Today’s Gaming News Roundup
The Switch 2 has received a ton of coverage in the last few months, but how did things begin for this console? We’ve got some juicy insights into Nintendo drama and other exciting gaming news from yesterday.
Nintendo began working on Switch 2 “shortly after the release” of Switch 1, new Genki lawsuit papers reveal
Court papers filed in California, USA, show Nintendo is formally suing accessories manufacturer Genki for infringing its trademark, as well as alleging unfair competition and false advertising. Nintendo lawyers reportedly approacheded Genki on the CES trade show floor in January after videos of its dummy Switch 2 console went viral before the system was formally revealed by Nintendo on 2nd April. Now, Nintendo has filed its claim against Genki, accusing the company of “capitalising” on demand for Switch 2 news and giving “contradictory and inconsistent” statements.
“Beginning at least as early as December 2024, [Genki] embarked upon a strategic campaign intended to capitalise on the public interest surrounding Nintendo’s next-generation console,” court papers said, “In January 2025, [Genki] began advertising that it gained unauthorised access to Nintendo’s upcoming Nintendo Switch 2 console, which had not yet been released or even revealed publicly by Nintendo. Nintendo said that “ensuring the compatibility of Defendant’s accessories would not be possible unless and until Defendant has console” and insists it neither provided nor authorized a Switch 2 to the company. Therefore, Nintendo alleges Genki either misled consumers by pretending to have a “genuine console” when it didn’t, or “unlawfully or illicitly obtained an authentic Nintendo Switch 2, or proprietary technical information about 2, prior to the console’s release to the public”.
Interestingly, the court papers also revealed that Nintendo wasted no time designing the Switch successor, saying: “Shortly after the release of the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo began planning its successor console, with formal hardware development beginning around 2019.”
The Sunday Papers
If you want to understand what made Polygon a great website, you could do worse than read Nicole Carpenter’s 2023 piece on “the untold history of Barbie Fashion Designer, the first mass-market ‘game for girls'”: Mattel sold more than 1 million copies Designer by 1998, a couple years after its initial release, according to Billboard numbers from 1998. This has been particularly prevalent around the reveal of the Nintendo Switch 2 and Bungie’s Marathon.
Read more at Rock Paper Shotgun
Bungie’s attempt to dismiss the Destiny 2 copyright case using YouTube videos describing ‘vaulted’ elements of the game has been shut down by a judge who is not going to sit through a 10-hour lore explainer
In October 2024, science-fiction writer Matthew Kelsey Martineau accused Bungie of lifting ideas for its first Destiny 2 campaign from a story published on his blog under the pseudonym Caspar Cole. While some of the ideas in question are fairly generic sci-fi elements, like consciousness transfer and the use of emergency failsafes to prevent disasters, both storylines involve groups called the “Red Legion” who use flamethrowers and trained hounds of war.
It’s entirely possible that’s a coincidence, but Bungie is struggling to prove it since all the relevant parts of Destiny 2 are now unplayable and tucked away in the ‘vault’. In the case of Destiny 2, that began when the Beyond Light expansion launched and the original Red War campaign, as well as its two follow-ups, were put in the ‘Destiny 2 Content Vault’. – YouTube Watch On While Bungie’s always maintained that old Destiny 2 material is just sitting in the vault for now, when the lawsuit was filed it suddenly turned out that material couldn’t be restored.
The videos in question included, as Exhibit B, a 10-hour lore video put together by YouTuber MynameisByf. Exhibit C is a cutscene compilation, again a fan, that’s a mere two hours and 40 minutes long.
Fallout 1 and 2’s source code isn’t lost after all, thanks to one hero programmer: ‘I made it a quest to snapshot everything’
Rebecca Heineman, one of Interplay’s founders, kept the receipts. When she left Interplay she was told to delete her copies of early builds and even her notes from development meetings, and apparently Interplay has since lost not only the source code but also the original Fallout artwork and the clay models that were scanned to make the 3D talking heads some of its NPCs are blessed with. Fortunately, it turns out Interplay cofounder and programmer Rebecca Heineman kept copies of Fallout 1 and 2, as she told VideoGamer.
In 1993, Interplay published a CD collecting one game it published in each of the previous 10 years, including Battle Chess, Bard’s Tale, and The Lord of the Rings. As she explained, “I asked for the source and was given a blank stare. “When I left Interplay in 1995, I had copies of every game we did.”. Heineman previously made the 3DO version of Doom freely available on Github.
2025 Upcoming Games Release Schedule
Keeping track of all your anticipated games is a futile task without a bit of help, so GameSpot has broken down all the games planned for release in 2025. 2025 is looking to be a very interesting year for video games, as the current-gen PlayStation and Xbox systems are well into their lifespans while Nintendo is releasing the Nintendo Switch’s successor, the Switch 2. This includes games that have concrete dates, as well as those given a 2025 release window–for the latter, you’ll find them grouped at the end.
The Best Deals Today: Monster Hunter Wilds, 11th Gen iPad, Xbox Series X, and More
Discover the sale for May 3 below: Monster Hunter Wilds for $54.99 – Standard Edition 0 $69.99 54.99 at Woot is still one of the biggest games of 2025, and you can save $15 off the PS5 version at Woot. In their 8/10 review, they wrote, “Monster Hunter Wilds continues to smooth off the rougher corners of the series in smart ways, making for some extremely fun fights but also lacking any real challenge.”
- Visions of Mana for $34.99 – Amazon Exclusive Edition (XSX). Amazon released at the end of August, and it’s available on sale for the first time this weekend.
- Xbox Series X for $479.99 1TB SSD Console. Amazon Xbox announced this week that the will increase the price by $100 in the United States. This puts the almost five-year-old console at $599.99, but you can still score it under its previous MSRP at Amazon right now.
How to Stream Max Movies and Shows in 4K If You Aren’t Already
It seems like there’s no shortage of compelling content to stream in 4K these days, and on Max, you’re spoiled for choice. If that’s you, read on, as our guide will explain the ins and outs of how to stream Max movies and shows in 4K – if you aren’t doing so already.
When it comes to picking a subscription plan for Max, there are three options available: Basic with Ads, Standard, and Premium. As with most streaming platforms (like Netflix), the only plan that allows for 4K streaming is the most expensive Premium plan. However, while there are two bundle options – With Ads and No Ads – neither plan includes the 4K Premium Plan features at this time.
This means you won’t have access to 4K streaming if you choose the multi-platform bundle. Thanks to the popularity of these shows and their avid fan bases, many of these titles have been released physically as 4K Blu-ray box sets.
Switch 2’s built-in storage can only fit four AAA games
Nintendo recently started taking s for Switch 2 games through its online store, coinciding with the opening of Switch 2 consoles. Out of habit, I immediately scrolled to the “Game file size” section on each page to see how much storage each game will require. He’s a product expert who began writing about tech and gaming in 2013 and migrated from The Verge in 2023. Some Switch 2 game file sizes are bigger than I expected, closer in size to Windows PC counterparts than original Switch ports were.
This makes sense given that Nintendo’s upcoming console is powerful enough to run games at 1080p and beyond at fast frame rates. And yet, it’ll only take a handful of games to completely fill up your Switch 2’s built-in 256 GB storage.
Mario Kart World is 23.4 GB, while Donkey Kong Bananza is, somehow, just 10 GB.
Fortnite Star Wars Battle Pass: All Skins And Other Rewards
Fortnite’s first-ever Star Wars season has now begun, and with it we’ve got a new battle pass full of Star Wars skins and cosmetics. It’s not really a full battle pass, however, as this season lasts only five weeks–accordingly, the pass is shorter, similar to the passes from the original Fortnite OG season and Chapter 2 Remix. So we’ve got 50 tiers of rewards in the main pass (including 1000 V-Bucks), 10 tiers of bonus rewards, and, unlike those previous two short seasons, there’s also a bonus skin, with its own set of cosmetics.
The pass will run you 1000 V-Bucks to buy, and it’s included with a subscription to Fortnite Crew. The two other skins on the pass are mashups–one is Evie from the Chapter 3 Season 2 battle pass reimagined as both a Jedi and Sith apprentice, and the other is a new mascot skin called Wookiee Team Leader. There’s still plenty that’s still unrevealed, however.
To take a look at everything that’s included with Fortnite’s new Star Wars battle pass while you’re stuck at work or are waiting for your game to update, read on. The main highlights are, without a doubt, the three Star Wars characters on the battle pass: Poe Dameron and Emperor Palpatine in the main part of the pass, and the bonus skin General Grievous.
How Much Would It Cost to Buy Avengers Tower? We Asked a NYC Real Estate Specialist
Avengers Tower – now called The Watchtower, thanks to new owner Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) – figures prominently in Thunderbolts, the new Marvel movie. While this does tie up a plot point that’s been dangling since Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) moved the Avengers out of the HQ in 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, it also raises a bunch of questions. Despite being home to two major battles next to Manhattan’s Grand Central Station (those would be in the first Avengers movie and Thunderbolts), the MCU building has replaced another, real-life landmark: 200 Park Avenue South, also known as the MetLife Building.
In the comics, the Tower is 93 stories tall, and as seen in the movies, it’s packed with bells and whistles like a helipad that allows both Iron Man and a Quinjet to take off. Michael T. Cohen, a Principal with Williams Equities, which owns and invests in several million square feet of NYC real estate, has over 40 years in the real estate business – and more importantly, has been a fan of Marvel Comics and movies for years. He compared Valentina’s purchase to the offering of 590 Madison Avenue, a high-rise office building 15 blocks uptown from “Avengers Tower” that recently had an asking price of $1.1 billion.
And multiple 50s and 60s (streets) – 10 to 20 blocks North of Grand Central – are getting converted into apartments, versus the towering office buildings that have dominated the area for decades. The rooftop helipad, which was banned in NYC in 1977.
What’s Your Take?
That’s all for today’s gaming news roundup! Do you think Genki deserves a bigger penalty for their actions? Will you be checking out the new Fortnite Star Wars content? Let us know in the comments below, and don’t forget to share this article with your fellow gamers!
