While most stories about price increases in the past few weeks have been US-based, yesterday’s PlayStation 5 price hike announcement from Sony only applies to the UK, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and other select markets in the Middle East and Africa.
Citing “a challenging economic environment,” Sony has upped the RRP of the digital edition PS5 in Europe and the UK and increased the RRP for both the standard and digital editions in Australia and New Zealand.
Here’s the table from Sony’s blog post:
The prices, which are effective starting today, have increased by 10 to 15% depending on the product and the location. Interestingly, the company has decreased the price of the disc drive accessory available for the digital edition consoles and made no changes at all to the PS5 Pro prices.
Officially, Sony has only provided “high inflation and fluctuating exchange rates” as reasons for the increases, with no mention of the U.S. tariffs. The company raised prices for this reason before in 2022, so there is a chance that this price hike is not directly related to Trump’s tariffs.
An analyst speaking to CNBC, however, expects Sony will raise prices in the U.S. eventually once it’s more clear where the tariffs are headed.
Other speculation includes the possibility that Sony is preparing to spread the cost of the tariffs across different regions to keep the console as affordable as possible for consumers in the United States. Because the situation with the tariffs is still evolving, it’s impossible to say what the final outcome will be for U.S. consumers at this time.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.