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UESC what they did there?
Flip-flopping.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt expansion “Songs of the Past” will appear at Gamescom 2026, …
Gamescom 2026 has completely sold out of all available exhibition space for the first time, …
Latest addition to XGP in July!The Planet Crafter, or simply Planet Crafter, if you will, is today's Xbox Game Pass addition for July 2026, bringing its sci-fi base-building survival goodness to the subscription service on both PC and, for the first time, console!It's an open-world terraforming survival type that supports co-op for up to 10 players, tasking you and your mates with transforming an inhospitable planet into a comfy spot to call home. If you've played Subnautica 2 or anything of that vein, you'll have a pretty good idea of what to expect.Since Planet Crafter launched on Xbox Series X|S, there's only been one full review published so far, so we'll have a look at that before seeing what players are saying on Xbox and Steam:Xbox Achievements (7/10)"While it’s taken its sweet time getting to consoles, The Planet Crafter emerges as an enjoyable entry in the survival genre, with simple base building, clearly-presented objectives, and an oddly relaxing gameplay loop that’ll get its hooks into you."Read the full article on purexbox.com
"We see physical and digital as complementary rather than competing"
Customers received what they "bargained for".Back in April, it emerged that two gamers in the U.S. filed a lawsuit against Nintendo, claiming that the company had an obligation to refund customers after it was deemed that tariffs affecting prices were actually illegal.Nintendo raised prices for the original Switch along with a bunch of Switch 2 peripherals in August 2025 in what it described as a reaction to "market conditions", however it was clear that the move was directly related to the imposition of tariffs.Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Just 7 PS5 games sell over 100k boxed copies.According to new sales data from Circana director Mat Piscatella, only seven PS5 games have sold more than 100,000 physical copies in 2026.In the week that ended 11th July 2026, just two PS5 titles managed to sell over 10,000 physical units during that seven-day timespan.Read the full article on pushsquare.com
Konami wants to make sure you know what the vania stands for
SOEDESCO will release Senscape-developed supernatural horror adventure game ASYLUM for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, PlayStation …
Pandora's box.Sony's staggered PS Plus Extra and Premium schedule means you're getting fresh additions to the catalogue throughout the month, and today sees the arrival of a few more games to the lineup.After adding Rise of the Ronin last week (in select regions), four more games join the fun (globally) starting today, 21st July. Here are the newbies:Read the full article on pushsquare.com
Boxed in.
Handheld combat.
Bandai Namco will host the Super Robot Wars Series 35th Anniversary Live Stream on August …
Comrades! The post Tears of Metal release countdown: Exact date and time appeared first on Destructoid.
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is a very competent Bethesda RPG, not made by Bethesda.
Announcement incoming...Earlier this month, the Donkey Kong Arcade LEGO set was leaked online. Now, in an update, the first official images have been revealed ahead of schedule.Not only is there another look at the box and set details, but there are also some official Lego screenshots showing the entire build and play features. These images originally appeared on the UK retailer Argos and have now been removed. Here's a look via the Legoleak subreddit:Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Featuring music from Super Circuit & Double Dash!!Since the arrival of the Mario Kart World album on Nintendo Music last month, Nintendo has updated it with multiple "Free Roam" songs from the Switch 2 game.This week's update for the app has now added Free Roam songs based on the GameCube title Mario Kart: Double Dash!! and GBA release, Mario Kart Super Circuit. Here's the full tracklist:Read the full article on nintendolife.com
ATLUS has released a new trailer for Persona 4 Revival introducing Chie Satonaka.
Right before GTA! The post Emberville countdown: Exact release date and time appeared first on Destructoid.
It's arriving "this year".One of the many surprises of last month's Nintendo Direct was the announcement Stellar Blade would be coming to the Switch 2 this year.Although there's no update about the release date just yet, an ESRB rating for the action-adventure featuring fast-paced combat and role-playing elements has now gone live. It's rated 'M' and contains blood and gore, language, suggestive themes and violence.Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Update: Here's the official Switch 2 trailer.Gameloft has this week released a dedicated Switch 2 Edition of its free-to-play racing title Disney Speedstorm on the eShop.Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Weapons of destruction! The post Pathogenic game Parasites tier list: Best ones to use appeared first on Destructoid.
Retro oddity.70’s-style Robot Anime Geppy-X has simply got to be the best kind of retro re-release.I’d never heard of this Japan-only PS1 scrolling shooter from 1999, but I had an absolute blast playing through its enhanced PS5 version, lovingly repackaged by Implicit Conversions – the studio behind PS Plus Premium’s emulated catalogue.Read the full article on pushsquare.com
A week after cautioning fans about a "quieter year" in new game releases, Ubisoft is teasing an update to mark the series' 25th anniversary.
Just in case that's of interest to you.
But what if I don't like the consequences of my actions?
Keep those saves intact.Make sure to keep your PS5 save data for The Blood of Dawnwalker on your console's SSD (or uploaded to the PS Plus cloud); you'll want to transfer it to future instalments in the series.Emulating what Mass Effect did with its own trilogy of games, it has been confirmed that a save data transfer option for the series Rebel Wolves is creating will be in place. Bandai Namco shared the exciting news after game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz spoke of the feature in an interview with Eurogamer.Read the full article on pushsquare.com
Not easy being green.The open beta test for Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls is coming up very soon, and it's a super generous one — but it's about to throw in a surprise bonus.Developer Arc System Works has confirmed that Green Goblin will be playable during the test, announced with this short video on social media:Read the full article on pushsquare.com
Put your money where your comment is
English, who won a BAFTA award for her work on Clair Obscur in 2026, says the decision was difficult but "personally necessary."
Alleged cybercriminals have to eat, too.
Drop Fake, in partnership with Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, has announced DCKO, a free-to-play DC …
Who asked for this one? The post DC Comics finally answers Marvel’s recent gaming slate with… a mobile fighting game appeared first on Destructoid.
Choo-choo-choose savings!
Forza Horizon 5 creative director Mike Brown has weighed in with his thoughts on the situation at Xbox currently, and one of the things he commented on was Xbox Game Pass. He said in an interview that Xbox Game Pass, simply put, was not able to attract enough subscribers to make it viable as a business, and this contributed to the pain Xbox is going through today. After all, we recently found out that Microsoft was hoping to have 77 million subscribers by now, but the number is actually only around 30 million. "That’s actually just really sad because we’re now going to see studios getting shut down or spun off," he told MinnMax, as reported by Kotaku. "Loads of people are going to lose their jobs. And that is honestly just a result of a well-meaning player-focused concept of Xbox Game Pass not quite landing. And I think that’s just, it’s just a real shame." Brown, who worked at the Xbox-owned Playground for years before splitting off to start his own company, said Game Pass is a "good idea," but Microsoft could not stick the landing. "If more people had subscribed, that makes enough money, and it works and and all those studios go on and those games get made again and those teams will make other games. Unfortunately, it didn’t," he said. Microsoft invested a "fortune" in making Game Pass work through its various acquisitions and funding efforts, Brown added. This was done with the vision of having a steady release of new games to help keep people subscribed and amass more members, but it didn't come to be. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma herself has acknowledged that Xbox Game Pass was a bet that did not pay off after Microsoft spent more than $80 billion buying studios to help funnel content to the service. Internal strife It has been reported for some time already that some inside Xbox did not buy into the vision for Xbox Game Pass and even tried to warn executives. Microsoft itself admitted that Xbox Game Pass could cannibalize full-game sales. Recently, reporter Jason Schreier said on the Triple Click podcast, "There are a lot of people out there in studio leadership within Xbox who absolutely detest Game Pass." He said these people think Game Pass has "destroyed the value of their games" and has been an overall detriment to gaming across the board "because of how it devalues games." A former Xbox studio lead, meanwhile, told Windows Central that launching games into Game Pass "almost creates an assumption that these titles could not sell on their own. It felt like a race to zero." So what happens next? Microsoft admitting that Xbox Game Pass is a bet that did not work out suggests the company may have some changes afoot for the service. Already, Sharma has cut the price of Game Pass and announced that new Call of Duty games will no longer be included in the service at launch, so some big changes have already been enacted. No one is expecting Microsoft to completely kill off Game Pass, but instead there could be other changes, like the kind of "windowing" of new releases that Microsoft has talked about. This would involve keeping key titles out of Game Pass at launch and for a period of time, similar to how movies are only available in theaters at first before coming to digital and streaming. The idea here would be to help maximize revenue with people paying full price before they are included in the catalog. New Call of Duty games, for example, now won't come to Game Pass until the following holiday season. So if you want to play Modern Warfare 4 on Xbox or PC at launch this year, you have to buy it outright, as it won't come to Game Pass until Holiday 2027 at the soonest.
Video games are getting more expensive. The PS5 and the Xbox Series X|S have seen significant price hikes, the Switch 2 is due for a $50 price increase in September, and seemingly overnight, $70 has become the normal asking price for most new releases.But for many, the gaming industry's slide towards an all-digital future could be the final nail in the coffin. For years, the secondhand games industry has represented a cheaper and more accessible way of getting into the hobby. But PlayStation's pending elimination of physical games means that a used market and public library access of games will diminish for new releases after 2028. Microsoft's mass of layoffs, studio sales, and project cancellations further indicate the direction the mainstream industry is headed: Fewer games at more premium prices for a wealthier clientele. There are a lot of forces to blame for this: the industry still realigning after the transformative boom-and-bust of COVID, the escalation of AI infrastructure making every aspect of computing pricey, tariffs making shipping anything to-and-from the United States prohibitively expensive. But all of this adds up to an onslaught that pushes poorer people out of the hobby. For this report, we spoke to gamers of all stripes. Some are professional content creators and journalists, while others are avid hobbyists and side-hustlers. They all shared a central problem: Rising costs have prevented them from upgrading their gear or playing the video games they want to play. This is not a comprehensive study, but it does offer a picture into what decisions and pressures players are feeling. Chris Edgerton is a freelance games writer, specializing in sports games and accessibility coverage. Since getting laid off from his regular freelance contract, his primary income is from SSDI payments. In our conversation over Discord, he emphasized, "We've been pushed into a space where no matter what, people are going to start thinking about games as a high-end luxury, right? Having a gaming device isn't like having a car--it's like having a nice car." Though video games are primarily a hobby for Edgerton, for years he has supplemented it with freelance writing, often justifying the cost of new games through the possibility of making that money back with a tidy profit. For journalists and critics like Edgerton, the rising costs of games results in loss of income, which further backslides into being unable to buy games. "Now I have to wait for sales on everything," Edgerton told us. Ashley Schofield, freelance critic and author of VA-11 Hall-A: Design Works, primarily games and reviews work on PC, but her computer's aging parts have made that more difficult. She told us over email that identifying technical issues with games is becoming more difficult. " [I have] to try to figure out 'Okay, is this genuinely an optimization problem with the game, or a case of it being CPU-intensive and that being, in a sense, on me?'" Cyberpunk 2077 is a great example of a gorgeous but technologically strenuous game. But upgrading her machine has proven fraught. Shofield lucked out on a graphics card from her brother, who sold it to her at a reduced price, but further upgrades to her rig are still far out of sight. "A better CPU is something I'd like to have, but struggle to justify. Same with the RAM, but to an obviously ridiculous degree," she said. Changing costs has yet to affect her ability to accept work, but she suspects that will soon change. "I haven't yet had to choose not to pitch [or] turn down a review due to being sure I won't be able to reasonably run it … but I think it'll happen within a year if nothing changes." Schofield's fear indicates another reality of these cost increases. While fewer and fewer gamers are able to afford new hardware, new games continue to demand more intensive machines. These same issues affect gamers with less professional investment in the hobby. Rodrigo is a lifelong gamer, but struggles to keep up with current releases. Over Discord call, he told us that he's always been "a generation behind" current consoles. Right now, Rodrigo mostly plays on a laptop he got six years ago. Though his computer has struggled with many new releases, like Marathon, he hasn’t been able to upgrade the system for years because of financial struggles. “Every single time that I've ever given serious consideration to upgrading… something ends up happening that ends up eating into my savings,” Rodrigo said. "“I have really been committed to squeezing every last bit of juice out [my current PC]." It's easy to compare this with prior generations, where the cost of consoles and associated technologies would decline over time. "At one point, it was a big deal that the PS2 was $99.That's an entry point. That's as low as these things are gonna get. And we're never gonna get the PS5 down to even $199. That's never gonna happen," Edgerton said. In fact, PS5 prices rose twice in the past year. A future where the PS5 drops even below $500 feels distant. Oh how we miss you, PlayStation 2. This is a contrast to most video game console cycles in recent memory. The PS3 and PS4, as well as the Xbox 360 and Xbox One, all got cheaper versions partway through their time on the market. Another gamer, Ty J., told us over Bluesky DMs, "When the PS5 got announced, I was in college and I thought, 'By the time I graduate and get a job, they'll have a PS5 Slim for $299.' Unfortunately, we live in the bad timeline, so not only am I still unemployed; the PS5 got more expensive." Even for people who have relatively up-to-date rigs, storage has become an increasing problem. Kyrie Page is an editor at indie website Scanline Media, which primarily produces podcasts and streams. She vented in an email, "The HDD cost has been the most frustrating. I wanted to build an NAS [network-attached storage] to hold things like streams [and] podcasts in one spot, and for a time that was very feasible. HDD prices were cheap and it wasn’t that hard to get a 12TB drive that you’d set and forget. But the data-center demands have vastly inflated the cost." The increased expenses make it hard for streamers and Let's Play creators to get started, or even keep back-ups of their own material. Outside of the AAA space, there are a breadth of alternative gaming cultures making retro-styled or otherwise low-intensive games which can run on any machine imaginable. “Friendslop” games like Peak or Lethal Company offer cheap, lo-fi thrills for entire groups of people. Rodrigo emphasized that not being able to access the cutting edge can lead to getting to more interesting places than new releases. “It does broaden the scope in terms of what you can engage with," he told us. "If you have the right mindset towards that, there's plenty of things that you can try and get a feel for that maybe you wouldn't have readily considered otherwise.” But if TikTok and Fortnite are major threats to the console space as it stands, those forces are even more brutal to the little guys. The fact is, homegrown games largely cannot be as honed and compulsive as Roblox or Candy Crush. This is a feature, not a bug, but it does mean that they cannot hold the cultural sway that those free-to-play games can. With a low barrier of entry--and plenty of ways they can financially prey on lower-income gamers--these titles are more likely to capture new audiences than anything else. Roblox is one of the most popular (and predatory) free-to-play games right now. "My hope is that all this stuff eventually cools down," Edgerton told me. "Either the AI bubble pops … Or the tariffs come down because Trump moves out of office and whoever takes over [wants] a bunch of political credit for [being] like, 'Oh, I just made all these electronics so much cheaper because I did this.'" While these hopes are not implausible, it is hard to predict what will really happen. Rodrigo was more pessimistic. He told us that, “We are now in an era where we are facing diminishing returns in terms of technological advancement, and it has done absolutely nothing to actually open up the playing field [so we can return to] a more accessible environment.” What feels certain, at least in the short term, is that games will continue to become more expensive. Video games consoles have always been a luxury item, but they have also served multiple purposes. The PS2, for example, was a way to get both a DVD player and a console. Additionally, its cheapness and ubiquity gave it sway in countries without a stable video game market. Both the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X are backwards compatible with prior generations, letting people import their physical and digital games into the future. Nintendo consoles have long been favorites of libraries, community centers, and retirement homes, often acting as ways to expand their event programming. What these all share in common though is that they are marginal use-cases. Nintendo does not design its machines for community centers, but for families of individual gamers. Backwards compatibility has always been intended to move unit sales, not to preserve gaming history. However, in their margins, all these things allow games to become a stranger, more expansive, and more welcoming space. The fewer people get to access games, the fewer people will be able to shape gaming culture. These margins still exist. But, at least for now, they are getting smaller.
Game director Mark Roberts said skipping it would be a "very, very bad way to go."
Pre-order players get five extra days of playtime.
"Tetsuya Nomura and I worked on FF7 and FF8 together, but then he was assigned to Kingdom Hearts," says Yoshinori Kitase
Return to the Cryo Archive.Marathon is a superb FPS, but it’s failed to resonate with a meaningful number of players.That’s left it floundering on its most popular platform Steam, while sales have been negligible on PS5.Read the full article on pushsquare.com
The idea was ultimately dropped, for good reasons.
No pre-order required.Activision and Nintendo have announced that an open beta for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 will take place next month from 28th August to 1st September 2026.Pre-orders will also kick off from 26th August 2026, though it's been clarified that you won't need to secure your purchase to take part in the beta. All you'll need is an active Nintendo Switch Online subscription and, naturally, a Nintendo Account. Beta Early Access has also been confirmed for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S, but Switch 2 will not be included in this.Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Full open beta runs 28th Aug - 1st Sep.Activision has announced its annual beta for the next Call of Duty title, this year being Modern Warfare 4, shall begin for those who pre-order on 21st August 2026. Five days of access will be provided, at which point the beta will go down for a few days and then return available to everyone from 28th August.Here's what those beta periods look like:Read the full article on pushsquare.com
Anyone else come across War Robots before?This week will soon kick into gear with lots of new Xbox releases on the horizon, but before we get there, we wanted to use this opportunity to highlight two "free" games that quietly appeared on the Xbox Store at the end of last week.Of course, they're marked down as "Free" on the Xbox Store but they're free-to-play games - meaning there are microtransactions involved if you want to pay for in-game benefits. Still, perhaps they're worth a try, especially in the case of War Robots which apparently has a whopping 325 million (!) players according to the press release we received.Read the full article on purexbox.com
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