The billion-dollar action film series John Wick is being turned into a video game, featuring the likeness and voice of star Keanu Reeves. Untitled John Wick Game, as it is currently known, will be made by Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 developer Saber Interactive and include input from film franchise director Chad Stahelsk. A trailer for the game, which is expected to be a prequel to the series, was unveiled at PlayStation's State of Play showcase on Thursday. The Sony event also revealed several remakes of major game franchises, including the God of War trilogy, as well as a 30th anniversary edition of platformer Rayman. The John Wick film franchise, which has earned more than $1bn (£735m) worldwide, follows the story of the retired assassin played by Keanu Reeves on a path of bloody vengeance.

A new report shows that only 7 percent of new-car buyers in the US completed their purchase online, despite a major push by automakers, Amazon, and others to move past the dealership. In the US, cars follow only housing as the most expensive purchase consumers make. So it makes a lot of sense that, according to recent buyer surveys, very few of them want an Amazon-style, one-click approach to getting a new set of wheels. "People want to see, feel, and touch the car," says Erin Lomax, the vice president of consumer marketing at Cox Automotive, a research firm that also makes digital auto sales products that allow dealers to initiate transactions online. Not to mention test-driving the expensive thing they'll probably use every day.

The Avatar Game Is So Good, They Don't Need to Make the Movies Anymore See the new movie if you'd like. But if you really want to experience the big blue world of Pandora, the video game is where it's at. The Avatar video game is better than the movies. I say this as someone who has dumbly adored James Cameron's Avatar movies for a long time. The original 2009 film was my first ever midnight premiere, which I attended along with a friend who sat in the theater shirtless with his entire body painted blue.

According to a report from Insider Gaming, it could release in 2028 on all platforms. If reawakened your appetite for the iconic sci-fi franchise, the good news is that a promising video game could be on the way. According to an report, a new game for the Alien franchise is back in development. The report's sources mentioned that the single-player game will be set in a decaying space station as an arcade survival horror that can be compared to Shadow of [the] Tomb Raider with Xenomorphs. It's not the first time we heard about this Alien game, which was first reported on in 2022 under the codename Marathon.

Gaming may be turning players into conspiracy theorists, but so is everything else. For nearly 20 years, the video games have presented themselves as sprawling works of historical fiction. They cast players as noble assassins during big inflection points in history--the French Revolution, Ptolemaic Egypt, the end of Japan's Sengoku era--and give them freedom to romp around stunning re-creations of these eras, interacting with historical figures along the way. You can do secret missions for Cleopatra, you can get Socrates out of a jam after he pisses a mob off, that sort of thing. They're extremely popular to the point of being taken for granted, the way a ubiquitous CBS procedural might be.

A new video game sparked fury and accusations of wokeness in entertainment. But we've played this game before--and it's boring. Back in the summer of 2020, during the first year of COVID lockdowns, two first-party PlayStation games were released back-to-back, just a month apart: and . Upon release, was pretty beloved by a specific right-wing culture-war gamer crowd, who placed it on a pedestal specifically as a way to directly attack . While is far from perfect (for example, Neil Druckmann, the game's creator and co-director, took inspiration from the Israel-Palestine conflict that was criticized for both-sidesism), but the game's sin on release for many on the political right was that it took a series whose lead was previously a man and continued its story with one lead who was a lesbian and another whose appearance was deemed too masculine for these players to be attracted to her.

The new owners could erase that legacy. The legend goes like this: In 1999, a programmer named Patrick Barrett joined the video game studio Maxis to help develop the video game that would become . Working from an out-of-date design handbook, he coded the game to allow for same-sex relationships--even though the studio initially decided to include queer relationships for fear of backlash. The game was demoed to press with a wedding scene at E3 1999, and during the demo two female Sims kissed. Suddenly the game was the talk of the event, and any attempt to walk queer content back would be impossible to do quietly.

After fifty years of books, games and movies, what more could the Aliens franchise deliver? The description "genre-defying" gets thrown around a lot these days - it is a convenient sticking plaster for any film or series that hasn't quite figured out what it wants to be. That said, it is an apt term for the Alien franchise. Ridley Scott's 1979 movie Alien, in which Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is part of a crew trapped on a spaceship with a salivating, scorpion-like "xenomorph", had such blood-curdling visuals that it made an indelible impact on both science fiction and horror films. But while the deadly parasite and its psychosexual torment were ever present, subsequent instalments tried their hand at being everything from a blockbuster to a prison flick to a philosophical drama.

In early August, just days before a major Black Ops 7 preview event in Los Angeles, former Blizzard president and Microsoft executive Mike Ybarra called the Call of Duty franchise "lazy". Posting on X, the veteran exec wrote that EA's upcoming Battlefield 6 would "boot stomp" CoD this year and force the team to make "better FPS games". And with Splitgate 2 head Ian Proulx mocking Call of Duty in his Summer Game Fest presentation just two months ago, it seems the blockbuster series has become the butt of an industry joke about endless franchises. It's not the only flak the 20-year-old brand has drawn. Though it sells millions of copies with each new release (Black Ops 6 was the bestselling game of 2024), accusations of predatory monetisation, pay-to-win skins, swarms of in-game bugs, and the recent use of AI to create in-game, paid-for content have understandably irked many players.

Two summers ago, the Santa Monica-based company behind the popular video game "Call of Duty" sent a letter to a 24-year-old man in Antioch, Tenn., who went by the online handle "Lerggy." Known in real life as Ryan Rothholz, court filings say, he is the creator of "Lergware," hacking software that enabled Call of Duty players to cheat by kicking opponents offline. A lawsuit filed in May against Rothholz and others allegedly involved in the hacking scheme is the latest salvo in years-long campaign by Activision-Blizzard and other companies to rid their games of cheating. The war is being waged in the Central District of California civil courts, but the defendants are scattered across the country and as far away as Australia. An immersive "first-person shooter" game, Call of Duty takes players into simulated, realistic military combat.