Hello everyone, and welcome to the inaugural issue of Modern Console Warfare.

Before we begin, this right here is THE SPREADSHEET. I’ll share this at the top of the newsletter every week. In it, we’ll be tracking the scores for every studio, publisher, and game company we track in this experiment.

Every week, we’ll look at the biggest news stories in the industry, and give each company involved a score of -10, to +10. -10 being catastrophically bad, +10 being unbelievably good.

At the end of the year, using the science of BASIC ADDITION AND SUBTRACTION, we’ll know definitively who the winners and losers of the video game industry were this year.

Let’s dive into it this week.

As posted by the developers on their Steam page, their wacky physics-based PEAK has sold two million copies in just 9 days. For a game that was conceptualized just 5 months ago at a game Jam, this is a monumental accomplishment.

In an industry where a 6-year development cycle can cost 200 million dollars, then lead to a game that’s erased from existence in two weeks, PEAK and it’s team-up of studios at Landfall and Aggro Crab are a testament to just how good a strong design and fun gameplay will get you, without spending the better part of a decade on building a massive AAA thing.

Sometimes a fun gameplay loop you can easily play with friends, and an inherently social gameplay hook that lends itself to sharing on social media is all you need.

Plus, the game is fun as hell, it’’s $8 on Steam right now, and I promise you it’ll be some of the most fun you’ll have with a group of friends in a long time, and I say this as someone that doesn’t normally enjoy viral “streamer bait” games like this. (REPO, Lethal Company, Etc.)

SCORE: +7 POINTS

You can give the event a watch below, which has more details on their big launches for the upcoming year. All in all, a good showing with more details on the mysterious shooter/puzzle (and maybe Mega Man game?) Pragmata, and a release date for Resident Evil Requiem coming in February 2026.

All of this along with new information about Street Fighter 6 bringing in Sagat, and new roadmap updates for Monster Hunter Rise.

Was there anything mind-blowing in this? Not really, the cover was blown on Pragmata and Resident Evil a couple of weeks ago at Summer Games Fest, but it was great to get more details about both.

SCORE: +1

As reported by Jason Schreier from Bloomberg, Microsoft is getting ready to start yet another round of layoffs in the Xbox division of the company. As of this morning, 7/2, the number 9000 has been thrown around as the number across a number of Xbox studios including King (Candy Crush), and Rare (Sea of Thieves). Rare’s game Everwild may also have been cancelled as part of these layoffs, which is pretty devastating for a game that’s been in development for the better part of a decade.

Call it their own “year of efficiency,” poor post-pandemic planning, or the knock-on effect of purchasing Activision Blizzard for $69 Billion. Conducting your fourth major layoff at Xbox in 18 months…what the hell is going on over at Xbox?

Last year, we saw three different layoff events that all came with a “No, we’re done this time, promise!” attached. Microsoft went on an acquisition spree over the last decade, purchasing the likes of Obsidian, Bethesda Game Studios and Activision Blizzard among many, many others.

They then proceeded to shut storied studios like Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks down completely, even with successful game launches.

And now the pressure is on for them to, you know, make money from all of those multi-billion dollar purchases. Their Game Pass subscription revenue is growing, as that’s the basket they’re throwing most of their eggs into. But if you keep laying off the actual talent that make your multi-billion dollar purchases worth it, all you’ll have left is a skeleton of a once prestigious studio.

SCORE: -8

Man I wish I wasn’t writing this right now, because I love Remedy, their Control-iverse and Alan Wake 2 so damn much. But FBC Firebreak, their co-op multiplayer experiment in the universe of Control isn’t going well at all.

Remedy’s Communications Director Thomas Puha spoke with GameSpot and was very candid about how things shook out around launch. As of this writing, according to Steam DB, the game saw a 24-hour peak of 139 players. Granted, this is only a subsample of the game’s total audience, as it doesn’t include the likes of Xbox and PlayStation, where the game was included as part of Game Pass and Playstation + respectively.

But in estimations, for a multiplayer only game like this to be successful, especially this early in it’s life, you’d normally want to see player counts in the thousands, if not 10s or 100s of thousands, so that’s a pretty dismal showing.

As a comparison point, Elden Ring Nightreign, another 3-player cooperative mission-based game (albeit highly successful and in the very different genre of action-RPG) saw a 24-hour peak of 90,744 concurrent players.

Puha says they’re committed to turning the game around by listening to player feedback, and clarified that a total of 1 million people have played so far total, with a big patch reworking the game coming this week.

Having played the game, for about 10 hours…yeah I can see why it landed with a thud. It’s fun enough with friends, but the actual gameplay loop gets repetitive very quickly. And if you’re not a GamePass subscriber, $40 is a VERY hard sell for the content you get in the game. But few people are bigger fans of Remedy than I am, so I honestly, truly, hope they can turn it around.

SCORE: -5

Nintendo is a strange beast of a company. They have some of the best designers and most polished games and frankly most wonderful games in the industry. But they also REALLY don’t like listening to their players. Nintendo is always right, according to Nintendo.

Case in point, the latest brouhaha that spawned a billion reddit threads last week: Nintendo’s latest patch for Mario Kart World on the Switch 2.

This will take some background, so bear with me.

Traditionally, Mario Kart has been based around fun kart races that take place across 3 or more laps around a given circuit-based track. It’s been like this since Super Mario Kart first graced the Super Nintendo in 1992.

In their newest game, Mario Kart World, they’ve bucked that trend for the first time: instead of only doing races around a course, the courses have been placed around an open world for the first time, and races now take place not only in laps around the course, but in the spaces between courses as well.

This, as it turns out has been a controversial change, and a source of much debate in the Mario Kart community. But in the online mode, there was a loophole that brought back the classic 3-lap Mario Kart experience. If you selected “Random” when picking which track you would go to next, it would start a race in a random new track, and that race would just be your classic 3-laps.

Nintendo saw people doing this, and went “Hey wait, that’s not how we want you to play our game. Let’s fix this.” and made it so random now only lets you do what the community calls “intermissions.” This, as you can imagine, has not gone over well with a vocal portion of the Mario Kart community.

When you add this own goal to the fact the game was the first in decades to launch at an $80 price point at a time when people are more price conscious than ever…it’s not making Nintendo look like a hero right now.

Is this a catastrophe that will tank Nintendo’s Switch 2 launch?

Absolutely not, it’s been reported that Nintendo sold 5 million of them in a month. But you do have to wonder how long Nintendo can actively piss off their most dedicated fans before it does start having a material effect on them.

SCORE: -1

Look out for the bomb to drop on those Microsoft layoffs I mentioned above. Plus, EA will unleash College Football 26 into the world on July 7th (if you get the special edition, 10th if you don’t). Last year’s was the first College Football game since 2013, and it was pretty good! Obvious room for improvement though, let’s see if they stick the landing.

Mecha Break, the Multiplayer Mecha-based combat game from Amazing Seasun Games, is out as of today. I’m cautiously optimistic about it, as a more casual Mech-based experience than, say, Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon from Fromsoft, hopefully it’s able to grab an audience out the gate.

Also, be sure to check out Summer Games Done Quick on Twitch starting this weekend and through the week next week. It starts at 9:30AM PST on Sunday and is 7 days of speed runners going through video games as fast as humanly possible, all to raise money for Medicines Sans Frontiers.

A highlight for me: Bioshock, one of my favorite video games of all time, being completed in 35 minutes.

But what are you playing? Please reply and let me know, I’m always happy to hear about new games I should be looking at, I would have missed PEAK from the above completely without people letting me know.

And are there any stories this week I missed? Let me know, and I might score them and add them to the doc.