Month: July 2026

Xbox reportedly tests Disc2Digital: game discs become digital licenses

Microsoft is said to be testing something called Disc2Digital, an unannounced Xbox feature that could turn certain game discs into digital licenses linked to your Microsoft account.

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If it works the way the rumor describes, you’d only need to insert a supported disc once. After that, you could launch the game later without keeping the disc in the drive. The same rumor says it would work with Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S games, while original Xbox and Xbox 360 discs would be left out.

The detail getting the most attention is how the digital entitlement would supposedly travel with the disc instead of staying locked to the first Microsoft account that used it. Sell the disc, trade it, or give it away, and the next owner could claim that license too.

Disc2Digital also may not work with every Xbox disc. Testers have reportedly been told that some Xbox One discs would be excluded for manufacturing reasons nobody has explained, which could make the whole system confusing if support changes by print run, publisher, or region.

If you still have a physical Xbox collection, this is one to keep an eye on as game sales keep moving toward digital. In Europe, 75% of new game sales in early 2024 were digital. PlayStation reached 85% digital in Q4 FY2025. In the U.S., 75% of Xbox console sales in early 2025 were for digital-only systems.

Right now, there’s nothing to download or test. Microsoft still hasn’t officially announced Disc2Digital, said when it might launch, or confirmed that it’ll come to Xbox consoles at all.

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Onimusha: Way of the Sword now launches Sept. 4: 21 days earlier

Capcom has pulled Onimusha: Way of the Sword forward to Sept. 4, 2026. The publisher says that puts it 21 days ahead of the previously announced Sept. 25 release date.

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Capcom’s line is simple enough: it wants to get the game into players’ hands sooner. What matters more on your end is the calendar. Onimusha: Way of the Sword now arrives just one day after The Blood of Dawnwalker on Sept. 3, which makes the first week of September a lot busier, and probably a lot more expensive too.

Rebel Wolves has pitched The Blood of Dawnwalker, its debut RPG from former CD Projekt Red developers, as a vampire-ruled medieval game built around branching choices, a day-night structure, and a time-as-a-resource system. If you’re into story-heavy, combat-driven fantasy games, there’s pretty obvious overlap there.

Grand Theft Auto VI is currently set for Nov. 19, 2026, Rockstar Games says, and other publishers seem to be cramming September with games like Marvel’s Wolverine, Silent Hill: Townfall, and Control Resonant to stay out of its path. In that light, Capcom moving earlier could buy it a little more room. And if you’ve been waiting on this RE Engine revival, reportedly in development since 2020 and placed by Capcom in Edo-period Kyoto around Miyamoto Musashi, the early word on combat has been strong, and Capcom’s approach to difficulty tuning makes it one to keep an eye on.

You can check Capcom’s official pre-order pages now. The company says some purchases , including certain Nintendo Switch 2 orders, may have to be canceled and placed again.

The Blood of Dawnwalker gets new gameplay: tomb raiding in Vale Sangora

Rebel Wolves has put out a new gameplay reveal for The Blood of Dawnwalker ahead of its September 3, 2026 release, offering a spoiler-light look at tomb raiding, investigative moments, and the wider world of Vale Sangora.

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Set in a 14th-century kingdom in the Carpathian Mountains, the game casts you as Coen, a Dawnwalker who lives as a human by day and a vampire by night. The new footage spends more time on exploration, ancient ruins, atmosphere, player choice, and digging into the setting’s lore than on running through a basic quest checklist.

You’re still trying to save Coen’s family from the vampire lord Brencis, but this latest look gives you a clearer sense of what sets the game apart: a 30-day in-game limit, Rebel Wolves’ narrative sandbox setup, a smaller but denser world built to last around 55 to 70 hours, and combat that changes with the time of day, shifting from swordplay and dark magic to claw-based attacks. If choice-driven RPGs are your thing, this is the kind of update you’ll want to check out. The Blood of Dawnwalker is an Unreal Engine 5 open-world action RPG from Rebel Wolves, a studio founded by former CD Projekt RED developers, and it’s coming to PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on September 3, 2026.

PS Plus July 2024 games are official: Borderlands 3, NHL 24, Among Us

On July 2, 2024, Sony officially revealed the PlayStation Plus Monthly Games lineup for July: Borderlands 3, NHL 24, and Among Us. That settled it. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III wasn’t one of the three.

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Borderlands 3 was the main attraction. It brought frantic co-op shooting, mountains of weapon drops, and enough flexibility in its character builds to keep people experimenting for a while. Even so, some longtime PlayStation Plus subscribers felt the pick didn’t hit as hard as it could have, mostly because Borderlands 3 had already been available through PlayStation Plus Extra. That overlap keeps coming up whenever people complain about Sony’s service. Among Us still carries plenty of influence, but it also got some pushback because it’s already cheap on other platforms. NHL 24 fell into the familiar late-cycle sports-game category: useful if you’re into hockey, much less exciting if you aren’t.

If what you wanted was one recognizable multiplayer game, the update still felt worth claiming, and Borderlands 3 also showed up at a pretty convenient moment with the Borderlands movie set for August 2024.

July had a bit more for PlayStation Plus subscribers, too. A Genshin Impact bundle arrived on July 16, and the Extra and Premium catalogs picked up additions like Remnant II and Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion, even as some gaming coverage called it one of the weaker PlayStation Plus months of 2024. All three Monthly Games were available to add to your library on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 from July 2 through August 6, 2024.

Apple Maps in iOS 27 gets sharper city views: smarter search too

Apple says Apple Maps on iPhone is getting a solid refresh in iOS 27. The update brings sharper Flyover 3D city views, better place recommendations, more natural route searches, a Parked Car Smart Stack widget, some Offline Maps upgrades, and a new Liquid Glass app icon.

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For Flyover, Apple says it’s using updated rendering and new aerial imagery, which should make buildings, reflections, lighting, and greenery look more lifelike. Maps is also leaning harder into discovery with Local Lists, broader Suggested Places, and Trending Restaurants. A few limits matter, though: Flyover is only coming to select cities, Local Lists is U.S.-only, and Apple still hasn’t fully spelled out what the Offline Maps changes actually are.

This update sits on top of the work Apple has already done with rebuilt map data, Look Around, 3D landmarks, and more specialized routing, including U.S. national park hiking trails that you can save for offline use. Google Maps still does better on discovery, reviews, and planning trips with multiple stops. Still, Apple Maps has gotten a lot more competitive when it comes to basic navigation.

If you use Apple Maps often, this one looks worth downloading for the day-to-day convenience alone. You’ll get it in Apple Maps on iPhone with iOS 27, Apple says, though what you can actually use will depend on where you live and where you travel.

X launches Live Studio: $1 million creator fund is now live

X, the platform many people still call Twitter, has rolled out Live Studio inside Creator Studio. It’s available now, with a new dashboard for livestreaming and a $1 million creator payout fund built around live video.

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X says you can schedule streams, upload thumbnails, limit access to subscribers or verified users, and keep an eye on numbers like concurrent viewers and audience demographics from the same place. The company is pushing harder on live content, and this looks like a direct bid to look more competitive next to YouTube and Twitch.

The fund is meant to get creators trying live video right away. What’s still missing is the part people will actually want clarified before they commit real time to it: X hasn’t said what the long-term payout model will look like or exactly which benchmarks creators will need to hit.

If you stream on X often, this is something to pay attention to.

There are catches. The more advanced Live Studio features require an X Premium subscription, livestreaming itself is on track to become Premium-only, and X is also giving monetization preference to original creators over repost and aggregation accounts.

That all fits with X’s bigger video push, especially as video viewing on the platform keeps climbing and the X TV app has now joined the mix. But X still has to show it can support bigger streams without issues, and it needs to explain payouts in a way that isn’t so vague.

You can get to Live Studio now through X’s Creator Studio. If you want the advanced tools, you’ll need X Premium.

Google Health CLI is now available: Fitbit dashboards and automations

Google released Google Health CLI today, a new command-line tool that gives you direct access to Google Health and Fitbit data for custom dashboards, workflows, and automations.

Fitbit Download

According to Google, Google Health CLI can pull in more than 40 wellness metrics, including activity, sleep, and heart rate. That opens the door to self-tracking tools, research projects, or routines built around exercise and sleep goals. For developers, it also creates a straighter path into Google’s health system at a moment when wearables keep getting bigger: the market is projected to grow from $92.9 billion in 2025 to more than $103 billion in 2026, with 614 million shipments.

If you want more say over the data coming off your wrist, Google Health CLI looks like something to try. Still, the trade-offs are real. Health features drive 70% of buying decisions. Google is also putting weight behind Fitbit coaching and a $10 million clinician-training effort. Then there are the usual concerns around privacy, safety, and platform limits, plus Cloud Application Security Assessment (CASA) costs for apps with more than 100 users. Add in the rising use of chatbot health advice in 2026 surveys, along with expert warnings that automated health answers can be inaccurate or even harmful.

You can download Google Health CLI from Google and use it with Google Health and Fitbit data.

Sony plans an all-digital PlayStation future: discs end in 2028

Sony says it will stop making physical PlayStation game discs starting in January 2028, with new PlayStation releases moving to digital-only sales.

The backlash is already easy to spot on Reddit and across other social platforms. A lot of fans are calling the move anti-consumer, and the argument is pretty simple: digital purchases leave players with less control and give Sony more of it. If you like being able to resell, lend out, trade in, or just keep your PlayStation games without having to think about account access, server shutdowns, or shifting license terms, discs still matter.

Critics also say digital ownership doesn’t feel much like ownership at all. It feels closer to a long-term rental that lasts only as long as Sony’s ecosystem does. That anxiety got worse after Sony removed about 500 purchased movie and TV titles when its StudioCanal deal expired, which led to fresh calls for clearer protections, and even for laws that spell out what you actually own when you click Buy Now.

Sony is also dealing with a California class action over that exact wording, with the case arguing that buyers receive a license, not ownership. On top of that, there’s a separate UK case, worth about £2.7bn, over alleged anti-competitive pricing on digital sales.

For now, you can still buy current PlayStation games on disc. But after Sony backed off its Helldivers 2 PSN-linking requirement for PC players, after the criticism and review bombing, fans clearly believe public pressure can still change things before 2028.

PlayStation App DESCARGAR

GTA 6 splits fans already: should its story be 30 or 75 hours?

Grand Theft Auto 6 from Rockstar Games hits PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on November 19, 2026, and people are already arguing about one thing: how long the story actually ought to be.

Grand Theft Auto V Download

Rockstar still hasn’t said how long the campaign is, but the split is easy to see. One group wants a tighter 30- to 40-hour story, closer to Grand Theft Auto V, which ran about 32 hours. The other side is hoping for something more in Red Dead Redemption 2 territory, around 50 to 60 hours, maybe even more, especially now that more than a decade has passed since Grand Theft Auto V.

There was also an unverified leak in August 2025 that claimed a 75-hour main story, broken into a prologue and five chapters, though none of that has been confirmed. If pacing and mission variety matter more to you than sheer size, that’s probably the part to keep an eye on, particularly since a lot of players end up spending more time messing around in Grand Theft Auto’s sandbox and side activities anyway. One stat people keep bringing up says only 22% of Grand Theft Auto V players actually finished the final mission.

Either way, Grand Theft Auto 6 will be available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S when it launches on November 19, 2026.

Red Dead Redemption 2 Download

GTA 6 launch-week contract goes viral ahead of its November 2026 release

Grand Theft Auto VI from Rockstar Games now has a release date, November 19, 2026, and people are already passing around a launch-week “contract” joke online.

The bit sets aside GTA VI time from November 19 through 29. The rules are exactly the kind of thing you’d expect: don’t walk in front of the TV, don’t ask for anything non-essential during missions, and save chores or questions until the game is paused. There’s also a buyout clause. If you purchase the game yourself, or chip in at least £40, you can strike one rule from the list.

Most people on social media took it for what it was, a joke. Still, it hit because the hype around Rockstar’s next release is already huge. The trailers have pulled in hundreds of millions of views. Businesses have made jokes about whether staff will be available that week. Publishers are reportedly steering clear of the same launch window. pre-orders opened on June 25 and demand was unusually high right away. One French retailer said orders were six times higher than for similar launches. Grand Theft Auto VI has also gone to the top of the PlayStation Store charts in the US, the UK, and Japan.

If you’ve been keeping an eye on Rockstar’s rollout, the post lands as one more meme in a fan culture that likes to turn anticipation into little rituals, even while some commentators keep saying that anticipation by itself isn’t unhealthy.

You’ll be able to pick up Grand Theft Auto VI on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S at launch, though the run-up hasn’t all been harmless excitement. It’s also brought reseller markups and reports of fans contacting Rockstar Games offices.