ENTERTAINMENT

Last week, after years of hopeful speculation, Sony’s Santa Monica Studio announced it will be remaking the original God of War trilogy. T.C. Carson, the original voice actor behind Kratos, stepped in front of the camera to reveal that the project is in the “very early” stages of development, and that we’ll have to wait a little longer for any of our questions to be answered. And there are a lot of questions.

Will this be a graphical facelift à la Bluepoint’s Demon’s Souls, or are we revisiting Greece with the Norse duology’s controls and overhauled game design? If the latter, will Kratos have a companion accompanying him to Pandora’s Temple and the Isle of Fates? Will there be a blacksmith NPC popping up in expected places to provide armor and weapon upgrades? Will we be able to jump and fly, like in the original games? And what about those sex minigames?

That last one almost sounds like a joke, but fans who’ve brought them up seem to be deadly serious. “You better not edit out Aphrodite,” one of the top comments on the announcement video posted to the official PlayStation YouTube channel warns, referring to the particularly graphic minigame from God of War 3. “Do not censor original material,” reads one of the – as of the time I’m writing this article – 256 replies to that comment. “Dont ruin it.”

For PlayStation users, Amazon’s been an excellent place to scoop up some new video games recently thanks to its big selection of discounted PS5 titles. At the moment, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is among the many options on sale right now at the retailer, but it’s not just its PS5 version that’s dropped in price.

Both the PS5 and Xbox Series X versions are on sale at Amazon for $29.99 (50% off) and $29.60 (51% off), respectively. If this RPG – which we even awarded as a runner-up nominee in our awards list of the best RPGs of 2025 – has been on your wishlist, now is your chance to grab it at a great low price.

Save on Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2

Barack Obama has clarified a recent interview in which he said aliens are “real,” insisting he saw “no evidence” that extraterrestrials have made contact with us while he was U.S. President.

Obama set the internet alight over the weekend when he told American podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen that aliens are “real but I haven’t seen them” during a quickfire “lightning” round of questions.

“They’re not being kept in Area 51,” he continued. “There’s no underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States. Obama then admitted his first question after becoming President of the United States of America on November 4, 2008, was where are the aliens?

Now, Obama has issued a clarifying statement on Instagram, insisting he issued the comment with “the spirit of the speed round” of questions. He then expanded on his prior thoughts.

“I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it’s gotten attention let me clarify,” he said.

“Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there. But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”

This isn’t the first time Obama has spoken about aliens, of course. In 2021 he told late night TV host James Corden that once he became President, he asked whether there was a lab “where we’re keeping the alien specimens and space ship.” “They did a little bit of research and the answer was no,” he added. However, Obama acknowleged footage and records of objects in the skies “that we don’t know exactly what they are.”

In 2023, the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released a report detailing official sightings of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs). Many of the phenomena continue to defy explanation, and were described as exhibiting “unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities.” According to the report, UAP reporting was “increasing,” which is “enabling a greater awareness of the airspace and an increased opportunity to resolve UAP events.” As of August 2022 there had been 510 UAP reports.

The Pentagon’s public attitude toward sightings of UFOs — now rebranded as UAPs — has shifted dramatically in recent years. Notably, in April 2020, the government made a surprise move to declassify three videos captured by instruments aboard U.S. Navy aircraft, which, having previously been leaked to the public in 2017, depicted encounters with fast-moving unknown objects.

After the report was published, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson pledged that the agency would not conceal the existence of aliens, if they were discovered to be the cause of any UAP it is working to investigate.

Photo by Kyle Mazza/Anadolu via Getty Images.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Following last week’s Star Wars: Galactic Racer gameplay trailer reveal, I sat down with the game’s makers for an in-depth chat revealing its new systems and story mode, and a proper discussion on why this marks the triumphant return of track-based racing, after so many open world games.

Galactic Racer is the first project from British studio Fuse Games, which was founded in 2023 by a core of former colleagues from Criterion, the beloved band behind Burnout and later Need for Speed titles, before it got gobbled up to become part of Battlefield Studios.

Now, as Fuse Games’ team races towards a galaxy far, far away, I caught up with its CEO and founder Matt Webster, plus creative director Kieran Crimmins, for an intriguing chat on what’s to come.

Obviously you’ve been announced for a little while now, but I’ve been looking forward to seeing more from the moment Fuse Games was announced, considering your long heritage at Criterion. And the game looks great, from what I’ve seen of it.

Matt Webster: Was it along the lines of what you imagined?

Well, I remember you did that GI interview and you were sort of hedging your bets on what genre of game you were going to be working on… And I was like, ‘they’re clearly making a racing game, I don’t even know why they’re pretending.’

Kieran Crimmins: [Laughs] We’ve made spaceship stuff before, so that was possible. It’s not [what we’re making] but possible. Who were we kidding!

Maybe you were working on another Battlefield game! But probably not.

Crimmins: [Laughs] Yeah, fair enough.

I had lots of questions about what kind of racer you guys were planning to make — open world or not, and we’ll get onto that. But when you made that announcement about first setting up, did you have an outline of what you wanted to make? What was that journey like from leaving Criterion to the announcement of Star Wars?

Webster: We thought we were going really fast, but we’re three years old now.

Crimmins: That’s crazy it, you’ve made whole games in that time before. [But] we’ve never set up studios in that time.

Webster: That is true. Where this comes from is, first of all, a shared love of racing and a shared love of Star Wars. But when there’s a new studio, new team, new tech, new creative… every time there’s new, you’ve got an element of risk. So when we’re thinking about it at studio level going, ‘well, okay, well how do you mitigate some of those risks?’ We can mitigate tech risk by using Unreal or technologies that exist. We can mitigate people risk by working with some folks that we already know and we can mitigate some creative risk by playing in some things that we already know. So I guess it’s a mixture of those two, but the more you think about it, you then say, ‘okay, why hasn’t there been a Star Wars racing game for so long?’

Crimmins: Yeah, I mean obviously we kicked around a bunch of concepts because that’s good game making. You want to think about what you’re doing. We always play to our strengths. We’ve got a certain sensibilities of how we like to make games. I’m sure if you’ve played any of what we’ve worked on that DNA is going to be present here, as it is in everything we do. And that’s one of the things that the studio is based, that mutual understanding and long history of shared love for certain types of mechanics and experiences around thrilling, fast arcade racing games. [And then there was that] shared love for the Star Wars universe… we were like, ‘oh my gosh, imagine all the things that we love but actually transferred into there as well as the heritage of the movies with podracing or all the racing experiences in there.

Anyway, when you put that together, it was fairly obvious that was probably going to be the best game we could make for our first game. It would just be the best game that we could make full stop. And then we took that to our partners in Lucasfilm, because we worked with them before, we know them, so we could say, ‘Hey guys, what do you think of this thing?’ And they basically said the same thing back to us where they were like, ‘yeah, we are really excited about this stuff. We love that stuff that you doing. That absolutely makes sense for us.’ And as soon as you have that kind of mutual excitement, it’s like, we’ve got to make this happen.

It sounds like there was a sort of mutual appreciation there from Lucasfilm.

Webster: Well, we’ve got a shared history. I think our first [time on Star Wars was] when we were at Criterion, I remember the folks at DICE were like, ‘we think it’s an impossible mission, but if anyone can do it, you can,’ and it was speeder bikes through Endor, just that fantasy. We’ve all got it in our heads. And so we just approached that as we would do delivering on any fantasies. Our previous fantasies used to be sports car fantasies. Well, the best way around the corner for me was always all four wheels smoking and sideways with a big smile on your face. We work on those levels, and as Kieran was saying earlier, there’s that shared appreciation of the type of experience we want to do, but that history just means something.

And then through to the [Star Wars Battlefront Rogue One] X-Wing VR mission [a free VR add-on to Star Wars Battlefront], which was one of our most favorite things to do and was really wonderful. There’s clearly an appreciation of the work and that goes a long way. So I think there’s the meeting of those two things together, people with an understanding of how both sides work, a mutual respect of one another and a desire to go and execute on something that looks like a wonderful opportunity. It’s a great starting point.

You mentioned a question there that I’d love to ask back to you, which is: why hasn’t there been a Star Wars racer in so long? Is it that you guys weren’t free, you were busy making Battlefield?

Webster: Maybe! I dunno, the obvious answers are only obvious once they exist, I suppose. For us at least, there’s that thing of ‘can we make a Star Wars racing game?’ And then there’s the ‘okay, well what should we do?’ Because I think we wanted to do things a little differently or we wanted to do something different, and that extends to what you are racing. Some of the mechanics inside racing we want to bring some fresh life into, as well as it being a Star Wars racing experience. I can’t answer the question of how come no one else has thought about it? Maybe it’s a question of timing. But once we had that, it was like, ‘okay, how can we do something different with racing and Star Wars?’

Crimmins: Yeah, it’s funny. I see it more like the time was right now rather than the time was wrong before. You’re right we were on other projects, we were talking about other things and I’m sure there were other teams working other things, but it’s that weird thing of both luck and timing. Whenever you make a video game, it’s a mixture of so many elements. It’s a little bit hard to get the lightning in the bottle, but when we did this brief and we got this together, we were like, ‘this is the perfect time to make this thing.’ And I believe we’re the perfect studio to make it.

You mentioned wanting to do things in a Star Wars racer that haven’t been done before. We got a look at gameplay last week but what more can you say about what you are doing, and also how people familiar with your past work might feel that DNA in this?

Webster: Well, you’ll be the best judge of that. It should come through immediately what we’re aiming for here in terms of the experience, [addressing] that in some ways HD players have been a little bit underserved by just some kickass track racing experiences. We love those types of games. We love making them, we love playing them, but we wanted to bring a modern view on what that experience could be. You touched on it a little bit earlier about open world, but we wanted to actually come back to tracks. There’s a lot of great stuff about tracks in that I replay, my mastery of a circuit comes from replayability, and we definitely are leaning into that from a game structure perspective. That recognition and the repetition and the familiarity of racing circuits, gets you outside some of the compromises you might make when you do an open world racing game. We knew we wanted to come back into delivering that type of experience for a modern player at 4K 60 with just really super strong visuals in a galaxy far, far away.

But like I said, we want to do things differently. So how can we breed some innovation in racing? We’re doing that in a couple of ways we can touch into. One is the mechanical boost system. Boost has been in and around racing games forever. Press the button, go fast, consume the boost, and you’ve got a sort of a tactical decision-making going on there. But we wanted to do something more. So we have a two-phase boost system. The second phase is something called a ramjet, which just goes really, really, really fast, but it’s got a consequence too — it generates a load of heat, and if run it for too long, you’re going to explode. So you’ve got consequence there. You’ve got a second phase of tactical decision making going on. And more importantly, it ties into Star Wars locations. So when we think about where we race in Star Wars, the locations are characters in amongst themselves.

We all know them by name — Hoth, Endor, Jakku, Tatooine — and we really wanted to bring that in as an integral part of the game. So the environment has a tactical part to play in terms of your racing, and it plays its part in the ramjet. So in Lantaana — a lush, tropical rainforest vibe on an active volcano island planet — we’ve got rivers of lava and rivers of water, hot and cold. And so you have those decisions — the environmental heat helps get my ramjet up to operating temperature, but it’s obviously going to get it hotter, quicker. I can also cool the ramjet, running it for longer over the colder water. And that’s just a little example of a mechanical change that we’re getting people thinking differently about [as they’re making] their racing line choices at a second to second level.

Crimmins: Yeah, this is probably the first game we’ve made where the racing line can be that variable depending on the vehicle you’re driving, the kind of build you’ve got within that vehicle, and the environment. This is a game where there isn’t just one racing line, there’s the one for your current situation, which means every time you attend the galactic tour it’s a different experience and a different set of things that you’re thinking about. There’s quite a lot there and we’re not talking about all of it now, but high level, we want to make an arcade racing experience that’s richer than it’s ever been before with more options and more things to do than ever before. I really think we’ve got some interesting stuff in this game that I’ve certainly never done in a video game, and I don’t think I’ve seen it in other racing games either.

Webster: While not losing that essence of delivering a racing pilot fantasy from second one, [where you] pick up the path, have a great time, but because you’ll know from our past and the way we go about engineering things, you’ve got a pretty high skill ceiling there for players that really want to drive for mastery so we can support a really broad range of play motivations.

You’ve given some great reasons for this to be a track racer, but I wanted to get your thoughts on open world racing, which you’ve got a lot of history with too. It was really interesting to see the debate about it going on last year — sparked by Mario Kart World, which obviously is a very different kind of racer — but I saw a lot of people come out and suggest there was a nostalgia for a track-based experience. Have you noticed that too? Did it help you feel more emboldened with your approach?

Crimmins: [Laughs] I didn’t notice that, but I would say this… I did play all those games and felt all those things. I absolutely love making open world races. I’ve made a bunch, there’s plenty more in me, I look forward to doing some of those at some point. I absolutely love track base races, some of my favorite early games track based races, and I think there’s wonderful experiences to be had there.

Has open world reached a point where it’s just been done a lot?

Crimmins: I don’t think it’s as simple as that overall. I think there’s great fun, innovation and things to do in both of those spaces. And I certainly, if I go to design a game or picture a game, I’m going to pick the version that does the thing that we want the best rather than I want this one or I want this one. In this game we really wanted something that was really replayable, something that really had that great replay loop, something that every time you replayed it, you felt like you got something new out of it.

It is weird, I can’t remember who wrote it but there was an article about ‘why aren’t racing games like shooters, why is the innovation different?’ I think it’s because racers, you just need more stuff to do in the race in the second-to-second. We talked about the tactical layer of the ramjet system and how that works with the boost, but I think that goes across the board with the whole genre. It used to be a very, very innovative genre, but it’s hard to push innovation in a space where your cognitive load is fairly small because you’re in a kind of dynamic system of where you’re moving around. Getting that right is a lot harder than other games. I just like to see really, really great experiences that really tighten focus. Then that’s what we want to make here.

The reason we’re a track-based racer is because we wanted to have that replayability loop that expands over time. All those benefits people learn in the tracks, the more they play, learning the handling, that familiarity getting them better rather than just a massive smorgasbord of a thing, which is a slightly different kind of ‘play with the toys’ experience. This is high consequence, high action, high replayability and something that creates player stories that you wouldn’t have seen in other games. And I don’t think we could do that if we would go in and say, okay, we’re also going to do this open world thing. That’s a whole set of different challenges.

Webster: You’re right, and you can also say, well, this is the Galactic League, right? This is sport, and we’ve seen racing as an activity and as a sport in Star Wars has been around in many forms, right? Episode 1’s podracing we all know and love, Bad Batch’s riot racing in Season 2 was just awesome. Star Wars Resistance has got the Aces and low-altitude starfighter racing. Racing as a sport and activity is something that’s inside Star Wars, and tracks lend themselves to that really well at an action level. And the other thing we realize more broadly is we are inside Star Wars. And Star Wars fans crave the characters and a story.

So we wanted to go there as well, in a way that frames the racing action. So, you play as a character who is racing, as opposed to it being a racing game. We’ve made plenty of racing games where you’re just a faceless silhouette in a car. Now you’re inhabiting Shade, you’re a canonical new Star Wars character. You walk down one of the shots in the trailer, you’re walking down the ramp of your starship, you’re going into a paddock. And this is really interesting addition here where the paddock gives us a place, a low intensity space where we can get up close with our Star Wars stuff, we can move a narrative on, we can see characters inside there. It gives us a low intensity space as a counterpoint and a contrast to the super high intensity racing. And I think it’s a really important distinction for us now as we call this a racing adventure.

In the trailer, we see Shade interacting with other characters in that area. So to be clear, it’s not just a place for cutscenes between races. There is an area where you can walk around rather than drive around and interact with characters.

Crimmins: In those spaces, yeah, you can walk around, interact with characters, you can build rivalries, you can upgrade your plethora of skimmers and have some nice character moments as well, because as Matt said, this is the story of the Galactic Racing League and Shade coming to that and to tell that story, we needed some time with the characters as well.

It is funny, I wasn’t thinking about it as a key innovation because it’s kind of a no-brainer. This is a Star Wars racing game, and we wanted to have a proper single-player mode in there where we could actually tell a story in this world of what this Galactic Racing league is and immerse people in the authentic Star Wars world with both familiar characters and a plethora of new characters as well. We had to have a space where you’re able to do that and we’re a gameplay first studio, so we didn’t want that to be a cut-scene space.

We’ve shown podracers, but these things are like seven or eight meters long and they’re enormous, but you don’t really get that sense of scale unless you are walking around them as a character and looking around at all this beautiful detail that we built into them. That space serves so many purposes for us in terms of as an immersion space, as a lower intensity. We learned while making Burnout: there’s only so long you can spend with your eyes on stalks at 200 miles an hour — or in our case, 400 miles an hour. You need a decompressed moment. And the paddock does a brilliant job of allowing us that mechanism for us to do all of those things.

I’m running out of time, but we’ve now seen Ben Quadinaros and Sebulba. Are there any more familiar faces in there?

Crimmins: There’s going to be a good mix of familiar faces and new characters. Obviously we want to get that mix right, so no matter what kind of Star Wars media you’ve engaged with, whether it be a movie or game, there’s a bunch of familiarity in there when it comes to the space. Otherwise it wouldn’t feel like an authentic Star Wars experience.

Are you using any kind of season pass model?

Webster: No. This is a premium release, right? We have our campaign and we have arcade mode and we have multiplayer, and it’s a self-contained thing. But what we also recognize is that the landscape of Star Wars evolves and changes over time and so do games as they go. So we see an opportunity for us to tap into more Star Wars or new Star Wars over time, but in terms of us outlining what we think post launch is going to look like, that’s not something that we see. The only reason I say a blind no to it is, in my head, season pass is connected to free-to-play games, and that’s not what we are making.

Crimmins: Our mindset right now is a premium release, to try and get an amazing experience out the box. Obviously we wouldn’t close the door to doing something later, but that isn’t what we are really thinking about right now. We just want it to be the very best game it can be, and we want it to be complete when it comes out.

People have been avidly working out when the game takes place in canon and according to Wookiepedia it’s definitely after 5ABY because of the crashed Star Destroyers following the Battle of Jakku. How much are you playing into the established canon? We’ve already seen Sebulba — and I suppose that was a surprise to me that he’d made it through the events of the trilogy alive. Will we find out exactly when it’s set or does that not really matter?

Webster: I don’t think it really matters. As you say, you’re on Jakku after the events of Return of the Jedi, the galactic civil war is over and that’s where sport becomes a more interesting opportunity. I don’t think we’re ever specific about timeline beyond that.

I love Sebulba’s beard, I just wanted to say.

Crimmins: Old Bulba!

Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

Arthur Morgan actor Roger Clark has revealed a Cameo apology request from a man who deleted his fiancé’s Red Dead Redemption 2 save file.

Clark said that while he really enjoys sending messages to fans on Cameo, he sometimes encounters particularly special ones. Posting a screenshot of one such recent request to X / Twitter, Clark wrote: “I really am blown away by the support you guys show me on Cameo. Thank you for liking my shoutouts. I enjoy them all, but it’s ones like these below that I live for. Let us all send this poor girl positive vibes. At least her man knows what he did.”

For the ‘occasion,’ the Cameo requester wrote: “apology for deleting Red Dead saved game.” In the instructions for Roger Clark, they added: “I just deleted my fiancé’s saved game in Red Dead Redemption 2 by accident. She was having so much fun and made every ethical decision, had about [two-thirds] completed. Can you say some words of support for this devastating loss and let her know I am sorry?”

I really am blown away by the support you guys show me on cameo. Thank you for liking my shout outs. I enjoy them all but it’s ones like these below that I live for. Let us all send this poor girl positive vibes. At least her man knows what he did. @cameo #cameo #rdr2 pic.twitter.com/U0nHM2pLVT

— Roger Clark (@rclark98) February 12, 2026

Understandably, Clark didn’t show us his Cameo video response itself, although I’ll admit that I wish he had!

The replies to Clark’s tweet are a mix of disbelief and empathy. Some are wondering how the save file was deleted in the first place. Others are saying a Cameo from Arthur Morgan himself will surely ease the pain. “I think if someone deleted my 100% save file with everything unlocked and every piece of clothing bought, camp completed, map and journal drawings all there, dreamcatchers murals bones exotics and cards, a shout out from Roger Clark might heal the pain,” said one fan.

Be sure to check out IGN’s big interview with Roger Clark on Arthur Morgan and Red Dead Redemption 2 to find out just how life-changing the iconic role was.

Meanwhile, Red Dead Redemption 2 fans recently made progress towards solving the game’s newly-discovered spiderweb mystery, and now believe they’ve reached its final clue following a major new discovery within Rockstar’s epic cowboy sequel, dubbed the biggest uncovering of hidden content in years.

An intricately-placed breadcrumb trail of spiderwebs was found and plotted, leading to a further set of marked telegraph poles. These then pointed to a collection of guitars within the game’s Fort Wallace location, where the trail temporarily went cold. Now, however, fans have pushed forwards — to what seems like a final clue beyond the edge of Red Dead Redemption 2’s map.

Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for ReedPop.

Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world’s biggest gaming sites and publications. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.

The AI-fueled chip crisis has reportedly upended Sony and Nintendo’s console plans, and may cause a delay to the release of the PlayStation 6 and a price rise for the Switch 2.

Memory is in high demand because companies like Nvidia and Google require so much of it for their AI chips, with a recent CNBC report pointing out that these companies “are the first ones in line for the components.” This will likely push up RAM prices and have a knock-on impact on both console retail prices and availability.

As part of a sweeping Bloomberg report on the impact of the ongoing shortage of memory chips, its sources indicated two crucial points on PlayStation and Switch.

The first is that Sony is now reportedly considering pushing back the debut of the PS6 to 2028 or even 2029, which it described would be a “major upset” to the company’s plans. Meanwhile, Nintendo is reported to be considering raising the price of the Switch 2 this year. Neither company has issued a comment in response to the report.

But would Nintendo actually go through with a Switch 2 price rise so soon after its launch? Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa recently addressed the possibility of a Switch 2 price rise caused by rising prices for components and the potential impact on profitability on the hardware, saying in vague terms that he didn’t think there would be any impact any time soon. “We do not disclose details regarding individual components, but we can say that we are working to secure stable supplies of memory components by holding discussions from a long-term perspective with our business partners,” Furukawa explained.

“As a result, the recent rise in memory prices did not have a significant impact on hardware profitability in the third quarter. In addition, we do not expect any significant impact in the fourth quarter. However, if this rise in component prices lasts longer than expected and runs through the next fiscal year and beyond, it may put pressure on profitability. If the situation deteriorates significantly, we will carefully assess market trends and respond.

“As for any future change in the price of Nintendo Switch 2 hardware, no decision has been made at this time. Any decision to change the price will be determined comprehensively, taking into consideration not only profitability, but also other factors like the platform’s installed base, sales trends, and the market environment.”

Furukawa was then asked if Nintendo would consider selling the Switch 2 at a loss in a bid to expand the console’s install base. “The current rise in memory prices is happening at a pace that exceeds our expectations,” he said. “In general, the profitability of hardware tends to improve with economies of scale, and we want to continue to reduce costs as much as possible through mass production of Nintendo Switch 2 hardware.

“With regard to not selling hardware at a loss, what we are focusing on is profitability on a global basis. There are various external factors, such as fluctuations in exchange rates, but looking at the global picture, we have traditionally tried to avoid situations where individual units are sold at a loss as much as possible.

“It is difficult to predict the changes in the external environment that are currently taking place, but I think it is not an appropriate approach to be excessively influenced by short-term trends. The second and third years for Nintendo Switch 2 are very important, and if we can expand the hardware installed base, we can use that as a basis to greatly expand software sales. We will take this into account when making business decisions and flexibly consider various options.”

Also earlier this month, Sony waved away concern about potential further PlayStation 5 price rises as a result of the rising cost of memory, insisting it’s already in a position to secure the minimum quantity necessary to manage the year-end selling season of its next fiscal year.

“Going forward, we intend to further negotiate with various suppliers to secure enough supply to meet the demand of our customers,” Lin Tao, Sony’s chief financial officer, said. “Given the stage of our console cycle, our hardware sales strategy can be adjusted flexibly and we intend to minimize the impact of the increased memory cost on this segment going forward by prioritizing monetization of the install base to date and striving to further expand our software and network service revenue.”

In January, an analyst report suggested that Sony may push the launch of the PS6 beyond 2028 and lengthen the PS5 lifecycle. David Gibson, senior analyst at MST international who focuses on game and tech companies, predicted that “rising memory prices will not impact short-term performance thanks to Sony’s existing inventory.” However, he noted that increased memory costs could become an issue for Sony in the next fiscal year (ending in March 2027), saying “Sony might pass future cost increases onto consumers.”

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.