A look back at games and game development between 10 September and 10 October 2026. Each item links to the company, organiser or store page behind it. Where we rely on a news report, we name the outlet. Future release dates are announced dates, not releases.
Tokyo Game Show planned its longest run ever and lost its final day to a typhoon. Around it, a Malaysian solo developer’s card-shop simulator reached version 1.0 and consoles, and a Chinese action game passed a big pre-launch milestone. In Europe, CD Projekt Red shipped its Witcher 3 remaster and a Danish studio found a new owner. Mexican studios ran their own Steam festival, and engine makers kept building for coding agents.
Asia
Tokyo Game Show’s 30th edition loses a day to a typhoon
TGS 2026 opened at Makuhari Messe on 17 September as the longest Tokyo Game Show yet: five days, with two business days and three public days. The organisers’ opening-day release counted 1,138 exhibitors (540 domestic, 598 international), just above last year’s record of 1,136. They came from a record 53 countries and regions, up from 47, and filled 3,999 booths, down from 4,157. The business-meeting area grew from 177 to 251 exhibitors, the indie area was steady at 292, and the AR/VR area halved to 8. The organisers expected about 300,000 visitors.
The weather intervened. Organiser CESA’s closing release of 20 September said the in-person event on 21 September, the final public day, was cancelled for the whole day as Typhoon No. 25 approached. Some official programmes and exhibitor streams went ahead online. The four days held drew 257,642 visitors, and business meetings arranged through the show’s matching system reached a record 3,673. TGS 2027 is planned for 16–20 September 2027.
Phantom Blade Zero passes 3 million wishlists
S-GAME’s action RPG Phantom Blade Zero passed 3 million wishlists across all platforms, according to a 17 September post on the game’s official X account reported by GamingBolt. GamingBolt says creative director Qiwei “Soulframe” Liang described first-week pre-orders as far above expectations. The game is scheduled for 29 October on PS5 and PC, after this period. Wishlists measure interest, not sales.
TCG Card Shop Simulator reaches 1.0 and consoles
TCG Card Shop Simulator, a store-management game from Malaysia’s OPNeon Games, left early access in mid-September. In August the developer had set 15 September as the 1.0 date, and the 1.0 update post on its Steam news page is dated 14 September. The developer wrote that the game was “going 1.0 on Steam and launching on all console platforms”. The headline addition is a playable version of the in-game card game Tetramon: players build 50-card decks, challenge customers at the shop’s play table and host tournaments.
The update adds Ascension card packs with 1,452 new cards to collect. In a separate summary of the whole journey from early access to 1.0, the developer lists collectible cards growing from 2,714 to 4,436, items to unlock and sell from 77 to 111, and furniture types from 21 to 43. Saves carry over from the early-access version. There is no multiplayer, and cross-save between consoles and Steam is not available.
The game is the work of Sia Ding Shen, who introduced themselves to 80.lv in July as “a Solo Game Developer from Malaysia”. In the same interview, the developer said the porting studio General Arcade had been brought in to handle other platforms, which freed up time for the playable card game.
Europe
The Witcher 3 Remastered launches
Announced at gamescom in August, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered launched on 29 September. It is a free upgrade for existing owners on GOG, Steam, Epic Games Store, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, and on Switch 2 for owners of the original Switch version. It is also sold on Battle.net and the Microsoft Store. The Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine expansions are included even for owners of the base game only. CD Projekt Red developed the remaster in close collaboration with the Yigsoft team. It lists path tracing on PC, a PS5 Pro mode at 60 fps with ray tracing, gyro, mouse and touch controls on Switch 2, and mod.io support for cross-platform mods on consoles.
Fireshine buys Danish Necesse studio Fair Games
Sweden’s Enad Global 7 announced on 7 October that its subsidiary Fireshine Games had acquired Fair Games ApS of Aarhus, Denmark. Fair Games makes the survival-crafting game Necesse, which has sold about 2.5 million units. The debt-free studio has eight employees and two freelancers. The upfront price is US$4.0 million, with up to US$2 million more tied to content and platform releases and a possible earn-out of 10–20% of net revenue, all paid from available cash. Fireshine chief executive Brian Foote called Necesse “a natural fit with our experience in survival-crafting games”. Founder Mads Skovgaard said the studio had been “looking for a long-term partner to secure a successful evergreen future for Necesse”. Fireshine sees room to take the game to more platforms and regions.
Latin America
Mexico’s studios take over a Steam festival
The fourth Mexican Entertainment System ran on Steam from 21 to 28 September, organised by Guadalajara studio Third World Productions. According to TierraGamer, it gathered more than 300 games from more than 200 Mexican studios and showed more than 30 exclusive trailers. Those counts come from the organiser. Featured games included Nine to Never, Luxan’s Metamorphosis, Nahualli (Xolo Studios), Murky (Mecha Studios) and Glawsome (Cometa Games).
Tools
Unity adds Codex support
A week after its Claude Code plugin, Unity released an official plugin for OpenAI’s Codex on 16 September. It starts with 31 skills for Unity 6 and later and installs with two terminal commands or one click from OpenAI’s plugin directory. A unity-cli skill lets the agent install Unity Editors, create projects and manage packages. Supporting two agent vendors in a week suggests Unity now treats coding agents as a mainstream way into the engine.
Godot 4.8 reaches feature freeze
The Godot team published 4.8 dev 7 on 29 September with 182 fixes from 80 contributors, and declared feature freeze: no new features will be added to 4.8. New additions in this snapshot include experimental project-wide symbol renaming, moving and rotating CanvasItems in the running game view, animated decals, non-allocating physics queries and AccessKit screen-reader support on iOS and Android. No beta date was given.
Also in this period
Tokyo Game Show’s SELECTED INDIE 80 awards, including a Gold award for a Taiwanese team, are covered in our separate Asia Spotlight.
GameTales uses AI to help research and prepare articles. This article was drafted with Claude Code, whose Unity plugin is mentioned above, and a human editor decides what we publish.