Layoffs, voluntary exits and a vanishing disc mark the day

For Aftermath's Inside Baseball Week, Luke Plunkett interviewed six former games-media workers, including Merritt K (Fanbyte), Danielle Riendeau (Game Developer) and Matt Kim (IGN, laid off in August 2026 after six years), about life after the layoff. His starting point is a 2024 argument of his own: with the sector contracting, a layoff now often means a new career rather than a new job at another site. The accounts bear that out. Merritt K applied for hundreds of PR and narrative jobs across 2023 and 2024 and got a handful of interviews. Kim found he had little appetite left to pitch games stories, and Kazuma Hashimoto feared homelessness if he stayed in the field.

Plunkett says he does not want to dwell on misfortune or portray an industry in terminal decline. He wants to show that, as in game development, a closed door can lead somewhere more interesting.

CounterpointLabor advocates and critics of media ownership might say that individual resilience stories can obscure structural causes, such as private-equity-style cost-cutting and the loss of any employer base for these workers.

At an MCM London Comic Con panel on 23 October, The Game Collection's Darren Simpson said it was unclear how Sony's promise that partners could sell new games at retail using digital codes would work. Sony will stop producing PlayStation discs after January 2028. Simpson hoped Sony would still let other publishers press discs. He also questioned whether a PS6 at £1,200 to £1,500 without a disc drive would beat the PS5 by enough to justify the price, and said Nintendo's continued investment in cartridges gives it an opening. Evercade's Sean Cleaver noted that most PS4 and PS5 consoles in circulation have disc drives, so demand for discs will persist whoever makes them.

CounterpointSony would presumably say digital distribution is where its audience has moved. The panelists also sell physical games or hardware, so they have a commercial stake in the format's survival.

Previously: A report said Resident Evil Requiem PlayStation discs out-earned all Xbox versions. — Thursday October 22 edition.

GamesIndustry.biz's Jon Hicks reports from the third Paris Game Biz, held in the 2nd Arrondissement while the city was still seeing widespread protests. He describes shattered shop windows, soot patches and burnt-out bins and shared bicycles on the walk to the venue, and police vans parked outside the official party to enforce a curfew just beyond the area. His argument is that publishers, investors and developers who have already weathered several years of financial turmoil are now adding civil unrest to the list, and that the mood was cautious rather than gloomy.

CounterpointCritics of the sector's leadership would say that optimism from dealmakers looks hollow against continuing layoffs and closures.

Previously: Sweeney's resurfaced 2000 Looking Glass eulogy prompted debate over whether closures reflect economics or strategic mismanagement. — Monday October 26 edition.

Polygon's Giovanni Colantonio argues that Super Mario Sunshine, now in Nintendo Switch Online's GameCube collection, is the Mario game that best captures the series' spirit. He says its early reception was glowing (9.4 from IGN, perfect marks from Nintendo Power) and that it became the third best-selling GameCube game. He also acknowledges its modern reputation as divisive. His case is that its FLUDD-based traversal, grab-bag level ideas and cohesive island setting make it the most experimental Mario game, a forerunner of Super Mario Bros. Wonder. He reads the whole series as being about travel, with Mario a tourist in unfamiliar worlds, and says Sunshine takes that idea most literally.

CounterpointDetractors, whom Colantonio himself cites, point to poor camera controls and a handful of dud levels such as the Pachinko minigame, and say its defenders overlook them.

EFF's Mitch Stoltz argues that Reddit's lawsuit against SerpAPI and Perplexity misuses Section 1201 of the DMCA, the anti-circumvention law. Reddit alleges that SerpAPI got around its arrangement with Google by bypassing access controls on search results. Stoltz says Reddit does not own its users' posts, that search indexing has long been held fair use, and that Google's rate limits are not the sort of access control the 1998 law targeted. He warns that a July ruling letting the suit proceed puts large-scale research, from public-sentiment studies to historical preservation, under legal threat, leaving only wealthy institutions able to afford the risk. EFF discloses that SerpAPI is a donor.

CounterpointReddit and other platforms holding user content would argue that licensing deals fund their services and that automated scraping around technical barriers is unauthorised use. The district judge agreed the claim could go forward.

EFF's Thorin Klosowski summarises Citizen Lab's report on AdFection, in which an ad network delivered zero-click spyware to journalists' devices. Ads from Discover-Tech, described as a likely front for ad espionage, carried JavaScript that reported device details to a server. For Al Jazeera machines, the server returned a payload made by partner Candiru/Integrity Labs instead of an empty response. EFF says neither malvertising nor zero-click attacks are new, but combining them with ad targeting is, and that behavioral advertising is the perfect vehicle for such threats. It lists mitigations, including Privacy Badger, resetting the mobile ad ID and Surveillance Self-Defense guides, and calls for banning behavioral ads.

CounterpointAdvertising trade groups would likely say targeted ads fund much of the free web and that the fault lies with spyware vendors and fraudulent advertisers, so tighter ad-network vetting rather than a ban would be the answer.