Piscatella seemingly expressed doubts about the new program on Bluesky. "Super healthy market when one of the recognized key incentives for driving purchases of a new game on a platform is content for a completely different game that already dominates player engagement [I don't know]," he wrote.

Nintendo recently held a hands-on showcase event with a bevy of demos for upcoming games. And while less of a focus than the games themselves, the presentation also included an opportunity for a closer look at some of its upcoming products like the new Mario Wonder Amiibo figures and $35 Talking Flower. We had a chance to get hands on with the Alarmo-adjacent doodad and it is certainly a talking flower.

A brief video walked us through the functionality. It will say random phrases from time to time, and you can press a button on the front to prompt it to speak. You can set a wake-up time or bedtime so the flower will wish you well, and that way it'll stay quiet at night. The phrases shift based on the time of day, and it's attuned to the room temperature so it can tell you if it's a little chillier today, and it will alert you if it needs a battery change. In music mode it can activate a "Wonder Mode," playing the Mario Wonder music.

The oddest feature, so to speak, is the ability to tell the time, but Talking Flower will sometimes tell you the wrong time. In the video demonstration he said it was 10 AM, then quickly corrected himself to say it's actually 9 AM. What a little scamp! An unreliable, possibly infuriating little scamp.

Two union representatives for Ubisoft have voiced their belief that CEO Yves Guillemot should resign. This comes after a wave of layoffs, project cancellations, and studio restructuring that hit the company best known for Assassin's Creed and Far Cry.

In January, Ubisoft announced plans to split the company into several "Creative Houses" dedicated to specific franchises. Internally, it also canceled several projects like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake, laid off developers, closed studios, and implemented a return-to-office mandate. This has angered many Ubisoft developers, who are planning to strike later this month.

In a recent interview with Game Developer, Ubisoft union representatives Marc Rutschlé and Chakib Mataoui placed most of the blame on the CEO and indicated they'd like a leadership change at Ubisoft. "I think Guillemot should move away at this point. I think the level of hate people have for him [means] he should move on. Then, we could build some sort of trust again," Rutschlé explained.

Geoff Keighley has announced the first details about 2026's edition of The Game Awards. The host and organizer of the annual event has revealed that this year's show will take place on Thursday, December 10, and once again, it'll be broadcast from the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles.

Keighley said more details will be announced later this year.

The timing is the normal spot for The Game Awards, as the event historically has been held in early December on a Thursday evening.

Apex Legends Season 28 is also the start of the battle royale's Year 7, and the Respawn team is keeping to tradition by implementing a substantial gameplay change for the game's birthday. Season 28, titled Breach, introduces breakable windows and skylights to Apex Legends called Hardlight Meshes. These surfaces can be breached by squads trying to find additional ways into a building, or reinforced by players bunkering inside who are trying to hold a point-of-interest. These new mechanics sound like some you might find in Rainbow Six Siege (or Highguard, the recently released raid shooter from former Apex Legends developers).

This isn't a small change, either. Hardlight Meshes will be added to all of the maps rotating into the battle royale playlists this season (World's Edge, Broken Moon, and E-District). Save for Olympus, these three maps have the most urban environments of all of Apex Legends' maps. That means there are plenty of buildings that have been remade by the sole conceit that they now have multiple breach points, making them significantly harder to defend.

"As with all new additions to Apex, community feedback will certainly drive the conversation and inform our future updates and tuning," senior game designer Connor Monahan told me. "Playtesting internally, the places where we feel Hardlight [has] the most [impact] fall into two big categories. The first category is buildings previously very difficult to assault that now have narrow weaknesses you can exploit to break in. Examples that come to mind are some Lunar buildings--the tube-shaped structures--on [Broken] Moon, four-story buildings and Powerbank on E-District, and Lava Siphon on World's Edge. There are now new choke points and entries that make pressuring teams bunkered inside much more viable."

For the last two decades, the vast majority of World War 2 games have been first-person shooters. ProbablyMonsters' upcoming title, Nekome: Nazi Hunter, is going to buck that trend with its single-player third-person experience. In the first teaser for the game, the main character demonstrates his abilities by fatally stabbing a Nazi soldier.

The lead character's name is Vano Nastasu, and he's not a soldier. He's a Romani who was persecuted by the Nazis and was subsequently unable to prevent his family from being murdered. However, Nastasu survived and now the hunted has become a hunter himself. His story of revenge will play out behind enemy lines across Europe during the war.

According to ProbablyMonsters, this game was inspired by grindhouse cinema. Players will be able stalk their prey, scout out enemy routes, and make their assassinations personal and precise. Nastasu has been given "grounded finishing moves," which will come "together in a symphony of violence where every encounter carries lasting consequences."

Obsidian Entertainment was one of Microsoft's busiest studios in 2025, releasing three games in the short 12 months of the year. While two of its role-playing games, Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 were favorably received, only one of them fits into the studio's future.

According to a report by Bloomberg, Obsidian is not currently working on a third entry in The Outer Worlds franchise, and is instead exploring ideas that expand on the setting introduced to players in Avowed. Avowed itself lives within the Pillars of Eternity universe, of which there are multiple Obsidian-developed games, so it might not be surprising that this is where the studio is choosing to continue focusing efforts.

The interview delves into how the single studio managed to put out three games in a single year, with studio design director Josh Sawyer chalking it up to unexpected project timelines, scope pivots, and poor planning. "Spacing those releases helps the company manage its resources and not burn everybody out," Sawyer says. "It's not good to release three games in the same year. It's the result of things going wrong."

Given how much has happened since, it might come as a surprise that Highguard has been out for just one week. Since then, the game has received a few patches, and an entirely new game mode that is now going to stick around.

Over the weekend, Highguard developer Wildlight introduced a 5v5 game mode to sit alongside its standard 3v3 queues, stating that it would be a limited-time mode. Given the response by players, the new game mode has now become permanent, letting you enjoy the game's mix of looting and raiding with hopefully more player interactions in the large, open map. Wildlight announced the news on X, stating that the player split between its two modes was relatively even across the weekend.

The addition of two more players on each team has been a favorable change to some players, with the game even emerging from its negative review status on Steam up to "Mixed" over the weekend. The effect might be short lived, however, as the increased player counts over the weekend has since subsided, with numbers now hovering below last week's worst days.

Nintendo has revealed that Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has sold another 2.39 million copies globally from April through December 2025, showcasing incredible staying power for the nearly nine-year-old Switch game. What's even more impressive is this number comes during a timeframe that saw the launch of Switch 2 exclusive Mario Kart World in June.

The newest sales figure comes from Nintendo's financial results for the third quarter of fiscal 2026, which runs from April 1, 2025 through March 31, 2026. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was the third best-selling original Switch game during that timespan. Meanwhile, newcomers Pokemon Legends: Z-A and Super Mario Galaxy 2 took the top two spots, with 8.41 million and 2.42 million copies sold worldwide, respectively. As for Pokemon Legends: Z-A, the Switch 2 Edition added another 3.89 million copies sold (yes, that includes hardware bundles), meaning together with the Switch version, the action-RPG sits at 12.3 million copies sold.

Overall, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has sold 70.59 million units since arriving on Switch in April 2017. That makes it the best-selling Switch game of all time. Technically, the racing game first launched on Wii U in May 2014 and has sold 8.46 million copies separately on that Nintendo platform. As for Mario Kart World, the Switch 2 exclusive is the top-selling game on Nintendo's new console with 14.03 million units sold.

Mario's sports spin-offs during the Switch era have been mostly decent, but also, largely unsurprising. There have been few frills and largely anemic single-player modes, and the occasional experiment like Mario Golf Super Rush have been divisive. Mario Tennis Fever is the first in the sport spin-off genre on Switch 2, and a chance to set a new course for the company. After a hands-on with it at a recent Nintendo event, I can't say whether it has course-corrected on the single-player, but the multiplayer is so chockablock with options and game-changing effects that I'm intrigued.

In fact, the main hook of the new game--the titular Fever rackets--have such wild impacts on the court that at times Fever felt more like a party game than a sports title. Our couch competitive experience was frequently interrupted by raucous trash talk and surprised screams as new effects totally changed the match mid-volley.

But first, the basics. A short tutorial explained the mechanics of Mario Tennis Fever, which are largely unchanged from previous tennis titles. You serve and volley just as you'd expect, and you hit the button early or double-tap for charged and powered-up effects, respectively. Mario and the gang look especially great here, thanks to the enhanced power of the Switch 2 and relatively limited scope of what's on screen.

So far, Nintendo's Switch 2 upgrade packs have been all over the map. There are the smaller ones with just a few quality-of-life features like Animal Crossing, serious upgrades like the Legend of Zelda games, and larger-scale expansions like Kirby's Star-Crossed World expansion. Super Mario Bros. Wonder's Switch 2 upgrade, Meetup at Bellabel Park, is priced like a larger expansion, but that doesn't quite capture the nature of what it is. Instead, based on a hands-on experience with Nintendo, it transforms the game into something else entirely, borrowing liberally from the Mario Party series.

Though Mario Wonder allowed you to go through its stages in multiplayer, Bellabel Park is centered around bespoke multiplayer minigames, using the Mario Wonder platforming as its mechanical underpinnings. So unlike an actual Mario Party game, in which the randomized minigames might challenge you to do new and unfamiliar things at a regular clip, these feel more like platforming challenges with a little bit of party game spirit.

Since they're built around traditional Mario platforming, the challenges aren't entirely competitive. We first played a cooperative level that had one player using the Switch 2 mouse functionality to draw Donut Blocks, Mario Maker style, to guide the other three players through a stage that was one big pit hazard. That by itself would be not much more than a neat toy-like experiment, but the stage was also littered with occasional hazards and puzzle challenges, like a special coin nested inside a set of breakable boxes. The Donut Block player would need to draw a path for a spike ball to roll its way into the boxes so that the other players could access the coin; and naturally, we were all shouting out tips of where and how to draw the path, adding to the chaotic fun of the whole experience.

Nintendo doesn't have very many high-profile missteps, which makes it all the more notorious when one of its flagship products falters. The Wii U is the most recent example, but before that the all-timer was the Virtual Boy--a mid-'90s experiment in early 3D effects that never caught on. Nintendo fans have identified many possible causes for this--the unwieldy design, the all-red graphics, the middling library--but whatever the cause, it's been a sore spot in Nintendo history. Now the company is bringing it back with emulation and two accessory options (one or the other is required) on the Switch 2. It works well, but will likely serve more as a museum piece for fans of Nintendo history than a strong part of the gaming library.

During a Nintendo event, we were able to try the Virtual Boy emulation, with a Switch 2 console fitted into the pricey Virtual Boy accessory. (The cardboard model was on display behind glass, but we weren't able to try it.) The $100 option looks just like my memory of a Virtual Boy in a Toys R Us kiosk, complete with its tripod stand and foam face shield. The only major differences are that this one has a Switch 2 noticeably lodged into it, and there is no attached controller since you'll just use paired Joy-Cons or Pro Controller. It was notable, more as an interesting curiosity than anything else, that about half of the Switch console was actually sticking out of the bottom of the Virtual Boy accessory. The actual Virtual Boy display was only utilizing roughly the top half of the screen.

Then there's the experience of actually putting hands (and eyes) on it. The foam face shield was actually very comfortable and did a great job blocking out the ambient light of the room. Hunching over to get my eyes in the correct position was less comfortable, but I learned afterwards that I would have been allowed to adjust the table height on request, so that may just be user error on my part. Still, it does raise the specter of one key weakness of the Virtual Boy: You have to find a position to play and stay planted there, rather than naturally shift around as people tend to do when relaxing with a video game. The field-of-view was slightly odd, also, as I had to lift my head up above the face shield slightly and look down "into" the display to see the part of the UI that explained the suspend menu shortcut. And of course, the red-and-black display does still feel fairly harsh, and emerging from the darkened cocoon of the Virtual Boy display is disorienting.

The Nintendo Switch was a massive success, but it was built primarily on the strength of first-party and less-demanding third-party games. We all knew you didn't turn to the Switch for the visual splendor offered on its competitors. The Switch 2 has brought things slightly more towards parity, and we've seen a few third-party standouts like Cyberpunk 2077 and Star Wars Outlaws that push the hardware. Those will soon be joined by two high-profile Capcom games, Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata, which were both visually impressive at a recent Nintendo hands-on event.

Both demos on display were familiar ones. For Resident Evil, it was the opening moments as Grace begins exploring the hospital that we've seen demonstrated in other presentations, and for Pragmata it was the same demo that's available on Steam now. But that also allows a direct comparison, and to my surprise, it was pretty favorable in both cases.

Resident Evil Requiem looked great, maintaining the high-fidelity distressed look that lends itself to the creepy atmosphere. Things in the hospital look worn and used, sometimes decaying, which helps set a mood, and the Switch 2 pulled off that look very well. In handheld mode, the smaller screen may have looked even better than on a big screen, since the more compact pixel density could hide some of the less-detailed parts. Plus, with the ability to play on a handheld you could play it in bed, hiding under the covers.

The original Nintendo Switch has surpassed the DS in sales, officially reaching a milestone as Nintendo's best-selling video game system of all time. With 155.37 million units sold as of the last week of December 2025, the Switch only trails Sony's PlayStation 2 for the all-time record.

This achievement was long expected, with the Switch shown to be inching toward the DS's numbers in Nintendo's last quarterly earnings report. Nintendo DS, which was released in 2004 and has long since been discontinued, sold 154.02 million units in its lifetime.

For the Switch to dethrone the PS2, it'll have to overtake its astounding figure of over 160 million consoles sold--if Nintendo can somehow squeeze out more than 5 million sales.

Ubisoft has released The Division: Definitive Edition, although that may come as a surprise as the company never officially announced it.

After being spotted in the wild in Japan, some theorized that the Definitive Edition might be a remaster of sorts for the 2016 game for its 10th anniversary. However, the Definitive Edition is actually a new $50 version of the game that includes the game's previously released expansions, Underground, Survival, and Last Stand, along with weapon skins and gear sets.

The Definitive Edition store page does not mention any graphical upgrades, but people playing on Xbox Series X|S or PS5 may see improvements due to upscaling on those systems. The store pages also do not list off any new features or improvements. The game was originally released for Xbox One, PS4, and PC in 2016. The Division's new Definitive Edition does not appear to be available on Steam.

Nintendo has published its financial results for the nine months ended December 31, 2025, and, amid some impressive figures for its new Switch 2 hardware, it has confirmed that the original Switch is its best-selling console of all time. While it hasn't dethroned the PS2 as the best-selling console of all time--160 million units sold--the Switch has reached a lifetime sales milestone of 155.37 million units.

This new figure has shifted the Nintendo DS to third place on the list of best-selling consoles, with the handheld having moved 154.02 million units during its lifetime. Nintendo predicts it will sell another 750,000 Switch consoles in the current fiscal year, which ends on April 1.

Last year, Bethesda released The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered to great acclaim, leading some players to call for The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind to receive the same kind of update. Now, Larian Studios publishing chief and Baldur's Gate 3 veteran Michael Douse is throwing his support behind a modern update of Morrowind.

In a post on X, Douse wrote, "OK, call me optimistic, but there is a very technically qualified developer out there that would happily remake Morrowind with a modern combat system and it would sell like f***ing hot cakes." In a subsequent post, Douse added, "Mission to find Bethesda's Bloober [Team]: go."

Ok call me optimistic but there is a very technically qualified developer out there that would happily remake Morrowind with a modern combat system and it would sell like fucking hot cakes https://t.co/pDO1HDYGVX

Douse was responding to previous comments left by Bethesda veteran Bruce Nesmith, who recently cast doubt that a Morrowind update is actually what people want.