Tom Phillips
Tom Phillips covers video games as news, treating consoles, big franchises, and subscription services as a connected beat where player experience and corporate decisions meet.
He is News Editor at IGN and a veteran reporter with around 20 years in the video games industry. He has previously led editorial coverage at another specialist games outlet and is described as particularly attentive to how Pokémon is discussed and presented. Across his recent work he focuses on Nintendo, Pokémon, live-service titles, subscription catalogs, and the production and business stories that decide what players actually get to play and watch.
Nintendo and Pokémon as a Core Lens
Nintendo and Pokémon stories are a defining strand of Phillips’ output, and he uses them to track how a platform holder manages its brands, broadcasts, and communities. He reports on Nintendo’s major announcement beats, including coverage of multiple Nintendo Direct broadcasts and a dedicated 40th anniversary event for The Legend of Zelda, treating them as signals of how the company stages its legacy titles and future slate.
His work on Mario Kart and Nintendo Switch 2 looks closely at the absence of new downloadable content and what that means for long-running franchises and their support on new hardware.
Pokémon is a recurring focus, not just as a game but as an ecosystem of live services and collectibles. He covers Pokémon Go both in terms of gameplay changes - such as new virtual items that automate parts of play - and in terms of data use and public concern, including a report on Niantic’s assurance that player data is not being used to train military drones.
On the trading card side, he writes about 30th anniversary Pokémon card scalpers complaining that the latest set is less profitable because rare cards are easier to find, framing the story around scarcity, accessibility, and speculation in the fan economy.
Phillips also follows how Nintendo handles its classic catalogue, reporting on staff views that a major reveal for an Ocarina of Time remake should have been staged differently after a high-profile leak. In these pieces he treats nostalgia-heavy franchises as active business decisions rather than static icons, highlighting how broadcast strategy, leak response, and product positioning affect long-term fan trust.
Subscription Services and Major Releases
Phillips consistently reports on subscription catalogs, especially the monthly changes to PlayStation Plus, and treats them as a barometer for platform strategy and value to players.
His coverage of a recent PlayStation Plus Game Catalog update centres on high-profile additions like Star Wars Outlaws and Red Dead Redemption 2, positioning these inclusions as part of how the service courts both blockbuster appeal and longer-term engagement. He has also written about a June 2026 lineup headlined by Final Fantasy 16 and Kingdom Come Deliverance, again using specific titles to show how the catalog balances new prestige releases with established favourites.
Major individual game launches appear in his work as news events with industry-scale implications, not just entertainment moments. In a report on Rockstar’s claim that Grand Theft Auto 6 “will be the largest game launch in history,” Phillips concentrates on the company’s framing of scale and ambition and what that signals for expectations on revenue, audience size, and technical delivery. He brings a similar approach to coverage of Fable’s romance mechanics, treating design details - such as how the RPG handles relationships and lovemaking - as part of understanding how big-budget games are marketed and differentiated.
Industry Business, Legal and Production Stories
Alongside game and subscription coverage, Phillips regularly handles stories where legal actions, closures, and production decisions have direct consequences for players and staff.
He reports on Nintendo winning $4.5 million from a Reddit moderator who sold pirated Switch games, setting out the scale of the settlement and its implications for enforcement against fan-run distribution networks. In business coverage of Ubisoft closing additional studios, he links cuts and job losses to the company’s broader restructuring, tracking how these moves contract its development footprint.
He also covers the use and removal of AI in game development, including a story where the developer of 1666: Amsterdam admits using AI assets, apologises, and promises to replace them.
In that piece he foregrounds the developer’s public response and corrective steps, framing AI-use controversies as reputational and production issues rather than purely technical curiosities. His reporting on Niantic’s denial about military drone training with Pokémon Go data likewise emphasises direct quotes and clear corporate positions, showing a preference for documenting what companies say on contentious technology topics.
Phillips extends this scrutiny to television production linked to genre franchises, notably repeated coverage of Doctor Who’s broadcast future. He writes on reports that the series is likely off air for years amid caution from production companies, and separately on plans and desires from the broadcaster for the show to return in specific future seasons, connecting production logistics to the continuity of a long-running sci-fi property.
Crossovers into Entertainment and Pop Culture
Although his primary focus is games and platforms, Phillips’ bylines also appear on entertainment pieces that sit adjacent to his core beat. On IGN’s entertainment pages he is credited on features tied to topics such as Animals and characters like Kraven the Hunter, indicating a willingness to handle stories where genre fiction and pop culture intersect with broader audience interests.
His Xbox coverage, including executive reflections on whether the brand is “fixable,” similarly shows him tracking how platform perception and corporate messaging shape the wider cultural standing of games hardware and services.
Across these different subjects, Phillips tends to work in a news format that privileges clear headlines, quoted statements, and concise context over extended commentary. The through-line is a reporter who treats games, subscription platforms, and related entertainment properties as a single technology-and-culture beat, and who repeatedly returns to Nintendo and Pokémon as touchpoints for understanding how that ecosystem changes over time.
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