A PlayStation Blog post co-authored by PlayStation and Rockstar Games said GTA 6 leverages the PS5's SSD to allow people to experience's the game's fictional version of Miami and wider Florida with "near-instant load times."

That sounds good and exciting, but it's also bumming people out. The original version of GTA 5 that came out in 2013 for PS3 and Xbox 360 was known for its lengthy load times when booting the game up that could be minutes long.

Nice artwork from GTA 5 would cycle through as the game loaded, and in cases where the loading took longer than expected, people might see character or environment art they hadn't before.

For the 2022 launch of GTA 5's PS5 and Xbox Series X|S edition, load times were improved. The loading screens have always been a distinct element of the GTA series.

GTA 6 artwork.

People online are saying they will miss this if GTA 6 does indeed have "near-instant" load times. That being said, this is all based off one line in a blog post, so it's unclear what "near-instant" even means or if it even pertains to the main loading page when the game boots up each time or something else.

A lot of the GTA 6 artwork hosted on the game's website bears a resemblance stylistically to the art from GTA 5's loading screens, so you can at least look at it there or download for yourself. But, again, that's not the same as sitting on your couch or in your chair looking at the artwork as the game loads.

Preorder GTA 6 at Amazon

The PlayStation Blog post is titled "GTA 6 plays best on PS5," a claim that has not been independently verified and comes as part of Sony's marketing arrangement with Rockstar, which is seeking to associate the game with PlayStation first and foremost.

The game is also coming to Xbox Series X, which has similar technical capabilities to the PS5, along with the relatively less powerful Xbox Series S. GTA 6 will also play on the PS5 Pro, but Rockstar has yet to confirm any specific enhancements.

GTA 6 launches on November 19 for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. GTA 6 preorders are finally, at long last, open on both consoles, and you can choose the $80 standard edition or $100 ultimate edition.

One month after a report revealed plans to lay off a "significant" number of employees, Bungie has confirmed these intentions as part of a company-wide reorganization.

In a June 25 X post, the Destiny developer announced a "reduction in force" that will have a "profound impact on the people affected, their families, friends, and teammates." PlayStation Studios head Hermen Hulst posted a lengthy blog post about the situation, confirming that "most of the Destiny team" is gone, as well as "some" members of the Marathon team and the Sony Interactive Entertainment teams that supported Bungie’s operations. Shortly after these posts went live, it was reported that Bungie studio head Justin Truman will also be leaving the studio.

https://twitter.com/Bungie/status/2070149689127973265

"As the leaders of Bungie, past and present, we recognize Destiny 2 fell short of expectations these past several years," the studio wrote. "Following our final content update to Destiny 2, and with our future projects still in early incubation, we unfortunately could not continue operating at our previous size."

In his June 25 post, Hulst said Bungie's latest project, the PvEvP extraction shooter Marathon, "remains an important part" of PlayStation's portfolio. The company will continue supporting Bungie as it works on new content for the game and incubates its "future projects," which Hulst said are "too early to discuss."

Hulst continued, admitting how "painful" this news was to deliver, particularly after the "extensive discussion and careful consideration" PlayStation went through before arriving at this workforce reduction.

"Over the past several months, together with Bungie leadership, we reviewed the studio’s long-term direction, development priorities, resource needs, and role within our broader portfolio strategy," Hulst wrote. "We explored multiple alternatives before concluding that a reduction was necessary to align the studio’s resources with its current priorities and long-term goals."

On X, Bungie said it will share more about the company's future, just not today.

"Today, we wish to extend our gratitude and compassion to every member of the Bungie team who has been impacted and to those who remain," Bungie wrote. "We hope you will do the same."

Despite indications that this news might be coming, it's a stunning reality to see play out for the Destiny team, which was responsible for creating one of the most influential games ever. It also highlights ongoing issues at Sony, which acquired Bungie in 2022 for $3.6 billion amidst the publisher's emphasis on live-service games, which Bungie had ample expertise in. That live-service push at Sony has seemingly been slowed, with multiple projects canceled and several studios shut down.

GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen is trying to buy the popular auction site eBay for $56 billion. He's now laid out a new angle of his vision, and it involves video games. In a recent interview, Cohen said one previously unannounced part of his plan to help eBay return to growth--if he can successfully take it over-is by creating a marketplace for digital gaming items. eBay has already flatly rejected Cohen's proposal to buy the company, saying it was "neither credible nor attractive."

He said on the All-In Interview podcast that eBay is currently a market-leader for physical collectibles, but not digital ones. He said he's identified a gap in the market, and he believes the returns could be massive.

"I would extend that into digital collectibles. If you look at all of these in-game items from AAA titles that people are accumulating--skins, weapons, all of these things--taking eBay and building a marketplace where you can provide liquidity for in-game digital items," he said. "Essentially, it's what NFTs could have ... people thought they were. But ultimately they had no real utility. In-game items actually have real utility."

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PeNclyAl9N4

He said physical collectibles like art and trading cards are "ego" plays. The markets for these items are massive, he said, but the items have no utility beyond telling people that you have them and owning something rare.

Video game in-game items, meanwhile, have real utility, he said.

"There is no marketplace that is providing liquidity for them. I would use eBay to provide liquidity for in-game digital items. I believe that addressable market could be much larger than eBay's marketplace on physical items. No one is doing it. This should already exist. It's crazy that it doesn't exist," he said.

Existing marketplaces like Player Auctions and Gameflip offer some of these services, but eBay has significantly larger scale and brand recognition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4j9RPGLENNI

Counter-Strike skins are known to sell for huge premiums online. Meanwhile, people have been selling their high-level World of Warcraft gaming accounts on eBay for a long time already, but Cohen is seemingly talking about something else here. In the case of Counter-Strike skins, these are sold within Steam (where Valve gets a cut). If Cohen is proposing something like a marketplace where people can sell Call of Duty or Fortnite skins, that would no doubt require developers to provide permission and infrastructure to support such a thing.

Cohen did not get into specifics regarding his plan to pull this off, but there does appear to be a significant market for digital skins. The state of New York sued Valve earlier this year, and in its case, it claimed the market for Counter-Strike skins was beyond $4 billion as of 2025. The lawsuit also brought up the very kind of idea that Cohen wants to address, as New York Attorney General Letitia James specifically called out the "ease of liquidating items through third-party marketplaces."

The other two parts of Cohen's plan for eBay, should he successfully take it over, is to cut costs massively to immediately improve earnings (like he did at GameStop) and to expand further into "live commerce." Popular in Asia and on TikTok, live commerce is the term for video where a content creator or store hosts a livestream to sell their products, giving viewers the ability to purchase items without leaving the video. eBay already owns and operates eBay Live, which does some of this, but Cohen said eBay has not properly managed or invested in it.

Also in the interview, Cohen said he came up with the idea to buy eBay while he was on the toilet (he did not elaborate further) and said buying GameStop was a bad idea in hindsight. Cohen said his original strategy for growing GameStop was to make it more like his previous company, the pet food company Chewy that he sold to Petsmart for $3.35 billion.

"That was the wrong strategy," he said, noting that when he became CEO, he changed plans and went into "maniacal cost-cutting mode" and doubling down on pre-owned and collectibles.

In other news, Cohen recently canceled his $35 billion pay plan to focus on the eBay takeover. Also in the interview, Cohen revealed that he's pouring $500 million of his own money into his bid for eBay.

It looks like layoffs at Xbox have started, with a number of developers at South of Midnight developer Compulsion Games now looking for new opportunities. The layoffs come as part of a massive shakeup at Xbox under new CEO Asha Sharma, which will reportedly see multiple Xbox Game Studios either closed or going independent once more.

The fate of Compulsion as a studio is still unclear. Reports from earlier in June suggested that Xbox was preparing to close the studio, though Compulsion leadership was said to be in discussions with Xbox over potentially spinning the studio off on its own.

News of the Compulsion layoffs comes from individual developers' posts on LinkedIn announcing that they are no longer with the studio, as compiled by reporter Mr Rebs.

https://twitter.com/mr_rebs_/status/2069959570877812839?s=46

Compulsion is based in Montreal and was founded in 2009. After developing Contrast and being at work on We Happy Few, it was acquired by Microsoft in 2018 as part of a flurry of studio purchases.

The Compulsion layoffs may be only the start for Xbox, with CEO Asha Sharma lining up big changes in an attempt to get Xbox "healthy" again, promising a "reset" on the business. Bloomberg reported that layoffs would likely occur after June 30, after the end of Microsoft's fiscal year.

Alongside Compulsion, multiple other studios including Double Fine and Ninja Theory are also reportedly in negotiations with Xbox to get their studios out from under Microsoft's ownership to avoid complete closure. There's been no recent update on how those talks are going--other than a single, not-so-promising emoji posted to Double Fine's X account.

After being announced in a Nintendo Direct two weeks ago, Deltarune Chapter 5 is live now and pushing Toby Fox's episodic RPG to new levels of hype. The update saw Deltarune's Steam concurrent player count jump to 291,816, more than double the game's previous peak.

As fans check out the new chapter, Deltarune has jumped into the top 10 most played games on Steam--an unusual feat for a single-player RPG with concurrent players normally in the low five figures. The game's previous all-time peak was 133,930 players last June, when the first four chapters were released as a paid game on Steam. The jump in popularity around the Chapter 5 release has also seen Deltarune reach number 13 on Steam's top sellers list.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5y22LUfetA

Of course the Steam numbers only give part of the story--Deltarune is also available on PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, and Switch 2, meaning there's probably a whole lot more players getting stuck into the new chapter right now.

Deltarune's fanbase is going off on social media, as fans have been waiting a year for the new content to share their theories, secrets, guides and more. Plenty of players have also shared their praise of the new chapter through Steam reviews, where Deltarune enjoys a 98% positive rating.

Deltarune's first chapter was released for free back in 2018, with intermittent releases of new chapters in the years since. With just over a year since Chapter 3 and 4's joint release, the wait for Chapter 5 has been the shortest yet.

Toby Fox still has more chapters to release to complete Deltarune's story, signing off Chapter 5's release announcement with a promise that the team will return to to working on the next chapter. According to the game's Steam page, Chapter 6 is currently planned for a 2027 release.

Rockstar has officially announced the pricing and preorder information for Grand Theft Auto 6, and alongside this news, the studio has also shared plenty of new screenshots and artwork from the game. GameSpot's Jake Dekker broke it all down, and though Rockstar likely didn't intend to offer too much concrete information about about the Leonida setting or its story, we did uncover several tidbits.

Two of the weapons available in the $100 Ultimate Edition are the Hawk & Little Morgan Revolvers. They're "his and hers" revolvers, each etched with the name of their owner, so Lucia Caminos and Jason Duval will each get their own. The "Morgan" part of the name could very possibly be an Easter egg referring to Arthur Morgan from Red Dead Redemption 2, as well.

Speaking of Red Dead Redemption, President Hardin--who previously served in office and also appeared on a $100 bill in GTA Online--is visible in one of the images, once again on some cash.

It remains to be seen what the gameplay dynamic will be between Lucia and Jason, but we noticed the two are together in a screenshot showing off the Shitzu Squalo watercraft. Presumably you'll be able to switch between them as freely as you could between Michael, Trevor, and Franklin in GTA 5, so this may be showing a story-centric moment.

One bit tucked away in the description for the '67 Vapid Dominator Buggy mentions that the Paradise Garage location features "a secure place to deposit stolen goods to be fenced." This would be a departure from past games, which don't really focus on stealing anything but cash--could the cops break down your door and find your collection of stolen cars? We can only hope so.

For even more nitty-gritty details, check out the full video above. Grand Theft Auto 6 arrives to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on November 19.

Microsoft released an update for Xbox Insiders today to test several new features coming to Xbox Series X|S. The update brings changes to Gamertags and more, but the most useful of these features allows players to use cloud gaming to play updating titles, fixing one of user's biggest annoyances with the console.

An Xbox Wire post broke down these new features in more detail. Typically, games that are updating on consoles become unplayable, and that wait can get quite long for large, high-fidelity AAA titles. However, this update makes it so that, if the game is part of the Game Pass catalog and you have a subscription, you'll now be able to boot it up via cloud gaming and play it while the update downloads.

If you have the internet bandwidth to support it, this update is extremely alluring. It also shows Xbox is still putting some focus on cloud gaming, even as it recenters its strategy around consoles like the upcoming Project Helix.

There are plenty of other updates for those who don't like cloud gaming to look forward to as well. Game hubs for Xbox 360 games will now show achievements, and a wishlist option will be added to game cards for ones you don't own. Those are small UI tweaks, but they do add things I'm surprised weren't already supported.

In 2019, Microsoft's last big overhaul of Xbox Gamertags limited them to 12 characters at most. Seven years later, it's finally upping the limit to 15 characters. Maybe it's finally time for me to change the Gamertag I've had since I was eight years old.

Xbox Insiders who are part of the Alpha Skip-Ahead ring are the first to have access to these updates. These updates will roll out to other Xbox Insider tiers in the future before eventually being released to all Xbox Series X|S owners.

The news that Grand Theft Auto 6 won't get a traditional physical release and will include a code in a box rather than a disc isn't sitting well with many on the internet. At least two retailers are joining the dissent, announcing their intent not to sell GTA 6.

Video Games Plus (VGP), a Toronto-based retailer, stated that it will not be offering GTA 6 under the company's policy of not selling games that only contain digital codes. VGP added that it would be "pleased" to carry and support the game should Rockstar release it on disc.

"We want to be clear that this decision is not a reflection of the game itself," VGP's statement on X reads. "We have tremendous respect for Rockstar Games and the incredible achievement that Grand Theft Auto 6 represents."

https://twitter.com/VideoGamesPlus_/status/2069773098295910714?s=20

According to VGP's official website, the retailer was founded in 1990 and entered the online marketplace through eBay before launching its own website. VGP has one brick-and-mortar location in Ontario.

Similarly, Delaware-based video game store Loot Box Gaming (LBG) said that while the company is still awaiting further details about GTA 6's release, it will not sell the game if the physical edition is just a code in a box.

"If a product can’t honor the people who pay their hard-earned money to purchase it, then we have no business trying to sell it to our customers whom we value above anything else," LBG's statement read.

LBG is an online-only retailer that also has roots in eBay, but the store's website states that it plans to expand with a retail storefront in the future.

https://twitter.com/LootBoxGamingUS/status/2069756247507624039?s=20

Both VGP and LBG emphasized game preservation in their social media posts.

These two retailers are small compared to superstores like Target and Walmart, so it's hard to imagine these developments will have much effect on GTA's launch and sales. Still, replies to their statements are largely complimentary and respectful.

Meanwhile, GameStop has been silent so far, which is somewhat surprising considering how annoyingly online its social media pages are, especially in the wake of massive games industry news such as this.

GTA 6 is scheduled for a November 19 launch, and as expected, it "features a single-player experience," leading many to wonder what the game's online plans will be.

GTA 6: 241 Screenshots To Ease The Wait View Images