What The Hell Happened This Week: A News Roundup (July 20–28, 2026)
Ths Roundup surprised me. I did not plan to become the guy who reads patent filings for fun, but here we are. This week gave us a console maker gagging its own employees, a hedge fund that occasionally makes video games, a board game company that thought NFTs were still a good idea in 2026, and Comic-Con doing what Comic-Con does best — making everyone lose their minds simultaneously. Buckle up, this one’s long.
Table of Contents
VIDEO GAMES: EVERYBODY’S MAD AT EVERYBODY
Sony tells its own employees to shut up about the disc thing
Sony announced on July 1 that it’s ending physical disc production for new PlayStation games starting January 2028, and the internet has not calmed down since. What actually got me wasn’t the announcement — it was the aftermath. According to former Santa Monica Studio writer Alanah Pearce, Sony handed its first-party studio employees what staff are calling the strictest social media guidelines they’ve ever seen, specifically about this topic. Her read: “They would only have done this if they knew it was going to be an enormous PR issue.” Sony knew.
Japan’s Patent Office is done being polite with Nintendo
In the ongoing Palworld saga, the Japan Patent Office rejected a Nintendo/Pokémon divisional patent application — and did it while citing a 13-year-old fan game as prior art. A patent attorney described the exchange as using language “rarely seen in standard patent practice.” The JPO also flatly told Nintendo that copyright infringement “has no bearing on determining inventive step,” which is patent-office speak for “sit down.” Nintendo has filed a petition against the rejection, so round two is coming.
Xbox keeps cutting
Microsoft’s July 6 layoffs hit Xbox especially hard — roughly 3,200 jobs, about 20% of the division, as part of 4,800 company-wide cuts. New Xbox CEO Asha Sharma called it the “most significant restructure” in Xbox history and said the business has been losing 64 cents on every dollar it puts into game studios. ZeniMax, id Software, and Blizzard all took hits, and several studios are being spun off entirely. ZeniMax, id Software, and Blizzard all took hits, and several studios are being spun off entirely.
Mark Darrah says the quiet part out loud
Ex-Dragon Age producer Mark Darrah doesn’t think we’re getting another Dragon Age, and his reasoning is the best quote of the week: “Someone once described EA to me as a hedge fund with a video game hobby that it wished it didn’t spend so much money on. And I think that remains true.” don’t even need to add a joke here. He did the work for me. This is something that I think most of us (at least all two of us here at chunkyrock) have been saying for years. The moment you let MBAs in too-tight suits start making decisions for video games, instead of creatives, you get this as the end result.
BOARD GAMES: MONEY’S WEIRD RIGHT NOW
A French distributor didn’t make it
French distributor/publisher Atalia entered compulsory liquidation on July 8 after 12 years in business, saying flatly that “so many new games are being released today that the market has become saturated. Shops no longer have the space, the time or the cash flow to stock all the games arriving each week.” That’s not one bad quarter talking — that’s a structural problem.
CMON backs out of its own NFT deal
Remember when CMON — a company with over $23 million in losses and $14+ million in undelivered crowdfunding — decided the move was to invest $2.1 million into an NFT game maker? (Yeah, we don’t either. I only added this in because who TF even considers NFTs in 2026?) They just walked it back, saying the deal’s conditions “had not been fulfilled.” No further comment necessary, but I’m making one anyway: incredible.
Magic: The Gathering just had a $545 million quarter
Meanwhile, at the other end of the hobby, Magic: The Gathering pulled in $545.3 million in Q2 — the first time it’s ever crossed $500 million in a single quarter — largely off the Marvel Super Heroes crossover set. Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks called it “the Magic flywheel firing on all cylinders,” which, sure, but it also means one 30-year-old card game is propping up the industry’s headlines this week almost by itself.
The tariff backdrop hasn’t gone anywhere
Stonemaier Games’ Jamey Stegmaier has been the loudest voice on this for over a year, and his math still checks out: a confirmed 145% tariff on China-made games, meaning a $14.50 tax on every $10 spent manufacturing. His own survey of 75 companies found them collectively facing over $13 million in tariff costs on products they’d already made. Every board game price increase you’ve grumbled about this year traces back to this.
POP CULTURE: COMIC-CON ATE THE WEEK
We have a new Black Panther
At Marvel’s Hall H panel, Ryan Coogler announced David Jonsson (Alien: Romulus, Industry) as the grown-up Toussaint/T’Challa II for Black Panther 3, dated December 15, 2028, with Coogler returning to direct. Feige said Marvel had sat on the casting for five or six months. Reaction split into the expected three camps — excited for Jonsson, disappointed a different actor didn’t get it, and a group that wanted a direct T’Challa recast instead of a legacy passing.
The Avatar Aang “ChatGPT slide” thing
A concept-art slide shown at SDCC’s Avatar panel cited ChatGPT for research on Southeast Asian facial features, and photos of it went viral fast. Visual-dev artist Kat Tsai pushed back hard on Bluesky: “Absolutely no AI whatsoever in the art/design process!” Best available read: the slide came from an outsourced art-book writeup, not the film’s actual production pipeline — but perception is doing a lot of the damage here regardless of what actually happened on the art side.
The Odyssey is having an absurd second weekend
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey pulled in another $90 million domestically in weekend two — a 30% drop, Nolan’s best-ever second-weekend hold — pushing it to $289.3 million domestic and $652 million worldwide. This is worth pointing out because a very online contingent spent months predicting the film would flop specifically over the casting of Lupita Nyong’o and Elliot Page. #SpoilerAlert …it didn’t flop.
Anyway… That’s the week. Nothing here makes me want to buy a $100 GTA 6 special edition, but at least Magic: The Gathering is thriving and my Steam backlog isn’t going anywhere. –Side note, deep dive articles will be published shortly on a few of these topics.
Elfishchunk read a Japanese patent rejection notice for fun this week and has accepted that this is who he is now. He has no further comment on the gnome hegemony’s own patent portfolio at this time.
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