Bandwagon Nerds News Report (8/25/2026): Kit Harington Enrolls at Hogwarts & Gamescom Takes Over

Description: Kit Harington becomes Gilderoy Lockhart, Marvel Snap launches Draft mode and Gamescom Opening Night Live takes over Tuesday.

Jon Snow survived the White Walkers.

Now he has to survive a classroom full of second-year Hogwarts students.

Kit Harington is officially joining HBO’s Harry Potter series as Gilderoy Lockhart, Marvel Snap’s experimental Draft mode is live, and the biggest gaming story of Tuesday is not particularly difficult to identify. And Gamescom has arrived!

It’s the Bandwagon Nerds News Report for August 25, 2026!

Kit Harington Is Gilderoy Lockhart

Kit Harington will play Gilderoy Lockhart beginning with Season 2 of HBO’s Harry Potter series, replacing previously announced actor Nicholas Hoult, who departed because of scheduling conflicts. Harington previously voiced Lockhart in the Harry Potter full-cast audiobooks. Season 2, adapting Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, is scheduled to begin production this fall.

That is a very different assignment from Jon Snow. Which is exactly why it sounds fun.

Lockhart works because he believes his own celebrity is almost a superpower despite being spectacularly less competent than his reputation suggests. Harington spent years playing one of television’s most relentlessly serious characters. Watching him lean completely into an arrogant fraud could be considerably more entertaining.

And apparently voicing Lockhart was just the audition.

Marvel Snap Draft Is Officially Live

Marvel Snap launched its limited-time Draft mode Monday, allowing players to construct temporary decks without relying on their existing card collections. Players begin by selecting cards through a draft before upgrading their decks through Augments and Stat Boosts as a run progresses. The mode remains available through September 8.

This is considerably more ambitious than simply adding another matchmaking queue. The Augments are the interesting part. Marvel Snap normally works because everybody understands what cards can do.

Draft deliberately starts breaking those expectations by giving cards abilities they normally do not possess. That makes the mode part collectible-card draft and part roguelike. If players embrace it, Second Dinner may have found something worth keeping around permanently.

Into the Radius 2 Heads to PS VR2

CM Games announced that Into the Radius 2 will launch for PlayStation VR2 on September 24. The survival shooter will initially include its expanded single-player campaign, with two-player cooperative play planned for later in 2026.

Virtual reality needs games rather than demonstrations. That sounds obvious, but the platform has spent years receiving experiences that feel designed primarily to prove that VR technology is impressive.

Into the Radius built its following around actually giving players a world to survive inside. Bringing the sequel to PS VR2 gives Sony’s headset another substantial game instead of another reason to dust it off for thirty minutes.

Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse Reveals Its English Cast

Konami revealed the English-language voice cast for Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse, with Abby Trott and Graham McTavish among the performers joining the upcoming PlayStation 5 action game.

Castlevania has spent enough time away from major console releases that practically any substantial update feels important. The Netflix animated adaptations helped keep the franchise culturally relevant while the games mostly lived through collections, remasters and smaller projects.

Belmont’s Curse now has the opportunity to remind players why the name mattered as a video-game franchise before it became a streaming one.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day Keeps Owning the Box Office

Spider-Man: Brand New Day remained No. 1 at the domestic box office over the weekend, adding approximately $39 million as Sony and Marvel’s latest Spider-Man movie continued its massive theatrical run.

Superhero fatigue remains real. Automatic superhero attendance is not. There is a difference.

Audiences have become much more willing to skip comic-book movies that do not interest them. Spider-Man remains one of the characters capable of overriding that selectiveness. At this point, Peter Parker is not really competing with the superhero genre. He is competing with himself.

Gamescom Opening Night Live Is Today

Gamescom Opening Night Live begins today at 11 a.m. PT / 2 p.m. ET from Cologne, Germany, with Geoff Keighley hosting a two-hour presentation following a 30-minute pre-show.

Eight games have been officially confirmed for the presentation: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Songs of the Past, Final Fantasy VII Revelation, Gears of War: E-Day, Ananta, Tides of Annihilation, Metro 2039, Game of Thrones: War for Westeros and Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons.

That is already a pretty ridiculous lineup before the words “world premiere” start appearing. Final Fantasy VII Revelation will generate enormous attention simply because it represents the conclusion of Square Enix’s remake trilogy. Gears of War: E-Day is only weeks from launch.

And a new Witcher 3 expansion arriving more than a decade after the original game is the kind of sentence that would have sounded completely absurd several years ago.

Gamescom also tends to work better than some other showcases because not everything has to be a surprise. Sometimes the useful news is seeing fifteen uninterrupted minutes of something we already know exists.

What to Watch After Opening Night Live

Gamescom does not end when Geoff Keighley leaves the stage. Xbox will broadcast from Cologne on Wednesday and Thursday, while attendees will get hands-on access to several upcoming games throughout the convention.

Then Thursday brings another enormous gaming event outside Cologne: Rockstar’s extended look at Grand Theft Auto VI is scheduled to debut through Netflix before arriving elsewhere online later in the day.

So yes, this may accidentally become Bandwagon Gaming News for a few days. We will survive.

Tuesday gives us the announcements. The rest of the week gives us considerably more information about whether those announcements are actually worth being excited about.

This report includes information from: EntertainmentWeekly.com, MarvelSnap.com, PlayStation.com, Variety.com, GameInformer.com, and GameSpot.com.