2017's Hollow Knight just reached a new all-time peak concurrent-player record on Steam, and the achievement came just after developer Team Cherry announced the release date for its sequel, Silksong.

Hollow Knight reached an all-time peak concurrent record of 23,819 on Steam today, August 22. Measuring a game's popularity by Steam concurrent numbers is never a perfect or complete encapsulation of a game's popularity, and Hollow Knight being an exclusively single-player game that doesn't rely on people playing at the same time muddies the waters as well. But what is evident here is that Hollow Knight's popularity on Steam is growing in the wake of the big Silksong reveal.

Hollow Knight's previously Steam concurrent record of around 20,000 players was achieved in May 2022. All of this data comes from SteamDB.

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NBA 2K26 is just a week out from launch for those who preorder or purchase the early-launch editions. When it gets here, players should expect to find that what was once the community's biggest complaint has been scrubbed out of the game, according to its gameplay lead. Earlier this week, gameplay director Mike Wang told me in a chat from NBA 2K Community Day in San Francisco that 2K26 was designed from "day one" to eliminate what players most often found had plagued the game: "RNG"--short for random number generation--or what often felt like randomized outcomes.

The community, Wang told me, "felt like they didn't have control over the outcomes of the shot or whatever it was on the court. That's the biggest thing we addressed. Like, from day one, one of the points of emphasis was to make sure that [for] everything in the game, there's a skill aspect to it, or it's completely driven by skill, so that the gamer had the ability to dictate whether they did something right or wrong.

SGA follows his nearly perfect season by being on the cover of NBA 2K26.

"That's probably most felt in shooting. Shooting is such a touchy subject. We're doing green-or-miss [mechanics] again," he explained, describing the way a perfectly timed shot will always go in, while a shot that misses the on-screen green timing window never will. This mechanic frustrated some players in 2K24, leading to the team creating different difficulty, or "shot timing" profiles for players to choose at will in last year's game, but this created its own set of issues by pitting players with different profiles against one another.

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Sam Fisher hasn't starred in a Splinter Cell video game in over a decade, but he's getting his comeback this fall. Netflix has released a new trailer for Splinter Cell: Deathwatch, an animated series that sends Sam on another mission, and it's set to debut on October 14.

Michael Ironside voiced Fisher in most of the Splinter Cell games, but the leading role in this series will now be filled by Liev Schreiber. There aren't a lot of story details in the trailer beyond Sam kicking some butt and taking names. But the trailer does pause long enough to focus on the grave of Douglas Shetland, one of Sam's friends whom he was forced to kill when he went rogue. If the animated series is following the plot of the games, this would set the story somewhere around the Pandora Tomorrow/Chaos Theory period.

The other cast members currently confirmed for the series are Janet Varney as Anna "Grim" Grímsdóttir, Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Zinnia McKenna, and Joel Oulette as Thunder. John Wick co-creator Derek Kolstad is the head writer and producer for Deathwatch, and the animation was provided by Sun Creature Studio and Fost.

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Double Fine's next game is out in October, but beyond that, don't expect to see the studio announce Psychonauts 3 or Brutal Legend 2 in the near-future. Studio development chief Tim Schafer recently spoke about what's next for the developer after it launches its puzzle-adventure game Keeper, and he confirmed that the studio has multiple original IP in development.

"I'm working on other stuff," Schafer said to IGN. "The studio is doing multiple projects right now, and they're all original IPs, because we did Psychonauts 2 and that will hold us for sequels for a while."

Development on Keeper is being led by Double Fine's Lee Petty, and this allowed Schafer to focus his efforts on these new projects. That doesn't mean that we'll never see a Psychonauts threequel--after all, the game between the first and second games was 16 years--or another Brutal Legend game, but for now, the developer is interested in creating brand-new games instead. Back in June, Schafer also commented on how he was developing new games instead of Psychonauts 3.

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In the menagerie of 1990s animal video game mascots, Bubsy might rank somewhere between Aero the Acrobat and Sparkster from Rocket Knight Adventures (the latter having a small resurgence last year with the rerelease of the Sega Genesis games). Now it's Bubsy's turn to get a new spin for a new decade in Bubsy 4D, and it actually looks good.

Over on Bluesky, the developer Fabraz showed off more of the game's mechanics, switching Bubsy back and forth from his hairball form, dashing through obstacles, then back to regular form, climbing and clawing his way over walls and other nefarious traps. The cel-shaded colors pop and set it apart from the other games in the franchise.

The wise-cracking bobcat is returning to his platforming roots after 2019's auto-runner, Bubsy: Paws on Fire, but this time he's not taking on the Woolies but an army of sheep robots: The BaaBots. Bubsy 4D also includes a customizable wardrobe, including the Bubsy 3D skin.

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Advance Wars: Dual Strike is celebrating its 20-year anniversary today, August 22, 2025. Below, we revisit the user-generated-content features of the game that were ahead of their time.

The rain drenched my infantryman's helmet as he marched forward. He could barely make out the jagged silhouettes of the grey buildings 100 feet ahead, but it would only be a moment until he reached them. Or so he thought--until the ambush fell. Tanks, recon trucks, and bazooka-wielding foot soldiers poured out of the fog and into my trenches, cutting through my defenses before I could even get my bearings.

For me, Advance Wars: Dual Strike was a grid-based chess match where every piece could explode, but the single-player campaign felt like squaring off against a row of toddlers still figuring out how pawns worked. The missions were charming, but I wanted something sharper. Dual Strike's other modes, especially Versus, were where the real battlefields waited, ready for me to customize my way into intense engagements--including horrific defeats like the one I just described. This mode was both a canvas for my tactical creativity and an early sign of where the game industry would go in the future.

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Hollow Knight: Silksong finally has a release date, and it's soon, with the long-awaited game slated to arrive on September 4. There is a lot of hype and pent-up demand for Silksong, and with that in mind, three developers have opted to delay their releases that were scheduled close to Silksong.

Developer Panik Arcade has announced that CloverPit, a roguelike that's described as the "demonic lovechild of Balatro and Buckshot Roulette," is now set for release on September 26. CloverPit was originally going to launch on September 3, but Panik Arcade is pushing it back.

"Silksong is the most anticipated and wishlisted game on all of Steam and we think people will love this game and play it right at launch (including us) but that also means it will overshadow all games launching close to it. So if we stick to our original date we would risk the launch of CloverPit a fair bit," the developers said.

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Unlike past Call of Duty games, this year's Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 will not allow players to choose a difficulty level for the campaign. Associate creative director Miles Leslie said that the difficulty scale for Black Ops 7 is "baked in" as opposed to being something a player can choose.

The reason for this comes down to how Black Ops 7's campaign can be played in co-op.

"We've built it for solo or four-player squads as well. You cannot pick a difficulty like past games. We've baked it in because you have to approach a co-op campaign differently, and we wanted to make sure the missions felt right for solo players," Leslie told IGN.

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Until recently, Bungie's next game, Marathon, was slated to be released in September. But the game was delayed indefinitely in June amid reports that Bungie will lose its independence by fully integrating into PlayStation Studios. Now, Bungie's CEO Pete Parsons has announced his departure from the studio after over two decades.

Parsons joined Bungie in 2002 and served as COO before being promoted to CEO in early 2016. In a statement shared on Bungie's official site, Bungie called his stint on top of the company "the honor of a lifetime" and added that he is "deeply proud of the worlds we've built together and the millions of players who call them home."

Before closing his statement, Parsons announced that Chief Development Officer Justin Truman will be the new head of Bungie. He also endorsed Truman as his successor.

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Battlestate Games has been developing its intense first-person tactical shooter Escape From Tarkov since 2012. Although the closed beta debuted in 2017, players had no idea when to expect the full release. Now, Battlestate Games has shared a new live-action Escape From Tarkov trailer that confirms its exit from early access this fall.

The November 15 release date was revealed in the closing seconds of the video above. Studio head Nikita Buyanov subsequently confirmed the date on his X account.

15.11.2025
1.0 release
Let’s gooooooo!

— Nikita Buyanov (@nikgeneburn) August 21, 2025

Very little was shared about what will be included in Escape From Tarkov version 1.0. Presumably it will have some story content as well as refined maps, weapons, and quality-of-life improvements. But absent any firm details from Battlestate Games, we can only speculate.

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2025 has already been a banner year for Nightdive Studios, the team behind the recently released System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster and the Heretic + Hexen remaster. The studio has made its name by giving classic games a modern coat of paint. One of the titles that Nightdive Studios CEO Stephen Kick is still eager to get his hands on is Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, which has only ever been released on GameCube back in 2002.

Kick shared his desire to revisit Eternal Darkness during a recent appearance on Shacknews (via Nintendo Life). But since the rights to the game are fully owned by Nintendo, it may never get an official re-release.

"[Eternal Darkness has] been kinda locked behind the GameCube/Nintendo wall all this time, and it's something that I would personally love to see get re-released," Kick said.

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Gearbox Software's Randy Pitchford has predicted that Borderlands 4 will push the franchise's total sales numbers to a new stratosphere: 100 million units. Speaking to Insider Gaming, Pitchford said plainly, "We will break 100 million units with this launch, easily, all in, with the franchise."

That's not actually a very bold prediction. The series currently stands at more than 94 million units, so Pitchford is predicting sales of at least 6 million for Borderlands 4. By comparison, Borderlands 3 sold more than 23 million copies and is 2K's fastest-selling game ever. The top-selling game of all time for 2K is Borderlands 2, which has achieved sales of more than 30 million units.

Not many video game franchises have reached 100 million units sold. If Borderlands 4 can help push the series to that level, Borderlands would join the likes of GTA, Red Dead, Pokemon, Call of Duty, Minecraft, Final Fantasy, and Assassin's Creed.

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Platinum Games, the developer of acclaimed action titles including Bayonetta and Nier: Automata, contributed to the development of Konami's Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, Konami has confirmed. Specifically, Platinum created a new version of Snake's Nightmare, an Easter egg that longtime fans of MGS3 will no doubt relish the return of.

Snake's Nightmare is a third-person action sequence that is accessed by saving the game when Snake is captured and thrown in prison. When the save file is reloaded, instead of going back to the prison, players wake up in a hellish otherworld where a mysterious man wielding hook-swords takes on demons in a graveyard.

The minigame, also known to fans as Guy Savage, was originally written and directed by Shuyo Murata, who contributed to a number of other Metal Gear Solid projects as part of the original Kojima Productions team. Although Metal Gear Solid 3 has been re-released in various forms since its debut on the PlayStation 2, Snake's Nightmare/Guy Savage has been omitted in the majority of them.

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There's a good chance that, at some point in your life, you've been so enamored of a piece of media that you've considered what it'd be like to experience it for the first time again. Watching Terminator 2, hearing Enter the Wu-Tang, and reading The Dark Knight Returns shaped who I am and, as a result, I remember the moments I experienced them with crystal clarity. Over time, however, those memories have become divorced from the emotions they stirred and what's left in their place is a longing for those lost feelings.

Video games are the only medium that I think are capable of making that first-time-again fantasy a reality--or as close to one as we're going to get. Time puts distance between us and the emotionally significant moments we cherish, but it also brings us closer to exciting technologies that can make the old feel new. In the right hands, those technologies can create opportunities to stoke those profound emotions again, even if it's just a little. Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater does exactly that.

Before getting into what's new, what can't be overlooked in making Delta such a good game is the fact that Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater remains a compelling, well-told story that has strong characterization and deals with some heavy subject matter. It approaches this with a strange mixture of self-seriousness and complete irreverence that is uniquely Metal Gear Solid and, for my money, balances both parts better than any other entry in the series. The stellar stealth is supported by systems that feed into the fantasy of surviving in the jungle and braving the elements, whether that be hunting for food or patching yourself up after sustaining injuries. Delta replicates it and, in my opinion, is better for it. The excellent work that the original Metal Gear Solid 3 dev team did remains the heart and soul of Delta, and it continues to shine.

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This is a chaotic, dark, and corrupt world of cultivation. All cultivators ardently worship the great beings with authority: the Fates. The Fates spread their might, bring down miracles, exert great power, garnering many believers, amassing vast power from incense offerings. They build sects for the Fates, restore temples, propagate doctrines, hold ceremonies, all in hope of receiving blessings to breakthrough realms and ultimately ascend. However, beneath the Fates, there exist many mighty beings, known as Unknowns: false gods, evil spirits, malicious thoughts… Starting from the weakest Unknown [Terror], you will gradually strengthen your sect, recruit your disciples, bring down your miracles, collect your offerings, and become the greatest being in this world of cultivation.

Welcome to Abyss: New Dawn, where the boundaries of reality blur beneath the endless layers of a mysterious realm. Will you roam the primeval forest of Lulita, where whispers of lost treasures and giant creatures fill the air? Or perhaps you’ll take your chances in the sun-drenched meadows of New Dawn land, where tranquil farming awaits those seeking a simpler life. In this enchanting world, you can choose the path of an intrepid adventurer, delving into the treacherous depths to unearth arcane artifacts and fight formidable foes, or cultivate your own tranquil paradise, planting seeds, tending animals, and watching the fruits of your labor thrive. With each choice, the Abyss shifts, offering new challenges and unexpected friendships. Forge your destiny as you embrace the vastness of Abyss: New Dawn. Will you chase glory and danger, or carve out your haven amidst the wonders? The adventure awaits!