Aion 2 hasn't even launched properly yet, and it's already shoving its way up Steam's charts.

The paid head start for founder's pack buyers has only been running for a couple of days. That's long enough for NCsoft's new MMORPG to show up near the top of both of Steam's big public lists: the best-selling games and the most-played ones. For a genre that has spent years being called a relic, that's worth paying attention to.

Climbing the charts

Start with sales. At the time of the original report, Aion 2 was sitting at #4 on Steam's top sellers list. That's a strong position, but it had been higher. For a while the game held the #1 spot outright, and NCsoft marked the moment by handing out a coupon code to players. It's a small gesture, but it shows the studio is watching those rankings as closely as everyone else.

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Astralis has a new name on its cap table, and it's one football fans will know. Real Madrid goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois and entrepreneur Gonzalo Vila are investing in Fusion Esports Group, the company that owns the Danish esports brand. They are coming in through NXTPLAY, the investment vehicle the two of them founded.

The timing is the interesting part. The deal was announced on Tuesday, 29 September. Eight weeks earlier, on 1 August, Astralis signed off on audited accounts warning that the business needed more cash than it had actually secured.

Nobody has said how much money is involved. The financial terms weren't disclosed, so we don't know the size of NXTPLAY's stake or how much fresh funding Fusion is getting.

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South Korea's esports squad is heading home from Japan with a full bag.

The country wrapped up its campaign at the 2026 Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games, the continent-wide multi-sport event, with five esports medals from nine events: two golds, one silver and two bronzes. The headline result is a second straight League of Legends gold, according to InvenGlobal. But the more interesting story is how spread out the medals are. They came from team events and individual ones, from fighting games to racing to a Pokémon MOBA.

League of Legends: Eight Games, Zero Losses

South Korea's League of Legends run was about as clean as it gets. The team played eight games and won all of them.

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Los Santos has gone spooky for the month.

Grand Theft Auto Online has started its Halloween season, and it isn't a single weekend of spooky bonuses. The multiplayer crime sandbox has lined up events and rewards that run through the whole of October. The theme is everywhere, from the races to the side activities you might otherwise ignore.

There's also a subtext to all of this, and it's hard to miss. GTA 6 is on the horizon, and the obvious question hanging over the original online game is what happens to it once the sequel arrives. A month of seasonal events won't answer that question, but it does keep players busy and logging in while they wait.

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ARK: Survival Ascended just got bigger, in more ways than one.

This latest round of updates isn't one patch. It's three, spread across the base game and two separate DLCs. Each one brings a creature to the island. One is a dragon with a bottomless appetite. One is a three-headed dog with a familiar silhouette. And one is an existing dinosaur that has finally been given some long-overdue attention.

How much of this you can actually play depends on how deep into ARK you've already gone. The base game update is there for everyone. The other two sit behind the Dragontopia and Fantastic Tames Season 1 DLCs, so only players who own those expansions will meet the new monsters. For the committed, though, that's three new reasons to head back out into the wilds.

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