Titles stay as they are. Here’s the post without the anime section.
Bethesda dumped its entire future slate into a studio letter this week, and my first reaction was that we have done this dance before. This is the same studio that walked onto an E3 stage in 2018, showed a title card and a camera pan for The Elder Scrolls VI, and then went quiet for eight years. So when a wall of announcements lands right on the back of 1,600 layoffs at Xbox with another round waiting in the wings, I start watching what the other hand is doing.
That was the shape of the whole week honestly. Nintendo telling customers the tariff money is not theirs. Ryan Cohen telling GameStop customers that games are irrelevant. Hasbro quietly writing off $56 million. A lot of very loud talking about money.
The letter covers a lot of ground. Fallout 5 is in pre-production on Creation Engine 3 and still sits behind The Elder Scrolls VI. Remasters of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas are confirmed with no release windows attached. Fallout 76 gets an expansion called Ravenrock in 2027, a prequel to Fallout 3. Fallout Shelter keeps getting seasons, and the unscripted Amazon adaptation is still alive. Obsidian is building a new Fallout game, which is why the Avowed sequel got shelved. And The Elder Scrolls VI is, in Bethesda’s words:
our primary development focus today
Cool. It has been the primary focus for years. What I want is a screenshot. Concept art. A single scrap of bread, sir, please.
Xbox is trying to over-communicate right now, and I understand why. When you have gutted ZeniMax and id, closed studios, and raised your console price three separate times in under a year, you dangle the keys so the baby stops crying. Gears of War is coming. Halo: Campaign Evolved is here. Look over here, not over there. The thing is that this letter did not even get the Marvel treatment with a stage and a crowd losing its mind over Phase Three. It got the old DC slate treatment, which is to say a document that went out with no fanfare and no roadmap.
Here is my actual prediction. Obsidian passes Bethesda in the pecking order. Obsidian put out Avowed, Grounded 2, and The Outer Worlds 2 in a single calendar year. Not one of those is a home run, and I do not care. They were doubles, they came out on time, and Asha Sharma is running Xbox now with a very clear preference for teams that finish things. Bethesda is going to fight that pace because slow is their whole identity, and when a studio digs in on a creative process that has not fully worked in twenty years, leadership changes follow.
The Fallout Shelter piece is the part that made me laugh. On Steam it sits somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 concurrent players against a peak of 42,500. An unscripted show for that game in 2026 has the same energy as the Among Us show. You missed the window.
As for Starfield year three and the Starborn content in 2027, I will say this. There is a PC mod called Star Wars Genesis that reskins the entire game into the Star Wars universe. You pick your character, you go to Coruscant, you learn the Force or you take bounty work. I watched a video on the 8.3 version and immediately started thinking about buying Starfield again. A mod team is doing more for that game than three years of official support has, and I am amazed Disney has not dropped a cease and desist on it yet.
The Supreme Court ruled the tariffs illegal, businesses are getting refunds out of a collective $160 billion, and a proposed class action wants Nintendo to pass some of that money back to the people who paid inflated prices on Switch accessories and the original Switch. Nintendo has moved to dismiss, arguing customers got what they agreed to buy.
Those who bought Nintendo’s products received exactly what they bargained and paid for
I am pro-consumer to my bones and Nintendo is right here. There is no leg to stand on. Nobody filed a class action when eggs were absurd. Nobody is going after the oil companies for a rebate after the fact. Scalpers charge triple during a shortage, people pay it, and those buyers do not get to demand the difference back six months later. A video game console is a luxury item, the price was on the box, and you decided it was worth it.
Nintendo also raised prices for reasons beyond tariffs, including memory and labor and shipping, and it ate the tariff cost on the Switch 2 entirely. That console has held its launch price for over a year, which is more than Microsoft managed while raising the Xbox price three times. The increase coming in September is a different conversation.
The other problem is that no number fixes this. A $15 store credit is an insult, $50 is an insult, $100 is an insult. So why bend the knee at all? A judge is going to toss this, because ruling the other way sets a precedent that reaches every company that ever adjusted a price during the tariff mess.
I get the frustration underneath it. Games are $80, the next consoles are creeping toward $1,000, studios keep closing after profitable launches. Everything is boiling over and people want somewhere to put it. Put it somewhere that can actually change. Xbox’s decision-making, industry-wide layoffs, the $80 price floor. This particular hill has no juice in it worth the squeeze.
Our favorite half cash, half stock guy is back. Ryan Cohen said physical game sales are irrelevant to GameStop’s business, that software is under 12% of revenue, and that collectibles make up over half.
It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all.
When a man says it twice in a row, he is trying to convince himself.
The pivot to collectibles makes sense on paper. GameStop saw the digital shift coming back in the PS4 and Xbox One era and knew trade-ins were going to dry up. What is tone deaf is saying it out loud to the people who still walk into those stores for games. The sign says GameStop. It does not say CollectibleStop or Trading Card Stop.
And the collectible business is standing on a trapdoor. Funko is one of the biggest sellers in those stores, and reporting last year suggested Funko might not have the cash to survive another year. The T-shirts are generic and the figures are mostly available elsewhere for the same money or less. Take away Funko and I would love to know what that half of the business actually looks like.
He also said the more efficient you get, the easier it is to grow. GameStop is one of the least efficient operations in American retail. This is a company that ran a trade-anything day where employees were told to prepare for taxidermied animals coming through the door.
Here is the free idea. If GameStop wants to be relevant in digital, go the GOG route and sell DRM-free games that people actually own. No activation, no sign-in, no launcher. I picked up the full Arkham bundle over there recently for about $16, including Origins, which Steam does not carry. There is real room for a reputable third storefront. It will not happen, because Cohen is busy buying up eBay stock and telling them they will be his one way or another, which is a strange play for a man who just said secondhand physical media does not matter to him. An analyst pegged the global secondhand game market at $7.2 billion, so somebody over there can do math.
Hasbro’s latest earnings report lists a $56 million impairment on what it calls a:
refocused digital games portfolio for 2028 and beyond
More unannounced games got canceled. Back in 2022 Hasbro was spinning up G.I. Joe projects, Forgotten Realms games, and Exodus at Archetype Entertainment with former BioWare leadership. That is a lot of teams to keep alive while you wait, and big public companies hate waiting more than anything.
The part everyone forgets is that Hasbro does not own Larian. Baldur’s Gate 3 won Game of the Year for a studio Hasbro licensed to, and Larian has already said they are not making Baldur’s Gate 4 because they are off building something of their own. So the plan became build it yourself, and now you are $56 million lighter with a canceled slate and people about to lose jobs.
Take the Disney route. Stop running studios and start licensing your IP to people who know how to make games. And nobody is buying a standalone G.I. Joe game in 2026. You call Epic, you put G.I. Joe in Fortnite, and suddenly a whole generation knows who Snake Eyes is. That costs you a phone call instead of a studio.
Not every release has to be a grand slam either. EA can afford to make an Unravel because FIFA prints money. You can hit a double, market it properly, and still come out fine. Banking on a Baldur’s Gate every time is how you end up closing studios. And while we are here, Wizards of the Coast has been charging premium money for increasingly thin D&D books. Do better.
Two other things stuck with me from the week. Jennifer English is stepping back from her role in Tides of Annihilation for health reasons while staying on in an advisory capacity, and she already helped pick her replacement, which is a class move from someone who just won Best Performance for Maelle. And Cliff Bleszinski opened up about his struggle with alcoholism and wants back into game development. LawBreakers was a dud, sure, but the man gave me Gears of War and set the 360 on fire doing it. I hope he gets what he needs and then gets back to work, because this industry keeps proving it is a machine, and the only reason any of us care about it is the people inside it.
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