Warning: this opinion piece contains spoilers for Resident Evil Requiem.

For three decades, players have been going toe-to-toe with zombies and other monsters in the Resident Evil series. This year’s latest mainline entry, Resident Evil Requiem, marks the beloved franchise’s 30th anniversary by being a love letter to the series’ entire past, from its early days of creepy, puzzle-filled survival horror to its adrenaline-fuelled action horror era. But while this approach has been praised almost unanimously across the board – we awarded Requiem 9/10 and its Metacritic score stands at 89, the highest of any modern, non-remake Resident Evil – I feel that its attempt to mix both of the series’ historic styles together creates a clash, rather than cohesion. Rather than a game that knows exactly what it wants to be, it feels to me like Resident Evil Requiem has a bit of an identity crisis.

Over the past decade, Resident Evil has reformulated itself as a slow-paced survival horror game, returning its mainline entries to the style of the 1996 original where every shot counts and everything around you is a threat. You're not a larger-than-life hero, instead you're an everyday person thrown into a nightmare scenario and you have to somehow find a way out alive. Seemingly inspired by indie hits like Amnesia and Outlast, Capcom opted for a first-person POV for Resident Evil 7: Biohazard and its sequel, Village, which anchored you in the terrifying experience of their everyman protagonist, Ethan Winters. This new formula worked well, garnering critical acclaim and reigniting many people’s interest in the franchise, myself included. This was an especially important victory for Capcom because of how poorly 2012’s Resident Evil 6 was received, which almost entirely abandoned the series’ survival horror roots in favor of horror-themed action.

But with the release of Resident Evil Requiem, it feels as if some of the work that Capcom has been doing over the last few years with Biohazard and Village has been thrown out the window. It is, for sure, a great game that’s engaging from start to finish, but its big swings from terrifying survival horror to relentless action set pieces makes it feel as if Capcom couldn't pick a lane for Requiem’s overall tone. While playing through the campaign, I couldn’t help but feel that it was suffering from an identity crisis. And because of that, I found that many key plot points missed the mark for me. A prime example of this occurs towards the campaign’s midpoint, when Grace’s child ward, Emily, transforms into a giant monster. It’s a moment that’s supposed to create a cocktail of emotions – shock and upset over what’s become of your friend, fear for what will happen next – but before any of that really comes into play, Leon rushes in, guns blazing, to save the day.

While playing as Grace, Requiem is a slow-burning survival horror – the exact style of game I've come to expect from the series. Similar to when playing as Ethan Winters, I was forced to think carefully about how I wanted to approach each situation, and I often would ask myself, "Is this fight worth the ammo?" Every time I ran into a creature that would tower over me, I'd often scream out in real life, then proceed to run for my life in-game. The fear was only amplified by the fact that Grace’s sections employ the series’ traditional labyrinthine level design, and so I was often forced to revisit locations I’d previously barely made it out of alive in search of hidden treasure pieces needed to move the plot forward. The puzzles those treasures are used to solve aren’t exactly the hardest, but their presence is appreciated, and it made playing as Grace even more enjoyable.

Ultimately, a lot of Grace's gameplay is grounded in reality – yes, a reality where zombies tear off faces and doors are unlocked by gemstones – but the oppressive atmosphere, overwhelming odds, and vision-limiting first-person perspective makes playing as her truly scary. Even though she is employed by the FBI, she's essentially a pencil pusher who has next to no combat experience in the field. It makes you feel truly vulnerable, and so this was the strongest part of the game for me.

Leon’s sections, meanwhile, feel like a complete 180 from everything you experience as Grace. Replicating the approach of 2005’s Resident Evil 4, Leon’s most famous mission, most, if not all of the horror elements are removed from his sequences and story beats, which undermines much of what you played through as Grace – once again, Leon’s brutal gunning down of the monster Emily transforms into feels like it’s from a completely different story than the one Grace was experiencing. This is where the identity crisis really kicks in. Ammo is not as scarce anymore, and you're encouraged to run headfirst into battle. Rather than search for helpful scraps, Leon has access to a shopping and weapons upgrade system that rewards you with currency based on how many zombies you've killed. The only way to get better gear is by racking up a high kill count, a system that goes against everything the game’s Grace-centric first half was building towards. As Grace, I’d learned to be fearful of pretty much everything coming my way, especially the larger monsters that stalked the corridors of the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center. Leon, on the other hand, could solve such issues with a few shotgun shells and a grenade.

Unfortunately, the same can also be said about the puzzles (or lack thereof) Leon has to solve in his portion of the game. A lot of them mostly involve running to site X just to open location Y, which feels a notable step down compared to the more sophisticated problems facing Grace. This huge shift in approach between the two characters means it almost feels like playing an entirely different game during Requiem’s second half. Leon and Grace's parts feel like two sides of a strong coin, but they are underdeveloped because they're so split. Rather than complimentary halves, they feel like mandatory reflections of the series past to honor the series’ 30-year milestone. As I played, I began to wonder if Capcom was trying to directly appease its many generations of fans – those who loved Resident Evil 7 and 8's old school-influenced gameplay and those who liked the more action-packed style of RE 3-6 – rather than finding a new formula that combined elements of both.

It seems strange that Capcom has tried to do this multi-style catering, as such an approach was widely unpopular when the studio first tried it in 2012 with Resident Evil 6. Much like Requiem, that game was split into distinct sections that delivered different gameplay styles. Leon’s storyline, while admittedly still action heavy, was focused on more traditional horror goals, while Chris and Jake’s campaigns were almost Call of Duty-like in their approach to action. Granted, this time around, Capcom has done a much better job of both sides of the coin – Grace’s side of things is genuine survival horror, while Leon’s is a good tribute to the style of RE4 – but it’s nonetheless odd to see it take such a massive swing towards a campaign structure that had already done a lot of damage to the franchise. Towards the end of the game, it almost feels like you're playing a more polished version of Resident Evil 6 rather than the successor to Resident Evil 7 and 8.

What really makes all this frustrating is that Capcom has shown with Resident Evil Village that you can still have these over-the-top action moments without undermining the horror and tension built up throughout the game. A key example can be found at the tail end of the campaign, when the perspective switches from Ethan to Chris Redfield – the classic Resident Evil hero who’s a proficient soldier at this point in the timeline. You play his sequence as an FPS, killing everything that stands in your way. But because this is a single sequence, rather than half of the game, it feels like a refreshing vignette rather than a case of split personality.

With it being the 30th anniversary of Resident Evil, it's clear that Capcom's goal for Requiem was to pay respect to and celebrate the many different things this series has been. And when it’s exploring those things in isolation, it’s undeniably compelling. I loved creeping around Rhodes Hill as Grace, and I loved ripping through the streets of Raccoon City as Leon. Together, though, these elements make for a campaign that feels fractured. Its lack of commitment to one style really hurts Requiem’s overall big picture, and in its worst moments the clash between horror and action undermines much of the tension built up as Grace and inflicts tonal whiplash. There’s a lot I like about Resident Evil Requiem, but I wish the game belonged to either Grace or Leon, not both of them.

Luis Joshua Gutierrez is a freelance writer who loves games. You can reach him at @ImLuisGutierrez on Twitter.

The Witcher franchise has always been a natural fit for the comic book medium (see our review of 2014's The Witcher #1 for more). Now those stories are being brought to an entirely new audience, as WEBTOON reveals it's acquired the rights to Dark Horse's back catalog of The Witcher comics.

This is the latest collaboration between WEBTOON and Dark Horse, with the latter's Cyberpunk 2077, Critical Role, and Avatar: The Last Airbender comics also appearing on the platform. Check out the slideshow gallery below to see how the series will look in the WEBTOON format:

WEBTOON is kicking things off with The Witcher: House of Glass, which was written by Paul Tobin, drawn by Joe Querio, and colored by Carlos Badilla. House of Glass is set in the world of the Witcher games and follows Geralt of Rivia as he makes his way through the titular haunted mansion.

Here's the original logline for The Witcher: House of Glass:

Traveling near the edge of the Black Forest, monster hunter Geralt meets a widowed fisherman whose dead and murderous wife resides in an eerie mansion known as the House of Glass - which seems to have endless rooms, nothing to fill them with, and horror around every corner.

WEBTOON will begin serializing The Witcher on Monday, March 9 at 5pm PT. These stories will be adapted from the original Dark Horse graphic novels and modified for WEBTOON's vertical scrolling format. New installments will be added weekly.

In other The Witcher news, reports suggest that The Witcher 3 could be getting another expansion. You can also check out our comprehensive timeline of all The Witcher books.

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on BlueSky.

War Machine premieres Friday, March 6 on Netflix.

Not to be confused with Netflix's 2017 Brad Pitt war satire of the same name, this War Machine stars Reacher's mammoth Alan Ritchson. He's a nearly aged-out Army Ranger hopeful (with a haunted past) whose two-hour Armed Forces commercial gets interrupted by a giant death robot from outer space that's a bulky combination of Aliens-style Power Loader and Tron-esque Recognizer. War Machine is an action/sci-fi mashup in the vein of Predator that stands slightly (on its tippy toes) above most of streaming's unchallenging, disposable rabble, mostly due to a ferocious mass casualty event of a second act.

War Machine's threat of a giant boxy contraption, instead of an alien monster, saves us from possible shoddy CGI, but it also adds to the film's visual dryness. It's mostly a drab, brutalist shoot 'em up that lacks the uniqueness needed for a great sci-fi invasion story. Ritchson's "81" (everyone has a number instead of a name) and his squad are on a final training mission when they're ambushed by a giant intergalactic bot, which tests his mettle while blowing most everyone else to Kingdom Come.

During the death bot's second assault, War Machine ticks upward a bit as the movie flashes its fangs. There's a particular chase scene that stands out due to its mercilessness, and it's here that the movie feels powered by its own engine and not just set on riding the coattails of things that came before it and did it better. It's a shame that the rest of the movie was designed to be a merely adequate affair, unchallenging and dry. Because the sci-fi behemoth element adds a horror movie-style bit of crash therapy in a "the monster is grief" sort of way. War Machine could have been a much deeper, satisfying experience, but they make the choice, in the end, to tease a possible franchise, and that deflates the resolution.

Ritchson is very good in this, providing a nice mix of tortured vulnerability and hulkish heroics. His physical hugeness takes a back seat in War Machine, as he's covered up for most of the movie in combat gear, but just knowing he's swole helps sell 81's unsettling obsession with durability and going the distance. 81 also comes with a tragic, recent past that gets unspooled throughout this crucible. Jai Courtney has a small but important role here as 81's brother, feeding into the redemption arc that helps give 81 layers as a character. Far more layers than the supporting soldiers, who, save for two, only get the barest of focus. They're mostly just faces in the chaos.

The blueprints for War Machine, as an action movie, are solid. The hero has a bone to pick with the universe. The universe sends a bone to pick. But this doesn't save it from moments of feeling like stodgy four-quadrant content. And the way the cosmic blastoid bot gets defeated, its weakness, is super silly. Almost enough to take you out of the story. No, it's not a big red "power off" button on its face but... that's not far off. Ultimately, War Machine -- which also stars Dennis Quaid, Esai Morales, and Stephan James (as one of the soldiers with "more to do") -- will rest comfortably as a medium-fine flick that you'll never watch again.

Some might have thought Bungie’s Marathon was going to be the big launch on Steam this week, but it turns out Slay the Spire 2 has quadrupled Bungie's extraction shooter in terms of concurrent player numbers on Valve's PC gaming platform.

Casey Yano, game developer and co-founder of Slay the Spire maker MegaCrit, took to social media to say he never thought Slay the Spire 2 would pass Marathon in terms of concurrent users. Well, it certainly has. At the time of this article’s publication, Slay the Spire 2 has over 350,000 concurrent players on Valve’s platform — an incredible number that makes it one of the most-played games on Steam, behind only the eternally popular PUBG, Dota 2, and Counter-Strike 2.

Marathon, meanwhile, hit a peak concurrent player count of 88,337 on the day of launch, a number Bungie will be hoping improves as the game heads into its first weekend.

Why did Yano mention this on social media in the first place? It was as part of an acknowledgement that a tweet from the official MegaCrit account about the launch of Marathon — viewed over half a million times — came off a little meaner than intended.

“Congratulations to the Marathon team on their launch!” MegaCrit tweeted Thursday, March 5. “Don't let small indie passion projects like this pass you by just because Slay the Spire 2 is out.”

Some thought that was throwing shade at Marathon, which is under significant pressure to deliver for Bungie following the torrid time the Sony-owned studio has faced in recent years. So, both the MegaCrit account and Yano himself issued follow-up messages.

“This seems a bit meaner than it was intended,” Yano said. “To be fair I didn't think we'd actually pass Marathon in concurrent users.”

And, in response to one user who called it “A SHADE FOR THE CENTURIES,” MegaCrit said: “it wasn’t supposed to be shade, we were being sarcastic 😭 did not know we’d blow up quite to the degree that we did…” All’s well that ends well. Bungie community manager Cozmo then replied to offer a congratulations of his own.

Slay the Spire 2 isn’t just outpacing Marathon on Steam, it’s rewriting the roguelike record books. It’s shot past Mewgenics to secure the highest ever concurrent player count on Steam for a roguelike, which itself inched ahead of Hades 2 last month.

That's an astonishing and clearly unexpected debut for this long-awaited sequel to the popular deckbuilder roguelike Slay the Spire, which returned a 9/10 review back in 2019. We said: "Slay the Spire takes some of the best parts of deckbuilding games, roguelikes, and dungeon crawlers, and mixes them into a wholly new and extremely satisfying package."

Slay the Spire 2 is currently only available on PC for its early access period, but it seems likely to get console versions once it's fully released.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Saber Interactive’s long-running development of its Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic remake is confirmed to still be underway.

In a recent interview with IGN, the chief creative officer of Saber, Tim Willits, answered our question regarding the project’s future with a short but simple: “Yes, it is still in development. That's all I can say.”

The news will be of relief to the hordes of loyal fans of the now-classic RPG originally developed by Mass Effect and Dragon Age studio, BioWare. The modern reimagining was first revealed way back in 2021, but nothing has been officially seen or heard of it in the five years since.

A report in December 2025 from Game File revealed that Aspyr was no longer leading development on the remake, but that the reins had reportedly been handed over to Mad Head Games, the team behind the upcoming Hellraiser: Revival.

That same article also claimed that plans are not only in motion for the KOTOR reimagining, but a remake of its sequel, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2, had also been discussed.

“Juliet was the codename for a project where we were going to do a full remake of KOTOR II with modern art, modern gameplay, you know, keep the story and the characters and the general — the general content of KOTOR II, but remake it for modern hardware and modern machines with updated graphics and all those kind of things,” said Douglas Reilly, Lucasfilm Games vice president. “It was something we were discussing with Aspyr.”

Whether those full plans for remakes of the Knights of the Old Republic series ever come to fruition is yet to be seen; however, it looks like development is still pressing on when it comes to Saber’s work on the original.

This all comes after the reveal of Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic at the 2025 Game Awards, a brand new single-player RPG set in a galaxy far, far away, led by former KOTOR director, Casey Hudson. Do you think we’ll be playing this new game before the Knights of the Old Republic arrives? Let us know in the comments below!

For more from our interview with Saber’s Tim Willits, you can find some new details about the upcoming John Wick game, and the news that extreme horror game Hellraiser: Revival has secured its ESRB rating.

Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.

With The Mandalorian And Grogu almost upon us, Star Wars fans are set for the first mainline film in the franchise since Episode IX, The Rise of Skywalker, came out in December 2019. It’s a long time coming, and launches into a different world… maybe even a different galaxy compared to the previous set of films. But it also launches without the weight of expectation that comes with introducing a new Star Wars trilogy — and that’s to its benefit, Lucasfilm co-CEO Dave Filoni has said.

The Mandalorian And Grogu, due out on May 22, is one of only two Star Wars movies with confirmed release dates (Ryan Gosling's Star Wars: Starfighter arrives on May 28, 2027). While there is a long list of Star Wars movies announced, there is significant doubt that many of them, if any, will actually be released.

Even the Dave Filoni New Republic team-up movie that was announced is uncertain. Outgoing Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy made no mention of the Mandalorian, Ahsoka, and Boba Fett crossover film when revealing her exit in January, though it's likely her successor, Filoni himself, will be the one to give an update on this as its fate likely rests on the performance of The Mandalorian and Grogu this year.

Either way, The Mandalorian And Grogu feels like the start of a new era of Star Wars, and that’s how Filoni himself made it sound in a recent interview with Empire. “Episode VII was a completely different entity,” he said. “I had dreams of Episode VII since I came out of Return Of The Jedi. You were like, ‘After VI comes VII! Where’s VII?’ We’re in a completely different era of Star Wars now.”

As such, The Mandalorian And Grogu is free to be, simply, “a big celebration” of its two main characters, rather than have to contend with introducing a new trilogy of Star Wars movies. Star Wars: Starfighter, from the sounds of things, will enjoy similar freedom when it comes out next year.

Related, Kathleen Kennedy also failed to mention the previously-announced standalone movie set to feature Rey Skywalker in her exit interview. The project, revealed by Kennedy with fanfare at Star Wars Celebration 2023, was planned to feature the return of Daisy Ridley as Rey Skywalker, and reveal how the character starts a new era of the Jedi Order.

Kennedy announced the project on-stage alongside Ridley and director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, who was confirmed to be helming the project. But in the years since — as with so many other Star Wars movies — little more has been said.

"We're pretty far along," Kennedy said of the slate of Star Wars films announced back in 2023. "These are things, as you can imagine, certainly looking at what Dave [Filoni]'s been doing with Ahsoka, that'll be at least six, seven years building to what it is we're going to be doing in a movie. As [for the project being made by] Sharmeen, we've been working on that for a couple years already."

Discussing the standalone Rey movie's plot in more detail, Kennedy described it as set 15 years after Rise of Skywalker. "We're post-war, post-First Order, and the Jedi are in disarray, and there's a lot of discussion around who are the Jedi, what are they doing, what's the state of the galaxy?" Kennedy teased. "[Rey is] attempting to rebuild the Jedi Order based on the books, based on what she promised Luke."

Of course, this isn't the only project expected to feature Rey in the future. Lucasfilm is also incubating a new trilogy of movies from Simon Kinberg, the director behind the widely-panned X-Men movie Dark Phoenix and 2022 spy action flop The 355.

"[Kinberg] wrote something that we read in August, and it was very good, but not there," Kennedy told Deadline. "We've pretty much upended the story, and then spent a great deal of time on the treatment, which he finished literally about four weeks ago. And it's a very detailed treatment, like 70 pages. And so he is expected to give us something in March."

Once again, Kennedy referred to Kinberg's project as a "trilogy," though it still seems far, far away.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Bungie’s Marathon is out now, which means players can finally see how its microtransactions actually work and, crucially, how much everything costs.

The $40 extraction shooter is monetized in a number of ways, including via a premium battle pass and direct microtransactions for cosmetic items, such as playable character skins. As Bungie had signalled before Marathon went live, gameplay-affecting items are not available to buy, only cosmetics.

Still, some players have responded negatively to Marathon’s monetization, criticizing the price of the skins and the digital sales tactics Bungie has in place.

Straight off the bat, on launch day, Marathon has $15 cosmetic packs (they cost 1,500 Lux, Marathon’s premium virtual currency). These packs include a runner skin, a weapon skin, a cosmetic trinket of some type, and a player banner and profile pic. Runner skins are sold separately for around $12’s worth of Lux.

This alone has irked some who believe that Marathon, as a $40 game, should not be monetized in a similar fashion to free-to-play shooters like Fortnite or Apex Legends. Others, however, are unsurprised by these cosmetic packs, and have pointed out that they’re more expensive in other premium games, such as the more expensive mainline Call of Duty games.

But what has caused more of a stink is the denominations of Lux available in the store. A runner skin costs 1,120 Lux, but of course you can’t buy 1,120 Lux exactly from the store. Instead, you have to spend $10 to get 1,100 Lux (just 20 Lux shy of what you need), and then another $5 to get 500 Lux on top, which in total dollar terms matches the same price as the $15 bundle.

This is a common tactic in video games that not only forces you to spend more money than you want to get a particular item, but leaves you with virtual currency spare that may encourage you to buy some more so you can get another item. Call of Duty does this. FIFA does this. And now Marathon does this.

“I'm tired of these Bungie scummy tactics,” one fan said. “Even if I love the game, this store and season pass in 2026 is a shame.”

“Dude I look at the shop to find that if you spend 10 you’ll get 1,100 coins or LUX but these people set every character price to 1,120, so you’ll have to spend another five dollars," said another player. "I hate this type of greed. I love the game but this is shallow.”

“Yea that’s dumb af,” said another. “And after spending $15 you’ll have 1,600 Lux so might as well get the entire bundle for 1,500. (Is what Bungie probably wants you to do) at that point why even sell the skin separately.”

Within the debate are a significant number of people who believe Marathon isn't doing anything particularly outlandish here when it comes to monetization. They point to the fact that only cosmetics are for sale and that no-one is forced to buy anything extra to compete out on the battlefield as evidence that Bungie is doing things well enough for its new shooter. Others say that anyone who played Destiny 2, Bungie's previous release, will find nothing here surprising.

And it doesn't look like Marathon's monetization has impacted the sentiment around the game at launch, either. At the time of this article's publication, Marathon had a 'very positive' user review rating on Steam.

It’s also worth noting that Marathon Reward Passes do not expire, so you can buy a previous season’s Reward Passes if you miss out. You unlock rewards in your Rewards Passes using Silk, which is earned by playing the game. You can also earn cosmetics via the Codex, with others available for purchase.

We’ve got plenty more on Marathon, including one Bungie developer’s commitment to “fontslop,” and Bungie’s words of reassurance on Marathon’s difficulty curve. Check out IGN's Marathon review so far to find out what we think.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Pokémon TCG Mega Evolution's latest expansion, Ascended Heroes, recently released its immensely popular Elite Trainer Box (see in stock here). It's been a hotly sought-after item, and there are only a few spots where you can comfortably bag one online right now.

The Pokémon Company has issued an official objection after the White House used Pokopia for a meme, pushing back against the Trump administration’s repeated use of its intellectual property on social media.

On March 5, the official White House X / Twitter account shared a “Make America Great Again” meme that looks like the recently released spinoff, Pokémon Pokopia. While unconfirmed, it appears that the meme is an AI-generated graphic in the style of Pokopia, which released on the Nintendo Switch 2 this week. The text, “Make America Great Again,” is similar to the Pokopia font. Familiar Pokémon can be seen in the background. At the time of this article's publication, the White House's tweet had been viewed 18.6 million times.

MAGA 🇺🇸⚡️ pic.twitter.com/8QRVP23zGu

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 5, 2026

The Pokémon Company issued a statement in which it stressed that it did not grant the White House permission to use its IP for social content.

“We are aware of recent social content that includes imagery associated with our brand,” a company spokesperson told The New York Times. “We were not involved in its creation or distribution, and no permission was granted for the use of our intellectual property. Our mission is to bring the world together, and that mission is not affiliated with any political viewpoint or agenda.”

In September last year, The Pokémon Company formally responded to the use of Pokémon TV hero Ash Ketchum and the series' theme tune by the Department of Homeland Security, as part of a video showing people being arrested and handcuffed by law enforcement agents.

"We are aware of a recent video posted by the Department of Homeland Security that includes imagery and language associated with our brand," The Pokémon Company International said in a statement shared with IGN at the time. "Our company was not involved in the creation or distribution of this content, and permission was not granted for the use of our intellectual property."

Many fans have suggested The Pokémon Company should defend its intellectual property by launching legal action. However, the corporation's former legal chief told IGN last year that he "wouldn't touch this."

Don McGowan, Pokémon's veteran ex-legal chief, told IGN in September that he believed any such action was highly unlikely. "I don't see them doing anything about this for a few reasons," McGowan, now principal at Extreme Grownup Services, said. "First, think of how little you see [The Pokémon Company International]'s name in the press. They are INSANELY publicity-shy and prefer to let the brand be the brand.

"Second, many of their execs in the USA are on green cards. Even if I was still at the company I wouldn't touch this, and I'm the most trigger-happy CLO [Chief Legal Officer] I've ever met. This will blow over in a couple of days and they'll be happy to let it."

As pointed out by The New York Times, Trump administration spokesperson Abigail Jackson has previously commented on their social media strategy, which shows no sign of backing off the use of entertainment company's IP.

“Through engaging posts and banger memes, we are successfully communicating the president’s extremely popular agenda,” Jackson said. “There’s a reason so many people try to copy our style — our message resonates.”

Indeed, The Pokémon Company isn’t the only gaming firm that has seen its IP used by the Trump administration in political memes. In October, Microsoft remained silent after Donald Trump released an AI image of the U.S. president as Master Chief and the Department of Homeland Security used Halo to promote ICE on social media.

Finishing this fight. pic.twitter.com/6Ezq9NUqMq

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) October 27, 2025

The Trump administration has form when it comes to using AI images to promote the President. In May last year, Trump sparked a backlash from some Catholics after posting an AI-generated image of himself as the Pope. The picture, which was shared by official White House social media accounts, was released as Catholics mourned the death of Pope Francis and prepared to choose the next pontiff.

The White House has also released AI images of Trump as Superman and as a Star Wars Jedi. And when the Department of Homeland Security used South Park to promote ICE, South Park trolled Trump in response, saying: “wait, so we ARE relevant?”

And earlier this week, the White House posted a video on social media that mixed footage from its bombing operations in Iran with Call of Duty gameplay. IGN has asked Activision for comment, but it has yet to respond.

Phot by Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.