Want to catch up on gaming news? You’re in the right spot! This is Stella’s page dedicated to bringing you gaming news in digestible chunks and exclusive behind the scenes of Snap Aim Podcast, Elevation Station, and video game reviews.
Maverick Games found its independence after Amazon Game Studios backed out of its publishing deal with the developer. Maverick seems to be doing just fine on their own and is going to be showcasing their new open-world, narrative driven, racing game sometime this year. Here's the full breakdown on what happened with Amazon and the history of where Maverick Games came from and what they aim to achieve.
Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming, and Sarah Bond, President of Xbox, have both resigned today February 20th, and new leadership is now in place. Asha Sharma, former President of Microsoft's CoreAI Products, is now the head of Xbox. Stella dives into all the implications this leadership change brings and what the future of Xbox may be.
Ashes of Creation was an upcoming MMORPG set to "rebirth" the genre created by the San Diego based developer, Intrepid Studios. Unfortunately, a few days after the official public early access dropped, Steam removed Ashes of Creation from the store and Intrepid Studios seems to have been dismantled completely. Here's the full breakdown on what we know so far.
Arc Raiders is a PvPvE third-person extraction shooter that’s been developed and published by Embark Studios that released October 30 2025. The game has come under scrutiny after Eurogamer released their review of Arc Raiders and criticized the use of AI voice actors. Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, responded to this review with AI positive sentiments and avoiding any conversations about the ethical impact of AI usage. Here's the full breakdown on what you need to know.
Stella went to Halo Studios in Seattle to talk to Executive Producer Damon Conn and Creative Director Max Szlagor about why they're remaking Halo: Combat Evolved for the 25th anniversary of Halo and what they hope to achieve with bringing this franchise to PlayStation fans. Halo: Campaign Evolved is a complete remake of Halo: Combat Evolved in Unreal Engine 5 and is set to release sometime next year in 2026.
If you’re not aware or caught up on the news of what the Saudi Arabian government is doing expanding so quickly and aggressively into the games and entertainment space, here’s a full comprehensive breakdown of why Saudi Arabia is aggressively pushing its way into gaming and why the country's public investment fund was used to buyout Electronic Arts;
In this episode of Snap Aim, Stella gave the Grounded 2 devs Marcus Morgan and Chris Parker a weird meme request, an actual gameplay addition request, and just asked them a bunch of questions on the creation process for Grounded 2 and what the future roadmap looks like for early access.
We all have a ton of games we're trying to play and finish in our backlog in this big year of 2025 but the new releases keep on coming. Grounded 2 just released July 29th and if you love survival crafting games, you might be tempted to drop your backlog games to hop on Grounded 2. Here are Stella’s thoughts on whether or not you should play Grounded 2 right now.
This episode was recorded July 4th, awful timing but it wasn't really feeling like a particularly celebratory day. Stella covers the Xbox layoffs, the Microsoft AI investment, and the game studios affected by the layoffs.
On June 24th, the new Phasmophobia update Chronicle was released which introduced a massive overhaul on how hunters can gather evidence, what gets hunters bonus points as evidence, a new CCTV system, and more challenges. Chronicle is the biggest update to come from Phasmophobia since it launched five years ago and the team at Kinetic Games isn't slowing down at all. Stella got to chat with Daniel Knight, CEO/Lead Developer (the solo creator of Phasmophobia), and Ben Lavender, their technical director on what we can expect from the 5 year anniversary update and how the journey has been so far with building Phasmophobia's community and playerbase.
Stella spoke with IO Interactive's Rasmus Poulsen, the Franchise Art Director, on their new IP with 007 and what it took to bring James Bond back to video games. 007 First Light will follow a young James Bond, who's just starting out in his British Secret Service career. Stella got to ask Poulsen what the process was like in writing a whole backstory to young Bond and how they stayed true to Bond's personality/character.
Fallout 76 just released their latest update Gone Fission and Stella got to talk to the Fallout 76 developers on the last five years of creating the game, maintaining fresh updates, and what we the players might expect in the upcoming 5 year anniversary update!
In this episode, Stella conducted a deep dive into Bungie's history with stolen artwork and writings. Last week, Bungie confirmed that Marathon, their latest extraction shooter title, had been built off stolen artwork. Prior to this transgression, Bungie had stolen work from other artists and community members three other times (that the public knows of). Here's the deep dive on Bungie's history with Plagiarism.
In this episode, Stella covers the FBC: Firebreak preview impressions rolling in and how this Control spin-off might play. Along with Firebreak, Stella discusses Katsuhiro Harada wanting to bring Waffle House as a level to Tekken and other small gaming news of the week!
In this episode, I talk about the Switch 2 pricing and whether or not it feels anti-consumer, read some odd headlines, get distracted by ADHD discussions, and talk about some real life news/drama.
Stella covers all the news this week from the GTA 6 delay, Xbox handheld leaks, Epic Games winning their lawsuit over Apple, and more!
Stella sat down with Ingwar Dovgoteles — Head of Cinematics / Cutscenes Director / Creative Director, Mykyta Balnov — Lead Compliance Artist, and Mykyta Horodyvskyi — Community and Social Media Manager from GSC Game World to chat about the current state of STALKER 2, the roadmap ahead, behind the scenes insight on development, and how they’ve persevered through war times while creating this long awaited game.
The Game Developers Conference (GDC) was last week and Stella got to be one of the 30,000+ attendees. While at GDC, Stella was super busy and signed up for a ton of meetings and hands-on demo time. There’s over 400 exhibitors at GDC so getting through the show floor takes the full week. However, there were some really great standouts that Stella wanted to bring some light to so these are the best demos Stella played at GDC.
