5 Video Game Things I Learned | 2026 June 13 - June 19
Dontnod In Trouble
Some social media posts and subsequent news articles have painted a very bleak picture of the road ahead for Dontnod. I’ve followed Dontnod closely ever since I fell in love with Life Is Strange, one of my all-time favorite game series. However, the games I’ve played outside of Life Is Strange from Dontnod haven’t kept my attention. I struggled mightily to make it through Vampyr, Twin Mirror, and Harmony: The Fall of Reverie; I didn’t finish any of them. I did manage to will my way through Tell Me Why and was very disheartened by how shallow the characters felt. The studio’s other games from the past few years have all failed to impress critics, so I’ve been slow on the uptake despite never forgetting about them.
The recent social media posts now tell a grim story of a studio unable to find funding for its upcoming project following the fairly cold reception of Aphelion in April, 2026. This includes from Tencent, the second-largest video game company in the world in terms of revenue, despite them owning a 42% stake in Dontnod. Reports suggest that Dontnod was sitting on roughly €8.8 million shortly before Aphelion released. While the release certainly would have brought in some revenue, it’s unlikely to be much after considering the game’s lackluster sales, taxes, platform fees, potential revenue share with company/project investors, and potentially plenty of other expenses. Analysts expect the company could be completely out of cash by November, 2026.
This marks a dark time for studios with a heavy focus on narrative-driven gaming experiences. My friend and coworker, Tracy Alan, summed up the current state of such studios by pointing out to me and the rest of the team at Fourth Act a number of recent, similar developments. Here are those along with a few of my own:
As part of the impending Xbox layoffs that I referenced in last week’s 5 Things post, Compulsion Games is expected to be closed after its valiant effort on South of Midnight.
Deck Nine, the developer behind the unnumbered Life Is Strange games, has found itself hit with many layoffs since the release of Life Is Strange: Double Exposure in 2024. Back in March of 2025, it came to light that Deck Nine had laid off a huge portion of its team responsible for the game, leading to nobody being around to accept an award the game received at the 2025 Game Developers Conference.
I also talked about last week how difficult Telltale’s history has been, a team solely focused on delivering satisfying, single-player narratives.
While not exactly news, it still burns me every time I think about Campo Santo. While the company and team are in a good, secure place as part of Valve, I can’t help but feel that so much potential was left on the table. Firewatch became a cult classic, and the studio’s follow-up, In the Valley of Gods, seemed poised to continue the same level of quality. However, the team was reassigned, and while there’s still a Steam page for it that lists “December 2029” as a release date, I’m simultaneously hopeful and skeptical.
Disco Elysium took the world by storm, and instead of being able to come together to replicate the success, developer ZA/UM split apart to create several spiritual successors, none of which seem to have been able to reach the same heights just yet.
BioWare once was the powerhouse in the industry when it came to character-centric RPGs. Now, the company is a shell of its former self, left shattered by key personnel departures, EA meddling, live-service hubris, and overall disorganization.
Quantic Dream has its own dedicated audience (including me), but overall, their games are just as divisive as the studio’s writer, director, founder, and president David Cage. Furthermore, the time between releases is getting unsustainably long. Three years between Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls. Five years between Beyond: Two Souls and Detroit: Become Human. It’s been eight years since Detroit and over four years since the reveal of Star Wars: Eclipse with little recent information to go off of. To cap it all off, Quantic Dream quietly released and shuttered its first attempt at a free-to-play, live-service game, Spellcasters Chronicles, after only a few months in early access in 2026.
Night School Studio, once a promising studio behind Oxenfree and Afterparty, was scooped up by Netflix which has forced them to make mobile games for the streaming service. They still have managed to release Oxenfree II: Lost Signals, a game that managed to stay mostly true to the first game’s quality in writing and voice acting. However, the game’s sales and critical reception were disappointing, so who knows if Netflix will allow them to try something fun again.
I could probably continue, but I’ll finish off this headline by showing that it’s not all doom and gloom. Despite these setbacks to story-driven gaming, other studios exist to fill the void left by some of these misfortunes:
Sandfall Interactive is, of course, the prime example right now on people’s minds with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. The studio took a bold approach to their storytelling, and it totally paid off.
AdHoc Studio’s recent success of Dispatch has me even more excited, though, because it shows that a Telltale-style approach can still work.
Naughty Dog continues to set the bar when it comes to telling stories in video games. Even though they don’t have the same charm that the indie, AA, and Triple-I scenes do, they do it right just about every time.
Insomniac is right next door from Naughty Dog making stellar superhero experiences that don’t skimp on narrative and characters.
And to finish the trifecta of PlayStation, Santa Monica studios just showed off God of War Laufey at Summer Game Fest 2026, demonstrating that they’re not slowing down anytime soon.
Larian Studios had pedigree already, but after Baldur’s Gate 3 and the reveal of their next Divinity title, they’re riding high, showing the gaming world how to write RPGs.
P-Studio just teased Persona 6, the next addition to a series that has its strange quirks but nonetheless knows how to deliver a story that stays interesting for well over a hundred hours.
While I’m not personally a big fan of CD Projekt RED’s games, their ability to capture so many players with their games is undeniable, and that’s thanks in no small part to the complex world building and plots that the team continues to put together.
Hazelight can do no wrong. A Way Out felt like it was tapping into a relatively untouched market by delivering a serviceable narrative. It Takes Two took the co-op gaming world by storm and tugged at some heart strings along the way. Split Fiction then came out in 2025, adding further complexity to a narrative by essentially having an ever-evolving setting to spur the narrative forward. I can’t wait to see what they do next!
TFT’s 18 Weeks
I played my fair share of Riot Games’s Teamfight Tactics. While I don’t play anymore, it refreshed my relationship with some of my long-distance friends during a time when we grew a bit bored of League of Legends. Until this week, I had no idea that Riot built the game with an indie-sized team over the span of only 18 weeks. I discovered this during the State of Unreal 2026 presentation this week, during which Riot announced that the game would transition to Unreal Engine after running up until this point on Riot’s proprietary League of Legends engine.
I took interest in this particularly because of the fact that the League engine lives in its own world. The engine is built for League of Legends, and that’s it. This makes it all the more impressive that a small team of scrappy developers managed to only take 18 weeks to shoehorn in a fun and functional game that doesn’t even resemble the game their engine was specifically designed to support. The only phrase I can think of is “black magic” to describe how they could have possibly accomplished such a feat. I hope that the development team is able to find some ease-of-use and relief after the transition to Unreal.
Lore: New Version Control
Another topic from the State of Unreal presentation was Epic Games’s new version control control system, Lore. It’s open source and built specifically with games in mind. While Perforce’s Helix exists and does well for the games industry, I’m very excited to see where this version control goes. I’ve always been a Git user as a software engineer, and using it game development is mightily difficult at times. First of all, it’s convoluted for the many disciplines in game development that don’t code. That means the programming team or an IT team at a studio needs to spend a lot of extra time and resources troubleshooting with people who may have never used something quite like Git or understand how version control works. While many people and companies are happy to accommodate this (myself included), it can be frustrating and leaving one wondering, “Why is this not more intuitive?“
While I haven’t dug significantly into Lore just yet, I’m intrigued and will be trying to follow how its adopted by game developers. I especially want to know more about the advertised treatment of binary files, a constant pain point in version control. The software is completely open source and was made available immediately along with the announcement at State of Unreal.
EA and In-Game Ads
It looks like Electronic Arts is taking the next shot at advertising to players within premium games. Well-worn is the path toward true advertisement integration in premium titles. One of the latest and most public attempts has been 2K in their NBA 2K series, sparking tremendous fan backlash, especially toward unskippable video advertisements in the pre-game loading screens. EA appears to want to stick to (for now) simply putting brands on signs, ultimate packs, etc.
The funny this is that part of me likes the idea. Specifically, I like the idea of game developers getting more chances with modern technology to earn money and turn a profit. Game makers struggle mightily on a consistent basis to simply break even and keep employees paid, so the idea of opening up other revenue streams for developers seems like a logical and good one. However, this assumes an ideal world. In practice, this is a disaster ideated by corporate executives who care very little about video games or players.
This starts to get a little into my political beliefs when it comes to large corporations. The reality, in my eyes, is that decisions like this are slippery slopes. Whenever corporations are given an inch, they try to take a hundred miles. Corporate executives simply cannot help themselves, and they’re so powerful that the western world desperately needs to put tremendous effort into containing them for the sake of the customer. This is another example.
“Oh, EA wants to put little signs with actual brands on them into their sports video games that they charge $70 a pop for? What’s the harm in that?” The harm is not what they’re doing now; it’s what they and other video game corporations will do in the future if this precedent is set today. Corporations like EA, that can’t make good decisions to save its life, envision a world where video games become like the internet, television, and podcasts; all ads, all the time. Oh, our customers don’t want ads? I have an idea! We’ll charge them extra to get rid of the ads… then in the future we’ll site some financial reason that our multi-billion-dollar company that hasn’t failed to turn huge profit in decades needs to charge even more for a higher tier subscription to get rid of the ads. And so it will follow the narrative we’ve seen so many times before.
Video games are some of the last pieces of media where consumers aren’t bombarded on a daily and constant basis with endless advertising, sponsorships, and product placements. EA is trying to change that so that they can grow their $1.121 billion of net profit from last year at the expense of the player experience instead of doing it by improving the player experience.
Translation ≠ Localization
One of the many pieces of content that I’m actively consuming way after it came out is the Alanah Pearce-hosted podcast Video Game Writing 101. I just listened to the episode in which she discusses localization with FromSoftware and Frognation writers. Of course, they primarily spend the episode discussing the importance of localization, but something that hadn’t occurred to me before is the necessity of being a good writer in order to be a good localizer.
What this taught me is the very integral line between translation and localization. While translation largely focuses on replicating the same words from one language in another language, localization takes into account culture, mood, tone, character likeability, rhetoric, etc. In other words, localization requires good writing while translation requires a dictionary. I came to better understand the importance of a good localizer even more so than I already did. I’ve always thought about localization from a translation perspective because as a programmer, I concern myself with making sure specific words aren’t being used throughout a project in order to make room for localized versions of those words. Typically, accounting for culture doesn’t factor into my job as a programmer. However, it feels like one of those things that I’ll never be able to get out of my head when thinking about localization now.