Michael 'Shroud' Grzesiek, former FPS pro player and noted Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 hater, is finally coming around on the JRPG-inspired game. After putting some hours into the fantasy adventure, he's conceding that, yes, it's actually worthy of all the plaudits it's received.

The revelation came during a livestream where he dug into Sandfall Entertainment's multi-award-winning release. "Dare I say, Asmongold was right," Grzesiek states. "He said, if I play this game after it wins Game of the Year, I'm gonna enjoy it."

He's referencing The Game Awards, where Clair Obscur took home the biggest prize of the night, the coveted Game of the Year, after winning eight other categories in an incredible and record-breaking streak. Having been a vocal critic of the game, Grzesiek was roundly challenged to check out Expedition 33 should it do what we all expected. It did, he has, and here we are.

"Is it too soon to say that?" he asks, bargaining with his own taste. "I mean, the game can't get worse, it's going to only get better." He'd been a cheerleader for Arc Raiders to take all the glory, another worthy candidate. Cognitive dissonance can be hard to navigate, but I think it's perfectly OK to concede this and enjoy the game, pal.

No doubt he's one of many at the moment who're diving into Clair Obscur. Though the RPG was massively successful beforehand, taking so many statues at the Game Awards no doubt encouraged a flurry of players to see what all the fuss is about. Welcome to the party, I say to Grzesiek and anyone else, and if you enjoy this, might I suggest some Dragon Quest, Tales of, or Phantasy Star?

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 lead says the secret of the J'RPG's success is to "not care too much about the players" – "if you care about your game, it means you care about the players ultimately."

2025 was a pretty incredible year for NetEase's Marvel Rivals. Since dropping right at the end of 2024, it's gone through five themed seasons, increased its collection of heroes and villains by 12, and experimented with PvE with its rough-around-the-edges Marvel Zombies mode.

But the team is just getting started. "2025 was more of a warm-up period for us," Marvel Games executive producer Danny Koo told Den of Geek. "Next year, we're going to have bigger plans. We're not going to slow down. We've already planned more than a year ahead and I can't wait for our players to see it."

I've been ruthlessly cutting live service games out of my library this month, as the dopamine hit from the endless progression is no longer justifying all the cracking traditional singleplayer games that have fallen by the wayside. So I'm on a Marvel Rivals break at the moment, but I sure played a lot of it this year.

I went from being more than a sceptic, hating how it felt to play and what NetEase had done to some of my favourite characters, like Magneto, to becoming a convert. The beta put me off, but shortly after launch I was hooked. It completely destroyed any interest I had left in Overwatch 2—though Blizzard had already done a good job of killing my interest before then.

"In the next year, we want to provide more game modes," said NetEase publishing and marketing lead Yachen Bian. "It's why we have prototypes in the game, like PvE and 18v18. We want to give the players more choices of different game modes beyond the basic gameplay because your fundamental experience might be very different. When you're fighting against zombies, it's quite different from fighting against other people."

I never managed to get into the zombie mode, full as it was with enemies where the only challenge was wrestling with my attention span, thanks to their absurdly large HP. Rivals is a punchy, swift game, but with this mode it ground to a halt. But I still appreciated the team's willingness to experiment, leaving me excited to see what it comes up with next year.

We'll have to wait until 2026 to find out what's coming, but NetEase has some big ambitions. "It's a lot of hard work and it always feels different and exciting," said Koo. "This game is releasing new content every week. Even my own team comes in every day asking what's new today. Everyone's excited. They want to continue to make this happen. Everyone wants to make this the biggest game possible."

There are many questions surrounding GTA 6. How will it feel to play? When are we getting another trailer? What's going to happen with GTA Online? But one of the most important is, how much is it going to cost? Speculation that it'll be $100 has lingered for a number of months, but a former Rockstar employee states this won't be the case.

"I think that they probably won't do that because, although they haven't said anything about it either, they will have a GTA VI online component and they'll be thinking we want the biggest user base we can possibly have," Obbe Vermeijj, previously technical director at Rockstar North, tells GameHub.

"Rather than trying to cash in that extra $30," he continues. "I think they're just going to make it a regular-priced game and then make the money on the back-end in the years to come." This is an important facet of the discussion. GTA 6 is likely to launch with whatever the next iteration of GTA Online is ready to go, and that’ll be full of microtransactions with a whole in-game economy.

Copies of the game themselves won’t be the only way Rockstar generates income. The belief it'll be $100 at retail stems from how expensive and time-consuming the development has been, spanning over a decade by this point. Blockbuster, triple-A games often find it hard to recoup all costs at current prices due to the sheer scale of making them, and Grand Theft Auto games are at the upper-most echelon of that.

Vermeijj does think GTA 6 will be a landmark in terms of development costs, and it’ll be a benchmark few others will get near. "My theory is that GTA 6 will be the most expensive game ever developed and it will remain that way because AI is going to take up a lot of the monotonous work that artists have to do," he muses.

"The main component of cost is artists. That's maybe 70% of the cost of a game," he adds. "I think more of that work will be done by AI and procedural generation, things that maybe aren't AI, but a set of rules that creates assets. Animated cutscenes as well. Motion capture for like 40-50 people for a crowd is very expensive. There's really no reason why AI couldn't do that."

That's a much bigger argument, as the use of generative AI in any shape or form is contentious within the industry. On a player level, at least, you might not need to spend any more than you typically would when GTA 6 lands on shelves, and that's the kind of pragmatic optimism I can get behind.

Ex-Rockstar dev doesn't believe GTA 6 will be delayed again: "The hype around the game will die down."