What has Sony learned from its biggest gaming blunder one year later? Why is Ubisoft’s CEO headed to court five years after a sexual harassment scandal rocked the company? And how many more copies will Hollow Knight sell as everyone rushes to play it ahead of Silksong‘s launch next month? Welcome back to Morning Checkpoint, Kotaku‘s daily roundup of gaming news and culture. Take cover. The end-of-year game release onslaught is about to begin.
Sony is taking steps to avoid another Concord
How did Sony slow-walk its way into a live service debacle that cost it over $200 million? A year after Concord launched, PlayStation Studios head Hermen Hulst explained what the company is doing to avoid releasing another expensive game that no one wants to play. “I don’t want teams to always play it safe, but I would like for us, when we fail, to fail early and cheaply,” he told the Financial Times. He promised more info sharing between studios and executives and said, “We have since put in place much more rigorous and more frequent testing in very many different ways. The advantage of every failure is that people now understand how necessary that [testing] is.”
What about Sony’s live-service plans moving forward? Hulst didn’t say the company is backing off its online multiplayer push, but he did hand-wave away prior commitments to launch nearly a dozen live-service projects by 2026. “The number is not so important,” he said. “What is important to me is having a diverse set of player experiences and a set of communities.” FairGame$, expected to be the next multiplayer game in Sony’s pipeline, recently lost its studio head after a bad internal review.
Ubisoft’s CEO has been summoned to appear in court
The French publisher faces a fresh lawsuit from the same victims who recently testified against former senior members of the company over sexual harassment allegations, including ex-chief creative officer Serge Hascoët. “This new case is being brought by the same plaintiffs, a union and four people, and is based on the same facts at those for which three former employees were tried and convicted this past June, following an investigation by the public prosecutor’s office,” Ubisoft executive vice president Cécile Russeil wrote in an email to staff on August 22.
CEO Yves Guillemot was subpoenaed to testify on October 1, though it’s unclear if the new litigation will be able to compel any new information to surface about the company’s workplace culture reckoning five years ago. “Ubisoft will continue to cooperate with the justice system in this matter, as it has done over the past five years in the review of the facts related to this case,” Russeil told VGC in a statement. Guillemot’s son was recently made co-CEO of a new business group within Ubisoft that oversees its most profitable franchises, including Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage is getting free DLC
Assassin’s Creed Mirage players, we have a surprise coming your way later this year!
📖 New story chapter & missions set in 9th century AlUla
🎮 Gameplay improvements for the base game and the new location
🎁 All for free
Stay tuned! pic.twitter.com/8CjB3MRvfR
— Assassin’s Creed (@assassinscreed) August 23, 2025
The 2023 game has new content coming on the horizon. It takes place in AlUla, Saudi Arabia. The new story update will arrive before the end of 2025 and comes after a report that Ubisoft received funding from the Saudi government-backed Public Investment Fund, which has recently been flooding the games industry with cash.
Switch 2 games with only game key cards won’t be eligible for preservation in Japan’s National Diet Library
The archival body will only take “physical media that contains the content itself,” according to a new report from Famitsu, translated by Automaton. “Since a key card, on its own, does not qualify as content, it falls outside of our scope for collection and preservation,” a representative of the library said. While all first-party Nintendo games are contained on the physical Switch 2 carts, most third-party releases have opted for the game key card solution, meaning most will no longer be accessible if and when the servers eventually shut down sometime in the future.
Hideo Kojima wrote a concept for Death Stranding 3 but doesn’t want to make it
The longtime director told PlayStation Arabia that Death Stranding 2 was his finale for the series, but that he has already scripted what a sequel might be about. “So I have that in data,” he said, according to a translation by Genki. “I hope that someone will create it for me.”
Peak is finally Steam Deck verified
The summer Steam hit, which has already sold over 10 million copies, received a new update that fixes some bugs and gets the game working on Valve’s handheld. Unfortunately for speedrunners, however, a major game-breaking trick no longer works. “Made fog walls taller so you can’t shoot over them to win the game in a minute with the Scout Cannon exploit,” read the patch notes.
Hollow Knight is skyrocketing up the Steam charts
Silksong is out in less than two weeks, and everyone who never finished Hollow Knight is busy catching up. The game currently has over 35,000 concurrent players on Steam, nearly double its April 2022 peak. Not bad for an eight-year-old game that’s already sold over 15 million copies. If the sequel sells another 15 million, it will officially be a bigger franchise than Metroid.
