5 Video Game Things I Learned | 2026 May 16 - May 22
Welcome to the second installment of five things I learned about video games. This time, we’re looking at a healthy dose of optimism and pessimism to offset one another. We have XBOX’s rise and Ubisoft’s fall. More games and more ways to discover them. Enjoy!
Q1 Steam Games Releases Rise 23%
As reported by HowToMarketAGame.com, there was roughly a 23% increase in Q1 Steam game releases from 2025 to 2026. Considering that Q1 is statistically the quarter of every year with the lowest number of game releases, this points to a pretty sharp rise in game releases for 2026 as a whole. HowToMarketAGame estimates Steam will hit nearly 26,000 game releases this year. While the number of games released every year has consistently been on the rise for quite some time, this would represent the greatest raw delta in Steam game releases ever. Unfortunately, the data seems to point toward a lot of slop and shovelware being responsible for this increase.
The Story Rich Showcase
Fellow Traveller Games—the video game publisher behind games like Orwell: Ignorance is Strength and the Citizen Sleeper series—has added to the Summer Game Fest lineup with a new Story-Rich Showcase. The company’s website describes it as a way to “give narrative-driven titles the time, care, and visibility they so often miss during one of the busiest moments in the games calendar.”
This showcase will live rent-free in my head until I can watch it in June. This time of year gets me so excited as I get to sit back for several days and just see the video game lineup of the future. Consistently, every year, the games that get me the most excited are the shorter, narrative-driven games that invite me to dive deep into a new world with new characters and a gripping plot. However, in the usual showcases, seeing trailers for those is like chipping away at ore with a dull pickaxe just to get a single nugget to break off. With this dedicated showcase, I feel invigorated and hopeful. Supposedly, we can expect 20-25 games that all have a primary focus on narrative.
I do wonder if landing right during Summer Game Fest is the best approach for Fellow Traveller. Ultimately, I feel confident that they know better than I do, but a piece of me believes that an approach of finding a time away from the noise of Summer Game Fest would help the showcase garner even more attention. On the other hand, Summer Game Fest essentially acts as a marketing buzzword that Fellow Traveller can use for free. At another time of the year, Fellow Traveller may have more difficulty bringing the raw numbers to the showcase.
XBOX Player Voice
XBOX continues to evolve under the fresh leadership of Asha Sharma. After a lot of initial scrutiny because she comes from a background in leading teams dedicated to AI, Sharma has made sweeping impacts on XBOX’s future, and all of them seem to be for the better. Game Pass’s price dropped; she made solid PR moves by directly addressing her AI background and describing a future of XBOX that is more focused on games; she killed the XBOX Copilot integration that nobody ever asked for.
Now, we have XBOX Player Voice, “a new place to collect [player] feedback and make it more visible.” Frankly, I don’t believe this marks some grand new design in the world of player feedback. Essentially, XBOX Player Voice is a forum where people can call out friction points with XBOX’s products and business or suggest changes and others can vote on which ones they agree with. Like any good forum, it comes equipped with commenting, sharing, and tagging features. Right out of the gate, players have created thousands of posts spanning over a dozen categories and all XBOX products/services.
After less than a week of the forum being pushed out, we can see the top rated asks from players in order:
Exclusives: Players wants to see more XBOX exclusives. This isn’t surprising. The lack of a competitive library of exclusive XBOX games has made the company an afterthought in the hardware race. While PlayStation over the years has hammered home hits like Ghost of Yōtei, God of War, Spider-Man, Astro Bot, The Last of Us, and Uncharted, and Nintendo has continued to embrace and succeed in their own brand of exclusivity, XBOX has gobbled up studios into their first-party lineup, spat them out, and come out the other end with very little to show for it.
Free Multiplayer: Players are sick of paying extra to play games online on consoles. They already pay for their internet connection, and they can play online games at no extra cost on PC. Is it financially necessary to charge for online play? Hard to say. If I were to guess, the answer would be technically no. However, since consoles are sold at a loss, hardware companies like XBOX have to find other places in the business where they can recoup those losses. Potentially more so than in any other industry, gamers are highly resistant to their prices increasing. Because of that, I’m not sure this one will ever see the light of day. To achieve this, XBOX may have to shift to other, worse practices to close the gap on that loss of income. However, free multiplayer would truly set XBOX apart from other consoles and build a lot of good will in the industry. The financial and statistical minds at XBOX may be able to put together some projections where the increase in player count ultimately leads to enough extra income in other areas of the business for free multiplayer to make sense. We’ll see.
Backwards Compatibility: Players badly want to experience OG and 360 XBOX games on their newer hardware, and XBOX’s acquisitions of Bethesda and Activision Blizzard have yielded an even larger library of games within the company’s control that players want to go back to. Unfortunately, we’ll likely need to wait until the next generation of XBOX consoles to see how seriously this cry will be taken.
Game Pass Family Plan: With a lot of households having multiple XBOX consoles and Game Pass moving onto Windows as well, the need for a Game Pass family plan is higher than ever. A lot of people complain about having to fight over who gets to play because paying for individual Game Pass subscriptions for each household member gets expensive very quickly. XBOX dabbled in this idea some years ago, but it disappeared without a trace. Customers clammer away in XBOX Player Voice for the return of the feature to simplify their XBOX experience.
Achievements: Color me surprised to see this getting so much attention. Apparently, players want an overhaul on how their achievements work. To be fair, achievements haven’t evolved much over the decades, so something fresh in that department would mean something to a lot of gamers. Requests include the ability to earn achievements offline, separating DLC achievements from main game achievements to avoid losing 100% completion when DLC drops, the ability to re-unlock some achievements to see how many times you’ve done so, separate achievements for each game in a collection, and just a general redesign of how achievements work to give something fresh that gamers haven’t seen or thought of before.
The real litmus test of this Player Voice initiative is going to be how frequently and effectively XBOX responds to this feedback. So far, the going is slow, almost certainly because of the sheer number of posts to sort through that have come through in such a short period of time. XBOX Player Voice comes equipped with status filters to see which pieces of feedback are being reviewed, considered, looked into, implemented, etc. As of the writing of this post, XBOX hasn’t marked any posts as being considered, looked into, reviewed, or worked on. However, the filter also produces a goose egg when looking at posts given the “Not right now” status, so XBOX hasn’t been quick to throw out any feedback just yet.
I do believe XBOX can celebrate a huge win regarding Player Voice. Recently, the first-ever change was implemented by XBOX as a result of Player Voice. Xbox announced that play time for games will now be shown in hours instead of days. The change rolls out to certain XBOX Insiders first, followed by a series of broader rollouts across consoles and eventually PCs over time. While not grand or glamorous, it gets the ball rolling quickly and demonstrates a desire by XBOX to take this feedback seriously.
Ubisoft Loses $1.4 Billion
Ubisoft has been in some muddy waters for a couple of years now. Personally, I think it really came to a head in 2024. The best way I can think to format Ubisoft’s missteps of 2024 is in a bulleted list:
Skull and Bones released to horrible reception. It was lauded as a ‘AAAA’ game by the company that began development in 2013 and continued to receive delay after delay after delay until it finally released in 2024 as a boring pirate MMO with no ability to stand out.
XDefiant released in an effort to capture more of the live-service market despite Ubisoft already having a large player base for Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege. The initial interest in the game was promising, but it failed to do anything inventive to keep players around for an extended period of time. By the end of the year, Ubisoft would announce that development of the game would be discontinued. Servers would be shut down just over a year following the launch.
Star Wars Outlaws hit store shelves and failed to impress. While the general consensus seemed to be that it’s a competent open world (a feature the Star Wars games had been lacking), it failed to reach sales targets due to technical issues and—once again—little originality.
Partially in the face of Star Wars Outlaws needing more post-launch attention to address its technical instability, Assassin's Creed Shadows was delayed outside of 2024 and would go on to be delayed a second time, not releasing until March 2025.
Ubisoft canceled Tom Clancy's The Division Heartland, another attempt to go in on live-service. The game was slated to be free-to-play, online, survival game with 45 players in a PvE lobby. It started as a planned battle royale mode in The Division 2.
Ubisoft, like much of the video games industry, participated in mass layoffs after hiring more than its fair share during the COVID-19 pandemic.
And finally, let’s not forget that 2024 was the year that Ubisoft quietly and shamefully released Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles, an NFT game that seemed to solely be aimed at cashing in on the NFT craze… at least a year after the NFT craze died out. If it had managed to release in the height of NFTs, most gamers would still recognize it as a cash grab with no soul behind it, but at least it would’ve been drowned out by the rest of the NFT noise. In 2024, it stuck out like a sore thumb and damaged Ubisoft’s reputation further.
Now, almost halfway through 2026, Ubisoft has reported tremendous losses in the last fiscal year to the tune of $1.4 billion USD. My hope is that this is a sign of Ubisoft getting worse before it gets better. Ubisoft has become the corporate spittoon of the video game industry, embodying an inability to produce and manage game productions, embrace creative ideas, or shift their gaze away from dollar signs. With mass layoffs, executives leaving, and lots of restructuring, Ubisoft is now feeling the true hurt of its past failures.
Sony Abandons PC
PlayStation has made concerted efforts to get their most popular single-player, exclusive titles onto PC to expose their properties to a wider range of players. In the 2020s, Sony Interactive Entertainment has released Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, Marvel’s Spider-Man, Days Gone, The Last of Us Part, Ghost of Tsushima, Returnal, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection, Until Dawn, and several other sequels to these games in an effort to test the waters of the PC market. Earlier in 2026, it was reported that PlayStation was moving back from these practices. This past week, Herman Hulst, the head of PlayStation Studios, stood firmer on this ground. Jason Schreier reported that Hulst confirmed in a company town hall that “the company’s narrative single-player games will now be PlayStation exclusive” and no longer release to PC.
I have little doubt that this announcement disappoints fans of these titles. While developing for another platform adds development time, bugs, and more behind-the-scenes work to manage, players enjoy the ability to push their PCs to their limits to achieve graphical fidelity that simply isn’t possible on home consoles. However, from a financial and practical standpoint, I guess PlayStation decided that the juice just isn’t worth the squeeze.
1-Up: Goodbye Destiny 2
As an extra entry here, I want to acknowledge the announcement of the end of Destiny 2’s development. Bungie has kept development going for nearly a decade after launch, and they finally decided that it’s time to throw in the towel. Strangely, this doesn’t feels like a developer moving on to bigger and better things. Instead, it’s more akin to a studio slowly withering away in the face of adversity. With development of Destiny 2 coming to a close, Bungie doesn’t plan to make something new like a third installment of the franchise or a new IP. In fact, it appears Bungie has zero plans for the future outside of its latest release, Marathon. With all of its eggs in the Marathon basket, Bungie will lay off a significant number of developers who worked on Destiny 2. This wouldn’t be such a bad omen if Marathon didn’t have an abysmal release followed by consistently lack-luster player counts. Putting all of your eggs into one basket is already ill-advised, but doing so when the basket is full of holes is definitely not a recipe for success.