Weekly Anime & Game in Asia 2026-W40 (2026-09-22~2026-10-02)

From this issue, the newsletter publishes on Saturdays. This issue covers September 22 to October 2.

Bungie said it will bring back retired Destiny 2 content and rebuild Marathon, and NCSOFT’s Aion 2 topped Steam’s global Top Sellers chart on the first day of its early access. KRAFTON ended development of PUBG: Black Budget, while its top regional PUBG league in Vietnam dropped off the official tournament list. Valve said it will replace hand-scheduled slots in Steam’s discount section with personalized recommendations early next year, and Red Brick House, a new South Korean indie-game publisher, moved its first title straight to a full release.

Company Strategy

KRAFTON, the South Korean publisher of PUBG: Battlegrounds, saw its PUBG Vietnam Series 2026 Phase 2 — Vietnam’s top regional PUBG tournament, scheduled for September 4 to October 4 and about half played — drop off the official PUBG Esports tournament list on September 23, Inven reported. The PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS VIETNAM YouTube channel and the Instagram and Facebook pages that KRAFTON ran as its official Vietnamese channels were also deactivated; the Facebook page told users to follow PUBG.COM instead. The changes came shortly after KRAFTON permanently banned two Vietnamese players, Himass and TanVuu, from their accounts and from official PUBG esports for checking outside information during matches at PUBG Asia Stars 2026, but KRAFTON has not said the two are connected. Separately, Vietnamese outlet VietNamNet reported that the PC version of PUBG has been offered in Vietnam without a local license — the licensed title there is PUBG Mobile, run by Vietnamese game publisher VNGGames — and, citing its own sources, that authorities are considering blocking the PC game more widely. Neither KRAFTON nor the Vietnamese authorities had announced an end to the league or a withdrawal as of Inven’s report.

KRAFTON also announced on October 1 that it has ended development of PUBG: Black Budget, a PvPvE extraction shooter that PUBG Corporation, the studio behind PUBG: Battlegrounds, announced in November 2025 and tested in two closed alphas, in December 2025 and June 2026. KRAFTON said a review of the project concluded that its current direction could not give players an experience they would enjoy over the long term, and that what it learned will go into future projects. Elsewhere in the franchise, the top-down shooter PUBG: BLINDSPOT, in early access from February, shut down on March 30, and a roguelite FPS, PUBG: DED.NET, was announced in August.

Sony Group will not exhibit at CES 2027 in Las Vegas in January, ending a presence at the show that dates back to 1967, Denfaminicogamer reported, citing the Nikkei and Bloomberg’s confirmation with Sony; no group company will show new products there. Sony told Bloomberg it evaluates its approach to events and communications strategically, based on the needs and priorities of its businesses. The company has said it will put more weight on games, anime, film and music, and on technology that supports IP and creators.

Platforms

Sony Interactive Entertainment, the Sony subsidiary that runs PlayStation, opened purchase applications for the PlayStation 5 Pro, which has been in short supply, at its Japanese Sony Store on September 28. Applicants need a Japan-registered Sony account with at least 60 hours of combined PS5 and PS4 play between September 27, 2024 and September 27, 2026; if applications exceed the planned number of units, buyers will be chosen by lottery. Applications close on October 7, lottery results are sent from October 26, and purchases must be completed by November 2. The PS5 Pro has no disc drive, so playing physical games requires a separately purchased drive.

Sony announced on its official blog in July that it will stop producing physical discs for new PlayStation titles from January 2028, according to Inven. On September 26, Inven reported a claim by Tom, host of the rumor-focused YouTube channel Moore’s Law is Dead, that Sony recently sent developers an unusually large survey that indirectly asked whether there is a problem with how games are sold physically. Sony has not confirmed the survey. Sony CFO Lin Tao said in a recent earnings call that no impact on the business has been seen so far, while saying the company understands players’ attachment to discs.

Valve, which runs the Steam store, said on September 30 that it will rework Steam’s “Discounts & Events” section in early 2027, replacing slots that publishers book through Steamworks or that the Steam team curates on a calendar with dynamic recommendations personalized for each user. In tests over recent months that replaced some of the curated slots, the section showed ten times as many games per user per day, and store-page views, wishlist additions and cart additions rose significantly, Valve said. Calendar curation such as Daily Deals has already stopped taking new bookings; slots already scheduled will run, and the calendar system ends completely early next year. Valve will give developers the timing within weeks, along with new tools for managing discounts and sale events.

Indie Game Marketing

Red Brick House, founded in June 2026 by three former staff of South Korean game publisher Neowiz who had led the discovery and publishing of Skul: The Hero Slayer and SANABI there, is South Korea’s first publisher dedicated to indie games, according to Japanese outlet 4Gamer, which interviewed its executives at Tokyo Game Show. A month after its founding, before it had released or signed a single game, it raised KRW 10 billion, taking money only from investors that do not seek an exit, 4Gamer reported. It sets its success line at 200,000 to 300,000 copies rather than 1 million — what a team needs to sell to make its next game — and in principle the IP stays with the developer. At a Tokyo Game Show stage event on September 19 it dropped the planned early access for its first title, VOID DIVER: Escape from the Abyss, a cooperative extraction action RPG for up to three players, and set a full release for January 2027. Co-CEO Kim Hyukjin said feedback from the game’s Discord, about 4,000 users, led the team to conclude that a finished release would better meet players’ expectations.

Live-Service Launches & Shutdowns

Aion 2, the MMORPG from NCSOFT, the South Korean publisher of the Lineage series, began global early access on Steam and NCSOFT’s own PURPLE platform on September 30 for buyers of a Founder’s Pack, and reached a peak of 171,530 concurrent players on Steam according to SteamDB, Inven reported; the figure excludes PURPLE. It topped Steam’s global Top Sellers chart on September 30 and the sales chart in 12 countries including the United States, France, Germany, Spain and Brazil, after more than 1.3 million wishlist additions before launch. Servers cover North America, South America, Europe and Japan in eight languages, and the full global launch is set for October 5.

Bungie, the Washington-based studio that Sony Interactive Entertainment acquired in July 2022 for USD 3.6 billion, said on September 22 that it “will not end Destiny.” Destiny 2 received its final live-service content update, Monuments of Triumph, in June, and Bungie made large layoffs the same month, partly because Destiny 2 had fallen short of expectations. Studio head Poria Torkan said Bungie had lost sight of its players over the past few years. The studio will now restore Destiny 2 story missions, locations and raids that players can no longer access and open them to all players, though it said adapting them to systems rebuilt since the November 2020 expansion Beyond Light will take time. For Marathon, the extraction shooter released in March 2026, Torkan said the game drew praise from critics but did not reach as many players as expected; Bungie will add cooperative PvE and competitive PvP options alongside the existing PvPvE mode. A major Marathon update planned for September has been moved to December, with a smaller update including a wipe in October.

Japanese game publisher Bandai Namco Entertainment said on September 26 that SYNDUALITY Echo of Ada, a PvPvE extraction shooter in which players fight in mechs, will end its online service in or after May 2027 and become a standalone offline PvE game that current owners can keep playing, minus features that need online play. Some online save data and eligible purchased items are to carry over. Online updates and events end with the content planned for October 2026, sales of the paid currency SYN COINS end on December 18, 2026, a feature to save data for the transfer arrives in December 2026, and the end date of online service will be announced in March 2027.

The offline version of Link! Like! Love Live!, a Love Live! mobile game, will be removed from the App Store and Google Play on October 30 at 12:00 JST. Its operator, ODD No., ended online service on June 30 after its finances worsened and it could no longer sustain production of the main content, and bankruptcy proceedings against it began in August 2026. After October 30, players can no longer log in or download data in the app; inquiries about reissuing link passwords close on October 20.

IP Expansion

SEGA’s Persona series, made by its studio Atlus, had sold more than 30 million units worldwide by June 2026, according to a 30th-anniversary feature on the Sega Sammy Holdings investor site. About 40% of sales are in North America and about 20% each in Japan, Europe and Asia — roughly 80% outside Japan. The Persona 5 games have sold more than 13 million units, and cumulative series sales roughly doubled between 2020 and 2024. Persona 4 Revival, a full remake of Persona 4 Golden, is due in February 2027, and Persona 6 was announced in June 2026.

Supercent, a Seoul-based hyper-casual mobile game publisher, chose Pororo the Little Penguin, from Korean animation studio Iconix, as the first licensed IP for its game Snake Clash, adding Pororo skins and profile frames for a collaboration running from September 16 to October 14. Snake Clash has 220 million cumulative downloads and 4 million daily active users, mostly adults in their 20s to 40s, and 30% of its revenue comes from the United States, according to Inven. The collaboration uses the game’s existing revenue model of in-game ads plus in-app purchases of skins and packages. Supercent plans to offer the same arrangement — its titles’ global user base as a distribution channel — to other IP holders; CEO Gong Jun-sik said games are “an effective path for IP to expand into markets it has not yet reached.”

Japanese advertising firm Dentsu entered a partnership with manga publisher Kodansha that gives prospective clients in North and South America access to Kodansha IPs including Attack on Titan, Ghost in the Shell and Blue Lock, Variety reported on September 25, according to Anime News Network. Dentsu becomes the central point of contact for brand marketers seeking sponsorships, tie-in campaigns, live events and fan experiences around those titles.

Genshin Impact, the game from Chinese studio HoYoverse, will open a permanent official cafe, Genshin CAFE, in Tokyo in 2027, its official X account announced on September 28, the game’s sixth anniversary. Tokyo will be the cafe’s fourth city after Seoul, Paris and Moscow, and its first permanent location in Japan.

WEBTOON Entertainment, the webtoon platform majority-owned by South Korea’s NAVER, launched its first “Global Drop” on September 19, releasing The Warrior’s Ballad, a fantasy webtoon adapted from Dodongpa’s web novel, in nine languages at once: Korean, Japanese, English, French, German, Spanish, Thai, Indonesian and Traditional Chinese. It is the first time the company has launched an ongoing series across nine language services simultaneously.

BookLive, a Toppan-group Japanese e-book company, said on October 1 that its Xfolio Publishing service will sell Touhou Project fan-made doujinshi as commercial e-books with the permission of Team Shanghai Alice, the circle led by ZUN that created the shooting-game series. Xfolio Publishing handles the rights, including license fees to the creator, and pays authors royalties of up to 75%; for works registered by November 3 it will cover the license fee and pay up to 80% for the first year. It began accepting comics, illustration books, novels, picture books and photo books the same day; the release date and lineup are to be announced.

SpiralAI, maker of RyzaChat:AI — an AI chat RPG set in Koei Tecmo’s Atelier Ryza games and made under license — said on September 29 that it will restrict what users can type, starting with an AI model update in October, after concerns about how the character Ryza was being treated; some users had used prompt injection to draw out responses the game was built to block. It is also filing takedown requests for edited or fake images presented as screens from the app.

Also This Week

• Kakao Entertainment, the story-IP arm of South Korea’s Kakao, announced on September 22 that it plans to shut down Tapas, its North American webtoon platform, five years after spending about KRW 1.1 trillion (about USD 780 million) to acquire Tapas and the web novel platform Radish; it closed Radish in 2025. In Korea it plans to merge KakaoPage and Kakao Webtoon into a single platform by the end of the year. User refunds and data handling have not been announced.
• The main stories of Project Sekai Colorful Stage! feat. Hatsune Miku, a free-to-play rhythm game running since September 2020, will conclude around early 2028, after which the game continues with “After Story” and “Another Story” arcs. The team said on a September 24 broadcast that the change is not a response to weak sales.
• Digital Bros, parent of publisher 505 Games, listed ARMED FANTASIA — a spiritual successor to Wild Arms by members of that series’ development staff — among three cancelled projects in its fiscal-year results on September 24, with a EUR 17.6 million write-down for the cancelled projects. The game’s 2022 crowdfunding campaign, run jointly with PENNY BLOOD, raised JPY 379,328,385.
• The Olympic Council of Asia will drop esports from the Asian Games after the 2026 Aichi-Nagoya Games and move it to a separate event, the first Asian Esports & Mind Sports Games, in Kuwait in 2027, with about 4,000 participants expected. Under Korea’s current rules, only Olympic top-three finishers and Asian Games gold medalists qualify for alternative military service, so the new event does not carry that benefit unless the rules change, Inven noted.
• The European Commission proposed the EU KIDS Act on September 17, a regulation on minors’ online safety that covers online games, game platforms and app stores. It would restrict features that reward minors for playing at set times or more often, or that take rewards away when they do not log in — daily login streaks could be affected, Inven noted — and would require age ratings in app stores. The European Parliament and the Council must still agree on a final text.
• The Tokyo District Court on September 30 dismissed voice actor Kenjiro Tsuda’s suit against TikTok’s operator over AI-generated narration resembling his voice, because the videos had already been deleted, but held that a person’s voice, like a portrait, is protected by publicity rights — reportedly the first ruling to say so.
• Grasshopper Manufacture, the studio Goichi Suda founded in 1998, became independent of NetEase Games on October 1, five years after joining it, by agreement with NetEase. Its last game under NetEase, ROMEO IS A DEAD MAN, came out in February 2026.

Company in Focus

Kodansha — one of Japan’s largest publishers and the rights holder behind Attack on Titan and Blue Lock. It sells manga abroad through its own overseas imprint and through K manga, the distribution service it launched in May 2023, and in November 2025 it set up Kodansha Studios in Hollywood.