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Study Finds Almost Half of PS5 Disc Backlash Came from Fake Accounts
A new study has put a number on the backlash that followed PlayStation’s August blackout initiative, and the figure is striking. Cyabra, which analyses online conversations, found that almost half of the responses to official PlayStation channels promoting the campaign were “inauthentic” – in other words, not from genuine accounts. The context is the company’s decision to stop producing physical games in 2028. That plan drew an immediate reaction from players who prefer discs, and the response on social media was loud enough to become a story in itself. The study suggests a significant portion of that noise was manufactured. That does not mean the anger was fake. This is the important distinction. A study of this kind measures the proportion of accounts and posts that look automated or coordinated, not the sincerity of every person who objected. Real customers can be genuinely unhappy while bots amplify the same message, and the two are...
Hideo Kojima Shows There’s No Hard Feelings After Physint Axe by Visiting Sony City
Hideo Kojima has been photographed outside Sony City, and the timing is hard to ignore. The visit comes roughly a month after PlayStation cancelled Physint, the espionage action game he had been working on, in one of the more shocking turns of recent years. The story did not end there. Xbox stepped in to back the project, rescuing what had been positioned as a spiritual successor to Metal Gear Solid. That reversal left plenty of PlayStation fans frustrated, and it turned a straightforward cancellation into a much bigger conversation about platform loyalty and where creative talent ends up. Which is what makes a casual photo noteworthy. Sony City is Sony’s Tokyo headquarters, and a visit there is not confirmation of anything on its own. People meet for all sorts of reasons, and a picture proves only that someone was standing outside a building. But in a medium where fans read meaning into every post...
Xbox Polling Players on Whether Fallout, Elder Scrolls, or Even Minecraft Should Go Exclusive
Xbox is asking a section of its own audience a question that cuts to the heart of its platform strategy. According to a report from Windows Central, with images authenticated by journalist Jez Corden, the company has been surveying users on whether franchises such as Fallout, The Elder Scrolls and even Minecraft should be turned into console exclusives. The questionnaires reportedly went to selected Xbox Insiders rather than the wider player base. That detail matters. Insider programmes are routinely used for market research, and a survey is not an announcement, but it is a useful signal of which questions the company is currently weighing in public. Call of Duty, pointedly, is not part of that question. The report’s summary is blunt about it: it is not an alternative. Anyone reading the survey as a hint that every major franchise in the portfolio is about to be walled off should temper that expectation. Exclusivity is...
PS1 Classics on PS5 Keep on Coming in Dino Crisis 2, Out Next Week
Capcom’s Dino Crisis 2 is coming to PS5 and PS4 through the PlayStation Store next Tuesday, 20th October 2026, continuing the steady flow of PS1 classics onto modern hardware. The release will be available through PS Plus Premium from day one, and it will also be sold separately for anyone who prefers to own it outright. There is one caveat worth knowing before you clear space on your hard drive: don’t expect Trophies. Sony’s classic programme has added Trophy support to some re-releases and skipped it for others, and this one falls into the second category. For trophy hunters, that removes a familiar excuse to replay a favourite. Dino Crisis 2 originally arrived on the original PlayStation, part of a wave of Capcom titles that took familiar genre frameworks and pushed them in stranger directions. The series is built around dinosaurs rather than zombies, and that shift changes the texture of the tension: predators...
How to run an indie game studio: Part 3, Dealing with issues
The third part of this series on running an indie game studio arrives at the point where theory meets the daily grind. The first two instalments dealt with the foundations: articulating what a studio stands for and the values that shape its decisions, then setting objectives that give a team direction over both the long term and the immediate future. This week’s subject is less exciting, and the series says so directly. Dealing with issues is the unglamorous half of running a company, the part that rarely appears in postmortems or anniversary posts but consumes an enormous share of a founder’s attention. That is not a complaint so much as a description of the job. Small teams are exposed to every kind of problem at once: a build breaks, a contract slips, a collaborator disappears, a platform changes its rules. None of these are dramatic individually. Together they can swallow whole weeks. The temptation...
“I wanted to make the show I wanted to watch” – How Galaxies found a place in the crowded showcase landscape
Tomorrow marks the launch of the fourth Galaxies Showcase, a milestone for an event that has carved out a specific place in an increasingly crowded calendar. Since the pandemic reshaped how games are announced, digital showcases have multiplied to the point where a single week can bring several hours of trailers. Galaxies has positioned itself in the middle of that spread. Its lineup leans on indie and mid-tier games, sitting deliberately between the smaller, purely digital indie partnerships at the bottom of the market and Geoff Keighley’s high-profile show at the top. Platform holders occupy their own tier alongside, with events like State of Play and Nintendo Direct carrying a weight that few independent shows can match. That middle ground is harder to hold than it looks. A show needs enough exclusives and reveals to justify attention, but it cannot outbid the platform holders for the biggest announcements. Its advantage is agility: a smaller...
