Stephen Totilo

‘Grand Theft Auto’ Studio Accused of Union Busting After Firings Union says 30 and 40 people were terminated. Rockstar Games’ parent company cites ‘gross misconduct’

BREAKING: Yesterday Grand Theft Auto VI maker Rockstar Games fired dozens of people, all of whom were involved in union efforts. A British union calls it "blatant and ruthless" union-busting. Take-Two Interactive says it was due to misconduct.

Here's the scoop: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Love and Deepspace Devs Respond to Player Complaints That Their Dark-Skinned Custom Characters Are Invisible in Cutscenes - IGN Love and Deepspace has been out for almost two years now, but its playerbase is growing increasingly exasperated over a persistent issue impacting players with dark-skinned custom main characters: the...

Headline I can't believe is real, but is

www.ign.com/articles/lov...

A damaging leak is delaying today's Game File a bit

(probably should have gotten those gutters cleaned before today's downpour in my area)

What's most intriguing to me about Nintendo upgrading a 2020 Animal Crossing in 2026 is that, based on past history (and counting the mobile game), it feels like a full new game is due:

2001 - AC1
2005 - Wild World
2012 - New Leaf
2017 - Pocket Camp
2020 - New Horizons

Yes, I think this is more of a threat to the traditional gaming business than the short-form video competition cited by some executives

I have studied these new Roblox charts and have concluded that Roblox is extremely popular

Question for Sea of Thieves players: How many expansions would you say the game has had? There are always some updates with each season, but fair to say that the Pirate's Life and Monkey Island releases were of a greater scale. And... there haven't been any like that since? Or am I missing one?

In gym class, because it's a lot of effort

It's striking how a bunch of people who were challenging me from a point of such fundamental ignorance about the topic quickly saw their engagement numbers rack up. I don't care about likes for clout or ego or whatnot, but people were scoring 100+ likes on false accusations in no time flat. Wild

(And that was all before the paywall!)

But some former Halo developers who I spoke to were strongly against the ICE Halo ad. Marcus Lehto, co-creator of Halo and lead designer of Master Chief, told Game File that he found the DHS/ICE post “absolutely abhorrent.” He added: “It really makes me sick seeing Halo co-opted like this.” I also spoke to Halo veteran Jaime Griesemer, who was one of the chief designers of the several games in the series. “Halo is a cultural icon and like anything with cultural capital, it is going to be used by politicians and brands and anyone else looking for relevancy,” he told me. “Usually I take it as a compliment to Halo’s continuing legacy.” Griesemer had found the Trump-as-Master-Chief post amusing. But the ICE one, he did not. “Using Halo imagery in a call to ‘destroy’ people because of their immigration status goes way too far, and ought to offend every Halo fan, regardless of political orientation,” Griesemer said. “I personally find it despicable. The Flood are evil space zombie parasites and are not an allegory to any group of people.“

So, yeah, to those who thought I made the people up, you could've read their names the second the post went live

To those who thought I quoted random Halo people, I quoted Halo co-creator Marcus Lehto and one of the lead designers of the first several Halo games, Jaime Griesemer

I've posted for long enough on Twitter (and Threads, BlueSky) to know that people mostly don't click through to read the article.
But it's there if you're curious--especially if you want to know who said the thing I quoted

The way I work, you're not going to be bait & switched

The paywall in the article comes after I name and quote the former Halo devs. That was my choice to not leave people out of the loop of a story where I figured folks would want key details

Low paywalls might cost me short-term $$, but I do it to engender long-term reader trust

The angry tweets demanding I name my sources--to the extent they were sincere--seemed to be based on assumption that I was trying to trick people and imagined that my sources weren't named in a Tweet in order to hide some fault with my reporting

All of that's absurd

But the whole thing eventually struck me as sadly cynical.

I'm an independent journalist who relies on people to pay for my work, but I don't do clickbait and don't prey on people's FOMO.

I put paywalls on two thirds of my articles, but always low enough so you get the gist.

As a reporter, I try to be empathetic and understand others' points of view as best I can. Most people assume they're doing the right thing.

But sometimes, people are just wrong.

I played along. Maybe everyone else was doing a bit, too?

Earlier, I noticed an odd reaction to my post here about original Halo developers' reactions to ICE's Halo ad

I was accused of hiding my sources. Making them up! Definitely not talking to key Halo devs

Name your sources, people demanded

But they were always named in the piece

Posted this thread over on Twitter, but it has some relevance here in terms of how people read and react to social media posts from reporters (and specifically how I operate).

So I'm also posting it here...

Thank you!

Pokémon did not give permission for ICE video footage The theme song, Ash Ketchum and slogan "Gotta catch 'em all" featured in a US government video.

Pokemon Company did. It's addressed in my article, citing this BBC piece

www.bbc.com/news/article...

Also in today's Game File: Lead designer of Pacific Drive, which launched onto Xbox and Game Pass last week, is urging people to buy/play it on other platforms

Speaking for himself, NOT the studio

He left the game's studio in July, didn't work on the Xbox version, is irked by Microsoft's silence

(And, no, the Halo ICE stuff did not come up...nor did the talk about margins get any more specific than that. Last week, Bloomberg reported that Microsoft leadership was pushing its gaming division to achieve 30% profit margins)

Satya Nadella (speaking to TBPN, trasnscribed by Game File): Remember, the biggest gaming business is the Windows business. To us, gaming on Windows… and of course Steam has built a massive marketplace on top of it and done a very successful job of it. So to us the way we are thinking about gaming is let’s… first of all we are now the largest publisher after the Activision [deal] so therefore we want to be a fantastic publisher, similar to the approach of what we did with Office. We’re going to be everywhere, on every platform. We want to make sure, whether it’s consoles, whether it’s the PC, whether it’s mobile, whether it’s cloud gaming, or the TV, so we just want to make sure the games are being enjoyed by gamers everywhere. Second, we also want to do innovative work in the system side on the console and on the PC. And it’s kind of funny that people think about the console-PC as two different things. We built the console, because we wanted to build a better PC, which could then perform for gaming. And so I kind of want to revisit some of that conventional wisdom. But at the end of the day, console has an experience that is unparalleled. It delivers performance that’s unparalleled, that pushes I think, the system forward. So I’m really looking forward to the next console, the next PC gaming, but most importantly the game business model has to be where we have to invent maybe some new interactive media as well. Because, after all, gaming’s competition is not other gaming. Gaming’s competition is short-form video. And so if we as an industry don’t continue to innovate both how we produce, what we produce, how we think about distribution, the economic model—best way to innovate is to have good margins. Because that’s the way you can fund.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was just on the online tech show TBPN and provided one of the longer answers about his views of the game business that I've seen
- Wants to put their games on everything, a la Office
- Wants to revisit console/PC paradigm
- "best way to innovate is to have good margins"

Halo co-creator says ICE’s Halo-themed recruitment ad “makes me sick” Another Halo maker says ad "ought to offend every Halo fan, regardless of political orientation." ALSO: A developer whose game just launched on Xbox slams Microsoft’s silence

NEW: I spoke to original Halo devs about that ICE Halo post

One: "abhorrent”

Another: "Using Halo imagery in a call to ‘destroy’ people because of their immigration status goes way too far, and ought to offend every Halo fan, regardless of political orientation”

www.gamefile.news/p/halo-ice-d...

Amazon Makes ‘Significant’ Cuts In Video-Game Division Tech giant will reduce game development work

BREAKING: Amazon is making "significant" cuts to its video-game division, moving away from MMOs like New World, and gutting its Irvine and San Diego development studios www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Oh No, My Kid Is Starting to Complain About Frame Rates Fortnite is raising dangerous questions in the house that I'm not prepared to answer.

Happy to have not reached this parenting threshold yet

www.crossplay.news/p/oh-no-my-k...

Game File | Stephen Totilo | Substack The business and culture of video games, from a reporter with 20 years on the beat. Click to read Game File, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.

If you're into reporting about the games industry that peers into the fine print, please check out more of my work at Game File.

www.gamefile.news

Back in 2022, as it shot back at that shareholder proposal, Microsoft added:

"Microsoft’s executive leadership and Board of Directors hold strong convictions that diversity and inclusion is fundamental to the Company’s long-term success."

Take Two removes praise for its LGBTQ efforts from its annual report, scrubs diversity references Game File combed the latest annual reports from Take Two and EA, finding numerous fine-print changes. Some serious, some not, some seemingly in reaction to Donald Trump.

I asked Microsoft why they are no longer boasting about (or even mentioning) their work on "diversity" in documents where it'd been a fixture for years. They did not provide a comment

I think we can all guess

Microsoft isn't an outlier. It's been a 2025 trend

www.gamefile.news/p/take-two-d...

2024 Microsoft proxy filing, listing executives' accomplishments. The final bullet point for each one mentions their support for diversity in the workplace

2025 Microsoft proxy filing, listing executives' accomplishments. There are no bullet points about diversity

In 2024's proxy filing to shareholders (left), Microsoft broke down executives' accomplishments and their compensation packages. The company included bullet points about how their leaders had a "steady focus" on and "championed" diversity

2025's proxy (right), published last week, has none of that