Gotta be honest… the amount of PR emails about Steam Next Fest demos is completely untenable. You’re gonna have to start curating the demos for the right creators if you want any sort of coverage cause at this point it’s just noise. Just being honest from the media side.

Man City to face HUGE points deduction which will guarantee relegation - and more could come next season - but they won't be sent down to League Two, insiders tell OLIVER HOLT.

Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave Expansion Pass announced youtube.com/watch?v=9tDRjYdG… Wave 1: today (additional weapons) Wave 2: Holiday 2026 (additional outfits, allies) Wave 3: 2027 (new stories - Bertrand/Talimun/Orchel/Anatolia, allies, classes, and more)

2026's top PlayStation and Xbox first-party games by revenue (@alineaanalytics estimates). We already covered Forza. So some other highlights: Wolverine takes #2, with $192.9M in revenue generated via 2.5M copies sold on PS5. Our estimates show that two-thirds of players have played for over 10 hours, 54% over 15 hours, and 31% over 20 hours. Then, trophy data shows that about half of Wolverine’s players have finished the main story, but just 12% have got the platinum trophy (full completion). Wolverine is a short game, with its main story taking about 12-15 hours to finish, with little else after. Around 31% of the copies sold are physical. I expect that many folks will ultimately sell or trade in their copies. MLB The Show 26 is just behind Wolverine with $192.7M in revenue, up 23% on The Show 25 (launch aligned). Remarkably, Xbox accounts for 48% of The Show 26 revenues, punching far above its weight relative to the platform size. A potential reason for this – beyond the US being Xbox and baseball’s #1 market by a country mile – is that MLB The Show 21 to 24 launched day-and-date on Game Pass, but not MLB The Show 25 and 26. This introduced plenty of Game Pass subscribers to the franchise, getting them in the yearly loop. For context, 3.3M folks played MLB The Show 24 via Game Pass. Game Pass helped build Xbox’s MLB audience, and pulling it off is now converting some of that audience at full price, which has big implications for when Xbox inevitably (in my opinion) takes day-one games off Game Pass. I reckon we’ll see MLB The Show 27 doing even better, as an influx of casual gamers in the States upgrade to the PS5 and Series X/S for GTA 6 (MLB is not on last-gen consoles). Gears of War: E-Day’s sales have ticked up a little since we covered it last week. It’s now generated $42.1M in revenue – about three-quarters on Xbox. It’s sold 311K copies (210K on Steam, 101K on Xbox). As mentioned in our post last week, 722K folks paid for the Game Pass premium upgrade, so over 1M people paid something for E-Day (separate from the Game Pass subscription, that is). Saros is now at $40.4M via 521K copies sold. Copies sold have essentially flattened out at this point, despite two discounts to $49.69 (including one happening right now) that have barely had an impact. This makes sense, given the insane number of single-player releases happening right now, including some around that price point. A Steam release would pump up these numbers, but PlayStation has seemingly abandoned a single-player cross-platform strategy. Catch the full write-up on Substack!

Today we're standing up XBOX LABS (labs.xbox.com). Here is the note that I sent to the team: Team, The first video games emerged some 75 years ago. In the time since, there have been booms and busts, but every year there are more great games to play, more devices to play them, and best of all, more people than ever playing. That growth helped make XBOX what it is today, and we've helped shape the industry in return, from bringing hard drives to consoles and online gaming through Xbox Live to Game Pass and cloud gaming, alongside franchises that have brought millions of people together. In recent weeks, we've seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support. Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple Silicon or ported to run inside a browser through WebAssembly and WebGPU, the latter now approaching 90% global browser support. Perhaps more surprisingly, we've seen many of the biggest games in the world have been remixed into the source code of another. These experiments challenge long-held assumptions about our industry: the tether between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play, and how people discover and experience games. While it is hard to predict the future of gaming, it is easy to see the possibilities in making great games easier to access, giving old games new life and allowing more players to become creators and co-creators. These are unmistakably good outcomes for players, even when (and sometimes because) they challenge our existing business models. To explore these possibilities, I’ve asked Scott to stand-up XBOX LABS, a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience. We'll build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating. I think XBOX has an important role to play here. Coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software. Games share many of those same properties, and people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing XBOX games, roughly five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide. We've spent 25 years learning how to make great games, and I want our game makers to help shape what these new technologies make possible. As we learn, we’ll share the tools we build with developers across the industry, just as we always have. Our priorities aren't changing. We remain committed to the 4Cs, to making great games, to our hardware and to being responsible stewards of IP and the communities built around it. LABS gives us a way to explore new technology that is game design led without abandoning the work already underway. Asha