As of January 15, 2025, PlayStation's Shuhei Yoshida will leave Sony but not retire from the industry entirely. Yoshida made the announcement while on the PlayStation Podcast Tuesday (a condensed transcription of the interview appears on the official PlayStation blog.) He hasn't provided a reason why he's leaving. Many know Yoshida as Sony Interactive's Head of Indies Initiative, a position he got in 2019. In other words, he's in charge of getting indie games onto PlayStation consoles by networking with indie developers and promoting the games they made.

Video game horses tend to play a fairly uncomplicated role, at least in mainstream titles. Like semi-sentient meat bicycles, they often exist as little more than a way to make the player travel faster, jump farther or occasionally defy the laws of physics. With the exception of Red Dead Redemption 2, an outlier beloved for its equine verisimilitude and breadth of riding-related activities, horses in video games are generally emotionless props, notorious for janky animations and unnatural anatomy. That's fine for most players' needs, but for those who are drawn to certain games in part because they have horses, there's a lot to be desired. Especially since the alternatives -- dedicated horse games -- haven't proven to be much better.

Leaf through the history of independent video games and the pages are drenched in horror. It was there in the 1990s shareware era of Doom and Hugo's House of Horrors. It was there too in the Flash games of the early 2000s: Exmortis, the House series, the now lost Hotel 626. And it is here now, in the modern indie age. Lone coders and small development studios have always explored dark stories in haunted houses, lonely forests and seemingly abandoned spacecraft populated by demonic entities.

After years spent pursuing a career in game development, Italian coder Luca Galante had given up. Uprooting himself from a comfortable life in Rome, he flew to England in the hope of finally making his childhood dream a reality. Yet after countless rejected job applications, Galante found himself flipping Big Macs in Thornton Heath McDonald's. Dejected, he gave up on his digital dream, leaving what he says might be "the worst McDonald's in the UK" to code slot machines for a gambling company. Now, 10 years and one bedroom-made game later, Galante is the proud owner of two Baftas.

The Epic Games Store launched just over four years ago, building an appeal for users on high-profile exclusives and tons of freebies, and appeal for developers and publishers with a more lucrative revenue split. While it's been growing in terms of both users and catalog, it's still a fraction of the size of the de facto standard for PC gaming, Steam. Today Epic is leveling the playing field for one of Steam's biggest draws, as it allows indie developers to post their own games to the store without the need for a publisher. The setup for Epic is similar to Steam: Pay $100 to submit a game, create a landing page, input some business info, and submit your game for review. Notably, the Epic Games Store is preserving the well-publicized 88/12 revenue split for indie developers (which beats out the usual 70/30 split of Steam, the Apple App Store, the Google Play Store, and most other digital storefronts).

EVERYTHING these days is becoming automatic, from self-service checkouts to self-driving cars, jobs are being taken away from real people. One job that always felt secure was acting. Conveying human emotion isn't easy for humans to do, let alone robots. However, one company, Altered AI, hopes to break through this barrier, promising to give game developers the tools to "create compelling, professional voice performances." Currently, around 20 professional voice actors have lent their work to the database, with hundreds more "common" voices fleshing out its library.

Playdate shouldn't be able to do the things it does. It's tiny enough to fit in the too-tight front pockets of my skinny jeans, it's lighter than a deck of cards and it has a 1-bit black-and-white screen. It feels like a relic of the '90s, at least until you power it on – Playdate supports smooth, densely pixelated animations, it connects to Wi-Fi and it has a library of exclusive games from top-tier indie developers, all available for free. The small crank attached to its side is the icing on the yellow cake, adding a layer of sweet innovation to every experience on the system. Playdate is my favorite handheld device since the Vita.

As many people around the world limit their time outdoors for fear of the coronavirus, one might think it's a boon time for the video game industry, which can provide a form of entertainment that isolated people so desperately need. But in reality, the outbreak could not have come at a worse time for the gaming business. Concerns over the virus, which can cause potentially deadly health complications, have led organizers to postpone a major industry event where designers often make big publication deals, potentially killing the next Fortnite in the cradle. Furthermore, it threatens to wreak havoc with the industry's supply chain just as Sony and Microsoft, two of the industry's biggest competitors, are gearing up to release their next big consoles later this year. News that the Game Developers Conference, or GDC, was being rescheduled came down late Friday.

For those who self-identify as gamers, chances are you have -- or at least know someone with -- a Nintendo Switch. The Switch was the best-selling console in 2018, thanks in no small part to Nintendo's own popular titles, like Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey. Nintendo now says Switch sales will be lower this year than what it originally expected. But it's also been following a new strategy that could help it keep the Switch cooking: going all-in on independent video games from tiny studios. Indie game developers have benefitted mightily from the age of Internet-connected consoles, which offer digital stores that make it easy for gamers to spend a few bucks to download quirky games from small teams.

Even casual video game fans know Sid Meier's name. They've seen it countless times, printed in sturdy text across every box in the Civilization series for the past 27 years, the most recent one being 2016's Sid Meier's Civilization VI. It's come to the point where most gamers can't hear "Civilization" without immediately thinking, "Sid Meier," and vice versa. "People know who Sid Meier is because his name's on the front," indie developer Ben Wander said on the busy Tulsa Pop Culture XPO show floor. He was showing off his first game as independent developer The Wandering Ben, a noir murder mystery called A Cast of Distrust.