Kotaku’s Biggest Gaming Culture News For The Week July 05, 2025

From mergers to memes, the landscape of interactive entertainment is always in motion. Here’s your cheat sheet for the week’s most important stories in gaming.

Reports and rumors of massive layoffs at Xbox have been building since late last month, and the first blood has now been spilled. Bloomberg reports that Candy Crush maker King is cutting 200 employees, or roughly 10 percent of its 2,000-person headcount, while multiple games across various Xbox studios, including the Perfect Dark reboot, have been canceled. – Ethan Gach Read More

The Alters is a narrative-driven sci-fi survival management sim about a research facility populated by clones. It released in June to positive reviews, with critics praising it for wedding interesting character interactions to the usual management sim churn. Now it’s getting flamed for incorporating AI slop. The studio behind it took to social media to defend itself, saying that a viral screenshot of an LLM text-generating prompt was an isolated incident and was never supposed to be kept in the game. – Ethan Gach Read More

I leave Elden Ring Nightreign matches all the time. Sometimes I’m playing with friends and we botch the first Evergaol mini-boss at level 2. Sometimes I’m playing with internet randos and the Recluse runs off to farm crystals without telling anyone and we get wiped multiple times by the Perfumer’s crossbow-wielding glass cannon henchmen. Every time I leave, the game warns me not to. “Don’t do it, don’t you dare do it!” it chides me. These are empty threats. I know because I lob them at my kids all the time. I have yet to see any evidence that I’ve actually been penalized for leaving matches, something I’ve occasionally done multiple times in a row. – Ethan Gach Read More

My eyes! What is this monstrosity?! Fetch me wooden stakes, holy water, silver bullets, shotguns, anything! Or has the Pokémon Company (TPCi) hired David Cronenberg to design its latest batch of plushies? – John Walker Read More

Overwatch 2 has been on a hot streak as of late, with excellent additions like the Perks system that lets you upgrade a hero throughout a match, and the Stadium mode that lets you create off-the-wall builds for each hero over the course of a seven-round game. The shooter just entered its 17th season, bringing with it a retro-game-themed battle pass, new heroes and maps for Stadium, and map voting across all modes. All of that sounds good on paper, but the addition of map voting and the way Blizzard implemented the system has split the community. After playing around with it myself, I yearn for the days of getting randomly assigned a map before a match. – Kenneth Shepard Read More

Few moments hit on the original SNES like your first time hearing “Stickerbush Symphony” while shooting through a labyrinth of towering thorny beanstalks in Donkey Kong Country 2‘s Bramble Blast levels. It’s one of the best songs to ever appear in a game, alongside one of the most evocative 16-bit platforming levels ever devised. That incredible mashup hasn’t been repeated since, until Donkey Kong Bananza. – Ethan Gach Read More

Red Dead Online, Rockstar’s other live-service game that isn’t as popular as Grand Theft Auto Online, isn’t dead. Well, not entirely. The online cowboy simulator just got a small update that adds a few creepy missions and promises more to come later. – Zack Zwiezen Read More

Buy now, pay later payment provider Affirm has partnered with video game commerce company Xsolla and will soon allow people to pay off in-game purchases of $50 or more via payment plans. – Zack Zwiezen Read More

Back in 2022, John Romero of Doom fame announced he was working on a new first-person shooter IP in Unreal Engine 5 for a “major publisher.” Three years later, the studio says it’s canceled and employees claim the latest wave of massive cuts at Xbox are to blame, with one designer calling the news “[a] massive, sudden & unexpected hit on a Project that was innovative, going strong and most importantly fun.” – Ethan Gach Read More