Key Note Gaming

From the D-Day landing that opened Medal of Honor: Frontline to the Battle of the Bulge that capped off the American campaign in the original Call of Duty, it feels like videogames have already told and retold most of the major conflicts that occurred during the second world war. However, while players have previously stepped into the combat boots of soldiers on the ground in various settings from Sicily to Stalingrad, the events of China’s War of Resistance against the Japanese invasion have largely been overlooked. That’s where The Defiant comes in. This story-driven singleplayer shooter from developer Hangzhou Hoothanes Entertainment is set to explore the prolonged and devastating conflict from the perspective of multiple Chinese soldiers. After getting hands-on with it at a recent BiliBili: First Look event in Shanghai, my first impression of The Defiant is that it’s spotlighting a setting that feels unexplored for the World War II genre, in a singleplayer-focussed style that’s a w...

Giants Software and Straight4 Studios have launched a new, free DLC pack alongside a “significant new update” for Project Motor Racing. Update 2.1 includes a total rebuild of the handling model for the GT3 and GT4 categories, Alpha triple-screen support on PC, and more. The ‘Aussie Rivals’ pack brings one of the greatest rivalries in motorsport to Project Motor Racing for the first time, introducing the 2013 Holden VF Commodore and a “completely reworked” 2013 Ford Falcon FG. These Australian domestic models represented the last truly local clash between Holden and Ford, before Holden transitioned to the imported ZB Commodore shell in 2018 and the death of car manufacturing in Australia saw the Supercars series subsequently shift to Chevrolet Camaro and Ford Mustang shells. This era of V8 Supercar racing has been represented in a string of Forza Motorsport games, as well as on iRacing and 2014’s Grid Autosport, but never in Gran Turismo – so this may come as particularly appetising for...

EA’s CEO got an $8 million raise thanks to how well Battlefield 6 performed — four months after the devs responsible for making the game got laid off. Battlefield 6 was the highest-selling game of 2025 , beating out Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 and NBA 2K26. It sold over seven million copies in just three days and was the best-selling title across both Xbox and PC at the time. However, in March 2026 — just five months after celebrating the most successful launch in the Battlefield franchise ever — EA laid off an undetermined number of employees across all its Battlefield teams to “better align” itself around “what matters most to our community.” Now, come July, one of EA’s SEC filings have been released, showing that CEO Andrew Wilson’s total compensation for the 2026 fiscal year added up to $38,649,984. As pointed out by PC Gamer, this is an $8 million increase from his total compensation from the previous year, and he has Battlefield 6’s success to thank for it. The filing credits B...

Capcom’s Q1 report for the 2026 fiscal year is out, and it’s making a lot of players uneasy. A quick look at the data shows that an overwhelming majority of Capcom's sales for Q1 2026 were digital — a whopping 93.3% of them, in fact, including both new releases and older games. That leaves only 6.7% for physical media sales, something that players can’t help but feel antsy about, given the imminent death of physical discs for PlayStation games starting January 2028. A closer look at these numbers shows that 60.4% of these digital sales were for PC, while just 32.9% were for consoles. This breakdown doesn’t come as a massive surprise, given that physical disc drives haven’t exactly been a thing on PCs for the last decade or so, but it’s still notable. This news has sparked quite the debate among fans online, with some wondering whether or not the digital sales figure doesn’t include DLC content locked behind digital-only purchases, or how it’s broken down per game. We can’t know ...

Halo: Combat Evolved sits in a pantheon alongside some of the best games ever made, so it wasn’t surprising that Microsoft would release a second remake of it eventually. However, instead of using a bespoke, in-house engine, this time around Halo Studios opted for Unreal 5,. And while that’s awesome for anyone with a high-end machine, it does mean it struggles to scale to lower-end and older hardware. That doesn’t mean the game doesn’t look good though. If you have the hardware to juice up the settings a bit, Halo: Campaign Evolved looks stunning, with excellent lighting and environmental detail. But unlike a lot of games that have come out this year, like Resident Evil Requiem and Crimson Desert , which are on much more flexible engines, the Halo remake isn’t well-optimized for lower-end hardware and turns into an ugly mess once you need to start turning down some of the settings. Unreal Engine 5 Ever since its debut back in 2022, Unreal 5 has had a bit of a reputation for being qu...

Double Fine, best known for creating the 2005 platform game Psychonauts, has laid off 25.6% of its staff three weeks after Xbox’s massive restructuring efforts were revealed. The studio announced the layoffs on July 28, 2026, confirming that this downsizing was a direct result of becoming an independent company after Xbox unloaded them as part of its own restructuring earlier this month. “As a small, tightly-knit team, these actions are not taken lightly,” a statement from Double Fine reads. “Only the survival of our studio would ever make us consider such a painful action. Our transition to becoming an independent company also means becoming a size that we can sustain. The people we are losing were all important. They all made an impact on our games and culture, and they will be missed. We are committed to supporting each affected person as best as we can, and we thank them for their hard work and commitment to the creative spirit we cherish here at Double Fine.” Xbox also released ...