GoKawiil
Tech News
Sony has announced that Mafia: The Old Country, Horizon Forbidden West and Poppy Playtime: Chapter 2 are joining the PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium catalogs. Most titles arrive October 20, with Poppy Playtime: Chapter 2 following on October 27. PlayStation Plus plans start at $11 a month and include access to a rotating library of games.
Microsoft has introduced the Xbox Nano Controller, a smaller version of its standard gamepad measuring just over five inches and weighing 3.5 ounces. It features a rechargeable battery, a programmable action button, and Bluetooth support for use with Xbox consoles, PCs, mobile devices, and smart TVs. Pre-orders are open now, with shipping in the US starting November 4 at $50, followed by availability in 35 more countries next month.
Epic Games has launched a redesigned version of its game launcher that the company says was built using AI, or "vibe coded." Epic claims the new launcher starts up 46% faster than Steam and offers a 30x faster library, along with new features like dedicated game pages, a unified downloads page, and collections for organizing titles. The launcher is in a preview/open beta phase, with some social and account management features still missing, and Epic advises Unreal developers and competitive Fortnite and Rocket League players to stick with the old version for now.
The Entertainment Software Association submitted recommendations to the US Trade Representative identifying Chinese-made handheld gaming devices, including those from Anbernic, as major piracy offenders. The ESA says these 'superfake' consoles ship with hundreds or thousands of pirated ROMs preloaded and may run insecure or malicious firmware. It cited an Italian enforcement action that seized roughly 12,000 Anbernic devices containing more than 47 million pirated files.
AI systems are now able to reverse-engineer compiled video games and software back into source code far faster than manual efforts, which previously took years and required large community projects like OpenGOAL and Ship of Harkinian. The resulting decompiled code can be modified, enhanced with features such as higher frame rates and dynamic resolution, and recompiled to run natively on other platforms.
Nintendo has told customers it plans to keep selling physical game cartridges for its consoles, even as Sony moves toward phasing out physical discs for PlayStation titles. Nintendo's reassurance follows gamer backlash against Sony's shift toward digital-only distribution.
Google is expanding its Ask Play chatbot into a broader AI-powered search tool for the Play Store, letting users ask questions and get app comparisons, with similar functionality coming to Gemini. The company also launched Game Finder, a recommendation engine using a 'Gamer DNA' profile built from usage data across 1.2 billion Android gamers, rolling out in the US now. Separately, Google plans to let users privately host and share apps they build themselves using AI coding tools through the Play Store.
Researchers and former officials gathered at Queen Mary University of London for a war-game exercise simulating how nations, companies and NGOs would respond to solar radiation modification technologies that could cool the planet by reflecting sunlight. Participants, including climate researcher Colleen Golja, played roles ranging from national governments to indigenous groups and tech firms, testing how a race to deploy such technology might unfold. The exercise revealed that reaching consensus on ethical, science-based deployment proved far harder than expected.
Microsoft is forming a new internal group called Xbox Labs, led by Scott (a games executive), tasked with turning emerging AI techniques—like decompiling and rebuilding games for new hardware, porting PC titles to browsers via WebAssembly and WebGPU, and remixing one game's code into another—into experiences for players and developers. The initiative follows recent community experiments that rapidly ported and transformed major titles using AI tools.
A game developer has published a blog post version of a 45-minute talk, 'Your Game Is A Harness,' originally delivered at the Indie Rodeo conference in Calgary on September 12. The post, written entirely without AI assistance, expands on using large language models for sustained, day-to-day game development rather than quick demo projects, drawing on the author's earlier experiment building a moodboarding site called mood.site using early ChatGPT.
Bloomberg reports Epic Games has pushed back the release of an untitled Disney-licensed shooter, originally slated for March 2027, to retool production around AI tools. A game director reportedly told staff there would be 'no more handwritten code' and that art would be generated through 'full AI workflows.' Epic founder Tim Sweeney confirmed a broader company pivot toward AI-accelerated development on X, and communications director Jake Jones said developers remain the 'visionaries' guiding the work.
LittleJS, a lightweight HTML5 game engine, has released its largest update yet, adding a full 3D renderer that shares the canvas with its existing 2D system. The update also includes built-in 2D and 3D level editors, a one-line particle effects library, a Three.js rendering plugin, and a reworked rendering core using batched WebGL2 sprites and instanced 3D drawing for faster performance.