Asia and MENA games market expected to hit $100bn by 2028

Greetings, Polygon readers! Each week, we round up the most notable new releases to streaming and VOD, highlighting the biggest and best new movies for you to watch at home.

Originally released in 2003 for the PlayStation 2 and then remastered in 2020 for PS4, Nintendo Switch, and PC, Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne has developed a reputation for unpredictable, unavoidable, and utterly brutal difficulty spikes, especially on hard mode. Bosses randomly take extra turns, open-world encounters can wipe you before you even get to act, one mistimed debuff or missed attack can spell disaster, and save points can be painfully infrequent. Your party will get blown out at the drop of a hat, and there's often very little – or quite literally nothing – you can do about it. 

Throne and Liberty, NCSoft’s free-to-play MMORPG, finally has a global release date, launching on September 17th for Xbox Series X/S, PS5 and PC. Published by Amazon Games, it will be available in North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South America. Check out the latest video, which explains the title in more detail.

Free-to-play MMORPG Throne and Liberty will launch for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC via Steam with cross-platform play in North America, South America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan on September 17, publisher Amazon Games and developer NCSOFT announced. An open beta test will run for all platforms in all supported regions from July 18 to 23.

Today, Amazon Games revealed that NCSoft's fantasy MMORPG Throne and Liberty will arrive in North and South America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan in less than three months. To be exact, the game will be released on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X (with cross-play, as previously announced) on September 17. Amazon Games also confirmed that the business model will be free-to-play, just like in the original Korean release. An Open Beta test will take place on all platforms between July 18 and 23, allowing players to check out the game before the launch.

Amazon Games and NCSOFT announced today that THRONE AND LIBERTY, a free-to-play MMORPG featuring massive-scale combat in a dynamic world, will launch in North and South America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan on Tuesday, September 17, 2024. The game will be available on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, with cross-platform play enabled.

The second wave of June 2024’s Game Pass offerings kicks off today, with The Chinese Room’sStill Wakes the Deep now available to subscribers on cloud, Xbox Series X/S and PC. Check out our review for more details.

Wolfenstein developer MachineGames is known for their solid writing and penchant for diabolical nazi villains, which is probably what got them the gig making Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, but they also just know how to make a good shooter. The Wolfenstein games deliver a lot of guns-blazing, gory action, so will their Indiana Jones game be the same?

Pokémon Go’s biggest event of 2024 kicked off at the end of May in Sendai, Japan, but the action is about to land in Europe, with Spain’s capital city, Madrid, playing host for the weekend.

Sony has started to deploy PS5 system update 24.04-09.40.00, allowing players to start or join Discord voice chat directly from their PS5 console.

Sumo Group, the British video game collective which owns developers Sumo Digital, publishers Secret Mode and more - including Everybody's Gone to the Rapture devs The Chinese Room - is laying off hundreds of staff, cutting 15% of their workforce “to better navigate the upcoming challenges expected in the coming months”.

A newly launched third-party Epic Games Store database called EpicDB has revealed database entries for a number of unannounced and codenamed projects from major publishers such as Square Enix and Sony Interactive Entertainment.