Ryan McCaffrey

Toys 'R' Us, the once-ubiquitous toy store/mecca for 1980's kids, is set to open 120 new standalone stores this holiday season, the company announced. The expansion is in partnership with the Go! Retail Group, who first partnered with Toys 'R' Us owner WHP Global three years ago to begin the toy store back from the dead and back into retail life. There are currently 40 standalone stores nationwide as well as other locations inside select Macy's locations nationwide.

New-ish Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has had a busy first six months on the job, including killing the divisive "This is Xbox" marketing campaign, slashing Xbox Game Pass Ultimate's subscription price, and unfortunately also overseeing mass layoffs and development studio spin-outs. But as Sharma has gotten settled in her job, she's also been spending time understanding Xbox's products and customers in another way: by fielding customer support tickets.

Renowned video game director Hideo Kojima's upcoming project Physint, which could fairly be described as a spiritual successor to Metal Gear Solid, will now be published by Xbox instead of Sony, Microsoft announced today. Xbox will continue to publish the horror game OD – itself something of a spiritual successor to the never-finished PT – and the Kojima-Xbox partnership will expand beyond these two game projects to include film and television.

I so vividly remember making the time to log on and play 1 vs. 100 in the evenings the game was available, and trying to answer those trivia questions as quickly as possible. You could get on Party Chat with your friends and root for each other to make it into The Mob -- or even The One. I never got to be The One, but I did make it into The Mob once. I fared well enough that I did win an honest-to-goodness prize: 80 Microsoft Points, which was the equivalent of $1. That's a dollar more than any other game I'd ever played had given me!

Everything in Fable 2 -- the charm, the humor, the action, the adventure, the puzzles, the dog, and the multiple-ending story -- combined to create an absolutely brilliant RPG-lite that was not only the peak of the series so far, but arguably the closest that Xbox ever got to having its own exclusive Zelda-like franchise.

Sony is making 59% more money per active PlayStation user now than they were during the PS4 era, according to new data compiled by Niko Partners Director of Research and Insights Daniel Ahmad, who covers the video game market with a focus on the Asia and MENA markets. It translates to $230 more spent by the average active PlayStation user now than in 2018.

The Witcher and Cyberpunk developer CD Projekt Red is staffing up for its unannounced 'Project Hadar', as that team is currently over 30 people strong with plans "to hire more, up to 50 developers by the end of this year," CD Projekt Red vice president of investor relations Karolina Gnas said on the company latest earnings call on Wednesday.

Grand Theft Auto 6: An Extended Look dominated Netflix's top 10 chart in its first week (in the English Film category), racking up 31.1 million views in its first week, beating the second-place film on the list, the Robert DeNiro, Adam Scott, and Michelle Monaghan thriller The Whisper Man, which pulled in 23.2 million views. Worth noting is that GTA 6 handily beat its Netflix competition despite not debuting until Thursday.

There were a ton of GTA 6 leaks before the Netflix Extended Look, and I'm glad I avoided them, because it looks absolutely incredible.

Double Fine Productions, who recently regained the rights to its entire catalog following its pivot back to independence after Microsoft parted ways with several studios during its "Xbox reset," is honoring Tim Curry by making Brutal Legend free to download and own on PC for 666 minutes – until 3:06am PT/6:06am ET on Thursday, August 27.