Games Industry News Roundup- January 6th, 2026

Here at Goonhammer, we know that it’s hard to keep track of all the news happening all the time in the games industry. So much is always going on with games of all sorts, and their related media, it can be a real blink-and-you’ll miss it situation.

That's why every week, we round up five of the biggest stories in the gaming sphere from the past week in the Games Industry News Roundup. Our trusty news boy, Dan “Swiftblade” Richardson, is at the very real and cool Goonhammer newsdesk with the scoop.

CD Projekt RED Sells GOG to Co-Founder

Credit: GOG

One of the titans of the video game space, Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projeckt RED (CDPR), is selling off another major name in the gaming world, digital distribution platform Good Old Games (GOG), for $25 million. Fortunately for everyone, the buyer for GOG is one of the company’s original co-founders.

Founded in 2008, GOG has been one of the largest digital games distribution platforms in the world, with a focus on DRM-free games and preserving older releases. For its entire history, GOG has operated within CDPR with a long leash, but with the sale to co-founder Michał Kiciński, the platform will be truly independent for the first time.

“With our focus now fully on an ambitious development roadmap and expanding our franchises with new high-quality products, we felt this was the right time for this move,” Michał Nowakowski, co-CEO of CDPR said in a press statement. “For a long time now, GOG has been operating independently. Now it’s going into very good hands — we are convinced that with the support of Michał Kiciński, one of GOG’s co-founders, its future will be full of great projects and successes.”

The deal includes a caveat that binds GOG to continue to sell CDPR games on its platform, but otherwise the deal makes GOG a separate entity from CDPR effective immediately.

Under his leadership, Kiciński promises that GOG will continue to cultivate “freedom, independence, and a genuine sense of ownership” in its users, and keep up the company's focus of preserving gaming classics of yesteryear.

Warhammer Kicks Off the New Year with Preview Show Announcement

Credit: Games Workshop

As we said in the roundup for 2025, Games Workshop had a very successful year by all measures, and few would blame them for taking a moment to catch their breath. There’s no rest for the wicked in Nottingham however, and the company has already announced a new preview show for January, with a teaser for what to expect.

The preview show is currently set for January 16th at 7:30PM GMT, with new announcements set for Age of Sigmar, Blood Bowl, Horus Heresy, and Warhammer 40,000 settings. A short preview video gives a few teasers for what we may expect. The video, which takes place during a new years party, has several easter eggs throughout that tease what we can expect from the show. Some of those hints are more obvious than others, such as a pile of golden bananas with a long red ribbon that is an unmistakable nod to the Custodes. The entire video ends with a cheeky joke, with the statement from one host that their new years resolution is to announce less space marines in the preview, with the other declaring “You won’t last three weeks”.

Seems like GW couldn’t even last that long, as the article announcing the show gives us a look at one of the new members of Huron Blackheart’s new character retinue, a Chaos Space Marine apothecary character named Garreon the Corpsemaster, as well as the promise to reveal the rest of the members of the new Huron’s command squad, and the hint that they will be battling “even pointier pirates”, which is likely a nod to the Aeldari.

The preview will be shown on Warhammer’s Twitch and Youtube page, and articles detailing the announcements will be posted the same day to WarCom.

Tech Companies Rumored to Increase the Price of GPUs in 2026

Credit: Nvidia

Things are not nearly as exciting in the world of big tech though. In fact, for consumers, it's already looking pretty grim. Reports coming out of leading companies like NVIDIA and AMD indicate that due to the rising demand for AI datacenters, the prices for GPUs could see a significant price hike later this year.

This is a gut punch for the wallets of anyone interested in upgrading or building their own computer, as prices for modern GPUs have skyrocketed in the past few years. As an example, the RTX 5090, the bleeding edge of modern graphics processing power, is supposedly going to jump up in price from $2000 to an eye-watering $5000 MSRP by the end of 2026.

These price increases are being driven by voracious demand from AI datacenters across the globe, who require a huge amount of processing power to operate. This is compounded by the rising demand for memory units in the market. According to the report, 80% of the cost of modern GPUs come from their memory processing units, such as VRAM, in order to take on more demanding workloads.

While NVIDIA has not confirmed these rumors at time of writing, ASUS has already confirmed that many of their products will increase in price, effective as of January 5th, with other computer manufacturing companies like LENOVO to follow suit. These changes look to be a bump of about 15-20% in most of their computer products, likely to offset the rising costs of the tech required to make these computers.

Steamforged Gives Fans a First Look at 2026 Warmachine Balance Changes

Back in the tabletop world, Steamforged gave Warmachine players a first look at the planned January balance update for the game, which looks to be the most dramatic change for the game since the game’s relaunch in 2022.

The balance update is making multiple changes across all factions to improve lower performing factions and models, while reeling in the game’s problem children. Specific offenders that are confirmed to be getting a hit include Khymaera’s gargantuan, the Trikhymaerax, and Cryx’s Cephalyx warcaster, Khythos.

More significantly, Steamforged is making broader adjustments to tone down the lethality of the game, as it notes that the current metagame is too deadly and players spend too much of the game trying to avoid any action that would put their models at risk, barring extreme defensive buffs. Steamforged wishes to bring down the deadliness of the game without making drastic rules changes by making minor adjustments to stats for offending models, rather than entire rules revisions, though according to the preview some models may lose keyword abilities such as Gang.

The biggest change is the removal of the spell rack from Warmachine entirely. The rack system in it’s current state allows for warcasters to pick and choose spells they want to bring to a game based on the number of rack slots available to them, which in theory allows for players to turn casters into swiss army knives for whatever the situation demands. In practice, players quickly identify the best spells from each rack and take them every time, turning the system into a crutch rather than a flexible tool. Each warcaster model will now have an expanded spell list with new spells to make up for the loss of rack slots, to better facilitate the playstyles from caster to caster.

These changes will release alongside the new organized play packet, Steamroller 2026, which promises more diverse missions and more ways for leader and solo models to score.

The balance update and packet are currently scheduled to release on the Warmachine app on January 21st.

Ubisoft Temporarily Shuts Down Rainbow Six Siege Servers Following Hacking Fiasco

Credit: Ubisoft

Back to the wild west of the video game world, Rainbow Six Siege has been making headlines since the end of December following a massive hacking breach, which caused Ubisoft to subsequently decide to temporarily take the game offline while it tried to address the damage done and figure out what to do with the billions in in-game currency given to players by hackers.

The hack occurred on December 27th, where a currently unknown group of hackers got into the game’s backend systems and began to have a field day, banning and unbanning accounts in the thousands seemingly at random while distributing $2 billion worth of in-game premium currency to every single player. Ubisoft addressed the issues on their social media page the same day by announcing that it was shutting the game down, saying it was doing everything it could to find the group behind this, and at the time did not address what it planned to do with the currency sent to players.

Ubisoft brought servers for the game back online on December 29th, once the situation had been stabilized, and thanked players for their patience. The company announced that while it was rolling back all of the premium currency sent out during the hack, as well as any purchases made during that time, players would not be penalized for any transactions made. Ubisoft has not stated the identity of those involved in the hack, and denies the claim that a recent wave of bans from the game are related to this incident.

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