There was a lot of interesting gaming news in the past couple of days and some of it happened so fast that I missed out on it. So if you missed it too, here’s a way to catch up.
One interesting tidbit came from Matt Booty on the official Xbox podcast. He told Tina Amini and xxx that the Xbox Showcase on June 7 at 10 a.m. Pacific will be all about games, like Gears of War. And he noted there won’t be news about Project Helix, the next Xbox game console. So whatever the news is on that, it won’t be announced on June 7. So adjust your expectations.
Another hot item: The 007 First Light, the new James Bond game from Delphi Interactive, IO Interactive, and Electronic Arts hit 1.5 million copies sold in its first 24 hours. Casper Daugaard, cofounder of Delphi, was ecstatic with joy that the game, which has a Metacritic score of 89, was the biggest launch ever from a Danish company. (Delphi is based in Copenhagen).
Of course, Activision announced Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 this week, with a campaign set in South Korea amid a ground invasion by North Korea, as well as a multiplayer mode that features Kill Block, where the terrain changes every round, and a new DMZ extraction mode.
We got a great inside look, and I played some multiplayer. More info is coming out on the DMZ mode on June 6, just after the Summer Game Fest. There’s a lot of side events at the Summer Game Fest, and we are doing our own GamesBeat Engage session on June 4 from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. You can check it out here.
Epic Games also teased Unreal Engine 6 inside Rocket League. No more news about it yet, but Unreal Fest is coming up on June 16 to June 18 in Chicago.
It was also interesting to see on LinkedIn a post from Moritz Baier-Lentz, a former partner at Lightspeed venture capital, congratulate Delphi and also announced that he personally invested in Delphi as part of his new family office investments.
Also under the radar was Krafton’s decision to pay the $250 million earnout it owed to the leaders of Subnautica 2 developer Unknown Worlds. This was the outcome of intense litigation between the South Korean game publisher and Unknown Worlds, which Krafton bought for $750 million in 2021. It owed the $250 million if the Unknown Worlds team hit targets for putting Subnautica 2 into early access in 2025.
But during the summer of 2025, Krafton fired the founders and CEO Ted Gill of Unknown Worlds for failing to execute on their early access plans for Subnautica 2. The Unknown Worlds leaders countersued and convinced a judge to restore them, after evidence surfaced of the Krafton CEO’s plot to unfairly deny the $250 million bonus. The judge also restored the chance for the leaders to earn the $250 million by giving them nine more months in 2026 to get it done.
Since they shipped it on May 14, the early access game has sold four million copies, and that pretty much means Krafton has to pay the $250 million. But perhaps that’s OK, as Krafton is reaping a lot of money from the sales. Funny how that turned out.