Welcome to Video Games Weekly on Engadget. Expect a new story every Monday or Tuesday (or Wednesday, whatever), broken into two parts. The first is a space for short essays and ramblings about video game trends and related topics from me, Jess Conditt, a reporter who’s covered the industry for more than 13 years. The second contains the video game stories from the past week that you need to know about, including some headlines from outside of Engadget.
Please enjoy — and I’ll see you next week.
On a planet shrouded in myth, in a land surrounded by lore, on a mountain draped in mystery, in a cave suffocated by secrets, the legend sleeps. For six years, the legend has slumbered while wild stories spiral around it, twisting and expanding and entwining. New words have been born and old words infused with evolved meanings: Believer. Doubter. Silkpost. The lies have grown so thick they’ve become corporeal, spreading trickery with a name and a dead smile.
For six years, the legend has slept while the masses roiled, all of them waiting for the signal to awaken and know truth. All of them waiting for a bell that will ring, finally and clearly, on Thursday, August 21, 2025.
Skong. Skong. Skong.
It’s a special time in the Silksong subreddit. After years of silence around its sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong, Team Cherry has scheduled a livestream with a “special announcement” about the game for August 21 at 10:30AM ET. Not only is this exciting for Metroidvania fans everywhere, but it’s also possible that this announcement marks the final moments of the Silksong subreddit as we know it. A strange cocktail of game delays, inconsistent updates and hyper-focused cult fandom has cultivated a fascinating little universe in r/Silksong, complete with its own rules, villains and heroes. It’s a place where clown wigs are commonplace and contributors have turned trolling into a role-playing artform. A LARPform, if you will. It’s a place that’s consistently made me laugh every time it’s appeared in my feed over the past year or so.
Ahead of Thursday’s special announcement, this sub is experiencing the last gasps of desperate myth-making and hopeless anticipation before it transforms into something else entirely, armed with actual information about the sequel, gameplay videos and maybe even a firm release date. Or, dare I say it, a surprise launch. For just a moment longer in r/Silksong, anything is possible.
And then it’ll be over. No matter what happens during Thursday’s livestream, the day will come when Silksong comes out and the drip-feed of silkposts dries up completely. But for now, our face paint is ready. Sometimes it’s just nice to recognize the madness and the beauty of the moment, before it slips away for good.
The news
News from ONL 2025
Gamescom 2025 kicked off on Tuesday with Opening Night Live, a showcase hosted by Geoff Keighley and the folks behind The Game Awards, and there were plenty of delightful morsels on display. Engadget UK Bureau Chief Mat Smith is on the ground at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, to play upcoming titles and talk to developers, but for now, here are our headlines straight out of ONL 2025:
And our headlines from Gamescom 2025 so far:
Gamescom 2025 runs through August 24.
ROG Xbox Ally lands in October
Microsoft is slowly establishing its handheld era with news that the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X will be available on October 16. There’s still no official word on how much they’ll cost, but there are hints: As spotted by Wario64, Best Buy recently listed the Xbox Ally at $550 and the Xbox Ally X at $900, and these fall in line with our predictions, which were based on the prices of existing ROG Ally handhelds. Alongside the release date, Microsoft announced the Handheld Compatibility Program, an initiative aimed at optimizing games for portable devices and informing players about how well they perform. It’s essentially Steam Deck Verified, but for Xbox handhelds, and it’s yet another sign that Microsoft’s portable gaming ambitions stretch beyond just one hardware manufacturer.
The PS5 will cost more tomorrow than it does today
First Nintendo and Microsoft raised the prices of their latest consoles, and now it’s Sony’s turn. Sony on Wednesday announced the following price increases for the PS5 family:
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Standard PS5 with a disc drive: $550, up from $500
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PS5 digital edition: $500, up from $450
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PS5 Pro: $750, up from $700
Sony blames the increases on a “challenging economic environment,” echoing sentiments from its contemporaries. The price hikes come at a time in the hardware generation when we’re used to seeing consoles get cheaper, which just makes this whole thing more frustrating.
Rod Fergusson is in charge of BioShock again and already making big changes
There have been signs of turmoil at BioShock 4 studio Cloud Chamber for a while now, including news earlier this month that the game failed a review with 2K executives and was due for a complete narrative revamp. Now, we’re seeing even more fallout. Former Gears of War and Diablo head Rod Fergusson has left Blizzard to lead development of BioShock 4 at Cloud Chamber, and his appointment comes alongside news that 80 people at the studio are being laid off. This is actually the second time Fergusson has joined the development of a BioShock game at the last second — he similarly swooped in and cut aspects of BioShock: Infinite at Irrational Games in 2012.
The race through development hell between Judas and BioShock 4 continues.
Blizzard’s cinematic and narrative team is unionizing
Microsoft is the home of another video game union. Workers with Blizzard Entertainment’s Story and Franchise Development team, which handles in-game cinematics and lore for titles including Overwatch and World of Warcraft, voted this week to unionize under the Communications Workers of America. This covers about 169 developers and it marks the fourth unionization effort from Microsoft’s gaming teams, joining QA workers at Activision, ZeniMax and Raven Software.
Steam censorship is breaking PayPal
PayPal isn’t a valid way to buy games on Steam in certain countries any longer. Steam in July removed hundreds of games with adult and NSFW themes from its storefront, and updated its policies to ban “content that may violate the rules and standards” of its payment processors. This was incredibly vague and raised immediate concerns around financial censorship, especially when combined with a related culling of thousands of games from Itch.io. Now, it’s confirmed that PayPal has terminated its partnership with Steam in multiple countries, affecting any denomination “other than EUR, CAD, GBP, JPY, AUD and USD.”
Valve says it’s being pressured by payment processors including Visa, MasterCard and PayPal to remove certain games and implement puritanical censorship policies, and this has already resulted in at least one game being unjustly removed from the platform. That game, VILE: Exhumed, is now available as shareware.
Roblox is changing its rules after so, so many child-safety lawsuits
Roblox is locking down its system for sharing and viewing user-generated games following a wave of lawsuits accusing developers of failing to protect their young userbase. All unrated experiences, or user-created games, will be restricted to the developer and anyone actively working on them, rather than being available to anyone over the age of 13, as is currently the case. This change and others, including a new system that automatically detects and tracks “violative scenes” on individual servers, will roll out over the coming months.
Analogue delayed its N64 remake again
It’s now due out in Q4 2025. 🙁
Additional reading
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More action than RPG, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 struggles to convince after a few hours’ play by Robert Purchese at Eurogamer
Jessica Conditt
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