I don’t envy those with the impossible task of migrating Call of Duty‘s featureless operator bravado to the big screen. Arc Raiders is falling off but still dominating. And the video game shovelware spam problem is getting out of control. It’s the latest edition of Morning Checkpoint for April 16, 2026.
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is out today and the clips have begun. JRPG super fans will even be able to use the Switch social sim to recreate their own dinner party of Final Fantasy developer legends.
Arc Raiders drops 80 percent of its concurrent player peak on Steam
ARC Raiders has collapsed. Game is dead now. The developers ruined the game. They don’t know wtf they’re doing. pic.twitter.com/3TqllEVPdG
— ExoGhost (@ExoGhost) April 12, 2026
Is it joever for the surprise extraction shooter hit of 2025? Not by a long shot. But after weeks of Marathon Steam Chart pocket watching, it was only a matter of time before the pundits turned their gaze upon the market leader’s recent decline from 466,000 in January to 90,000 today.
Forbes‘ Paul Tassi has listed a handful of possible reasons for the softening spirit among Arc Raiders‘ scavengers. They include a lackluster season, ongoing cheating issues, negative vibes among streamers, and a more fickle audience around the game’s PVE-centric multiplayer focus. So far at least, the game seems to be following a similar trend to Helldivers 2, which sports an ongoing live-service success arc that anyone would be happy to mimic.
We know basically nothing about the Call of Duty movie other than when it’s coming out
That date is June 30, 2028, Paramount announced on Thursday at CinemaCon. “We want to make sure that the authenticity of it is captured on a human level so that it feels really real and infuse that with epic scope,” Activision president Rob Kostich said, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Yellowstone co-creator Taylor Sheridan will write the script with Peter Berg of Battleship and Deepwater Horizon fame directing. The movie was reportedly eyeing Steven Spielberg to lead production at one point but he wanted too much creative control. What it means for a movie to be “authentic” to Call of Duty‘s annual cyclone of remixed military set pieces remains anybody’s guess.
A Congressman calls on the FTC to halt Saudi Arabia’s buyout of EA
Florida Democrat Maxwell Frost shared his concerns on a recent livestream with Zefrine and lilsimsie (via TheGamer). “I’m very concerned about what’s going on in the gaming industry,” he said. “Especially ’cause Saudi Arabia is essentially trying to acquire every part of gaming you can think of.”
He continued, “It’s gonna put us in a really tough position in terms of national security, in terms of censorship in what that government believes, and in terms of the workers who create the games as well. So, I really think the FTC needs to step in here. They can sue to stop the merger; the Department of Justice can sue to stop the merger as well. There are so many reasons why they need to do this.”
Minecraft lookalike Hytale takes aim at Switch shovelware rip-off Hytale: Sandbox RPG
Yeah, it’s being handled by the legal team.
— Simon (@Simon_Hypixel) April 13, 2026
The voxel crafting game Hytale is currently only available in Early Access on Steam, but spam copycats are already popping up elsewhere (via Automaton). Fans noticed one particularly gratuitous rip-off on the Switch eShop. “It’s being handled by our legal team,” co-director Simon Collins-Laflamme wrote on X. Sony has started cracking down on viral slop grabs on PSN by purging hundreds of junk listings.
A Pokémon clone of a Pokémon clone leaves Steam
Pickmos is a creature collector survival game that apes Palworld and Pokémon. It’s such a brazen knockoff that it’s hard to tell if the game’s existence is actually just a big piece of IP theft performance art. It was announced last month as Pickmon before changing its name to Pickmos. Now it’s yeeting itself off Valve’s storefront.
“We’ve heard your feedback regarding the removal of our Steam store page and want to clear things up,” publisher Networkgo told players. “Networkgo has officially intervened in the development of Pickmos. We will be supervising the PocketGame team from a player’s perspective to ensure the game keeps getting better.”
The famous game jam series that spawned Celeste will wind down
Ludum Dare has scheduled its final game jam for October 2028, cofounder Mike Kasprzak announced today (via Game Developer). “Those of us that have been around since the beginning know that April is Ludum Dare month,” he wrote. “It’s the one thing I will take full responsibility for: convincing everyone involved that if it’s April, we need to run a Ludum Dare.”
He continued, “So with that, I do intend to run an encore event in April of 2029. That will be the end-end though. Do note this isn’t a ‘scheduled’ Ludum Dare event, even though I am telling you it’s going to happen. October 2028 will be Ludum Dare’s goodbye celebration event. After that, Ludum Dare will return ‘as needed.’”
