The holiday ******* is a great time to catch up on some of this year’s games that may have passed you by. If Ninja Gaiden 4 was on your list of games to play, Best Buy is offering a $15 discount on both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X versions right now as part of its Deal of the Day (see it here). This offer brings its price down from $69.99 to $54.99, which is a nice little early holiday treat to jump on. Again, since it’s part of Best Buy's Deal of the Day selection, the timer on its ***** page has already started counting down until the end of today. Now is the time to take advantage of this limited-time deal and add it to your library for a little less. Save $15 on Ninja Gaiden 4 (PlayStation 5/Xbox Series X) Ninja Gaiden 4 was one of our favorite action games of 2025, earning a runner-up spot in our IGN Awards. Our 8/10 review from IGN’s Mitchell Saltzman said, “When it comes to combat, there are few games I’d consider to even be in the same ballpark as Ninja Gaiden 4. It is quite simply the most fun I’ve had with a 3D action game since ****** May Cry 5.” With praise like that, why not add it to your list of must-play games over the holidays? If you're grabbing this game as a gift for a Ninja Gaiden fan this year and are on the hunt for more gaming-related items to pick up before the holidays, we can help there, too. Our roundup of the 10 best gifts for gamers features even more recommendations we think are worth gifting this year, from hardware to apparel to the very cool LEGO Game Boy build. If something catches your eye, now is the time to buy to make sure you have it in time. Hannah Hoolihan is a freelancer who writes with the guides and commerce teams here at IGN. View the full article
Вышедший накануне в ранний доступ ролевой MMO-шутер Pioner от российской студии с сербской штаб-квартирой GFA Games не смог покорить пользователей сервиса цифровой дистрибуции Steam.View the full article
From the Vault | Obsidian was "at the top of the list" to make New Vegas, GamesTM learned at E3 2010, and Bethesda's reasons still make sense todayView the full article
Dispatch, the hit episodic superhero workplace comedy, has appeared on Australia's Nintendo eShop, signaling that the game could soon lose its PS5 console exclusive status. This year has been filled with great surprises, and Dispatch has been one of 2025's most charming new releases. Switch 2 owners may soon get to find out what all the hype is about. View the full article
Metacritic ranks its 10 worst games based on the lowest scores. The site explains that it excludes any titles with fewer than 4 reviews, and that the reviews must come from "professional critics." Read Entire Article View the full article
Bloodborne fans high on hopium were once again disappointed by no new announcements at this year's The Game Awards, despite there barely being a snowball's chance in hell of a sequel or remake even being mentioned. Bloodborne was released over 10 years ago now, but the game still has an incredibly active community, largely thanks to PC mods. View the full article
Diana Burnwood has been a consistent presence in the Hitman franchise for most of the series. Agent 47's primary handler and ally, Diana, has grown from a faceless support character primarily there for tips into a complex character in her own right. Jane Perry joined the franchise almost a decade ago, as Burnwood became an even more important presence in the series. View the full article
An FPS game so realistic-looking it had to debunk claims that it was a scam, Unrecord aims to take the tense action of Ready Or Not and make it more believable and lifelike than ever. Its reveal in 2023 generated huge amounts of hype, and despite seeing very little of the project since, it proudly sits in the top ten on Steam's wishlist charts. Now, it's re-emerged, and while there's sadly no new gameplay to feast on, developer Drama has some big news: it's just received the financial backing of Tencent, which will help it "build the best game possible." Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Unrecord release date estimate, story, trailers, and latest news Is Unrecord on Game Pass? Bodycam FPS Unrecord is "not a scam" and will have "no bias," dev says View the full article
Call of Duty: ****** Ops 7 launched last month to become the best-selling game of November in the U.S. by dollar sales. It's both a huge sales feat and a common Call of Duty W, as the franchise has topped the charts in its launch month every year for 18 straight years. However, it looks like its rival Battlefield 6 will reign at the top of the U.S. sales charts at year's end. This comes from Circana's monthly report, which has ****** Ops 7 debuting as the best-selling game of November and the seventh best-selling game of the year-to-date, behind Battlefield 6 at No.1, NBA 2K26 at No.2, Monster Hunter Wilds at No.3, Borderlands 4 at No.4, EA Sports College Football 26 at No.5, and Madden NFL 26 at No.6. All of those games have a few more months on the market on Call of Duty, but it's still a lot of ground to make up in a single month, and Call of Duty's at a bit of a disadvantage. The game launched into Game Pass, meaning its actual dollar sales on Xbox consoles are much lower than that of its rivals as people use the subscription service to access it instead, and there's no good recent data on how Call of Duty's presence on the service impacts subscriptions. It is worth noting, though, that ****** Ops 7 doesn't seem to be doing as well as ****** Ops 6, a fact that's reflected in everything from the critical review scores to fan response to European sales figures to Activision's own admissions. Circana reports that the Call of Duty franchise saw a double-digit dollar sales decline compared to November 2024, and Circana senior director Mat Piscatella tells me that November full game dollar sales of Call of Duty: ****** Ops 7 finished below those of Call of Duty: ****** Ops 6 last November, with Call of Duty: ****** Ops 6 launching in the October 2024 tracking *******. It is Piscatella's projection that Battlefield 6 is "extremely likely" to finish as the best-selling game of 2025 in the U.S. This would not be the only time Call of Duty didn't top the annual charts in recent memory. In 2023, Hogwarts Legacy defeated Modern Warfare 3, and that was with Modern Warfare 3 not launching into Game Pass. However, ****** Ops 6 still dominated in 2024, and prior to that only Rockstar's GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 had been able to dethrone Call of Duty going all the way back to 2008's Rockband. Given all that, it's perhaps unsurprising that Activision is considering significant changes to how it plans and releases its Call of Duty franchises year after year. Then again, while Battlefield 6 had an incredible launch, it recently introduced an update that broke the game in pretty significant ways across PC and consoles. It was a weird November for all, I guess. Game sales in general had a shockingly weak November in the U.S., as we covered in our larger roundup of Circana's numbers. You can see what's going on and why gaming hardware and physical software just had the worst November since 1995 right here. Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected]. View the full article
Superhero workplace comedy game Dispatch has just popped up on the Nintendo eShop for Switch and Switch 2, and is already available to pre-order. There's been no formal word yet by developer AdHoc Studio, but the Nintendo eShop listing is now live in Australia, where Switch owners can pre-order the game. There's even a release date, too: January 29, 2026. For Nintendo Switch 2 owners, a free upgrade pack will be available to download separately, providing a version of the game with enhanced resolution and improved frame rates. As of yet, there's no sign of the game arriving on Xbox — though we'll update this article again when AdHoc makes any formal announcement. Dispatch first launched back in October for PC and PlayStation 5, where it quickly won over a legion of fans for its quirky, episodic storytelling, and shifted 2 million copies over its first month on ***** — something its team had projected the game would reach after two years. The game features an ensemble cast of heroes voiced by some famous faces, including Aaron Paul, Laura Bailey, Jeffrey Wright, and Matthew Mercer, while its development team features key personel from Telltale Games' heyday, who previously worked on The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us and Tales from the Borderlands. "Dispatch is a sharp-witted workplace comedy that charms with its smart dialogue choices, great writing, and lovably aggravating cast," IGN wrote in our Dispatch review, scoring the game with a super 9/10. Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social View the full article
While players are still waiting on pins and needles for Bethesda's next major Fallout project, Fallout 4 still has a massive player-base and extremely active community. With the recent launch of Fallout 4's Anniversary Edition, however, fans were a bit disappointed to fire up the new version and be overwhelmed by bugs, performance issues, and crashes. View the full article
Even if you aren't a fan of huge open-world games, Red Dead Redemption 2can hit you like a ton of bricks and make you a believer in the genre. It's just that detailed, and usually that level of craft comes with a higher price point. That is, until recently. View the full article
November 2025 was a shockingly terrible month for video game sales in the U.S. While we traditionally think of November as a huge sales month what with ****** Friday and all, November 2025 was the worst November in video game hardware unit sales, and the worst in physical software dollar sales the U.S. has seen since 1995. That's according to Circana's monthly report, which paints a pretty dismal picture of last month's commercial performance. The industry in the U.S. saw declines across the board in hardware, accessories, and console spending for an overall drop of 4% year-over-year, at $5.9 billion in total spending. Hardware More specifically, hardware spending was down a whopping 27% year-over-year to $695 million, the lowest hardware spending total for November since 2005's $455 million. Even worse, unit sales reached 1.6 million, which is the lowest November total since 1995's 1.4 million. And that's representative of declines across the board. Xbox Series hardware sales were down 70% year-over-year. PS5 sales were down over 40%, and combined unit sales of Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 were down over 10% from Switch sales last year, despite this being a launch year for the Nintendo Switch 2. What's going on? As pointed out by Circana senior director Mat Piscatella, video game hardware has never been more expensive, reaching an all-time November high of $439 per unit, up 11% year-over-year. The Xbox specifically saw its average price per unit increase by over 30%, perhaps confirming one reason why folks aren't so keen to buy Xboxes specifically. With the Nintendo Switch 2, Piscatella says he's watching its sales "very closely," and offers this analysis of its current situation: With six months in the market, it remains the fastest-selling video game hardware in U.S. history. However, part of what was driving that was its availability to be bought during its launch window. It's been extremely rare to have such a successful new device not suffer supply constraints going into its first holiday sales *******. Unit sales of Switch 2 were lower than those of Switch 1 during each console's first November, but the price points are also quite different. The average price paid for a new Nintendo Switch in November 2017 was $309 (which, if adjusted for inflation, is approximately $405 in November 2025 dollars), compared to the $486 for Switch 2 in November 2025. Perhaps it is a case of demand having been pulled forward earlier in the year because people could find them. Or perhaps the mass market is not as quickly adopting Switch 2 as it did Switch. Or perhaps consumers are looking elsewhere for holiday gifting as the prices continue to rise in video game hardware. Tough to say at the moment. There's one piece of hardware that's doing okay, and it's not what you'd expect: the NEX Playground. It was the third best-selling piece of video game hardware of November by unit sales, surpassing the Xbox Series, while the more expensive Xbox Series beat it in dollar sales (the PS5 was first in both categories, the Switch 2 was second). Piscatella calls the NEX Playground a "remarkable story," noting that while everyone else is having a bad time, it just had a superb November by comparison: November 2025 tracked unit sales at U.S. retailers for NEX Playground were just 7% below its entire tracked lifetime sales at retail through October. With an average selling price of just over $200 in November, strong placement at retail, and some successful influencer and viral marketing efforts, the NEX Playground became one of the hottest video game products of the holiday season during the month. We'll have to see how well the pace can keep up, as there are reports that the NEX Playground is now largely sold out, with secondary market prices on sites like eBay soaring accordingly. There could be a lesson here that more affordable, family friendly gaming devices carry appeal during holiday gifting season. Software Things aren't looking much better on the content side. While Circana reports that content spending was up 1% year-over-year to $4.8 billion, that's with subscription spending rising 16% and 2% growth in mobile. Physical software sales, meanwhile, dropped 14% year-over-year to the worst November since 1995, the year Circana began tracking them. Call of Duty: ****** Ops 7 put the Call of Duty franchise back on top for another debut month in November as the month's best-seller, marking the 18th year in a row a Call of Duty has launched to the top of the charts. That said, Circana reports that the franchise saw a double-digit percentage full game dollar sales decline when compared to November 2024. It's a little tricky to make precise comparisons between ****** Ops 7 and its predecessor, ****** Ops 6, given both games launched into Xbox Game Pass, and ****** Ops 6 released in October last year, not November. Still, Piscatella tells me that ****** Ops 7's full game dollar sales finished below those of ****** Ops 6's last November. Additionally, ****** Ops 7 is currently the seventh best-selling game of the year-to-date, and Piscatella anticipates that its rival, Battlefield 6, will end the year as the best-selling game of 2025. This isn't the first time in recent memory it's been beaten, with Hogwarts Legacy coming out on top in 2023. Notably, that year, Hogwarts Legacy beat Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, which did not launch into Game Pass, while ****** Ops 7 this year did, almost certainly making its actual dollar sales total lower as a result. It's worth noting as well that accessories spending was down 13% year-over-year. Red Flags This is shaping up to be a pretty weird year. I asked Piscatella what he makes of all this, and what it means for the games industry. He pointed out that much of the story remains to be told in December, and that it's possible consumers are waiting for better deals closer to the holidays. Alternatively, it's possible that economic factors and price of consoles are pushing people to hold off on gaming purchases. Here's what Piscatella had to say: Retail spending had been holding up relatively well until now, despite the pressure from higher prices we've been seeing in the market. More affluent consumers have kept on spending so far, which has made up for some of the declines in spending from the less affluent portions of the market. Perhaps this is a sign that those higher prices are beginning to impact purchases of pricier items, like consoles. Perhaps not. However, if the crunch on RAM pricing continues, if we see rising prices on consoles and gaming PCs over the coming months it could, theoretically, be potentially devastating to the dedicated gaming device market. Which would, of course, have potential carryover effects on the content side. I certainly see some of the relationships between hardware unit sales and pricing we're seeing in the November results as a red flag. We won't get the December and full-year results in until January, which will tell us a lot more about whether the games industry is about to enter a lean *******, or if this November was just a goofy one-off. November 2025 U.S. Top 20 Best-Selling Games:Call of Duty: ****** Ops 7 (NEW)Battlefield 6NBA 2K26Madden NFL 26EA Sports FC 26Pokemon Legends: Z-A*Ghost of YoteiEA Sports College Football 26Minecraft*Kirby Air Riders (NEW)*Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment (NEW)*The Outer Worlds 2Sonic Racing: CrossWorldsDonkey Kong Bananza*Marvel's Spider-Man 2Red Dead Redemption IIGrand Theft Auto VBorderlands 4Forza Horizon 5Digimon Story: Time Stranger * Indicates that some or all digital sales are not included in Circana's data. Some publishers, including Nintendo, do not share certain digital data for this report. Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected]. View the full article
With nearly 30 ghosts to choose from, it can be pretty tough to figure out the right one in each Phasmophobia contract. Some have been around since the start, while others, like the Dayan, joined fairly late into the game. The Dayan was added alongside the Obambo and the Gallu in an update that launched on Dec. 16, 2025. Since it's a fresher addition to the lineup, there's a good chance you may not know how to spot one. Like all ghosts, this one has plenty of unique features you can look out for, so here’s how to identify a Dayan in Phasmophobia. Table of contentsDayan evidence in PhasmophobiaDayan behavior, patterns, and clues in PhasmophobiaDayan evidence in Phasmophobia Screenshot by Destructoid You can identify a Dayan by catching EMF Level Five, Ghost Orbs, and Spirit Box evidence. The Dayan is the only ghost with this specific combination of evidence, making it fairly easy to catch if you manage to gather all three. EvidenceHow to getEMF Level FiveEquip and use an EMF Reader until you catch an EMF Level Five reading. This can happen at any point when the ghost is active and interacting with the environment around you. It's one of the toughest pieces of evidence to get, as there's no way to know when or how the ghost will do something big enough for the reader to catch it. Use the EMF Reader frequently to ensure you don't miss it. Ghost OrbsUse a Video Camera around the ghost room to look for small, moving Ghost Orbs. You can either walk around while holding one or place down a camera, then return to the truck to watch from there. Ghost Orbs only spawn in the ghost room, and generally only appear in one specific portion of it, so be sure to check every corner to avoid missing them. Spirit BoxTurn on a Spirit Box and ask the ghost questions until you get a response. Any reply you get counts as Spirit Box evidence. This machine can be finicky, especially if you're using a lower-tier version, so be sure to thoroughly test this type of evidence before ruling it out. Dayan behavior, patterns, and clues in Phasmophobia Screenshot by Destructoid All ghosts have some signature behavior, patterns, and clues you can watch out for, including the Dayan. These details are unofficial evidence, meaning you won't need to mark them down in your journal, but they can be watched for to make your investigation easier. Here's everything we know about the Dayan, which will be updated anytime we learn more about them. The Dayan can only be a female ghost and will thus always manifest with a female ghost model. The Dayan doesn't like movement, including walking and running. When players move near them, the Dayan gains the ability to move more quickly.When players are standing still near them, the Dayan is forced to move more slowly. The Dayan has a default hunt sanity threshold of 50 percent.If a player is moving near the Dayan, the hunt sanity threshold is increased to 60 percent. When a player is within 10 meters of the Dayan, they move at a speed of 2.25 meters per second if the player moves, or 1.2 meters when the player is still. If it doesn't seem like the ghost you're dealing with is a Dayan, consider testing for an Obambo or a Gallu next. And once you're done with that, there are plenty of other tough tasks worth working on, like finding Slenderman, using the Sound Recorder, and getting all hidden achievements. The post How to identify a Dayan in Phasmophobia appeared first on Destructoid. View the full article
Arcadia-7 is a lovely planet, filled with sweeping vistas and dramatic scenery that provide a comfortable resting space for mineral riches. The air is clean and warm, abundant plant life grows from the fertile earth, and while the fauna is a bit on the spicy side that's not a particularly unreasonable expectation on a wild planet that's yet to see humans establish a settlement. All told Arcadia-7 is a fantastic place for castoff criminals to work off their cultural debt, living a life free of the pressures that drove their lives so wrong while supplying Earth and its colonies with much needed resources. With a little bit of care the planet could be just this side of paradise, other than the highly unstable star that scours its surface to ash on a daily basis. View the full article
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is one of the biggest success stories in indie gaming, with the AA studio's passion project going on to win a ton of TGA Awards, including Best Art Direction, Best RPG, and of course GOTY in 2025. It's being hailed as one of the best games to release in years, and with its massive success, Clair Obscur is also facing intense scrutiny from gamers across the board. View the full article
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Looting will cause fallen allies and enemies to fadeView the full article