Credits, juries and AI: who makes games and who judges them

Aftermath's Luke Plunkett takes issue with how Star Wars: Galactic Racer's development has been described. In a GI.biz interview, Fuse Games CEO Matt Webster outlined three tiers of distributed development: traditional outsourcing of assets, external development of self-contained features (photo mode went wholesale to an outside studio), and co-development with people embedded in Fuse's stand-ups, Slack and code base. GI.biz nonetheless framed the game as made by a core team of 75, while MobyGames lists roughly 1,109 credited people.

Plunkett says Webster is working within the realities of the 2026 industry, and his main complaint is with the coverage. He argues that repeating the small-team figure, as happened with Manor Lords and Expedition 33, misrepresents how modern games get made. He also says the model risks entrenching a permanent underclass of contractors, naming Electric Square, Expression Games, Mindwalk and Original Force. He lands on bafflement at why the industry keeps trying to narrow the spotlight.

CounterpointStudio heads such as Webster, and the GI.biz writers, would say the core-team figure describes who steered design and direction, which differs from headcount of everyone who touched the project. Webster also argues that distributed work lets a studio scale up and down without laying off its permanent staff.

Polygon's Oli Welsh reports that the 2026 Game Awards jury has just 17 American outlets, down from 24 in 2024 and 2025. The UK rose from 14 to 17 and now matches the US, while Brazil gained four outlets and holds 14 votes. Latin America makes up about 21% of the jury, and continental Europe (27%) now nearly matches the Anglophone bloc (28%). The US decline comes largely from mainstream, lifestyle and tech outlets leaving, among them Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Wirecutter and Wired. Welsh says he cannot tell whether the cause is TGA's choice or newsrooms losing their games writers.

He restates last year's argument that a bigger international jury has narrowed taste toward games that travel easily, which has hurt indies that cannot afford localisation. He adds a caveat: the winners' countries of origin have diversified, with no American GOTY winner since 2020 after four wins in the first seven years. Grand Theft Auto 6, which squeaks under the eligibility cutoff, is the overwhelming favourite, and Welsh calls it likely a last hurrah for the American blockbuster.

CounterpointWelsh himself concedes the US-UK shift looks mostly symbolic given how similar the two gaming cultures are. Defenders of the jury would say a broader panel better reflects a global audience, and that winners follow quality rather than outlet nationality.

Polygon reports that Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney is again defending AI in development, arguing that AI coding has improved sharply over the past year and will let studios build large open-world games with far fewer resources. He says the time he spent writing Unreal Engine 1 could have been saved with AI producing equivalent work. Ahead of a report that Epic's upcoming Disney title prioritises AI, he posted that Epic is moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration.

The piece also gathers earlier reports: developers allegedly told there is no more hand-written code, rumours that some partners are refusing Fortnite collaborations over Epic's AI use, and a new store launcher, in preview, that was vibe coded. Polygon describes player reaction as largely hostile and calls Epic's upcoming products a litmus test for how comfortable players are with generative AI.

CounterpointMany developers and gamers oppose the stance, as Polygon notes, citing concerns about quality, effort and labour. Sweeney's critics point to the vibe-coded launcher, which fans felt lacked polish, as evidence that the promised gains have not yet arrived.

Previously: Konami's president said people and creators matter most, while a vibe-coded San Francisco game drew backlash. — Sunday October 18 edition.

Eurogamer's Robert Purchese profiles Dr Marcel Pflug, who spent years of evenings and weekends fitting his Game Boy Museum archive onto a cartridge that runs on real 1989 hardware. The site catalogues the handheld's products, peripherals, hardware revisions and hundreds of journal articles, and the cartridge makes it searchable like a chapter-by-chapter paperback. The limits were severe: only 255 tile blocks on screen, many consumed by each line of text, which Pflug calls making the Game Boy a spectacularly bad e-reader.

He added QR codes, a format invented in 1994 for a Toyota factory, so the handheld can point phones to photos, and drew the title screen by hand because photo conversion turned his face into a skull. The ROM is free to download. Purchese reads the project as a human counterweight to AI, because the work is done purely for the pleasure of it, at a time when similar projects might take minutes to generate.

CounterpointAI-tool advocates such as Tim Sweeney would argue that automation lowers the barrier to making things and does not stop hobbyists from doing it the slow way. The framing also sets this hobby project against AI rather than against a specific use of it.

PC Gamer's weekly Steam roundup for the week ending October 18 notes that Steam Next Fest has more than 8,000 demos. Its headline also describes vibe-coded games as worthless slop that is levelling up on the platform.

Previously: Konami's president said people and creators matter most, while a vibe-coded San Francisco game drew backlash. — Sunday October 18 edition.

Eurogamer reports that the memory and storage in the PlayStation 6 reportedly cost more than $680 between them. The figure adds a concrete number to the debate over how expensive the next hardware generation will be.

Previously: Rob Fahey argued a hardware market freeze could reshape the industry just as GTA VI should be boosting console sales. — Saturday October 17 edition.