HellDivers For Crabs

Sony has lost Kojima. XBOX has found Kojima.
And we go helldiving for crabs....

Well. We didn't have this one on the bingo card. PlayStation has stepped away from Physint, Hideo Kojima's big return to action espionage, after Sony unexpectedly cancelled the project in June. Kojima Productions then spent three months hunting for someone willing to help keep the game alive. Enter XBOX. Microsoft is now publishing Physint through XBOX Game Studios, expanding its relationship with Kojima beyond OD and somehow leaving XBOX with not one, but TWO Kojima games. We're sure the internet will react to this news in a calm, measured and entirely reasonable fashion.

XBOX Game Pass has discovered the relationship tactic of only appreciating you after you've left. Former Game Pass subscribers are reportedly being offered targeted discounts of up to 30% off to tempt them back. Which is great news! Unless you've been faithfully paying for Game Pass every month. Then you get the warm fuzzy feeling of knowing your continued loyalty is apparently its own reward.

Remember when XBOX Cloud Gaming was about playing anywhere? Microsoft would now prefer you didn't play too much anywhere. Starting in November, XBOX Game Pass Ultimate gets 15 hours of cloud gaming each month. Premium gets 10. Essential gets just five. Run out and you'll be able to buy additional hours from the XBOX Store. Microsoft says only around 4% of Game Pass subscribers will be affected, which raises the wonderfully obvious question: if it's only 4%, why annoy them? Especially when XBOX has spent years telling us that cloud gaming is an important part of the future of XBOX. Apparently the future comes with a timer now.

Quick! Microsoft has done something good. Everyone, remain calm! XBOX's new disc-to-digital program is rolling out to XBOX Insiders, letting you insert supported physical XBOX games and claim digital access to them. More than 800 XBOX discs are already supported, including over 200 delisted games, and the list continues to grow. It's a fascinating solution for XBOX game preservation, backwards compatibility and taking physical libraries into an increasingly digital future. It also resurrects some ideas from the infamous XBOX One announcement in 2013, except this time Microsoft appears to have explained what it's doing before setting the internet on fire. Progress! Not every publisher is fully onboard yet, though...

And finally, something rather more important than arguing about plastic boxes. Nearly 1,900 Blizzard Entertainment workers across World of Warcraft, Diablo, Overwatch, Hearthstone, QA and other teams have ratified a major new union contract after two years of bargaining. The agreement includes wage increases, layoff protections, hybrid and remote working provisions, just-cause protections and, rather interestingly in 2026, rules requiring Blizzard to actually discuss and bargain with workers over the use of generative AI. It's potentially a massive precedent for people working across the games industry, and it all happened inside a Microsoft-owned studio.

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