The PlayStation 4 and Xbox are nearly 11 years old, but they are still surprisingly popular and used daily by a lot of people. That probably explains why Goat Simulator 3, released back in 2022 as a current-gen-only game, is now getting ported to the older consoles later this month. And this isn’t the first time that’s happened this year.
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Released on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S in November 2022, Goat Simulator 3is the sequel to the original Goat Simulator. (No, there isn’t a Goat Simulator 2.) The sequel expanded on the original 2014 game’s open-world antics and was well-received by fans of the first game. But perhaps you have yet to buy a PS5 or Xbox Series X/S and still want to play this wacky goat-filled sequel? Well, good news: Goat Simulator 3 will be available on PS4 and Xbox One on October 24.
On October 8, Coffee Stain announced that Goat Simulator 3 was making the leap backward to PS4 and Xbox One. (In August of this year Goat Sim 3 was ported to Switch.) This upcoming version of the game will include all the free content updates that Goat Sim 3 has received since 2022. Goat Sim 3‘s Multiverse of Nonsense DLC will also be available to buy separately on last gen.
If you already own the game on PS5 or Xbox Series X/S, you’ll be able to play it on the old consoles without having to buy it again thanks to cross-buy support. And the Xbox ports will support cross-saves across generations, too. It’s a nice gesture, though I’m not sure how many people who own Goat Sim 3 on PS5 will be loading it up on PS4 anytime soon.
This situation reminds me of what we saw with Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. That game launched on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC and skipped last-gen machines. But then in August 2023, EA confirmed it was porting the blockbuster game from Respawn to PS4 and Xbox One. Those ports arrived in September of this year and look pretty good. But it does feel like the last generation of consoles are lingering around more than usual.
Everyone saw this coming but it was still disappointing to see. Fans were salivating over the 30th Anniversary PlayStation 5 collection, a one-two punch of nostalgia and neat aesthetics, when it was revealed earlier this month. Today many of them stared blankly at PlayStation Direct pre-order screens as they watched them sellout while they waited in confusing online queues and battled glitched website buttons.
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The 30th Anniversary collection went up for pre-order earlier today and it turns out the limited edition PS5 Pro bundle, only 12,300 of which were manufactured, wasn’t the only thing that felt impossible to get. Pre-orders for the PS1-style PS5 slim bundle, PS Portal, and DualSense controller also disappeared almost immediately, begging the eternal question of why Sony doesn’t just manufacture as many of these items as people want.
Panic began overnight when anecdotes began pouring in from Australia and the UK that pre-orders, which became available at 10:00 a.m. local time in each region, began to immediately disappear followed by reseller listings popping up on eBay for anywhere from five to 10 times the suggested retail price. As the 30th Anniversary pre-order hour approached in the U.S., people tried to load the PlayStation Direct page early only to be thrown into a queue with estimated wait times of over an hour.
The initial confusion was compounded by the fact that Sony never really gave fans a clear idea of what to expect from the pre-order process. After unveiling the 30th Anniversary PS5 collection it just said they would be available to buy starting September 26 with no advance notice of an official start time or even the prices. Essentially how it worked is that people who tried to order from PlayStation Direct were put in a waiting room to get a random spot in line at which point they could order whatever was still left, which for most people, including myself, seemed to be nothing.
Was that because I didn’t get into the waiting room sooner? Or did I just get a bad place in the queue? Was there a better way to go about this whole thing? There were anecdotal reports of people getting to the store only to be tossed back into the waiting room. Once they were in the store, it was still confusing trying to buy stuff. Even items that didn’t show as sold out, like the PS1 DualSense controller, couldn’t be purchased when clicking “add to cart.”
It seems like people who just wanted the $80 controller actually had more luck going through retailers like Amazon, Best Buy, and GameStop, whose pre-orders for the PS5 controllers when up at the same time as PlayStation Direct. Those sold out fairly quickly as well, however. It’s possible that additional stock will be released in waves, as Sony did when demand blew supply out of the water with the original launch of the PS5. But I’m also not sure why Sony doesn’t just try to sell as many of the PS1-style controllers as possible, at least for those who order in the next couple of months.
It’s the cheapest option for fans wanting to be a part of the anniversary hype, or just really love the idea of channeling all those nights they spent in front of their original PS1 in the modern era. Maybe Sony was just testing the initial demand and will come back later with a bottomless Santa Claus bag of 30th Anniversary PS5 stuff come the holiday. If not, 30th Anniversary PS5 DualSense controllers are already going for up to $200 on eBay.
Image: Firewalk Studios, Sony / Firewalk Studios / Kotaku, Blizzard, Boss Key / PlayStation / Epic / Kotaku, Nintendo / Kotaku, Sony / Kotaku, Capcom / Kotaku, Screenshot: Nintendo / Kotaku, Microsoft, Photo: Michael Tullberg (Getty Images)
FThe biggest story of the week was probably the announcement that Sony was shutting down Concord, its big, expensive, long-in-development hero shooter, just two weeks after its disappointing launch. We’ve got the details on the original announcement, as well as reactions from across the internet.
In other news, rumors about Nintendo’s successor to the Switch are swirling, Sony sorta confirms leaked design images for a PS5 Pro, and disgraced streamer Dr Disrespect touts his return. All these stories and more are yours for the reading.
The icons from the banner (left) and the rumored PS5 Pro design.Image: Sony / Kotaku
Sony is beginning to ramp up celebrations for the upcoming 30th anniversary of the PlayStation brand. And new images posted by the company seem to include an icon of a console that looks a lot like the alleged leaked PS5 Pro design. Hmmm…
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The original PlayStation console launched in Japan in December 1994, so technically the 30th anniversary isn’t for a few more months. But Sony isn’t waiting until December to start celebrating its big 3-O birthday. On September 5, the company posted some announcements and plans to kick off the anniversary celebration. But the most interesting bit of news wasn’t located in the blog post. Instead, eagle-eyed fans spotted what appears to be a new PlayStation console in the 30th anniversary banner.
Check it out below. The left image is from the blog post the right image is from Instagram.
Image: Sony / Kotaku
Both of these images include a PS5 console with three lines across it. This perfectly matches a report last month about the still-unconfirmed PS5 Pro, which claimed that the console would feature three black lines across its front and that Sony was planning to officially announce the powerful new product “in the coming weeks.”
The Verge reports that all PS5 games released after September 16 need to support the PS5 Pro, which seems to suggest it’s going to be announced soon.
So is this banner image Sony playfully teasing its most hardcore fans with the first confirmed acknowledgment of a PS5 Pro? That’s what it seems like on Instagram, with Sony posting the banner containing the Easter egg and adding “Your first look 👀” as a caption. It’s also possible this is a really big mistake, though considering how many people had to look at and approve these images and the fact that they have remained up for hours, I’m leaning toward this being a teaser and not a screw-up.
Now we just have to wait for Sony to actually, officially, for real, announce the PS5 Pro, which is rumored to be launching later this year.
Baldur’s Gate 3just celebrated its first trip around the sun this past weekend. Have you, by chance, neglected to play the rightful Game of the Year 2023 (I’m not bitter) thus far? Well, if you have a PlayStation 5 and you’ve been waiting for the right time to jump into it, Larian Studios’ masterclass in RPG design is on sale.
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I tend to buy a lot of games right as they’re coming out so I don’t partake in PlayStation’s Summer Sale that often. But Sony’s cooking with gas this year and there’s still time for you to grab some of the best games on the PS5 for cheap. I’m just trying to scroll through the list right now and keep getting caught up on things I would buy if I didn’t already have them. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, the entirety of Hades developer Supergiant Games’ catalog, and plenty of other gems are on sale until August 14. But right at the top of the page is Baldur’s Gate 3, which has dropped from its usual price of $70 to a slightly less intimidating $55.99.
Larian’s Dungeons & Dragons RPG captured the hearts and minds of many an adventurer last year, and if you waited an entire trip around the sun to play it, now’s a great chance to do so on PlayStation 5. It’s got a few rough edges compared to its PC counterpart, but it’s still pretty damn incredible. Play it as your own custom character and live out your fantasy dream, smooch a bunch of complex heroes who are just trying to survive literal brainworms, and engage in some of the most complex tactical combat you’ll find on a PS5. If you haven’t jumped on it yet and you’ve got a PlayStation, now’s the time to see what all the fuss is about.
Microsoft shutdown the Xbox 360’s marketplace this week and nearly two decades after the console first launched it feels like the final nail in the coffin for a particular era of gaming we’ll probably never see again.
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The Xbox 360 came out a year earlier than the competition and $100 cheaper than the base PlayStation 3. It seemed to make all the right moves, using Halo, Gears of War, and Call of Duty to jump start online multiplayer into the soon-to-be dominant form of gaming, while investing it all back into indie curation, big exclusives, and marketing deal that made the console feel like the place everyone had to be.
In some ways it felt like the best of all worlds, and by the end of the generation you could pick up an Xbox 360 for just $100 and play dozens of the best games ever made. The culture was far from healthy, and some of the places making everything were a mess to work for. But it was also a fun time, and a weird one. Here’s what we’ll miss about it and why the Xbox 360 still feels so special to us.
Carolyn Petit: The first E3 I ever attended was in 2005, with the Xbox 360’s launch still some months out and I have to say, the games I saw on the show floor looked amazing. It’s hilarious to me now considering I haven’t even thought about this game in probably 15 years, but at that time, the game that blew me away the most was probably GRAW. Interestingly, though, despite my initial excitement about the console being rooted in its graphical power and my lust for next-gen spectacle, now, when I think back on what made the console so special to me, it’s not really about that aspect of it at all. What about you Alyssa?
Alyssa Mercante: I’ve told mine on Kotaku.com more than once, but I had borrowed my high school sweetheart’s original Xbox to play Halo 2 when he went away to college, but not long after that Halo 3 came out, which wasn’t backwards compat. So I went out during my free period in high school (we had an open campus for seniors, you could take your car and leave if you didn’t have class), and drove to a Target where I spent my summer job savings on a 360, Halo 3, and Xbox Live.
Ethan: I have zero recollection of the Xbox 360’s launch. What was I even doing at the time? 2005. Hmm. I was going into my senior year in high school, barely playing anything except for the occasional late-stage PS2 game—Shadow of the Colossus and Dragon Ball Z: Budokai, followed eventually by Okami and Final Fantasy XII. My only real memory of the beginning of that console cycle is my brother getting a PS3 and me having almost no interest in it. It wasn’t until my girlfriend’s roommate’s boyfriend in college got me hooked on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 that I finally picked up a super cheap used Xbox 360 arcade edition for like $150. That four years after the console launched but still somehow only the mid-way point.
Carolyn: Yeah, I don’t remember exactly when I finally got one myself—I certainly couldn’t afford one at launch, and my memories of the time around release have a lot to do with playing Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie (lol) at GameStop kiosks.
Moises Taveras: The first time I ever played an Xbox 360 also had to do with Call of Duty: MW2. It was all the rage with the kids in my middle school, but I was largely looking from the outside in as a) a PlayStation kid since my youth and b) someone who came from a family too poor to afford more than one console. But eventually, I made friends who had 360s and I remember us all cramming onto a couch in the smallest bedroom imaginable at our friend Howard’s house and playing local multiplayer matches till we lost our voices from shouting. I learned really quickly then that the 360 was synonymous with multiplayer and socializing with folks and it made me want one so bad. Little did I know I wouldn’t get a 360 till the very end of the console generation!
Carolyn: I think part of the Xbox 360’s dominance in that era can be attributed to the fact that it offered the best online experience for folks wanting to play Call of Duty, but it also did something incredible that totally won over people like me. I’m not saying I didn’t have an amazing time playing Gears of War co-op, I absolutely did, and huge credit to Microsoft for putting out a steady stream of banger exclusives that really made Xbox Live feel essential. But for me, when I think about the Xbox 360, what still gets me excited most is Xbox Live Arcade, and particularly amazing games like Pac-Man Championship Edition. Games like this took the arcade leaderboard competition of my childhood and absolutely exploded it. Suddenly I was staying up nights pouring everything I had into beating my friends’ high scores on online leaderboards for all the world to see. Man, it was incredible.
Moises: Supergiant Games’ Bastion absolutely blew my mind as far as what I thought games could be. It being a console exclusive to the 360 through XBLA broke my heart and kept me from the portfolio of what’d become my favorite studio, and then Xbox just kept pumping out indie titles like it. Honestly, my working definition of an indie game was largely informed by this era of XBLA games.
Xbox Dashboard Evolution 2001-2019 (Xbox Original, Xbox 360, One)
Kenneth Shepard: The Xbox 360 was the first console launch I was really tuned into the industry for. I was full-blown sicko mode for that thing as a kid, and was counting down the days. I was a huge Rare fan at the time and Kameo and Perfect Dark Zero were a huge deal to me. But broadly, I think I fell off video games for a bit because the system just didn’t speak to my tendencies. As Moises said, the 360 became the multiplayer system and I preferred gaming in solitude, and eventually pivoted to the PS3 in the final years of that generation. But I played the Mass Effect trilogy on the 360, so I ended up keeping an old 360 in my home longer than any other system. I had to replace the household 360 more times than probably any other system my family owned.
We got a launch window system that died by the time Halo 3 came out, so we had to replace it swiftly. Then I got my own 360 for Christmas 2009, just before the launch of Mass Effect 2. That sucker lasted over a decade. It gathered dust for large swaths of the time, but since I didn’t own an Xbox One, it was the only way for me to go back to my old Mass Effect trilogy saves until the Legendary Edition came out in 2021. So while I had mostly abandoned the system by the end of the generation, the 360 is still a defining system in my life because it gave me one of the most important video game experiences of my life. I’ll always be grateful for it, even if I think the Microsoft was a trailblazer for some of the industry’s worst modern tendencies with it.
Ethan: That was the other thing that I think tipped me in the direction of the Xbox 360 besides the price and walled multiplayer gardens. As someone coming from the PS1 and PS2, it just had more of the RPGs I was craving earlier or in better condition. I came to the original Mass Effect late but it blew my mind. I got to catch up on Star Wars: The Old Republic. It was synonymous with retro and couch-coop indie games for me like Castle Crashers and Super Meat Boy. It really did just nail a lot of the same things that the PS4 did a generation later and which ultimately helped Sony to reverse the tide.
Moises: it’s so weird to think about now given Xbox’s current situation and catalog, but the 360 was where all the games were!
Carolyn: Another thing that was a big factor for me, I have to admit, is that I was totally cheevo-pilled. The Xbox 360 brought about the advent of achievements and I got extremely excited about pulling off absurd things like beating Call of Duty campaigns on Veteran to get all the achievements. I no longer put much stock in achievements or trophies, but to this day I greatly prefer the at-a-glance number that reflects your achievements compared to all the trophies of PlayStation’s system. And on top of that, the whole interface on Xbox just felt so much more inviting to me than that on Sony. I think avatars were really smart of them to introduce in that era. I loved signing on and seeing little cartoon versions of all my good friends online, playing games of their own. In comparison to that, the whole interface of the PS3 just felt cold and impersonal to me, and that console would end up gathering dust in my entertainment center.
Ethan: The Xbox 360 home screen definitely felt a lot more inviting and hit that sweet spot of clutter to chill. The controller was also very solid. Have any of you gone back and tried to hold a PS3 DualShock? It feels like you’re being pranked. I take it none of you ever had an issue with red-ringing or other hardware failures?
Photo: Mark Davis (Getty Images)
Moises: Nope! Correct me if I’m wrong but those issues got ironed out with later iterations of the console, so by the time one of my best friends let me indefinitely borrow his 360, it was smooth sailing for me.
Carolyn: I did have to send mine back for repairs once, and for a while there at least, it felt like everyone I knew who owned one was hitting the red ring. There was a period there, at least in my circle of friends, where there was real disbelief and anger that Microsoft had sold us all a product that was so prone to failure. I think it speaks to just how fond people were overall of the console—its library, its interface, its online features—that today, when you bring it up, you’re far more likely to get fond recollections than bitter complaints. It was so good that even the considerable irritations so many of us experienced with it are now just a footnote in our memories.
Ethan: My console ended up red-ringing in like, 2012? But then I read that you can just put it in the oven and bake it at a low temperature to loosen up the glue. Has worked like a charm ever since.
Carolyn: Wow, I never knew that!
Ethan: I think one of the reasons people look back so fondly on the Xbox 360 is that, in retrospect, it felt like the last time you could contain the entirety of what was going on, coming out, and being talked about in your head at any given time. It was still very intimate and physical, with midnight launches and stacks of controllers in the split-screen coop session. There was spectacle with E3 but also the feeling you alone were discovering these incredible hidden treasures on Xbox Live Arcade, which was like a return to finding the internet for the first time again.
Carolyn: I agree. And they just had so many games that became sensations for a time, from Braid to Geometry Wars. The curation was exceptional, and it was an era in which it still felt like the whole culture, or much of it at least, could still come together for a few weeks around some exciting new downloadable game.
Moises: Yeah. By comparison, when the PS4 really started to pivot to those smaller more intimate games early in its lifetime, it wasn’t that those games were lesser, but it did feel like they were being more haphazardly thrown on the platform to fill gaps between big exclusives. Meanwhile XBLA had these clearly thought out rollouts and events that made a big deal of Arcade titles. Also everything was less shitty. Xbox Live Gold was the original multiplayer subscription, and the only one for quite some time, but it at least seemed to provide value with great deals and a platform that produced rock solid multiplayer hits. It also wasn’t as expensive as anything is nowadays.
Carolyn: Before we wrap things up here, I think we can’t talk about what an amazing console the 360 was without saying a little more about its games. Are there any games y’all want to shout out as particular favorites that really helped make that library great or were emblematic of what the console was doing? When I think about the 360, I think about how the grittiness of Gears of War coexisted harmoniously alongside the whimsy of Viva Pinata, and I’ll never forget the dozens of hours my friends and I spent driving around doing challenges together in Burnout Paradise. It really did feel, more than a lot of other consoles, like it offered something for everyone, and like the people behind it thought deeply about how to bring people together to share in the experiences it offered.
And even though some of its games were also on PlayStation, at least everyone in my friend group, won over by the cheevos and online features of Xbox, always bought multiplatform games there, which perpetuated the console’s dominance in that generation. It’s a little wild to think how this generation it feels somewhat the opposite for me, like most people I know play most multiplatform games on PlayStation. Wild how the tables have turned. But yeah, any other 360 shoutouts?
Moises: I cannot separate the 360 from the stunning role it did in promoting so many smaller studios to the mainstream. I already invoked Bastion from Supergiant Games, but I can’t not shoutout Limbo and Playdead, which has now delivered two absolutely singular game experiences in a row. Oh and Shadow Complex does still own.
Ethan: Limbo was incredible. While the indie darling backlash was fair and warranted, it was really an incredible run of curation there for several years. The Dishwasher games were great, and really spoke to that sense of Newgrounds 2.0 animating the grungy vibe of XBLA. It’s also wild how much Microsoft tried to court Japanese RPG fans with Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey. For me personally, Dungeon Defenders is still an all-time great. One of the last times I was able to rope friends into playing something for hours with me on a couch.
I was trying to think of my top five favorite 360 games, exclusive or no, and couldn’t stop listing stuff. The end of that console generation was so strong, on both 360 and PS3, maybe there’s hope that the Series X/S and PS5 pick up in their final years. But with massive budgets, long development times, and so much risk-averse consolidation, I’m not hopeful.
Carolyn: Whether it picks up to some degree or not, I think it’s safe to say that there will never be an era quite like that exemplified by the 360 again. The console was just perfectly poised to take advantage of a given moment in gaming culture and technology, employing exciting new ideas like achievements to build a sense of both community and friendly competition around games in ways that its library and online service leveraged brilliantly. Also, Sneak King was great.
Ethan: Any parting thoughts since you vanished, Alyssa?
Alyssa: LMAO. The time my 360 red ringed right before I went up for senior year of college. The day before. And I went out and bought another because not having one wasn’t an option. That or the time my mother heard me cursing out misogynists in Italian?
Ethan: Was it on the $3 phone bank operator Xbox 360 headset?
A screenshot I took while Remote Playing the Elden Ring expansion this weekend.Screenshot: From Software / Bandai Namco / Kotaku
I used to consider myself a certifiable cloud hater. I’ve never enjoyed my experiences trying to engage with cloud gaming, which allows players to stream their console games to PCs, smartphones, and dedicated handhelds, as well as adjacent remote play technology. In my limited experience, it was always too laggy, made the games look ugly as shit, and needed far too potent a signal to work even passably well. However, I went away this past weekend and didn’t want to lug around either of my consoles, so I gave it an earnest shot again and I must say, I’m pleasantly surprised with how far cloud and remote gaming’s come. – Moises Taveras Read More
A Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 campaign that looks like Mission: Impossible by way of an Adam Curtis documentary, a Gearsof War prequel that shows fans E-Day and the birth of the series’ iconic “Lancer” chainsaw gun, and a trailer that showed Perfect Dark isn’t just still alive, it’s potentially thriving. Microsoft’s 2024 summer showcase was the best that Xbox has looked going back to the Xbox One years. But it’s come at a huge price, and one the company doesn’t seem ready to acknowledge publicly.
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Insiders had been hyping the showcase for days, in part due to the fact that its full list of reveals and announcements had already leaked to some in the media and beyond. Fans have been burned before, expecting Xbox to finally turn a corner only to have the football pulled once again and realize the platform is still in another one of its inescapable “rebuilding” years. The proof is always in the games themselves, and how successful they are can only really be determined once they get into players’ hands. For now, though, the showcase delivered.
There was over sixty minutes of games big and small, offering everything from zombie survival to nostalgic teen hangout, punctuated by massive first-party franchises and third-party teases. If you own an Xbox Series X/S there will be plenty to play this year and next. Xbox game studios head Matt Booty’s perennial promise for a steady cadence of quarterly Xbox games worth showing up for might finally come true. The only thing missing from the event was any accountability for what, and who, Microsoft has sacrificed to get here.
It’s been just over a month since the company announced it’s shutting down three studios and reshuffling a fourth. One of the casualties, Tango Gameworks, and its 2023 hit Hi-Fi Rush, seemed to symbolize the best of Xbox in the Game Pass era: a hyper-stylized passion project from a newer team that wowed critics and won awards and wouldn’t have been possible without the “let a thousand flowers bloom” strategy behind the platform’s pivot to a Netflix-like subscription library. In a crushing reversal, however, the deep-pocketed tech giant cut the team, along with storied immersive sim makers Arkane Austin and others. According to internal comments from Booty and the head of parent company Zenimax, there just wasn’t enough bandwidth for one of the three most valuable companies in the world to manage so many studios.
The bad news and bullshit explanation might not have gone down like a lead balloon if Microsoft hadn’t announced mass layoffs just months earlier across several departments, including newly acquired Activision Blizzard. The cuts hit everyone from the Overwatch 2 team to Call of Duty makers Sledgehammer Games, and included the cancellation of Odyssey, a survival crafting fantasy game that might have become the first new franchise from Blizzard in nearly a decade. Microsoft spent $69 billion on the acquisition, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer toured the Activision Blizzard King offices shortly after the deal was finalized last fall, and then in early 2024 the mask came off.
Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer blamed the heel turn on a combination of investor pressure and the stagnation of the console gaming market in interviews with Game File and Polygon. In other words: capitalism. But the complete closure of Tango Gameworks, originally founded by Resident Evil director Shinji Mikami to train a new generation of creatives, seemed especially capricious. The Xbox team didn’t mention the developers it’s laid off and their contributions in its remarks to a live audience ahead of the showcase today, or during the pre-recorded event itself. (Even after learning its fate, Arkane Austin worked hard to push out Redfall’s much-needed final update.)
Instead, Spencer opened the showcase by promoting Black Ops 6 and the company’s desire to bring one of the most popular franchises to even more players through the power of a $17-a-month subscription. It maybe wasn’t surprising given the billions Microsoft paid to acquire the series, but the choice to open the show this way underscored the new reality of an Xbox brand that now needs to make a return worthy of all of those investments. “I haven’t been talking publicly about this, because right now is the time for us to focus on the team and the individuals,” Spencer told IGN later in the day, away from the hundreds of thousands of fans tunning into the showcase.
He continued:
It’s obviously a decision that’s very hard on them, and I want to make sure through severance and other things that we’re doing the right thing for the individuals on the team. It’s not about my PR, it’s not about Xbox PR. It’s about those teams. In the end, I’ve said over and over, I have to run a sustainable business inside the company and grow, and that means sometimes I have to make hard decisions that frankly are not decisions I love, but decisions that somebody needs to go make.
The showcase, meanwhile, didn’t even clear the bar set days prior by Geoff Keighley at the Game Awards host’s own showcase. Xbox president Sarah Bond, who responded with corpo word salad when asked about studio closures last month, closed out the Xbox showcase by pointing to the future instead of dwelling on the recent past. “It’s our mission to make Xbox the best place to play, by including our own studios’ games on Game Pass at launch, by bringing your games into the future with our commitment to game preservation, by pushing the boundaries in our future hardware, and to empower you to play your games wherever you want on Xbox console, PC, and cloud,” she said. “This is what defines Xbox today and in the future, and we’re hard at work on the next generation.”
It was a commitment aimed at reassuring fans still recovering from the shock of the brand’s recent pivots. But the future is built on the past, and every shiny new Xbox game now comes with the question of what will happen to the teams Microsoft has purchased or partnered with, once it no longer feels like they serve its bottom line.
Update 6/9/2024 9:10 p.m. ET: Added comments from Spencer’s post-show interview with IGN.
We’re now halfway through the life-cycle of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, but Call of Duty doesn’t appear to be giving up on the last-gen consoles that preceded them yet. A leak out of GameStop suggests that Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will still come to PS4 and Xbox One, but continue to cost the same as the $70 “next-gen” versions.
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An apparent photograph circulated by CharlieIntel shows the SKUs and prices for 2024’s Call of Duty in GameStop’s inventory system. The image lists Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PS4, with a $70 price tag for each, and the Xbox One version seemingly included via Smart Delivery. Insider Gaming reports that it’s been able to independently verify that the data in the image is real, and two GameStop employees Kotaku spoke with corroborated the claim as well, confirming that pre-order SKUs are currently live in their system.
If made official, this would be the longest that Call of Duty has ever remained cross-gen. When the series originally made the jump to PS4 and Xbox One back in 2013 with Call of Duty: Ghosts, it remained on PS3 and Xbox 360 for two years after that until Activision ditched the older consoles with Call of Duty: InfiniteWarfare. With Black Ops 6, PS4 and Xbox One will have continued receiving last-gen versions for a surprising five years in a row.
If you’re wondering why this might be the case, look no further than the fact that roughly half of PlayStation users are still playing on a PS4. The last-gen install base remains huge, and cutting it off from one of the most expensive games to make would be leaving a ton of money on the table. PS5 exclusives like Spider-Man 2 and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth already appear to have suffered poorer sales as a result of that.
Of course, Xbox players aren’t likely to notice the price hike anyway since most of them will be able to play Black Ops 6 with a paid Game Pass subscription. Microsoft is reportedly planning to bring the series to the Netflix-like library later this year, though there are also rumors that it might raise the monthly service’s price once it does.
Activision declined to comment.
Update 5/24/2024 5:45 p.m. ET: Added Kotaku’s own sourcing and independent corroboration.
It’s the middle of May 2024 and that means we’re nearly halfway through the year. What has this year been like in video game news? Tons of layoffs (sad), lots of new games (glad), and some weird outliers, as usual. This week, we saw set photos and official shots from The Last of Us season two, dove back into the GameStop stock market, and asked the dude who nuked Phil Spencer in Fallout 76 about his motivations. Click through for all of this week’s best breaking news.
Sony has named existing company veterans Hermen Hulst and Hideaki Nishino as the new heads of PlayStation. Hulst will take over and run a new Studio Business Group while Nishino is in charge of the Platform Business Group. The division of roles replaces former CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment Jim Ryan, who retired earlier this year, and comes as Sony searches for its next PlayStation 5 blockbusters amid cost-cutting and cancellations.
Thank You, PS Plus, For Making My Backlog Even Bigger
“Sony Interactive Entertainment is a dynamic and growing business that delivers incredible entertainment experiences through the connection of content and technology,” interim SIE CEO Hiroki Totoki said in a press release. “These two leaders will have clear responsibilities and will manage strategic direction to ensure the focus remains on deepening engagement with existing PlayStation users and expanding experiences to new audiences.” Both will continue reporting to Totoki who is also Sony’s President, COO and CFO.
Originally the head of Guerrilla Games, maker of Killzone and Horizon Zero Dawn, Hulst was promoted to head of PlayStation Studios in 2019 following the departure of Shawn Layden. He’s responsible for overseeing Sony’s first-party game development, including hits like Spider-Man 2 and God of War Ragnarök. Nishino was previously in charge of PlayStation platform technology and experiences, which he will continue to lead, in addition to now being in charge of third-party relations and commercial operations. Both men take over their new roles on June 1.
Ryan announced he was stepping down from PlayStation after decades with the company last fall. Earlier this year, Sony announced a series of cost-cutting measures, including hundreds of layoffs and project cancellations at its studios, and the closure of London Studio. The changes come as big-budget game makers try to negotiate spiraling development costs and a stagnating console gaming market. Sony’s big annual spring PlayStation Showcase is rumored to be happening later this month, though the company previously confirmed that no major new sequels were planned to release in the current fiscal year.
“I am thrilled to lead the Studio business group and continue to build on our success with PlayStation 5, while preparing for the future,” Hulst said in a press release. “The video game industry is one of the largest entertainment industries in the world and has been built on the marriage of content and technology, and I look forward to continuing to push the boundaries of play and entertainment.”
Earlier this week, Xbox announced that it would be shuttering several studios it had attained as part of its $7.5 billion purchase of Bethesda, including Arkane Austin, Tango Gameworks, Alpha Dog Games, and Roundhouse Studios, the last of which is being absorbed into another team. Collectively, the studios’ produced games like Dishonored, Prey, Redfall, Mighty Doom, Hi-Fi Rush, and more. These studios, and some of the more innovative titles that they developed, seemed at one point to be the future of Xbox’s floundering brand. After a downturn in many of Xbox’s large key franchises due to mismanagement, the shifting priorities of its audience, and the Xbox’s dwindling image across the world, titles like the ones these teams were developing seemed like the start of a promising new era for Xbox, one that might be marked by more creative, sustainably made games that weren’t designed to bleed its audience dry. – Moises Taveras Read More
After shutting down multiple Bethesda studios, Xbox and Bethesda leadership held a town hall meeting with staff to discuss the closures, explaining that the company’s studios had been spread too thin and that it wanted to focus on fewer projects moving forward.
Thank You, PS Plus, For Making My Backlog Even Bigger
On May 7, Xbox announced that it was closing three studios—Tango Gameworks (Hi-Fi Rush), Arkane Austin (Redfall), and Alpha Dog Games (Mighty Doom)—with a fourth support studio, Roundhouse Studios, being absorbed by the team behind Elder Scrolls Online. According to a new report, on May 8, in the aftermath of these surprising shutdowns, Xbox President Matt Booty and Zenimax head Jill Braff held a large meeting with staff and laid out the reasoning behind the cuts.
As reported by Bloomberg, during the meeting Booty praised Hi-Fi Rush, but wouldn’t go into specific details on why the studio behind the colorful action game had been shut down.
Speaking more broadly about the closings, Booty reportedly explained that Xbox and Bethesda’s studios had become spread too thin, like “peanut butter on bread,” and that team leaders felt understaffed. The idea being that by closing studios, Xbox would free up resources elsewhere within the company. Booty also told staff at the meeting that Akrane Austin’s closing had nothing to do with Redfallflopping with fans and critics.
Reportedly both Tango and Arkane Austin had pitched games to work on next, including a Hi-Fi Rush sequel and possibly a new Dishonored or similar single-player immersive sim-like game. Those likely won’t happen.
Braff allegedly said that she hoped the closing of some studios would allow Bethesda/Zenimax to focus on fewer projects in the future.
“It’s hard to support nine studios all across the world with a lean central team with an ever-growing plate of things to do,” she said, according to a recording Bloomberg reviewed. “I think we were about to topple over.”
Tango and Arkane were trying to hire more people while pitching new games, and both Braff and Booty reportedly suggested that the long, expensive road those teams faced before being able to release something new was the main reason for closing the studios, implying that it was just bad timing as Microsoft looks to trim down costs and overhead. It’s reported that more cuts are likely for Xbox, according to people who spoke to Bloomberg.
It’s also reported that ever since the massive $69 billion Activision Blizzard acquisition in 2023, Microsoft leaders have been ramping up their scrutiny of the Xbox division. The Verge reported on Wednesday that executives at Microsoft and Xbox had discussed not adding Call of Duty games to Game Pass, and raising the price of Game Pass Ultimate. However, nothing is concrete yet.
Microsoft’s leaders taking a bigger interest in Xbox might help explain why Booty and others are looking to cut costs. Either way, it’s likely more folks at Xbox will lose their jobs in the future.
If you’re paying for access to Nintendo’s Switch Online package, you too are probably perennially wondering whether you’re actually getting anything out of it, but then remembering it’s only $20 a year and it stores all your saves in the cloud. Thankfully, every so often a few more prehistoric games get added to assuage any remaining feelings of wastage. Today it’s Super R-Type, Wrecking Crew ‘98, and, er, Sugoi Hebereke.
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Obviously, only madness awaits those who try to fathom the workings within Nintendo, but it still bemuses me that these online libraries of decades-old games have been so slowly drip-fed. Right now, after almost six years of existence, Nintendo Switch Online—with today’s addition of Wrecking Crew—finally includes almost all of Nintendo’s in-house developed, US-released SNES games, conspicuously lacking its last, Wario’s Woods.
Alongside Sugoi Hebereke (Amazing Hebereke—a Sunsoft fighting game that no one cared about at the time, getting its first U.S. release), the game anyone’s going to care about in this collection is Super R-Type, essentially a souped-up port of the wonderful arcade/Amiga side-scrolling shooter game, R-Type II.
Stunningly hard, it was—amusingly—somewhat easier on SNES thanks to its atrocious slow-down that would occasionally bring the game to a total slideshow. Whether or not that will be replicated when playing it on Switch, we’re not sure.
I still find it a struggle to get too excited about Switch Online’s offerings. Things like online access and cloud saves seem like they’d be right and proper to just offer as part of paying for a console, and while 63 SNES games, 21 Game Boy games, and 71 NES games seems like a bumper library to play through, the fact that you can’t just download them to the system makes them a hassle to play, and most of them are obviously extraordinarily dated and tough to stick with.
The more expensive ($50 per year) and clumsily named Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack option improves things with 30 N64 games, 14 Sega Genesis titles, and a paltry 15 (admittedly excellent) Game Boy Advance games, which are a lot more tempting to get stuck into today. However, the lack of first-party GBA games on there is very disappointing, and only becomes more so with every announcement like this, that seems to prioritize unwanted SNES bargain bin guff. Where’s Wario Land 4? Where’s Rhythm Tengoku? F-Zero Climax, Pokémon, and more than anything else, Mario Golf: Advance Tour? Whine moan complain.
Anyway, it’s a big news day for all you Wrecking Crew ‘98 fans, and god bless you.
Sony’s PlayStation VR 2 is barely a year old, and it appears it’s not catching on like the PS5 when it launched in 2020. There are so many PSVR2 headsets unsold that Sony put the production of new units on hold, according to a Bloomberg report Monday.
Since its launch in Feb. 2023, Sony produced approximately 2 million PSVR2 units, each with a price tag of $550. However, the virtual reality headset has yet to take off with only 300,000 sold in the weeks after launch, as reported by Bloomberg last year.
It doesn’t come as much of a surprise. The PSVR 2 is limited to just the PS5, which means it’s up to the console’s library to entice people into buying the expensive hardware. While the PS5 has some great games, there aren’t many VR games to get excited about. So far, the most recommended games for news PSVR2 owners are VR versions of games already released on the console such as Resident Evil Village, No Man’s Sky, and Gran Tourismo 7.
There’s also the issue of the competition. The Meta Quest 3 comes at a slightly lower price point, but it works with PCs, opening it up to more games and applications. Then there’s the Apple Vision Pro, which at $3,500 is priced way higher than the PSVR2 but has taken up the spotlight in the mixed-reality space.
Even with lackluster sales of its PSVR2, Sony did reveal a new “xtended” reality headset at this year’s Consumer Electronic Show back in January. The new hardware featuring a flip-up visor is a joint venture with Siemens. This headset, however, isn’t intended for gaming and instead targets businesses and professionals looking to model 3D environments.
Sony is currently running a pretty awesome sale for a number of its first-party games, particularly those in the action genre. Whether you’re looking to check out Nathan Drake’s swan song in Uncharted 4, Sam Porter Bridges’ strange trip through the apocalypse in Death Stranding, or Kratos’ dramatic shift into sad dad mode in 2018’s God of War, there’s a ton here to check out.
Most of these deals are for PS4 versions, many of which you can upgrade to the PS5 version either for free or at a small cost. All of these deals run from now until April 1, 2024.
We also threw in a list of action-adjacent games you may wish to check out as well.
Last week, thanks to the Final Fantasy VIIRebirth demo, some old video game discourse returned and overtook social media: The use of yellow paint to mark certain in-game objects or ledges. All it took was a now-viral tweet of Cloud climbing some yellow rocks in the new demo and a comment about how yellow paint was a “virus” and, bam, the debate is raging all over again. Like a comet returning for another scheduled pass by Earth, the yellow paint topic has once again predictably appeared, leading to endless takes, jokes, threads, opinions, and arguments. Why is this topic so incredibly capable of sucking in everyone around it for days or weeks on end? Well, it’s not really because of the paint, but everything the yellow splotches represent. – Zack Zwiezen Read More
The Thaumaturge, an upcoming narrative-focused, turn-based RPG, was planned to launch in just a few days on February 20. However, the game has now been delayed until March as the developers and publishers hope to avoid a “busy” February and give the game more “breathing room.”
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As we warned late last year, the first few months of 2024 have been stacked with popular video game releases. This is bad news for folks hoping they could catch up on their 2023 backlog in what is usually a quiet time for the game industry, as the first weeks of 2024 have already delivered hits likePalworld, Helldivers 2, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Tekken 8, and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. And the rest of February isn’t empty, with games like Pacific Drive, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Star Wars Dark Forces remastered, and Skull and Bonesall launching before March 1. As a result of this packed start to the year, The Thaumaturge is going to wait for the dust to settle a bit.
On February 12, developer Fool’s Theory and publisher 11 Bit Studios announced on Twitter and explained in a press release that even though The Thaumaturge is already in the hands of some critics, it was going to be delayed until March 4 in order to avoid all this chaos.
“Taking February’s busy launch period into account and the opening for a better release window,” the two companies said in a statement, “we’ve decided to take this opportunity to give more breathing room so it receives the attention we believe it deserves. We want you to have enough time to enjoy the game in full, and we feel that the current release window is not the perfect moment for it.”
While folks who have been waiting to play the game are probably a bit sad that they have to wait about two weeks longer, it’s a smart move to get away from so many big and small hit games and try to find a bit of a gap in the release schedule to give your game a better chance to find an audience, as well as the attention of over-worked critics and content creators. We’ll have to wait and see if the move pays off.
The Thaumaturge, an isometric RPG set in 1905 in an alternate-universe Poland filled with magical powers and tough choices, will now arrive on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on March 4.
Image: Kotaku / Xbox / Thomas Mucha / Lukasz Pawel Szczepanski (Shutterstock)
Over the February 3 weekend, reports from different outlets and insiders claimed that a number of big, Xbox exclusives—like Starfield and Gears of War—could possibly end up on PlayStation 5 in the near future. Once the news spread around the internet, the most Xbox-pilled users and creators began theorizing, denying, mourning, and ranting to those within their Church Of Xbox circle and beyond. Then, Xbox boss Phil Spencer posted a vague statement, seemingly confirming something was happening but the faithful would have to wait until next week to hear what. Perhaps he thought this would calm the masses. It didn’t. Instead, for some devoted Xbox fans, it was confirmation that the brand they worshiped was leaving them behind. And they aren’t taking it well (though some remain pretty chill about the prospect of Starfield coming to PS5). – Zack Zwiezen Read More
Thursday’s Xbox showcase included some big games that I can’t wait to play. But if you tuned it right when the action started you might have missed the best part of the show: a series of fun pop-up facts and trivia about various Xbox-owned studios.
On January 18, Xbox posted its latest Developer Direct, showing off gameplay from a few big titles coming to Xbox and PC later this year and letting the people making these games talk about them in detail. (Hey, Geoff, take note.) It was a solid showcase and that new Indiana Jones game looks wonderful. But perhaps my favorite part of the event happened before all the trailers and gameplay. During a countdown before the Developer Direct started, Xbox flashed numerous fun facts about studios like MachineGames, Oxide, and Obsidian Entertainment.
I didn’t see a lot of people talking about these neat little pieces of trivia, so I wanted to take a moment and highlight some of them so we can all enjoy them after the fact. I love stuff like this. I also lovedPop-Up Videoon VH1 back in the day. Anyway, to the facts!
