Today’s Morning Checkpoint–Kotaku’s daily round-up of news and other stuff you might care about–is filled with some good news, like new awesome retro game music being added to the Nintendo Music app, and also some bad news, like IGN losing more staff members as parent company Ziff Davis continues to make cuts. We also have some new and intriguing data on how popular (or not popular) video game engine Unity is in 2025, and more.
Stop Killing Games Enters Its Next Stage: Waiting
For the past year, Ross Scott’s campaign against game publishers shutting down online games completely and making them unplayable has been quite active. But now, the Stop Killing Games campaign has entered a new phase which is mostly about waiting to see what happens. That’s because the campaign’s biggest focus, an EU petition asking for lawmakers to pressure publishers into keeping games playable, is no longer accepting signatures. Now, in a new “wrap-up” video for Stop Killing Games, Scott says he’s going to take a break while he waits to see what happens, but he has assured supporters that he’ll pop back up if and when he’s needed.
More layoffs at the biggest gaming site, IGN
On August 4, IGN parent company Ziff Davis laid off eight more staff members, as confirmed by the IGN Creator’s Guild Union. This follows additional layoffs at Ziff Davis and comes months after the multibillion-dollar company pushed some employees out via buyouts. Last year, three IGN staffers were laid off.
“The company has told us that the reason for this layoff stems from a Ziff Davis-mandate to cut costs despite several quarters in a row of year-over-year revenue increases, to which IGN Entertainment responded by coming for our members’ jobs,” explained the IGN Union in a message posted to social media. “This is perplexing to us, as we are told again and again that IGN Entertainment has had a tremendously successful year thus far thanks to their hard work.”
All the songs from Pilotwings games are available on Nintendo’s music app
Nintendo continues to update and expand its Nintendo Online subscriber-only music player app. On August 5, the company added the full soundtracks from the entire Pilotwings series, which includes Pilotwings, Pilotwings 64, and Pilotwings Resort, to the Nintendo Music app. As with most other songs in the app, these tracks can be extended and looped for up to an hour. Finally, you can listen to the excellent song “Flight Club” for as long as you desire while doing something else.
The Switch 2 might be getting smaller game cart sizes
Taiwanese tech company Marconix, which is the company responsible for creating the game carts used by Nintendo for the Switch 2, revealed in its latest fiscal update that it is planning to produce carts in more capacity sizes. Currently, there is only one large 64 GB option, which is handy for big games like Cyberpunk 2077, but is a very expensive option for smaller games that don’t need all that space. This has likely contributed to the high number of third-party publishers opting for game key cards on Switch 2. Hopefully, these new size options from Marconix will mean fewer publishers use the controversial game key card option in the future.
Unity is becoming a less popular engine for game devs
In 2021, around 60 percent of game devs who participated in the Game Maker’s Toolkit Game Jam were using Unity. Now, new data from the popular YouTube channel reveals that in 2025, only 41 percent of the submitted games are using Unity. Many devs seem to be moving to Godot, a free and open-source game engine that has become more and more popular following some really dumb moves by Unity.
Back in 2023, Unity announced a series of controversial runtime fees that would cost devs a lot of money if their games became popular and were installed by many users. The company eventually walked back some and then eventually all of these plans, but the whole ordeal left a sour taste in the mouths of many developers. And while this is just data from one game jam, it still seems to show that Unity might have to do a lot to win back smaller devs who don’t trust the company anymore.
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