The PlayStation Network  has been back up and running  for a bit now, after a major outage took PlayStation 5 and PS4's online features offline for roughly 24 hours at the end of last week. To make up for the extended downtime, Sony is offering every paying PS Plus member a small but free extension of their existing subscription. “We apologize for the inconvenience and thank the community for their patience,” Sony  posted  on X on February 9, the morning after PSN came back online. “All PlayStation Plus members will automatically receive an additional 5 days of service.” It appears this make-good should be added directly to players’ accounts and push back their renewal dates by nearly a week. It’s a nice little gesture but it still doesn’t address why PSN suffered one of the longest outages in the service’s history over the weekend. The pervasiveness of the problems, across multiple continents and PSN features like accounts and the PlayStation Store, seemed to...

Tim Sweeney, the boss of   Fortnite   maker Epic, believes the future of gaming is, well, Fortnite. Speaking at the Unreal Fest in Seattle, as reported by   PC Gamer , he said that “a lot of games are released with high budgets, and they're not selling nearly as well as expected”. According to the executive, this is because players are gravitating towards the “really big games where they can play with their friends”. While other titles fail, Fortnite is going from strength to strength, according to Sweeney. He said the Battle Royale – which has become more of a platform of late – attracted record highs of 110 million active users over the last holiday season, demonstrating a “generational change” for the industry. Sweeney believes the value of a game “grows in proportion to the number of your friends you can connect to”. Fortnite has really innovated in this area, too: it’s not just a shooter, but also a place where you can watch live concerts, drive cars, and build world...

  In the aftermath of the release of Call of Duty Black Ops 6’s live-action reveal trailer, fans have unearthed a number of secrets, Easter eggs, and hidden details — and perhaps even a pointer to the game’s first Zombies map. Activision’s marketing so far has revolved around teasing fans with cryptic nods to the Gulf War of the early ‘90s, and the trailer, below, continues the conspiracy theories with a few words of wisdom from world leaders central to the military action that took place in Iraq during the decade. Former U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush, as well as ex-UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Iraq leader Saddam Hussein, combine to utter words from the shadows that allude to some grand conspiracy the player will presumably unravel over the course of Black Ops 6’s campaign. To accompany the release of the trailer, Activision released a single piece of key art for Black Ops 6. On the face of it, this image, below, rekindles memories of Black Ops ...

 Palworld 's creator wants the development studio to stay small because "big-budget triple-A games are not for us." Palworld certainly performed like a big-budget blockbuster as the monster-taming survival game had over two million Steam players logged in at the same time, rivaling the very biggest hits on the platform. Pocketpair CEO and director Takuro Mizobe now claims the team won't substantially grow, despite the game's staggering success. "We are and will remain a small studio," Mizobe explains in an interview with Bloomberg. "I want to make multiple small games. Big-budget triple-A games are not for us." The studio previously developed card-battler Overdungeon, party drawing game AI: Art Imposter, and the genre-blending open-worlder Craftopia, though all were relatively inexpensive projects. alworld itself reportedly cost around one billion yen (or $6.7 million) to develop, a number that's minuscule compared to the unsustainable budg...

  Like returning to a beloved amusement park as an adult, Contra: Operation Galuga instantly reconnected me with the 2D run-and-gunners from the quarter-slinging arcade days of my youth. And just like revisiting a childhood fancy, I quickly remembered why I had so much fun with this series, while also feeling a bit underwhelmed by how little things have evolved in all that time. This reimagining of the original Contra offers a perfectly adequate modernization of a bonafide classic that makes for an enjoyable jaunt alongside your friends, but it’s also perhaps overly faithful to its predecessors, allowing for only the slightest tweaks. I don’t regret the handful of hours it took me and my buds to get through all of Operation Galuga, but it’s one of those games that’s likely to fade from my memory just as quickly. This sidescroller plays it safe with the reliable, if not particularly exciting, formula of fighting through stages filled with enemies before taking on a boss. Despite bei...

  During a   Hasbro investor's call , the American toy and game company revealed that Baldur's Gate 3 has earned it $90 million since the RPG's official release last year, thanks to a licensing deal. According to Hasbro's Q4 2023 earnings call, Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast's revenue increased 7% following the release of Larian Studios' 2024 Game of the Year award-winning D&D role-playing game alongside Monopoly Go! Baldur's Gate 3 released for PC in August 2023, followed by PS5 in September and Xbox in December. “Our refreshed leadership team is bringing innovative new products to our fans," Hasbro chief executive officer Chris Cocks said during the investor's call. "At the same time, we are taking the necessary actions to transform Hasbro and deliver long-term profitable growth starting with driving significant profit growth across our segments in 2024 and building momentum in our innovation pipeline between now an...