The Official Xbox Magazine will reportedly shut down after 18 years of serving players around the world with information regarding everything Xbox. According to a statement given to Eurogamer, OXM was shut down last week by its parent company Future.
The few remaining staff members of the long-running magazine were let go in Future’s attempts to reorganize its business. Official Xbox Magazine isn’t the only publication affected by Future’s move, either. Five others were shuttered, although OXM was the only gaming-related publication.
Future blamed the closure on the overall decline in video game retail sales, which the company says resulted in a decrease in revenue for Official Xbox Magazine. To keep the layoffs to an “absolute minimum,” the media company noted that its executives had already taken “significant” pay cuts and said that Future is well placed with “significant digital audiences.” It also gave a vague promise to continue serving “our customers’ changing needs” through “diversified revenues.”
As for OXM’s previous digital presence, much of the magazine’s content was posted on GamesRadar. However, it didn’t have a publication site of its own.
Last week, editors at numerous sites, including GamesRadar and PC Gamer, were reportedly notified of reduced budgets for freelance coverage. OXM is the only one to fold completely, however.
OXM began right around the launch of Microsoft’s original Xbox in November 2001. Officially licensed by Microsoft ever since, it provided fans in Europe and North America with the latest news, previews, and reviews of the original Xbox, the 360, and the Xbox One for more than 18 years.
The OXM closure comes after Future shut down the Official PlayStation Magazine several years ago in 2012, just before the now-historic PlayStation 4 would be announced in 2013. It’s an unfortunate time for the end of OXM as well since this year marks the release of Xbox Series X, Microsoft’s fourth home console generation.
OXM is but one of many physical games publications to meets its end, resulting in fewer options for magazine subscriptions. Those that do still remain these days include Nintendo Force, a successor to Nintendo Power, Game Informer, and the Future-owned PC Gamer magazine.
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.