Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Sony exec Jim Ryan confirmed first party games won’t launch into the newly announced subscription, unlike Microsoft’s approach with Xbox Game Pass. “We feel like we are in a good virtuous cycle with the studios,” he said, “where the investment delivers success, which enables yet more investment, which delivers yet more success. We like that cycle and we think our gamers like that cycle.” He continued: “[In terms of] putting our own games into this service, or any of our services, upon their release… as you well know, this is not a road that we’ve gone down in the past....

A new lighter model was spotted last month in Australia, though it was unclear what changes had been made. Now, YouTuber Austin Evans has ripped open the new model to discover plenty of changes (thanks The Verge). Watch on YouTube Eurogamer Breaking Newscast: Sony reluctantly raises PS5 price, but knows it can get away with it The new 1200 model is 200g lighter than the most recent revision and pulls a significantly reduced wattage, making it more power efficient....

The storefront appears to have changed overnight after Eurogamer yesterday asked Sony for comment. To understand this mess, we have to travel back to last year, so strap yourself in. Back in September, Sony made a dramatic U-turn on its decision to charge users to upgrade their PS4 copies of Horizon Forbidden West upon release, after previously stating it would offer free upgrades for its cross-gen launch titles. Sony also confirmed future cross-gen titles, including God of War Ragnarok and Gran Turismo 7 would not offer a free upgrade, but rather charge £10 for the upgrade as planned....

The detail was dropped rather unexpectedly last night, as part of an official Xbox Twitch livestream for the game featuring streamer Frank “Techniq” Ellerbe and Marvel’s Avengers lead designer Brian Waggoner. In an off-the-cuff comment, Ellerbe claimed his acting coach was actually the voice of She-Hulk in the game, to the obvious surprise of Waggoner - who stated that the character had not yet been officially confirmed. “You wanna funny fact about She-Hulk?...

Even though Spirit’s Eve has come and gone, this festival keeps the chill in the air and is the beginning of the busiest month in Stardew Valley celebration wise. The highlight of the Festival of Ice is the fishing competition. If you can catch more fish than the villagers, you’ll net yourself a couple of prizes. On this page: Date - 8th Winter Time - 9am to 2pm Location - Cindersap Forest Return to Farm at - 10pm...

Neon White is a hyperviolent card-based speedrunner that takes place in a heaven that feels more like hell. Inevitably, it’s a treat. Each brisk level sees you taking down a set number of demons as you make it to the exit. You have a standard blade attack and a jump on the left trigger, but the game doesn’t want you to use the blade very often. Instead, you collect other cards that give you different weapons - guns, say, with limited ammo....

That said, whilst that figure comes from SteamDB, Steam itself states the all-time peak is a more modest 30,044,046. In either case, though, it’s proof that PC gaming remains on the rise, even if the majority of those players were idling at the time (SteamDB estimates “just” 8.9 million were actively in-game at the time the record was set). Steam numbers have been rising since the pandemic began in 2020, with a previous previous peak of just under 30 million set back in March this year....

If you’re a dog person, you can play as a cute French bulldog puppy thanks to modder crubino. The Happy Puppy mod even changes most of the meows into woofs, and crubino hopes to add more to it, including customisation of the puppy’s fur. As a cat person, I think that’s barking mad… Modder hibrietas provides a modern staple for mods, the Jason mod. Taken from the infamous mall scene in Heavy Rain, meowing is replaced with “a pleading call to find your lost son, you terrible father”....

New Zealand streamer Rudeism (aka Dylan Beck) is known for his controller tinkering and, after a jokey Twitter post from Wario 64, took on the challenge of modifying the kids controller. Over two weeks, he modified the Fisher Price controller into a working Xbox controller and showed off his creation with a spot of Elden Ring. Beck used a clone of an Arduino Pro Microcontroller inside the controller and reassigned the various button inputs....

Unknown Worlds’ latest update - officially titled Living Large, or 2.0 to its friends - is described as a “labour of love for the entire Subnautica team”, and aims to address “a tonne of tech debt and [bring] across some improved code from Below Zero.” To that end, Living Large moves Subnautica and its follow-up Below Zero onto unified versions of Unity, enabling the developer to implement quality of life features, fix bugs, and performance improvements in Subnautica that were already available in the more recent game....

In its original guise, Paradise Killer was wonderfully idiosyncratic, a breathlessly stylish blend of visual novel and exploratory open-world murder mystery unfolding on the gaudy, sun-drenched Paradise 24 - part tropical island retreat, part shrine to a pantheon of preposterous cosmic gods - where players, in the role of Lady Love Die, must hunt for clues and cross-examine suspects to discover exactly who horrifically butchered the island’s ruling council. It’s at once a breezy, upbeat escapade - in large part thanks to its lively, appealingly diverse cast of characters (ranging from a fighter turned reluctant idol after a thankful god blessed her with the head of a goat to a blood-red skeleton eternally caught between life and death following a confession of true love) - and genuinely unsettling as its slow ebb of cosmic and human horror builds insidiously beneath the surface....

The survival game - which also boasts detective elements - will initially release in Early Access. The team also confirmed that a free prologue, which gives players “a chance to test the game’s core mechanics”, is “coming soon”. “A mysterious experiment drove the population of Erlsen Island crazy,” the game’s description teases. “The authorities have isolated the region from the outside world and sealed «the incident». As a detective Howard Chapman, you secretly arrive on the island to look into the cause of the accident....

Both were announced last night during publisher Nacon’s latest showcase, with RoboCop: Rogue City coming from Teyon, the developer behind the very wonky Terminator: Resistance. RoboCop: Rogue City will be a first-person shooter, and of the two new games looks to be one we’ll see launch first - in June 2023 for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. Let’s take a look: And yes, RoboCop movie actor Peter Weller is indeed back to provide his voice, as well as his visual likeness....

“We have a special treat for you this month,” started 343 community writer Alex Wakeford in a very in-depth blog post yesterday. “Something that becomes part of the great journey of many Halo fans is learning about all the stuff that didn’t make it into the games over the years,” he teased before revealing, “I can confirm we are working on a rebuild of the original E3 Earthcity scenario that makes it playable in modern retail Halo 2....

This week, developer Neon Giant released an update (2.1.4.0) for The Ascent on Xbox and Windows 10 platforms that was meant to bring parity with the Steam version. That is, it included DLSS support for Windows 10 (and, as a result, the Game Pass on PC version), as well as co-op, stability and mission fixes. However, players have reported that this patch has negatively affected the cyberpunk-themed twin-stick shooter, including hits to framerate, stuttering and asset loading problems....

Things begin with a jump - a scare as you open a door that then leads into a bit of one-on-one combat with one of The Callisto Protocol’s more standard enemies. The twist here is that enemies in The Callisto Protocol can mutate. After you engage them in combat some tentacles will start spurting out of their torso. Shooting or otherwise battering them in the tentacles will put them down faster, the mutation acting as a kind of weak spot, but miss your fairly short window and those enemies will evolve, gruesomely, into much more resilient, aggressive opposition....

The new video from developer Striking Distance Studios is entitled “The Truth of Black Iron” and invites us to discover “what terrifying secrets lie beneath Black Iron Prison in The Callisto Protocol”. You can check it out below: Following last week’s report that a phone number hidden in a recent The Callisto Protocol teaser led to the discovery that an announcement was imminent, we knew something was coming, if not quite what it was going to be....

The employment profile - which was reportedly updated in January 2022 - comes from a new starter at Bethesda, who reportedly joined the studio in talent acquisition just this month. “Bethesda Games Studios sets the benchmark for open-world gaming and is currently in full production on Starfield, its first new universe in 25 years, and pre-production on the highly-anticipated The Elder Scrolls VI,” the profile - now unavailable - reportedly said (thanks, Gamereactor)....

This is one of the best prices we’ve seen for a monitor that is QHD (1440p) and has a refresh rate of 165Hz. This means the monitor is ultra-responsive as well as good to look at, so you’ll have a big advantage over your opponents in CS:GO or Valorant if they’re playing on less responsive panels. There’s different things you need to do to get the most out of the 165Hz panel....

Let’s be clear here, while we’re not exactly big fans of the Ark concept, the new version of the game is completely transformative. It’s one of the biggest improvements we’ve ever seen, turning the game from a hideous, unplayable mess into one of the more impressive Unreal Engine 4 titles we’ve seen on Nintendo Switch. It’s been rebuilt from the ground up and addresses virtually every criticism we had of the original game....