It was only last August that Sony raised PS5 console prices in the US, blaming a "challenging economic environment" at the time. Today it has slightly tweaked the phrasing to "continued pressures in the global economic landscape," but the outcome is the same: price rises across the board, this time even affecting the PS Portal handheld. Starting April 2, the price of the standard PS5 (that’s the one with the disc drive) is going up to $650. That’s a whopping $100 hike, or $150 if you go back to before the August price increases. The Digital Edition is getting the same increase, up to $600 from $500 since August. But the most eye-wateringly huge bump goes to the PS5 Pro, which will now cost you $900, $150 more than its (already very high) previous $750 MSRP. If you managed to pick up a Pro during last year’s Black Friday sale, when its price was slashed to $650, then you’re probably feeling pretty smug right now. Even the PlayStation Portal is getting a $50 increase, up from $199 to $250. The Portal has gotten a lot more capable in the last 12 months, but $250 for a device that can’t run any games natively might make a purchase harder to justify for a lot of people. In a blog post, Sony acknowledged the impact of prices increases on its audience, but said after "careful evaluation" that it was "a necessary step to ensure we can continue delivering innovative, high-quality gaming experiences to players worldwide." Global economic turbulence is affecting the entire games industry right now. Valve has already pushed back the launch date for the Steam Machine, while the ongoing RAM crisis could also be to blame for Steam Deck stock shortages. Microsoft also raised Xbox prices twice last year, and earlier this week Nintendo announced that some of its physical first-party Switch 2 games will soon be more expensive than purchasing the game digitally. While Nintendo has experimented with this kind of pricing structure before, it might point to the increasingly prohibitive costs of making and shipping products right now.

There were two questions I was looking to answer as I fired up MLB The Show 26. First, how much does the game cater to a baseball newbie like me? Second, will it keep me hooked enough to keep playing after my first few games? I think it's important to share some personal context. I have very limited experience with baseball. I have been to one MLB game, which was on my first visit to Canada as a teen. The lead-off Toronto Blue Jays hitter scored a home run on his first at-bat. Fireworks went off and everyone was going wild. Fun! But that was the only score of the whole game. My dad and I (both lifelong soccer fans, for what it’s worth) were bored lifeless for the rest of the three hours. An incredible run of a dog playing a baseball game at Games Done Quick aside, I had no real interest in the sport for the next couple of decades until the Blue Jays made a deep run into the 2025 playoffs. This time, now as a Canadian citizen, I bought into the excitement and watched all of the World Series last year. I was enthralled. I slowly started to appreciate the nuances of pitching, the skill of trying to make every pitch look identical at the time the ball is thrown to hopefully hoodwink the batter. Friends who are in-the-know tolerated my most basic of questions about how everything works as the postseason wore on. Now, I’m planning to watch a lot more games this year and MLB The Show 26 arrived at just the right time to get me ready for the new season. Sony's San Diego Studio seemed to be speaking to me, personally, when the first thing the game asked me to do was select my preferred playstyle. The Competitive track was definitely out for now. The Simulation option offers an “authentic MLB experience that plays true to player and team ratings.” I wasn't quite feeling that either. As a newcomer to all of this, I had to select the Casual style. That’s billed as “an easier, fun, pick up and play experience with an emphasis on learning the game.” Exactly what I needed. I was immediately impressed with how deeply you can customize the gameplay, even if the vast array of batting and pitching options in particular felt a little overwhelming. Using both a thumbstick to aim and button to swing at the ball seemed too much for someone who has no idea as yet how to read pitches. Dipping my toes in slowly was surely going to help me avoid getting too frustrated too quickly and uninstalling the game, so I chose to keep everything as simple as possible. I’m not switching off options like automated bullpen warm ups for a long time, if ever. Finally, after about 20 minutes of fine-tuning some settings in the tutorial, it was game time. Instead of jumping into the Road to the Show career mode, an online match or another exhibition game to get my feet a tad wetter, I next tried the Storylines feature. This is what really drew me into MLB The Show 26. San Diego Studio has been sharing the stories of several notable players from the Negro Leagues in the last few editions of the series. I know very little about baseball history outside of household names. So I was fascinated to learn about the likes of Roy Campanella, who debuted in the league as a 15-year-old catcher, and Mamie "Peanut" Johnson, the league's first female pitcher. The developers did a fantastic job of connecting these athletes' stories to playable moments from their playing careers. Cutscene insights from Bob Kendrick, the president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, tied everything together quite beautifully. Great stories are such an effective way to pull you into a sport and to start learning about it. Stories connect us more than just about anything else. The default difficulty in the Storylines mode was much higher than I dealt with in my first washout game. Still, that gave me a chance to practice the Competitive playstyle without having to play a full game or the stop-start nature of the tutorial. My pitching was less accurate, so figuring out how to compensate for that made for an interesting challenge. Batting was a lot tougher too, with balls travelling faster and pitchers trying to trick me. At first, I was swinging at every ball, but that clearly was the wrong idea. I tried to be more judicious and wait to see if a ball was breaking, but that meant I was swinging too late and fouling or giving the fielders an easy catch. That's a tricky conundrum to solve, and I'll need a lot more practice before I dream of playing online. I'm not even going to get started on how woeful I am at catching. And yet all of this deepened my appreciation for baseball. There's so much more nuance and complexity to the sport than I realized until a few months ago. And even as someone who doesn't typically enjoy turn-based games, I found myself getting into the swing of it... so to speak. I'm never going to care about Diamond Dynasty, MLB The Show's take on Ultimate Team modes in EA Sports games. I can't see myself diving into the team management-focused Franchise mode, in large part because I don't yet have a strong enough understanding of stats to have a decent handle on what makes a specific player great in their role. And as much as I like the idea of the Road to the Show career mode — in which you can stick with a player from their high school days all the way to a Hall of Fame induction — I don't think I can invest enough time into that to make it worth the effort. I did find the answers to the two main questions I had about MLB The Show 26. It does a bang-up job of easing a baseball newbie like me into the fray. I'm eager to keep playing as well. I don't think MLB The Show has quite enough pull to keep me away from my actual forever game, Overwatch, for too long. But I can absolutely see myself playing it on a second screen while streaming some MLB games this season. After all, I'm always on the lookout for a great story. MLB The Show 26 is out now on PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch.

Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has revealed more details about its upcoming title, Stranger Than Heaven, at the Xbox Partner Preview stream. While previous teasers showed that it was going to be set in the 1910s and 1940s, it turns out its gameplay will span five different time periods: 1915, 1929, 1943, 1951 and 1965. The game’s events will also take place in five different cities. Ryu Ga Gotoku has yet to reveal what the locations will be based on, but the setting for 1965 seems to be Kamurocho. That’s the fictionalized version of Tokyo’s Kabukicho entertainment district in the studio’s games, the Yakuza and Judgment series. One time period seems to be set during winter, while another focuses on a hot spring town. It’s clear from teasers and the new trailer RGG released that new title will share Yakuza’s aesthetics and maybe even its fighting mechanics. The studio has yet to say whether it will be connected to the Yakuza series, but fans believe Stranger Than Heaven could focus on the beginnings of the yakuza clans that appeared throughout the franchise. RGG Studio will reveal more details about the game on another stream with Xbox on May 6 at 7PM Eastern time. For now, you can watch the trailer below for a preview. Take note that while the studio has teamed up with Xbox for these reveals, the game will also be available on Steam and the PS5.

The spooky, yet cozy, game Grave Seasons is coming out on August 14, which was announced at today's Xbox Partner Preview event. This is basically Stardew Valley, but set in a Lovecraftian nightmare of a town. Players farm, mine and romance villagers, but also solve murders and deal with the occasional bloodthirsty demon or two. It looks fun! This is being published by Blumhouse Games, which is a division of the film studio that pumps out modern horror hits like Happy Death Day, M3GAN and Five Nights at Freddy's. Perfect Garbage is the development studio behind the game, which previously made the narrative-driven cyberpunk title Love Shore. Grave Seasons is coming to just about every platform out there, including Xbox Series X/S, Steam, PS5 and the Switch. It's truly a golden age for cozy gamers. This isn't the only cozy game with a darker undercurrent. Titles like Graveyard Keeper, Cozy Grove and Spiritfarer have all experimented with this idea. Even Nintendo's recent smash Pokémon Pokopia is set in some kind of post-apocalyptic world.

Dispatch was one of 2025’s standout titles and one of the best narrative games in years, which made its no-show on Xbox all the more puzzling. Luckily, that’s being rectified this summer. Announced during today’s Xbox Partner Preview broadcast, Dispatch is coming to Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC and Xbox Cloud later this year. It will also be an Xbox Play Anywhere title at launch, so you can play it on your console and continue on your PC or Windows handheld, or vice versa. ICYMI last year, the game is pitched as a superhero workplace comedy by developer AdHoc Studio, which was founded by a group of ex-Telltale developers. You play as the excellently named Robert Robertson, a recently out-of-work superhero who’s talked into reluctantly taking a 9-5 desk job that involves him dispatching other heroes. Dispatch is an episodic game, which rolled out gradually on PS5 and PC last year but will presumably be available in its entirety straight away when the Xbox version arrives. Gameplay is divided between interactive narrative segments that will feel familiar to anyone who played Telltale’s previous titles, and the management sim-like dispatch missions. Dispatch has also since made its way to Switch, but that port was highly controversial after it emerged that some of the game’s content had been censored. I would assume that all nudity and explicit content will be present and correct in the Xbox version, which will cost $30 or $40 if you want the Deluxe Edition, which includes four digital comics and a digital artbook. A firm release date was not announced in the stream.

Stalker 2 is getting its first DLC, titled Cost of Hope, this summer. The expansion and its general release window was announced during today's Xbox Partner Preview showcase. It's been more than a year since the base game finally released, closing a long development cycle that was disrupted by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, where the studio GSC Game World was initially based. Stalker 2 was released on PlayStation 5 in the interim, but otherwise, the team has been focused on making this substantial DLC. Stalker 2: Cost of Hope will add two new regions and a new story that takes place alongside the events of the base game. You still play as protagonist Skif as you negotiate between two factions, Duty and Freedom, that have opposing views of the Zone and how to approach it. The blog post teased that there will be a second expansion on the way to close out the full Stalker 2 story as a trilogy. For now, the survival-horror saga will continue when Cost of Hope drops for the Xbox Series X/S, Xbox Cloud, Xbox on PC, PC and PlayStation 5 this summer.

If you’ve been (impatiently) waiting for Hades 2 to hit Xbox Series X/S and PS5, there’s some great news for you coming out of Thursday’s Xbox Partner Preview showcase. Supergiant’s roguelite action RPG is coming to those consoles (as well as Xbox on PC and Xbox Cloud) on April 14. It’ll be available on Xbox Game Pass too. The full version of Hades 2 hit PC and Nintendo Switch last September after over a year of Steam early access. It was one of our favorite games of 2025. This time around, you play as Melinoë, the sister of the original game’s protagonist, Zagreus. Melinoë has a longer dash than her sibling, a sprint ability and more of a focus on area-of-effect attacks than ranged projectiles. You can also expect tough bosses along two separate paths, animal familiars, a range of modifiable weapons and messy romances.

The Serious Sam game franchise is back with a new entry, giving the FPS series a co-op roguelite twist. Basically it's getting the Nightreign treatment in the same way Elden Ring did. The latest title is Serious Sam: Shatterverse, where teams of up to five players will take on waves of perennial foe Mental's monster goons. Each run will offer the usual roguelite approach of upgrade options to make your team more powerful. And if you're a long-time fan of the series, the trailer has plenty of the same broad, loud humor; for instance, the three upgrade cards shown are all ball jokes. Behavior Interactive, the studio behind Dead by Daylight, is helming the project. Serious Sam: Shatterverse will arrive on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox on PC and Xbox Cloud some time this year. Considering the first quarter is nearly over, the team is probably targeting the second half of 2026, but that's only a guess.

AMD just revealed the Ryzen 9950X3D2 Dual Edition desktop processor, which is a beastly follow-up to last year's 9950X3D. This is the company's first desktop processor where both chiplets have been equipped with AMD's proprietary 3D V-Cache technology, which seems like a boon for gamers. Each chiplet includes 104MB of cache, offering an incredible 208MB total on-chip cache. "208MB of cache means more game data, more assets and more working data sitting right next to the CPU cores," AMD Senior VP Jack Huynh explained in an announcement video. Just like last year's release, the 9950X3D2 features a 16-core processor based on the Zen 5 architecture. This new release has increased to a 200W TDP, compared to the 170TDP of the original. This could indicate an increase in speed and performance, but with more heat output. AMD says the chip will be great for both gaming and for creative workloads, like compiling game engines, running AI models and rendering 3D objects. The company says it can deliver a five to 10 percent performance boost when using applications like Unreal Engine, Chromium, Blender and DaVinci Resolve. Last year's 9950X3D chip was already an absolute powerhouse, so we are looking forward to putting this one through its paces. The Ryzen 9950X3D2 chip will be available on April 22, though we don't have a price just yet. The standard 9950X3D currently costs around $675.

Nintendo just announced it will soon start charging different prices for first-party Switch 2 games based on whether the content is digital or physical. This could actually be a good thing for those who like to download their games instead of heading to a brick-and-mortar store to pick up a copy, as digital titles are getting a nice discount. It starts with the release of Yoshi and the Mysterious Book on May 21, which will be $60 on the eShop but $70 at retail locations. Prior to this, most first-party games were $70 no matter how you bought them. I prefer downloading games, for convenience, and paid that much for both Donkey Kong Bananza and Pokémon Pokopia. It's yet another blow, however, for consumers who prefer physical media. They aren't getting any kind of a discount, and many Switch 2 cartridges don't even contain the game nowadays. The boxes include game key cards, which allow the user to download the title to the console but are basically paperweights after that. This isn't the first time Nintendo has participated in this kind of dual pricing structure. The digital version of Donkey Kong Bananza was cheaper than the physical version in some parts of the world, including the UK. Is this another sign that making and shipping actual things is getting to be prohibitively expensive? There are storage and memory shortages due to AI and oil shortages due to war, not to mention an ever-shifting tariff policy here in the US. It's tough out there.

Sony is shutting down Dark Outlaw Games, a first-party game studio led by former Call of Duty producer Jason Blundell, Bloomberg's Jason Schreier reports. Before leading Dark Outlaw Games, Blundell was the head of Deviation Games, which was an independent studio, but also happened to be developing a PlayStation game before it shut down, Schreier says. Dark Outlaw Games had yet to announce what it was working on, but considering Blundell's experience with the Call of Duty franchise, it seems likely the studio was developing a multiplayer project for PlayStation. Blundell was a programmer and producer at Activision before making the jump to Treyarch to work on Call of Duty 3, and he contributed to multiple Call of Duty: Black Ops games after that, including serving as the director for the campaign and Zombies mode of Call of Duty: Black Ops III and the career and Zombies modes of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. The studio's shutdown is being paired with cuts to staff at PlayStation focused on mobile development, according to Schreier. Sony has made a habit of laying off staff and shutting down studios in the last year, seemingly as a way to retreat from an earlier investment in online, live-service multiplayer games. The company shut down Bluepoint Games in February following attempts to get a live-service God of War game off the ground. Sony also closed Firewalk Studios after the spectacular failure of multiplayer shooter Concord in October 2024. And a year before that, Naughty Dog officially abandoned work on a standalone multiplayer version of The Last of Us in December 2023. That leaves Sony with at least two Horizon Zero Dawn spin-offs, a co-op game from original developer Guerilla Games and a MMO from developer NCSoft; Fairgame$, which is still in active development despite the departure of Haven Studios head Jade Raymond; Arrowhead Game Studios' Helldivers 2; Bungie's Destiny 2 and Marathon; and if you really want to stretch, Gran Turismo 7. Sony clearly hasn't given up on producing online multiplayer games, but it's not hard to characterize its attempt to expand into the space as a disaster.

At the close of a video announcing the second season of Splitgate: Arena Reloaded, the company's co-founder and CEO Ian Proulx revealed that "a small section of the team" has started work on a new game. He said that the next project will be a movement shooter in the style of Titanfall and Black Ops 3. Those two tidbits are really all that 1047 Games had to share. People can sign up to participate when playtesting begins, but considering the latest release is only just hitting its second season, it's a safe bet that we'll have a while before this project gets a title and a trailer, much less a release window. Splitgate is a well-made game with smart traversal and movement mechanics, so it's likely that they'll have good ideas to bring to this sliding and gliding subgenre of FPS. Whether players will continue supporting 1047 Games is a different question. The studio leadership bungled a lot of things in the past year, starting with Proulx's questionable fashion choices and even more questionable handling of said choices. 1047 Games also pulled a bait-and-switch with the release of Splitgate 2, yanking it back to beta after release and cutting jobs before re-releasing and reimagining the sequel as Splitgate: Arena Reloaded in December.