The Igloo — ES6 Slips Again, Bernie Calls Out Xbox, Minecraft Gets Chairs
Elder Scrolls 6 is still at least two years out — eight years after it was announced. Senator Bernie Sanders publicly calls out Microsoft for cutting 3,200 Xbox jobs while posting record profits. Plus Persona 4 Revival rewrites its most controversial character, and Minecraft finally adds somewhere to sit after 17 years.
Tuesday, July 8, 2026. The biggest number in gaming today isn't a Metacritic score or a launch-week sales figure — it's eight. Eight years since Bethesda announced The Elder Scrolls 6. And according to new reports, there are at least two more to go.
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The lead · Elder Scrolls 6: year eight, finish line still off-screen
More than eight years after Bethesda showed a mountain range and a logo and called it a reveal, IGN is reporting that The Elder Scrolls 6 is still at least two years from release. That puts the earliest plausible launch somewhere around 2028 — a decade after the announcement. For comparison, the gap between Oblivion and Skyrim was five years. Between Skyrim and ES6 it will be seventeen.
The player-side math is quietly startling. A lot of people who first loaded Skyrim as teenagers will be in their thirties by the time the sequel ships. Bethesda's fanbase didn't just grow older — it moved on, came back, moved on again, and is now waiting on a game announced before some of its potential new players were in high school.
The industry angle is messier. ES6 is reportedly being built on an upgraded Creation Engine by a studio that's been inside Microsoft for four years — the same Microsoft that last week cut 3,200 Xbox jobs, including workers at studios closely tied to Bethesda's orbit. Whether that context adds pressure or just adds noise is the open question. Starfield's 2023 reception didn't exactly build confidence. The people rooting hardest for ES6 are the same ones who most wanted Starfield to land.
Source: IGN
02 · Bernie Sanders calls out Microsoft over Xbox
We covered the scale of the Xbox cuts over the past two days: 3,200 Xbox jobs eliminated, id Software reportedly halved, Obsidian cut by a quarter. Now US Senator Bernie Sanders has gone on record criticizing Microsoft for the layoffs.
His argument is short and blunt: Microsoft posted more than $100 billion in profit in 2025 while CEO Satya Nadella took home $96 million in compensation. Cutting thousands of jobs while those numbers are on the table looks, Sanders says, like a choice.
For the people who make games, a senator naming their employer's headcount decisions is overdue visibility on something that has happened too quietly for too long — a creative industry where mass layoffs are treated as routine restructuring. For players, this is the moment the Xbox story crossed from industry news into something a general-audience politician felt worth engaging with.
Worth watching: Microsoft has also raised Xbox hardware prices. Sanders cited that too.
Source: GameSpot
03 · Persona 4 Revival is changing Yosuke
Persona 4 Revival, Atlus's 2027 remake of the RPG, is revising one of the original game's most argued-about characters. Yosuke Hanamura — the protagonist's closest friend — has a history of behavior toward another party member that a portion of P4's fanbase has found uncomfortable since the original 2008 release. Polygon reports the remake is adjusting his characterization "to be more appropriate for the modern day."
The reaction has already split the community in predictable directions. On one side: a long-overdue correction to moments that undercut an otherwise excellent cast. On the other: concern that a remake is retroactively softening a character in ways that sand down what made him feel like a real, flawed person.
The craft-side framing is the more interesting one. Persona 4's writing is specifically why it became a touchstone rather than just a well-designed RPG. The challenge Atlus faces is keeping the texture of a character's relationships intact while removing the parts that read as punching down. Whether Revival threads that needle is probably the most consequential design call in the whole project.
Source: Polygon
One more thing
After seventeen years, Minecraft is adding somewhere to sit. The latest Bedrock preview build introduces cushions — a new furniture item — and players have already figured out how to use them as trampolines, fast-travel devices, and, occasionally, actual seats. Minecraft players were given the ability to fly, mine to the center of the earth, and defeat interdimensional gods long before anyone thought to give them a chair. That's the game. (Eurogamer)
The Igloo is The Penguin Alley's daily gaming show — gaming news and what AI is doing to game development, every day at 1 PM MTY. Subscribe on the podcast feed.
Sources: IGN — ES6 report · GameSpot — Sanders/Xbox · Polygon — Persona 4 Revival · Eurogamer — Minecraft cushions