Jank Mail: Epic fails

It's Saturday, and you know what that means: time to look back at what happened in PC gaming this week.

Round these parts the big news was that Brendy doesn’t like Marathon very much, which might not sound like a particularly hot take but sure did attract some Discourse. He also found a job sim about router configuration and your reaction to that description will tell you exactly whether you want to play it or not. Sin Vega modelled a good use of AI, for a specific definition of “good”, and Total Playtime programmed some superior gaming conferences. Here is what you should be playing right now. 

Beyond our hallowed walls, the magic 8-ball of games news remains stuck firmly on LAYOFFS as Epic canned 1,000 staff. The layoff announcements have become so regular and the numbers so huge that it can be challenging to visualise them, but looking at an incomplete list of the freshly-unemployed (which contains less than half of those affected) helps to bring it home: one of those documents so long it’s a physical chore to scroll through, listing lives across the world suddenly cast into a historically terrible job market. We cannot go on like this, and yet somehow we keep doing so.

The stated reason for this particular bloodletting is a drop in Fortnite numbers plus of course those pesky “market conditions”, although spending a billion dollars fighting Apple won’t have helped and ultimately it might just be that forever games aren’t actually forever, which is difficult news for the execs who spent billions trying to build them. Elsewhere in seemingly doomed enterprises, Meta says that Quest had its best year ever in 2025, which doesn’t pair well with all those studio closures, but killing off the VR version of Horizon Worlds, mostly, can only help those who remain. 

What else? The new Serious Sam is both multiverse and multiplayer but not made by Croteam, although Devolver are still publishing so it’ll probably skip the skins marketplace. Rebellion’s latest is Alien Deathstorm which is not that Alien but otherwise pretty much exactly what you’d expect. Jesus is coming, twice, look doubly busy. Kojima fans continue to have a normal one. 

The PEGI voiceover guy finally got (a bit) more than 200EUR for his performance. Modders have solved (one of) Brendy’s problems. The writers at Valve are messing around with AI but it’s Valve so we’ll probably never see anything come of it, heyoo. Will Wright’s studio ran out of money but he’s still making the game anyway. Ivy Road ran out of money and it’s shutting down, but there’s one last Wonderstop thing planned.

The Verge interviewed the guy who tells studios how to create good photo modes. In independent media, GTA Wiki ditched Fandom and Aftermath debuted Woke 2, with a new stronger formulation designed for today’s stubborn dystopia. And Sony announce it's putting up the price of PS5, which is not PC gaming news but is another sign that only the super-reach are getting hardware upgrades this year.

That’s it for this week. Please enjoy the next one.