Category: Video Games

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, the sequel to Hideo Kojima’s 2019 hit Death Stranding, was well-received at launch. It’s “incredibly exciting and original,” and “bold work that deserves to be encouraged,” at least, according to our review. As a result, fans might be hoping for an eventual third game in the series. But for right now, Kojima isn’t planning to make Death Stranding 3…even though he already has a concept written.

Kojima said this in an interview in Riyadh, Saudia Arabia, as a part of the Death Stranding 2 World Strand Tour. When asked by the interviewer about Death Stranding 3, he replied with the following:

“I’m not planning to do that at the moment, because the ending of Death Stranding 2 was my finale of 1 and 2. But I already wrote the concept of DS3, so I have that in data. I hope that someone would create it for me.”

This isn’t the first time Kojima has suggested that someone else might pick up the mantle of his games after him. Back in May, he said that he’d been thinking more and more about his own death lately, prompting him to create a USB stick “kind of like a will” that lays out the future of his studio, Kojima Productions, if he dies.

“I gave a USB stick with all my ideas on it to my personal assistant, kind of like a will,” he said. “Perhaps they could continue to make things after I’m gone at Kojima Productions… This is a fear for me: what happens to Kojima Productions after I’m gone? I don’t want them to just manage our existing IP.”

While we won’t be getting a Death Stranding 3 anytime soon it sounds like, there’s plenty coming from Kojima’s mind in the near future. Death Stranding is getting a live-action film adaptation in partnership with A24, and Kojima is busy working on two different games: horror project OD, in collaboration with Xbox, and Metal Gear successor Physint.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

After a high-profile failure in Concord and a high-profile success in Astro Bot last year, PlayStation is looking to adjust its strategy to incorporate fewer live service games, more big franchises, and stricter oversight of its owned studios.

In an interview with Financial Times, PlayStation CEO Hermen Hulst says the company is hoping to mitigate future big, expensive risks with future games. “I don’t want teams to always play it safe, but I would like for us, when we fail, to fail early and cheaply.”

Concord was not a cheap failure. Analysts estimate Sony spent around $250m on the game, only for it to sell so poorly that Sony shut it down two weeks after launch, and shuttered its developer, Firewalk Studios, not long after. By contrast, Astro Bot also launched last year to universal acclaim, winning multiple awards and selling 2.3 million copies as of March 2025, one of the best-selling games on PlayStation 5.

The differences between the two games are myriad, certainly, and their development stories are quite different as well. But what Hulst has taken away from this is that there needs to be more supervision of Sony’s owned studios to ensure that games veering in the direction of Concord are spotted before they become expensive failures, so they can be canceled or corrected in time.

“We have since put in place much more rigorous and more frequent testing in very many different ways,” Hulst said. “The advantage of every failure . . . is that people now understand how necessary that [oversight] is.”

Financial Times spoke to multiple Sony studio heads, who said that this oversight means more focus on group testing, more communication between internal Sony studios, and closer relationships between the studios’ top executives. “If we’re heading towards a giant landmine, like there’s another studio making exactly the same game, that’s good information,” said Jason Connell, art director at Ghost of Yōtei studio Sucker Punch.

That comment rings especially poignant in light of Concord’s failure, which analysts say occurred for a number of reasons, including an oversaturation of multiplayer, live service shooters. Hulst suggests in the interview that PlayStation isn’t as intent on churning out live service games as it used to be. That said, PlayStation does have Bungie’s Marathon coming up before March 2026, a game that has a number of Bungie fans concerned amid delays, staff layoffs, and a general lack of information as to what the game entails.

But there’s another strategy Hulst also wants to pursue: he wants more, massive Sony IP. Astro Bot’s success has come about over the course of multiple games, with the little robot icon growing in popularity each time. According to Financial Times, Hulst wants studios to be thinking about how their IP can be turned into bigger and bigger franchises over time, following in the footsteps of The Last of Us and Uncharted. “We take a very intentional approach to IP creation . . . understanding how a new concept can turn into an iconic franchise for PlayStation, that can then again become a franchise for people beyond gaming,” he said.

Currently on the docket, PlayStation has Ghost of Yōtei and Lost Soul Aside coming this year, with Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls and Housemarque’s Saros for 2026. Other games such as Fairgames, Marvel’s Wolverine, Naughty Dog’s Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, Marathon, and more remain in the works.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

The Magic: The Gathering product release schedule continues, with anticipation building for the arrival of Spider-Man next month, but there are plenty of price changes to come before then. From classic cards seeing new life and staggering value changes, to big drops for some of Edge of Eternities’ most popular cards, there’s plenty to keep up with. Here are the big shifts this week for August 28, and why they’re happening.

This Week’s Climbers

Need for Speed debuted in 2001 (the card, not the video game series) and it lets you sack lands to give creatures haste, but folks have noticed that Toph, the First Metalbender from the upcoming Avatar set can take advantage of its effects.