Have to admit the game is growing on me a little bit more now I'm a bigger chunk through it, although still find the gameplay very repetitive and the environments a bit drab but now there are some interesting bigger creatures to cover from and periodically pop out and shoot at.
Although to hear this game probably cost between equal to double Spiderman 2 is quite a shock. Its not a patch on that game in my opinion. That feels like very bad management if true, especially when knowing it won't be making much money back due to Game Pass?

If Day 1 games are removed from the service with the subscription I receive as a mobile phone 'add-on' then I'll probably sell my Series S and swap my 'add-on' to something with better value. I bought a Series S for GamePass only and to go back on their reason to buy one is pretty damning for me. I wonder if I could sell my Series S for more than I bought it for as well? I truly feel like the next gen of Xbox could be the last?

This was always going to be shown on a PS5 however the fact they have used a base ps5 shows how confident they are with their product. Didn't all promo work for Cyberpunk come from top range PC's which made everyone suspicious, so kudos to Rockstar for catering to what we want to see.
Saying that I have a Series S but not got high hopes that it'll look or play anything like the Series X/PS5 version - but we can but wait and see. It really does look incredible from the trailers/gameplay drops. Can't wait to experience it.

@EskZr0 I didn't notice this, however I have a pretty decent PC (cost me over £2k a few years back) and its the only game that causes my PC to make loud noise and pump out massive heat.
I also get a chunk of screen tear - so hopefully that will solve this issue?
Just wish they would do a fix for the colour palette. Seems very grey and brown, to the point they've named some protagonists Grey and Brown (which did make me chuckle).
Game has improved now its opened up the map slightly but still only seen about 3 different enemy types so far. Could do with some variety.

I am baffled by the love for E-day. I'm forcing my way through it currently. Seems a very polished game but unless things change a little I'm struggling to see how this could be GofY material. Its a very grey/brown game will limited enemy variety where everyone/thing looks the same. I'm sometimes shooting my own team mates as the enemies/gears all look the same?!?
Its also a very repetitive cover shooting gallery, move onto next area, repeat.
I'm hoping this is just me at early parts of the game and there will be more variety in the second part of the game?

I don't think I have a GotY this year yet. Hoping GTA can be that game, although I imagine it will end up being Ocarina of Time remake, which is not a great sign of the year for me personally.

Not played the Doom DLC (someone mentioned it above) but if Doom (Dark ages) came out in 2026 it would have been my GotY. Game I've played most in 2026 probably the Wolfenstein series (on GP) and it still feels better than all the other shooters released this year!

Yep affecting me. First thing I did was come here to check if it was just me or everyone else! Oddly its stopping me from playing Wolfenstein 2 on the PC. I can load up the game but the 'Press ENTER' isn't working to start the game. Very odd?

To be fair I'd argue Rockstar have done the exact opposite and treated it like a normal video game which has annoyed everyone. They've hardly shown anything about this game. Teaser trailers a long time ago then this extended look. These next few months will likely be their actual marketing push which haven't really even started properly yet!

I was able to play Wolfenstein on my PC fine however the last days worth of save seems to have failed. Wonder if this was the cause?

No chance MS and Sony that many next gen consoles in the first year. With a prohibitive cost and no likely reason to upgrade with cross gen gaming I can't really see why anyone would actually buy on of these machines? At least for the first few years to see whether the price ever becomes attainable.

@OorWullie wow I do not remember writing that! Nice spot

My prediction is that GP has probably plateaued now. About 30 million with CoD included and no point in casual players getting GP now CoD has gone so reckon if MS keep GP on 30 mil they will do well - so they will have to work around that price point. Perhaps why they are making so many redundancies as they probably aren't confident those numbers will increase enough to justify the number of studios they have.

@HonestHick My example is not really about MS expected to foot the bill for losing money, but 'supposedly' Ninja Theory at one point reported they were pleased with the financials and reported a profit (google AI suggesting at a point in time it was at £5 mil profit).
In my eyes thats a good game. Its niche, different to the main stream cut and paste games and it returned a profit.
The problem for MS is the investors aren't happy with the % of profit, so the company is not focussed or doesn't care about the art as such but more about the profit %.
I can complain about it all day as to as to me gaming is a hobby and I don't care about profits, but to MS gaming is a business and it's only about the profit. This will always end badly for us gamers when both Sony and MS are 100% driven by this metric.

@HonestHick the problem with the remit to 'make better games' is that what defines better games? To some of us its games like Psychonauts, Hellblade, Prey, Dishonoured. But if these don't make the required profit margin (even if they make profit) then to MS, and more importantly their shareholders, they are not good games so they will ask for more games like Minecraft, Fortnite, CoD, EA FC.
What we are going to end up with is a smaller pool of game styles that are in the 'pop' bracket and turn the industry into a boring mass of corporate designed trash.

I'm not entirely sure how, as MS have admitted, with the Xbox business failing that losing a handful of studios and laying off a lot of talent will result in success and growth? Yes perhaps they will save money here or there but the failures in install base and game pass sales surely aren't because of too many staff members or too many studios? I just don't see how the product they offer going forwards will improve with this direction? Especially with helix likely going to bomb (as will PS6) due to prohibitive pricing, game pass already higher costs year on year (even after the price drop) and the reality being a drop off in GP numbers due to a likely difficult future for the industry.

@kmtrain83 lol - so true I'm getting lost with all the continuous bad news between everyone going all digital, studios closing, redundancies, huge price rises. Feels like the industry is just imploding on itself.

@kmtrain83 I think @Gabrie was referring to MS and their practice of buying up loads of studios just to close them down and make thousands of people redundant. Not sure if he could mean Sony to be honest - unless he means the disc news, which MS have also unofficially indicated with this disc to digital news so I would them assume he is referring to both companies? Hold on - now I'm confused what he means 🤔

Considering the huge number of games (and quality games at that) left in 2026 to come - this is one of my most anticipated. I AM TUROK!

As far as I understand it MS putting other stores on Helix will massively reduce the amount they take in from storefront sales. Especially if steam sells a game new for £50 and Xbox sells for £60 for example. It could possibly add competition to reduce store prices on helix but that would only harm MS more. Which makes me think Helix will have to be a very expensive machine to justify it's creation. Theres no chance I'll ever be buying this machine and sadly doubt I'll get the next PS6 if it's anything close to £1k.
As someone who's had nearly every console since the SNES days it will be a sad time for me.
Guess I'll have more time for golf and padel. Yes I'm that old!

@J_Mo_Money a simple google shows ps plus has "over 600 games" while game pass has "over 400 games". But to be fair his original opinion is not about quantity but quality. No one has the time to play 400 - 600 games.

Wonder if this is being pimped around for potential buyers or is actually coming out 🤔 who knows 🤷 Hardly seems like any good news on these sites these days. I guess September / October we'll all be too busy to notice!

@MrStark this is hilarious 😂 and why I come to read the comments on PureXbox/Push Square. Love the enthusiasm. In truth I doubt Sony give two hoots on this news but fun to read all the same. Would have loved your reaction to Forza and Halo ending up on PlayStation and the inevitable doom for MS at that point 😆

@Weebleman I think Sharma has to be a bit careful. She's coming out in the press on a daily basis ranting like a politician saying everything Xbox owners want to here but adding enough contradiction to be able to back out of whatever she is ranting about. May look good now but may bite her in the future if she isn't careful.

I read this as they are likely going to look at pushing subscription models on the hardware side more aggressively. Similar to how mobile phones are pushed with subscription models.
Probably make you pay a premium on Game Pass over a long time period so they contract you in for a long period of time while you slowly pay off the cost of the Helix + APR.

@Banjo- true but they are the only regions that actually sell Xbox's to a meaningful level and that's always been the case. Otherwise it highlights more incompetency if there are loads of stock in UK but France are struggling with demand for example (which a quick Google suggests is the case).
Either they are incompetent or deliberately holding back stock in regions that they don't sell to back up their 'we have too much demand' claim.
I just find it all laughable. In truth it makes no difference to the quality of the games or how much I play on my series machines but I find it incomprehensible how stupid they think we are when they come out with this garbage 🙄

Huh? Amazon have the Series X, X digital and S available to buy and delivery for tomorrow? Same with Argos, John Lewis, Currys, Smyths, EE and the MS Store?
All I did was google stores that sell them and check the availability. Either Matthew Ball is a terrible liar or completely incompetent 🤔
For information - if anyone is desperate to get an Xbox but struggling like Matthew I'd recommend Amazon or Smyths with the X best price at £479.99. You're welcome.

I do have a feeling ms need to be careful with their exclusives. They must think having GoW exclusive will sell enough to justify it however it could also spell the death of several franchises following this path. There must have been a very strong reason to stop exclusives in the first place and I'm guessing s##ts and giggles wasn't it.
Unless something has changed financially to allowed them to take a hit. Maybe they tried giving PS owners a taste before trying to draw them over to Xbox? Maybe it was their plan all along?

@Deformedpye yeah its amazing. Love go-karting too! Quad bikes probably my favourite though.

If MS really want to show off this game and compete with Gran Turismo they should do a VR mode for PSVR2. I absolutely love GT7 on PSVR2 with my wheel set up and would consider getting this if it had VR mode. They did it with flight simulator so maybe this too?

@SmokeEmAll just not sure where your optimism comes from. 2026 for PS5 includes Ghost of Yotei, Wolverine, Saros, Marvel Tokon (others I'm less interested in). Plus all the Xbox releases on top of it. I bought my Xbox only for the exclusives but no chance I'll be buying the Helix after being burnt this gen.

@Arkz I guess I could try again but Im pretty sure I went to lowest settings and it was still a problem.

@theduckofdeath that is a good point. Would it be possible to tweak settings for a steam game on Helix to end up like my control scenario where it is just unplayable and not understanding what the f is going on? On my PC I just gave up and assumed the game was unplayable on that system. If I'd bought it I would probably have asked for a refund but as it was a Game Pass game I just moved onto the next game.

@Arkz well I've learnt something today if nothing else. Its the 16GB version. I bought the PC as my old one was too old (15 years!) and it came recommended on loads of review sites and I know next to nothing about PC's.

I'm enjoying the learning curve a bit but must admit it was a complete shock. Playing Doom Dark Ages it blew me away how much better it looked/performed to console games, however when I played Doom Eternal it looked like a 1990's game until I realised the settings were on their lowest and I had to update them. I also found Control an unplayable mess on my PC, jittery and crashing constantly even on low settings so had to play that on my console - so all a bit trial and error really.
The comparison between that and my series S is a shocker though!

And this is where I struggle with PC gaming. I have no clue where my PC sits within that range. I know I have Intel Ultra 7 265K processor and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti but does that put me on Extreme or could I squeeze in Extreme RT? I have 32G memory as well so I'm possibly mainly Extreme RT but potentially a bit short.

Also how would Helix deal with PC gaming? If you looked on Steam would everyone know how their set up would behave versus these settings, especially as I imagine they will have their own bespoke cpus?

Wonder if they could do a scheme such as 'return discs and pay £5 to receive a digital code'. So they can make a small bit of money, take the disc out of circulation (can they recycle the material for other uses?) and gives us all the option to keep our back catalogue for a small fee.

I don't actually have any Xbox physical games so not something for me to worry about, although having spent probably close to £1000 on GP I don't actually own any Xbox games which feels really bad when put like that!

Hook, Line and Sinker 😆

@Fiendish-Beaver My concern with buying a top of the range PC as a gaming console is will it do all the things I need a PC to do. Will it do all my work stuff like Office? Remote desktop. Will i be able to do all my Go Pro video editing and so on.
If the answer is no then I'd need to buy another PC that is capable to do all that plus this gaming one so ending up doubling my costs (currently I have a PC that does all that so buying this machine seems madness to me as it won't offer me anything more, possibly not even any extra fps).

At that point people may as well just buy a top level PC which would cost the same as both machines, giving me something much better than what the Xbox will offer, or just save thousand pounds on just having the PC.

I also think this won't be for the masses (and as a result not successful enough for MS liking) because its not going to be something the lay person would understand so would just avoid it. It may be a PC with optional stores but the majority will just look at it as an Xbox that costs £1000+ vs a PS5 which will be much cheaper.

If the general consensus is the PS6 will be £800 vs £1200 Xbox I just don't understand who buys the Xbox for console gaming other than diehards. Imagine all the kids trying to persuade their parents to go for the £1200 console vs the massively cheaper PS6? I just don't get how this will work for them?

@fatpunkslim interestingly I feel it may not appeal to either of these. Pc players already have a PC and access to all the Xbox games day 1. This doesn't feel like anything different other than a more closed system compared to their current set up. They also have access to all store fronts and Game Pass anyway. Me personally I have a PC which is likely as powerful as the next xbox anyway so this wouldn't appeal to me yet.

Console players generally want a console and don't want to deal with windows operated machines and don't care about operating systems. At a price that will likely get you a more functional and as powerful PC I can see people just going down the PC route instead?

Is it a niche product? Anything that is outside the price range for 90% of consumers, no matter how good it is, is considered a niche product. The large majority of console owners just buy based on availability and price. I do worry this will end up a worse gen than Series X/S, especially if the price of GamePass continues to go up and up.

I'm going to say something very stupid, but don't I already have the next Xbox? Recently bought a PC for about £2000. It plays Xbox games, steam games and I use an Xbox controller for it. How is this different to the next xbox? It's probably still going to be more powerful than the next xbox too?

@Fiendish-Beaver to be fair it sounds like Xbox was controlled by people who knew gaming but not how a business runs. That has obviously changed now. Its clear that Xbox division was haemorrhaging money from everywhere (especially Game Pass) and it took someone with business acumen to stop it. It's how every business works. Its a bit like me buying treats non-stop for my kids so they love me more than my wife, only for her to make me stop or we'll be in trouble financially, only for my kids to tell her she doesn't understand parenting

My biggest problem now is I bought my Series S to play Game Pass but its now at a point I'm not paying that price. So all I have is a box that does next to nothing. Think this gen has been a learning curve for me and how digital isn't the way forward for me personally.

@Weebleman I think MS HAS put that genie back in the box many times over. GP was all about day one games as part of the service. Then they changed it to day one only on the premium tier (or Ultimate tier or whatever). Then it became Day One ONLY if you pay the additional premium on top of the premium to get it Day One so the Premium Tier subscribers get it day 7 (or whatever it now is).
To the point as a Pure Xbox reader I'm completely lost with it all. Can't imagine the casual gamer has a clue whats going on with the service!

I mentioned this in another post but had no response. Isn't the new Xbox already out? Aren't there PC's already out there that will be as good as the next gen releases (albeit expensive atm) that use Xbox controllers and have the Xbox store, GP, Steam etc?

I'm not sure what the difference between the new xbox would be other than having to pay for online versus not for the current PCs?

Going to sounds an odd question but if I were to buy a brand new top of the range PC today, wouldn't it be able to play Xbox games AND Steam games and likely be as powerful as the next Xbox? I don't really understand what the difference is? Isn't the next Xbox technically already available now then?
Edit: And another question? Would the only difference on top of my head be that my brand new PC bought today will play all those games online for free, but the Xbox version would require a subscription to play online?

The more I read about the Series S getting a poorer version the more I think there should be a cheaper tier GP subscription for Series S owners. I know it wouldn't work, but a bit like when users watch films in HD or 4K the prices are different due to quality differences. Sometimes feels annoying I'm paying the same price but getting a worse service

Really want to download Crime Scene but currently have latest CoD on my Series S so can't download any other games Big decision to make....

Silly question but if the next xbox is going to be PC based and potentially upgradable like current PC's why would anyone buy one instead of a PC? Would I use the new Xbox to work on? Can't imagine so, but could I use my gaming PC to work from? Yes. I can't think of a reason I'd want to buy the next Xbox ahead of a PC other than console exclusives which aren't a thing?
I guess MS are going to have to do something to convince me I'm wrong.

If I get this right the PS Vita sold about 10-15 million according to google and was seen as a massive flop. On the assumption this does twice as good as Steam Deck then would it be seen as a massive flop too? And I'm referring to MS seeing this as a flop, not the fans. Unless this is crazy cheap I just can't see this being worth while for them?

I'm going with 'done with Xbox after this gen'. I'll have a series S and will assume I'll be able to play the next gen for a good 5 years after it starts and longer, and after that I assume I'll be able to stream games and the quality of streaming will have improved by then. I also expect the price of the nextbox to be far too much for me to spend the money.

Starfield is just a typical Bethesda game. Awful gameplay, boring story, old gen graphics, dodgy scripting, terrible AI like all their games but I still put over 150 hours as with the others. No idea how but they must be doing something right somewhere?!?

@Medic_alert Didn't Balders Gate 3 have to cut multi player as it wouldn't work on Series S? Maybe its there now, I can't be sure anymore. Obviously the developers would never say it but wonder if this is the reason Local multiplayer was dropped from Halo Infinite? No chance its because the Series X can't handle it, but maybe not worth the effort to get it onto Series S? Real disappointment as I had planned playing that game with my son but in the end we just have to play different games instead.

@Jenkinss I sort of agree with what you are saying. I read this as developing a game that will work at the lowest level then scale up. Doesn't sound great for pushing game development. Although saying that I have a Series S so can't really complain too much as I'm one of those to blame!

Will definitely give this a go. Series X HDMI port broke when I plugged in the cable so it all works fine but doesn't output an image. Instantly a £450 paper weight 😥. Bought an S to replace it but very disappointed as it was my first Xbox since the 360 RROD but had GP annual subscription so was wasting my subscription without an Xbox to use it.
But I guess I now have some hope.