Some additional highlights from Sony’s FY2022 earnings call:

• Inventories have now “normalized” which means availability should be much better for those now looking to find a PS5.
• With the hardware sell through rate incrasing and availabilty now stable, software sales have started to exceed like-for-like monthly sales.
• Monthly active users have also increased compared to the same month previously.
• Sales of first-party software increased 41% YOY.

Sony said it sold 19.1 million PlayStation 5 consoles in the financial year, beating its own forecast of 18 million. That was up from 11.5 million PS5 units sold in the previous fiscal year when Sony was facing supply chain issues.

Off the back of the earlier reports that Game Pass revenue was down, Microsoft have released their Q1 FY22 results with increases to the Xbox hardware driving the performance.

Gaming revenue increased $501 million or 16% driven by growth in Xbox hardware. Xbox hardware revenue increased 166% driven by higher volume and price of consoles sold due to continued demand for Xbox Series X|S, on a low prior year comparable impacted by a slowdown in volume of consoles sold ahead of Xbox Series X|S launches. Xbox content and services revenue increased 2% driven by growth in Xbox Game Pass subscriptions and first-party titles, offset in part by a decline in third-party titles, on a strong prior year comparable that benefitted from stay-at-home scenarios.

Available to all Apple Music subscribers:

PS5 offers seamless integration with the Apple Music streaming service with background music and music video playback, so players can listen before, during, or after their gameplay session.

The update adds a Photo Mode and more crucially for some, introduces a Suspend Cycle option. As someone who has played a lot of Returnal I did not see a need for any saving functionality, however my needs and how I play differ a lot to others who may want more of a short game cycle.

The lack of this functionality did put a lot of people off, so here is hoping that by adding Suspend Cycle more people pickup this great title.

The structure of the game remains unchanged, so this functionality is not a traditional mid-game “Save Game” option: by suspending the cycle, Returnal will simply > create a single use suspend point, and once you resume playing the suspend point is deleted and cannot be used again. Your game will continue directly from the moment you left it, and if you want to suspend the cycle again, your progress will be captured from that new point onwards. There are some limitations in place – for example, players won’t be able to create a suspend point during Boss battles, cinematics, first-person sequences or during intense combat scenarios

A extremely deep dive into the Playstation 3 architecture by Rodrigo Copetti.

An early look at Haunted Chocolatier, ConcernedApe’s latest title after Stardew Valley.

In Stardew Valley, the focus was more humble: living off the land, growing food, and connecting to the people and nature around you. However, with my next game, I wanted to explore more fantastical possibilities… experiences that take you beyond the ordinary. That’s where magical haunted ghost chocolate comes in.

CD Project announced the purchase of independent developer The Molasses Flood, developers of The Flame in the Flood and Drake Hollow. The studio will stay independent, will not be folded into CD Project or any existing team and will work on a new project based on an existing IP.

Set for release on November the 11th, there are numerous enhancements to each game, both graphically and with gameplay.

Current pricing is around £55/€65.

The show will clock in at around 20 minutes and only focus on announcements and updates for upcoming third-party releases.

One of the early ideas for a Tomb Raider reboot was Ascension, a darker, horror-themed game that took inspiration from Resident Evil, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus.

Vampyr updated to support “up to” a 1440p resolution at 60 FPS on next-gen consoles.

Snuck into the PC announcement for God of War, Sony confirms its sell-through for the title as of August 2021, was 19.5MM copies.

Due to “recommendations supplied by teams supervising the development of both games”.

The new release schedule is Cyberpunk 2077 in the first quarter of 2022 and The Witcher 3 in the second quarter of 2022.

Sony is adding God of War to it’s slate of first-party PC releases, with a slew of graphical enhancements:

Our PC version includes a wide range of graphical presets and options so you can fine-tune your visual experience based on your setup. From higher resolution shadows and improved screen space reflections to enhancements to the ambient occlusion pipeline with GTAO and SSDO – God of War on the PC can create striking visual quality unique to the platform.

We’re also happy to announce that we will have full integration with NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) available on RTX. You won’t have to sacrifice high graphical settings and output resolutions for high performance in God of War.

In addition to DLSS we will also have NVIDIA Reflex low latency technology available. Reflex delivers a more responsive experience allowing you to react quicker and hit harder combos.

Alongside the graphic and performance improvements, we are also offering 21:9 ultra-widescreen support.

Axios did some digging on a recent financial filing to show that for FY2021, the 12 months ending June 30 2021, Microsoft’s target for subscriber growth was 47.79%. Game Pass subscriptions increased by only 37.48%.