Wednesday opens with one of the week’s heaviest industry beats: Ubisoft is proposing to close the studio that built Trials, Activision has locked down the biggest Call of Duty launch of the year, and Facepunch is publicly admitting its big sandbox experiment missed. Trials is the long-running motorcycle stunt series that defined Xbox Live Arcade. Facepunch is the studio behind Garry’s Mod and Rust. Here is your morning brief.
The big one
Ubisoft is proposing to close RedLynx, the Helsinki-area studio behind the Trials series, and is cutting 70 jobs at Ubisoft Singapore, the publisher told staff on Wednesday. RedLynx, acquired in 2011 after Trials 2 and Trials HD took off on Xbox Live Arcade, would shut under Finland’s local change-negotiation process. Up to 52 positions are affected. Ubisoft Singapore, founded in 2008, is losing roughly one-fifth of its headcount. The studio was best known for leading the troubled development of Skull and Bones.
The cuts are the latest move in Ubisoft’s Creative Houses restructuring. Ubisoft has already closed studios in Stockholm, Halifax, Winnipeg, and Belgrade this year. Six games have been cancelled in the same window. No current RedLynx project is in active development. Singapore shifted to support work after Skull and Bones shipped in 2024. Our Ubisoft RedLynx story has the full statement and the studio-by-studio math. The practical read for players: nobody’s open-world sequel lost its home today, but the trend line matters for anyone tracking which Ubisoft franchises still get standalone bets.
Our read: This is the second major publisher-closure story in eight days. It follows Asha Sharma’s Xbox “will not survive” without new IP speech at Microsoft’s Town Hall a week ago. The same week, Microsoft shipped Battlefield 6 to Game Pass Ultimate (our story) and announced Xbox Labs. October is shaping up as the month where every major Western publisher either committed to live services or started cutting staff. The pattern is not a coincidence. Post-Covid studio bloat is meeting post-AI-investment margin pressure. The names disappearing are the studios that did not ship a hit since 2022.
What to watch: Battlefield 6 versus Modern Warfare 4 is the data point that will define the rest of Q4. We track live Steam player counts on our player-counts page. If Battlefield 6 holds above its current peak through next week, the live-service commit was vindicated. If it slides, expect Microsoft to call another studio shutdown before Halloween. The /coming-west/ tracker now has three new japan-only entries from the past 24 hours: Tales of Eternia Remastered (status: released), the Lost Saviour revival, and 1999 TOKOYO Building.
Also happening
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 preloads roll out tonight at 9 PM PT (midnight ET), with the full game unlocking worldwide at midnight local time on October 23. Digital Standard Edition is $69.99. Digital Vault Edition is $99.99, with both Operator Packs, the Signature Weapon Collection, one season of BlackCell, and DMZ bonuses. DMZ opens for preorder customers on October 20. Campaign Early Access starts October 16 for digital preorders. Our MW4 preload story has the timeline and what is still unannounced.
- S&box is going free-to-play by the end of 2026, Facepunch founder Garry Newman admitted in a post titled “Rethinking / We got it wrong.” S&box is the spiritual successor to Garry’s Mod that launched into Early Access in 2025. It has been sitting at 47% positive on Steam after about six months with 3,600 reviews. Garry’s Mod is at 97% positive across 541,000+ ratings. The pivot drops the $20 entry fee and leans on Steam Workshop for discovery. It also scraps the custom backend sharing system and ditches the cartoon Citizen character. Our S&box F2P story has the full strategy shift.
- Game of Thrones: Kingsroad opened its Global Content Alignment server today. The update brings Casterly Rock (House Lannister’s ancestral home) and the Season 3 Stormlands content “Trial of the Stormlands Bannermen: Rain and Flame” to Western players for the first time. Players can stay on the existing Western Server or transition to the new server. The transition comes with a reward program based on character progression and purchase history. Our Kingsroad server story has the option comparison.
- FreeStyle Football 2 launches December 3 on PS5, Xbox, and PC, with pre-orders open and a 10% launch discount running through release day. FreeStyle Football 2 is a 5v5 role-driven soccer game from developer Woore and publisher JOYCITY. Three editions are available: Standard $29.99, Deluxe $39.99 with three-day early access, Ultimate $69.99 with the Death Game cosmetic set. Our FreeStyle Football 2 launch story has the system specs.
- Pokémon Sleep’s Halloween 2026 event “Double Ameri-Search” runs October 26 to November 2. The event adds Ghost-type Duskull and Dusclops to sleep research, plus a purple-hatted Halloween Eievui (Eevee) variant and a candy bonus that triples on Halloween itself. Pokémon Sleep is the global sleep-tracking app where Snorlax is the central Pokémon. Our Pokémon Sleep Halloween story has the candy schedule.
- Bandai Namco’s Gundam Game 40th Anniversary Livestream is October 28 at 8:00 PM JST (7:00 AM ET) on the Gundam Channel YouTube. GUNDAM ROGUE ORBIT news is expected four months before its global March 4, 2027 launch on PS5, Xbox, and PC. Our Gundam livestream story has the lineup.
What’s out today
Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2 is out today on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC (Switch 2 version later), per our release calendar. Tomorrow is the heavy hitter. Here is the standout list:
| Game | Date | Platforms | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse | Oct 15 | PS5, Xbox, Switch, PC | Our pick of the week; reviews roundup posted yesterday |
| Tales of Eternia Remastered | Oct 15 (JP) / Oct 16 (WW) | PS5, Xbox, Switch, PC | 2000 JRPG, Japan-first with a one-day gap |
| Ratatan | Oct 15 | PS5, Xbox, Switch, PC | From the creators of Patapon |
| It Takes Two (Switch 2) | Oct 15 | Switch 2 | The co-op hit finally lands on a Nintendo console |
| Warframe Epoch Operation: Taubound | Oct 15 – Nov 17 | PS5, Xbox, Switch, PC, Mobile | Permanent Tau Prologue quest included |
| Toy Story 3 Complete Edition | Oct 15 | PS5, Xbox, Switch, PC | Re-release of the 2010 game |
Also landing October 15: Harvest Moon: Echoes of Teradea (delayed from September 24), Enshrouded’s full launch on PS5 and PC, Bluey’s Happy Snaps, and The Jackbox Party Pack 12. Plan your weekend accordingly.
Deal of the day
Halo: The Master Chief Collection is $9.99 on Steam, 75% off, through October 19. Halo: The Master Chief Collection is the bundle of six Halo games (Reach, Combat Evolved Anniversary, Halo 2 Anniversary, Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, Halo 4) plus multiplayer. $9.99 is the deepest discount we have seen on this Steam listing in our recent tracking, and the price undercuts the $39.99 list price by $30. If you have been waiting for a reason to revisit the Master Chief story or play it for the first time on PC, this is the one. (Halo store page).
One more thing
The original Alliance of Valiant Arms is shutting down on October 28 after 18 years, G·O・P confirmed today. The successor AVA RE:BIRTH launches this fall on the Korean Pmang and Japanese VFUN platforms. Alliance of Valiant Arms is the Korean-Japanese competitive FPS that launched in Japan on December 1, 2008. It built the Japanese PC FPS competitive scene through regular online and offline tournaments. Japanese clans reached multiple international finals. RE:BIRTH keeps most of the original maps for Bomb mode but layers in a PvPvE “Hunting Field” extraction mode. It also adds a cost-cap anti-gear-creep system. There is no English version; both the original and the successor were always Korea/Japan-only. Our AVA RE:BIRTH story has the full CBT improvements list. The Coming West? tracker now lists RE:BIRTH in the japan-only bucket.
Edited by the Pixel Herald newsroom.
Correction (October 14, 2026): We originally cited an unverified $14.99 March 2026 sale floor for Halo: The Master Chief Collection; the claim has been removed.
Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report
Comments
Join the discussion Which of Wednesday's stories do you want to come back to first: the Ubisoft studio cuts, the Modern Warfare 4 preload tonight, or the S&box free-to-play pivot?
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