Sony’s PS5 Pro has vanished from major US shops ahead of Grand Theft Auto VI, and eight titles are leaving Xbox Game Pass at the end of October. Xbox is hiring someone to manage physical game launches, an insider warns of steep memory costs for the next PlayStation and Modern Warfare 4 honours Vince Zampella.
PS5 Pro sells out across major US retailers a month before Grand Theft Auto VI arrives
Since September 19, shoppers have been unable to find Sony’s PlayStation 5 Pro at Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart, Target or the company’s own online store, a few weeks after Rockstar Games showed an extended preview of Grand Theft Auto VI in late August. Buyers who want the most powerful way to play the year’s most anticipated game are turning to the high-end console, particularly because the game will not be released on PC at launch. It arrives on November 19 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles.
A global shortage of memory chips, which has pushed up hardware prices throughout the year, has tightened supply further. In September, Sony reportedly told distributors that the Pro model would remain scarce until 2027, citing temporary supply constraints and strong demand. The console went on sale in November 2024 for $700 and now costs $900 in the United States. Other recent exclusives, including Wolverine, which has reportedly sold 2.16 million copies since September, have also driven demand. Sony did not immediately comment.
Grand Theft Auto VI is set in Leonida, a fictional state modelled on Florida, and centres on Vice City, a version of Miami, following the criminal couple Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos. Lucia is the series’ first female lead who is not optional. Rockstar began early work after Grand Theft Auto V came out in 2013 and moved into full production in 2020, after the release of Red Dead Redemption 2. The game was delayed twice before the current November date was set, and leaks also marked its development.
LEGO Star Wars and seven other games will leave Xbox Game Pass on October 31
Microsoft has listed eight games that will leave its Xbox Game Pass subscription service on October 31, according to notices in the official Xbox mobile app. The departing titles are Day of the Tentacle Remastered, Dead Static Drive, Deep Rock Galactic, Full Throttle Remastered, Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris, LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, Wartales and Wildgate. All of them are currently available on console, on PC and through cloud streaming, although access can depend on the game and the type of subscription.
The LEGO game gathers all nine main Star Wars films into a single comic adventure, while Deep Rock Galactic is a co-operative shooter in which teams of space dwarves mine dangerous caves and fight alien creatures. The two remastered point-and-click adventures are tied to the catalogue of Double Fine, which has recently become independent again, although the timing does not show that the change of ownership caused their removal. Players who want to continue after the deadline will have to buy the games.
Game Pass launched on June 1, 2017, as a monthly subscription giving access to a rotating library of games on Xbox consoles, Windows computers, mobile devices, smart televisions and the cloud. Since January 2018, every new game from Microsoft’s own studios has joined the service on the day of its release, and subscribers get discounts on titles in the library. Microsoft folded its Xbox Live Gold service into Game Pass in September 2023. The service had about 30 million members in July 2026.
Xbox advertises a role to coordinate launches of its physical games
Microsoft’s Xbox division has posted a job listing at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, for a games supply strategist who would coordinate the launch of physical Xbox games on all platforms. According to the advertisement, the person hired would lead global strategies for positioning stock across a product’s whole life cycle, make sure inventory meets targets for working capital, cost and service, and oversee how those games are sold through retail channels. The listing suggests the company is planning to expand its production of boxed games.
The advertisement does not say which physical format Xbox might use in future. There has been speculation that the supply of optical disc drives is shrinking and that the company may need to look for an alternative to discs, but a new focus on boxed releases could point the other way if Microsoft builds or buys its own production capacity. Xbox also runs a disc-to-digital programme that lets owners of older Xbox One consoles claim digital copies of games for the current Series X and Series S machines.
The Xbox Series X and the cheaper Series S went on sale on November 10, 2020, as part of the same console generation as Sony’s PlayStation 5. The Series S has no optical drive, and Microsoft later added an all-digital version of the Series X. Prices have risen several times since 2025 because of tariffs and a shortage of memory chips, most recently on August 1, 2026, when increases were steeper in Europe and the United Kingdom. The consoles had sold an estimated 35 million units by February 2026.
Memory costs alone could top $680 in Sony’s next PlayStation, says chip insider
The memory and storage inside Sony’s next home console, widely expected to be called the PlayStation 6, could cost more than $680, according to a well-known forum poster who goes by the name KeplerL2 and is regarded as an insider on the chipmaker AMD. The estimate suggests that the full retail price of the machine could exceed $1,000. Figures of that size once covered the cost of an entire console, and buyers have already seen prices for solid-state drives and other parts climb sharply over the past three years.
The main driver of rising component prices is the artificial intelligence industry, whose data centres are absorbing large volumes of memory and other parts and locking in supplies from key manufacturers. Console makers once accepted losses on hardware, recovering the money from game sales and licensing fees, but players now spend more time with fewer games, which makes that model less reliable. The PlayStation 5, the Xbox Series consoles and the Nintendo Switch 2 are the first generation of machines to become uniformly more expensive over time.
The current shortage of memory chips began in 2025 and, unlike the chip crisis of 2020 to 2023, which grew out of pandemic disruption to supply chains, it stems from demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure. The leading memory makers, Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology, cut production after a slump in 2022 and 2023, and from mid-2024 the rapid spread of generative AI services created heavy demand for high bandwidth memory used in data centre processors, shifting factory capacity away from chips for ordinary consumers.
Modern Warfare 4 credits honour Call of Duty co-creator Vince Zampella
Following the early praise reported here on October 17 for the campaign of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, players who finish the story have found that its credits pay tribute to Vince Zampella, the co-creator of the series, who died in a car crash last December. After the final mission, which plays out midway through the credits, the developer Infinity Ward first displays the names of colleagues who died during the game’s production. Zampella’s name is among them.
The other names shown include Rainer Yang, Matt Canale and Preetam Raj Bordoloi, who also worked on the series over many years. Modern Warfare 4 was released this week, almost two decades after the first game in the Modern Warfare line came out in 2007 under Zampella’s leadership. Before Call of Duty, he led the design of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, and he later founded Respawn Entertainment, the studio behind the Titanfall games and the Star Wars Jedi series.
Born in October 1969, Zampella co-founded Infinity Ward with Jason West and Grant Collier after working at studios including SegaSoft. When Electronic Arts took Medal of Honor development in-house, the new studio struck a deal with Activision to build a rival shooter, which became Call of Duty, and Activision then bought the company. Under Zampella and West it released Call of Duty 2, Call of Duty 4 and Modern Warfare 2, before Activision fired the pair, who sued and set up Respawn. He died on December 21, 2025.