Iain Harris

Iain Harris covers how major games and their studios sustain long-running worlds, from live-service RPGs and MMOs to flagship action series and their communities. He works as News Editor, Games at GamesRadar+, running the games-side news team and shaping its day-to-day coverage. He joined the masthead in May 2022 after roles at PCGamesN and PocketGamer.biz and freelance work for outlets including Kotaku UK, RockPaperShotgun, and VG24/7. His reporting concentrates on big-budget franchises, developer leadership, and the business decisions that determine how games evolve over years rather than launch weeks.

Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, and Street Fighter are still going strong

Harris frequently uses executive interviews to explain why long-running series endure and how their custodians adapt them for new audiences. In coverage of Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, and Street Fighter, he highlights a Capcom executive’s argument that these franchises thrive because their direction is no longer tied to the ideas of a single creator, even requiring some games to be rebuilt “from the ground up.” The piece foregrounds structural decisions rather than surface-level features, focusing on stewardship, internal reorganisation, and the strategic approach that keeps decades-old brands commercially and creatively active.

Across similar work, he gives space to senior figures to set out the rationale behind big shifts and then grounds their comments in concrete examples from recent releases and updates.

Final Fantasy XI is still kicking

A substantial strand of Harris’s beat is Final Fantasy and other JRPGs, where he tracks how classic series are maintained and modernised through ongoing support and new projects.

On Final Fantasy XI, he reports that the original MMO is “still kicking” despite expectations of a sharp player decline, noting that the game has locked off a third server due to overpopulation and is teasing a brand-new zone for the first time in over a decade. He follows the saga of the 23-year-old MMO as Square Enix takes emergency action to cope with booming demand, while also recalling earlier internal discussions about shutting the game down and the “lot of support” developers received to keep it running. Elsewhere he covers Final Fantasy 14 fans pushing for one of Final Fantasy 16’s best features to be adopted, treating fan sentiment as an important driver of design decisions. His reporting on Final Fantasy Resonance frames the game as part of a wider resurgence of turn-based RPGs and JRPGs, amplifying a lead developer’s goal of capturing the appeal of genre classics.

He also tracks updates like the surprise arrival of New Game+ for Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles eight months after launch, showing a close watch on systems-heavy, long-tail content pushes. This mix of server management stories, feature requests, and design philosophy pieces reflects a sustained focus on how JRPGs live and grow over many years.

GTA 6 boss says there will always be things to satirize

Harris regularly reports on Rockstar’s major projects, using leadership commentary to explore the tension between satire, relevance, and protracted development cycles. In his GTA 6 coverage, he relays a studio boss’s view that “there will always be things to satirize” but that the team must be careful what it chooses because, after 11 years of development, a target could be gone, changed, or dated by release. He connects those remarks to the realities of building open-world games at this scale, framing satire as a production risk as much as a stylistic choice. In Red Dead Redemption 2 coverage, he notes that GTA 5 left Rockstar feeling “slightly nervous” about the follow-up, underlining how prior success reshapes expectations and pressures for the next narrative epic.

These stories combine creative questions with business and timeline considerations, positioning Harris as a reporter who treats tone, ambition, and schedule as part of the same conversation.

Dragon's Dogma 2 release time and other live-service launches

Alongside deep dives, Harris covers the logistics of playing new releases and follows studios as they ramp up live-service projects. His Dragon’s Dogma 2 release time guide lays out precise launch timings for PC and console across multiple regions, turning a complex global roll-out into clear, actionable information. Coverage of Shift Up’s post–Stellar Blade plans tracks the studio’s second “AAA-class” game, Project Spirits, described as a “live-service experience” progressing smoothly under an efficient, well-structured development process and targeted for reveal in the second half of the year.

He follows Naoki Hamaguchi’s dual role as the person in charge of Final Fantasy 7 Revelation and as someone pushing Kingdom Hearts 4 forward, noting that the latter’s future, including a possible physical edition, sits squarely on his watch. Harris also reports on Palworld launching on PS5 while a Nintendo lawsuit is ongoing, placing legal headwinds alongside platform expansion. In the wider live-service space, his Destiny 2 work surfaces former developers’ accounts of toxic, dysfunctional conditions at Bungie and leaders who “forgot that people play games for fun,” bringing workplace culture into the same frame as content cadence and community expectations.

Taken together, these pieces show a reporter who moves fluently between practical player guidance, forward-looking project updates, and critical reporting on how live-service games are made and managed.

News editor with a JRPG lens

Harris’s author bio presents him as News Editor, Games, running the news team on the games side while maintaining a strong personal interest in JRPGs and Final Fantasy 14.

That stated affinity aligns with the breadth of his Final Fantasy and broader JRPG coverage, where he follows everything from server population spikes and new zones to ranked cover features and new turn-based projects. His path across PCGamesN, PocketGamer.biz, and freelance stints at multiple specialist outlets underpins a background in fast-moving games reporting and platform-specific coverage. The result is a news editor whose work foregrounds studio leadership, franchise longevity, and player communities, with a clear lean toward sprawling RPGs and MMOs that demand constant attention.