Midpoint Musings: The Biggest Gaming News of 2026
Midpoint Musings: The Biggest Gaming News of 2026
A year’s worth of stuff, now in half the time
It’s hard to believe that 2026 is already half over. But it’s true! Time keeps happening. We can prove it by counting up some of the biggest gaming news stories of the year… with a focus on the good news, because we’re still too bummed about the bad stuff.
January:
Animal Crossing: New Horizons get a massive free upgrade
The year in games started off rough as studios downsized and big games announcements and releases were sparse. People seemed excited about the new consoles they had received over the holidays, though, and that gave them hope that exciting new things may be coming soon. On the horizon, if you will.
But there was also some fear that the things we loved about gaming might be replaced by new, more expensive releases. Almost as if they heard out fears, Nintendo announced that the six-year-old Animal Crossing: New Horizons would be receiving a boatload of free content, including villager crossovers with other Nintendo games, as well as the option to upgrade the game for Switch 2 for a mere $5. We could only hope that life in general would somehow get upgraded for all of us in the year to come.
February:
Resident Evil turns 30, Requiem becomes the fastest selling game in the series
After a few years of identity crisis and some wild highs and lows, Resident Evil celebrated its 30th birthday with Requiem, a new release that sold five million copies in five days, uniting the franchises 1st-and 3rd-person branches into a single seamless adventure. Its survival segments felt more desperate than ever, while its action set pieces pitted returning hero Leon Kennedy against more intense problems than he’d ever seen before—including zombies dropping mortar shells on him.
The success of the game signaled to the industry that classic, single-player games were bigger than ever—in no danger of being replaced by the latest A.I. F2P Gacha Blockchain Frankengame strung together from the leavings of board meeting buzzword fever dreams.
March:
Nividia floats A.I. yassified DLSS 5 graphics filters for existing games, and the world says “No Thank You”
OK, maybe not the “the world”, but by and large, the loudest voices in gaming either laughed out loud or threw up in their mouth a little (or both, messily) when they saw Nvidia’s attempt to prove A.I.’s value by showing how it could take characters like Grace Ashcroft from Resident Evil 9 and replace her humanity with thousands of dollars of digital plastic surgery.
If 2026 is a “question mark year” where we’re all wondering exactly what the future holds, it was a relief to see that, by and large, both fans and creators alike still want game art that’s made by actual artists, not by an expensive version of auto-complete that makes its best guess as to what humans want to see.
April:
Super Mario Galaxy Movie flies to new heights, takes Star Fox with it
Critics may not have loved it, but the massive success of the Super Mario Galaxy movie signaled once and for all that staying true to the source material makes for hugely successful game-to-movie adaptation. While 2023’s Super Mario Bros. Movie front-loaded itself with non-game-related shenanigans set in the real world as Mario and Luigi ran afoul of angry dogs while being chastised by their family for wearing white gloves, this new movie got it right. It jumped right into the core Mario universe, with concepts taken directly from a wide range of games, then stitched it all together to create a Frankenstein’s monster that, unlike the corporate Frankencreature derided above, was actually pretty cool.
If the Mario Galaxy movie is a living collage of Shigeru Miyamoto’s career, then the sewn-on animal snout on the side of its face is Fox McCloud, who swooped in out of nowhere to become one of the film’s central characters. Sure, his inclusion was likely driven by a marketing strategy to get him out in front of the public before his latest game shipped last week, but again, just because all of this is all driven by billion-dollar corporations trying to become trillion-dollar corporations doesn’t mean these projects are artistically bankrupt. The artists behind The Super Mario Galaxy movie brought every ounce of skill and art they had to the party, and it’s great to see them rewarded for their efforts.
May:
Switch 2 price increases announced, meaning every modern console will cost more than it did at launch
Despite winning a lawsuit against the U.S. Government for implementing illegal global tariffs last year, Nintendo still found itself lining up with Sony and Microsoft with plans to raise the price of its latest home console. In March, Sony announced a $100 price increase for the PlayStation 5, while Microsoft implemented not one but two price increases for the Xbox Series S/X through the end of 2025. With the Switch 2 set to jump from $449 to $499 on September 1st, there’s no denying that the price of gaming has entered a new era… an expensive era.
Let’s just hope that this is all an angsty Act 2 set up for a later win, like the end of The Empire Strikes Back, and that future price drops lead to the triumphant return of the $300 console.
June:
GTA 6 is really coming out this year, and everyone is feeling some kind of way about it
Another theme of this year is the return of the sleeping franchise. Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse will be the first mainline Castlevania title released since Lords of Shadow 2 in 2014. Rhythm Heaven Groove and Star Fox [Switch 2] are the first new games in their respective franchises in a decade. But none of them top Grand Theft Auto VI, which is the first all new, single-player GTA game since GTA 5 first dropped in 2013. With a reported budget of over a billion dollars and multiple changes to gaming culture and priorities in the conveying 13 years, it’s hard to imagine how any other franchise other than GTA could come out of hibernation for that long looking fresh as a rose, to the open arms of tens, if not hundreds of millions of fans.
Sure, the game is going to cost between $80 and $100, and it’s not going to be on PC for a little while, but with a confirmed release for PS5 and Xbox Series S/X on November 19th, everyone in the world of gaming has a new lightening rod to gather around. Some think the game will be an overhyped mess, others believe its unprecedented levels of realism will change the medium forever. Regardless of how it all turns out, just about everyone who gives a hoot about videogames is going to learn more about, talk about, praise, criticize, and maybe even play GTA 6 together. In less than six months! What a time to be alive.