Nintendo's freaky lifesim and a Steamboat Willie shooter: Autofill for April 15-21, 2026

Hey, readers. It’s been a good week for video gaming, with a handful of noteworthy new releases to talk about!

I’ve been careful not to buy too many new video games, especially with such a hefty backlog to get through. But I have to admit that I caught the hype bug for Capcom’s new title Pragmata, and as I write this, I’m over halfway through that game already. We’ll talk a little more about that later in this issue!

As always, tell your friends about Autofill and don’t forget to send me any questions or curiosities about the games industry you wanna be caught up on. You can also tip me for my work on Ko-fi through the link below.

Our top two stories relate to two different CEOs in the gaming space—one who aims to begin her tenure with some goodwill, and the other who appears to be a totally unhinged dude.

Xbox Game Pass was seen as Microsoft’s attempt to build a “Netflix for games” subscription service. It was a steal at first, containing hundreds of titles for a monthly fee, but multiple changes to its pricing plans and models slowly made what was once gaming’s best deal more complicated, bloated, and expensive.

But the top tier of Xbox Game Pass, called Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, just got a price cut, which is rare in any industry these days. Ultimate subscribers only need to shell out $23 a month instead of $30 a month—that’s $276 annually, or a saving of $84 if you subscribe for an entire year.

The catch is that future installments of Call of Duty, which is published by Microsoft-owned Activision, won’t be on Game Pass Ultimate when they launch—instead, they’ll be added to the catalog “during the following holiday season,” so about a year after they release.

These changes are the result of “a lot of feedback,” and they come just a week after new Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma reportedly said that Game Pass became “too expensive for players” in an internal memo. It’s easy to see this price cut as one of several calculated moves by Sharma’s new regime to regain trust from Xbox’s fanbase.

Game Pass launched in 2017 at $10 a month, with only one tier and a little over 100 games. In 2019, Microsoft introduced Game Pass Ultimate, which also included online multiplayer access and eventually added cloud gaming, all for the price of $15 a month.

In subsequent years, prices rose and Microsoft added more tiers. By October 2025, Game Pass had over 800 games, but it was split into a $10 per month “Essential” tier, a $15 per month “Standard” tier, and a whopping $30 per month for Ultimate. As you can imagine, the response was not great.

Perhaps the new price cut makes Game Pass Ultimate a better deal, but observers are still worried about further “enshittification” of the service. Reports that Microsoft is toying with an ad-supported tier of Game Pass aren’t helping.

The Call of Duty series is its own separate beast. It’s an annual franchise, and each game consistently is at the top (or near the top) of sales charts every year. And it’s a big enough deal that it prompted Microsoft to rethink the calculus on Game Pass pricing.

While including new Call of Duty games was a boost for the service, it might not have made much sense from a business perspective for Microsoft and Activision. The move cut into game sales, with one report claiming that the corporation lost an estimated $300 million as a result of putting new Call of Duty games on Game Pass. That’s a lot of money!

Going forward, you’ll have to pay the full $70 to purchase a new Call of Duty game—but at least that’s less than the $84 you’re saving from the Game Pass Ultimate price cut.

If you haven’t heard of the video game MindsEye, you’ve been missing out on a lot of drama. I’m skipping over a lot of backstory behind the game and its studio (the horribly named “Build a Rocket Boy”), but just know that this game is a fairly generic third-person shooter that bombed with critics when it came out last summer. Also, the game’s director is former Grand Theft Auto producer Leslie Benzies, who was named in the Epstein files. Yikes.

In the lead-up to its release, Build a Rocket Boy co-CEO Mark Gerhard (who shares the role with Benzies) made unfounded claims of a “concerted effort” to “trash” the game before it was out. Such accusations continued after the game launched with a negative Metacritic score of 39, with Benzies doubling down and Gerhard insisting he had “overwhelming evidence” that “organized espionage and corporate sabotage” led to the game’s failure.

Layoffs ensued, and unsurprisingly, employees at Build a Rocket Boy laid the blame on the company’s leaders, alleging crunch and mismanagement at the studio. The Independent Workers of Great Britain union even sued Build a Rocket Boy over its treatment of employees and handling of the dismissals.

And now the union is taking additional legal action against the studio for alleged data privacy violations. Earlier this year, employees at the studio noticed that their computers were slower than usual, leading them to discover that management had installed Teramind monitoring software without their knowledge.

It’s hard to know without any concrete evidence whether or not this “sabotage” is legit, but Gerhard claimed that “a very big American company” spent over €1 million to commit “criminal activity” against the studio. According to Gerhard, this company paid an influencer agency, a handful of journalists, and internal Build a Rocket Boy employees to damage the studio.

But in what might be the world’s weirdest attempt at a flex, Gerhard announced that an upcoming mission to be added in MindsEye will feature real-life evidence of this alleged sabotage. According to Gerhard, parts of the mission will include the actual names of some of the supposed perpetrators “for our own fun.”

I’m going to editorialize a little bit here to say that that’s freaking nuts.

I haven’t played the game myself (I’d rather save the $60), but even Gerhard himself said that MindsEye had “the worst launch in history.” The game was riddled with bugs, along with possibly the worst CPR minigame in any video game.

Even without the glitches and launch issues, what you’re left with is a paper-thin story set in a lifeless game world. Streamers literally paid to play the game couldn’t keep a straight face when promoting it.

IO Interactive, the company that made Hitman and published MindsEye, ended its collaboration with Build a Rocket Boy earlier this year. And even around the game’s launch, IO flatly denied any conspiracies of sabotage.

(Every week, I’ll address a question or curiosity about gaming from readers! Submit your inquiries through this Google Form and read my explainer in a future newsletter!)

Dear reader Jess asked for a refresher for “really hyped games that were supposed to have a long lifespan and what happened to them,” and not just games that “immediately died like Highguard.”

First off, let’s catch everyone up on some of the names and terminology from that last paragraph!

A live service game, or “games as a service” (which has the unfortunate abbreviation of “GaaS”), basically refers to a game built on continuing monetization, bringing in and retaining players by offering new content over time.

You can track this type of game back to MMOs like World of Warcraft, but modern live service games are in the vein of Fortnite, which popularized many live service mainstays, such as battle passes, a free-to-play model, and a store with rotating items.

Naturally, the success of games like Fortnite led to a land grab by big publishers and studios, with many greenlighting and releasing games that would theoretically be cash cows indefinitely. That’s how you get some successes like EA’s Apex Legends and infamous bombs like PlayStation’s Concord, which shut down just a couple of weeks after its August 2024 release.

Highguard is one of the more recent and prolific live service failures—it launched in January after its reveal trailer generated skepticism and shut down in March after low player counts and middling reviews. Despite the pedigree behind the game (coming from original developers of Apex Legends), it failed to build a playerbase for various reasons.

There’s a growing list of games suffering the same fate as Concord and Highguard—personally, I grieve the loss of Knockout City and XDefiant. And with even Fortnite undergoing financial troubles, the idea of a “forever game” is now looking like a myth, perhaps demonstrating that the financial model isn’t sustainable.

Most of the popular live service games are still going relatively strong—I’m thinking of Destiny 2, Apex Legends, Rainbow Six Siege, Grand Theft Auto Online, Warframe, No Man’s Sky, Valorant, Sea of Thieves, and Genshin Impact, just to name a few. Of course, every fanbase is hard to please, and mismanagement is inevitable, so most or all of these titles probably have their own problems to deal with.

But some attempts like Square Enix’s Foamstars barely made a splash and ended update support, while others like The Finals and FragPunk are still slowly chugging along despite relatively lower player counts. Meanwhile, people are oddly obsessed with player counts for the recently released Marathon, because they’re either dreading or actively rooting for its demise. We’ll see how much longer game studios can sustain these “forever games,” but as I wrote in the past, “forever” is running out.

With reports that an Ocarina of Time remake is coming this holiday, I decided to revisit the 3DS remake of the original. I had started a save file over a decade ago and got maybe halfway through it (do you see an ongoing theme with this “On Deck” segment?), so I thought it was finally time to roll credits on this classic.

Having played subsequent Zelda games, it was easy to track the lineage from this to what came after, but Ocarina surprisingly held up well. The dungeons were fun head-scratchers (even the infamous Water Temple!), and I felt content with the experience overall after defeating Ganon.

The big problem for me was Navi. You know, that little fairy that constantly interrupts you to shout, “Hey, listen!” As someone annoyed by overdone tutorialization in modern games, the trend that began with Navi is one I wish had fizzled out. You know all those times in games like God of War where characters blurt out puzzle solutions? I blame stuff like that on Navi. What makes Navi more infuriating is that when you actually need a hint or some help, she’s utterly useless.

I remain curious and cautious about what an Ocarina of Time remake in 2026 would look and play like, but I have one item at the top of my list of stuff I hope gets fixed.

Thanks for sticking with Autofill for your gaming news!

Keep on gamin’,
Chris Compendio