The Igloo — Burnout's Crew Is Back, Building a Star Wars Podracer

Tuesday, June 23, 2026. The Steam Machine's price tag is still ringing in everyone's ears a day later, but the thing that actually made us grin today wasn't a console — it was a racetrack. The studio carrying Burnout's DNA showed off its Star Wars podracer, and for the first time in a while a preview wave felt like pure joy. Welcome to The Igloo.

🎮 This is the print twin of today's The Igloo episode, "Diablo 4 Breaks Its Own Meta on Purpose — and Burnout Crashes Into Star Wars." Want it in your ears instead? Listen to today's episode.

The lead · The Burnout crew is making a Star Wars podracer — and it might actually land

For years, "we want a new Burnout" has been one of those wishes the genre just stopped granting. Today a whole row of previews suggested the wish is being taken seriously by exactly the right people. Star Wars: Galactic Racer, from developer Fuse Games with Lucasfilm Games, is led by creative director Kieran Crimmins — an ex-Criterion dev, from the studio that built Burnout in the first place. The pedigree is the story.

The pitch is high-octane podracing with a roguelike spine. Eurogamer's hands-on dug into why a game this good is so hard to make, with the devs describing Burnout Paradise's magic as "lightning in a bottle" — the kind of thing you can't just reverse-engineer. Crimmins told Rock Paper Shotgun the build encourages contact racing — "It's okay to give people a bit of a smash" — and that speeder customization runs deep enough that "the combinations are in the trillions."

Why it matters to players

Arcade racing has been starved for a decade. The sim-racers are thriving and the open-world car games keep coming, but the pure, crunchy, lean-into-the-wall Burnout feeling has been mostly a memory. A Star Wars skin on that idea is almost unfair in how well it fits — podracing was built for collision and chaos. The early read is cautiously great: IGN went in worried the roguelite loop would get in the way and came out the other side, saying the Burnout roots were "joyously evident" on the track.

The craft angle

Here's the part worth sitting with. The most honest thing in any of these previews wasn't a feature list — it was the devs openly admitting how hard their target is to hit. Calling Burnout Paradise "lightning in a bottle" is a team telling you they respect the bar they set themselves, and they know talent and a famous license don't guarantee you clear it. That humility is a good sign. The games that chase a feeling usually do better than the ones that chase a checklist, and this is a team chasing a feeling they helped invent.

02 · Diablo 4 nerfs its own beloved Mythics — on purpose

Season 14, "Death Awakening," is shaping up to be one of the biggest shakeups Diablo 4 has had, and Blizzard knows the centerpiece is going to sting: it's weakening the game's beloved Mythic items, framing the move as a fix for "issues compounding issues" and a bet on the game's "long-term health." A softer note alongside it: the next crossover is with Overwatch — Reinhardt, Mercy, Kiriko and friends dropping into the dark-fantasy world in the lightest-toned collab yet.

Our take. Deliberately nerfing the thing players love most is a hard sell, but it's also a sign of a live game being managed for the long run rather than the next dopamine spike. Power creep is the slow death of every loot game; pulling it back is unpopular and usually correct. The Overwatch crossover is the spoonful of sugar — and a quiet reminder that "dark fantasy" is now a tone Blizzard turns up and down like a dial.

03 · EA's AI boss sees "a real rise of creativity." The timing is the catch.

EA's newly promoted president of enterprise development, Laura Miele, told Game Business Live that AI tooling has driven "a real rise of creativity" across the publisher's studios — "removing some of the tedious tasks," enabling "faster prototyping" and "faster creativity." It's a genuinely positive framing, and it lands against a more complicated backdrop: a Business Insider report that EA urged its ~15,000 employees to use AI for "just about everything," that its in-house chatbot ReefGPT shipped flawed code needing correction, and that some staff worried about their jobs after being asked to train AI on their own work. For contrast, Amazon just announced an Arnold Schwarzenegger AI game as a Luna exclusive — a concrete "AI game," not a slide.

Our take. Both things can be true. AI genuinely can take the tedium out of a pipeline and free people to do the creative part — that's the good version, and Miele has clearly seen it. But "a rise of creativity" is a hard message to sit next to a year of layoffs and a chatbot that hallucinates code. The honest builder's read is the one we keep coming back to: AI is a real tool for the people doing the work, and a real risk when it's used as a reason to need fewer of them. Which one EA is actually running is the question worth watching, not the quote.

04 · Tencent quietly backs out of Japan

After an investment spree at the turn of the decade, Tencent is reportedly in talks to sell its stakes in several Japanese studios — even if it means taking a loss — as it refocuses around user-generated-content platforms. Among the names: Marvelous, the studio behind Rune Factory and Monster Hunter Stories, now reported to be in a tougher spot for it.

Our take. Foreign investment is how a lot of mid-size Japanese studios kept making the slightly-weird, mid-budget games that don't fit a blockbuster spreadsheet. When that money reverses, those are the games most at risk — not the safe bets, the interesting ones. Worth keeping an eye on which studios find a steadier home.

One more thing

Lord British is coming for his crown back. Richard Garriott, the creator of Ultima, has a plan to reclaim the rights to his legendary RPG from EA using an obscure, decades-old quirk of copyright law that lets original authors eventually terminate old rights transfers and take their work home. Whether it works is a lawyer's question — but the image of a genre founding-father patiently using the fine print to walk one of gaming's foundational series back out the front door of a giant publisher is the most delightful thing on the wire today. Make of that what you will. We're quietly rooting for him.

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That's today's Igloo — the day's games, and what AI is doing to the people who make and play them. The full episode, "Diablo 4 Breaks Its Own Meta on Purpose — and Burnout Crashes Into Star Wars," is up now: listen to today's episode.

Sources: Eurogamer — Galactic Racer "lightning in a bottle" interview · Rock Paper Shotgun — Galactic Racer creative director on "trillions" of combinations · IGN — Star Wars: Galactic Racer first preview · VGC — the Burnout revival I've waited decades for · GameSpot — Diablo 4 Season 14 Mythic changes · GameSpot — Diablo 4 x Overwatch crossover · Eurogamer — EA's Laura Miele on AI and creativity · IGN — Arnold Schwarzenegger AI game on Luna · VGC — Tencent in talks to sell Japanese studio stakes · Eurogamer — Marvelous and the Tencent retreat · Eurogamer — Richard Garriott's plan to reclaim Ultima