Game Control: ‘Horizon Steel Frontier’ Announced; ‘Vampire Survivors’ VR Accessible
nintendo
Console: Tech in Asia reported that Nintendo raised its forecast for their Switch 2 console sales by March 2026, from 15 million to 19 million units. This number isn’t too far from the console’s first seven weeks performance back in June 2025, with sales surpassing six million units. According to Forbes, the company has now surpassed 10 million units as of November 2025. Each unit costs $450 despite steep pricing while audiences seem very receptive to the new hardware. Nintendo raised 16% of its full-year income forecast to a total of ¥370 billion ($3.4 billion). Despite attempts to diversify, maintaining this growth might be difficult, especially considering growing tensions in the US-China trade relationship. The Kyoto-based tech giant has pinned the console’s success on the most recent instalments from their “Donkey Kong” and “Mario Kart” franchises.
Mobile: Korean publisher and developer NCSoft (Guild Wars 2) and Dutch developer Guerilla Games (2017’s Horizon: Zero Dawn and 2022’s Horizon: Forbidden West) collaborates to launch a new game in the Horizon universe, named Horizon: Steel Frontiers. Guerilla Games studio and art director Jan-Bart Van Beek announced that, unlike its sister games, Steel Frontiers is an MMORPG built for mobile, with the later option of a PC port. The game will have massive servers, like Blizzard Studios’ World of Warcraft, to host thousands of players simultaneously. The game is inspired by New Mexico and Arizona, just as Forbidden West, for example, was set in Nevada and California, and the main playable region is called the Deadlands. Both Van Beek and Steel Frontiers executive producer Sung-Gu Lee emphasized player character customization, exploration and synergy. Players can fight alongside each other, or against each other, amidst “the thrill of taking down colossal machines,” in an MMORPG experience fit for the phone. Though different, it is a refreshing pass of (Zero Dawn and Forbidden West’s) Aloy’s single-player adventures.
Maliyo Games, a leading mobile game developer in Nigeria, reveals in its Nigeria Gaming & Esports Report 2025 that the mobile gaming market has taken over the country. In the shift from casual play to deeply connected gaming and esports communities, Nigeria now hosts over 46 million active players, with 90% of them being mobile players. As Maliyo Games founder Hugo Obi points out, Nigeria’s rise to power in the gaming (and esports) scene is a direct reflection of its creative growth as well as focus on community-building in these spaces. As a result, annual revenue projections for this market have reached $300 million.
PC: The co-op climbing “indie darling” PEAK released a new region update on Nov. 5, right as the game got nominated for three Golden Joystick Awards: “Ultimate Game of the Year,” “Best Indie Game Self-Published” and “Best Multiplayer Game.” American-based Aggro Crab and Swedish-founded Landfall Games, the two studios behind the game, were also jointly nominated for “Best Studio of the Year” under the joint name “Landcrab.” The game hit record-breaking numbers in its first week of release, where it surpassed two million copies sold back in June. The point of the game is to safely, alongside friends, traverse each region all the way to the peak, with each region posing unique challenges. The new region, called “The Roots,” is a host to all sorts of new climbing terrain, strange and poisonous foods and creepy crawlies. The game offers a bug-phobia mode accordingly for this reason. With its consistent update schedule, the game is projected to maintain its popularity for the rest of 2025.
Similarly, AdHoc Studios’ debut episodic game “Dispatch” has sold over 1 million copies in its first week of release. The game is created by former Telltale Studios writers (The Walking Dead Series, Wolf Among Us) who were among the first who really popularized the episodic choice-based game format. It stars American actor Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad) in the role of former hero and “dispatcher” Robert Robertson, who is immersed in accommodating a team of former villains into hero work. The game has gained critical acclaim for its vocal performances (from industry legends Laura Bailey and Matthew Mercer to contemporary YouTubers like MoistCritikal or JackSepticEye) as well as its soundtrack. One of its highest performing tracks is sung by rapper Blvck Bunnie (one half of the duo ‘THOT SQUAD’) who also voices the character Prism in the game. The game is not only diverse in terms of character designs, but it also diversifies the way choices should be treated by players. Each choice leads to a consequence, and the characters remember the player’s choices. The game released its “episodes” in pairs every week or two weeks. With its final episodes now in-bound, the creators of the game stated in an interview that the game had hit a target meant for three years, in three months. There are already talks about giving the game a “season 2,” and the voice actors themselves seem excited about it.
Virtual Reality: The popular roguelike Vampire Survivors can now finally be played on Virtual Reality, but with very little changes to the original gameplay. This would mean that unlike the usual first-person perspective that VR games have, the VR version of Vampire Survivors still features a small sprite that the player has to navigate. Though there is a lot of cheer around the Vampire Survivors’ IP being more accessible to other audiences, it isn’t as accessible as it looks, as the headsets on which it can be played are incredibly limited. According to Destructoid, the game is only available on MetaQuest 3 and 3s, despite having “very little graphical intensity,” due to its visual direction. Audiences are hoping that if the game takes off, it will not only spread to other VR platforms but also cause other games of its kind to be adapted.
