@MUG3NHC I did! Thanks for the heads up, much appreciated.

Eternal life of Goldman has looking amazing since first showing. Hopefully it hits.

@RoomWithaMoose That's more on the developers and WHEN they place the notification. Some are truly obnoxious and it's seemingly an afterthought right at a key emotional moment in a game. But occasionally there are good ones. I've had a few that made me laugh too when something random I do in game gives me an trophy / achievement.

Bloated, repetitive and unwieldy by most accounts... but also highly successful. As a company I can understand wanting that, as a player... hell no. But I fell off the AC train a while ago.

@bestuardo The third Jedi game is exactly what I was worried about.

I've only played a little of the Halo Remake but it was quite disappointing imo. It LOOKS lovely, but looks can be deceiving, it didn't quite FEEL right and lots of small things added up to it being a bit disappointing, enough that I stopped playing after a few levels. Maybe it gets better, but I didn't stick around to find out.

And so it begins... sadly all too predictably

EDIT: Devs from Bioware, EA Originals, Criterion, Respawn all should be planning for the worst.

Sadly I expect job losses, and the opposite of what they say.

Innovation? No i'd expect more sequels and big IP. Probably the closure of EA Originals and other actually innovative programs.

How many I buy will depend on reviews and how much time I have, but maybe buy 2 or 3 at launch. Play another 2 or 3 on Game Pass and the rest will have to wait for 2027.

DAMMIT I voted wrong, meant to include Control Resonant, definitely want to support the studio if it's good.

You should have added November... just GTA 6 (almost) for the lols.

Also just to give another view. I liked Signalis in places, but didn't think it was the masterpiece others do. The gameplay was a bit too slow and clunky for my tastes, but I loved the art and world. Still worth trying to see what you think.

Always appreciate the reminder. Thanks.

@DennisReynolds @AhmadSumadi I think Sony was always right to pursue more live services, however it was HOW they went about that, and the studios they seemingly indirectly pushed towards making them that never made sense (RIP Bluepoint).

This is a much better fit, partner with a talented studio who has made a string of great fighting games already and give then a huge IP, a decent budget and a large marketing push to elevate them. It looks great.

@Athrum Ah beat me to it!

@ShogunRok Everyone assuming it's Wolverine's arse, my first thought would have been Mystique.

@Enuo When do we expect the new GTA Online to release? The original was 2 weeks after GTA V. But they haven't mentioned anything as far as I am aware - I still think it might be a standalone F2P release that could really mess up everyone's scheduling in 2027 too. Might have to dodge GTA twice!

Absolute insanity.

Series S up £180 from its launch price of £249.99 to £429.99 a whopping 72% increase.

Series X up £220 from launch price of £449.99 to £669.99 an almost 50% increase.

Unlikely I feel. With game pass and play anywhere Xbox have already transitioned most of their players to digital. We see it in physical sales charts too.

Anecdotally I have both a XSX and a PS5 yet while my PS5 have had dozens of discs in it my Xbox has had just one… a £1 copy of Anthem from CEX which I played before the servers shut down.

Looks good, will be interested in reviews to see if they successfully managed to get away fr its origins. Most games that start as a live service and convert don’t.

@Oram77 Prices are expected to keep going up for the next few years. At the moment it's RAM and SSDs but CPUs and GPUs are expected to go up soon too.

Releasing earlier may in fact be cheaper.

@Questionable_Duck Depending how it sells I suspect the sequel remakes will probably make it to PlayStation too, and probably any multi-player live service element. A new campaign is harder to see... but if this sells well...

Been pretty off Marvel, but Spider-Man: Brand New Day looks great, will try and catch it at the cinema before holidays.

@Swandivetotheasphalt Snarky!

Come on, google is your friend, this was reported last year. As we said at the time this is being done to deliberately make physical look even weaker to fast-track the push to an all digital future. Jump forward 12 months and guess what is happening... the playbook is disappointingly predictable and transparent.

So, this appears to just be a fluctuation due to release schedule timings. The overall trajectory is very much downwards.

Firstly that is just an estimate. Second that is including shadily count physical game key cards as digital sales despite them selling at retail. (Re: Sony those SHOULD 100% be counted as physical sales, they were sold at retail in a box)

More widely no one with any sense is denying that it is trending down generally, but it's still a large slice of the console market when counted fairly. What we are up in arms about is how misrepresentative some of the numbers being parroted here are. And because they are being misinterpreted it is making physical look even smaller than it actually is. At least be FAIR about the numbers. E.g.

• What does the NEW Day 1 Physical v Digital split look like (incl. games sold at retail as physical), I bet you it is MUCH closer than the long term catalogue that is on sale digitally and discs are harder to get hold of.

@add286 I don't think anyone with half a brain is denying that physical market share is generally declining. Digital is the future... at least till cloud takes off. But what we are pushing back on so strongly is how the actual percentages are being misrepresented on console. Many aspects are deliberately stacking the numbers in digitals favour, it isn't a fair apples to apples comparison.

If they actually represented it fairly, comparing like for like, e.g. Day 1 physical v digital sales, and not dodgily counting game key cards as digital sales, then the numbers would be far more even.

BTW I don't really blame publishers for presenting the data this way it's in their best interest to push hard for digital as they make more money, in their shoes I would likely do the same. But I strongly resent that the media like Push Square just freely accepts their data without even the slightest bit of scrutiny. It's sad to see.

@add286 How about the fact that Capcom's physical sales jumped a whopping 133% year on year (i.e. 2.33 times as much as last year), don't you think that deserves mentioning somewhere in the article.

By comparison digital console sales "only" went up 49.6%.

And all this physical growth DESPITE the fact that all Capcom's recent Switch 2 games (RE: Requiem, Pragmata, SF6) are game key cards that they shadily count as digital sales.

@Krlozgod I don’t really blame Capcom for presenting the data like this, they want to move to digital only asap as they will make more money per sale. They will present in whatever way enables that.

But Push Square and others lapping it up without even scrutinising the numbers to see what they are hiding is highly disappointing. They could have led with Capcom’s digital to physical ratio on console was 6:1 last quarter which is grounds for some optimism. Or they could have gone with Capcoms physical sales increased a whopping 133% YoY - also true. (Edit)

Instead we get this negative piece that heavily skews the numbers by including digital only PC on a PlayStation website. Shady AF.

@2here2there your numbers are all wrong but I agree that the numbers are deceptive. On console it’s around 20.4% physical 79.6% digital which is still a sizeable amount.

You are misreading the chart.(Edit)

Except it REALLY isn’t. As reported 60.4% of those sales are on PC where they are all digital. That means that on console around 20.4% of sales are physical and 79.6% digital. Around 1 in 5 console sales of Capcom games are physical, that’s still a very sizeable chunk, don’t you think? (Edit - numbers are a little off, shouldn't do calcs at 3am!)

Is it so easy to pull the wool over your eyes @shogunRok?
Frankly I expected more thorough reporting. E.g.

Capcom reported their physical sales went up a whopping 133% YoY. Where’s that in the article?

@tdolla2000 Keeper was brilliant and well worth a play. It starts slow but gets better and better as it goes along ending with a satisfying crescendo.

Kiln was an online multiplayer game and thus not for me.

Love stuff like this. Lots of history, and happy memories.

Agreed. There's also the fact that Japan Studio used to fill a gap in the market of smaller games on PlayStation. Whereas nowadays there are hundreds of smaller high quality indie and AA games releasing on PS5 every year, that gap no longer exists, there's nothing to fill.

I miss Japan Studio, but I think it was right to consolidate them into team Asobi.

What people forget is that Japan Studio was no longer the studio it once was when it closed, a lot of the top talent had already left and it was primarily a support studio at the point of it's restructuring.

However I hope they will invest some more in Team Asobi and perhaps enable it to grow and become a two team studio, or more.

Will play on Game Pass

Yes they need to sort this and a dozen other things out.

But really they just need to keep discs and consumer choice.

@EfYI Depends on the game. In a bit of friend slop T-posing would be fine, hilarious even. But a dark gritty story about the repercussions of war? Hell no! T-pose just breaks that immersion, it's awful.

Looks great to me. Hopefully they can pull it off. Two of my most anticipated games. I will try to play both at/around launch. Fable probably via Game Pass on XSX - though I might buy it on PS5 if the Pro version is a large step up.

@KingPev I want to, but I also have 100+ other games i've already bought and not played. Same old story: too many games not enough time! One day.

I want to give this another go but I was VERY disappointed at launch, buggiest I have played in years with everything from sound bugs, to floating items, to T-posing characters.

I played for 2 hours and dropped it as it just wasn't finished and broke any sense of immersion. While it was perhaps understandable the state the game was in considering the conditions the game was made in, it still made it a horrible experience.

Unfortunately it left Game Pass before I came around to it again.

NO THANKS.... it's hideously addictive!

Fable, Metro, Tomb Raider, Persona and now God of War... February is already stacked!

Looks great. Looking forward to playing it in due course.

@ShadowRJ Agreed, sadly. Boycotts like this just don't work in big enough numbers, and if anything it probably has a chance of backfiring when so few people take part that is just emboldens Sony.

No. They will get all the same metrics as soon as you login again.

@TedLassoNikes In fairness Digital lovers may actually get some benefits if Sony can delay increasing games to £80 because they get around 50% more per sale of both First and Third party game sales digitally they might be able to keep them at £70 for longer.

They might also be able to subsidise the cost of PS6 a little more if they are making more money from each game sale. There are POTENTIAL upsides, but that's a lot of "might", personally I love discs and the guarantees that come with them.

@Balaam_ Sony would still get the metrics when you log back on.

I will be participating...

@ButteredCrumpet I agree I was actually discussing with Mat on social media. He is just presenting data, everyone else is running away with it.

Though he still hasn't answered my question about if 7 games this year have sold over 100k physical in the USA how many have done that digitally. I don't really like presenting single bits of information like that without context or comparison.

Two other takeaways from this data

• physical media is GROWING for the first time since 2009
• almost three quarters of PS5s sold have a disc drive

That is all. (my point is we can all cherry pick statistics)

Would have made sense to at least make this issue free.... without all the "free"* account shenanigans.

Even better make it viewable in game, perhaps as an animated cutscene as @Ravix suggested.