5 Video Game Things I Learned | 2026 September 26 - October 2
A relatively upbeat week of learning for me. It’s been so long! It started with updates from Naughty Dog about some of my most anticipated games: Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, more The Last of Us projects, and an upcoming Uncharted game. The good news keeps coming when I look at the winners of the Best Places to Work Awards 2026 and some of the news I’ve missed surrounding the success of Big Walk. Finally, some more analytical news surrounding PlayStation’s crusade against physical media and Steam’s never-ending pursuit of connecting players with games they could love.
Minor Naughty Dog Updates
A lot of eyes steal glances at Naughty Dog every news cycle to see what they’re up to, and I’m one of those people. However, I also feel confident that if I sit back and let the studio do their thing, I will be rewarded with something incredible. While most of the video game industry’s focus has been on Rockstar’s upcoming Grand Theft Auto VI, all of the things Capcom is up to, and the monumental shakeup at XBOX, Naughty Dog has quietly gone more than six years without releasing a new game.
This is the longest break between major releases in Naughty Dog history, and there are several things behind it. Even if you don’t consider Uncharted: The Lost Legacy a “major release,” there was only a four-year gap between Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End and The Last of Us Part II, the 2020 game that is currently Naughty Dog’s most recent major release. Since then, Naughty Dog has produced another remaster of The Last of Us, a remaster of The Last of Us Part II, and a collection of Uncharted games, all of which brought Naughty Dog properties to PlayStation 5 and PC. The studio also reportedly spent three years in development on an online The Last of Us game as part of PlayStation’s still-failing push to find a live-service gem before the game was cancelled to focus more on the single-player games Naughty Dog is known for.
Naughty Dog revealed their next major release at The Game Awards in 2024. It’s called Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet and is Naughty Dog’s foray into space sci-fi. It also serves as Naughty Dog’s first game for a new IP in more than a decade, the last one being The Last of Us in 2013. The last time the studio released a game that wasn’t in the Uncharted or The Last of Us franchises was before either of them existed in 2005 with Jak X: Combat Racing. Needless to say, this is long overdue, and Naughty Dog fans like myself are anxious to get their hands on Intergalactic.
This past week was The Last of Us Day, September 26, and as part of the company’s celebration of arguably their most beloved IP, Naughty Dog president Neil Druckmann announced that in the year of our lord, 2026… there will be no more Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet news… A bit underwhelming. However, he confirmed that “In 2027, that changes. We’ll fully reveal Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet and give you a proper look at Jordan’s wild sci-fi adventure.“
While I’m certainly excited to find out more next year, this is just an appetizer of the Naughty Dog news.
Druckmann also addressed future plans for The Last of Us. “We have [two] very exciting new projects in very early stages,“ he wrote. He then went on: “The world of The Last of Us means a great deal to us, and we wouldn’t return to it unless we had something meaningful to say. We believe these stories are worth telling.“ Naturally, I want to speculate a bit on what these projects could mean. Obviously, I have as much idea as any other person you pass on the street. However, to me, it would make a lot of sense that the studio has ideas for how Ellie’s narrative continues after her violently bloody ordeal in The Last of Us Part II. That covers one of the projects. So what would the second one be? A spinoff is a clear frontrunner for a hypothesis. I would be curious to know if such a game would be its own full game or a shorter experience akin to Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. An even more interesting project, though, would be a sort of kick off to a new, multi-game narrative in the universe. I don’t think this is likely since I don’t think Naughty Dog typically projects that far ahead with their properties, opting typically to pour their hearts into one, impassioned story at a time.
Anyway, that wraps up Druckmann’s short statement following The Last of Us Day.
But wait! There’s more! Later on in the week, news came out that the director of Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, Shaun Escayag, is heading up a new Uncharted game that will see Nathan Drake return… but perhaps not as the leading man anymore. This news has been supposedly corroborated by multiple sources, and I can’t help but wonder what stage all of these games are in. While Druckmann said specifically that the projects for The Last of Us are in very early stages, I wonder what that means. Prototyping? Narrative conceptualization? A small meeting where it was mentioned?
I get the feeling that this Uncharted project is likely much further along than the other ones. I would even go as far to say that we should expect it to be the next major release after Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. Escayag left Naughty Dog in 2018 shortly after the release of Lost Legacy to join Crystal Dynamics, but he returned in 2021 and was assigned to an unknown project. Assuming that project was this Uncharted game, that would mean the game could be more than five years in the making already.
Steam to Improve Discoverability
Okay, that title is like saying, “Steam makes decision.“ Everything Steam does is in service of trying to connect players with games they may enjoy and developers with their audiences. After all, that’s how Steam earns money.
This particular decision comes in the form of an automatically curated Discounts & Events section of the Steam storefront. But wait, Brandon. Doesn’t Steam already do that? Apparently not. We’re all used to hearing about all of the ways Steam is changing up algorithms to decide what to put in front of players, but Steam still relies on manual curation of Discounts & Events. I was shocked to learn that this is the case.
What does this mean? Well, for starters, if that section of Steam is manually curated, they’re obviously not manually curating for each of their 200 million monthly active users. In other words, whenever you see that section, it’s not a personalized list of games that you might enjoy but rather a single list that is the same for all users. With this new approach, you can expect to see more personalized, algorithmically selected games in the Discounts & Events section.
Higher personalization means hopefully better discovery for games across the board on Steam. It’s just another place where lesser-known games can potentially get players’ eyeballs. With a manually curated list, Discounts & Events is a place that most indie developers wouldn’t even try to get on because you either need to get noticed by Steam or have a contact at Steam who they can reach out to. Developers will also get better tools for managing their discounts and sales events.
More information about this and a complete rollout of the refactored feature is expected in early 2027.
PlayStation Surveys Devs About Physical Discs
If you’re one of the sick and twisted individuals out there following my weekly posts, then you’ve probably read my ramblings on physical games more than a couple of times. It’s a hot topic in the industry right now. Shortly after Rockstar announced that Grand Theft Auto VI wouldn’t have any physical disc release, PlayStation announced its plans to do away with physical discs on their platforms altogether starting in January of 2028. All of this happened this year, and the community still has a lot to say about it. I won’t rehash all of my thoughts again, but I don’t like it mostly because of consumer rights reasons.
What’s interesting is that PlayStation has reached out to developers via a survey in which at least one of the questions had to do with developers’ satisfaction in the way that PlayStation is handling physical game sales. This was a sort of small comment from Tom on the Moore’s Law Is Dead YouTube channel. In it, he describes having contacts who told him this information, but Tom didn’t seem to be able to divulge any specifics about the question on the survey that he referenced.
Nonetheless, it’s a curious thing considering I don’t think anyone anticipates PlayStation to roll back this decision. But if they wouldn’t consider continuing physical copies of games, then what is this question in the survey about? What is the end goal of this for PlayStation? To be frank, they can do what they want. XBOX is dead in the water at the moment, and Nintendo is off doing its own things that are pushing us closer toward this all-digital future for gaming. PlayStation can move forward with this decision, receive tons of backlash, and still be the undisputed champions of the next generation. PlayStation has such a huge audience that developers won’t stop developing for PlayStation consoles. All of the other platform holders either can’t compete or want the same thing that PlayStation does. PlayStation will save a crap load of money going through with this change. Governments move so slowly that there’s almost no way that legislation is going to catch up with digital gaming in time to slap this thing down, and that’s if such legislation could even be passed in any of the large gaming markets.
So what does this news mean? I have no freaking clue. I guess it’s nice to hear that developers are being given some sort of a platform to voice any concerns they have, though.
UK Best Places to Work Awards 2026 Winners
I love that GamesIndustry.biz does an annual awards ceremony for the best places to work. While these awards did not include U.S. companies, there are plenty of recognizable names and fresh faces in the list of 2026 winners. I especially like how there are separate categories for big, mid-sized, and small game companies spanning all disciplines.
Here are some of the winners who you may recognize and the games they developed and/or published:
Playstack (Balatro)
Fireshine Games (Far Far West, Denshattack!, Shadows of Doubt, Atomfall, Lies of P)
Behaviour Interactive (Dead By Daylight, 7 Days to Die)
Fenris Creations (EVE Online)
Hangar 13 (Mafia)
Kinetic Games (Phasmophobia)
Rare Limited (Sea of Thieves, Donkey Kong Country, Banjo-Kazooie)
Frontier Developments (Planet Zoo, Planet Coaster, Jurassic World Evolution, Elite Dangerous)
Jagex Limited (RuneScape)
Playground Games (Forza Horizon)
TT Games Studios (Lego Star Wars, Lego Batman, and a crap load of other Lego games)
Big Walk Takes Off
I’ve been loosely following the story of Big Walk since it was announced in 2023. The indie game initially just looked like an interesting puzzle game with friends amid the hundreds of other co-op games released over the past five or six years. However, after its release back on August 4, 2026, it looks to be possibly one of the best games to come out this year. While I haven’t played it and find it unlikely I ever will get around to it, people are raving about how fun this game is at its fundamental core design. 93% of critics recommend it on OpenCritic. It sports a 91/100 on Metacritic for PC and PS5. It’s gotten a 9/10 from Game Informer (as well as some decent press about its development) and GameSpot. PCGamesN and Eurogamer gave it perfect scores. As of this post, 96% of the more than 26,000 reviews on Steam are positive. It’s a phenomenon.
Most of this I just learned about this week. I believe it has something to do with the fact that this week I finally got through my stack of Game Informer magazines in which there are multiple writeups of how much the writers and editors enjoyed the game. I also think the recent news of the game hitting two million units sold less than two months after release had something to do with it.
Regardless of why it took me so long to fully notice the post-launch hype surrounding this game, I find myself falling into my usual state of feeling joy and envy. On one hand, my heart feels so full whenever I read stories like this. Seeing small developers make something that’s stylized, low-fidelity, just straight up fun, and able to connect in a big way with players makes me so excited for this industry. Meanwhile, my brain gets in the way of my joy because I can’t stop thinking about how badly I would love to see something I make connect with players. I’m working on it as we speak! Check out Brackish Waters for more info.