The Last Of Us 2 VR is coming soon. PCVR is COOKING right now! LETS GOOO! ⤵️Full video in the comments ⤵️ #PCVR #VR #VirtualReality #SteamFrame #Quest3

Gears of War: E-Day has sold 230K copies (@alineaanalytics estimates). Steam accounts for 168K of those, with Xbox (console and PC) selling 62K. But there’s more to this story, as Xbox makes up the bulk of revenue (almost three-quarters). On Xbox, Game Pass is cannibalising much of the premium revenue. Our estimates show that 1.7M folks accessed E-Day via their subscription rather than a copy. But Xbox is having it both ways – or having it halfway, at least – via its Premium Edition Game Pass upgrade. Game Pass subscribers could pay $30 (or their local equivalent) for up to five days of early access starting October 1. Our estimates show that of the 1.7M who accessed E-Day through Game Pass, 722K paid for the upgrade. Between the review embargo lifting on October 1 and the full release, E-Day managed to shift another 250K early-access upgrades – no doubt helped by the campaign’s rave reviews. So despite selling far fewer copies on Steam, Xbox accounts for almost three-quarters of the revenue (roughly $26M of the $37M, versus about $11M on Steam). So “230K copies” undersells the paying audience. Including the 722K upgrades, nearly 950K people actually paid something for E-Day. While E-Day is a sublime game (it's made my top 10), these are soft numbers for a flagship when Xbox badly needs revenue wins. E-Day sold 62K copies on Xbox against 722K Premium upgrades, so for every one copy sold on Xbox, nearly 12 Game Pass upgrades were sold. The $70 premium SKU is – functionally – dead on Xbox. In a world without day-one Game Pass, many of these folks would have bought E-Day at $70. They paid $30 for five days early access to something they don’t own. Xbox is, in effect, charging its most valuable customers the least, based on a hangover from a tried-and-exhausted strategy from a previous administration. Those 722K willing-to-pay players generated about $21.7M via the upgrade. If three quarters of this group – mostly US and European audiences – bought E-Day outright, that’s nearly $40M. Of course, Game Pass does bring in meaningful recurring revenue, and E-Day is adding value for hundreds of thousands of subscribers. However, Game Pass is no longer growing, so Xbox is at a crossroads. Normally you can’t see what a Game Pass player would have paid, because the game’s just there in the subscription. But the $30 early-access upgrade estimate shows that 722K people demonstrated they’ll spend real money on this game. Xbox is reportedly looking to do a Netflix and bolt on an ad-supported tier to pad it further. But that will just set a new floor, and leadership keeps telling us the priority now is revenue growth, which is subscriber-speak for ARPU. Xbox has already pulled Call of Duty from day-one Game Pass after day-one inclusion hammered its sales, with new CoD titles now arriving on the service around a year late. We know that some Microsoft executives believe the service devalues games outright, and rumours (which Microsoft has dismissed so far, to be fair) suggest that day-one releases could be taken off Game Pass. When a game this bloody awesome and well-reviewed does this softly on its home platform, the model – not the game – gets brought into question. Which leaves Xbox at a crossroads. Will it keep making Gears games when the financial returns are this thin and the margins this low? And if it does, does the next one arrive off Game Pass at day one – the way CoD now does, or on PlayStation? More, including player crossover and playtime distribution, on the new Substack.

While the excitement for GTAVI and XBOX is great to see, it has also led to some misreporting. We are looking forward to launching GTAVI on XBOX November 19, though the game will not be streaming exclusively or to PC.

First PSSR came to PS5 Pro. Now Quick Spectral Super Resolution (QSSR) is coming to PS5. Details on new upscaling tech, coming first to Marvel’s Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei: play.st/4hjL9yo

Update on Xbox's "Reset": ▪️268 roles are being eliminated across Halo Studios, Xbox Game Studios management and other first party teams ▪️Rare and World's Edge will be under Activision ▪️Activision will develop the next Halo title ▪️Halo Studios will continue with a small team 'supporting the Halo community and games in-market' ▪️Obsidian will now be under Bethesda ▪️Turn 10 will merge with Playground Games as one studio, focusing on Forza and Fable ➡️ news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/09/… #Xbox

The Firewall Ultra servers are shutting down on the 17th. I'll be doing one last stream of the old girl tomorrow to mark the sad event. Pencil it in your diary. Firewall Ultra | The Final Stream youtube.com/live/eCOYxv56gm4…

As confirmed earlier through our official channels, in mid-June of this year, we unexpectedly received notice from PlayStation Studios that they would cancel the PHYSINT project. PHYSINT is an important project both to me personally and to KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS. Determined to keep the project alive, we have spent the last three months searching tirelessly for a new partner. In the course of seeking advice and pursuing negotiations with people across many fields, we found in XBOX a partner with whom we share a common vision for the future, and we have decided to team up with them once again. Please rest assured that development of PHYSINT, our genre-defining action-espionage title, is ongoing and will continue moving forward.

Did you roll across Hyrule Field? In The Legend of #Zelda: #OcarinaOfTime on Nintendo Switch 2, you can now dash by holding the A Button (you can still roll if you really want to).