Was Wolverine the Start? A Man on Xbox Investigates

I’ve been playing Gears of War: E-Day and I have to say, I’m thoroughly enjoying it. It got me reminiscing — in a good way — about the old days with Killzone. On PlayStation, that feeling of shooting an enemy simply couldn’t be beaten. There’s been a lot of discussion about how PlayStation needs to get back to that, and reports suggest a Killzone revival is indeed in the works at Guerrilla, apparently with an external studio helping out. I couldn’t be more pleased that they’re heading in that direction, even though I won’t be joining the party myself.

What happened with Wolverine in terms of its reviews — a mid-70s Metacritic landing for an Insomniac flagship — was, you could say, something that was always going to happen eventually. I remember hearing a story that one of the bosses at PlayStation played through God of War: Ragnarök, and it wasn’t until the final six months of development that they felt they had a good game on their hands. Whether or not that tale is true, it captures something real about how the last few years have felt from the outside. PlayStation will get back to what it’s good at — and, thinking about it, there’s an element of the competition doing better where that’s finally being heard. Microsoft made Gears of War: E-Day an Xbox console exclusive after all, pulling it back from a planned PS5 release.

And E-Day is well and truly back — Gears, I mean. It’s amazing: a young Marcus and Dom fighting through Emergence Day itself, pushing Unreal Engine 5 to its limits. And if you look at the reception Nintendo is getting for its latest games — its Switch 2 Ocarina of Time remake is the highest-rated game of 2026 at 96 on Metacritic — everyone really is putting out a strong lineup of games that people want to play.

Of course, the PS6 will have its fans. I don’t see why the majority of players — who are largely digital anyway, with 78% of PlayStation full-game sales now digital downloads — would turn down the next God of War, Killzone, or even Uncharted. These are big games, and the appetite for them is always going to be strong. Even Wolverine, with all its lukewarm reviews, still became September’s best-selling game in the US.

However, looking at the big picture, all the noise on the internet hasn’t really mattered in the grand scheme of things. Not because people aren’t angry about the decisions, but more because of how the industry is moving forward. When it comes to the platforms we play on, it’s basically pick your poison. I think the next generation could be one of the most significant yet in how people deliver their message — even if it doesn’t actually make a difference.

What remains true is that eventually the powers that be will catch up to the companies not playing fair. In one way or another, you don’t get to treat your fans the way they have this generation without some form of reckoning. Was Wolverine the start? Who knows — but ultimately, it’s up to Sony to get back to the games people actually care about in order to bring that sense of nostalgia back, regardless of their all-digital future and the way they forced it, with physical PlayStation releases reportedly set to end by January 2028. Everything else is up to the fans in how they respond — but loyalty, in itself, is sometimes every bit as much of a force to be reckoned with as the brand it belongs to.