Nearly all evidence of Microsoft's "This is an Xbox" campaign has been quietly removed from the internet (via Game Developer). The news post that kicked it all off is now a blank webpage, though the YouTube video unveiling the campaign is still up. The change comes less than a month after Microsoft named Asha Sharma as Xbox's new executive vice president and CEO.

Sharma took on her new role in late February, after former CEO Phil Spencer suddenly retired. Spencer's long-time protege Sarah Bond left her role as Xbox president immediately thereafter. Bond was said to be the driving force behind the "This is an Xbox" campaign, which debuted in November 2024 with the goal of showing consumers that Xbox isn't just a console.

Bond was apparently the driving force behind the campaign, which confused consumers and reportedly offended internal Xbox employees. The campaign debuted shortly after the departure of Xbox executive Kareem Choudhry and chief marketing officer Jerret West, which left Xbox's marketing reporting directly to Bond. According to some Xbox employees, Bond was "tough to work with."

One of my biggest criticisms of Black Ops 7's initial integration into Warzone was that nothing about the update screamed futuristic Black Ops style or gameplay. Black Ops 7 only added its weapon pool and some of its gadgets to Warzone, but the battle royale's maps weren't pushed into Black Ops 7's futuristic setting and players didn't get the advanced wall-jump omnimovement introduced in Black Ops 7. It felt like Call of Duty was uninspired or playing it too safe, making for one of the weaker integrations we've seen with Warzone.

Now, several months after launch, Black Ops Royale looks and feels like the Black Ops 7 integration that Warzone should've initially received. This new mode is heavily inspired by Call of Duty's original Blackout battle royale that was introduced in 2018 alongside Black Ops 4. Black Ops Royale utilizes the grappling gun and wingsuit mechanics originally featured in Blackout and reintroduced in Black Ops 7's campaign and Endgame. The mode also integrates Call of Duty's latest wall-jump omnimovement, and all of these additions make for more fluid and interesting movement and player engagements on Warzone's new map.

Technically, Avalon is a "new" map for Warzone, but it's one you had plenty of time to get familiar with if you played Black Ops 7's Endgame mode. Warzone's version of the map is not an exact replica, and the devs aren't just retrofitting the map for Black Ops Royale, as it was designed in part to support it. The battle royale version drains some of the water to provide more land for players to traverse and reduce how much swimming is needed to get from island to island.

After six years, the multiplayer horror game Phasmophobia is getting a 1.0 release later this year. This upgraded version of the game will offer a bevy of enhancements--from overhauled character models to new maps--but with developer Kinetic Games also branching out into publishing, has development on the 1.0 release been impacted? Not at all, studio CEO and game director Daniel Knight said to GameSpot, as the developer and his team are still locked into the game while the studio hires the right people to manage its publishing duties.

"We've grown to about 45 people at our studio, and we're still growing. So we're making sure anything we're doing outside of Phasmaphobia doesn't affect the development," Knight said. "For me personally, I am exclusively on Phasmaphobia. "We have more than enough people on our team to cover the publishing. We're hiring people on the publishing side as well, so we're making sure that I'm not spread too thin between everything that we are doing."

Director of Marketing and Partnership Asim Tanvir added that the company has a publishing production manager to handle this side of the business, and that Kinetic Games has continued to grow out of necessity, not just for the sake of it.

Pokemon Pokopia is off to a stellar start in sales shortly after its release on Switch 2, already joining the ranks of other popular spin-offs in the franchise. The Pokemon Company and Nintendo say that sales for the cozy life sim surpassed 2.2 million copies.

That's according to a news release from the two companies, which added that the game reached this figure only four days after its March 5 launch.

Serebii editor Joe Merrick compared Pokopia's sales figures to those of other Pokemon spin-offs in an X post, showing that the new release is already the twelfth-best-selling spin-off. It's already overtaken fighting game Pokken Tournament, Pokemon Pinball: Ruby & Sapphire, and the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX remake.