I will be honest, I looked at the Persona 6 ones lol

@Nightcrawler71 They are both quite different, to be honest. The Bus focuses on a real-life scale of Berlin, while Bus Sim 27 is based on a fictional Mediteranian/South American map.

Both have good handling mechanics, and Bus Sim 27 has a much wider variety of licensed vehicles, including coaches.

Both are on the cheaper side, so if you can get both.

I have enjoyed it so far, but for anyone who is holding out, I suggest waiting a few weeks while the dev team irons out the rest of the bugs/performance (especially on Series S).

This dev team does usually present quite a high-quality, polished product after a couple of months of patches.

I am excited for both. They are more complementary and competitive.

I think I went ultra basic and picked the Football. I may have also used the Panda pic too.

It doesn't look that great to me, tbh, kind of a more cringe version of Forza but not as polished. Considering these are ex-Forza devs, the story looks to have taken new levels of cringe.

I don't think Playground Games has anything to worry about from this particular developer.

They normally just do midnight local time, so if you live in another part of the world, best to keep offline lol or "travel to New Zealand"

Once it gets to the 19th somewhere, they won't care about any leaks or spoilers, as it will technically be launched.

I personally can wait 12/13 hours tbh.

Curious to see how this one lands on console now that some updates have been put out.

Nothing for this part of the month

I can imagine the 3 largest markets (US, Canada & UK) will be excluded from this, as there will be more of a focus on pushing hardware sales rather than cloud, with low-engagement countries getting an easier time with cloud to keep people subscribed to Game Pass.

If you are playing more than 15 hours of gaming per month, saving for. series s should be a consideration.

I think MS realised cloud gaming has a long way to go before it becomes profitable for them.

Looks like a great level of customisation here, which means anyone can enjoy the game on their terms.

@fatpunkslim Same - The State of Play's are usually rubbish

@strzelec Yes, check the link - sadly looks to be a mistake which is why it has not being reported

@strzelec The video got taken down - maybe this was a mistake

@Kloppo Pure Xbox feels like the unloved child of Hookshot; they rarely get codes outside of 1st party games. I guess it's indicative of how many people visit this site vs the other 2 main ones.

The next review to expect will probably be Minecraft Dungeons 2 or Gears of War E-Day

Let's be honest, for Fable fans, the story is treated as a nice add-on. Like Elder Scrolls games, you can spend hundreds of hours doing everything else in the world.

The world/life sim elements are what really excite me about this game.

If you are just playing the story in this game, you are missing out on about 80% of what Fable has to offer.

I can see why MS decided to cut their losses.

I am very impressed and excited for this game!

A lot of people will complain about the price, but watch it sell out, lol

I grabbed the controller, which went up for pre-order yesterday.

Update 7 mins after pre-order launch - it's sold out in the UK.

A great start to 2027 for sure

Oh no, how will people farm engagement now?

I struggle to understand how anyone other than shareholders and MS executives care about the sales numbers.

If Xbox is doing badly (which it has to a degree) Asha will just come out and say it anyways. Sales data for certain games is just a small part of what good performance looks like at a gaming centric business.

@Banjo- Alphabet is the owner of Google fyi

Where are the Series S specs?

So the expected UK price will be about £799.99. that's £10 more than a 2TB PS5 pro and not worth it even for a big Xbox fan like myself.

@Fiendish-Beaver Dawnwalker is out Sept 3rd FYI

Smyths is taking pre-orders for £79.99. I expect it to come down at other retailers too, like Currys, Argos, and Amazon. The Forza controller went down to £74.99 eventually.

This is actually quite cheap compared to the £300-£500 some SSDs are going for.

It looks like they aren't available in the UK yet.

Unlike others, I am hyped for this lol

Xbox should cancel the 1TB Series S version. £519.99 is the same as the much more powerful PS5 digital (which can have a disc drive added) and is a terrible look tbh.

I can only see someone paying £519.99 for a Series S if all other consoles are sold out and someone is desperate to play GTA 6.

Where I work, you can still get Xbox's at the old prices, but stock is running out fast as everyone is rushing to get a much cheaper one now.

We have shifted a huge amount of Xbox Series X Digitals and Series S's online today. Many are now store collection only. The Series X Disc sold more today than at any other point since launch; we are out of stock company-wide now except for a couple of stores.

@8th_Observer Well, the reason they have gone downhill in the last 2-3 years is that they diluted the brand so badily but making everything an Xbox and multiplat that nobody knew or cared what an Xbox was. The exclusives strategy is there to try and rebuild the Xbox brand and give consumers a reason to pick Xbox in the future. It is a long-term play rather than a short-term one where they will lose money at first.

@8th_Observer

Exclusives don't make the most money, but they provide a gateway to hardware investment that then leads to broader software investment. It is a tactic that PlayStation uses.

Spider-Man gets players to buy a PS5, and they will then, in turn, buy a much larger number of copies of COD or FC 27 to generate more money for Sony.

Something big like The Elder Scrolls 6 as an exclusive would be a gateway product for Xbox like Forza used to be before Xbox decided to make online games multiplatform.

Shame it is not available to play on an Xbox console.

The game plays best on a high-end PC, not the PS5 Pro. From what I saw from DF, it was not a huge difference between the Series X and the PS5 Pro.

Had no issues at my end

Got the UK prices effective 1st Aug:

Series S 512GB £399.99

Series S 1TB £449.99

Series X 1TB Digital £599.99

Series X 1TB Disc £649.99

The game can win all the "change" awards it wants. But not many people bought it, and Xbox lost a lot of money.

@trev666 Maybe, but it will come out.

Obsidian was sadly not making enough money to keep the number of staff they had. They should focus on one big project at a time.

Asha has made the right call to get rid of the bloat and try to fix the mess that Phil and Sarah left.

@trev666 Clockwork is due out next year, is almost finished, and is being marketed as an exclusive for 2027. I doubt this one will get cancelled. It's normally the games in Dev hell that are years away that could go. I expect Blade to go, for instance.

All the underperforming studios are going; that's no surprise. I am glad those studios will remain open, and their jobs will remain for now, though.

Okay, that looks great, something to keep on my radar as I love flight sim.

I don't trust the game business who have a clear bias towards Xbox and like to push out negative stories. You can be sure Matt Ball was on the phone to Jason Schrier to set the record straight.

@Coletrain

Agree, we are selling Switch 2s for £379.99 where I work, and Xbox Series X for £479.99, and Series S 512 GB for £289.99.

Even GTA 6 has stuck at £70 and not gone to £80, and MS is launching new AAA games at £60-£70.

Curious why the prices have remained fairly low in the UK until now.

So we looking at £74.99 as Take 2 actually convert down.

As the game is prone to a big leak on physical, it's probably best to keep this off disc or PC until after launch.

Hopefully they will do a disc version at some point after launch.

I personally don't care about physical games.

@dkxcalibur Not a dumb question at all. The full game would have had to have been on 2 disc which doubles up the cost and gives a risk of leaks.

Depends on factors such as:

How much RAM and storage did Xbox buy? They have far greater access to RAM and storage than Steam

How much cost is it willing to bear? They have significantly more money they can lose than Steam

When did it source these items? And at what price? Larger orders pre-2024 will be much cheaper than Steam's 2024 + smaller-order prices.

How far will it lean into affordability, by lowering specs and reducing cost (as Asha and Matt Ball have mentioned in recent interviews), Xbox could pivot away from very high-end specs, which would lower the cost.

That will determine the launch price and how many units they can sell at that price.

Unless we have that information, we will just be assuming and guessing.