headlines and hot takes: march 2026

Hey guys, it's Nate and it's time for another bite sized edition. Bite sized episode of the Backlog breakdown. And I have got some headlines and hot takes for you for March 2026. Now, historically I have done some news coverage in the past. I've never really been super satisfied with the way it goes. I, and frankly, I don't think it's our strongest content. But I do like doing it. And so I'm going to keep doing it until it works or until I finally just like, you know, shuffle off the mortal, you know, the mortar coil or whatever it is. I don't know. You know, I know that's the definition of insanity. And it works. It'll be fine. It'll be fun even. So, yeah, let's, let's just kind of jump right into this and keep ticking along here. So our first headline is, it comes from ign. It says Microsoft Gaming chief Asha Sharma killed. This is an Xbox campaign. As it didn't feel like Xbox. And I think that this firmly goes into what we would call a good category. I know that that ad campaign has not been, was not received well. It's, you know, from the hardcore fan space. I don't think it was really received well internally and I don't think it has done much to really help, you know, preserve brand identity and sort of, you know. Yeah, so I'm, you know, I think this is pretty cool. And you know, Asha Sharma, you know, she's, you know, she's new to, she's, she just replaced Phil Spencer here not too long ago. And, and it's kind of one of those things where there was a little bit of a dust up, I don't know, dust up. But, you know, it was kind of weird because everybody thought that Sarah Bond, who was sort of the heir apparent, was going to just take Phil's place. And then when he announced his retirement, Asha was appointed his successor. And I just think that confirms that Xbox is kind of moving in a different direction than maybe the vision that Phil had for it. I mean, that's obviously what it means, but you know, it's kind of, there's a lot of things to be seen. I think frankly, the Xbox brand has, it's kind of been pretty troubled. I think it frankly has a lot to, you know, a lot of trust to kind of earn back in a lot of ways. And so we'll see how this sort of works out. But I think this is a good move. I think, you know, she has stated that she's committed to maintaining a console presence that she really wants to engage the core audience a lot more. And so we'll see. I think this is a good step. And you know, I just, I actually just, I'm kind of like, I, I have the, the article up here from Idea. It's actually. There was a report that the, the internal team had actually been offended by that campaign ever existing. So that's like, that's. I think we can call that good news and I look forward to seeing what she does. You know, it's. I think, I think one of my favorite statements when she was appointed was Rick Hogue sort of talked about, you know, I'm, I'm willing to let her disappoint me. And I think that that's, you know, it's, I think this is a good, good. This is a step in the right direction. So let's kind of like, let's, let's just look at something bad here. This is real bad. This is not, not good. March 27, 2026 the PlayStation Blog New price changes for PS5, PS5 Pro and PlayStation Portal Air. Oh my goodness. This is just stinking painful. These new. The new pricing will be effective April 2, 2026. The. The. The prices. Oh my goodness. Is in the US the, the regular model of the PS5, $649.99. The PS5 digital edition is going to be $599.99 and the PS5 Pro is going to be $899.99. So I'm betting that PS5 Pro owners who were earlier adopters are feeling super smrt and they should because boy howdy, those prices are not that friendly. I think this brings up a couple things and just as I'm thinking about it, you know, we just, we did a show with our friend of the show and patron Alex Castellanos not too long ago just. And big chill. Just the, the whole topic was like sort of being left behind by the pricing of games and consoles and everything else. And I think this just doesn't help that this makes sort of this, that kind of adoption even harder for somebody who's just like, I just, I don't feel like I can spend that kind of money. I think the other thing though too is like you have this price hike on top of the fact that the PS5 generation really hasn't felt like much of a generation, mostly due to the fact that there just haven't been a ton of console exclusives. Now here's the part that I hate to tell a lot of People I think console exclusives really are sort of. It's not that they're not important. I actually do think they matter but I think that the only company that if you want a console that is going like and that you're going to be getting first party exclusives from with regularity you need to just migrate over the. To Nintendo if you haven't already. I think PlayStation and Microsoft and I mean just the PC space in general like. Well PC doesn't really have. I guess yeah anyways but PlayStation and Microsoft have both sort of just you know they're, they. They don't rely on their first party output the way that Nintendo does and so because they don't rely on it the way that they do and that their, their market is actually much more, much more third party dependent in a lot of ways. I think it just you know and, and frankly they're getting more expensive you know with the, the dev times are getting longer and everything else. It's like. I think the argument is like that you have a back especially with backwards compatibility, you have a pre existing library and that these machines in a lot of ways are just going to become the places to, to play the stuff you already own but in the best possible way. I think that's, that's kind of more of the move with this, this latest console gen. It doesn't mean I like it. I just think that that's the direction that it's kind of moving. It does also make sort of any sort of rumors about the PS6, you know, sort of being revealed or talked about anytime before 2028 I think is going to be just not good. I think. I just don't. This is not good. It's. I, I understand it, you know the economic, global economic pressures, the war in Iran, the, the AI chip boom. Everything else like it makes sense but it. Oh boy, it does not feel good. The, the also just. And again the portal going from 199.99 to $249.99. Yeah, what's really funny is over at the. The PlayStation blog right at the very end it says did you like this? And it's like there's no option to be like no, there's a little heart. I think that is like show me more kind of thing. Anyways, so yeah that. Yeah not awesome. Other things that aren't awesome but this is kind of a more of a mixed bag sort of thing here. Nvidia recently released DLSS 5 and over at Tech Radar, Darren Allen published a March 21 published an article, why Do Gamers Already Hate DLSS 5? Here are three key reasons and why History suggests Nvidia will win them over eventually. So Nvidia DLSS5 has come out and it's. It, it caused some reactions. It's been divisive to say the least. You know, and initially some of that was sort of played off as being like, well, dlss, the model affects lighting and so some of these things are really just, it's just lighting done on a super granular level. But then it turns out that actually the, the way that this tech works is that it is basically sort of like slapping some AI generated art assets on top of things which, you know, you, you throw in AI and art and everybody just is super reasonable when it comes to that. There are concerns, you know, especially, you know, I've seen it sort of. I can't remember where I saw it, but somebody basically said like, you know, they could see this tech being used as a shortcut where, you know, studios won't really have an art direction. They'll sort of like have these very chunky sort of art models and then they'll sort of apply the dlss and that will, they won't have to design any sort of art assets for their game. And I think, I think that's a problem. I'd rather that not be an option. And I'm sure that we will have some bad actors who take advantage of things like that. But the reality is it's very early on in the sort of the revelation of this stuff and we don't know how it can be tuned. You know, we, you know, I know that the current DLSS stuff doesn't leave a lot of sort of options for customizing it on sort of the back end for devs. So maybe there will be sort of a much more advanced tool set suite for devs with the implementation of DLSS5. Maybe not. You know, and again, I think we sort of need to see how this plays out. I think also just, you know, to sort of throw things out there. It's running on. It was when it was shown off, it was running on two 5090s and so like there's a few things there. Like this thing is definitely not ready for prime time. So I, you know, there's still a lot of work to be done. I think there's a lot of sort of, you know, rough edges that need to be smoothed out. And ultimately, you know, the, the, the end product could look nothing like what we saw. You know, the other Week. So they're calling the Real Time neural rendering this new model it. And it does. And obviously it does stuff with, you know, lighting. But again, it's sort of like the big problem has been like it came out that there's basically some, you know, they, they take sort of a, an image and it sort of again, slaps a little bit of an AI, rendered AI generated assets on top of that stuff. So. Yeah, but yeah, I liked, I liked it. I think in some ways it's really interesting because it does help push things to more photorealism in some ways. Kind of a problem with the yassification filter kind of stuff. Look. But yeah, and I think the, the. The fact is in this Tech Radar article as well, people have reacted to the DLSS stuff, you know, pretty well, not always reasonably, and eventually they come around. So we'll see. Like I said, we'll sort of see how comes out here. Let's sort of looking ahead here. Other things that, you know, people are perfectly reasonable about. And this is a bit of like a point of comparison. This isn't even a headline. This is just something I wanted to talk about. This is a tale of two games or March has really been a tale of two games in, in sort of. Two games have dominated the online dialogue, the online sort of conversation. And it's been Bungie's Marathon and Pearl Abyss's Crimson Desert. And it's kind of, to me, it's been kind of interesting because Marathon was a game that for when it came out, it became pretty clear that there were a lot of people who were very into this game. Now it's also very niche. Yeah, there were a lot of people who weren't into it and a lot of people bounced off and there was a lot of weaponizing of. Of the Steam charts to prove that. Like people were saying, oh, the game's failing because of X, Y and Z. But the reality is it's been pretty stable. It's kind of, you know, I doubt that it's getting the numbers that Sony wants from it. But this isn't Concord and this isn't High Guard. It's sold about, you know, according to, you know, some online estimates, 1.2 million copies. It's got a fairly stable concurrent player level on Steam. Over on Steam. You know, it's sort of like the tag. The tag line, you know, a lot of people, the people are into it is like, this is a very good game, but it's not for everybody. And it definitely again, is sort of. I think it's Probably a little underwhelming and it's, it's probably kind of inaccessible in a lot of ways. It's just, I think the very nature of his genre, it's a PvP extraction cheap shooter and so that, you know, a lot of things kind of working against it. But, you know, I think, you know, Chris Ray Gun from Sacred Symbols and Snark Tank has had nothing but high praise for this. Now granted, he's a bit of a mark for Bungie games. He loved Halo, he loved Destiny 1 and 2, you know, and it's not that, you know, he has criticisms of those games as well, but, you know, the, the fact is like, he kind of came into this and, you know, he, he thinks Bungee's really cooking. And so, you know, I'll, I'll take his word for it. You know, it's kind of like one of those things where and, and again, some of the other. I know that some of the streamers have been a little like down on it, but again, this just sort of goes to show that's it's not a game that's for everybody. Another game that's not for everybody. Well, but I think it's for more people than not in some ways. It's Crimson Desert from Pearl Abyss and it's a, you know, it's a single player adventure game, very sandboxy. Its sales estimates at 3 million, you know, or just over 3 million. It's, you know, it's doing very, very well. It's got a lot of momentum behind. Did have a bit of a rough start and I think what's kind of been interesting is where the dialogue in online spaces or the conversation in online spaces has been very much people rooting for Marathon to fail kind of. It's the, the, the fan in some ways. It's like what I've seen is that anytime there's any criticism of Crimson Desert, people just want to sort of write it off as journalists just hating good things. And. Well, I'm not saying that that's not the case. I don't think that's entirely the case. All at the point, you know, point in fact. Ty Guy Travis, Travis Northrup over at ign, who I think is probably one of the best reviewers in the space. He gave it a six, and he didn't give it a six because he thought it was a bad game. He gave it a six because of some design choices, some implementation of controls and some performance issues. And I think that's fair. Now I also think that I, I could very Much. Check this. And I guess. Well, you know, I know this is the best radio, but we're going to check Crimson Desert IGN because I think technically that's a review in progress. And so that might. With. Because it has been patched fairly recently, I just wanted to check here that's It's. They're counting it as a. Just. I don't see anything to indicate that it's a review in progress. So I mean, maybe he'll need to go back and sort of address some of that stuff because Pearl Abyss has been very aggressive with sort of patching things and addressing player complaints. I. And I think that's a good thing. You know, I. I love the fact that we have two games that are. They're just not for everybody. Like they are for the people they are for. You know, personally, these are both games that I'm curious about. I'm not. These aren't day ones for me. I'm not jumping in on them anytime soon. In fact, pretty much the way I'm looking at it is I'm gonna wait until there's a free weekend for marathon for me to check it out to see if it's something I might be interested in. As far as Crimson, like, dude, I gotta be honest, like, even though it's got a grappling hook and grappling hooks make everything better. Like this is a 20 or 30 game for me, especially since I've heard that it doesn't run awesome on base model PS5. I wonder how it would run on my laptop though. Anyways, all that being said, you know, it just again, it's. It's kind of a tale of two games and just. I've just been kind of amused, befuddled and enraged by the way the conversation for these games has unfolded. It's just because again, people online, social media, super reasonable. Last. I think the last thing I kind of want to touch on here is that, you know, Epic laid off a thousand people and that just sucks. You know, obviously you don't want to see anybody lose their jobs, but I think what's kind of been interesting to me is that last year marked a downturn for Fortnite to the point where Epic felt like they needed to do some, you know, pretty significant, you know, personnel management. There was a bit of a tone deaf tweet from Tim Sweeney where he basically sort of praised all, all the people that were let go of. But it's also like, well, if they were that good with them, why'd you let go of them? It's one of those things where back in 2023, Epic laid off 830 people. And at that time it was about 16% of the workforce, suggesting around 4,000 employees remained at the company. If those, if those numbers were, have remained fairly constant. So that. About that 4,000, it's about a 25% workforce reduction. And I'm looking at the, you know, sort of over here at it and gadget from Chris Holt. Epic is laying off more than a thousand workers, citing a downturn in Fortnite engagement. It's kind of, to me, it's kind of shocking that it's not even shocking that they had that many people working on it. You think about the amount of, like that. The amount of content that gets added to that game. Sort of like the developer turn in the sense where it's just like there's. They're constantly tweaking, adding things, new modes, sort of. They do the map resets and then you have all the different assets and everything that they're pulling in. So there's just a lot of, I think, money that sort of gets thrown at this thing. And they're so nimble and like, so quick and sort of like turning things around and fixing things. That. Yeah, that headcount doesn't really surprise me, especially for a company that doesn't. I mean, Fortnite is pretty obviously their. So their biggest revenue generator, but they also have the Unreal Engine and the Unreal Engine support and the licensing off of that. So that really sucks. We hate to see people lose their game. It also says that Rocket Racing, Ballistic and Festival Battle. Festival Battle Stage are going offline as well. So some of those extra modes are being turned. Turned off. Some of this, he did say, is tied to, you know, they've taken a lot of bullets into battle, which is only in the early days of paying off for ourselves and all developers. Sweeney Row. This is sort of in regards to the over $100 million in legal fees that Epic has paid and just in its fight with Apple and sort of the App Store there. So, yeah, it's. It's kind of like one of those things where they also. And this also comes on the back of the increase in the price of Fortnite's V Bucks. So, yeah, it's. It's just kind of wild that Fortnite, which in some ways felt just kind of like completely untouchable, is actually sort of flagging a little bit here. And I think that's really fascinating. So. Yeah. But. Hey, guys. Yeah, that's it. We get we had some good, we had some bad. We had some sort of muddled, muddied, middle ground kind of stuff. But, yeah, I'll try to remember to include links to all those articles so that you can read them for yourselves and all those things. And, oh, yeah, like, hey, we have a substack now, so if you. I'm maybe we can do a little bit of a write up here. And so you include links to these things as well. Maybe. You know, I'm not promising anything right now, but if you like what we're doing here, you know, do the rating and the reviewing, do the sharing and the caring and like, and subscribe and all those things. And until, you know, be good. Until next time, do the things. Later, guys.