MMO Business Roundup: IGN layoffs, PlayStation boycott bellyflops, and AI

Welcome back to yet another roundup of MMO and MMO-adjacent industry news! While this bundle of headlines is about the wider games industry, our favorite genres are part of that too, so this reporting is important to provide. With that clarified, let’s get to it.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang thinks AI guardrails are a hoax, effectively praising similar statements made by U.S. President Donald Trump and his resolution to not stop AI growth. This is in spite of recent cybersecurity concerns stemming from OpenAI hacking a startup company’s network and Anthropic’s CEO arguing in favor of the industry slowing down to create better security. “There’s a lot of complexity and the fact of the matter is you saw through all of that, and we’re all just really grateful,” Huang is quoted as saying to the President.

A boycott of PlayStation apparently made little impact on Sony according to observations from analyst and Circana games lead Mat Piscatella, writing, “There was no significant change at all in player count or engagement in our tracking.” The boycott was attempted as a way to respond to Sony’s reduction of physical disc production, but it doesn’t appear to have done a lot of needle-moving in the U.S. Piscatella further clarified his statement and its implication — or more specifically, what he wasn’t trying to imply.

I said in a reply to a question that we saw no significant change to PlayStation player count or engagement in Circana's Player Engagement Tracker US panel data.That's it. I said literally nothing else about it.I did not speak to or imply anything beyond what we see in our own internal data.

— Mat Piscatella (@matpiscatella.bsky.social) 2026-09-14T23:43:21.476Z

Finally, in news close to our personal circle, IGN has suffered a fresh round of layoffs that have affected multiple departments and staff including video show hosts and senior staffers. A specific number of affected workers has not been provided at the time of this writing, but a statement from the IGN Creators Guild union confirmed that four union members and “many more people across the organization” were given pink slips. “While we recognize the challenges the media industry is facing as a whole, it is difficult to understand how laying off valuable employees better positions us to meet those challenges,” the union writes. It goes without saying but we extend our deepest condolences and well wishes to those at IGN who were fired.

We are tired of posting statements like these.

— IGN Creators Guild (@ignunion.bsky.social) 2026-09-14T23:16:45.064Z

sources: PC Gamer, Bluesky (1, 2) via GamesRadar, Kotaku, Bluesky