Years later, the relevance of OnlyBans endures

2023 marked the first time in 15 years that a Call of Duty or Rockstar game didn’t top the annual sales chart in the United States.

After 2022 saw US spending on games dip 5%, 2023 saw a return to growth, according to the latest figures from industry-tracking group Circana.

Developer Team Ninja has updated the PS5 store page for its upcoming open-world action title Rise of the Ronin, offering more details on the various factions that are part of the game’s story and setting of the Bakumatsu era.

A recently translated interview with Shigeru Miyamoto has shed some light on Nintendo's plans to make a major SNES peripheral a haven for indie devs - a full decade before indie gaming on consoles would become a proper reality.

Martin Scorsese’s compelling, righteously furious crime epic Killers of the Flower Moon is now available to stream at home on Apple TV Plus, and it’s well worth watching if you didn’t catch it in theaters. Starring Robert De Niro in diabolical uncle mode, Leonardo DiCaprio in tortured idiot mode, and a luminous, movie-stealing, award-winning Lily Gladstone, the film tells the incredible, appalling true story of the wholesale murder of members of the wealthy Osage tribe in 1920s Oklahoma. Based on David Grann’s nonfiction bestseller, Scorsese’s movie focuses on the marriage of Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio) and Osage heiress Mollie (Gladstone), and the machinations of De Niro’s cattle baron Bill Hale as he attempts to secure Mollie’s family’s oil rights. It’s a damning portrait of American complicity, greed, and erasure.

One WWE fan won a special holiday giveaway from the pro wrestling behemoth a decade ago, and is still trying to claim it today because the company never sent it. As WWE is now worth billions of dollars thanks to its merger with the UFC, the wrestling company is typically quite generous with giveaways and promos involving merchandise, which is why this failure to follow through seems uncharacteristic.

Before we read and wrote, we moved. Stories of people moving – migrating – have been told since time immemorial. The Mexica journey to central Mexico; Moses leading the Jewish people across the desert; the founding of Rome – as told by Virgil – by those that fled the fall of Troy. Unsurprisingly, then, video games also tell stories of migration. On August 8, 2013, game designer Lucas Pope, the man behind the studio 3909, released Papers, Please, a game about managing migration.

As 1983 came into focus, the future of video games in North America looked bleak. Store shelves were crowded with poorly made games, and consumer interest waned substantially. Developers that ushered in the “golden age” of arcades and the first two generations of home consoles began to crash and burn at an alarming pace. In no time, the once billion-dollar industry was reduced to rubble.

A Rōnin is a samurai without a master. Unshackled from bonds, these wandering swordsmen are free to carve their own path, and that freedom forms the foundation of Rise of the Ronin. The adventure is Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and Nioh developer Team Ninja’s first choice-driven, open-world action game. We recently got another peek at the title during The Game Awards, and we spoke to the game’s lead designers to get some insight and context as to what the adventure entails. 

For a long time, video games have been the top dog when it comes to entertainment revenue, having been the most lucrative industry for well over 10 years. You'd have thought that with how good we had it with video game releases last year that this trend would continue, but it turns out revenue from video-based content was higher than that of video games in the United Kingdom for the first time in over a decade.

Most of us probably spent the 2023 holiday season  helping to break a record. Online shopping hit a new high, raking in $222.1 billion from the start of November to the end of December. And there is no sign of e-commerce slowing down. The ease of scrolling through websites at any time of day continues to trump the hassle of the in-person shopping experience: commuting, long lines, lugging around shopping bags and poor customer service — just to name a few annoyances. Bloomberg Intelligence estimates that online shopping will make up 33% of retail sales in the US in the next three years and that 60% of the increase will be driven by digitally native shops such as Amazon.com Inc. and SheIn Group Ltd. 

Welcome to 2024, everyone! With our Game of the Year coverage just about wrapped up, we've put together this handy article in which we're going to recap all of 2023's winners. Indeed, it's time to put that last 12 months behind us and look ahead to what should be another exciting year for PlayStation fans.