Unity and Google push AI game-making while studios keep shrinking

Unity announced Unity Spark, a web-based platform for people who want to make games without conventional development skills, and Aftermath's Luke Plunkett has little patience for it. He quotes CEO Matt Bromberg pitching it at genre obsessives, artists who cannot code and modders, then argues the launch trailer undercuts the pitch. Its showcase is a corridor shooter, and in his view the animation and lighting look poor even though the assets come from the Unity Asset Store.

Plunkett takes aim at Bromberg's claim that games are the last major entertainment form almost everyone consumes but almost nobody creates. He notes that he listens to music and watches films without making either, and asks why a company that sells tools for real game development would say this. He points to Roblox, Nintendo's Game Builder Garage and even Disney Infinity as existing ways to assemble a game with friends. He concludes that AI products, years into the boom, still look bad and will keep doing so for lack of any soul, and that the platform insults people who learned to build games the hard way.

CounterpointUnity and supporters of lower barriers to entry would say the aim is access rather than replacing professionals, and that a first trailer says little about what users will build. They would add that easy tools like Roblox have already widened who makes games. Plunkett's case rests largely on taste and on a single demo.

Previously: Polygon had tied a wave of AI-built game mashups to a new Claude model, alongside industry-practice stories from Warhorse, Fortnite and Sega. — Wednesday October 7 edition.

PC Gamer's Samuel Roberts argues that 2026 is producing an unusual run of games built around ordinary, unglamorous movement. His benchmarks for considered movement are older power fantasies such as Mirror's Edge, Titanfall 2, Dishonored 2 and Doom Eternal. The newer crop, he says, captures granular real-life actions with no power fantasy at all: walking slowly, climbing awkwardly, being beaten by a slightly high rock. Baby Steps (2025) set him thinking, because it rebuilds the act of walking from its parts. It was inspired by Stratocubulus, a punishing Mirror's Edge mod, as designer Gabe Cuzillo said at GDC 2026.

He lists this year's examples as Cairn, Control Resonant, Vholume, the Doom: The Dark Ages Revelations DLC, Cicadamata and Big Walk, and says some of these games have become GOTY frontrunners. He doubts any of it is a deliberate trend and offers two theories. One is that 3D games have existed long enough for every niche to be explored. The other is a reaction to control being taken from players in the big-budget blockbusters of the late 2000s and 2010s. He lands on admiration for the craft, comparing the shift to action games' turn toward FromSoftware-style hardcore combat.

CounterpointSkeptics could note that Roberts himself says this is not a deliberate trend, and that a handful of standouts, some from last year, may not amount to a shift. He also concedes that simulation-style games about mundane physicality are as old as PC gaming. Players who find slow, punishing movement tedious, as he partly did with Baby Steps, would dispute that it has broad appeal.

PC Gamer's Andy Chalk uses the approach of Grand Theft Auto 6 to look at how far the series has been absorbed into the mainstream. He recalls the 2005 Hot Coffee scandal, when San Andreas was re-rated Adults Only, pulled from retail shelves, banned in Australia and criticised by the FTC. He contrasts that with the ESRB's newly posted M rating for GTA 6, whose descriptors include intense violence, nudity and strong sexual content. PEGI reportedly listed it 18+ in a since-deleted entry citing detailed decapitation and frequent, prominent drug use.

Chalk's explanation is that players grew up. The ESA said in 2025 that the average US gamer is 36 and has played for 18 years, and he notes that predicted social collapse never arrived while violent crime fell over two decades. He then contacted Jack Thompson, the former attorney who campaigned against violent games, about Florida's GTA 6 promotional tie-ins. Thompson called government promotion of commercial interests fascism and ended the exchange with insults, while a county sheriff's office said it was not concerned by private promotional decisions. Chalk concludes that GTA won and that the absence of catastrophe is a good outcome, if perhaps a disappointing one for Thompson.

CounterpointThompson and other long-standing critics would say a decline in violent crime does not show that violent games have no cultural effect, and that normalisation is exactly the concern. Chalk himself allows that mainstreaming could be read as desensitisation. Thompson's present objection is to state-backed corporate promotion rather than to the game's content.

Aftermath's Luke Plunkett retracts, under a spoiler warning, his podcast verdict that Control Resonant's protagonist Dylan Faden is deeply annoying. He had judged him on roughly the first two-thirds of the game, where Dylan, the villain of the first Control, seeks redemption for the deaths he caused. In Plunkett's view that arc falls flat, with Dylan answering confrontations with little more than a protest that he is trying.

The final third, he says, reframes Dylan around a decade of mistreatment by the Federal Bureau of Control. Dr. Casper Darling's FMV segments shift from warm greetings to threats and torture, and a long Earthbound-style 16-bit RPG chapter called Rebuild returns to 2002 and the night Dylan and his sister Jesse were separated. Plunkett finds the retro presentation haunting, since it keeps the player at a distance from heavy events. The ending, he argues, is not about saving New York but about Dylan being free to wear his own clothes, have an apartment and talk music with a friend, and he apologises to the character.

CounterpointPlunkett's own podcast verdict, shared by his co-hosts, is the obvious rival reading. A protagonist who grates for two-thirds of a game is arguably a design flaw, and a late reveal, however well staged, may not repair it. Plunkett concedes the redemption arc is weak before that point.

The Game Business has identified the unnamed buyer that fell through for Undead Labs as Splash Damage, the Tencent-owned UK studio that has worked with Microsoft on Gears of War and Halo, according to Rock Paper Shotgun's account. Studio head Philip Holt says Microsoft's divestiture moved fast and that State of Decay 3 needed an amount of capital he thought the studio could raise itself. He proposed a management-led acquisition, which Microsoft accepted. Any major outside investor, he said, would likely have wanted a majority stake.

The new material is Holt's read of the investment market. Capital exists, he says, but is waiting for "obvious slam dunks", and investors scrutinised the unit cost of labour in Seattle, one of the most expensive places to make games, against cheaper regions. He describes a race to the bottom on labour economics that he cannot win. Saber's Tim Willits made a related case at Gamescom, urging studios to buy in teams from lower-wage countries. Holt says the game has changed somewhat after the buyout and layoffs but is still aimed at a release next year.

CounterpointDevelopers in lower-cost regions, such as the Brazilian and Argentine developers RPS recently interviewed about being treated as cheap labour, would dispute framing their wages as the competitive problem. RPS's writer also notes that independence gives Undead Labs full control over the scale of job cuts, which is little consolation to the departed staff.

Previously: Undead Labs' head explained the employee-owned buyout and said State of Decay 3 was nearing completion despite significant layoffs. — Wednesday October 7 edition.