Good morning! Winter has hit my area of the country hard, and so I write this with cold fingers in a chilly basement office. Will I finally break down and turn on the heat? Stay tuned to find out. Anyway, my frozen digits and I welcome you to another edition of Morning Checkpoint, Kotaku’s daily round-up of video game news and other stuff you might care about. Today we’ve got more layoffs, bad news for some Battlefield 6 players, creepy horror game Horses getting banned from another store, and more.
MLB The Show is getting a mobile port
PlayStation’s long-running baseball sim series, MLB The Show, is arriving on a new platform: your mobile phone. Well, assuming you live in the Philippines, where the mobile port is soft launching for a regional test. Meanwhile, PC players longing for a great baseball simulator watch on and shake their heads. Maybe one day, Sony and the MLB will remember to port The Show to computers.
Testing shows a BF6 tank skin makes you take more damage
A Battlefield 6 player on Reddit posted a video that went viral on the BF6 subreddit. It shows that some tank and armored vehicle skins awarded to players who grind for hours are actually broken. Apparently, if you have these “Mastery” skins equipped, your vehicle will take more damage from RPGs and other explosives, making it much easier to destroy your tank. Yikes.
A lot of players in the comments shared their own first-hand experiences using these skins and were happy to see this video seemingly proving that, no, they weren’t going mad, and in fact, their tanks were being blown up faster. Some players speculated that other vehicle skins in BF6 might have similar bugs and warned players from using any cosmetics on tanks until EA patches things up.
Eidos Montreal lays off staff for the second time in 2025
As first reported by Insider Gaming on December 2, a number of developers shared on LinkedIn that they had been fired in what appears to be a new round of layoffs at the studio behind Guardians of the Galaxy and Deus Ex Human Revolution. According to sources who spoke to the outlet, most of the studio’s internal projects have been canned, and what remains is now focused on supporting Xbox-published games like the upcoming Fable and recently released Grounded 2. This is the second round of layoffs this year to hit the Embracer-owned studio. In April, 75 employees were laid off at Edios Montreal.
A game studio fighting AI allegedly requires artists to draw during interviews
As spotted by Automaton, an anonymous graphic designer at a mid-sized game studio in Japan told a local outlet that after hiring artists who had used AI to get the job and discovering they lacked the skills the team needed, they are now allegedly testing artists during the hiring process. As translated by VGC, here’s what the dev said:
“There are many people who claim that artwork generated by AI is their own creation. We’ve actually ended up hiring such people, only to find they weren’t productive, which led to several problems. Because of that, we’ve changed our hiring process and it now requires candidates to draw something in person during the interview to verify their skills. As a recruiter, it’s a huge hassle, and it feels like we’re going backwards in time, but I’ve heard that several other companies are doing the same thing.”
Horses has now been banned from another storefront
On December 3, IGN reported that Horses is now banned from being sold on Humble. This is the third storefront to ban the controversial horror game, following Steam and Epic’s refusal to allow it to be sold on either platform. Horses is out now on GOG, for now at least.
