Today, Sony held its latest State of Play and while it didn’t include some of the bigger games that people were likely hoping for, like a new God of War spin-off, it did include some cool surprises, including what might be the best-looking fighting game I’ve seen in years and a remake of a beloved Final Fantasy title. Suggested ReadingTears Of The Kingdom's Newspaper Questline And The State Of Hyrulean Journalism Share SubtitlesOffEnglishview videoSuggested ReadingTears Of The Kingdom's Newspaper Questline And The State Of Hyrulean Journalism Share SubtitlesOffEnglishHere’s the full State of Play if you want to watch it all: State of Play | June 4, 2025 [English]Lumines Arise Lumines Arise - Announce Trailer | PS5 GamesThis fun announcement kicked off the 45-minute show. It’s from the devs behind Tetris Effect, and it looks (and sounds) awesome. This one is coming to PS5 and PSVR2 in Fall 2025.Pragmata delayed againPragmata - First Contact Trailer | PS5 GamesCapcom had a new gameplay trailer for its long-awaited space-adventure-action-horror game featuring a young robot girl and a cool astronaut dude fighting robots. The game was set to come out in 2022, got delayed until 2023, and then got delayed again. Now it’s set to arrive in 2026. Romeo Is a Deadman looks wildRomeo is a Dead Man - Announce Trailer | PS5 GamesZombies attack, nearly killing Romeo, but luckily his grandfather shoves a big sci-fi thing into his head and turns him into a sword-wielding half-dead undead killer. Okay, I’m interested. This one is “maybe” arriving in 2026. No shock that Suda51 and Grasshopper Manufacture are behind this wild-looking game. Silent Hill F arrives in SeptemberSilent Hill f - Release Date Trailer | PS5 GamesI’m very happy that we’ve entered a new and better era for the Silent Hill franchise after so, so many years of crap and lukewarm slop. This latest entry looks very different than past games, but still seems properly foggy, spooky, and creepy. And that’s all I need in a Silent Hill sequel. Don’t have to wait long for this one as it launches September 25, 2025.Bloodstained: The Scarlett Engagement is revealedBloodstained: The Scarlet Engagement - Announce Trailer | PS5 GamesSurprise! We are getting a new Bloodstained game. What started back in 2015 as a crowdfunded attempt to make a new Castlevania-inspired 2D action game has expanded into a large franchise of its own. And it’s about to get bigger when this new entry arrives sometime in the future on PS5. Digimon Story Time StrangerDigimon Story Time Stranger - Release Date Trailer | PS5 GamesWow, it’s wild how much better Digimon games look than Pokémon games. This latest time-traveling RPG set in the universe features some slick visuals and a lot of people screaming about the digital world. As someone living in 2025, I’m fine with the digital world being burned to the ground. Time Stranger is out October 3, 2025. Final Fantasy Tactics is finally getting a remakeFinal Fantasy Tactics - The Ivalice Chronicles - Announcement Trailer | PS5 GamesYou can read more about this in our story here, but suffice it to say that the legendary tactics RPG is, at long last, getting the remake fans have been clamoring for for ages. Sony devoted a few minutes to sharing trailers and a few bits of info on these four games, one of which is launching on PS4. Wild. Baby Steps - Release Date Announcement | PS5 GamesHirogami - Pre-order Trailer | PS5 GamesCairn - Release Date and Demo | PS5 GamesNinja Gaiden: Ragebound - Release Date Announcement | PS5 & PS4 GamesMortal Kombat Legacy Collection looks amazingMortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection - Announce Trailer | PS5 & PS4 GamesDigital Eclipse, the retro game wizards behind some excellent old-school video game collections, is taking on the Mortal Kombat series in 2025. Legacy Collection will contain a ton of games from the series, including handheld, console, and arcade ports, as well as rollback netcode and documentary content. I’m very excited to see more of this thing.Sony is making a fight stickProject Defiant Wireless Fight Stick - Teaser TrailerNot much info beyond that. Here’s Sony’s official description of the device:Join the fray at home or away with the Project Defiant wireless fight stick*. Take the fight to your opponents with the included sling carry case, and enjoy precise in-game response with ultra-low latency wireless and wired play options, along with a durable, ergonomic design that’s built for battle.New Metal Gear Solid Delta Snake Eater trailerMetal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater - Gameplay Trailer | PS5 GamesThe Ape Escape mode is back and looks bigger than before. But the big news is at the very end, where Konami is teasing what looks like a multiplayer mode. Is Metal Gear Online returning? I hope so. Nioh 3 is coming in 2026, a demo is out nowNioh 3 - Announcement Trailer | PS5 GamesTeam Ninja is back with Nioh 3. The game will let players swap between a samurai and a ninja on the fly during combat, and looks slick as heck. This one drops in 2026, but you can check out a demo for it today on PS5. Thief VR spin-off coming to PSVR2 this yearThief VR: Legacy of Shadow - Reveal Trailer | PS VR2 GamesWhen I saw this trailer, I thought, “Hey, this looks like a new Thief game.” And I was right. Thief VR Legacy of Shadow arrives in 2025 and is being co-developed by Eidos-Montréal and Vertigo Games. Tides of Tomorrow looks like a colorful Waterworld gameTides of Tomorrow - Release Date Trailer | PS5 GamesI love colorful-looking games, so Tides of Tomorrow instantly caught my eye. The mix of online asynchronous gameplay and having to deal with other people’s decisions in a dying and flooded world sounds interesting. Tides of Tomorrow arrives in February 2026.Astro Bot is getting even more levels! Astro Bot - Challenge DLC Trailer | State of Play 2025One of the best PS5 games ever made, Astro Bot, is getting even more free levels later this month. Five new levels will soon be added to Astro Bot. And Sony is bringing back the fan-favorite Astro Bot PS5 controller that sold out instantly last year.Sea of Remnants is another colorful pirate gameSea of Remnants - Announce Trailer | PS5 GamesWait a minute, another colorful and fun-looking ocean-based adventure game? That’s strange. But anyway, this third-person pirate game has a cool style and big bosses to fight. and ship gameplay. And mermaids. It arrives on PS5 in 2026. Sword of the Sea is coming to PS PlusSword of the Sea - Launch Date Announcement | PS5 GamesThe people behind Abzu and Pathless have a new game coming out, and it looks like you’ll be doing a lot of sick sword surfing. This launches on PS Plus on August 19. More games coming to PS Plus Classic CatalogDeus Ex’s PS2 port - Jun 17Twisted Metal 3 and Twisted Metal 4 - July 15Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 - Later this summer007 First Light reveals its new Bond“Bond is a bullet without a target. Let’s give him one.” This new trailer looks exciting as heck, but I’m really bummed by how boring the new Bond himself looks. This is out in 2026. Read more here. Ghost of Yotei will get its own digital eventSony is promising a big gamepaly deep dive for Sucker Punch’s upcoming samurai game. Expect to learn more in July. MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls | Announce TrailerWell, this is a wonderful surprise. Sony, Marvel, and Arc System Works (Guilty Gear, BlazBlue, Dragon Ball FighterZ) are teaming up to make a 2.5D Marvel Comics tag-team fighting game. And it looks sick as hell. Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls is coming out in 2026 on PS5 and PC. Here’s a separate video Sony posted about how the game came about and the work going into it: MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls | From Japan to the World

How deep is Sony's commitment to live-service? | Opinion Sony's live service ambitions have steadily scaled back, but questions remain about Bungie – and how much the overall PlayStation strategy hinges on live service Image credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment Feature by Rob Fahey Contributing Editor Published on May 23, 2025 In many regards, things are going very well for Sony right now. The PlayStation 5 has sold strongly, generally slightly outpacing the performance of the PS4 at equivalent points in its lifecycle despite cost pressures that have kept its retail prices high. Its biggest direct competitor, Microsoft, started the generation with a great hardware line-up but has ultimately pivoted away from console exclusive software and become one of the biggest third-party publishers on PlayStation. Sony has an enviable line-up of studios and premium first-party game franchises, has started to find success with movie and TV adaptations of some of its game IP, and is gradually building up a solid sideline business in PC versions of its blockbuster titles – not to mention that next year GTA 6 will turn up and presumably sell absolute truckloads of PS5s in the process. It's not all quite so rosy, of course. With a view to the longer term, for example, it's not unreasonable to point out that while the console business has stubbornly defied all the predictions of collapse over the past decade or two, it has certainly found itself smacking off a glass ceiling somewhere around the installed base mark achieved by the PS2, and additional growth seems elusive despite rising costs across the board. Still, within the confines of that market reality, Sony has been performing extremely well – with the arguable exception of one specific part of the company, over which hovers a question mark so big that it casts a shadow over a lot of this success. This strategic enigma is Bungie – or to be more specific, it's the entire content strategy that was meant to be anchored around the $3.6 billion dollar acquisition of Bungie back in 2022. While this is chickenfeed compared to the money Microsoft was splashing around on gaming acquisitions during the same era, it was an enormous purchase for Sony, and it was meant to kick-start a major change in how the company would make games. Image credit: Bungie Sony got live services religion, and it got it bad; the company, or at least some influential people within the company, believed that the way to achieve the kind of break-out growth that its success in hardware and premium games was failing to deliver had to come through finding the next Fortnite. Bungie, with its experience of running the Destiny franchise and supposedly with multiple unannounced live service titles being incubated at that point, would be the lynchpin of that strategy, not only building its own live service games but also providing expertise and guidance to Sony's other studios as they worked on live service titles based on their own core IPs. In the years that have followed, that strategy has foundered somewhat – not least because rather than being the jewel in the crown of the live service effort, Sony's acquisition of Bungie appears to have resulted in constantly having to put out new fires at the company. I wonder how different Sony's strategic positioning might sound now if the release dates of Concord and Helldivers 2 had been swapped around While insight into the internal workings of the relationship is very unreliable given that most people leaking information undoubtedly have an axe to grind, one does speculate that there's a weird, destructive tug-of-war going on between Bungie's leadership and their new owners at Sony. What we can say with certainty is that revenues from Destiny 2 fluctuated wildly (as did the quality of the game and players' sentiments towards it), drawing into question just how much Sony's other studios might want to take direction on live service strategy from Bungie. Major layoffs were conducted, raising some even bigger questions about what Sony had paid all that money for, if not for acquiring a wellspring of talent and experience in the form of Bungie's now-fired employees. Despite this, however, Sony's determination that its future lies with live service releases doesn't seem to have faltered – well, at least not much. The ambitious initial plans for a dozen live service games to launch by early 2026 were scaled back to six a couple of years ago. Depending on how you're counting (bear in mind that titles like MLB The Show are considered live service, even if they may not be what jumps to mind when you think of this category), it seems pretty likely that this halved forecast will be missed by a fair bit, especially given the ignominious failure and rapid shutdown of one of the few live service games to actually launch, Concord. Image credit: PlayStation / Arrowhead Game Studios There was also a widespread suspicion that the retirement of former Sony Interactive Entertainment boss Jim Ryan a year ago might see the company quietly water down its commitment to live service. Despite this, however, Sony's messaging continues to suggest a strong focus on this sector. SIE co-CEO Hermen Hulst announced a new live-service oriented studio in the PlayStation Studios group, teamLFG, just this week. Back in 2022, the Bungie acquisition seemed to make a sort of sense. The climate around live service was extremely positive; this was long before we'd seen gigantic, costly failures like Warner's catastrophic Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, or indeed Sony's own Concord. Sony lacked expertise in this sector, and the Bungie deal could plug that gap. It was nonetheless risky – not least because it flew in the face of Sony's de facto policy of only buying out large studios with which they had built extremely close working relationships on successful titles over several years, despite that policy being central to building up PlayStation Studios in the first place. Today, the climate is very different around live service games, not least because of the aforementioned failures, but also because of what seems to be a fairly strong turn in consumer sentiment around these kinds of services. Sony, however, still has a multi-billion dollar studio that really only does live services attached to it, and one does have to wonder about the extent to which that creates path dependency. The new live service studio, teamLFG, is a good example in that it appears to be a direct spin-off from Bungie, so that acquisition is still very much driving Sony's engagement with this whole market sector. It's worth noting, though, that Sony did also have some beginner's luck in live services, with its first real dip into this water being the excellent and well-received Helldivers 2. In any high-risk gambling, beginner's luck is a curse, because you'll end up throwing far more of your money at the casino than the person who had a run of bad luck on their first visit and never caught the bug or tried to chase the winning feeling. I wonder how different Sony's strategic positioning might sound now if the release dates of Concord and Helldivers 2 had been swapped around. Even were it not for the need to do something with Bungie, and the sense that Helldivers 2 shows that this market sector can work for Sony, there's another logic that might underpin a continuing commitment to live service games – even despite what is now much more widely understood to be a near-suicidal risk profile for launching them. It's the logic of venture capital, which can often look quite crazy from the perspective of an ordinary investor with a regular risk appetite, but which is all about high risks and high rewards. Venture capitalists are generally not too interested in solid businesses with sober risk profiles and a decent profit margin. They're interested in crazy, fast-growing businesses that, while being incredibly likely to flare out and die, will return a hundred-fold, a thousand-fold, or an even higher upside ratio in the unlikely event that they do succeed. The logic of a venture portfolio is that losing a big chunk of money on each of 99 bankrupt companies you back is worthwhile if the 100th company in the pack strikes the jackpot for you and returns your investment a thousand-fold. Since games don't really do that – they're risky, but almost never have upside rewards on that scale – the venture capital model doesn't work terribly well for them, and that kind of VC activity has been very limited in this space over the years. Live service games, however, turn this on its head. It's extremely, vanishingly unlikely that your game will be the next Fortnite, but if it is, it will deliver exactly the kind of immense return that venture capital funds are interested in. This, I think, is a sort of thinking that's taken root in some quarters within Sony. Who cares if they back dozens of failures, if one of them becomes a new title whose recurring revenue is big enough on its own to be a whole new pillar of the business? We'll see in the coming years whether that's really the approach Sony intends to take – if it's happy to absorb more and more Concord-style failures (or, perhaps more likely, a bunch of commercially mediocre performers that stick around for a year or two before being shut down, which seems to be the general life cycle of live service games at the moment) in pursuit of that one, elusive, incredible hit. If so, it's a strategy which carries an especially extraordinary degree of risk for Sony, because while a venture capital fund can back dozens of losers without anyone really noticing or caring – that's just part of the business – it's definitely going to be noticed by Sony's consumers if PlayStation starts releasing dozens of dud live services games under its banner. Money is only one of the currencies that needs to be considered in this equation, and it's arguably the easiest one to gamble with. The prestige and reputation of the platform and the brand is a much more valuable currency, and one that would be a lot harder to earn back once lost.