Microsoft reportedly projects $1,200 to $1,800 price for 2028 Project Helix

Xbox is in a rebuilding phase. The platform’s leaders have repeatedly made clear that “console” remains “core” to Microsoft’s gaming business. But according to a new report from Fortune, those consoles are about to start costing as much as $1,800 if the tech giant declines to subsidize next-gen hardware. “As it stands, the price of the Helix console has internally been projected to cost consumers between $1,200 and $1,800, unless Microsoft decides to subsidize the cost,” the report states. Microsoft has traditionally subsidized its hardware, much more so than Nintendo and Sony, but living room gaming devices have also never cost this much before. The PS6 is reportedly facing similar pricing pressures. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has called “affordability” one of the key challenges facing Project Helix as the AI race eats up all available supplies of memory and storage, even if some of the finished server racks for all of the data center buildouts are completely idle right now. It’s such a big obstacle that Microsoft is even having trouble keeping the existing Xbox Series X/S consoles stocked in stores despite massive price hikes over the last 12 months.

Sam Hill is a news writer at Polygon covering gaming and entertainment. He's a Portland, Oregon–based journalist known for covering gaming, the outdoors, national parks, tech, food, and internet culture. He has written for a range of publications including Outside Magazine, Boston Magazine, Vice, the Seattle Times and Digital Trends. Rockstar Games has spent years building hype for Grand Theft Auto 6, with every trailer and update becoming a major event for fans. But what if that same dramatic treatment was applied to a very different kind of video game? One starring a certain green ogre, perhaps? That's apparently the thinking behind the official reveal of Shrek 2 Remastered, which has officially been announced with a trailer that channels nothing less than the cinematic style of Rockstar's GTA 6 marketing.

Sam Hill is a news writer at Polygon covering gaming and entertainment. He's a Portland, Oregon–based journalist known for covering gaming, the outdoors, national parks, tech, food, and internet culture. He has written for a range of publications including Outside Magazine, Boston Magazine, Vice, the Seattle Times and Digital Trends. Adapting thousands of years of lore and hundreds of novels presents a daunting challenge for the filmmaker

With an unmanageably colossal heap of demos on offer, a massive number of which look to be filled with AI-generated garbage, the current Steam Next Fest is a serious bummer. How on earth is any adult with limited free time supposed to muck through the stables of slop to find something worthwhile? Increasingly, people have been creating ad hoc slop-free recommendation lists on social media in addition to sharing browser plugins and other tools that people can use to filter out games that have a genAI disclosure. But even with tools to separate the good game wheat from the slop chaff, that’s still a lot of games to sift through, so I’m gonna throw my own recommendation onto the pile with the only demo I’ve made time for this Next Fest: Fallbearers. I found the game via Bluesky, wooed to its Steam page by the game’s trailer alone. Imagine a game that combines Bennet Foddy’s track-and-field simulator QWOP with the “Coffin Flop” bit from Tim Robinson’s HBO sketch show I Think You Should Leave—that’s Fallbearers. In it, you—by yourself or you with a friend—control two Victorian-era pallbearers as they try to transport the dearly departed from the hearse to the grave.

When the battlefield gets too crowded, sometimes the only answer is to blow the whole thing up In Magic: The Gathering, board wipes (otherwise known as "sweepers") serve as the ultimate reset button. Whether you’re in a pinch with no creatures while your opponents have full armies, or you’re looking to slow the game down by ridding everyone of lands, these are the types of spells designed to clear multiple cards from the battlefield in a single shot. These kinds of big plays have been a pillar of Magic strategy since the game’s debut in 1993, when Alpha introduced Wrath of God and set the standard for mass destruction. Control and midrange decks rely heavily on these cards to erase an opponent's early momentum, using one card from your hand to level an entire battlefield of threats.

The wonderful thing about video games is that they can take something that is, quite frankly, terrible, and turn it into an experience where you can't help but think "just five more minutes. " Incremental games often have that effect, and Selkie's Salvage&Co. is no different in that regard, it's just the funny thing is that it is essentially a game about taking your rubbish out. That is bastardising it. The setting for the world is one where the entire planet is flooded, and you, a robot created by an anthropomorphic rat girl (the titular Selkie) who I can already predict salacious fan art of, have to clean up a whole bunch of trash from it by fishing it out. This starts slow of course, all you have is you, your fishing rod, and a magnetic arm that can't carry all that much. The more trash you collect and feed into a grinder, the more you can steadily increase your capabilities.