Saturday, July 25, 2026

PlayStation Network spent much of July 24 face-down, and the culprit was not Sony. An Amazon Web Services outage centered on its US-WEST-2 region rippled out across the internet, and PSN went down with it: sign-ins, the PlayStation Store, and the PlayStation Portal all fell over, right as the Marvel Tokon open beta went live and funneled a fresh wave of players straight into error screens. Awkwardly, PSN stayed dark for hours even after AWS said its own incident was fixed (via Video Games Chronicle).

By the time the dust settled, Sony said "network services have fully recovered from an operational issue" and offered a peace token: every PlayStation Plus member gets five extra days of service tacked on automatically, the company's now-standard makegood for a long outage (via Video Games Chronicle).

If you would rather look ahead than dwell on downtime, Sony used its own blog to round up 19 PS5 games still due before the year is out, a reminder that the back half of 2026 is stacked even without a State of Play on the calendar (via PlayStation Blog).

Xbox's next seven days are all about Master Chief. Halo: Campaign Evolved, the Unreal Engine 5 remake of the original 2001 shooter's campaign, lands July 28 as a day-one Game Pass release across cloud, console, handheld, and PC, adding HD visuals, refined controls, and three brand-new prequel missions. The week also brings Dispatch (July 29), a superhero workplace comedy from the Tales from the Borderlands team, and pirate city-builder Corsair Cove (July 31), which also drops into Game Pass (via Xbox Wire).

The following week hands Game Pass a bigger swing. Beast of Reincarnation, Pokemon studio Game Freak's first major action RPG outside its comfort zone, arrives August 4 and goes straight into Game Pass on day one. It is a Soulslike set in a ruined, blight-choked future Japan, following an exiled hunter and her wolf companion, and a very deliberate turn from catching monsters to cutting them down (via Video Games Chronicle).

Call of Duty is coming back to a Nintendo console, and you can try it for free first. Activision and Nintendo confirmed that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 will run an open beta on Switch 2 from August 28 to September 1, open to anyone with a Nintendo Switch Online subscription and no pre-order required. It is a notable vote of confidence in Switch 2's horsepower for a series that skipped Nintendo hardware for years, with the full game due October 23 alongside the PS5, Xbox, and PC versions (via Nintendo Life).

For a calmer kind of chaos, Two Point Hospital: Full Health Collection has a date. The management sim about running gleefully absurd hospitals arrives digitally on Switch 2 September 16, with a physical edition following November 6, and it bundles the base game with every major expansion in one box (via Nintendo Life).

The memory crunch that has made consoles and GPUs pricier all year is now reaching your driveway. The same AI-driven shortage of DRAM and NAND, the chips that make up system memory and storage, is pushing up the cost of cars: General Motors has warned of large added costs, and BYD hiked prices on its driver-assistance features by 20 percent. It is a sign the squeeze that forced hikes on Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft hardware is spreading rather than easing (via Tom's Hardware).

Gaming laptops may be about to get a real desktop-class trick. A leak points to an AMD Ryzen 7 9800HX3D, a mobile chip that would bring 3D V-Cache, extra cache memory stacked on the processor that reliably boosts gaming frame rates, to laptops, reportedly with 8 cores, 16 threads, and 96MB of cache. Treat it as an unconfirmed leak until AMD says so, but it would be the first time the company's best gaming CPU tech shows up in a portable (via Tom's Hardware).

Intel, meanwhile, is trying to convince the industry its factories are back on track. The company committed to mass-producing chips on its next-generation 14A process in 2028 as quarterly sales rose 25 percent year over year, a bet that its long-delayed manufacturing roadmap can finally keep pace with rivals building on TSMC (via Tom's Hardware).