Nintendo will start taking action against real-money transactions in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
Nintendo said on Monday, June 15 that it will move to eliminate real-money transactions when players buy and sell villagers and other items in the game. In a statement to Japanese website J-Cast, Nintendo said that using real money to buy and sell virtual goods is a violation of its terms of service. The company didn’t divulge how it would handle incidents but said that it will evaluate each transaction on a “case by case basis.”
Since its launch in March, the wildly popular Animal Crossing: New Horizons has had a robust digital trade community where people regularly buy and sell villagers and items. Some of those people buy those goods with in-game money, like Nook Miles and bells, which appears to be an allowed practice.
In other cases, however, players are using PayPal, Venmo, and other real-world services to pay actual cash for their desired characters. There have even been websites created for the sole purpose of buying and selling villagers from the game.
When they are paying for items and villagers, buyers are finding it’s an expensive prospect. In fact, eBay is awash with listings allowing players to buy villagers from $5 up to $25 and beyond. And along the way, Nintendo finds itself cut out of the equation.
Whether Nintendo will actually be able to enforce its new policy, however, remains to be seen. Since the transactions occur on third-party platforms like eBay, Twitter, and elsewhere, it may be difficult for Nintendo to accurately determine if players purchased villagers and how. Indeed, the company didn’t say how it intends to make determinations and ban accounts and did not immediately respond to a Digital Trends request for comment on the matter.
It’s a problem Epic Games has tried to deal with in Fortnite, where players have used real money to buy rare skins and other items from the game. And although Epic Games has banned the practice, a quick search on eBay reveals plenty of rare skins for people to buy outside the confines of the game.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.