Content Warning: The story contains details regarding physical and psychological abuse, as well as the death of a child.

A new report from People Make Games has unearthed deeply disturbing allegations of workplace abuse at Brandoville Studios, an Indonesian animation support studio that has worked on games such as Assassin's Creed Shadows, Age of Empires 4, and The Last of Us: Part I Remake.

Allegations of mistreatment at Brandoville Games were first reported by People Make Games back in 2021 as part of a broader story on how Western AAA studios effectively outsource crunch on major games to overseas developers, effectively sweeping it under the rug. However, People Make Games was urged to revisit its reporting on Brandoville more recently, after accusations went viral on Indonesia social media of continued crunch, as well as physical, verbal, and mental abuse.

TheGamer reported on the allegations in September of last year, pointing at CEO Ken Lai's wife, Cherry Lai, as the instigator of much of the studio's worst issues. Numerous screenshots and videos verified by TheGamer as well as shared publicly across social media told a story of Lai's abusive behavior, which included sending threatening and insulting messages to staff, verbally berating and insulting them, and in at least one case, repeatedly physically assaulting an employee and ordering them to physically hurt themselves as "punishment" for poor performance. That employee, Christa Sydney, has shared much of her story publicly, including claiming Lai once slapped her head so hard it caused tinnitus, and at other times choking her, pushing her down the stairs, and forcing her to bang her head on the wall until she had a concussion.

People Make Games' follow-up investigation goes further to verify and detail these claims, including sharing a video Sydney was allegedly forced to send to Lai of her slapping herself 100 times. In addition to Sydney, People Make Games' report details other accounts, including allegations that Lai pit employees against one another by verbally berating employees in the office or gossiping about them, forced employees to participate in Christian worship on a daily basis, and would insist on approving employee outfits every day before work. One former employee in the video claims Lai manipulated him into giving him a significant part of his salary.

Another former employee, Syifana Afiati, tells a story of being overworked while pregnant to the point of being asked to work while she was in the hospital. Afiati's child was born prematurely, and she was asked to return to work just one month after giving birth, despite her maternity leave being three months and her son still being treated in intensive care. Her son died four months later. Three days after he passed away, Lai sent a message to company HR, strategizing on how to avoid supporting Afiati and deprive her of benefits while she was on leave.

Ken Lai did not comment to People Make Games when asked, but Cherry Lai provided a statement to People Make Games: "To me, my part of the story is not important, as long as my team are good and safe now," but ghosted the outlet without much further commentary.

Brandoville Studios was shut down last year. While Ken and Cherry Lai attempted to spin up a new company with some of the former Brandoville employees, LaiLai Studios – it's unclear if the company is currently running or working on anything. As of September, Jakarta police were actively searching for Cherry Lai as part of an investigation into Brandoville. Lai suggested in an email to People Make Games that she may have fled to Hong Kong, but that has not yet been confirmed.

IGN has reached out to Naughty Dog, Xbox, and Ubisoft for comment on their partnerships with Brandoville in light of this story and will update if a response is received.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

In a rather unusual merging of two completely separate reported stories from last year, the former staff of Annapurna Interactive are seemingly preparing to take over the portfolio of shuttered indie label Private Division. At least some of the remaining Private Division employees are expected to be laid off in the process.

This is according to a report from Bloomberg, which states that a currently unnamed company staffed by former Annapurna Interactive employees has reached a deal with private equity firm Haveli to take over the distribution of Private Division titles. Bloomberg reports and IGN can independently confirm that Haveli is the company that purchased Private Division from Take-Two Interactive last year for an undisclosed amount.

The portfolio includes both current and upcoming Private Division titles, such as Tales of the Shire, which releases March 25. It also includes Project Bloom, a AAA action-adventure game developed by Game Freak that was announced back in 2023 with nothing more than a concept art teaser.

Xbox is ringing in the new year by taking yet another step toward its promise of making everything an Xbox: by announcing it will add the Xbox app to LG TVs later this year.

In an Xbox Wire post today, Xbox announced it's partnering with LG Electronics to bring the Xbox app to LG smart TVs in 2025. What this means is that Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers will be able to play games on supported LG TVs without needing a console, using cloud gaming tech. And yes, that includes Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.

Xbox already implemented this feature on Samsung Smart TVs back in 2022, and added Amazon Fire TV devices to the mix last year. With the expansion to LG TVs, Xbox expands its TV presence even further amid an ongoing ad campaign focused on showcasing the ability to play Xbox on any device. This campaign, using the slogan "This is an Xbox", positions TVs, laptops, phones, consoles, and other devices as Xboxes thanks to the combined powers of the Xbox app and Game Pass. LG makes several of the best TVs for gaming, including our overall favorite, the LG G4.

Despite numerous moves in recent years to spread its wings from consoles to other devices, Xbox leadership has repeatedly stated it's committed to consoles as well. Just last year, it announced a mid-gen refresh for the Xbox Series X and S, including an all-digital Series X, and confirmed it's "full speed ahead" on a next-gen console.

Meanwhile, rumors continue to pop up every few months of a dedicated Xbox handheld, though Xbox head Phil Spencer recently suggested it's still a few years away.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Forget Year of Luigi. 2025 is the Year of Eevee. At least, according to The Pokémon Center, the official merch arm of The Pokémon Company.

This was announced today via the official Pokémon website, which christened the year by announcing an array of Eevee-themed merchandise such as plush toys and Eeveelution statuettes.

Notably, the "Year of Eevee" thus far appears only to impact The Pokémon Center, the official merchandise store for Pokémon. So it's entirely possible this is purely a marketing thing to sell more Eevee plush, and won't impact anything else.

Typically over the holidays, thousands of people will look in their stockings or under the tree to find brand new Nintendo games waiting for them. But this year, a number of Nintendo Switch fans are claiming they unwrapped a far less pleasant surprise on Christmas morning: instead of a Switch cartridge in their game box, some are claiming they found a single googly eye staring at them.

Over the holidays, a number of posts popped up across Reddit and Twitter/X from individuals claiming their seemingly sealed, brand new Nintendo Switch cases contained a googly eye and a black piece of plastic instead of the actual game cartridge. Why a googly eye? The running theory is that the googly eye will rattle if you shake the Switch box, similar to how the box rattles with an actual game inside. And the black plastic around the side fools individuals trying to look through the cracks on the top or bottom to see if the outline of a game is visible without unwrapping it. Without these items, someone might be tipped off that a game has been stolen from the package, but this method ensures that no one notices the crime until they open the case.

It's unclear at the moment how or why this is happening, on what scale, or at what point in the distribution process. Games reportedly impacted included Luigi's Mansion 2 HD, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Mario Party Jamboree, Echoes of Wisdom, and others. The reports also seem to go back several months, though there's been a higher influx of them recently likely due to more games being purchased over the holiday. And all of them seem to include a googly eye and the same black piece of plastic, though at least one person is claiming to have only gotten the plastic, no eye included.

IGN reached out to several individuals claiming they had received googly eyes instead of games over the last year and a half, but no one we spoke to had taken a video of them unwrapping the shrink wrap and discovering the eye, as they (understandably) didn't know they were unwrapping a googly eye to begin with. As long as all these reports remain unconfirmed, it's always possible this is just some sort of viral prank. Still, through our conversations with the individuals claiming they were impacted, all seemed to be legitimate accounts. A few had return receipts or were able to direct me to specific Walmart, Best Buy, and Target store locations where googly eyes had been acquired, all located in the western United States. One person said they purchased their googly eye game online. Timeline-wise, googly eye claims went back as far as June 2023, though most took place in the last six months.

In an effort to confirm these reports, I tried to reach specific stores where googly eyes were allegedly found. One of the Reddit posters claimed in private messages with me that they had returned their googly eye box to a specific Walmart store, so I gave them a call. I was unable to get anyone to answer the phone at the store for over an hour despite calling various different departments. When I finally reached someone in a completely unrelated department, they transferred me to Loss Prevention, who upon hearing what I was calling about offered to have me speak to a higher manager, before hanging up the phone entirely. Multiple calls back to the same departments did not glean any further responses. I tried a second Walmart location identified by posters, where I eventually reached an employee in electronics who had never heard of this happening. However, the incident taking place at their store allegedly happened months ago, and would have been handled by returns and not electronics, so their lack of awareness wasn't much of a debunking.

A very similar scenario unfolded when I tried to reach a specific Target location where someone claimed to have successfully returned a googly eye game. Repeated calls to relevant departments went unanswered, until I finally reached someone in an unrelated department who transferred me to Guest Services. Guest Services then directed me to Target's corporate media line, which I have already contacted and did not receive a response from. All told, I spent about three hours on a Friday afternoon calling various big box stores, but learned absolutely nothing about googly eyes.

With the direct route failing, I reached out to Nintendo for comment, but did not hear back in time for publication. I also reached out to Best Buy corporate for comment on this story, but similarly did not hear back in time for publication.

Walmart corporate PR did get back to me on Friday, but the PR representative I spoke to seemed baffled. They told me over the phone that the company had not heard anything about this, and we spent the better part of the afternoon going back and forth over email trying to investigate. The representative said they'd look into some specific stores where googly eyes had been reported over the weekend and return to me with a statement by first-thing Monday, but IGN did not receive any further response to our inquiry by our deadline. We'll update if that changes.

The takeaway from all this, then, is just a PSA that your recently-purchased Nintendo Switch cartridge may or may not contain a game, or a googly eye. It's unclear if this is a real problem affecting many people, a real problem affecting a very small number of people caught up in a supply chain that has poor communication and no way to confirm these things, or a joke problem invented by the internet. Fortunately though, if it is indeed a real problem, it sounds like most stores are exchanging googly eyes for games if you find yourself the victim of this weird but admittedly quite frustrating switcheroo. Hopefully they manage to catch this Googly Eye Bandit, if they're indeed real, and save future Christmases from disaster.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

At last, it's time for the most exciting live competitive event of the year. No, I don't mean the Super Bowl - it's time for Awesome Games Done Quick, the annual charity speedrunning marathon that features a week of talented gamers showing off the wildest things they can do with video games.

Games Done Quick (GDQ) has been running for 15 years now, since 2010. The event is a live broadcast speedrunning marathon, during which speedrunners take turns showing off beating video games as fast as possible, and often in wacky and especially impressive ways. In recent years, the events have shown off increasingly ambitious performances, including blindfolded or one-handed runs, two players using a single controller, showcases of tricky arcade games, and even speedruns performed by dogs.

The annual event is held to raise money for the Prevent Cancer foundation, having previously raised a record high of $3,442,033 in 2022, and $2,539,832 just last year. And this year's marathon has some pretty ridiculous runs on the docket. There's a run of Crazy Taxi backed by a live band, someone playing Elden Ring with a saxophone, new Super Mario Bros. Wii run while simultaneously playing piano, a two-players-one-controller run of Breath of the Wild, loads of randomizer races, and it all wraps up with a Map Randomizer Race between some of the best Super Metroid runners out there. If you've never watched GDQ before, it's really worth tuning in.

AGDQ 2025 kicks off at 9:00 AM PT on Sunday, January 5 with a run of Pikmin on Nintendo Switch, followed by Portal 2. In fact, Sunday's full of bangers: Kirby's Air Ride follows, there's an Astro Bot run, then The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, a run infamous for appearing at GDQ every years and getting shorter each time as the community discovers new, run-changing skips.

As we rang in the new year earlier this week, thousands of people seemed to be celebrating in an admittedly unusual way: by playing Valve's 2018 TCG Artifact.

Then, as quickly as they started, the 12,000-ish individuals all stopped playing at once on January 3, leaving the game as empty as it had been at the end of 2024.

Who were these people? No one seems to know. The Artifact community isn't reporting any sudden spikes in interest, and no one's really talking about the game on social media apart from marveling at the sudden jump in player numbers.

So why, then, is SteamDB suggesting that a free-to-play card game that is, by all accounts, close to dead, seeing wild spikes in users over very specific two-day periods?

As spotted by Forbes, Artifact Classic's (the original, now free-to-play version of Artifact) player count suddenly spiked on December 31, jumping from a measly ~200 concurrent players up to the 5,000s, before spiking to a height of over 12,000. Artifact remained at around 11,000 concurrents through the second, before its playercount absolutely tanked back down to ~150 at midnight on January 3rd. What's strange is that something almost exactly like this happened earlier this month, too: on December 14, player counts shot up to around 14,000, hung out there for about two days, and dive bombed again into the hundreds on the 17th.

So what's really going on here? The actual answer is that no one really knows. The most prevalent community theory seems to be that it's bots, though why someone would train bots to play Artifact isn't exactly clear. One person suggested someone was training an AI to play the game "for shits and giggles" which is perhaps as good an explanation as any. Another person suggested the spikes were due to scam bots increasing playtime in random games in order to make their Steam accounts look legitimate for other purposes.

Another theory pointed out by multiple members of the Artifact subreddit is that the spike in players is due to pirates. Because certain video games require Steam authentication, in order to pirate those games, pirates will use the AppID/SDK of a different, free-to-play game to fool Steam into thinking they have a real copy. In this case, it's being suggested they're using Artifact. That said, this theory doesn't entirely hold up, due to the extremely sudden spikes and then drops in activity at very precise times.

So the actual answer behind Artifact's mysterious player numbers remains a mystery for now. We did reach out to Valve for comment, but did not hear back in time for publication. What is clear at least is that despite the numbers, Artifact itself doesn't seem to be garnering any meaningful, real-world interest eight years after launch and four years after Valve effectively called it quits, even though the game itself was pretty fun at first. At least the bots, if they are indeed bots, in Artifact don't seem to be bothering legitimate players, unlike the on-and-off situation over in Team Fortress 2.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

In 2017, Brendan Greene (aka “PlayerUnknown”) pioneered the Battle Royale genre of games with the early access release of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. The game has since gone on to become a massive hit, spawning countless more games like it, including some of the most successful games of all time.

Next year, 2025, Greene wants to pioneer something new. He wants to make a metaverse. No, not the one you’re thinking of. Greene doesn’t think those count as actual metaverses.

“I hesitate to talk about this, because it's just such a dirty word, but I want to build a metaverse because I don't think anyone else is,” he tells IGN. “I think everyone's building IP bubbles that might talk to each other at some stage in the future, maybe if we're lucky, but it's not the metaverse. See, the Metaverse is a 3D internet. You should be able to create your own worlds and just have them all operating on the same protocol, like HTTP. So a world is a page, and that's what I'm trying to do with Artemis.”

Artemis, aka Greene’s metaverse, is actually the third of three games he’s currently cooking up at his studio, PlayerUnknown Productions. The first two are testing grounds for the technology Greene eventually wants to use to build his metaverse. They’ll each be games in their own right, but their real purpose is to work out the kinks in Greene’s most ambitious ideas before they hit primetime in Artemis.

Final Chapter Prologue

The first game, Prologue, is already being tested by players in Greene’s Discord (in an early format Greene refers to as “Preface”) and is planned for a wider release in 2025. It’s a fairly basic survival game, Greene says, with a simple loop of trying to reach an objective while dealing with typical survival mechanics. There’s weather, hunger, crafting, discoverable loot, and other such elements to deal with, but the real meat of Prologue is its terrain generation tech. That’s what Prologue is really about: testing high-tech terrain generation at a small scale, before implementing it more broadly in Artemis.

Greene calls the terrain generation tech used by his studio “Melba,” and it’s basically a world generation machine. Melba uses machine learning, and is trained on NASA data of real-world Earth terrain. With that information, Melba is able to spit out entire maps, or even worlds, that have realistic geological features, and is able to do so either randomly or based on instructions, such as a request for a world with tons of mountains. These worlds are then filled with textures, assets, and other elements designed by actual artists, and are able to be customized in a similar fashion to have more forests, rivers, or whatever other elements are desired.

“There's a new terrain every time you press play,” Greene explains. “The seed system gives us, I think 4.2 billion possible maps, but maybe millions of those would be interesting, I'm not sure yet…But this kind of tech is really cool because we're seeing it shaped day to day with the artists. They're going, ‘Let's try this, let's update the masks we use for the river to this so we generate that slightly differently.’ And they're learning how to use this tech along with us, which is just great to see.

“It's more an emergent space to test our terrain tech, and we're going to work with the community to try to figure out: how can we make this test interesting? How can we make this game mode fun? What can we add to it that's systemic, and then will help us moving forward going into game two, and three, and building these bigger systems using the foundations we built in Prologue?”

Building the World Machine

Prologue is just game one. Game two, which is currently unnamed, will come once the terrain tech is solidified. For Game Two, Greene wants a world that’s “500 million square kilometers, earth scale” to test a different sort of tech ahead of the release of Artemis: gameplay with a whole awful lot of characters all in one space together.

Greene won’t say much about this one. He tells me about his end goal for Artemis, which is to fit not thousands, but millions of players in a space together and have everything still work. In Game Two, Greene will test that via both multiplayer gameplay as well as AI character interaction. “You’ll be controlling an army, basically,” is all I can really get out of him. Game Two will focus on multiplayer while “controlling lots of assets”...which, when combined with Melba, will lead to the massive, multiplayer metaverse that Greene is dreaming up for Artemis.

“The metaverse has to have millions of people, and server client-side, you'll never get that. You'll maybe get a few thousand, maybe 10,000 if you're lucky, but it's attacking the problem at the wrong end, which is to solve the simulation locally, which we've done with Preface and then you can scale to hundreds of thousands, millions of people, hopefully.”

As for what all those millions of people will be doing in Greene’s metaverse…that’s largely up to them, he says. He compares it at one point to a Star Trek Holodeck, and then later to Minecraft Survival. In the tradition of the latter, Artemis will have a sort of basic game experience everyone can play, but then those users will be able to go off and make their own worlds, freely mod them, share them with others, and essentially treat them like “3D webpages” and experiment, build, and create totally new things within these spaces. He says he’s already seeing some of the beginnings of that within his Discord community as they tool around with and mod the early release of Prologue.

“The internet was empty when it first started, and it was just the way of sharing data, and I look at this the same,” he says. “This is probably going to be empty for the first few years, but then eventually you'll start to see the possibility of what you can do with this kind of world generator that it's like a multiverse of worlds.”

Critically, Greene wants Artemis to eventually be like the open internet in the sense that no one can really control what’s on it, not even him. I ask him how content moderation will work in that case, and while Greene believes Artemis will need moderation, he wants that power to stay in the hands of the users.

“I've been thinking a lot about this and what I want to do within this multiverse of digital spaces, you give the power to the community, that if someone acts like an asshole then they're locked out of spaces. And it comes down to identity. We have to solve the identity problem because anonymity online kind of breaks the social construct. But if on our network or on our system, it's tough for you to reenter it or to create an identity twice, you could still be anonymous, but at least there will be consequence to action.”

Greene also suggests that instead of outright banning people who cause issues, one path might be to turn miscreants into “ghosts” that can’t interact with anyone. They can see everything happening and browse the world, but they are incapable of speaking or otherwise engaging with anything in it. “If you look at Covid, there were 12 people that generated something like 96% of the misinformation that was online. [Author’s note: The actual number was 65% of disinformation posts on Facebook, and 72% of all anti-vaccine content.]...If you shut out this small group of people that really actively try to upset the information space and deliver propaganda, then you've solved the problem kind of holistically…I think that the future will be local. Everything will be local. You will have your identity locally and you will share it as you see fit, and it won't be stored by people across the world. At least I hope.”

I press Greene on this - what if people are doing illegal things in this metaverse? What about copyright violations, or worse, everything Roblox has been accused of? At what point does he become responsible? Greene admits he doesn’t have an answer yet.

“That's where we're going to have to figure it out. As I said, I want to build games with the community, rather than for them, and I think with their help and finding out what tools they need to better do this, then we can figure out how to do this in a way better way for everyone. Thankfully we have good AI regulation in the EU as well so there are checks and balances there already, at least this side of the planet to help with this, right? I mean, let's see how long they last, but at least there are people smarter than me thinking about it already. So I'm happy to follow guidance, and work with the community to figure this out because it's important to get right.”

Long Road Ahead

Greene’s vision is incredibly technically complex, and he mentions several times that he doesn’t expect we’ll see its final form – Artemis – for ten, maybe even 15 years. He’s already highlighted a number of the challenges ahead of the team, but I ask him about another one he hasn’t yet mentioned: is Artemis going to be PC-only? No, he says. It’ll be on everything, eventually.

“It has to. I mean, the device is just an access point to the world. It has to be. Kids in Africa on their mobile phones have to be able to access it the same as gaming PCs on the West Coast. The experience of the world might be slightly different, but because it's not a game, that's okay. It just has to run on every device.”

And there’s another technological issue I need to raise with Greene: NFTs. Previously, it’s been reported that Artemis will implement them, but Greene says that was a misunderstanding stemming from an interview he did with Hit Points back in 2022.

“[Nathan Brown] asked me about blockchain because it was the hype thing at the time,” Greene says. “And I explained that blockchain, I thought, was an interesting financial instrument, as a layer within a digital world. But that was it. I said maybe some future iteration of blockchain or hashgraph or that tech is interesting. Ultimately it's a digital ledger and if we can use a digital ledger, we'll find the best one and use it. But that's really it. The next day after I did that interview, [headlines were] ‘PUBG Guy Making Blockchain Game’, and that's not what I said. It's an interesting tech and I think it can be used if it's useful, but otherwise we'll use what is the best at the time.”

So he’s not currently thinking about NFTs in Artemis, then?

“No, not even thinking about it. Our concern is about getting the engine to a state that we can make things in it and then as I said, Game Two, we'll test ideas then, but really now not even thought about it. More just getting some fun games made.”

Between the length of time Greene needs to build Artemis and the sheer amount of questions still looming about its final form, Greene and his studio have a difficult road ahead. He’ll need time and personpower, which also means money, and the games industry is currently going through a funding drought amid layoffs, closures, and project cancellations. Greene says his project is fine, having gotten funding for Prologue early on and used it thoughtfully thus far. But that doesn’t mean Artemis is guaranteed. He says they’ll still need people to buy Prologue so they can sustain development long-term.

Still, Greene isn’t daunted by the fact that he’s basically claiming he wants to build an entire second internet in a time of mass game and tech instability. In the same way that PUBG started out as a fairly barebones game but became a smash hit that launched a genre, he believes his new vision can grow to something massive with the help of a creative community. And maybe, he suggests, a successful Artemis could even help prevent the current games industry situation from happening again.

“Games are driven a lot by data points on Excel spreadsheets rather than making fun games and it's a little depressing,” he says. “So that's why I want to stick to my vision because I think we need a platform like this. We need a platform where people can just create and not worry that you've got an exec team shooting it.

“I want to find the next PlayerUnknown. I was really lucky to have been given this chance and providing people with a platform that can help do that, why wouldn't I do that? And yes, it's a big vision, but I've got a good team of industry professionals and they don't think it's that crazy. So yeah, I'm filled with confidence.”

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.