Money Monday Oct. 12th

Money Monday – October 12, 2026

Second Monday of October. Fall is here, the releases keep stacking, and the industry keeps finding new ways to piss me off. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is less than two weeks out. Microsoft's asset streaming tech just went cross-vendor. Razer dropped some compact speakers. Bombanana! is the indie hit nobody saw coming. Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen landed last week and Capcom actually delivered. And the Ninja Theory situation got worse, because of course it did. Let's get into it.

💥 Fail of the Week: Ninja Theory Is Cooked (And So Is E-Day's Launch)

I told y'all last week Microsoft started gutting Ninja Theory after failing to sell the studio twice. Nobody wanted it. Not once, but twice somebody looked at the deal and walked away. This week it got uglier. More developers hitting LinkedIn with the "looking for new opportunities" posts. Programmers, designers, artists, sound engineers. The studio that made Hellblade is being carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey, and Microsoft is holding the knife with a straight face.

Here's what makes this a special kind of stupid. Microsoft put Senua, the third Hellblade game, on stage at the Xbox Games Showcase in June. 2027 release window. Trailer and everything. Hyped the crowd. Got people excited. Four months later, they're firing the people who were supposed to build the damn thing. You can't announce a game on a world stage and then dismantle the studio making it. That's not restructuring. That's incompetence.

Asha Sharma's Xbox has now axed 3,200 jobs across FY 2027. Playground and Turn 10 got merged. World's Edge lost half its people. Halo got shipped off to Activision like a kid going to live with his stepdad. Undead Labs split from Xbox entirely. And now Ninja Theory is being hollowed out while a game they literally just showed the world sits in limbo. What's the plan, Asha? Because from where I'm sitting, there ain't one.

And speaking of Microsoft fumbling the bag, let's talk about Gears of War: E-Day. Critics gave it an 88 on Metacritic. Cool. Players are telling a different story. Steam user reviews are sitting at 74% positive, which is lukewarm at best. The game peaked at 31,500 concurrent players on Steam. For a franchise this big, backed by this much money, that's embarrassing. Yeah, a lot of people are playing through Game Pass and on Xbox, where it hit the second-biggest Game Pass debut of 2026 behind Forza Horizon 6. But the PC launch is rough.

Players are reporting frequent crashes on PC. Long-time Gears fans are pissed about misleading marketing. The trailers sold a return to beloved characters, and then the game swaps them out early in the campaign. That's a bait-and-switch, and the community is calling it exactly that. Ranked multiplayer just went live today, a full week after launch, which means the competitive crowd has been sitting on their hands while the rest of the player base dealt with stability issues. Not a great look.

And the developers who crunched for months to ship this thing? Still checking their email every morning wondering if today's the day HR sends them a calendar invite. The Coalition's staff has been terrified of post-launch layoffs since before the game even dropped. You crunch, you ship, and your reward is anxiety. That's Xbox in 2026. Fail of the week, and honestly, it's getting old watching Microsoft do this to talented people over and over again.

🎮 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 — October 23

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 drops October 23 on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Switch 2. Infinity Ward is back at the wheel. This one's set around a modern Korean conflict, and it feels like the first COD in a minute that actually has something to prove.

Here's the tech story worth caring about. MW4 is confirmed as a day-one title for Microsoft's Asset Streaming Delivery (ASD). That's the tech that cuts load times by up to 90% by handling game assets smarter. AMD and Xbox had it first. Intel followed with Arc support. Now NVIDIA RTX and Qualcomm GPUs are getting ASD this month. By the end of October, every major Windows 11 GPU vendor will support it. MW4 is the first real test at scale.

PC players, pay attention. Call of Duty's install base is massive. Running ASD across AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, and Qualcomm hardware all at once on launch day is either going to prove this tech works or expose every crack in it. Either way, we'll know fast.

🔊 Razer Mako X — New Desktop Speakers

Razer dropped the Mako X, a compact speaker setup for desktop gamers who are sick of having a headset clamped to their head for every single session. 30W RMS, 45W peak, virtual 7.1 surround. Small enough to sit on your desk without taking over.

Let me be straight with you. 30W RMS is fine for gaming at a desk. It's not going to rattle your walls or give you bass you can feel in your chest. There's no subwoofer. If you're expecting a 2.1 experience out of this, you're going to be disappointed. And virtual 7.1 is a coin flip. Sometimes it adds real spatial depth. Sometimes it just makes everything sound like you're gaming in a bathroom.

If you want something decent for casual sessions without strapping a headset on, it might work. But I'm not recommending anything until real reviews drop. Razer has a habit of charging a premium for mid. Prove me wrong, Razer.

🍌 Indie Spotlight: Bombanana!

Alright, this one's fun. Bombanana! sold over 1 million copies on Steam in its first 10 days. Had a million wishlists and 6 million demo players before it even launched. And it was built by one dude.

Ufuk Girit, 25 years old, out of Turkey, working under his studio Lefto Studio. The game is beautifully dumb. Three players each control a monkey. One's blind, one's deaf, one's mute. Each monkey has a different piece of the information you need to defuse a bomb. You gotta communicate across those handicaps before time runs out. It's co-op chaos that turns your friends into screaming morons, and it's hilarious.

Launched September 2 on Steam. Hit a million sales by September 12. Then jumped to Roblox and pulled in 16 million visits and 80,000 favorites. Hit iOS and Google Play on October 9. A Steam party game crossing over to Roblox and actually working is something we haven't seen before. This 25-year-old kid from Turkey is outselling studios with 200 employees and ten times the budget. Love to see it.

If you've got two friends and you ain't soft, grab Bombanana!. It's cheap, it's stupid fun, and it's proof you don't need a hundred million dollars to make something people actually want to play. Take notes, triple-A.

🐉 Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen — Out Now, $49.99

Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen dropped October 9 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Switch 2. $49.99 standalone, or bundled with the base game if you're new.

New frozen region called Norgan. 12 new dungeons. New companion named Eir. New weapons, new skills, and a storyline centered on an undying Fallen Dragon. This is the expansion Dragon's Dogma 2 needed from the jump. The base game had the bones but the endgame was thin as hell. Capcom did the same thing with the original Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, where the expansion turned the whole game's reputation around. Early word is solid. If you dropped DD2 because there wasn't enough to do after the credits, this is your ticket back in.

🎮 Game Pass Update

First wave of October Game Pass drops:

• Battlefield 6 — Confirmed for Game Pass this wave. No exact date yet.

• Valor Mortis — Game Pass.

• Forever Ago — Available now. Day one.

• Gears of War: E-Day — Live now. Ranked just went live. Whether you want to deal with the crashes is on you.

Battlefield 6 hitting Game Pass is a big move. EA and Microsoft have been getting cozy all year, and dropping a Battlefield title into the sub is a statement. No word on whether it's permanent or timed, but if you've been sitting on the fence, Game Pass just kicked you off it.

🕹️ What's Coming

• Planet Zoo 2 — Oct 13. PC. Frontier's follow-up to one of the best management sims out there.

• SIGNAL LOST — Oct 14. Horror heads, keep your eyes on this.

• Final Fantasy Resonance — Oct 22. HD-2D reimagining of Brave Exvius. Single-player.

• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 — Oct 23. The big dog.

• The Wolf Among Us Remastered — Oct 29. Fresh coat of paint on a classic.

• Crimson Desert: Charting the Unknown — Oct 29. $24.99. Sea exploration expansion.

📰 Quick Hits

• Triple-i Initiative showcase dropped this week. Brotato's getting a new DLC called Primal Dread on Nov 2. Chained Together is adding a race mode Nov 12. Risk of Rain 2 has new content cooking. Gods with Badges from Strange Scaffold looks like a sleeper for tactics fans. Lot of good indie stuff in the pipeline.

• Deadlock got a fat visual overhaul and Valve is letting the community vote on which new heroes join the roster each week. Rat King and Baba already won their spots. Valve doing Valve things. Say what you want about them, they know how to build a community.

• Star Wars: Galactic Racer reviews are in and they're strong. If you missed it last week, it's Burnout meets podracing with a roguelike campaign structure. Nobody had this on their radar and it turned out to be one of the best surprises of the fall.

That's your Monday. Microsoft is gutting studios and shipping games that can't even launch clean on PC. Ninja Theory is being dismantled four months after announcing a game on a world stage. Gears of War: E-Day got critic love and player backlash. Call of Duty is two weeks out with new tech that's about to get stress-tested across every GPU vendor on the planet. Razer wants your desk space but hasn't earned your money yet. A 25-year-old kid from Turkey is outselling half the industry with three monkeys and a bomb. Dragon's Dogma 2 finally has the expansion it should've launched with. Battlefield 6 is coming to Game Pass. October ain't slowing down. See y'all next Monday.