Game development articles

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Final Fantasy XI was supposed to decline, instead the 24-year-old MMO is growing again

The MMO's 24th anniversary includes an unlimited free trial and hints of future expansion content
Ripple effect: Final Fantasy XI is having an unlikely moment. The 24-year-old MMO is not just hanging on to a loyal niche, it is sustaining growth. Pushing up against technical limits dating back to the PlayStation 2 era, now Square Enix is looking for ways to open up new parts of its world to a much larger audience.
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Denuvo may have reached the end as every protected PC game is now crackable

The takeaway: The PC piracy scene appears to have reached a milestone many once thought unlikely: Denuvo, long regarded as one of the most formidable DRM and anti-tamper systems in gaming, has effectively been defeated. With hypervisor bypasses emerging as the latest breakthrough, there is now no known PC game protected by Denuvo that cannot be obtained for free through either a crack or a functional bypass.
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Former boss Shuhei Yoshida thinks day-one PlayStation launches on PC would be a mistake

Delayed PC ports are "printing money" without hurting PS5 sales, Yoshida argues
In context: Shuhei Yoshida spent nearly four decades at Sony, from 1986 until his retirement in 2025. The executive was also part of the original PlayStation team since 1993, which means he knows a thing or two about how you run a successful video game business.
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This Quake-style shooter fits in just 64KB

Developer built his own image editor and programming language to save precious bytes
WTF?! While the latest AAA first-person shooters usually require over 100GB of storage space, and even retro-style indie titles consume a gigabyte or two, a solo developer recently released a project that resembles the original Quake but could comfortably fit on an NES cartridge. The creator built most of the development tools himself, including the programming language.
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Nearly half of the 19,000 games released on Steam this year went almost unnoticed

Bottom line: Steam's flood of new releases in 2025 underscores an ongoing tension in PC gaming: a thriving ecosystem that also risks overwhelming its own creators. Data aggregated by SteamDB shows that Valve's digital storefront saw 19,112 games launch over the year. Nearly half of them – 9,327 titles – received fewer than 10 user reviews, suggesting they never reached a meaningful audience. For 2,229 games, the review count never rose above zero.