Gaming · Sunday, 6 September 2026

01 Briefing what happened

Sony expects half a billion dollars in refunded taxes. It told a court its buyers are owed none of it.

Sony says it will get around $500m back from the US government after import taxes on consoles were struck down. Its buyers, who paid higher PS5 prices while those taxes were being charged, asked for a share. Sony's answer is that the price was never about the taxes.

$500m

Sony expects back from the US government in refunded import taxes

most of it flows into the games division, and none of it to buyers [1]

console makers arguing they owe buyers nothing

Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have each filed a version of the same defence [1]

15 hrs

of cloud streaming a month on the dearest Game Pass plan from November

every tier had unlimited streaming for the past year [9][10]

The lead story — what happened

Sony expects to get around half a billion dollars back from the US government after import taxes on goods brought into the country were ruled illegal, with most of it landing in its games division. [1]
PS5 owners have gone to court to make Sony hand some of it back. Their argument is that Sony has been paid twice: once by the US government, and once by them, through PS5 price rises made while the taxes were being charged. [1]
Sony's lawyers told the court that nobody was forced to buy a PS5, and that paying the advertised price for something you chose is not an injury a court can fix. [1]
Sony also called it speculative and illogical to say the taxes caused the price rises, listing inflation, exchange rates, part costs, shipping, competition and demand instead. [1]
Its strongest argument is a second price rise: Sony raised the PS5 price again after the US Supreme Court struck the taxes down, and offers that as proof the two were never linked. [1]
Microsoft's lawyers said almost the same thing in August, telling a court there is nothing unjust about buying an Xbox at an advertised price and getting what you paid for. Nintendo has made the same argument. [1]
One company went the other way. Panic, the small US software company behind the Playdate handheld, has said it will pass its tariff refunds on to the customers who paid them. [1]
The refusal lands in the middle of a bad week for Sony's relationship with its buyers: it is arguing in a separate case that nobody really owns a digital game, and its September showcase was drowned in demands for discs. [2][3]

Who is involved

Sony Interactive Entertainment

the Japanese company that makes the PlayStation 5; it expects the tax refund and says buyers have no claim on it [1]
The PlayStation owners suing Sony

customers who went to court to make Sony hand back part of the refund; a separate group of four filed a class action in June over whether anyone owns a digital game [1][2]
Microsoft and Nintendo

the makers of Xbox and the Switch; both told courts before Sony did that console buyers are owed no share of the refunds [1]
Panic

a small US software company that makes the Playdate handheld; it is the one company that says it will pass its tariff refunds back to buyers [1]

What is pushing on this

Buyer anger at Sony High↑

the September showcase chat filled with NO DISC NO BUY [3]

The console makers' legal line High→

three companies, one argument: you got what you paid for [1]

Pressure to hand money back Easing↓

only Panic, the smallest of them, says it will pass the money back [1]

Cost pushed onto players Building↑

cloud streaming metered, ten games leaving Game Pass, discs ending in 2028 [4][9][12]

How it unfolded

During the taxes Sony raises US PS5 prices, which buyers say was to protect its profit margins [1]
18 June four Sony customers file a class action over digital game ownership in a US federal court [2]
After the ruling the US Supreme Court rules the import taxes illegal, and Sony expects about half a billion dollars back [1]
August Microsoft tells a court its buyers got exactly what they paid for [1]
3 September Sony files its own version and calls the tariff argument speculative and illogical [1]

Where this points

Watch whether a judge lets the price-rise claim proceed at all: every one of these cases turns on whether an advertised price a buyer accepted can be reopened later, and no court has answered that yet. [1]

The rest of the day

25 more stories on this beat.

Each with its own sources. None of these is a link to the story above.

02
Xbox cloud gaming goes on sale by the hour

From November, anyone will be able to buy hours of Xbox Cloud Gaming from the Xbox store and stream games they own, with no console and no Game Pass subscription. [7][9] Cloud gaming means the game runs on Microsoft's computers and only the picture is sent to your screen. The same announcement caps Game Pass streaming at 15 hours a month on the top tier, 10 on the middle one and 5 on the cheapest, after a year in which all three were unlimited. [10][38][40] Microsoft says the cost of running the service grows as people play longer, and that 4% of subscribers are affected. [9] An Xbox app is also coming to TCL televisions. [8]

Why it matters — It turns the heaviest streamers into people who buy hours, and opens the service to people who have never owned an Xbox. Microsoft's 2023 plans had expected cloud gaming to be the main reason anyone subscribed to Game Pass. [39]
03
Sony's showcase drowned out by disc demands

Sony ran its September State of Play showcase on Thursday, announcing an April 2027 date for Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, a Resident Evil film clip, release dates for Until Dawn 2 and Metro 2039, and a surprise Maneater 2. [5][6] The live chat mostly ignored all of it. Messages repeated NO DISC NO BUY and spammed CD emoji, in protest at Sony's decision to stop making PlayStation 5 discs in 2028. [3] Days earlier Sony had adopted a policy in Japan banning prolonged customer demands unrelated to its products. [3]

Why it matters — The protest is about who decides what happens to a game after you buy it, which is also what the tariff case and the digital-ownership case are about.
04
CD Projekt Red says it will keep making boxes

Michal Nowakowski, who runs CD Projekt Red, the Polish studio behind The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077, said the company will not walk away from physical releases. [4] He pointed out that studios do not control disc manufacturing at all: Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo do, and a console without a disc drive settles the question by itself. His answer is to keep putting out boxes worth buying. The Witcher 3's standard edition came with a cloth map, stickers, a soundtrack CD and a lore book. [4] The disc inside may become a download code. [4]

Why it matters — It shows how little a large studio decides here. The thing a player buys is shaped by three hardware companies, not by the people who made the game.
05
Xbox disc-to-digital works on delisted games

Microsoft's disc-to-digital feature went live for Xbox Insiders, the volunteers who test Xbox software early, on 31 August. [11] It gives you a digital licence for a disc you own, so the game plays on a Series S, which has no disc drive, and on PC. Testers then found it also works on delisted games, meaning games that have been pulled from the Xbox store and can no longer be bought. [11] A disc owner can now get a working digital copy of something the shop stopped selling.

Why it matters — It is a rare case of a company handing back something the shift to digital took away, and it only works for people who still own the disc.
06
Ten games leave Game Pass, including Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 leaves Xbox Game Pass on 15 September, along with Dead Cells, Frostpunk 2, Spiritfarer, Train Sim World 5 and five others. [12] Game Pass is a subscription: you pay monthly and play whatever is in the library that month. Games arrive under time-limited deals with their publishers, and Cyberpunk 2077 was added in March, which suggests a six-month term. [12] The Witcher 3, from the same studio, came off in August. Seven games are being added this month. [12]

Why it matters — Ten games leave and the monthly bill does not move, because subscribers were never told which games they were paying for.
07
Nvidia opens DLSS 5 to older cards after modders forced it

DLSS 5 is Nvidia's system for using AI to draw game frames, and it was meant to launch on one game, only on the newest RTX 50 graphics cards, with developers controlling how strongly it is applied. [13] Modders got a leaked version running on almost anything first, with every setting turned up. Nvidia then told The Verge it will officially bring DLSS 5 to the older RTX 40 series after tuning the RTX 50 version. [13] It will not give players the sliders modders already have. [13]

Why it matters — Nvidia dropped the restriction that stopped being enforceable and kept the one that still is.
08
Square Enix denies it is going private

Square Enix, the Japanese publisher behind Final Fantasy, said no consideration is being given to taking the company private. [14][15] Going private means buying out the shareholders so the company no longer trades on a stock market. The Japanese magazine Sentaku had reported it was being looked at, and the share price rose on the Tokyo exchange before the denial. [15] The two reports disagree on the size of the jump: IGN put it at nearly 12%, GamesIndustry.biz at 8.3%. [14][15] The activist investor 3D Investment Partners, which holds about 18.5% of the shares, is alleged to have prompted the speculation. [15]

Why it matters — It follows Electronic Arts being bought and taken private by a Saudi-led group, which is why an unconfirmed magazine report moved a share price at all. [14]
09
Warhammer studio promises no AI in Space Marine 3

Saber Interactive confirmed that Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 3 will contain no generative AI. [16] The promise follows a public row. A former Saber writer said she was fired and replaced by AI on another game, Rideshare Stimulator. Chief executive Matt Karch answered with a statement that was both pro-AI and personally insulting to her. [17] Saber later added an AI label to that game's Steam page. Games Workshop, which owns Warhammer, banned generative AI in its own design work in January. [16]

Why it matters — It is the first time on this beat that a studio has advertised the absence of AI as a feature of a game people are waiting for.
10
13TB of old Steam files spill online

About 13 terabytes of data uploaded to Steam between 2003 and 2013 appeared online last week. [18] Steam is Valve's PC game shop, and the files include unreleased builds of its own games plus test versions of Dragon Age: Origins and Batman: Arkham Asylum. The person who posted them says no hacking was involved and the files sat on a publicly reachable address. Other accounts suggest the files came from a third-party server holding earlier leaks rather than from Valve. [18]

Why it matters — Almost nobody keeps old builds of games, so a leak is currently one of the few ways early versions survive at all.
11
Xbox staff describe the fallout of 3,200 job cuts

In July, Xbox chief executive Asha Sharma emailed the division to announce 3,200 job cuts through to 2027, 1,600 of them immediate. [19] Staff told the Guardian what followed: meetings held with every camera and microphone switched off, so nobody could speak, then a flurry of goodbye messages before work accounts were shut. One laid-off Bethesda Austin developer said it never made any sense. [19] Union members have since rallied outside a Microsoft building in Austin, Texas. [19]

Why it matters — It puts faces on a number this beat has reported for weeks, and it is the same cuts the Game Pass strategy above was supposed to be paying for.
12
Double Fine's founder rejects the flop story

Tim Schafer, who founded Double Fine, told Bloomberg that the studio never set out to make a game it expected to lose money on. [20] Double Fine was one of the smallest studios Microsoft owned and its games sold modestly, which has led some to say it made deliberately niche things. Schafer named Keeper as a game he believes non-players would love. [20] The studio has since left Microsoft and is independent again, funding a public game jam through Kickstarter. [35]

Why it matters — It is a live argument about who should carry the cost of a strategy: the studios that filled Game Pass, or the people who chose that strategy.
13
Dwarf Fortress creator on AI and job cuts

Tarn Adams, who wrote Dwarf Fortress, a famously deep simulation game built over two decades, told PC Gamer at Gamescom that the industry is in a bad state. [21] He described the goal being chased as a chief executive pressing a button that makes a game, and everyone else somehow buying it without a job. [21] He also said the bosses of people he knows are slowly losing their grip. [21] Games revenue passed $200bn in 2025 while studios kept closing. [21]

Why it matters — The gap he is describing is the same one running through the layoff coverage: record money taken, fewer people needed to take it.
14
Saber blames studios built around one game

Tim Willits, chief creative officer at Saber Interactive, told PC Gamer that studios of a couple of hundred people all working on a single game will struggle to survive. [22] His argument is that Saber spreads people across projects of different sizes, using remasters and small games to fund big ones, so nobody sits idle waiting for one release. He gave SnowRunner, now a large franchise with over 46,000 Steam reviews, as a game that began as one person's experiment. [22]

Why it matters — It is a claim about studio shape rather than about the market, and it comes from an executive whose own studio has been in the news for other reasons.
15
Mario Kart 8 gets eight-player split screen, free

Nintendo released version 4.0.0 of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, its Switch 2 upgrade, more than a year after that console launched. [23] The headline addition is eight-player split screen on one television, double what the game has managed since 2014. Split screen means everyone plays on the same screen, divided into panels. The update also brings sharper visuals and faster loading, and it is free to anyone who already owns the game. [23] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is the original Switch's best-selling game. [23]

Why it matters — A twelve-year-old game getting a free feature is the opposite of the pattern in most of today's stories, where what you bought quietly gets smaller.
16
No Rest for the Wicked slips to March 2027

Moon Studios, the developer of the Ori games, delayed the finished version of its action role-playing game No Rest for the Wicked from October 2026 to March 2027. [24] The game has been in early access since April 2024, meaning players can buy and play an unfinished version, and it has sold two million copies. The studio said the game is close but that close is not good enough, and promised more open testing, with a beta in December. [24]

Why it matters — Early access lets a small team be paid while it finishes, which is why a delay here costs the studio less than it would have done a decade ago.
17
Tetris owner objects to a US government copy

The Tetris Company, which owns the rights to Tetris, said it takes copyright infringement very seriously after the US president's office put a clone of the game on the official US government website. [25] The clone is called Build the Wall, subtitled Zombie Border Siege, and asks the player to stop aliens and zombies crossing the border between the United States and Mexico. It was one of five simple games posted on Thursday, all copies of existing games, each promoting a US government policy. [25] The Tetris Company said it was not involved. [25]

Why it matters — Game rules cannot be copyrighted but a game's look and name can, which is why a clone is a legal fight about the shell rather than the play.
18
Nvidia's RTX Spark laptops arrive in October

Nvidia said its N1X chip will ship in RTX Spark laptops in two versions in October. [26] The larger one pairs a 6,144-core graphics chip with a 20-core processor and between 24GB and 128GB of memory shared between them; the smaller one has 5,120 graphics cores and up to 32GB. [26] These are Arm-based chips, a different design from the Intel and AMD processors most Windows laptops use. The second chip, the N1, is not coming this year. [26]

Why it matters — It is Nvidia moving from selling graphics cards for gaming PCs to selling the whole machine, at a moment when memory prices are climbing.
19
A Windows security update can cost frame rate

Microsoft will switch on a Windows 11 feature called memory integrity across more machines from next month. [27] It blocks untrusted low-level code and drivers from running, which closes off a common way for attackers to take over a PC. Microsoft has warned before that it can slow games down, and the hit is worse on older processors. [27] Machines where someone already turned the feature off will not have it switched back on. [27]

Why it matters — It is a real trade, made for everyone by default: PC owners get more safety and some of them lose frames, without being asked which they wanted.
20
Meta's Pocket builds games from a prompt

Pocket is Meta's new app for making small games by describing them, launched in the United States on 21 August. [28] It packages the sort of AI coding tools that until now needed command-line skills into something as easy as posting on social media. Ars Technica's reviewer got real playable versions of his own ideas out of it. The catch is where the results live: what the app makes stays inside Meta's platform rather than on the maker's own computer. [28]

Why it matters — It lowers the cost of making a game to almost nothing while raising the question of who owns the thing that comes out.
21
PAX brings a tabletop show to Houston

PAX Unplugged, the tabletop-games arm of the PAX convention series, will hold its first Houston show at the George R. Brown Convention Center from 25 to 27 June 2027. [29] It is the second Unplugged event; the first has run in Pennsylvania since 2017. PAX South, which last ran in San Antonio in January 2020, was cancelled for the foreseeable future in 2021, and organisers say this brings the series back to those fans. [29]

Why it matters — Conventions closed in the last few years are starting to come back in different cities, which is a slow signal about where the money for events sits now.
22
USB-C readers rescue dying cartridge saves

Nintendo cartridges made before flash memory used tiny watch batteries to hold save files, and those batteries were never meant to last decades. [30] A Verge editor powered on a 26-year-old copy of Pokemon Pinball and found the save gone. Two devices from Epilogue, the $50 GB Operator and the new $60 SN Operator, plug a real cartridge into a computer over USB-C and copy the save off it. [30] They can also play the cartridges, and an N64 version is coming. [30]

Why it matters — Nobody at Nintendo is preserving those files, so the only people doing it are the owners and a small company selling them a cable.
23
CD sales jump as physical media returns

The Recording Industry Association of America says 17.5 million CDs were sold in the United States in the first half of 2026, up from 12 million in the same months of 2025. [31] That is a rise of 45.7% in units and 58.6% in money, reaching $171.1m, after CD sales shrank 22% the year before. Vinyl rose almost 21% to 26.5 million units. A separate study suggested only about half of CD buyers own a CD player. [31]

Why it matters — It cuts against the argument Sony uses for ending PlayStation discs in 2028, that buyers have simply moved on from physical copies.
24
September's releases stack up around GTA 6

September is unusually crowded with games, and the reason is a single unreleased one. [32][33] Publishers are scheduling around Grand Theft Auto 6, whose launch is expected to swallow attention and spending for weeks. The month brings The Blood of Dawnwalker from the studio founded by Witcher veterans, Silent Hill: Townfall, Control Resonant, NBA 2K27, Onimusha: Way of the Sword and Orbitals. [32][33] The Witcher 3 also gets a free remaster for existing owners. [32]

Why it matters — The release calendar is shaped by one game nobody has played yet, which is how a hit costs other studios money before it exists.
25
A leak points to a Nintendo showcase

Ubisoft told players it will share the full picture on Just Dance: Decades of Hits on 10 September, after gameplay footage leaked online. [34] Just Dance games are usually revealed during Nintendo Directs, the video presentations Nintendo uses to announce games, and Nintendo has a history of holding one before the Tokyo Game Show, which starts on 17 September this year. [34] Nintendo has announced nothing. Treat the date as a reasonable inference, not a fact. [34]

Why it matters — Publishers increasingly answer a leak by naming a date, which turns a leak into a scheduling announcement they did not plan to make.
26
Nvidia buys the place developers get AI models

Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9bn: about $11.9bn to investors and up to $1bn in shares to keep staff. [36][37] Hugging Face, founded in New York in 2016 by three French entrepreneurs, hosts open AI models that anyone can download, change and run on their own machines, which is how many game studios test AI tools without paying per use. Nvidia's chief executive Jensen Huang said the platform stays open and that its chips will not be required. [36][37][41]

Why it matters — Nvidia already sells most of the chips these models run on, and now owns the shelf they are picked from.

02 Lesson why it matters

The reason a price went up is not a promise it will come down

Sony raised the PS5 price while a US import tax was being charged, and now says the price was never really about that tax.

The twist

A company only has to justify a number on the day it raises it, and nobody ever asks it to justify the same number again after that.

How it works

A government puts a new tax on a product
The company raises its price and blames the tax
Buyers accept the higher price, because the tax is real and public
The tax is struck down and the money comes back
The company says the price was never really about the tax
The price stays where it is

The same force, elsewhere today

Where this chain is also running, in today's other stories.

Xbox cloud gaming goes on sale by the hour

Microsoft named a cost to explain the cut, saying cloud gaming gets more expensive as people play longer, and nothing in the plan gives the hours back if that cost ever falls
Ten games leave Game Pass, including Cyberpunk 2077

the monthly bill does not move when ten games come off the service on 15 September, because subscribers were never told which games they were paying for
Nvidia opens DLSS 5 to older cards after modders forced it

Nvidia gave a reason for locking its new rendering to the newest cards, dropped that reason when modders broke the lock, and kept the restriction that still suits it

Where you've seen this

Airline fuel charges

a line is added to the ticket when fuel gets dear and rarely removed when it gets cheap

A cafe menu

prices go up the week coffee beans jump and stay up the month they come back down

Rent and heating bills

a landlord raises the rent after an expensive winter and does not lower it after a mild one

The catch

Sometimes the company is telling the truth. Prices really do move for several reasons at once, and working out how much of a rise one tax caused is genuinely hard.

And the whole of it

Sony's lawyers made the argument that was open to them, and the buyers looked at a number, decided a PS5 was worth it, and paid. None of us can check the reason behind a price before we hand over the money, and most of what we buy is sold to us the same way.

03 Truth what's really going on

What is really going on

Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are each getting money back from the US government after import taxes on consoles were struck down, and all three have told courts that the buyers who paid higher console prices while those taxes were being charged are owed nothing. Sony goes furthest: it says its most recent PS5 price rise came after the US Supreme Court ruled the taxes illegal, which it offers as proof that the earlier rises were never about the taxes at all. [1]

Why it works on us — A price you looked at, agreed to and paid feels finished, so money that arrives afterwards reads as somebody else's windfall rather than part of the same transaction. [1]

Who gains

Sony — It expects around half a billion dollars back from the US government while keeping the higher console prices set during the tax, and its legal position is that the two are unrelated. [1]
Microsoft and Nintendo — Sony's filing follows arguments both had already made, so three console makers now hold the same line and no single one of them stands out for refusing. [1]
Xbox Cloud Gaming — Capping Game Pass streaming turns its heaviest streamers into people who buy hours, and the same announcement opens the service to anyone with no console and no subscription. [7][9]
Nvidia — For $12.9bn it buys Hugging Face, the site where developers get and share open AI models, which puts it inside the place its own customers pick their tools. [36][37]
Saber Interactive — Saying Space Marine 3 will use no generative AI costs the studio nothing and closes a row its own chief executive started by attacking a former writer in public. [16][17]

Who pays

People who bought a PS5 while the tax was being charged — The price rises made while the tax was being charged stay in place, and Sony's lawyers call paying a fair market price for something you chose to buy not a legal injury at all. [1]
Game Pass subscribers who stream a lot — Streaming was unlimited on every tier for the past year. From November the subscription costs the same and buys 15 hours a month on the dearest plan, 5 on the cheapest. [9][10]
The 3,200 people cut from Microsoft's games division — Staff describe being told on calls with cameras and microphones switched off, then losing access to their work accounts within the hour. [19]
Anyone part-way through one of ten games leaving Game Pass — Cyberpunk 2077, Dead Cells, Frostpunk 2, Spiritfarer and six others come off the service on 15 September, six months after Cyberpunk 2077 was added. [12]
People with old Nintendo cartridges — The watch batteries that hold the saves are dying, and a 26-year-old Pokemon Pinball file was gone before its owner played it again. [30]

What nobody knows yet

Open questions from across today’s stories — ours included.

01

How much Sony actually gets back, and when.

Sony says it expects around half a billion dollars from the US government, most of it landing in its games division, but has published no figure, no date and no breakdown. [1]
02

Whether any court will accept the argument.

Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have all filed versions of it, and none of the cases has been decided. The separate case over whether PlayStation buyers own their digital games is also still open. [1][2]
03

How many Game Pass subscribers lose cloud hours.

Microsoft says the caps will affect 4% of subscribers and has not said 4% of what number, nor how it counted a heavy streamer. [9][10]
04

What Microsoft will charge for an hour of cloud gaming.

Microsoft says extra hours and pay-as-you-go bundles go on sale in November and that prices will vary by country, but has published none of them. [7][9]
05

Who started the Square Enix going-private story.

The magazine Sentaku printed it, the share price rose, and Square Enix said no such thing is being considered. The two reports give different jumps: IGN says nearly 12%, GamesIndustry.biz says 8.3%. The activist investor 3D Investment Partners, which holds about 18.5% of the shares, is alleged to be behind it and has not commented. [14][15]
06

Where the 13TB of old Steam files came from.

The person who posted them says no hacking was involved and that the data sat on a publicly reachable address. Other accounts say it may have come from a third-party server holding earlier leaks, not from Valve. [18]
07

Whether Games Workshop's ban on AI binds Saber Interactive.

Games Workshop banned generative AI in its own content work in January and Saber says Space Marine 3 will not use it. Neither has said whether the ban is written into the licence Saber makes the game under. [16][17]
08

Whether DLSS 5 reaches cards older than the RTX 40 series.

Modders already have it running on RTX 30 and RTX 20 cards, badly. Nvidia will only say its focus is the RTX 50 series and that it will get there one step at a time. [13]

04 Hope carry this

Two cartridge readers that cost 50 and 60 dollars can now copy the save file off a Game Boy or Super Nintendo cartridge onto a computer. The tiny watch batteries inside those cartridges hold the saves and were never built to last 26 years.

Also true today

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe added an eight-player split-screen mode this week, twelve years after the game came out, free to everyone who already owns it.
Xbox players testing the new disc-to-digital feature found it works on games that have been pulled from the Xbox store, so a disc owner can get a playable copy of something the shop no longer sells.
Double Fine, independent again after leaving Microsoft, is running a public game jam funded by its players. Backers vote on which of 26 pitches get built into playable prototypes, and the whole thing is being filmed and streamed.